#84 - Raja

Here we have another movie from those crazy cats at Film Movement. You may remember my review of Falling Angels. That's the Film Movement movie that I really enjoyed, recommended that you seek it out...and nobody did. Don't try to tell me you tried. I know the truth. You're all fans of Rock-a-Doodle and got pissed off when I thought it sucked and figured I must suck too. Be that as it may, I will iterate again...nay...I will reiterate that people should take the time to watch falling Angels. And on that note, Raja is nothing like Falling Angels.

As I am sure I mentioned before, Film Movement movies are art house movies, which due to my prejudiced cynicism, the pretentious alarm starts going off in my head almost instantly. You get those people who turn their nose up at Hollywood movies just because they are from Hollywood. They turn their nose up at anything with a budget because in some way money can't translate into art, or even good movies. I know I'm generalizing here, but so are they, so that's what you get. So what makes a movie art? Well, first and foremost, it HAS to be foreign. This is crucial. It is imperative. Secondly, it has to be a drama because comedies are in no way an art form, unless it is a dark comedy or a social satire. Rule of thumb for this is that if you laugh out loud while watching the movie, it cannot be art. Finally, a movie is art if you can't eat popcorn while watching it, other wise known as the Eddie Izzard rule. Raja passes all of these rules with flying colors.

To this point you may have sensed a tone of dislike in this review. That may be because it is normal for me to rant and rave like I have been doing after I have watched something I disliked...or more accurately...hated. Do be clear, I did not hate this movie. The acting, writing, directing, and everything else is exactly what it needed to be in order to tell the story as it was desired to be told. What I have a particular distaste for is the genre. This is the first modern European drama I have ever watched and it fits the stereotype perfectly. It's stiff and rigid. It has a tremendous amount of internal angst wrapped around pent up desires and jealousy. Oh my god, the desire is thick, but nobody does anything. The two main characters play little games to make each other jealous, and apparently it worked because they hated each other at some point. It's hard to explain because according to the story there is a crapload of strong emotion, but it is pretty much all internal and in my mind had little justification. In other words...SNOOZE. I just don't get the appeal.

I think what made it hard was that one character spoke French and the other spoke Arabic, which to my untrained ear are both just foreign languages that couldn't be less discernible. So it seemed like they couldn't communicate at the beginning or in the middle, but at the end, they were communicating. Did I miss something? And if I did miss something, when the hell did I miss it? Sure, this movie had an underlying background about class differentiation in a post-colonial Morocco which apparently led to a heightened intensity of these two people's supposed passion as well as making their relationship that much more unconventional and taboo. That's all fine and dandy, but one would think these things could have been talked about in a more palatable format. I mean, can somebody do something? Can somebody actually say something instead of fucking around with indirect dialogue and heaping spoonfuls of subtext? PLEASE?