The second part, shot digitally in carnival colors, concerns an old couple whose distant past as members of the French Resistance a Hollywood producer wants to turn into a film. This is an expression of Godard's distrust of Steven Spielberg and his film Schindler's List. She's living in poverty in Argentina. The film includes some porno footage that, as aspiring actresses used to say, is absolutely essential to the plot. The film is so saturated in the sad glamour of their love that style becomes substance.
Some directors take a journey into the exotic past, some into the perilous present.
Two distinguished Iranian auteurs made films that tested their journalistic as well as dramatic instincts. The resulting documentary, A.B.C Africa, may not be what either the film maker or his hosts had in mind. Apparently realizing that the devastation was too great to make sense of, Kiarostami takes shot after shot of bereft kids, most of them singing, nearly all of them smiling. The Afghani children in Kandahar, by Kiarostami's compatriot Mohsen Makhmalbaf, do not smile. Another boy, an orphan in the desert, will peddle anything, including himself, to keep going.