Women, war, and a world without men

Ken Eisner REVIEWS

d SOMEONE WEARING a Nelson Mandela mask uses a rock to smash a drone she just shot down with a bow and arrow. That’s just one of many startling images presented by Woman at War, an ecopolitical action movie savvy enough to throw entertainment grenades at an audience that might be expecting lectures.

The woman in the mask, battling the power grid that she feels is overindustrializing Iceland’s rugged landscape, is Halla, a middle-aged choir director played magnificently by Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir. (She does double duty as our hero’s twin sister, Ása.)

Halla’s been sabotaging electrical stations and cooking up a radical manifesto with help from someone inside the government (Jörundur Ragnarsson), but when he tells her it’s time to cool it, she only gets more ambitious.

As if the stakes weren’t high enough, Halla gets word that the adoption she applied for years ago has suddenly come through, and she’s been matched with a four-year-old Ukrainian girl.

Will Halla yield to her maternal instincts or keep pulling warrior duty for Mother Earth? Things don’t stay that simple for writer-director Benedikt Erlingsson in his terrific followup to 2013’s Of Horses and Men. Here, he’s constantly shifting moods and color palettes, aided by three bearded musicians who accompany Halla’s adventures. When the adoption subplot kicks in, they are joined by a female trio of Ukrainian singers, marking the contrasts between male and female, militant and pacific, normal and just plain weird. All these elements head confidently toward an uplifting yet appropriately open-ended finish.

Lucky Vancouverites can sample a wide range of Jia’s works in a retrospective at the Vancity Theatre. These include his nihilism-pricking Unknown Pleasures, futuristic Mountains May Depart, and Tarantino-esque A Touch of Sin. One thing those titles have in common with the new one is the presence of Zhao Tao, his favourite star, and wife. She has the whole run of the time-jumping Ash Is Purest White, and pulls it off spectacularly.

Zhao plays Qiao, a party girl with hidden depths that are tested again and again. When we meet her, in 2001, she’s the blunt-cut Uma Thurman to Liao Fan’s John Travolta. He is Bin, a handsome mobster who runs the local mahjong parlour in Datong. Bin seems to have it all together, and is respected as well as feared by local thugs, cops, and cadres. Well, not feared enough, it seems, and Qiao ends up taking the fall for Bin when she defends him against young hoodlums with his own illegal gun.

When shit goes down, the twosome don’t find each other again for five years, allowing Qiao to explore the Three Gorges area, with the looming dam project that Jia centred his Still Life on. The new movie becomes increasingly peripatetic, changing video formats as this century progresses, and travels to more out-ofthe-way places, as well as revisiting many of the socio-political themes he developed in earlier efforts.

In the end, which takes almost 140 minutes to reach, Ash is almost too self-involved. The relatively draggy last half-hour, set in the present, rests entirely on Qiao’s undying love for Bin—a fellow who, frankly, doesn’t seem to deserve half this much attention. For some reason, she still doesn’t grasp that she’s the hero of her own story. g

VISHTÈN COOKS UP A STEW OF COSMOPOLITAN SOUNDS

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WANT ENTERTAINMENT? Head to Vishtèn’s website, and let the francophone band from Prince Edward Island beguile your eyes and ears with its mix of traditional fiddling, extroverted foot percussion, and 21st-century arrangements. If you’re in need of education, the trio’s members will be happy to fill you in as well, with notes on Maritime history and the survival of the Acadians. And if you’re hungry, you’re also in luck: the aforementioned website also includes a selection of recipes, some handed down from family members and others garnered on tour.

Perhaps you’ll learn to make chicken fricot with dumplings, a hearty stew with roots in French peasant cuisine. I’ve already bookmarked the page for pâtés à Dodo, a rustic variant on Quebec’s famous tourtière, as made by multi-instrumentalists Emmanuelle and Pastelle Leblanc’s grandmother Claudette. But it’s telling that the Vishtèn menu also includes Knoblauchcremesuppe, an Austrian garlic soup, and homemade wontons. Proud of their culture the Leblanc sisters might be, but they’re no chauvinists.

Are their recipes a metaphor for their sound?

“Oh, maybe!” Pastelle Leblanc says with a laugh, reached at home in Charlottetown. “But we’re just so much foodies that we thought it would be

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