Two films shot in rarefied locales and starring Marie-Josee Croze, one of
our greatest actresses: _Another Silence_ and _Iqaluit_.

_Another Silence_ is a long chase that takes us from suburban Toronto
(probably Montreal in disguise) to sun-bleached destitute towns in Chile. Policewoman Marie tracks her husband's and son's killer Pablito (Ignacio
Rogers) across the globe to a desert near the Argentinian border. Along
the way she endures endless waits for buses that might come the next morning, sleeps in countless desolate places inhabited only by women and children,
many of them indigenous, penniless. The men are elsewhere, aggregating in larger communes where there are there are money and beer. She maims
and tortures a few along the way; in a film defined by long silences and patient stalking, violence strikes like heat lightning. It is like Takashi Kitano's _Hana Bi_ (especially the night time SUV-shootout where muzzle
flashes paint over bloodshed) -- only without the laughter.

The film does not ignore Pablito's perspectives. We watch this callow
youth bring home a flat screen TV to his cursing family (like Jacky Cheung's blood-money offering in _As Tears Go By_), then coaxed into cocaine duty
the next day. Marie arrives at Pablito's home only to find his jilted
wife and daughter. They are not afraid of her gun, as if they intuit a wordless honor among mothers, a sort of desert code -- although for a moment
it is unsure what the intense, feral Marie would not do. They send her to
the border, across which Pablito has gone with his uncle for a job. (Chile
and Argentina share the longest, most ambiguous boundary in the world.) The crossing is an oasis where the lovely hotel owner Teresa (Martina Juncadella) offers room, board, and human warmth. But it is a momentary respite before
the inevitable reckoning.

We don't need the wound on his left hand, almost identical to Marie's, to
draw comparison between two killers who have lost almost all humanity in
the same few seconds of gun fire. We don't need the sight of her U.S.
dollars, constantly administered to bribe locals, or his truckload of white cocaine, to trace the origin of their entwined fate. We don't need the
beatific Catholic funeral Teresa and her grandfather attend to foretell
that the cathartic finale is really a battle for their souls. But these
are welcome haikus in Santiago Amigorena's spare, elliptical film with
little dialogue, exposition, or signpost.

Marie-Josee Croze is brilliant and nuanced, a deceptively calm samurai who rarely waste energy with emotions. With her dirt-caked hair loosely hanging over her bowed head she reminds us of Tony Leung in _Ashes of Time_ --
another ronin waiting in a desert for a fateful last battle. The few times
she allows cracks to her inner life it is as though all of the world's grieving women mourn through her. If she were not French-Canadian Croze
would have been a perfect Sarah Carter in _Terminator_, a better, less histrionic Jodie Foster in _The Brave One_. The closest cinematic
brethren to Marie might be Jessica Chastain's Maya in _Zero Dark Thirty_. Co-writer and director Amigorena wisely let her face, her tiny telling gestures, and the vast empty landscape do all his storytelling. Amigorena loves actresses -- he was married to Julie Gayet and was in a relationship
with Juliette Binoche, who starred in his _A Few Days in September_ --
and in the resourceful, relentless, remorseless, Marie-Josee Croze he has
found the perfect enigmatic heroine.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------- _Iqaluit_ is nowhere near as good but Croze makes it worth watching.
She is a fish-out-of-water widow in Indian country in Northern Canada.
Hindered by cultural and language barriers, she stubbornly tries to find
out what caused her husband's injury while he was working there. The exotic locale gives the film an unique flavor, but ultimately the director leans
too much on wide-angle compositions and drowns out Croze's good performance.
It doesn't help that everyone seems to have a different acting style, with Natar Ungalaaq stuck in a droll, Aki Kaurismäki-mode and the non-professional actors doing their own thing.


(for A.)

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