(07 November 07)Serenades
Reviewed by Rodney Eivers
Directed by Mojgan Kadem with main actors Alice Haines and Aden Young. Made in 2001.
"It is 1890 and at a Lutheran Christian mission on the edge of the desert in Central Australia a girl is born of an Aboriginal mother and an Afghan father. Conceived against her mother's will, she is a dark-skinned green-eyed forbidden beauty. She is a reluctant traveller between the world of her parents. This is the story of Jila."
So runs the blurb on the back of the video release of this recent film. My immediate reaction after seeing the film on the small screen was that it is not a great picture. And yet, during the night and the next day I found myself thinking about it quite a bit. Clearly it had a greater impact on my psyche than I recognised at the time.
At one level it is a love story. The tension of awakening attraction and desire frustrated by the very real dangers inherent in the developing relationship has elements of the Romeo and Juliet story. The end of the tale, nevertheless, is sufficiently unpredictable to hold one's attention to the end.
Of interest to SoFiA members would be the underlying background to the love story. This is the clash of religious cultures, namely Christianity, Islam and the Aboriginal. In view of the current world troubles these issues are of vital interest and here we see them being played out at the family level in a remote little corner of Australia rather than the crowded international scene.
Is there a bias towards one religion or another? Probably (you may judge that for yourselves), but the author and director seem to have been at pains to provide some balance in illustrating and understanding the tremendous difficulty of letting go or modifying views of life which have been ingrained in us from an early age. These become especially important issues when young people, women in particular, step outside the orthodoxies of their religion.
So if a dose of inter-faith tension at the micro level is to your taste in the present social environment, Serenades should be of some interest.
