Tangerines and Grief

tangerinesIn the Estonian-Georgian film Tangerines, which I recently viewed on Netflix, the central character Ivo, at an impromptu evening picnic in a near-deserted war-torn village, can think of only Death to toast. His three companions, all deeply scarred by the 1992 conflict – two of them enemies, rescued casualties from a firefight – demur, but Ivo persists, telling the soldiers Ahmed, a Chechen mercenary, and Niko, a Georgian volunteer, that they are the children of Death and its servants. For the past year I have been disheartened and almost willing to raise a glass in that desperately defiant and ironic salute to the grim reaper, but after an hour and a half with Tangerines, I began to feel ashamed of myself.

The last decade has been hard on my friends, and I have counted the afflictions and fatalities, nursing my grief like a private, secret, even prized, possession. I’ve been unable or unwilling to attend memorial ceremonies, keep in contact with families, participate in written tributes. Those who found solace in the sorrow dance suddenly seemed like strangers. The result has been a self-righteous isolation: these public rituals fell so far short of what I believed my profounder-than-thou feelings of loss that participation would seem, I reasoned, like an understatement. My misery didn’t want company, as I didn’t want to overdramatize my sorrow nor to minimize it, so I withdrew from any potential community of mutual solace and bore down, pulled in my outposts, concentrating on daily survival, sequestering when possible with my wife, staring at the TV’s festival of horrors – extreme weather, national and international political sniping and lying, terrorism, insurrection, economic threats. The collective grievances all served to distract me from examining my own grieving inertia, which amounted in the end to misconduct.

Eager to deny that we’re immersed in self-pity, we’re capable of excavating a sanctuary of distraction and numbness, only to discover that it soon becomes a pretty effective grave. We harden, accentuate the practical, minimize the emotional. We soldier on, eyes front. But then, if we’re very lucky, something breaks the trance. In my life the awakening agent has often been the discovery (or rediscovery) of a work of art – film, poem, story, song, painting – and I won’t go so far as to claim that art heals me like some medical prozac panacea, but it speaks to me in that thunderous and irresistible whisper with which the bust of Apollo said to Rilke, “You much change your life.”

Of course, timing is crucial. Back before Christmas, I would have kept my mind too distracted to really engage with Tangerines, and even last week I probably wouldn’t have been quite ripe for a face-to-face encounter with Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” to help me start rescuing myself, but Tangerines (Mandarinebi in Estonian) came as a surprise and provided just the summons I needed. I suspect I was not alone. After all, the film received, I’ve discovered, nominations for best foreign language film in both the Golden Globes and Academy Awards last year. . . though on second thought, those may be suspect credentials. Fortunately, I often find the decentering element of foreign films can bring from the periphery some topic or imagery that I can see with my direct gaze clearly for the first time. Maybe it’s the subtitles, but I suspect it’s more a matter of non-American filmmakers being not so inclined to “entertain,” to both exploit and encourage our shallowness. They demand more.

I don’t want to tell too much about this film. Its story is an old one, its trajectory nearly guessable, but what follows is just a hint at how the small story of four men working out their salvation with diligence plays against the backdrop of the “large” stories of war, sectarian hostility, displacement, harvest.

In Zaza Urushadze’s film (his as writer, director, producer), the grandfatherly Ivo and the younger Margus remain in their evacuated village to bring in the precious tangerine harvest, despite war’s rapid approach. Ivo makes crates, his friend picks fruit, the landscape teems and shimmers – with both sea and mountains close, the forest deep and the sky deeper. The setting is vital in all senses, and the men robust, disciplined, dedicated to their task, stoically good-natured, given the circumstances. But the savagery falls upon them, and soon they witness a firefight and rescue a pair or survivors, whom they nurse as the two sworn enemies taunt each other, threaten and engage in vitriolic dispute. I’m paring this down in an embarrassing way, but I don’t want to interfere with readerss chances to see the film afresh.

It’s an old story: each combatant slowly and perilously begins to recognize the other’s humanity, and as they do, their allegiances, losses and griefs are revealed, along with those of Ivo (Lembit Ulfsak) and Margus (Elmo Nuganen). The Chechen mercenary Ahmed and the Georgian volunteer Niko begin to shed their prejudices and indoctrination. (There’s an old Twilight Zone episode, “Two,” along this line with Charles Bronson and Elizabeth Montgomery, and such stories usually begin with the “last two standing” premise, as does the song “Wooden Ships” or Hardy’s “The Man He Killed”). Empathizing as they learn to share their sorrows, they assist their hosts with the work around the farm and promise to assist with the harvest. To watch them guardedly gravitate towards one another is to be reminded of Faulkner’s “human heart in conflict with itself.”

You don’t want to be told how the inhumane obstacles arise, as that would spoil the dramatic tension, but before they do, much is exchanged among fatalist, Christian and Muslim – questions of mortality and duty, fathers and sons, harvests accomplished and harvests thwarted, honor and fairness. The rough bucolics provide a powerful backdrop which helps to keep sentimentality at bay; the wounds are all deep, the treatments severe, the dialogue authentic. Perhaps the hardest element of the narrative to embrace is: of the four survivors holed up in this front line village, all four are actually good men, but none a duplicate of the other. I wish I could believe in that ratio as representative. As the story develops, the men’s plans and needs twist together like the vines of a wisteria, braiding strength. Soon they are engaged in word and communion, at war with the war, but the story, the time, requires sacrifice in order that disaster be averted.

At the end, the titles rolled, as did the landscape and plangent music, and I pondered the cost to each of those men to understand and express his own dreams and miseries. Dire circumstances and the guidance of the sardonic Ivo brought them out of the solipsistic (or numbed) refraction of their feelings and into a vital relationship with their pasts, their destinies and their companions.

tangersceneThe acting was moving, the script running from grim to wry to droll. An allegory, perhaps, with its journeys and meetings, its dark night of the soul and the inexorable silent progress of the citrus crop – ripe for picking but with only a brief window of opportunity.

From start to finish, I saw actors portraying the kind of man I had forgotten how to strive to be – resourceful, stoic but sympathetic, receptive and centered and generous. Art had done its job again; a made-up but believable story had nurtured and stimulated me and said, “try harder; you have that responsibility.” The influence of Tangerines has lasted for days, and I hope it will continue to do so, but I’m sure I’ll eventually need another fix, which I can’t get from buying a rapid-fire weapon, nor from cursing and threatening a whole culture or a band of sojourners or a gender, not even from being rude or dismissive. Tangerines won’t banish pettiness or melodrama any more than “Mending Wall,” A Hundred Years of Solitude or “Trois Gymnopedies” will, and I continue to need booster shots, but I remember now where to seek them, and it will not be in a toast to death.

Tangerines reminds me that I owe a debt to what has been and what will be to shake off my sense of defeat, understand my losses and weave the grief tightly into my personal tapestry of human strength and vulnerability.  I must change my life.


recent-meR. T. Smith has edited Shenandoah since 1995 and serves as Writer-in-Residence at Washington & Lee. His forthcoming books are Doves in Flight: 13 Fictions and Summoning Shades: New Poems, both due in 2017.