World War I was pretty violent. This was the first major mechanized conflict the world had experienced, and there were really no rules…no standards. No Geneva Convention. Just death. Of course, the world really had no experience with war at this scale…wars between this many countries, and for reasons other than deeply-seated religious beliefs or cultural values.

Well anywho, it’s Christmas Eve in 1914, and German soprano Anna Sorensen has succeeded in convincing the Prussian Prince to join her tenor husband Nikolaus Sprink to sing for the German high command. The whole performance, Sprink looks pained, and feels guilty for leaving his comrades on the front, so Sprink brings Anna back with him to the front to sing for his comrades in the trenches.

On the side of the Allies, the Scotts have brought out their bagpipes, and are singing traditional Christmas songs. Sprink joins them with his voice, and suddenly, Sprink finds himself in no man’s land belting out sweet, sweet Christmas hymns. Super confused with what’s going on, the three commanding officers for the Prussians, the Scotts and the French all meet and call an informal, and unauthorized, truce. The front-line soldiers emerged from their trenches into No Man’s Land and share a pause in the violence and suddenly the enemy gains a human face as the soldiers befriend each other.

Scottish priest Palmer holds a mass for all the soldiers together.

On Christmas Eve of that year, the lonely souls of the front lines abandoned their arms to reach out to their enemies on the battlefield and greet them with not anger or hostility, but with the simple, kindly gesture of a much needed cigarette or a treasured piece of chocolate, and to put their differences aside long enough to wish their brothers a sincere “Merry Christmas!”

The Christmas Eve truce actually happened, although not on quite the scale director Christian Carion suggests in his film. He is accurate, however, in depicting the aftermath: Officers and troops were punished for fraternizing with the enemy in wartime. A priest who celebrated mass in No Man’s Land is savagely criticized by his bishop, who believes the patriotic task of the clergy is to urge the troops into battle and reconcile them to death.

Roger Ebert paints a pretty good picture:

The trench warfare of World War I was a species of hell unlike the agonies of any other war, before or after. The enemies were dug in within earshot of each other, and troops were periodically ordered over the top so that most of them could be mowed down by machinegun fire. They were being ordered to stand up, run forward and be shot to death. And they did it. An additional novelty was the introduction of poison gas.

The next morning, Christmas Day, they play soccer, and share pictures of their loved ones, and bits of chocolate. And they bury their dead, whose bodies have been lying frozen between the trench lines. As these men hang out, they find they have a lot of common with one another. They come from the same homes, they attended the same schools, they have the same religions…really the only difference between them was the language they spoke and the country they hailed from.

Eventually, they will be required to fight, and because of the inane tactics, most of them will be ordered to die. After Christmas, the soldiers share information about plans for artillery attacks, and they share a trench while the other is shelled.

Brings into question why we have wars.

My roommate has an answer: there’s usually about 6 assholes that want more power, and use their money and influence to send poor kids out to die for their power.

Governments warring with each other cannot afford to have their soldiers making friends with each other because when it comes down to it, I’m about to get all waxing poetic, and make some comment about how wars aren’t really about cultural differences…they’re about struggles of power, and it takes a lot more to kill a man you know than just another face in the enemy’s uniform.

Joy Stone…27 years old, drama teacher, lost her way. After losing her lover/colleague to a drowning accident on a vacation, Joy completely loses it. Because she wasn’t officially attached to Michael, she really can’t properly mourn for him, and with all of her pent-up emotion, she completely loses herself as she tries to cope. She also refuses to accept where her problems stem from…she refuses to believe they’re from trouble at work or from Michael’s death…she thinks the problem is with her. A little dangerous.

The book itself, ironically, completely breaks convention and routine with its formatting. Margins are irregular, sometimes trailing off the page, fonts and font-sizes are chosen at random. Sentences are left hanging quite often…the whole book’s a mess but it works because Joy herself is an absolute mess. I’ve had some pretty down-and-out bouts with my head before, but jesus, Joy’s character takes things to a completely new level.

As Joy tries to cope…not admitting she’s depressed about her problems, she turns to routines…she says routines are a way of pretending things are normal when they’re really not.

“I like routines. You can get cosy in a rut. You can pretend things are the same when they’re not. Knowing I need to live with lies makes me more anxious, depressed and guilty. This way I need the routines more.”

Going back to my military post, drills and routines are a fallback for when your mind can’t think rationally fast enough. When things are shit, at least you have some sense of normalcy in a routine.

But it’s interesting, because at the end of the book there’s this:

“I read an article about depression that said buying yourself presents is a good thing…break the routine and spoil yourself a little”

I think by nature routines and drills are a coping mechanism when we can’t handle the situation we’re in…refusal to leave a  rut means tyou can’t handle uncertainty.

Part of our brain’s self-protection mechanisms, so as to avoid complete sensory input overload is to slowly ignore something that is repeatedly happening in a pattern. Routines numb you. Maybe that’s what Joy needed right after Michael’s death…numbness…because she simply couldn’t deal with all of the emotions she felt…and she refused to express those emotions properly:

“Screaming would be good,” she writes to herself at one point. “But I never scream. I can write it down but never do it.”

Joy’s refusal to confront her problems, her retreat into her routines, and the fact that she refuses to express her feelings caused her depression to linger much longer than if she had properly grieved in the first place.

Oh, to be in an ultra-conservative intolerant religious family who completely misunderstands the culture of younger generations.

I can relate. My parents are the same way…they’re hurt when I don’t open up to them, but at the same time, they continually display an intolerance and ignorance to the views of my generation.

That’s really what makes Aye Fond Kiss resonate with me. I mean here we are, with a young man out of a conservative muslim home, betrothed to marry a woman he doesn’t know to perpetuate an old tradition: that of marriage for family-stature-building over marriage for love. Not that I’ve got a marriage set up for me back home or anything, but I definitely can feel for the guy. Pre-arranged marriage is definitely a major part of traditional Pakistani culture, and to break that out of that traditional mold can be painful…and it takes a lot of courage. And that’s what I want to talk about.

It’s really easy to say you support progressiveness and interracial/inter-religious relationships, and it’s another thing entirely to live that progressiveness. I mean I’ve got some of the most conservative parents you could imagine…dad hails from the reddest, most country-christian neck of Texas you can imagine, and my mom’s from small-town, backwoods Michigan. Super conservative, traditional Christians the both of them. They’re not racist, but I really don’t know how they would react if I were to bring home a black girlfriend…or a muslim girlfriend…or boyfriend for that matter. I’m sure there’d be some issues. The relationship between Roisin & Casim directly challenges deep-seated traditions in both catholicism and islam. To directly challenge those traditions takes a lot of courage…or a certain level of naïve-ness.

It’s  a nice idea, to fight for a love that crosses all of those old boundaries…until that love starts tearing your current life apart. I mean shit got real for Casim really fast. When he called off his wedding with his cousin, his family was shamed in their community, his older sister’s wedding was called off, and his parents were stuck with an extension on their house that would probably go unoccupied…their livelihood within their traditional islamic neighborhood basically went down the pooper.

And let’s not forget about Roisin, a Catholic school teacher living with  a man  out of wedlock. A man who was most decidedly not Catholic (I do believe there are several instances in history when the catholics have taken issue with muslims). She doesn’t necessarliy have to defy her family to make her relationship with Casim last, but her private life comes into question when her parish preist refuses to sign a letter of approval because of her living arrangements. True to Catholic form, a school teacher in a Catholic scholl must have Catholic approval from a Catholic priest. Catholic.

To the credit of Casim’s family, as immigrants from Pakistan to Glasgow, their reception into Scotland hasn’t been totally hospitable. We see scenes where Glasgowian kids chase Casim’s younger sister, Tahara, and spit on her, and Glasgowian residents using the sign for the family shop as a dog-pissing station. During the partition of India, Casim’s father saw a lof really horrible acts by the hindus and the Catholic British, so to the credit of Casim’s family, they had just cause for their hesitance to trust Western philosophy…much less Western people.

It’s a rough business changing religious paradigms. Religion and dogma don’t exactly go hand in hand with challenged beliefs and change.

I’m disappointed this film wasn’t given more acclaim…Rob Roy has so many great attributes that are lost on a great majority of American film these days. The costumes, casting, and writing is all very respectful of Scottish history, the character development isn’t pandering and in your face (Rob’s respect for men, his honor, and his self-confidence was demonstrated. The directors didn’t force some cheesy bullshit where Rob somehow respects a man’s honor in a scene…no, Rob’s moral fiber is just demonstrated in the way he talks to his friends & people that would oppose him and in how he chooses to handle tough situations.), and most significantly, the film shows some goddamn respect for women.

If we’re getting into gender roles, we’ve gotta talk about the way in which modern cinema literature television news…hell, media in general, portrays women.

And not female sideshows in films starring men where the hunk saves the princess from the evil ugly troll of a man holding her hostage (I call it the Mario model…think about it) either. I have issue with films where they focus on this horribly objectified image of a strong female character. I say: Fuck Wonderwoman, to hell with Mikaela Banes, Arwen can go calculate the last digit of pie, Leia can hop in a sewer, whatever to Vivian Ward, Kay Matheson can go back to her non-existant parents, Erin Andrews? meh…these weren’t strong female characters, they were just Mary Sues created for and by dudes that don’t understand that portraying a perfect woman with hundreds of fantastically sexy traits doesn’t make a woman any stronger…just more objectified and brain boner inducing.

Characters like that are just the collective wet dream of white, socially awkward, nerdy dudes in North Dakota who don’t actually know that many women, so they’re intimidated by anything other than the overused Mario model of a babe damsel in distress, or some super sexy badass supermodel, who just happens to be a top scientist, that fights baddies on the weekends, in nothing but a horribly inefficient leather skinsuit, with a knack for marksmanship.

Quoting almost ver batem from Overthinking It, we don’t need more [Strong Female] Characters, we need us some [Strong Character], Females.  God, I want more Ginny Weasley’s, more Lucille Ball’s, more Dorey’s…more Mary MacGregor’s.

Yeah…the best part about Rob Roy wasn’t the realism, the nuanced character development, the dialogue, the under-sensationalized fight scenes…it was the portrayal of the main woman in the film. From the start, Mary is different. Strong. Smart. Vivacious. We’re introduced to her in a scene in which Rob Roy is just returning from an unknown amount of time on the road. We’re to assume she hasn’t seen him in ages. Guess what she’s doing when we’re introduced?

Cooking? No
Doing some early morning laundry? No
Makin a sandwich? Hell no
Giving the lads hair cuts? No
Milking the cows? Eff that
Managing like 8 kids running around the house like they’re caged the rest of the day? No, she’s a better mother than that.

Mary’s sleeping…and she’s sleeping in a practical night gown…not naked, half covered in sheets. She’s got pillow hair, and she’s visibly without makeup. And when Rob wakes her, she’s witty, but in that groggy, still-half-asleep way that’s clear that she’s just another mother who’s enjoying the fact that her kids aren’t up at like 4am. That’s how to introduce a mother.

And from the dialogue, it’s clear that Mary is one that can talk with the big boys. She doesn’t need some sugar-coated bullshit pandering lipservice…and she makes Rob pay for mental slipups with some rock-solid snark. She’s feisty.

Here’s the great part though. Mary isn’t one to fall apart the second an atrocity happens to her. Archibald Cunningham, in an attempt to provoke Rob, kills her livestock, burns her house down, and rapes her.

It’s unfortunate that the rape scene had to be so graphic, but it stood out to me that Mary kept her dignity…she didn’t scream and cry for help…she didn’t beg for mercy…she kept her resolve, and carried on. Immediately after the rape, and as her home is burning around her, she makes sure to compose herself before emerging to face the battalion of British marines outside.  

Because she knew the knowledge of the rape would indeed provoke Rob into unadvisable action, Mary remained silent, and swore her body guard to do the same. She didn’t need a shoulder to cry on, she didn’t need some foil character to explain to her why she should keep her rape a secret. She’s smart, intelligent, strong, and has emotional resolve.

Those are the characteristics I’d hope to be displayed in women in film…and Rob Roy nailed it. Now let’s talk about how the British baddies were all queer and the Scots were all rugged and hetero…