Our friends Emily and Aaron took us to see The Terminal on Friday. Trailers had suggested that it might appeal to me more than the star-power of Hanks/Zeta-Jones/Spielberg might otherwise suggest, and given recent experiences a film based entirely around immigration procedures seemed somehow appropriate.
It didn’t disappoint. Normally, I find Spielberg films hard to watch, finding either his heavy-handed, black-and-white approach to issues, or the schmaltz suffocating. While some, such as Charles Taylor writing in Salon, seem to think the film has an agenda to highlight and protest immigration bureaucracy, I didn’t read it that way. In this case, the bureaucracy seemed more a given than a political agenda.
The Salon review claims that the film is the worst directed that Spielberg has yet made. This amused me, given that I’m tempted to say I’ve enjoyed it more than any of his to date. I’d agree with charges that many scenes aren’t given the room to breathe that they truly deserve, that several relationships aren’t developed as well as they could be, and maybe even the charge that Spielberg is inept when it comes to portraying romance, but I’m also hoping that this is evidence of a new lighter touch from a director with hitherto heavy hands.
[One word of warning: the imdb comment “a record may have been set for product placement” is almost certainly correct]
Yesterday, Christian Science Monitor ran an article on Mehran Karimi Nasseri, an Iranian refugee who has been living at Charles de Gaulle airport (of course you didn’t take Hollywood setting a story in the US as evidence it originated here did you?) for the past sixteen years. The article outlines his story with:
The original crisis began when Nasseri tried to travel to England from Belgium via France. But he lost papers declaring his status as an Iranian refugee. It’s been confirmed that he was expelled from Iran in the 1970s, but the famous squatter has since rejected his heritage - even denied he can speak Farsi - under the belief that his Iranian background is the cause of cause of his troubles.
Nasseri has since received papers from the French government but refuses to leave the airport terminal. The article explores potential reasons for that, such as a reluctance to pay rent elsewhere, or (more likely) over-adaptation to his life in the airport.
Iranian (in LA) blogger ‘The Other’ picked up on the article and suggested that Nasseri’s case is symptomatic of an Iranian national disease which is likened to the inability of the lead character in Woody Allen’s excellent Zellig to be himself, constantly shifting to try and be something else.
Reading Iranian history it certainly does seem the case that the country has never really been resolved with its past. In some ways, no country ever is, but the way Iran’s successive regimes have seemingly alternated between emphasising the pre-Islamic or Islamic history of the country, and shuffled between nationalism and western influence, has left a legacy of dislocation. ‘The Other’ doesn’t offer much in the way of evidence for his assertions regarding Nasseri, but it’s not hard to see where they come from.