Sarang's latest effort, A Safe Place, is not his most exciting movie, and it's not his funniest. Fans expecting a reprise of his madcap comedy The Sociology Department are bound to be disappointed. Where his previous films have drawn comparisons to Sidney Lumet and Steve McQueen (the director, not the actor), A Safe Place defies easy categorization. The closest precedent I can think of is La Fille du RER, André Téchiné's touching story centered on a false allegation about an anti-Semitic attack on a Paris train. Like La Fille, A Safe Place revolves around a dramatic, nationally covered news story, but focuses almost all of its attention on the smaller, human-scale drama that surrounds the central players. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Frank Cavanaugh (played by Gabriel Byrne) is the Republican governor of Kansas and a serious contender for the Republican nomination in the upcoming presidential election. Having established good relations with the Tea Party, Cavanaugh seeks to burnish his foreign policy credentials with a whirlwind trip around the globe. He dazzles Conservatives in Britain and gives a well-received speech to Venstre party activists in Denmark. Soon he is catching a baseball game in Tokyo and then taking a quick swing through Korea and China.
It is in China that he comes to grief. During a tour of Nanjing, while listening to an account of the atrocities, Cavanaugh breaks down. He simply loses it, seemingly unable to cope with the enormity of the suffering. Here Sarang is ruthless: the camera doesn't turn away, even as Cavanaugh's sobs turn ragged. There is no music and little background noise—we mostly hear Cavanaugh's labored breathing. The scene lasts for minutes, as officials stand solemnly, unsure what to do.
Of course this disqualifies Cavanaugh for elective office. Even in the more refined precincts of the conservative movement, it is felt that Cavanaugh's conduct was unbecoming. As one conservative intellectual puts it, "True, the Japanese atrocities at Nanking were reprehensible. But only a few years later, the Communists swept through the country and made the Japanese look like amateurs. Maybe Cavanaugh should shed a few tears for their victims." The response among conservative bloggers and activists is, needless to say, much less restrained.
But thankfully, Sarang quickly moves away from such large-scale concerns and focuses on the personal repercussions for Cavanaugh and his family. Where the Nanjing scene was raw and brutal, Sarang's depiction of the aftermath is delicate and indirect. Cavanaugh's wife, Susan (played by Mary McDonnell), has to navigate an unfamiliar political and personal landscape, and we learn as much from her carefully maintained (if at times somewhat rigid) façade and her minor duplicities as we do from her direct interactions with her husband. This is a woman whose whole conception of her life and her marriage is shifting tectonically, buckling the terrain and causing unpredictable upwellings and stress fractures.
Frank Cavanaugh tries to support his wife, but he is distracted by politics in Kansas, where his friends and allies are being driven out of power and replaced with his old foes. Here Cavanaugh's sense of impotence begins to grow, as some of his friends are not just replaced but humiliated, with no one to protect them anymore. His wife casually asks about an old friend; Cavanaugh feels that she is mocking him, because the man has just lost his license to do business with the state and is about to declare bankruptcy.
Separately, Cavanaugh visits his son in Kansas City. The scene is a reminder of just how light Sarang's touch can be: it appears that Cavanaugh wants to tell his son that it is all right to come out of the closet now, and to apologize for whatever pressure has been put on the young man to remain closeted. But Cavanaugh doesn't manage to say any of that, and the scene is wrapped in ambiguity. The characters speak over each other, and then retract what they were going to say. It is perhaps the most realistic and heartbreaking scene Sarang has ever filmed.
A Safe Place is superficially about the ways that love and family are contingent on worldly considerations, and the pain that comes when those links are severed. But I prefer to see it as an exploration of what remains, the safe spaces where we connect, which are within our power to build or destroy, and the way our connections of love and affection draw us back even when there is little to see but rubble and devastation.
