When is it enough?

Zinédine Zidane has finally spoken. In an interview on Canal+, he expressed apology ("Ce n'est pas pardonnable, je m'en excuse") for his now infamous headbutting of the Italian defender Marco Materazzi 10 minutes from the end of extra time in the World Cup final a few days ago between France and Italy, but was explicit that he had no regrets ("Je ne peux pas regretter mon geste").

The coup de tête, then, was over insults Materazzi had made about Zidane's mother and sister. The Times reports that support in France is very much given to Zidane: "It was understandable that he should defend his honour in the face of an insult, the argument goes." Typically (yet how I love them for it), the French somehow has to express everything as a beautiful philosophy: "This logic has spread among the intellectual classes who are now depicting Zidane's gesture as an 'existential act'."

To his credit, my viewing companion had come up with this observation that very night, right after Zidane had been sent off and long before any of this was in the press. Like everybody else, we had speculated like crazy what could have been said; like everybody else, the first thing that came to our minds was that it must have been some sort of racial slur. But we established one thing: whatever it was, it had tipped Zizou over the edge. "So maybe he was sick and tired of racist abuse and he didn't want to take it anymore. And to make that stand he would sacrifice everything, even the glorious end to a great career."

The Times has followed this story with a limpid article: "When is it right to lash out?" The article was dull, but the question is valid. When is it right? When is it enough?

The film Bus 174 was brought up the other day by Ian, friend and fellow supervisee, over at Dr Mabuse's. The director José Padilha calls it "a theoretical documentary" (as opposed to "an observational documentary"), by which he means it is a documentary more emphatic on exploring questions and issues than the narrative of the event. Very briefly, the film is about a youth, Sandro do Nascimento, who hijacked a bus one day and held its passengers as hostages for four hours. The event was almost entirely captured on Brazilian television and Padilha's film made extensive use of the footage, right up till the denouement of the event, namely, the fate of Sandro.

The questions in the film are clear: who is Sandro? How did he come to hijack the bus? What were his purposes? Was it for money (a criminal - robber and cop-killer, to be exact - interviewed in the film wryly commented: "why would you hijack a bus for money? If you want money, you rob rich people")? By and by, the film revealed some answers: the harshness of reality for Brazil's street kids; the massacre of Cadelaria, where police killed dozens of homeless people, many of them children, sleeping in a square in front of a church; the inhuman conditions of state juvenile centres and prisons, conditions which, argues the director in his interview, are responsible for breeding more violence ("you put a thief who stole a purse into a prison shared by 30 inmates, why would you not expect him to become violent?"); the police brutality; the economic inequities of the country; the social ills which are all ignored by a government too involved in politics to care. And, right in the middle of all that was Sandro, who hijacked a bus but did not kill anyone in it (although he pretended to, and the fact that he didn't actually do it says alot). Sandro, who by an account changed his behaviour once he realised the cameras were on him, that for once people were watching, seeing him, listening to him. This was, of course, the film's thesis: perhaps that was all he wanted.

But there is one other question the film didn't address: when is it enough? More specifically: when is it enough for violence? Honour? Equity? Justice? Freedom? When? I've had many thorny and emotional discussions about this with D, but I am still ambivalent: when is it freedom-fighting, and when is it terrorism?

I thought about a few other films I'd watched before which were similar to Bus 174, principally Kossivitz's La Haine and Panahi's Crimson Gold (it is not a coincidence that I only remember films I write about). Films which similarly explored iniquities and inequities, films which not only asked "why", but also "when". In relation to Crimson Gold, I wrote this at the end of the post:

Because in the end, Hussein, having observed and suffered the inequities of his society, eventually commits robbery and murder. The whole point of the film is to explore why. And I am realising I understand.

But now I am realising the fact, though, is that I don't.