Movie review: Rabbit-Proof Fence -- and commentary on racial fear

The 1930s, the time of Hitler's rise, was a time when racial fears were common.

"Rabbit-Proof Fence" is an amazing true story. Follows the 1,500-mile trek of 3 little girls who escape on foot, without food or water, from an abusive orphanage. It's set in the 1930s in Australia, where England ruled back then. Astonishingly, the girls succeed not only in evading for months the urgent and persistent efforts of their captors to find them and bring them back but also in surviving this horrendously tough crossing of the desert to find their homes again. They showed pictures of old women who were actually two of these girls.

Here's another astonishing part. The English government was very upset that white English workers who'd gone to jobs in Australia were intermarrying with Aboriginal people. It decided that it must remedy this situation at all costs. It decided to set up a magistrate as sole judge and jury to locate half-caste children, steal them from their families, and put them in controlled settings where they would teach them "how to be white." The idea was that they would teach them to follow white culture and then to marry white men (they all seemed to be girls in the movie) and thus breed the "blackness" out of them after a couple of generations.
This pure racial purging occurred years before Hitler rose to power and began his reign of horror to create the perfect Aryan (white) race. Wonder if he got some ideas from the English? But as my daughter said when I told her about it, I guess because they weren't killing the children, it didn't seem so bad to the world. The Aboriginal people refer to the children of that time as The Stolen Generation.

Almost as amazing--I was in luck because my DVD player is screwy and I can't control what it does very well--I accidentally found myself first watching the documentary section of the DVD, "following the making of Rabbit-Proof Fence." The director made a film of how he went among the Australian people to find the right three girls to play these difficult roles. He couldn't find them in the big cities and had to go out into the regions where the Aboriginal people still live. A grueling process of finding the girls with the right qualities, the courage to undertake the touch job, and the stamina to see it through. Imagine--finding a 7-year-old to play a part like this. If you see this movie, do not fail to watch the documentary. In fact, I recommend watching it first. It made the whole movie seem even more poignant and intense.

And it would be nice to think our world is finished with racial discrimination and hatred and murders, but since we all know that's not yet the case, let us hope we will still be alive when the end is in sight.

La Dolce Vita an exercise in male single-life fantasy

You know, I thought I had seen "La Dolce Vita" many years ago, but got it from Netflix anyway thinking, hey, it's a classic and can't hurt to see it again. Turns out I never saw it--or at least never got past the first part of it.

Why? It's really a vehicle Federico Fellini created for feeding male fantasties--definitely not high on my list of favorite ways to be entertained. The protagonist (I don't call him a hero because he's pretty much a rich lowlife with nothing on his mind but having sex with as many women as possible, despite the fact that he lives with a very beautiful woman who loves him) , played by a handsome young Marcello Mastroianni, wanders through the movie seducing and being seduced by women of every stripe--rich, bored heiresses, to older women, to 15-year-old girls. However, it all happens in opulent surroundings, with fancy cars (for the times), with people wearing beautiful clothes behaving in wanton ways throughout the two-and-three-quarters hours of the film, so it looks seductively attractive.

Marcello makes a bow to morality by asking his older friend who's settled--that is, married with two children he clearly loves deeply--if he shouldn't do this himself, isn't it healther? But, no, the calm and settled guy says don't let appearances fool you. Every day he regrets that he doesn't have a wider life with more options. Marcello returns to his playboy path. And just to drive the point home, Fellini has the calm and settled friend commit suicide later in the movie. Oh, yeah, and Marcello's live-in lover finally commits suicide, too.

There's an amazing sequence in the movie where two children are supposed to have seen an apparition of the Madonna--wild to see the gullibility of the masses. Reminds me of how easily human beings can be sucked into doing ridiculous--or hateful--things.

The movie's pretty depressing in its depiction of the various women as sluts, crazy, and so madly in love they give their own lives up. I was gratified on viewing the critic's comments of the DVD that he said this movie is not even considered one of Fellini's best. So guess I know now the reason why it's had such a long and popular life.

Stories that take us away

When you think about a lot of what's on television these days--murder, gore, sitcoms, and reality shows--and the magical enchantment of the Internet, you might wonder if books have lost their power.

But all you have to do is find a good one and you'll likely be lost to those other blandishments. That's why at SWWAN we are building a database of book (and movie) reviews by single women. If you're anything like me regarding fiction, you may have a hard time knowing what to pick out at the library or at the bookstore. Everyone tends to rely on the blurbs on the cover--but what do we have in common with most of those reviewers? Not much in most cases. And even though we're all wonderfully individual, we thought it might be nice to get a recommendation from a fellow single-woman traveler.

One day we hope to start a star system like with Netflix where you rate for yourself and then they recommend other things you might like. For now we just take your description of the story (and a good quote if you like), and let you judge for yourself. So check out our book and movie reviews page and maybe start your own rating list.