From Word To Word

I experimented with plantain in the soup for this past Saturday’s Dinner and a Doc, not the plantain that looks like a banana, the one that is almost certainly growing as a weed somewhere in your backyard.  It was not the greatest soup that I have ever made, though this was not entirely the fault of the plantain.  I was working from a recipe that actually calls for spinach, and this recipe turned out to be far too bland.  It needed roasted onions and garlic.  It needed bay leaves.  It needed lemon juice.  It needed salt.  None of this was the fault of the plantain.

The plaintain actually tasted quite good, something like spinach only a little more bitter, but its texture was far too tough.  This was partly due, I think, to the lateness of the year, when the plantain has already flowered and toughened.  It was also partly due to my substituting it directly for spinach, assuming that it would wilt in a similar way.  Had I picked the leaves younger, or had I boiled the older leaves separately before adding them to the soup, I think the texture would have been much better.  I will need to experiment further, though not at the next Dinner and a Doc, where I should probably offer something a little more traditional once or twice before I make people into test subjects again.

Where I had reservations about the soup, however, I had none about the film.  The Agronomist was the first documentary that I had seen by Jonathon Demme, though I have seen several of his feature films, and I found it very effective.  The subject itself, the life and death of Jean Dominique, who ran Haiti’s first independent radio station, is powerful, and Demme’s portrait of the man is beautifully rendered.  The film expresses an obvious affection and admiration for Dominique and allows his personality, his gestures and idiom, his passion and emotion, to dominate the screen.

Demme’s editing and cinematography are mostly unobtrusive, so there is little to detract from Dominique himself, and the few obvious editorial interventions are clearly meant to emphasise the person of Domique even further.  At certain points, for example, Demme replays a clip several times in succession, and these clips almost always include something that is characteristic of Dominique: the way that he sniffs the air, or the way that he imitates gunfire, things that recur in other places throughout the film as well, and help give a sense of Dominique’s personality and idiosyncrasies.

This repetition also occurs once on a much larger scale.  The film includes a long segment that record’s Dominique’s first return from exile, where he alights from his airplane to the adulation of a Haitian people who are experiencing their first taste of political freedom.  Dominique is cheered like a pop star, embraced by everyone who can reach him, and carried on the shoulders of the crowd, his hand raised, first in a fist, but only for a moment, and then in the peace symbol.

This whole segment, with much additional footage, is then replayed at the end of the film, after Dominque has been assassinated.  It follows immediately after a segment in which Dominique’s wife and fellow reporter, Michele Montas, returns to the air to proclaim, with a determined irony, that Dominique has not actually died, but lives on to help his people and his country.

The relation of these two scenes is significant, I think.  Dominique was twice forced into exile, and just before his death, he threatened to go into exile again.  Demme’s repetition of Dominique’s first triumphant return to his country, therefore, serves to reinterpret his death as merely another exile, a temporary leavetaking, from which he will return again, just as his wife declared.

The man may have been killed, certainly.  The film shows his body being loaded into an ambulance, shows his face in the casket at his funeral, shows his ashes being spread in the river.  Even so, Demme implies, the man cannot be wholly killed.  He, and the freedom that he sought, can only ever be exiled.  They will return again, triumphantly, even if they must return again and again, endlessly.  This kind of man will always return, to be taken into the arms of his people, whenever they are able to find freedom, even if it is only for a time.