A night at the movies.
I dithered over what to call this: “What we’re fighting for,” perhaps, or “Which side are you on,” or “The Family or the Sygn,” perhaps (again)—but all that’s reductive and simplistic and combative and decreasing the Us and increasing the Them and that’s not the point. —Though if I had alluded to Delany with that last title, I could have gotten in my dig at that study about conservative thought that’s mostly been (rightly) blasted, by pointing out how much more simply it could have been stated—has already been stated—
[A]ll human attempts to deal with death [fall] into two categories of injunctions: (1) Live life moment by moment as intensely as possible, even to the moment of one’s dying. (2) Concentrate only on what is truly eternal—time, space, or whatever hypermedium they are inscribed in—and ignore all the illusory trivialities presented by the accident of the senses, unto birth and death itself. . . . For each adherent the other is the pit of error and sin.
But what this is about, really, is a movie. One we just got done watching. An ambling, amiable epic: Le Destin, or Destiny, or Al Massir, written and directed by Youssef Chahine. It’s a loose historical about what might have happened when the Caliph Mansur banished the philosopher Abu Al-Walid Muhammad Ibn Ahmad Ibn Muhammad Ibn Rushd, or Averroës, for the crime of insisting that faith and reason did not need to be reconciled, as they did not conflict. Most of the plot swirls around the machinations of the fundamentalist cult promulgated by suave courtier Sheikh Riad and the attempts bumbling and not so by Averroës’ friends and family to see to it that his books—his commentaries on Aristotle and The Republic, his Tahafut Al-Tahafut, his Kitab fasl al-maqal—might be copied and smuggled into libraries in Languedoc and Cairo and out of danger from pyres and fanatics. Plus: beautiful scenery, great architecture, a cast full of eye-candy, bouts of derring-do, and song and dance numbers.
—Irresistable, in other words. (Movie Madness has a copy. [I should maybe have called this “A night in front of the VCR,” but it doesn’t have the same allusive panache.] I’d bet Scarecrow in Seattle does. It’s distributed stateside by New Yorker Films, so you’ve got a shot elsewhere, too.)
And yes, it’s long, and meandering, and heavy-handed, and digressive, and thuddingly obvious, and it doesn’t matter. The flick is “unusual even for a Western film in its espousal of liberal values,” as this review put it, and that’s true (sad, but). And there’s the unavoidable echoes and appalling ironies rung off the here and now—all unforeseen, from this, to this—that will leave you in the mood to ask cheekily leading questions like What are we fighting for, anyway? and Whose side are you on? Why do we mourn the burning of a book? Why must reason and faith be at odds? Why must there only be one side to every story? What is truth, anyway, and can you ask that question without washing your hands of it?
But I’m just getting silly. Of course you can. And it was a good movie; highly recommended. Soaringly achingly delicious Arabic orchestral pop. And I did mention the eye-candy?
—I should maybe just leave you with the thoughts of national treasure Ray Davis and get the heck to bed already.
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