Three films on the idea of freedom

Ahead of our own celebration of Freedom Day next week, this week’s selection of films offer three memorable explorations of the idea of freedom. These are seen through the eyes of immigrants in Germany, England and the US, and the struggles of outsiders to find acceptance from communities that continue to discriminate against them decades after large scale tragedies like world wars and cold wars. The films also show smaller battles like the ongoing vicious cultural wars, which have sought to restrict their ability to express their very ordinary desires, needs and dreams.

The Art House Essential

Ali Fear Eats the Soul — YouTube

German New Wave maverick Rainer Werner Fassbinder was one of cinema’s most prolific and bright burning lights before his tragic but not completely surprising death in 1982, as the result of a lethal cocktail of cocaine and barbiturates. In a career lasting just under two decades, the notoriously manipulative and often abusive director produced more than 40 feature films that stuck a knife into the hypocrisies of post-World War 2 German society and twisted it to brilliant and still potent effect.

This short, sharp and memorably touching tale of doomed love between an ageing German cleaning lady and a strapping, much younger Moroccan migrant worker remains one of his most surely executed takedowns of the moral two-facedness of German society in the 1970s.  

Heavily influenced by classic golden-age Hollywood melodramas, such as Douglas Sirk’s All that Heaven Allows, it’s a distinctively anarchic Fassbinder blend of melodrama, Hitchcockian psychodrama and ‘70s visual kitsch that pushes far beyond the realms of social realism to offer a singular cinematic take on a solidly dependable narrative staple.

What makes it even more effective is the bigoted attitudes that still remain in Europe towards African migrants, almost half a century later; and the committed, unforgettable performances by its leads, the longtime and long-suffering Fassbinder collaborators Brigitte Mira and El Heidi Ben Salem.

Fassbinder himself makes a convincingly nasty cameo as a slippery and hateful son-in-law and the overall enterprise stands as a remarkable demonstration of the director’s fast-working but hard-hitting legacy as one of Germany’s most important and gifted directors.

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The stone-cold classic

Bhaji on the Beach — YouTube

Before she became one of the early 2000s leading British breakthrough directors with Bend it Like Beckham, director Gurinder Chadha announced her arrival as a new British director to watch with this 1993 classic immigrant experience comedy, written by future The Kumars at No 42 creator and star Meera Syal.

Chadha’s debut feature displays a strong feel for the gentle comedy of ordinary people in its simple but effective tale of a group of Asian women friends who decide to take some much-deserved time off from the pressures of their daily lives by going on a holiday to Blackpool. There they slowly but surely get into the swing of the freedom they enjoy away from their pesky and annoyed menfolk, who soon come calling in an effort to restore patriarchal normality to the situation, only to find that their wives and girlfriends aren’t just ready to come on home and cook and clean for them. What for most people might seem to be the expected delights of a break away from domestic pressures, become in the eyes of the excellently acted ensemble of women characters, potent symbols of the lives they should be living but haven’t been allowed to.

Quietly but firmly feminist and often slyly hilarious, it’s a film that laid much of the path for the later breakout comedy dramas of British immigrant tradition vs modern life films that have since become such a well-worn and often over-treaded staple of 21st century British cinema.

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The diamond in the rough:

Moscow on the Hudson — YouTube

Veteran American New Wave director and master of the modern, awkward, social-situation drama Paul Mazursky made his own particular and very funny intervention into the Cold War, with this quirky, fish-out-of-water comedy in 1984.

Starring Robin Williams in the now, probably culturally dodgy role, of a well-meaning but inconsequential Russian musician who makes the decision to defect to the US, it’s an early demonstration of the late comedian’s talents for sensitive dramatic work that makes the easily relatable argument that freedom isn’t always what you might hope it could be when you come from somewhere where you don’t enjoy it.

Thanks to considered direction and the small joys of Williams’s performance, it does a better job than most films of similar story at painting a convincing picture of the small delights and wonders of New York life through the eyes of an immigrant.

By the time Williams’s saxophone-playing Vladimir decides to make his big political announcement in a department store, where nobody seems that interested, Mazursky offers a gentle but firm critique of the 1980s mania for media spectacle and a moving tribute to his protagonist’s small but meaningful personal sacrifice in the service of a complicated, bizarre, sometimes infuriating but still much better life for himself and those still trapped in tyranny at home.

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