Louis Kahn’s 1974 obituary in the New York Times hinted at the kind of mystery-shrouded life that makes for great novels.
Kahn was one of the most renowned architects of the 20th century, and his name was often mentioned alongside Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe. Kahn was highly respected for creating a handful of unique buildings, but he died bankrupt and in obscurity in a Penn Station men’s room.
That obituary was even more telling for Kahn’s son, Nathaniel. The Times claimed the architect’s only remaining relative was one daughter, but in reality, Louis left three children behind. Kahn made his name designing iconoclastic buildings, and he created an equally idiosyncratic personal life. Though he was married to Esther Kahn and had a legitimate daughter, he carried on relationships with two other women, which in turn produced two illegitimate children.
My Architect: A Son’s Journey is filmmaker Nathaniel Kahn’s Citizen Kane-worthy search for his Rosebud: the father he hardly knew. Near the film’s opening, Nathaniel recalls in poignant detail the only day he ever spent with his father. A lifetime with a father creates a history, but one day creates an enormous void.
Nathaniel’s movie, one of last year’s Oscar nominees for Best Documentary Feature, will be close to the hearts of anyone with unresolved father issues, not just those with famous architect fathers. It reveals a strange truth: Those who are closest to us are often the most knee-deep in mystery. And it is often fathers who, by design or circumstance, take on such a mythic resonance. Mothers shape by their presence, and fathers by their absence.
In his quest for Daddy, Nathaniel turns his camera and a million questions on a host of symbolic architectural mack daddies. He interviews Frank Gehry, I.M. Pei, Philip Johnson and Robert A.M. Stern, among others. These people attest to the human, fallible Louis.
But because he was an artist and because he had a worldly significance beyond the people he met and the children he sired, Nathaniel also “interviews” the buildings his father constructed: the Gattaca Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, CA, and the magnificent National Assembly building in Bangladesh — a physical metaphor for democracy, says an Indian architect weeping at the power of the place. This film about one architect turns out to be a larger film about the spiritual component to architecture, of buildings as the physical manifestation of dreams and vision.
Equally important to the film is Nathaniel’s spiritual return to the many tombstones his father left behind: the material representations of his life on Earth. The bitter irony of My Architect is that to make these spectacular buildings, Kahn had to make his family secondary to his work.
Though the film is driven by the assurance that we will learn more about Louis Kahn than when we started, My Architect has an unsatisfying core, perhaps because despite his greatness, it is hard to shake the impression of Louis’ unconscious cruelty.
It is a source of great sadness throughout the film that Louis saw his legacy of greatness in buildings only and not in his own children. While a father longed for a connection to immortality through his architecture, his children only longed for a father. My Architect leaves the worst kind of melancholy in its wake: the magnificence of what one man achieved and what might have been. (F.F.)
Set to the peppy strains of classic 60s pop like “Wooly Bully” and the French variant yeye, Monsieur Ibrahim at first promises to be a far different movie than the one viewers end up seeing. It initially reeks of a Summer-I-Lost-My-Virginity period piece choreographed with wall-to-wall Bill Haley and Johnny Hallyday.When the film opens, 16-year-old Momo (Pierre Boulanger) is like a hundred cinematic teenagers before him: young, restless, horny. He’s prematurely debonair and absurdly handsome with his tiny Elvis pout and jet-black hair. But like Antoine Doinel, the alienated teenage hero of Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, Momo has been supremely gypped by the adults in his life. His mother is nowhere to be seen and his father is a constipated tyrant who Momo has no hope of ever pleasing.
In a slow, natural progression, Momo begins to transfer his desire for fatherly love from his own deadbeat dad to an unlikely mentor: the Arab grocer Monsieur Ibrahim (a still captivating, sparkly-eyed Omar Sharif) whose tiny store services the local working folk. And the film ripens, too, from a superficial coming of age tale into a tender, pleasantly low-key buddy film.
Ibrahim’s lyrical, philosophical — and often illogical — musings on life, women and the Koran give Momo a kind of spiritual nourishment his grim, critical father can’t. And so the Arab shopkeeper and the Jewish budding ladies’ man become confidantes. While Ibrahim offers Momo a more ideal and loving father than his biological one, Momo offers Ibrahim the opportunity to be more than an anonymous Arab grocer. He becomes a teacher and a mentor — what he has learned over his lifetime suddenly seems more vital when he’s passing it on to the boy.
Their union comes with some degree of contrivance the Arab man and Jewish boy is not an unconscious or entirely naturalistic match. But it is true that there is often something of the exotic that makes such friendships work in real life. While Momo seems unfamiliar with prejudice, there are many indications that Arab Ibrahim has seen his share. That attention to anti-Muslim discrimination gives Monsieur Ibrahim a contemporary feel, making it undeniably a film of our own time.
In one of the film’s most enjoyable interludes, Ibrahim buys a red convertible and the pair takes off for a driving tour to Ibrahim’s Turkish motherland. The deeper they move into the Middle East the more soulful Ibrahim becomes. Soon the bubble gum pop and coming of age cliches that seemed to define the film are traded for something deeper, and Monsieur Ibrahim mellows into the oddest and most satisfying kind of buddy film. Momo’s coming of age becomes all the more poignant with Ibrahim as a compassionate, devoted companion beside him, guiding him to adulthood even as he watches his own mortality fade. (F.F.)
There’s something uncomfortably familiar about the mood of menace and impending conflict that hangs over The Return. The Russian film primarily takes place over a benighted fishing trip with two fractious brothers and their long-lost father, who wants to renew his relationship — and lay down the law — after a 12-year absence.Much of The Return feels like the most fraught, hostile moments of your own worst family vacation, those points when personalities clash and tempers fray until the wrong word can set off an explosion. Director Andrei Zvyagintsev draws that tension so tightly that we spend the film with muscles taut, bracing for an ugly, possibly lethal confrontation. With a grim but gripping story rich with allegory, The Return does for father-son bonding what George Orwell’s Animal Farm did for agriculture.
On a murky afternoon, a group of boys dare each other to climb a rickety tower at the end of a jetty and leap into the gunmetal gray water below. Eager to fit in, teenage Andrey (Vladimir Garin) takes the plunge, but his prepubescent brother Ivan (Ivan Dobronravov) loses his nerve at the top and crouches shivering in place for hours.
The Return cleverly introduces Ivan when he’s most vulnerable. Ivan otherwise reveals few soft corners as he eagerly picks fights and resents restrictions. When the other boys call him a coward and Andrey reluctantly agrees, Ivan furiously attacks his older brother. The two chase each other home in a race that’s both angry and exhilarating, as if only rage can fuel their fun in the sleepy town.
When they arrive home, their mother surprises the boys with the announcement that their father (Konstantin Lavronenko) has returned after being away for almost Ivan’s entire life. Never addressed by name, the father remains nearly as much a mystery in the flesh as he did before his homecoming. He shows only a passing interest in Andrey and Ivan, but the next day invites the boys on a fishing trip.
The father proves to be the kind of disciplinarian who enforces rules before explaining them. He’s genuinely interested in teaching the boys manly activities such as how to drink wine or settle a restaurant bill, but he prides force over all else. When young muggers steal Andrey and Ivan’s wallet, the father catches one of the thieves and orders his sons to punch the frightened teen in retribution. “You’ve got no fists,” he sneers when the sons refuse.
The father grows ever more tyrannical when the car gets stuck in mud and, later, when he forces the boys to row a boat across an endless lake. Though Lavronenko’s expression never softens, he doesn’t come across as a sadist, but a man taking brutal steps to make up for years of missed fathering. He clearly has a hidden agenda for the trip, but does he intend to use the boys as accomplices or an alibi? Or does he really just want them along for the company?
Garin gives a performance that’s alert to Andrey’s moods, especially his hunger for masculine approval and quickness in registering hurt feelings. Dobronravov gives Ivan suspicion to balance Andrey’s trusting nature. Like Haley Joel Osment as a smoldering problem child, Dobronravov sets his chin like a challenge and glares with death-ray eyes.
Zvyagintsev emulates the eerie, icy formalism of a Stanley Kubrick film. Power struggles play out in such close quarters as the dinner table, the car and the boy’s tent. Long shots of empty roads, primeval forests and glassy lakes make the father and sons seem increasingly isolated, with no hope of rescue when things inevitably build to a boiling point.
Even though the climax feels preordained, it still has the power to shock the audience. The Return ends with a kind of slideshow, the family’s old photos that leave the viewer to sort out the mixed emotions of loss, relief and confusion. Both powerful and enigmatic, The Return leaves you so drained and frazzled, you’ll probably need a vacation by the closing credits. (C.H.)
My Architect: A Son’s Journey, Monsieur Ibrahim and The Return will be presented as part of this month’s Charlotte Film Society series, beginning this Friday at the Manor. The month’s other offering is Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… And Spring. For details, call 704-414-2355 or go online to http://charlottefilmsociety.com.
This article appears in Jun 9-15, 2004.
