Arizona Reporter - Movie Reviews - 13/11
BEFORE TOMORROW
Alliance Films/ Igloolik Isuma Productions
Reviewed for Arizona Reporter by Harvey Karten
Grade: C
Directed by: Marie-Helene Cousineau, Madeline Piujuq Ivalu
Written By: Marie-Helene Cousineau, Madeline Piujuq Ivalu, Susan Avingaq from Jorn Riel’s novel “For Morgendagen”
Cast: Paul-Dylan Ivalu, Madeline Piujuq Ivalu
Screened at: Critics’ DVD, NYC, 11/13/09
Opens: December 2, 2009
In viewing “Before Tomorrow,” whose spare and simple dialogue is spoken in the Inuktitut language, one cannot help thinking of those fanboy comments on Rotten Tomatoes that snipe at some critics for liking art films that boggle the mind with their boredom. “Before Tomorrow” is one of those works that might fight into that category of watching paint dry, a look in 1840 at a remote, Arctic region in Canada that was the home of Innu people—known as Eskimos before the days of political correctness. No doubt the picture would find a home with anthropologists or schoolchildren learning about people who really discovered the North American continent long before the white man invaded, an imperialism that went far beyond the cultural in that the Europeans brought smallpox along with industrial improvements.
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Following the two superior movies in the trilogy, “Before Tomorrow” pales in comparison with the much longer “Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner” (an Inuit legend about an evil spirit causing strife within the community and which I reviewed here-- http://www.imdb.com/Reviews/312/31256) , and “The Journals of Knud Rasmussen” (about how shamanism was replaced by Christianity). Whereas these two bring us up-to-date on how the Innu people became the folks they now are, this one sadly deals with the Gotterdammerung of its people.
If you manage to get past the extended, pretentious opening with its ballad “Why must we die,” you’ll set your eyes on the mostly happy people of the community, living so far north, so ice- and snowbound and dreary to Western mindsets, that it’s just the place you’d have to pay a small fortune to Maupintour to take you there to enable you to brag to your neighbors of your advanced travel credentials.
Ningiuq (Madeline Piujug Ivalu), an elder tribesperson whose wrinkles and words of wisdom that only senior citizens can provide, has her hackles raised by stories of the strange unwashed coming to the land, notwithstanding the cool knives and sewing needles that they gained in trade with other Innu groups. Sensing the end of her days and feeling inadequate to contribute her share to the clan, she dries the fish catch away from the white men while escorting her grandson, Maniq (Paul-Dylan Ivalu). She tells him how much she loves him so much that the kid could not be blamed for being suspicious of her true feelings. When the pair take a boat from a remote island, they see that all their people are dead, victims of the Europeans’ smallpox.
The film stands in as yet another dirge for the cultural and even physical mayhem caused by the intruders, but its pace, as glacial as the scenery, sets up its 93 minutes as time that will be appreciated principally by students (or more accurately, their social studies teachers), and by an audience that has a thing for seeing ancient cultures through their own eyes. Color me philistine.
BEFORE TOMORROW (Alliance Films/ Igloolik Isuma Productions)
Unrated. 93 minutes. © 2009 by Harvey Karten Member: NY Film Critics Online
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