Recently, a journalist told the story that, doing badly on the street, he sat on the floor in front of the Mega Image where he wanted to go shopping, trying to ask for the passers-by. No one stopped and they all turned their heads. They thought he was a beggar, and with the beggars you didn't talk. At most you throw some money. The scene seems broken from Radu Jude's new film, “Kontinental '25”, who recently entered the rooms. When I discovered it on Facebook, I had just finished seeing the movie and I was preparing to write a text about indifference and carelessness. We intended something more optimistic.
Jude nourishes the same disappointment since in his cinematic replica at “Europe51” he did not take from the film of Roberto Rossellini and the heroine's aura. In the 1952 film, a bourgeois (Ingrid Bergman) was going through a change of consciousness after losing his child and, discovering the suffering of the poor, choosing to dedicate himself to him.
She made thus from her own rescue the rescue of others, saying in the end that the love we feel for close should “grow until all people.”
That we cannot live for us and ours. That empathy just for ours is not empathy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9ciknjl-ge
A permanent tragic-comic air
In the county, things are more mixed and permanently harass the comic. An executor (Eszter Tompa) enters a consciousness process after the evacuation of the home (Gabriel Spahiu) who lived illegally in a building result in his suicide.
Unlike the heroine of the 1952 film, which was beginning to help the poor and the end sent to the asylum by the family, Orsolya Ionescu cancels her departure with her on vacation, seeking the validation of the close (masochist?) The details of the suicide, she has an adventure with a former student, she makes a hinge, it is decided to meet with the family in Greece.
The common points of the two films are, among other things, the reactions of the entourage: you had nothing to do, it is useless to knead, take things as they are, it is not your fault, you have done everything possible.
In both films, a priest seals the fault between consciousness. The Catholic priest from Rossellini's film, convened by the family, invokes the “rules and discipline”, after which we must model ourselves in order to live in society, while the Orthodox priest (Șerban Pavlu) judges Homemess by invoking the sin of suicide and emphasizing the role.
Although it is ironic with the priest, Jude refers to judge his heroine. Orsolya Ionescu is a decent, but ambiguous man. Although he deceives his husband, he is more kneaded than others for those in suffering.
Although a tragedy with potential comes out of his way, he has difficulty assuming his salvation because he does not know how he can change a system that often destroys individuals like homeless.
On the other hand, what could he do?
A saint who today would be considered crazy
The sacrifice for the fellows has something dubious for today's man. Sure those who do this are waiting for something in return, right? It was so for the man yesterday. Rossellini confessed that he was inspired by the heroine of his film from Saint Francis of Assisi who, he said, would have considered crazy if he appeared in the world today.
Another model was Simone Weil (1909-1943), one of the most misunderstood personalities of the last century, from which we remained philosophical-mystical writings, but also anecdotes that indicated (as today) that it was different than the others. (A kind of Greta Thunberg without mystic or philosophy.)
Like that at the age of 6, during the First World War, he gave up sugar from solidarity with soldiers on the front, and at 10 years he embraced the cause of Bolshevism, joining workers at a protest.
Or that, although he came from a wealthy family and had a remarkable intelligence (he had learned Old Greek up to 12 years old and Sanskrit in adolescence), he went to work in the factory to be with the dismantled.
That, although he had poor health, he volunteered in Spain of the Civil War to fight the Republicans.
That he ended up not adaching any political party or religion, believing only in giving up ego, moral purity and self -sacrifice in relation to others.
And, above all, that he died of inanity during World War II. He had returned from the US (where he had taken refuge with his family) in Europe, to fight with French resistance. In hospitalized for a treatable tuberculosis, she refused to eat, dying at 34. On her death certificate she writes “suicide”.
After her death, some began to wonder if she was somehow a saint and if her end was not a sacrifice for a wide cause.
Saints, without knowing nobody
Although saints are an exception among people, many of them probably live without anyone knowing them. I come with a mission and work out of it. Even when the miracle is impalbable, they absorb and normalize the pressure in the community.
These people are attracted (says Rossellini's film) by those who suffer, because they feel a force that can move the mountains themselves.
But this force is not they, but it passes through them. Simone Weil told her divine grace.
In the only text he published during his life, an essay about “Iliada”, Weil wrote that force was the central character of Homer's epic.
A way of saying that society is always based on power relationships, that someone is permanent in a weak position-and that only weakens the idea that the one in front of us would be us.
It is one of the reasons why the comfortable in their lives tend to show sympathy for some of their own, not for a foreigner.
And there are also those who do not feel sympathy for their families. Who would give their brothers out of the house for inheritance.
Not in vain the community of the fans of David Attenborough on Facebook, a group of over 350,000 people, constantly publishes texts about spiders and other living creators with the message “Be Kind!” (“Be good!”).
Whoever abandons cat chicks has as little empathy with the one who starves people.
“We must see a brother in a stranger and God in the universe,” Wiil wrote.
Each of us reaches, at a time, in a moral turning point, a prisa of conscience which can help him open to others. Of course, we have a free will but, at a precise moment, we are given the opportunity to choose.
In recent years, a movement has grown that promote small gestures of kindness – to smile at a traveler in the subway, to hold the door of a stranger in the store, to compliment to the one you are talking to. “Practitioners” say that people tend to give goodness further and that so, over time, we could all become better.
But not so should we usually behave?
Kindness has become a sign of weakness
The “Pay It Forward” (“Give”) Movement has not appeared with the Catherine Ryan Hyde's homonymous book in 1999, in which a dying boy created a community of people around, or with the film screening of Mimi Ledder, from 2000. And the Bible refers to the good, and in the Bible. theater with a similar subject.
Throughout history, people have felt at least at least that the good done to another is returning, like boomerang, all of them.
Did you not notice, however, that people take you as a sucker if you behave beautifully? Nowadays you need to know how to impose yourself, to ride the other, to show who you are, to dominate the dialogue refusing to listen to your interlocutor.
Goodness has become a sign of weakness.
In America I was amazed by the dignity of those who begged in the street. Even if you did not give them anything, they claimed their right to confirm their existence. I was heading down, embarrassed that I could not give them money, but they wanted to be seen, to be answered.
Empathy is not a fashionable word, as they say. In fact, people were tired of hearing it.
The truth is that, although there are so much about empathy, few are truly empathetic.
And, in fact, I think we are witnessing the death of empathy-that's why those who do not think of them reach extreme gestures, detonating metaphorically in the hope that they will change something in the collective mind. But again, they are only exceptions – some strange and excluded.
It is much easier to pull their feet down those who are not like you and accuse them of being broken by reality.
In the 2010 documentary “Ancounter with Simone Weil”, the director Julia Haslett wondered what we can take, for our life today, from Simone Weil's existence. The main answer is the attention for the other, which Weil considers “the rarest and purest form of generosity”. (Unlike “fear and terror that paralyzes the soul”.).
And yet, how to use your attention when there is so much suffering around?
How can the suffering of someone's foreigner awaken something in us?, The film asks, slipping image from Guantanamo and from other hot points of the globe.
Some survivors of clinical death talk about a kind of judgment afterwards, which made him feel the good and the evil done to others. That would be the punishment in the other world-to feel what the ones you hurt-and the suffering, is said, is very strong. Feeling the pain of the other, we understand that we are not separated, but a great body.
We will have to strive not only to do harm but not to be indifferent
Not all people can feel empathy, even wishing it. It seems that there is a precise area of the brain bark, which is responsible for empathy.
But the brain has neuroplasticity so, until science finds the remedy, we will have to strive not only to do harm, but not to be indifferent. Things become clearer in the slippers of the other – but this is also about the free will.
In “Kontinental '25” the moral crisis is more relevant than social polarization, monstrous real estate development or the deadlock. And it is all the more complicated as it comes to the package with the good faith of the characters.
And Orsolya Ionescu, and those who talk to are convinced that they care and do the right thing. And Hitler believed he was doing the right thing.
But there must be a middle area between carelessness and holiness. If we cannot be all saints, at least we do not become all insensitive to suffering. But again, everyone decides alone. If you are interested in reading the screenplay of the movie “Kontinental '25”, which was awarded in Berlin, you now have it in the printed edition.
