21502: (Craig) NYT: Elegy for the Unflinching Conscience of Haiti (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Dan Craig <hoosier@att.net>


Elegy for the Unflinching Conscience of Haiti
April 23, 2004
By A. O. SCOTT

In recent months, between grim bulletins from the Middle
East, Haiti has periodically found its way back into the
headlines. As has so often been the case over the last 30
years, the news has been confusing, dispiriting and sad.
The turbulence that led to the removal of Jean-Bertrand
Aristide from Haiti's presidency gives "The Agronomist," a
superb new documentary by Jonathan Demme, a melancholy
timeliness. Its hero, Jean Dominique, embodies the fragile,
perpetual hope that Haiti, so long tormented by foreign
meddlers and domestic dictators, might someday nurture a
just and decent political order.

The film, which opens today in New York and Los Angeles,
emphasizes both the fragility and the resilience of that
hope. The resilience is personified by both Dominique, an
excitable, elfin figure who looks a little like Joel Grey,
and his wife, Michele Montas, who, while calmer than her
husband, is no less strong and determined. Mr. Demme's
interviews with them are interspersed with the voices of
family members and colleagues and television news clips,
all bound together by Wyclef Jean and Jerry Wonda
Duplessis's simmering, loose-limbed score.

The music bubbles up under the interviews, an unusual
tactic in a politically minded documentary, but an apt one
here. Dominique was a radio personality; his voice was
frequently broadcast on Radio Haiti Inter, the independent
station he ran from the 1960's until his assassination in
2000. But his political commitment also expressed itself
with the same buoyant, infectious joy that percolates in
Mr. Jean's melodies. As he surveys the vicissitudes of
repression in his native country - frequently from exile in
the United States - Dominique is funny and acerbic, immune
both to wishful thinking and to despair.

The filmmaker met with his subjects many times, in Haiti
and in the United States, from 1991 until Dominique's
death, and the present-tense quality of the conversations
gives "The Agronomist" a roller-coaster intensity.
Dominique and Ms. Montas both grew up as part of Haiti's
light-skinned, Catholic, French-speaking elite, but their
rapport with the nation's poor - especially its peasants,
whose plight Dominique discovered during his first career
as an agronomist - is unmarked by either bourgeois guilt or
paternalist condescension. Radio Haiti Inter was the first
station to broadcast in Creole, the first language of the
county's majority, and Dominique's advocacy on behalf of
peasants, laborers and other disenfranchised citizens
frequently got him in trouble with the country's rulers.

In the 1960's, Papa Doc Duvalier shut down a cinema club
Dominique had founded because it was showing "Night and
Fog," Alain Resnais's movie about the Nazis, with parallels
that were perhaps all too clear to the strongman. (If you
see a good film correctly, Dominique notes, giving "The
Agronomist" a potential slogan, the grammar of that film is
a political act.) In subsequent decades Radio Haiti Inter
was subject to raids, violence and harassment, especially
in the tumultuous 1980's, when the two-generation Duvalier
dictatorship was finally kicked out.

Mr. Demme retraces the ups and downs of the next decade -
through the election of Mr. Aristide, the coup that removed
him and the American intervention that returned him to
power - as every advance toward democracy seems to yield
compromise, brutality and failure.

Through it all, Dominique maintained his station as an
oasis of truth-telling and free thought, and he continued
to mock, prod and shame those in power in the name of
patriotism and democracy. Initially, he was sympathetic to
Mr. Aristide's Lavalas movement, but it is a measure of his
integrity that he refused to exempt Mr. Aristide from
criticism. One of the most bracing moments in "The
Agronomist" is an interview between Dominique and the
president, in which tough questions about corruption and
bullying within Lavalas are met with defensive platitudes.

Dominique's murder remains unsolved; it is clear that he
never lacked for enemies. His friends were more numerous.
Mr. Demme, proud to count himself among them, concludes the
film with words and images that will at once rally the
spirit and break the heart of anyone who believes in the
values of democracy.

After her husband's death, Ms. Montas arrives at the
heavily guarded offices of Radio Haiti Inter to deliver a
defiant tribute to him. "Jean Dominique is alive," she
tells her listeners, in a speech that recalls the American
labor ballad "Joe Hill."

Mr. Demme's magnificent film makes her point; it seems
almost unthinkable that such a charismatic, generous and
lively man could be gone. It also makes you understand what
it means for a country like Haiti to lose a citizen like
Jean Dominique.

"The Agronomist" is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly
cautioned) for violence.

THE AGRONOMIST

Directed by Jonathan Demme; directors of photography,
Aboudja, Mr. Demme, Peter Saraf and Bevin McNamara; edited
by Lizi Gelber and Mr. McNamara; music by Wyclef Jean and
Jerry Wonda Duplessis; produced by Mr. Demme, Mr. Saraf and
Mr. McNamara; released by ThinkFilm. Running time: 91
minutes. This film is rated PG-13.

WITH: Jean Dominique and Michele Montas.


http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/23/movies/23AGRO.html?ex=1083715507&ei=1&en=9f49c94ab07572a1
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