Hey folks, Harry here with the honorable Mister Sheldrake telling us about what truly sounds like a remarkable film from Ismael Ferroukhi about a father and son's journey to Mecca. It's a road trip to Mecca. This really does sound like a great film. Here's Shelly with the latest...
Le Grand Voyage
March 26th 2005
French-Moroccan
Directed by Ismael Ferroukhi
Written by Ismael Ferroukhi
Sheldrake here, reporting live from midtown in New York City. The Film Society of Lincoln Center at 66th and Broadway, and the Museum of Modern Art at 53rd Street between Sixth and Fifth Avenues, is running its New Directors / New Films series from March 23rd through April 3rd. Go to the Film Society’s site (www.filmlinc.org) or MOMA’s site (www.moma.org) to see the schedules. The programs feature new cinema by directors who’re displaying their celluloid wares for the first time (or close), and much of what I’m seeing is stupendous in its vision and execution.
And, for the record, even the great Sheldrake nods: ALL the intros for these pictures should note that The Film Society of Lincoln Center and MOMA together have sponsored this series and provided venues. For example, we saw JUNEBUG at the wonderful 1200 seat Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center, and I saw THEY CAME BACK, the French Zombie movie (doit manger des cerveaux! doit manger des cerveaux!) at the Walter Reade theater right down the row from the Julliard School—what a concentration of talent! All these theaters are marvelous venues for film festivals because they have stages the film’s creators can appear on after the screening to dazzle us with insight and cinematic savoir faire.
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LE GRAND VOYAGE is a road movie. The road begins in France and ends in Mecca, and an Arabic-Muslim father and his French-Muslim son travel it together from beginning to end. The son, his youngest, doesn’t want to travel three-thousand miles by car with his old-fashioned father and asks, very reasonably, why they don’t just fly there. The old man explains that’s its better to walk by foot than to drive, better to drive than to fly, and the canny young man, who, trained in French schools, can recognize a losing argument when he sees one, drops the matter and reconciles himself to his impending fate. The old man has imagined and prepared for this final journey to Mecca, to purify his soul before death, his entire life, and no young whelp is going to change the way he’d imagined the adventure if he can help it. And no quick stops in Venice or Milan.
Of course, he can’t help it, and what they discover along the way is that the changes to the journey you imagined ARE the journey. That’s as close as we’re going to get to a spoiler in this review, because it would be a terrible critical crime to ruin this movie for you—for anyone. I’m writing this review after a night’s sleep, but I want you to have the sense of how I felt right after seeing it. Here’s the note I sent via wireless to Harry from the Lobby of the Museum of Modern Art Titus 1 Theater, five minutes after leaving the movie:
“just saw amazing ,amazing, amazing huge -- john ford freakin huge - movie, le grande voyage - i'm a in a daze, electrified, deepened - a boy and his father on a journey from france to mecca, a great healing movie of our ideas of islaam, an incredible love story between the kid and his dad, and the story of every journey that you and i have ever taken and the changes we've made along the way. i've just looked into the gaping jaws of an epic film that succeeds on the deepest and most spiritual and intellectual and cinematic levels. my god.”
I wish I’d closed that note now with “my god: there are stars inside,” but some moments are lost forever, like tears in rain. That’s what it felt like, though. My god, there are stars inside.
This is one of those films where the director grows new levels of courage right in front of you, he realizes what he’s making and says, the hell with it—and tears are streaming down his face as he things this, because he realizes the how deeply he’s going to have to go into himself for this, he knows his old self will die and he’ll be changed forever by making this film and he is sore afraid--this may be the only movie I ever get to make, this may be the best movie I ever make and everything else may be awful, so I’m not going to waste your time talking about anything less than God, the infinite, fathers and sons, the desert and the sun and the faith of a billion people on this planet, and I’m going to tell the absolute truth about the whole thing AND I’m going to entertain you. Then, to jump into the middle of a figure, he pushes all his chips towards the center of the table, takes off his money belt and throws it in, then the keys to the car and the deed to the house, then his children’s birth certificates: then throws a steely glance around at the other players and says simply: I’m all in. And he shows you his cards.
Thinking about it, it didn’t have to be this good. LE GRAND VOAYGE was, for me, a movie where I walked in afraid I was going to get one thing, and walked away with something else entirely. What did I think I might get? A movie where a wise, religious, old Muslim father takes his young son on a journey to teach him that his secularism is foolish and is Not Islaam, and the Good Old Ways are the best ways. What a small and vile little movie that would have been.
What did I take away instead? Here’s a short list, but it’s just a start: a great, grand sad movie about the changing world, about the last trip along an age-old trail and a dying set of traditions; a movie about a father and son coming to accept each other; a movie about the way reality changes our idealism, and about how idealism changes our reality; and a movie whose journey stands for every journey we ever make, about every spiritual adventure, every romantic one, every geographical one, every intellectual one and the changes we have to go through to get there.
Watching LE GRAND VOYAGE, I thought about my own journey since joining up with Ain’t It Cool in October, how each movie, each review has changed me a little; and about some other journeys I’m on right now, personal, economic and so on. Road movies are metaphors for Life—the road is the timeline—and lives have the same problems that road movies do: there’s no natural narrative coherence: the story is in all the little adventures they have along the way. If you don’t have a lot of adventures, if your life is static and boring and cycle-based, changes are good you’ll adapt an existing narrative to give your life some sense of movement, of involvement. The problem with these narratives is that they may drown out the messages that the “little adventures you have along the way,” and these may be the point of life. Joseph Campbell always tried to make the point that, look, those books you’re following: they’re good guidelines but they’re about SOMEONE ELSE’S spiritual experience. Stop being a copycat: go get your own. There’s a great moment in the movie when the father throws away the son’s cell phone; that’s a Joe Campbell moment—because if you’re going to go on this kind of journey and get what it has for you, you have to cut off ties to the familiar world, to the world that comforts you and keeps you safe, otherwise you won’t get the benefits of the journey. The great thing about LE GRAND VOYAGE—one of many great things—is that the real spiritual adventure is about what happens ON THE WAY to Mecca. The director’s smart enough to know that. LE GRAND Voyages not just one of the great movies for this year, but for any year, and perhaps for a lifetime of movies and other little adventures.
