A Screaming Man (2011)

Pretty Good

Please don't spend money on this.

Must See Movie...

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Adam is a swimming champion, who has spent his entire life at or in the pool. His son, Abdel, also loves to swim, seeing as his father raised him to be a swimmer. When the Chinese take control of the luxury hotel that Adam works at, the manager decides to make Abdel the the pool attendant instead of Adam. This crushes Adam, because he lives for the pool. During the time of this happening, a civil war is going on in Chad. The army comes to draft, and they choose to draft Abdel. Adam does nothing about it, because he wants his job of pool attendant back. When his one and only son is sent away to the war, Adam is eaten away by his guilt. Abdel later goes to the army camp to save his son, but Abdel is already on the brink of death. The director says that it was God's will to not save Abdel, because Adam did not try to save Abdel. Overall, this movie uses Adam's guilt to show that he regretted the decisions that he made as a father.

A Screaming Man in my opinion was not a very great movie. I did not enjoy this much quite as much as the other ones because it was very slow. I understand that slow movies still have a meaning and a story behind them but it did not seem so as much in this film. It was not that clear to me how Abdel manages to take his dads job. How did it happen? What did he do? Because I know they called Adam into to office to ask if two worker were to many people for the pool and he said no it was a good amount of people. So I am assuming Abdel was like I think two people is one to many. The movies was full of selfish characters to me. Abdel took his dads job and his dad gets sent to work at the gate. Adam is not a fan of this and then gets him drafted into the civil war. This means that Adam gets his job back. He basically murdered his own son by sending him into the civil war. You can tell the movie is not an American movie y how slow it is. American movies move at a much faster rate. While I was watching the film I noticed globalization, the women from China was the head of a hotel in Chad. If I was to put myself in the shoes of one of the characters. I would have made it so Abdel as told the women from China that they needed two workers by the pool because that would have solved many conflicts throughout the film. If I could have changed the ending I would have made it so that the son does not die and that the family gets back together and Abdel's son is born.

In A Screaming Man a father and his son share a close bond. The father loves the pool. He was a champion in 1965 and his son and him share a job as the pool attendant. The father's life gets turned upside down when the hotel decides to cut his job and make him man the front gates. He hates his new job and has jealousy towards his son, who got to keep the pool job. I believe the father hates losing his pool job so much that he gives his son to the army. I thin he did this as an attempt to get his job back. What the father didn't know was that his son was expecting a child. As soon as he hears this he becomes very upset. I think the movie is titled A Screaming Man because the father is screaming on the inside when he finds that out.

"Be careful not to cross your arms over your chest, assuming the sterile attitude of a spectator, because life is not a spectacle, a sea of pain is not a proscenium, and a screaming man is not a dancing bear." (Extract from Aimé Césaire's poem Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, 1939Chadian filmmaker Mahamat-Saleh Haroun's fourth feature tells the story of Adam, or "The Champ" (Youssouf Djaoro) as he is also known, a former swimming champion in his mid- fifties, who works as a hotel pool attendant; a job in which he takes immense pride. Adam's closest colleague is his son Abdel (Dioucounda Koma), a twenty year old who documents every day of his life with his camera. Father and son make a harmonious pair and their family is a happy one, despite an intensifying civil war and the plans to privatise the hotel where they work. That is until the day the hotel management's cutbacks hit the family and Abdel is made pool attendant in his father's place. The looming threats of armed rebels approaching the city offers an unfortunate opportunity for Adam to restore himself, or at least that is what he, whose identity is intrinsically tied to his job and his past achievements, thinks.A Screaming Man talks about loss of self, not as a consequence of happenings beyond our control, but of the choices we make when life throws us off guard. "Life continues", says David (Marius Yelolo), the hotel chef and Adam's close friend who is among the first to be affected by the down-sizings. Both men struggle to come to terms with the realisation that their passion and zest for life is of little value to anyone but themselves. The problem, David concludes, is that we put our destiny in God's hands – a God he still believes in but in whom he has lost faith – thus implying that there is room for human intervention regardless of the magnitude of the challenges we face. That it is in fact up to ourselves to decide what kind of person we want to be and how to express and live up to the decision once it has been made.Adam's wife (Hadje Fatime N'Goua) scolds both her husband for having changed when he meets danger with passivity, and the invisible neighbour who thinks nothing of asking for favours without ever offering anything in return. She knows that there is pride in cooking, in singing, and in caring and providing for one's family. In having a purpose, and in trying to be the best one can be. And she knows that inherent in pride is the sense of dignity that helps us to treat others and ourselves with respect. Just before we lose ourselves we lose the little things; the subtle detail, the unsaid and the almost unnoticed, like the acts of saying "thank you" after supper. Haroun evokes the ordinary, not horror or deprivation, which he merely illustrates by the absence of what used to be. The civil war, like the rationalising process at the hotel, is but a backdrop and a circumstance; not a defining factor.In his characteristic careful and understated manner Mahamat-Saleh Haroun shares the secret behind a decent life with an audience who has time for the mundane and the slow unfolding of seemingly undramatic events brimful with meaning. A secret spelled dignity and pride, be it that of a father, a professional, or a frightened man who has decided that his best years are behind him.Talented South African filmmaker Khalo Matabane once tweeted "Great art speaks to the essence of what it is to be a human being; not only material and physical aspirations but existential too." A perfect description of A Screaming Man; a brilliant work of art in its own right, and in the way the film relates to its characters' ability and need for full self-expression through cooking, singing, swimming or tending to a pool.This and other reviews available on the blog In The Words of Katarina (wordsofkatarina.blogspot.com)