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Reviews of Recent Independent, Foreign, & Documentary Films in Theaters and DVD/Home Video
THE IMPERIALISTS ARE STILL ALIVE! In this subtle, throwback indie, social class is on full display. The story centers on Asya (Élodie Bouchez), a French conceptual artist with Arab roots living in Manhattan among a circle of rich socialites and hipsters. Her days and nights become increasingly hectic when her close friend, Faisal, goes missing—apparently part of a CIA terrorism investigation—and her brother is caught in an embattled Beirut during a series of devastating Israeli air strikes in the 2006 flash war between Hezbollah and Israel. All the while Asya negotiates the decidedly less dire but somehow more pressing concerns of her bourgeois friends and family while falling for a new beau, Mexican law student Javier (José María de Tavira). Here’s where the throwback part comes in: all of these moving parts, all of the would-be excitement, all of the melodrama is skillfully downplayed in Zeina Durra’s first feature with an ironic, tongue-in-cheek tone. It’s not as if she doesn’t take Asya’s struggles seriously, but even at her most distraught, Durra always allows us a sense of perspective. It’s interesting to observe how a frivolous episode at a party can be as affecting as anything else. For Asya, her only real connection with life-and-death politics is her distant brother, and as happens with most people, her stress manifests as frustrations in a relatively safe lifestyle. Most illuminating about Asya’s socially elevated circle are the paranoid discussions on the fate of Faisal. Her friends are the type to hold meetings in the back of a stretch limo to avoid any wiretaps. They are also careful to take along a lapdog and several trays of hors d’oeuvres, and, afraid to circle the block for fear of looking suspicious, they remain double-parked on the street outside their high-rise apartment while they squabble about how to direct the driver. The sardonic humor is one of the most discernible elements in this sometimes hard to read film, but another standout is surely the look and feel of contemporary Manhattan. These spaces—a Soho loft, a hole in the wall Chinese restaurant, the back of a yellow cab—represent that fleeting and indescribable notion of New York City as a place that is both glamorous and gritty at the same time. Visually, The Imperialists Are Still Alive! accomplishes something poets and writers have been after for decades. It’s flat, yet dynamic. Dark, yet singed by the bright neon. This is a film with a subtle sense of cinematographic style, but an incredibly sophisticated one. Durra, who,
like her protagonist, has a variety of ethnic and geographic roots,
portrays this plethora of ethnic identities quite deliberately. It’s no
random choice to pair Asya with an upper-middle-class Mexican man or to
put her in conversations with her Latin housekeeper’s family or an Arab
taxi driver. We’re a part of a mesh watching this film, one that
sustains romance and intrigue and that can vary between comforting and
alienating from moment to moment. The trick is, as Asya and Javier
learn, to take our comforts where we can get them.
Michael Lee
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