Channel Vision
SMOKE (Monday, Pearl, 9.30 pm) is a rare film indeed. Set in and around a Brooklyn street-corner tobacco store, it's a slow but nonetheless beautifully paced, urban tapestry about five very different people: the philosophical owner of the tobacco shop, (Harvey Keitel), his rough and ready old flame (Stockard Channing), the burnt out novelist who lives round the corner (William Hurt), a worldly wise teenager (Harold Perrineau) and his tormented father who runs a ramshackle, out of town garage (Forest Whitaker) The five intertwine, squabble, fight but eventually help each other. It's sad, warm, touching, colourful and finally, joyously uplifting. It's just wonderful.
Black Robe (Friday, World, 1.10 pm), like Smoke is also a beautifully shot narrative-light tale and there the comparisons end. While Smoke is a feel-good New York story, Black Robe is a bleak, violent and savage adventure yarn, about a Jesuit Priest's (Lothaire Bluteau) physical and spiritual journey through 17th Century Quebec. It couldn't be more different.
Essentially it's Heart Of Darkness meets Dances WIth Wolves it's about the Priest's (physical and metaphorical) journey to a disease-ridden Native Indian outpost and it's certainly not for the squeamish - it's extremely and explicitly violent - but at the same time, it's strangely beautiful and brutally honest. Its depiction of both missionary culture and the culture of the Native American are spot on. Watch it and be captivated.
Scent Of Green Papaya (Saturday, World, 1.30 am) is another slow, captivating and very astute movie. Set in 1951 Vietnam - when Western values were just beginning to overtake the traditional way of life - the film perceptively explores contemporary Vietnamese social hierarchies through the childhood and young adulthood of Mui (Tran Nu Yen-khe) a peasant girl who comes to Saigon to serve in the house of a bourgeois family where her days are spent cleaning, washing and cooking, among other things, green papaya.
It's poetic and poignant stuff about human servitude and human love but more than anything, about the condition of the human spirit. And, while it does occasionally look rough round the edges, director Tran Anh Hung's lyrical brilliance easily saves it.
Steel Magnolias (Saturday, Pearl, 3.20 am) is also a tale about women; about the loves, lives and losses of six Southern Women who have little in common by way of class, wealth, temperament and generation, share the same feisty self-confidence and steely, never-say-die humour. The action, which takes place over several years - and sways unashamedly between tear jerker and side splitter - is centred around a beauty parlour run by, who else, but Dolly Parton. And while it's slick enough fare, it is the six women - Parton together with Sally Field, Shirley MacLaine, Daryl Hannah, Olympia Dukakis and Julia Roberts - who make this tale really special.
For once the male characters are kept strictly to the periphery. It's just a shame that, with its 3.20 am broadcast slot, this movie will be kept to the periphery too.
