Divine passage

Bresson is dead, long live Makhmalbaf

The greatest living filmmaker, France's Robert Bresson, is no longer living; he expired December 21, 1999, at age 98. Born in 1901, surviving through the Auschwitz/Rwanda century, he gave a thumbs-down "no" to bearing witness to the upcoming millennium, rejecting it as he has the last odious, blasphemous, 2000 years. Man's progress? Bresson's nonpareil oeuvre (Pickpocket, Diary of a Country Priest, Mouchette, Au Hasard Balthazar, etc.) refrains one bleak Catholic vision: that time on earth is an eternal return of the jeering, rock-throwing, impenitent cruelty of those who mocked the innocent Christ as He died for humanity's sins.

Life is ugly, insisted Bresson, yet there is one dim hope: God, he avowed, is out there, up there, listening. In even the most excruciatingly hopeless of Bresson's works, there might be a moment -- literally, a few seconds -- where the sky cracks open and the Almighty reveals himself, usually through a spilling forth on the soundtrack of divine classical music. Monteverdi, Mozart. That's all: a hint, for true believers, that their suffering will be atoned for in the afterworld.

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If Bresson calculated right by his lifetime of Catholic devotion, he's dancing about now with God's angels -- Salvation!! -- while we deluded mortals fuck our brains out for New Year's 2000. Good luck to us. Good luck to him. Meanwhile, a mini-miracle is happening in Boston, and wise men and women should pay homage: Bresson reincarnated, sort of, with Mohsen Makhmalbaf's magical, wonderful The Silence, playing January l through 22 at the Museum of Fine Arts.

The Iranian Makhmalbaf (Gabbeh, Moment of Silence) is, in most obvious ways, the very antithesis of Bresson. A once-zealous soldier of Mohammed (he served a jail sentence for attacking, in Khomeini's name, a policeman of the Shah), Makhmalbaf makes films as vivid expressions of his amazing conversion: away from Allah (though he could never say this) to an inspired secular humanism. So how to fathom that The Silence is the most Bressonian film by a major filmmaker in memory?

Is it a coincidence that Makhmalbaf opts for a style of shooting so close to Bressonian minimalism? The characters in intense close-ups against blank backgrounds. The world sliced up into more close-ups, incredibly framed and abstracted, and stitched together through startling editing juxtapositions.

Let's move to the performances. Bresson revolutionized cinema by a) casting only non-professionals in his movies, and b) far more radically, restricting his actors to those who managed not to act when before the camera. The more passive, expressionless, "real," the better. Bresson would have endorsed Makhmalbaf's amateur ensemble in the Tajikistan-shot The Silence, who, without artifice or affectation, embody something close to (though not exactly: they are following a script) their real selves.

The protagonist is Khorshid, a 10-year-old blind boy who -- my leap of faith -- is probably quite similar to the child who plays him, a 10-year-old lad named Khorshid Normativa. The same with his charming, bow-mouthed, young female friend, Nadereh, played by Nadereh Abdelahyeva.

As for the world of The Silence: it's hardly as cold and mean-spirited as that of Bresson, and yet young Khorshid is, as a Bresson character, a total innocent trapped on all sides. The landlord is begging for the rent, and about to throw Khorshid and his mother onto the streets. Khorshid is about to be fired from work, the last chance for him and his mother to get some money. What to do? What to do?

Khorshid's temporary solution is a spiritual one, and a delirious convergence with Bresson: bursts of classical music! The four ominous knocks on the door of his greedy landlord are transformed by the music-crazy Khorshid into the world-famous opening chords of the Fifth Symphony. While the cold cruel real world closes in on him, Khorshid sails away inside his head into the heavenly realm of Ludwig van Beethoven!

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There's another impoverished, crippled child in trouble in Djirbil Diop Mambety's The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun, at the MFA December 31 through January 29. She's Sili Laam, a 12-year-old paraplegic in Dakar, Senegal, who tries to alleviate the dire economic distress of her and her grandmother by peddling newspapers in the streets of the city. The movie's title is a pun: La Soleil is the name of the periodical she sells. But on a more important level, Sili Laam is sunshine itself, a little person of grit and heroic spirit who, as much as Makhalbaf's Khorshid, seizes the day, every day.

The filmmaker Mambety, who tragically died during post-production, called his last film "a hymn to the courage of street children." There's no Bach or Beethoven, but something equally stirring: Sili Laam, with arm braces and shaky greyhound-sized legs, dancing with Fred Astaire-like confidence to African chants.

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Craving the perfect December 3l movie end-of-the-millennium? Cambridge's Peter Dowd, who programs at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, is showing the Garbo-starring Flesh and the Devil (1927) at 10 p.m., and 2000 will be welcomed in with a projection of Edison's 1896 John Rice-May Irwin smooch, The Kiss.