Frida, dir. Julie Taymor, 2002.

Sometimes several oscars, fantastic acting, gripping storyline are not enough to impress you very profoundly, when the film that you are watching claims to be based upon someone's life. How much sense of Frida Kahlo's life does Julie Taylor succeed in conveying in her much acclaimed film? Not very much, I think. It was an intense experience watching the movie, but at the end of it you are left feeling more out than in Frida Kahlo's life.

It is problematic enough to reduce a 'life' into a 'story'. Biographers can hardly presume to tell the 'story' of a life when life never unfolds as a story does. But while turning the life into a motion picture you inevitably need to be selective, to be able to hold the attention of the spectators who come to see a movie expecting a story. Frida gives only the sense of this selection of hurriedly assorted images, of sensational events arranged into a sequence that seeks to explain away her life and her personality. The exploration rarely is beyond the surface. Her paintings are related to biographical contexts in a way which leaves very little to finer intellectual contexts. Nothing of surrealism is touched upon, nor Frida's reading during the time she was painting her most original works, little of identity politics. If the director had sought to represent the artist alongside, and as, a power woman, then she had clearly got her emphases wrong.

There isn't much of an effort at offering comments on Frida's love affairs, with men and women, and very little on what prompted her to get started on painting, which must be one of the most probing questions with which to start an artist's biography. The cinematography is highly distinguished, at times disturbingly so, but steadily becomes a little predictable and tedious in its importunate need to shock and excite.

Heremakono (Waiting for Happiness), dir. Abderrahmane Sissoko, 2002.

Mauritania-born director Abderrahmane Sissoko's Waiting for Happiness tells the story of several people living in a small town on the north-western coast of Africa. Seventeen year old Abdallah is spending a few weeks with his mother in his native village before emigrating to Europe. He can't speak the local dialect Hassanya, and the locals don't speak much French, so he doesn't have much of a social life. He spends all day reading his books, idly wandering about the town, watching the people about their business through a little window. Incidentally he befriends a little boy, Khatra, who tries to teach him the local language. A beautiful woman, Nana, tells him of her harrowing visit to Europe in search of her lover, with whom she'd had a child. Close to Abdallah's house sits a young Arab girl taking singing lessons from a older woman. The heartwrenching tunes, aped by the little girl, create a bathetic effect, as the tragic flow of notes intermingles with the little girl's half-mocking imitation of her teacher.

The film is woven out of a montage of images, episodes, sequences, broken sentences, phrases, songs. People go about their business - the oddjob man Mata tries to bring electricity, helped along by the questioning, sweet, little orphan child Khatra; Nana sits in the sun braiding a child's hair; Abdallah's mother tells her friends about her son's imminent departure; sandstorms swirl over the barren lands burying deeper Mata's treasured radio which he had hidden in the sand for safekeeping.

Like all stories about departure and arrival, this film too explores questions of identity, but an identity which is radically unsettled, on the cusp of two worlds. It is not a story about a stranger in a foreign land. rather, it is a story about exile in one's homeland - very pan-European, Joycean, in scope - deployed with great cinematic sensitivity and perception. Largely avoiding a dominating narrative voice, this is cinema on the edge of documentary. There is nothing absolute or central about the way the eye of the camera shifts from scene to scene, from people to places. In a way, this kind of impersonal representation is quite impossible for fiction (just think of Stephen Dedalus, or J. M. Coetzee's narrator in Youth), which inevitably cannot escape the narrator's/protagonist's perception.

Perhaps the view of Europe that Sissoko presents is not entirely favourable - and that is partly the point of the film - but then there is Abdallah's seemingly unhoping attitude towards Europe put in to contrast with Nana's bitter recollection of her time there. I think Europe/non-Europe is more of a cultural/aesthetic construct within the film, than a matter of politcal identity. The scope of this film is certainly more complicated than political. It resonates with questions of the gaze, the notions of aesthetics, how intricately these notions are embedded in associations, acquired taste, education, and fantasy: How do we look at the world - familiar and unfamiliar - around us? Is the familiar always familiar? Is the unfamiliar, unseen, sometimes not more real than the reality we inhabit? Somewhere in the film these deeply philosophical questions remain alive and unresolved.