La Faute de Fidel

The other night I went with some friends to the first in a series of french films being shown for free at the Hippodrome. It was quite a multicultural (and food filled) event... tapas at a cuban restaurant with a new friend from England, a taste of Italian gelato on the way to coffee at Starbucks (yes, Starbucks is a culture of its own), and a french film about revolution in Chile, followed by king's cake for all the movie goers. All this within a block of downtown Gainesville! The film was really good I thought - a little humor, perhaps a little too much thoughtfulness - just my style:) The story depicted life through the eyes of a child, so there were lots of comical and insightful misunderstandings.

Wkipedia's synopsis: A 9-year-old girl, Anna de la Mesa, weathers big changes in her household as her parents become radical political activists in 1970-71 Paris. Her Spanish-born lawyer father, Fernando, is inspired by his family's opposition to Franco and Salvadore Allende's victory in Chile; he quits his job and becomes a liaison for Chilean activists in France. Her mother, a Marie Claire journalist-turned-writer documenting the stories of women's abortion ordeals, supports her husband and climbs aboard the ideological bandwagon. As a result, Anna's French bourgeois life is over. She must adjust to refugee nannies, international cuisine and a cramped apartment full of noisy revolutionaries.

I definitely would recommend the film, and would really like to see it again for myself, because I think it has a lot of interesting things to say - and I probably only caught about a fifth of them:) Having said that, I feel pretty inadequate to comment on the film, because I know very little nothing about Chilean politics, and because the film was packed full of social/political/religious/philosophical ideas that were far too overwhelming to sort through after just one viewing. I do have one comment, though, about the films depiction of religion as merely a cultural product...

The little girl, Anna, attends a Catholic school where she learns, and is very satisfied with, the genesis account of creation. Thereafter she asks her greek nanny, spanish grandparents, and then asian nanny about how the world began, and is given different stories of greek gods, then roman gods, and then one of buddhist philosophy I think. The film implies that because different culturally influenced answers to that question have been given, no answer exists. The film's conclusion on this point, I think, is that Anna can pick whatever she wants to believe, or is it that she should believe nothing at all? Either way, religious faith and ideals are portrayed as ignorance and unawareness of the bigger/multicultural world. The irony is that the film is all about ideals - of what is good and just. Isn't faith and religion (belief in something beyond the material world), exactly where those ideals come from? Can such noble ideas exist and persist in an a-religious culture where materialism gives no motivation or foundation for such ideals?