It's a story about a private publishing company with a sole proprietor, the owner, and he flees the company because he flees his creditors. He leaves the country, the company, his people, and then the workers after some discussion discuss, and they decide to take the company into their hands. They make it into cooperative, and then, of course, the proprietor at one moment comes back and he claims the ownership propriety, and then of course, one of the writers working for this publishing company, he decides to kill the owner. Then the murderer [inaudible], flees the country, etc. It's a very simple story, but in this story there are many layers of other stories. Anwar thought about having a tableau film with different kinds of stories which are not immediately linked. Stories which in Classical Hollywood movie or Hollywood type of movie would be deleted because they are not useful, they are not functional. He really want to insist on having those stories into the structure. It's sort of a parable, you could say, a very simple story on a contemporary event. It deals with issues like the collective. The collective and the cooperative is more successful than a private company. It's a political stance. It's also dealing with issues like murder, crime. Can you use crime, violence for a higher ideal? Here, Anwar says yes. The whole film and the controversy around the film is that the murder of this proprietor is legitimated, and he did it in different ways. One of the clever things Anwar did was that he started the story at the end through his plot. His film starts where the story ends. What is happening at the end of the film is that [inaudible], the murderer, left France, comes to the Belgian French border, and he goes into a hotel with his lover [inaudible]. He goes in his hotel room, and [inaudible] comes back to the bar of the hotel. She tells the story of what happens to people around a table, and they act as a jury. The whole film is constructed as one big flashback, where not only those people around the table have to make a judgment because they know of this guy did that, and we can alert the police, etc. But we as spectators, are also put into this moral position of making a judgment. We watch the film as if we are around the table. This [inaudible] who is having this plea for [inaudible], and at the end of the film, he comes back to this round table and they decide you can go, and so they flee, that's an open-ending. They flee to Belgium coast, and they are gone. It's an open-end like life. It's a simple story, a parable but Anwar puts us into a subjective moral position. We have to make this decision. This makes the film on one hand, interesting but also controversial because we legitimate, and we say, yes, in this case, when an individual, proprietor, a capitalist, comes back, you can commit a murder. There are different levels of how a filmmaker like Anwar dealt with this act of violence. This is a key moment in the story of course, but also a key moment of guiding the audience and guiding the spectator. There is not only this jury where we are taking into a moral position, but especially the act of violence. Different clause, I think there's a story. The workers, they made these bankrupt company into a successful profitable organization, so they deserve the ownership. There is something maybe to determine values. They are legitimate to own this. There is also part of the story and the act of killing where there is some irrationality of the act. The story at that moment is that the owner takes a gun, and threatens, and then leaves, and then [inaudible] takes the same gun, and so it's maybe suicide. It's turned into this topic. It's a film and there is the technicality of the film. What is Anwar doing? The whole film in fact is situated in one place. In France it's a coup, one square around the buildings. The murder takes place in the center of the coup of this square. You see how [inaudible] takes the gun, and then Anwar films, in one take how [inaudible] goes down, take the corridor, enters the car and just shoots like irrational thing. Anwar insists on taking the time on showing what other movie mates would never do. How he is taking the gun, being more and more convinced that this is the only solution, but we as spectators also have the time to think. He insists on, and this is about time, temporal aspect and the relationship between what happens and our understanding and how we live this. In fact, he is making a circle again, and then he goes down and shoots. We are also technically implied into what happens and maybe not the technicalities, maybe not enough for convincing us this whole story, this atmosphere, the ambiance in the film that makes it a completely new world. The cooperative makes a very joyful, nice ambiance, and this is how life is. There are different levels of convincing us in legitimating the crime, I think.
