Nikos Papatakis’ Walking a Tightrope
in fact figuratively walks (or runs, or leaps) across a series of them,
stretched across a strange, highly iconoclastic variety of narrative and
thematic divides and contrasts. The film does feature a fair amount of literal
tightrope walking: famous author Marcel Spardice (Michel Piccoli) fixates on
and later seduces Franz-Ali, a young man who catches his eye while picking up
elephant dung at the circus, and then invests much time and resources in helping
Franz-Ali work toward his high-wire dream. But with Franz-Ali failing to fulfil
Marcel’s vision for him, and another young lover appearing on the horizon,
Marcel’s attention moves on, and Franz-Ali eventually ends up back where he
started, except that it’s unbearable now, and only obliteration awaits. There’s
much genuine longing and loveliness in the film - not least in the character of
Helene (Polly Walker), initially little more than a procurer for Marcel (it’s clear
how those with power and connections manipulate the system to their advantage),
but later overcome by a doomed love for Franz-Ali – and much personal and
societal pain. The film counterpoints Marcel’s initial pursuit with a damning portrait
of engrained racism – Franz-Ali’s mixed ethnicity causes him to be randomly
rounded up and thrown into jail, after which a policeman volunteers to his German-born
mother that as bad as the Nazis were, her dilution of racial purity by marrying
an Arab is a worse sin. But this aspect of the film rather recedes as it goes
on, while certainly remaining implicit in Franz-Ali’s decline – for instance,
even at the height of her love for him, a large part of Helene’s plan is to
have him work as a uniformed manservant either for her or her sister. That’s just
one aspect of Papatakis’ consistent confounding of expectations, of his highly
singular, energized sense of cinematic and emotional form and balance.
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