Unbreakable (118 mins, 12) Directed by M. Night Shyamalan; starring Bruce Willis, Samuel L. Jackson, Robin Wright Penn
Blackboards (85 mins, PG) Directed by Samira Makhmalbaf; starring Said Mohamadi, Behnaz Jafari, Bahman Ghobadi
The year ends with a bang not a whimper, or rather with a pair of decisive bangs in the form of pictures by two confident young directors who first emerged in the late Nineties. Both are of Asian extraction and discovered a cinematic vocation early in life, learning to make films at the same time as they learnt to read books. Though superficially very different, they are visual stylists and movie fabulists.
The 29-year-old M. Night Shayamalan was brought up in Philadelphia, the son of sub-continental Indian parents, both of them doctors. He started to make short movies at the age of 10 and decided at 17 that he wanted to become a professional filmmaker, attending film school in New York rather than studying medicine.
The 20-year-old Samira Makhmalbaf appeared at the age of eight in The Cyclist, directed by her father, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, one of Iran's leading directors. She then studied film before becoming his assistant. Whether they'd have become more interesting cinéastes had they had a traditional academic education, we shall never know.
Shayamalan's third film The Sixth Sense (its two low-budget predecessors made little impact and weren't released here) garnered six Oscar nominations and became the tenth most profitable film of all time. Makhmalbaf's first, The Apple, was shown in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes in 1998 and played to world-wide acclaim on the festival and art house circuits.
Like The Sixth Sense , Shayamalan's new film, Unbreakable, is an occult thriller, and it too is set in Philadelphia, and stars Bruce Willis as a traumatised victim of violence. In this case Willis plays David Dunn, a former college football star with a tottering marriage and an unrewarding job as security officer at a university sports stadium. He emerges unscathed as the sole survivor of a railway accident in which 131 people die.
As David comes to terms with his miraculous delivery he's contacted by Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson), the well-off African-American owner of a gallery dealing in original art works by comic book illustrators. Since birth, Elijah has suffered from a severe form of osteoporosis that results in constant fracturing of his bones, and he's in search of someone at the other end of the spectrum - someone like David who appears indestructible. Such a person, he believes, must have superhuman powers that could make him a hero comparable to those of ancient times, a type kept alive in purest form, so he argues, by comic books.
The Old Testament names (Elijah the prophet who sought to purify society and predated the coming of the Messiah; David the heroic leader and man of destiny) hint at the underlying allegory. With some subtlety the director traces the increasing if uneasy involvement of the two men and how one makes the other aware of his predetermined role. As in The Sixth Sense the dark, lowering city provides a portentous setting for the story. Sometimes we're made to see events from the characters' point of view, as when we watch TV upside down through the eyes of David's hero-worshipping son looking at a newsreel of the train crash, or we observe a would-be assassin on a railway platform from the twisted perspective of Elijah after he's fallen down a flight of stairs and fractured several bones. More often, however, there are long takes in deep focus in which we overhear conversations at some distance, with bars, staircases, rows of restaurant tables, the seats of a railway carriage or open doors between the camera and the people we're listening to.
A visual tour-de-force occurs when David becomes aware of his unusual powers at night on the railway station concourse. His mind takes in confusing information about the depredations of those he bumps into, and he has to decide whose victims are most worthy of his heroic attentions. Shyamalan, however, doesn't know how to resolve his picture. It ends abruptly, surprisingly and shockingly, and one leaves vaguely dissatisfied. But it's a film to see, to enjoy, and perhaps to ponder.
Samira Makhmalbaf's Blackboards, which won the Special Jury Prize at Cannes this year, strikes into different territory from The Apple, her semi-documentary debut about two little girls in Tehran escaping the bondage of their parents. But the theme of tyrannical oppression and enforced ignorance is pursued in the oblique, coded style that a rigid society has forced on Iranian film makers and which has given their films such resonance. The setting is the arid, awesomely beautiful north-west of the country, where Kurds are being persecuted on either side of the borders between Iran, Iraq and Turkey.
Offering hope and relief to the downtrodden of Kurdistan are itinerant schoolteachers, 10 of whom are first seen in the distance on a dusty mountain road, carrying blackboards on their backs and resembling the bird-like sculptures of Lynn Chadwick and Elisabeth Frink. They hide from a helicopter gunship, and then split to go in search of pupils. Like travelling holy men, they seek little in return for their simple, liberating lessons in reading, writing and arithmetic. The movie concentrates on two of them, Reeboir and Saïd.
Reeboir attaches himself to a party of teenage smugglers who risk their lives carrying heavy contraband goods across the border for exploitative, conspicuously absent employers. Saïd joins a large group of old men attempting to make a pilgrimage over the mountains to the native lands from which they presumably fled during the recent war. The only young person with the old men, and the only woman in the film, is Halalheh, the widowed daughter of one the most decrepit of the men, and she's accompanied by her little child. No one in either camp sees any value in education, having adjusted themselves to a life of permanent exploitation and persecution that leaves them at the mercy of cruel, anonymous border guards.
Nevertheless Reeboir and Saïd persist in a doggedly heroic manner, using their blackboards variously as protective camouflage, stretchers, clothes lines, screens for a wedding, doors for privacy, splints for broken limbs, shields against gunfire. So emblematic does his professional prop become that Saïd becomes known to the old men as Blackboard.
Blackboards is plainly an allegory or parable, but it has a force and documentary vividness that resists simple explanations and deters us from reading easy messages into it. But ultimately, and unsentimentally, it's an affirmative work. Only the young woman and one of the teachers has any previous acting experience, but Makhmalbaf (whose father co-scripted the film as well as editing it) manages to bind the two groups of young and elderly non-professional actors into distinct communities on the move.
Jason Robards Jr, who died last week aged 78, came late to acting and much later to the cinema, though he was the son of a well-known screen and stage performer and was educated at Hollywood High School. As a stage actor he was the greatest exponent of Eugene O'Neill (another theatrical son much drawn to the bottle), and one of my great regrets is that I didn't see his Hickey in the 1956 revival of The Iceman Cometh, though I was lucky enough to catch his Cornelius Melody on Broadway in A Touch of the Poet, and we're all fortunate that he reprised his Jamie Tyrone in Sidney Lumet's 1961 film of A Long Day's Journey into Night. The latter was only Robards' fourth movie, made when he was 40, but he went on to appear in a further 50 pictures, several of them classics, culminating in his final appearance as the dying patriarch in Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia last year.
That gravelly voice lent authority to the soundtrack of documentaries, and he was memorable in parts as different as the honest bandit in Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West and the exasperated cop chasing Bill Murray in Quick Change. But the finest roles to which he lent that craggy, crooked, infinitely experienced face were real-life figures, some good, some bad, but all in the American grain - Doc Holliday (Hour of the Gun), Al Capone (The St Valentine's Day Massacre), General Lew Wallace (Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid), Richard Nixon (TV's Washington: Behind Closed Doors), Ben Bradlee (All the President's Men), Dashiell Hammett (Julia), Howard Hughes (Melvin and Howard). This was a veritable Mount Rushmore of a movie career.
