Word: malik
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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SEVEN-YEAR-OLD Malik rises slowly from his bed, his eyes half closed. With arms outstreched, as if holding a marionette, he walks down the hall, past the bathroom, and out the front door. In post-World War II Yugoslavia, sleepwalking was a very good way to escape from reality...
...familiar with the circumstances of the CIA funding of this conference, but it is unfortunate that I was not informed of it until two days ago. As it happens I had received Professor Malik's paper only the day before and had not yet read it or prepared my comments, so I cannot complain of having been put to extensive labor. I would like to think that my comments would have come out pretty much the same. But it is the case that a CIA connection of any sort can severely compromise one's scholarly reputation, certainly in India...
...chance, a dedicated philanderer. During a tryst on a train, he deflects pleas of love from a randy gym teacher with an offhand "Who loves anybody in this madhouse?" Before you can say "compulsory resocialization," he is sent to a labor camp--or, as his six-year-old son Malik (Moreno D'E Bartolli) is told, "Father is away on business...
...Malik has a few problems of his own: he is a chronic sleepwalker and an irrepressible imp. When Mama (Mirjana Karanovic) snags a few intimate moments alone with Father, Malik feigns a fit of sleepwalking; Mama resignedly gets out of bed and lullabies the boy to sleep. When she returns to make love to her husband, she finds him asleep. When Malik crawls into bed between his parents, Father embraces him, and Mama is left awake and alone. In the film's loveliest scene, Malik sleepwalks out of his bed, down the stairs, out of the house, down the street...
...recently, "There were a lot of sleepwalkers in Yugoslavia back then." But its viewpoint is applicable beyond Eastern Europe. It suggests that life is a series of small revolutions against, and accommodations to, the prevailing power, whether ideological, social, sexual or parental; and that flight into a dreamscape like Malik's may be the only sensible solution. The little boy's somnambulism leads him to a consuming first love, to the top of a mountain and, in the final shot, into delicious complicity with the viewer. In the mind, or in movies, we can all be rebels...