International Socialists

Fiona Bowker

Somehow, when I was marking crosses next to all the films I wanted to watch at the latest Film Festival (coming soon to a city near you, if it hasn't already been), I must have had a subconscious yearning for sweeping vistas and snowy landscapes. The themes of imprisonment and claustrophobia also seem to be prevalent this year. Of the five films I saw (two of which I will write about here), only Udayan Prasad's Brothers in Trouble stopped short of the snowy theme, although it was certainly about claustrophobia and imprisonment.

The film deals with the fear in which illegal Pakistani immigrants in Britain in the sixties lived. In the film, fear exists as a political ideology that is culturally reinforced by each occupant in the two-up two-down house in which 17 such immigrants are forced to live. Thus, when Prasad exploits such racial stereotypes as the "Pakistani huddle" where the immigrants follow each other everywhere, he is showing the political and cultural relevance of such gestures; the immigrants must keep each other literally in sight to guard against anything that could lead to their being discovered.

The jobsite in the film is a wool-cleaning factory, which sets up a comparison to Blake's "dark satanic mills," and thus Brothers in Trouble is about the exploitation of labour. The film does not directly take on those who profit most from the illegal labourers - the capitalist factory owners - but they are conspicuous by their absence. Instead, the exploiters are the middlemen, the Pakistani businessman cum landlord who is true to his class position rather than his nationality when he packs the immigrants 17 to a house, and the factory supervisor who takes on illegal labourers because he doesn't have to offer minimum wages and conditions.

Although these are the concerns of Brothers in Trouble, the narrative focuses on the "brothers" life in the house and the threat that is introduced in the form of a bright and lively young Irishwoman who herself represents the working class Irish who emigrated legally across the Irish Sea but were treated little better than the Pakistani labourers. When one of the tenants moves her into the house, their terror is thrown into sharp relief, and their worst fears eventually realised.

Brothers in Trouble is a fabulous film. It respects its characters and never settles for glib stereotypes. From the start when the central character, Amir, is shown through the slats of a packing container to the end when he walks from the asylum in which his friend is housed into an archetypal English meadow full of summer flowers, Prasad keeps the class commentary running. He doesn't slip once.

The sun never shined in The Day the Sun Turned Cold. The film deals with the lives of peasants in northeast China and uses unrelenting snow as a metaphor for the harshness of rural peasant life. The Day the Sun Turned Cold, made by Hong Kong director Yim Ho, is based on the true story of a 26 year old man who reports his mother to the authorities for murdering his father a decade before. By the time he has forgiven his mother for his father's death and her remarriage, it is too late - the wheels of bureaucracy are moving.

The story is told through conversations between the young man and the long suffering police commander and through flashbacks to his early life in a northeast Chinese province. While commentators describe the film as containing a simple Freudian moral of the mother-son father-son relationships, the concentration on the unpaid economic activities of the mother make the film much deeper than that. It is her economic activities that occupy Yim Ho and, by extension, us. While the father, Guan Shichang, is a school teacher, and thus probably well paid, little attention is given to his contribution to the household. Pu Fengying runs the house and makes and sells beancurd - an activity that also encompasses their children who tow the beancurd through the village on their sleds in the freezing cold.

When Guan Jian returns to the village with the police ten years after he left, he asks his mother to make beancurd for him, although she has not done so since her remarriage. She obliges, and while he is nostalgic for the steam-filled room that was at the centre of his childhood, we see the reality of Pu Fengying's life as she exerts her weight against the giant grindstone that turns round and round on top of the beans. While the son's relationships with his parents are the narrative focus and provide the chilling denouement, The Day the Sun Turned Cold is also an exploration of a woman's unpaid labour within the family and her lack of choices in life.Like Brothers in Trouble, the film does not caricaturise its cast, although it would have been easy to do so, and nor does it try for the simple moral. The dead Guan Shichang was not an abusive husband, nor was Pu Fengying a victimised wife, they were both trapped within their economically determined social roles and although the son comes to realise this, this realisation comes too late.