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‘Free Trade’ 101
And Life and Debt gets an ‘A’
BY GERALD PEARY

Perhaps my proudest moment as acting curator for the Harvard Film Archive several years ago was to help cancel the Harvard address that Jack Valenti had volunteered to give. Valenti is the oily film-industry lobbyist who travels the world in the high pay of Hollywood demanding an open market for movie exhibitors. No quotas, please! A typical flagwaving Valenti triumph: in post-Communist Poland, 95 percent of films shown are Hollywood products. In America, hardly any Polish films have been distributed since the death of Kieslowski.

I can grasp the monstrous inequities of "free trade" when it comes to international film distribution. But what about the other kinds of financial squeezes that prevail in the name of "globalization?" If you are like me, in dire need of Economics 101, emotionally on the side of those protesters in Seattle and Quebec City without quite getting what they were protesting, I’ve got the documentary that brilliantly explains it all, a globalization primer: Stephanie Black’s Life and Debt, which screens this week at the Brattle Theatre.

Black’s recent Human Rights Film Festival hit is a vivid horror tale of the economic invasion and ruination of Jamaica, with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank standing by — and secretly approving? — as the Caribbean island is plundered from abroad, particularly the USA. "Free trade" has allowed US businesses to flood Jamaica with products grown for ages by local farmers — potatoes, carrots, onions, etc. — and at such low prices that the native businesses have gone under. Life and Debt is filled with melancholy interviews with wiped-out Jamaicans standing despairingly in front of their now useless farms. Meanwhile, truckloads of Idaho potatoes roll into the markets.

The dairy industry? America has arrived with cheap powdered milk, making milk straight from the cow redundant. No point trying to make hamburger out of the poor cow either, since the island’s McDonald’s and Burger King franchises bring their own chemically loaded patties from stateside.

You get the idea. Jamaica is being screwed. The screwing is articulated best in the movie by the marvelously charismatic Michael Manley, the populist (and left-wing) former prime minister. His talking-heads adversary (and the movie’s de facto villain) is Stanley Fischer, smug in a tie and gray flannel suit, the deputy director of the International Monetary Fund.

Life and Debt has a second narrative: a week of partying-by-the-pool leisure enjoyed by a typical group of vacationers from the US. Talk about fiddling while Rome burns! These tourists, sequestered from the "real" Jamaica, squander their time there with moronic drinking games and show-your-pecs contests organized by their hotel’s grinning, paid-to-be-coonish staff. Only once do they take a mini-bus day trip away from their luxurious, locked-in retreat. What do these revelers make of the hollow-eyed, chronically unemployed people who stand all the day alongside Jamaican roads?

Life and Debt gets a bit overstated in its Eisensteinian cutting between noble black Jamaicans and pale, privileged, ugly Americans. Likewise, the Jamaica Kincaid–written voiceover teeters between poetic and gratingly self-righteous. And it’s really too facile to insinuate that the murderous riots in the streets of Kingston that end the film are caused by globalization. Still, Life and Debt is necessary viewing, since the decline and fall of Jamaica is a microcosm of the have-not nations of the world.

DANCING AT THE BLUE IGUANA, a Michael Radford–directed film set in a lowly LA strip club, opened at last fall’s Toronto fest, and with plans for a grand New York opening in the making, star Daryl Hannah made a Letterman appearance promoting it. Surprise: the movie tumbled instantly to video, and now, several months later, it’s hopping off the shelf at local video stores. I finally managed to rent a copy and found it, alas, one crass, sudsy, pointless movie. As you might imagine, strippers have bummer lives. There’s much chintzy overacting and pained soul baring, and perhaps even more — Hannah and Jennifer Tilly and Sandra Oh all do it — tit baring. Dancing at the Blue Iguana is fodder for video voyeurs, who will doubtless fast-forward through the speechifying to get to the naked actresses sliding down poles. But those looking for an enticing drama about strippers should go directly to Atom Egoyan’s Exotica.

Issue Date: February 21 - 28, 2002
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