Baby Steps
First films are rough. It is rare that an opening salutation
lives up to an artist’s true abilities, yet they are often judged as harshly as
films from well-established directors. Rather than a fully-formed feature,
Zeina Durra’s The Imperialists Are Still Alive! is more like the overture to her blossoming talent.
Asya is that rare thing, a successful conceptual artist,
living the high life in a post-9/11 Manhattan. In between making videos about prostitution
in the Middle East and explaining her mixed heritage to anyone who will listen,
Asya attends exclusive parties, rubs elbows with models, and takes up with a
sexy Mexican PhD student. But her idyllic world is shattered when her childhood
friend disappears on a flight to Houston. Alysa’s paranoid CIA conspiracy
theories amuse her new lover, but she seriously feels she is being watched. She
obsessively pays attention to news coverage of the Lebanon war, which rages in
her brother’s neighborhood. Nothing really happens and the movie ends without
much resolution.
Despite writer/director Durra’s valiant attempt to knit
together her disparate plot threads, the result is rather grotesque. Asya’s
life plays out in a series of barely connected vignettes, populated by
paper-thin characters defined primarily by the 30 second autobiography each
gives upon introduction. In fact, much of the film is repetitious, with similar
scenes punctuated by underdeveloped or extraneous segments. Jump cuts alternate
with long, boring static shots, accentuating the scattered nature of the
action.
Asya is alternately defined by her identity as an artist and
by her origins. The film opens with a long and steady look at Asya’s naked body
at the intersection of these two influences: performing a part and exploring
her roots. These two separate for the remainder of the film, as Asya laughs at
some ridiculous environmental dance (“I am a tree. I am a naked tree.”) and
then chatters on her phone in a mixture of French, Arabic and English. Everyone
in the film is comfortably foreign; the cab driver is Egyptian, the cleaner
Mexican, the gambling house Chinese and a friend Native American. Only during
the last scene do these identities intersect in the parade of friends and
family through her apartment, now showcasing an over-sized print of her naked
self-portrait.
Durra aligns her directorial style too closely with her
protagonist. The film is both banal and overly metaphoric. In one scene, Asya
runs her eyeliner pencil along the tile grooves in a bathroom, which Durra
wants to commute to Asya’s life being stuck in a set track. Then, when Asya is
actually talking about her fears, Durra provides an anonymous visual of dogs in
a park or the stark Manhattan skyline. Such treatment sucks the humanity from
her protagonist, and makes Asya very difficult to care about.
But for all its
faults in title, plotting and editing, The Imperialists Are Still Alive! contains the promise of
a distinct female voice in independent cinema. Durra’s visuals are dark and
engrossing where her story isn’t, and, given time to mature, her plot lines
could live up to her educated mis-en-scene. With a tighter premise and a more
discerning eye, Imperialists could have been a strong opening number in the
life of a provocative independent director.
The Imperialists Are Still Alive!
Directed by Zeina Durra
Runtime: 90 min.