‘Se ERRROTER eee BP wie REVIEWS, SOLIDARITY The shattered image of the perfect wife DANCING IN THE DARK. Starring Martha Henry. At the Ridge, Vancouver. Edna the wife and home- maker has devoted herself, unselfishly, to building an ideal universe of love and order. But something out of place slits the . fabric of the myth that she’s woven around her husband. For 20 years, Edna has been the super-meticulous housewife and tireless morale booster to her business executive spouse. The home and Harry com- pose her entire world and she cannot imagine her husband’s existence outside of the polished house. The discovery that Harry does indeed have an outside life and that it starts to include another woman, plunges her into chaos. The order that she cared so much for, has been ripped apart, the love betrayed, and her faith squashed flat. The shattering of her illusions also shatters her sanity. Canadian Leon Marr’s Dan- cing In The Dark tells the story of a traditional woman’s jarring plunge into madness and her realization that she was living with a lie. Martha Henry is magnificent in the leading role, making Edna utterly believable. Marr’s script is based on a novel by London, Ontario writer, Joan Barfoot. His thoughtful direction steers clear of melo- drama and manages, through dramatic imagery, to add depth to what could have been a slow, introspective narrative. It is to the film’s credit that the husband, played by Neil Munro is not sitaply a carica- ture of a-chauvinistic man. That would have been easy. Harry seems to truly love and appre- ciate his wife. He is not overtly forcing Edna into the role of a one-dimensional housewife, though he certainly provides positive reinforcement. His affair with another woman is appar- ently done out of boredom. After 20 years of being a slave to housework and marriage, Edna is not the most exciting person to be around. So how did Edna come to all of this? It might appear that it was Edna’s own doing and this is a weakness of the film, though there is one hint that Edna has been shaped by society’s tradi- tional bounds. of subjugation for women. She oberves that today her women’s magazines give hints for working mothers Martha Henry as Edna in Dancing in the Dark. rather than for full-time house- wives. She shakes her head at the changes that have occurred since her own upbringing and asks where it will all end. “Chaos,” Edna answers her- self. — Michael Connolly Soviets screen own ‘Day After’ By WILLIAM POMEROY Early in September a film began showing in a Moscow cinema house, reportedly with a profound effect upon sellout audiences. It is a film on the aftermath of a nuclear conflict, Letters From a Dead Man. In both the U.S. and Britain television dramas on the same theme, The Day After in the U.S. and Threads in Britain, have ventured to depict the con- ‘sequences of a raining-down of nuclear missiles. They were rela- tively effective in their own ways, but the Soviet film makes both look mild and evasive in comparison. Directed by Konstantin Lopushansky, Letters From a Dead Man was produced in Leningrad. The locale of its events is not specified; it could be any city. Whatever the place, the above-ground settings are an incredibly blasted landscape. The appalling ruins and twisted wreckage, strewn with bodies, flooded, burning, whipped by constant winds, stun the viewer with their horror. Nuclear exchanges seem to be still occur- ring, insanely. Except for the military, shrouded inhumanly in protec- | tiveuniforms, who roam above- ground over the @evastation and hunt looters and black marketeers, life, the remaining life, is underground. The shel- ters are chiefly tunnels and the deep cellars of buildings, entered and left through a series of air- lock chambers and heavy steel Everything is dim, even the upper world (the entire film is shot in murky sepia tints), the only light in the shelters from dim bulbs occasionally lit from pedal-type generators, or from candles. Many in the shelters are dying from radiation sickness, to be buried in shallow graves. In the unrelieved grimness, as always in Soviet films it is the human factor that shines. The main character (played by Rolan Bikoy) is a scientist who is concerned with the mainte- nance and perpetuation of life, persistently thinking of how to prevail over the holocaust. At the film’s outset he has escaped (hiding among the corpses on an underground train carrying the dead out of the shelters) from the central directing shelter, in order to look for his wife from whom he has been separated. He finds her in a shelter beneath a shattered museum, peopled by a group of varied individuals struggling to find reasons for what has happened and for ways of coping with it. Their despondency is dee- pened by the knowledge that the catastrophe was precipated by a computer error. The museum director is overcome by the thought that all the efforts of his museum to display the arts of man did nothing to stop the nuclear war; he digs his grave, climbs into it, and shoots him- self. One of the group, a woman, contends that people need to bare themselves, to go naked among each other, as the way to live together, and acts accordingly. The scientist’s wife dies, des- pite his dangerous excursions aboveground to find drugs for her, where no one can:go with- out clumsy protective garb. Other members of the group drift away. The scientist, himself dying, spends his time writing letters to his son, whose where- abouts is unknown (hence the film’s title). He is left finally with a group of children, orphans whom no one wants to.care for and who are considered to be doomed. The scientist, however, instills in them his own outlook, that man must never stop struggling, - must keep moving. When he dies the children bury him, leave the shelter and go into the outer world of utter ruin. As the film closes they are moving, in a Staggering single file, across a landscape of nuclear winter, with no actual destination, but moving. Some- how, they make an image not of despair but of hope. The essence of this film is in the philosophical discussions of the group below the destroyed museum, in the overvoice letters to the son and in the scientist’s words to the silent children. Letters From a Dead Man is not about politics or the issues of conflict, but it is a powerful anti-war film. It is about man- kind, and the need to find the will and the way to survive, and to move forward. Campaign to aic El Salvadoran Local activists supporting the revolutionary forces in El Salvador plan to launch a campaign to raise funds and goods for the victims of the Salvadoran government bomb- ing, the Vancouver-El Salvador Action Committee has announced. Action committee representa- tive Dave Spencer said the cam- paign follows a_ cross-country caravan to Ottawa where govern- ment representatives rejected a call to end Canadian aid to the coun- try’s military-controlled govern- ment. : Meanwhile, a spokesman for El Salvador’s Revolutionary Demo- cratic Front (FDR) said Nov. 10 that the military is losing -in its attempts to defeat the liberation forces grouped together as_ the Faribundo Marti National Libera- tion Front (FMLN). Both the Salvadoran liberation force’ and their support organiza- tions in Canada call for a nego- tiated political settlement to the six-year-old conflict that has claimed more than 61,000 lives. The caravan, organized by the National Association of Commit- tees for Solidarity with El Salva- dor, left Vancouver Oct: 21 to bring attention to the current situa- tion in the Central American nation and to protest Ottawa’s renewal of financial aid to the U.S.- backed government of Napoleon Duarte. Some 55 people took part in the western portion of the caravan while 250 Ontarions and others from eastern provinces partici- pated, Spencer said. In Ottawa the caravan members had a 45-minute meeting with representatives of the Central America section of the External Affairs Department, but were told the government’s policy on aid to El Salvador would not be changed, he related. “External Affairs was telling us the situation is improving in El Salvador. Yet I’ve talked with the victims of the bombings,” said Spencer. Salvadoran government forces, armed with U.S. equipment, have been saturation bombing the “zones of control” — areas where FMLN forces hold sway — drop- ping more than 3,000 tons of mainly incendiary bombs on civili- ans in the zones. “T find it ludicrous for our government to say that the human rights situation has improved,” said Spencer. The Liberal government of former prime minister Pierre Tru- deau stopped all aid following increasing reports of human rights abuses in El Salvador, making a clear break with U.S. policy in the region. Brian Mulroney’s Conservative government revived economic aid last year, and sent $8.9 million worth of fertilizer last June. The fertilizer is sold on the open market — meaning it is only available to representatives of the country’s wealthiest farmers — under the administration of the Canadian Hunger Foundation. RUBEN ZAMORA. ..U.S. int vention growing. The foundation broke with of non-governmental _ organizatlo in the Canadian Council for In national Co-operation which ha boycotted all aid to the Salvado government. : Spencer said the Salvado government has full control of the money earned from the sale, t ing that it can be used for mil purposes. El Salvador’s liberation fore have no objection to aid sent toM country’s people — but that © must be sent by non-governmen™ organizations to their counterpa) in El Salvador, an FDR repres ative told a Vancouver audiel last week. Ruben Zamora, a former me ber of Duarte’s. Christian Dem cratic Party and a former gov ment cabinet minister, told a P@ session organized by Simon F University that increasing U- to the military will prolong ” conflict and suffering and pre a negotiated political solution “If the United States comp the delivery program of (arm helicopters, by the middle of 4 year in El Salvador we are gone have a density of helicopters © higher than what the Amel had in Vietnam at the peak intervention,” he stated. | 4 But despite the military aid FMLN forces have increas® victories to the point where %6 now control 13 of El Salvade! provinces, while the govern forces now suffer losses © than 600 soldiers per month, ora said. if Zamora said the governme? losing rapidly whatever SUP. had before” since peace talks bi off in 1984. The reasons # ing a policy of peace but 4 solution,” the Salvadoran getting larger and the coun ing oligarchy has a “vest est” ina military solution The FDR and FMLNS itical solution as.a nec. save lives ina country that® too much death” but fears the Reagan administra! directly intervene in E war. But, said Zamora, the zation” for a political sett! growing.