And it really is cold, yet the left turns out in droves.

Teams of police officers tap their hoses against tear gas canisters while local entrepeneurs collect discarded bottles of Beck’s and Club Mate for the deposit latent in each.

I know its a bit odd to read it out of context. I can tell you that he’s a narcissist, very emotional too.

1.
‘I don’t think she understands me,’ he said casting two yellow tablets down his throat with carbonated lime. He imagined that they were sea shells washed down his throat by waves. In Berlin, Roman had discovered, it was possible to get anything with just a look. It was not like Missouri, where looks were inevitably misinterpreted by angry or lustful people as an invitation to take you to whatever den they had in mind. No, in this world, a look communicated simply knowingness, it communicated that you were part of an ever growing cult of pleasure whose membership was limited only by the number of willing members.
And as he cocked his eyebrow to give that knowing look, he had sat with one leg crossed over his knee surreptitiously opening his genitals to the world. But his eyelids were peeled wide enough to convey the vulnerability alloyed to his manliness. And this woman with her straw-coloured hair and creeping scar down her forehead had come to him, perhaps overwhelmed by desire and pity.
Roman confessed his gravest fear: that he was unlovable.
‘How do you know that? Maybe you just don’t communicate very well.’
His jaw ground to stillness.
‘No, that’s not it. We talked all the time.’ He locked his eyes into hers. ‘Believe me all the time. I don’t hold things in.’
He could tell her these things because he sensed that she too had known tragedy. It was something about the way she sat with her back straight and he palms splayed over her knees. It was though her body were fixed in place somehow, like those butterflies you see under glass at museums. Maybe she had an injury, fell off her bicycle and underneath a bus. Or maybe it was a botched transplant, a robotic part that was not properly assembled, or was not a match for her human core. If that were the case, then it was all the more likely that she lived in aching awareness of the flawed corpus she carried herself in. That would make her vulnerable to compliment. Yes, he would put a rose in that joy-starved cheek.
‘You are really beautiful. Not like everyone else.’
He hadn’t meant to say so dripping with desire but she gobbled it up as bait.
‘Not like your girlfriend?’ She asked raising her eyebrows and slowly parting her lips to reveal rows of teeth straight as dominoes. He needed to fall back.
‘No, she is beautiful. I miss her.’
He couldn’t help it that people found him irresistible. His body spoke a language he wasn’t in control of. And it had a god-like effect on the Berliners, who bit their lips and turned their eyes as he passed.

I just thought, that’s wrong innit? Its disgusting. Because home is supposed to be a place of sanctuary.

So I wrote this poem from the perspective,’ he stopped and wet his lips, ‘of the little girl:

Morning, laying in my bed,

the sound of mum going to work, of car door close

and engine rev. Then the sound I dread:

Crrreeeek. Crrrreeek.

The door opening.

Crrreeeek.‘

At this point I could not absorb the description of the rape he gave, which was rather graphic, although mercifully not in rhyme. I had begun to shake with horrified laughter, a kind of irrepressible laugh of such force I have not experienced outside of a church or school assembly. I took great interest in the menu while my shoulders quaked.

He finished.

Silence.

For.

Effect.

‘Now I know that was a bit dark.’ Pensive look. ‘But, I mean, its not all roses is it?’

What is really disturbing is how Chahine winds Qinawi’s violent lust into everyday sexuality.
Qinawi spends his days at Cairo’s Central Station, selling newspapers, but most of all watching the women that surround him, whether passing through on journey’s, pose in stockings for newspaper advertisements, or, like him, making their living at the station. Qinawi is in particular Hanuma (Hind Rostom), the drink seller, who is already engaged for Farid Chawki (played by the actor of the same name), and who laughs off all of Qinawi’s ineffectual advances. As the summer heat bears down on Central Station, Qinawi’s infatuation boils over into a dangerous obsession.

I’ve never seen a more genuine, nor sobering portrayal of lust. We watch Qinawi as he watches erotic dramas unfold that he will never be included in, as he paws over newspapers freshly saturated with erotic Western imagery and pastes them on the wooden walls of his pathetic shack. We also watch him watching others, station workers lusting after and gently harrassing women as they pass.

What makes the film unique, for its heritage anyway, is the occasional attention Chahine gives to the women who are the object of his and others’ lust, women who live their lives constantly buffeted by the desires of men which reach out initially from the watching eye.

Chahine takes this everyday activity, watching, desiring, lusting, and shows how easily this spills over into violence. We not only see the women he desires, but we see the intensity of his longing growing until it completely consumes him and he is only a violent hunger barely contained by a thin membrane of skin and basic sociability.

But it is not just looking which is the problem, rather it is the lack of reciprocity, the looking without looking back. When Qinawi’s fantasy – of marrying Hanuma, building her a house by the sea, giving her children – is about to be punctured forever as she readies herself for marriage he decides to murder her. This fantasy is doomed to failure because it is impervious to the desires of Hanuma. It exists in spite of what she desires, not because of it. Its failure only feeds anger into Qinawi’s succession of lascivious fantasies.

This eventually drives him mad and in the film’s conclusion he is straightjacketed and sent to an asylum moments before he would succeed in marrying Hanuma. But what is really disturbing is that Chahine sets his madness on a continuum that begins with the desires of ordinary men. For what sets him apart from the other men gathered at this nexus of human interaction? The men around him are able, ocassionaly at least, to satisfy their desire. Qinawi, with his broken body, pride and masculinity can not. Otherwise they are not that far apart.

Qinawi’s violence began in his desiring eye. Chahine ventures that looking, an activity at central to the way men express desire – all men, not just sadistic lunatics – in fact commingles with violence and hatred and for this reason, Bab el Hadid makes for uneasy viewing.

First of all, I was impressed by the levity of the show. I guess this was part a response to what I can avoid but call the image problem of contemporary feminism. I’m inclined to believe this is not so much to do with certain people who identify as ‘feminist’, but with the success of a subtle campaign waged by – who? – some collective subconscious mysogyny, the kind of thing that would be represented as a dark cloud in a whirlpool if depicted in a 1980s television movie for children. Anyway I don’t want to get absorbed in this question. The auditorium was filled with laughter, genuine laughter, not helpfully indulgent theatre laughter (the knowing chuckle one hears at performance of Shakespeare) but laughter that was very much the sound of tension being released.

Secondly, I was captivated by the presence of bodies. The end of the first part of the show involved approximately fifty women dancing naked. I heard people say that it was desexualising, I wouldn’t quite put it that way. I agree that it wasn’t arousing, or at least not in that particular way, because it was rousing, but I felt more that the layers of everyday pornography through which, speaking for myself, I feel conditioned to view women’s bodies was lifted away. What was it about the context that achieved this? I think it was the power of a collective of women dancing unashamedly while naked. The masculine gaze (yes, back to first year) just didn’t function in that context. It broke down and I was forced in its absence to look at woment’s bodies anew. It was beautiful.

Nic Green’s Trilogy is a show about women. That said, the other thing which was particularly resonant for me was the subtle address Green makes to the men in the audiience. The other cliche about feminist art is that it is ‘men hating’. This label is deployed as a way of circumventing any critique that a work of art might make against patriarchy and also those nasty things in your own life which are the reality of oppression, that you wish could pretend were the hallucinations of a bunch of women with an axe to grind.

I doubt that women members of the audience remember this as acutely as I do. The performance evoked the famous Town Hall meeting, where Germaine Greer and others joined a panel with Norman Mailer to debate Women’s Liberation. I say it was famous but then I can find next to nothing of detail on the internet, except this footage. Anyway, in the meeting, sections of which were played on a big screen, Mailer goes into one of his frothing fits, begins a torrent of abuse in which his hatred of women is revealed. The play then cuts to a new ensemble of dancers (ensemble, is that the word?) one of whom is a man, the only man in the play. He is dressed to resemble Mailer. And he says something like ‘The man in the video is not me. But my biggest enemy is thinking that he is not in me. That I have defeated him.’ And its true, this is a real danger for young progressive men, to look at the patriarchal archetype and think, fuck, I’m not like that, just because this person seems so plainly unlike oneself. This line was an arrow driven at the all-the-more sophisticated misogyny of young, progressive men; a welcome warning against complacency.

Finally, what was most effective in the performance was the way in which Green and her performers used silence. As my mate Andi pointed out, silence is dangerous in theatre, you have to have a lot of confidence that you’re not about to lose the audience. It was used to particular effect in one scene to utterly crush that kind of facile humour which takes the politics out of misogyny. If you can’t laugh, you take things too seriously. You shoould lighten up, submit to our laughter. Anyway. Green shows a placard held aloft by a man behind a campus rally of feminists which read ‘Iron My Shirts Bitch’. The audiences immediate response was nervous laughter. Green and the other leading performer broke the tempo of the show that had been established and settled into a deep contemplative silence. This silence was removed from the haste and shallowness of everyday chatter where someone make a joke of this nature and this allowed the kind violence and hatred underlying such a comment to emerge from the protective shell of its humour. It was quite disturbing.

Aside from this, it was superbly, expertly choreographed. I’m just not equipped to talk about that.

‘Its not mine,’ or ‘Somebody must have planted it there’.

I’d always assumed that it was a fabrication, a final and implausible plea for freedom by those facing years, decades even, in a dank, overcrowded prison thousands of miles from home.

Now, I’m not so sure.

It was Christmas Eve. I had passed security at Marrakesh Airport and was waiting my turn in an achingly slow passport queue.

Eventually, my brother overcame this hurdle, and then I presented my passport and waited in silent amicability for the requisite checks and stamps. As the official was about to conclude I was seized from behind by a Moroccan police officer, marched back to security and into a small curtained booth.

All the while, the officer spoke to me in French while I called out ‘Anglais, Anglais’ and protested that French is no longer the international language (I jest.). He did give me a funny look, though, as if to say, ‘Come on, you know what I’m saying.’

Inside the booth he presented me with two of the aforementioned condoms packed with something – hash, heroin, I don’t know. Now I’m not certain whether he did switch to English, or whether in this moment of desperation we spoke in some kind of universal language, but from here on I understood what he was saying.

‘They are yours,’ he said.
‘Non,’ I replied. Needless to say, I had not seen these items until this moment.
‘They are yours,’ he said again.
‘Non.’
He felt around my cock and balls to see if I was concealing anything. Another officer slipped through the curtain and double checked his partner’s work.
‘They are yours!’ They said in unison.
‘Non!’ I shrieked.
‘Passport.’
I handed it over and the pair scrutinised it, muttering ‘Australian’ under their breath.
‘You are here with a child. You came before with a child.’
‘Non.’
‘Yes a child.’
‘No, just my brother and he’s gone through.’
‘You were here with a child!’
‘Non!’
Clearly, the officer was stressed now that his gutsy arrest was rapidly fragmenting into a case of mistaken identity.
The two men muttered with one another, pointing at the passport and at me.
The original officer turned to me and flicked his wrist without saying a word. I was dismissed.

I could not feel the airport tiles beneath my feet.

Mediocre cellist Daigo Kobayashi quits his musical career and moves back to the countryside of his youth along with his wife. With no other options, Kobayashi takes up work as an ‘Encoffineer’, a job that takes in both practical and ceremonial measures to repare bodies for the afterlife. Surprising himself (though not any half-intelligent audience) his new line of work becomes the catalyst for Kobayashi’s emotional transformation. By preparing others to move beyond life, Kobayashi gains the strength to face the traumas that are holding back his own.

Nicholas Barber in The Independent, for example, said ‘this heartfelt, unpretentious, slyly funny Japanese film is worth waiting for’ and it took the award for Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards (although that means nothing to me) and a host of others.

Its not that what people say is wholly untrue. It is witty and at times quite touching. And Takeshi Hameda’s cinematography brings a sincerity and stillness that is a perfect frame for Departures’ moments of genuine, simple humour.

But at other moments Departures risks crossing over into sentimentality, even schmaltz. What really got on my nerves, though, was the character of Kobayashi’s wife who was not much more than a prop, skin deep, without the conflicts and desires that humanise a character. Perhaps the Japanese masters of electronics have invented smiling, sympathetic robots to accompany sensitive men on their emotional journeys.

These superficialities prevent Departures from approaching the cinematic meditations on death of a master like Akira Kurosawa, films like Ikiru or his finale Adadayo.

Despite the hype, Departures just isn’t that good.