Tag: Region: South America

TIFF 2012 – Day 5

The Master

Dir. by Paul Thomas Anderson
Because I’ve waited until September 21, the day of The Master‘s theatrical release, to write this capsule, and because hundreds of thousands of words have already been spilled on this film (Ignatiy Vishnevetsky’s review at MUBI nails my response almost exactly), I’ll just add two quick thoughts.

First, Joaquin Phoenix’s performance is truly a strange thing, and not just by Hollywood standards. The way he collapses his chest and distorts his face reminded me of Emmanuel Schotte in L’Humanite (Dumont, 1999) and also of Antonin Artaud’s disintegration from the striking beauty of The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer, 1928) to the toothless madman of his final years. Phoenix’s histrionic showdowns with Philip Seymour Hoffman didn’t impress me nearly as much as his moment-to-moment embodiment of inarticulate panic. I’d like to see a Douglas Gordon-like version of this film built from nothing but long-distance shots of Phoenix walking.

Second, like nearly everyone else I think the final hour or so of The Master is muddled and frustrating, but I love the final scene, when Freddie: a. finally gets laid, and b. uses the language of “The Cause” as a means of seduction. My main complaint with PT Anderson’s previous film, There Will Be Blood (2007), is that the meticulous period detail is window dressing rather than anything like a real historical context, which is why I’ve never been convinced by readings of it as an analysis of a particular development in capitalism (or religion, for that matter).

The Master, I’d argue, is about post-WWII America in a way that Blood is not about the early-20th century oil boom. Because it defeated a black-and-white evil in Hitler, we like to pretend the “greatest generation” wasn’t devastated — emotionally, psychologically, spiritually, sexually — by the trauma of war. While hardly a perfect film, The Master is, I think, a curious study of the anxiety and desperation that characterized the lives of so many returning veterans and the loved ones they’d left behind. (I never would have guessed a PT Anderson movie would remind me of The Best Years of Our Lives [Wyler, 1946].) That final sex scene makes explicit what has been implied throughout the film. Cults, modern marketing and advertising, talk therapy, family, religion, sex, love — especially love — are all a kind of maddening seduction.

Prediction: Someone is already writing an academic conference paper on The Master and jouissance.

Once Upon a Time Was I, Veronica

Dir. by Marcelo Gomes
First, a quick game of Six Degrees of Brazilian Cinema. Hermila Guedes, who plays Veronica here, also starred in Gomes’s first feature, Cinema, Aspirins, and Vultures (2005), which was co-written by Karim Ainouz. Guedes also starred in Ainouz’s breakthrough film, Love for Sale (2006). Ainouz was at TIFF last year with The Silver Cliff, a character study of an attractive, 30-something dentist who suffers an identity crisis after her husband, without warning, leaves her. Once Upon a Time Was I, Veronica is a character study of an attractive, 30-something doctor who suffers an identity crisis after her father is diagnosed with a vague critical condition. I mention all of that because Veronica is familiar in the worst ways. The Silver Cliff was one of my favorite undistributed films of 2011; Veronica, inevitably, suffers by comparison.

Once Upon a Time Was I, Veronica is book-ended by what we eventually learn is Veronica’s vision of ecstasy (or something like that), a strangely prudish orgy on a sun-drenched beach. The opening image is interesting simply because it lacks any context: What’s not to like about beautiful, co-mingled naked bodies rolling in the sand and floating in shallow waters? When the vision returns at the end of the film, immediately after an unnecessarily long, faux-dramatic shot of Veronica being baptized by sea spray and a standard-issue “making a new start” montage, it’s reduced to a banality. Perhaps this is Gomes’s stab at transcendence? There’s just no magic in his mise-en-scene, and certainly nothing approaching the rapturous image of Alessandra Negrini dancing her ass off in The Silver Cliff. Even Gomes’s documentary-like footage of carnival is boring. Seeing this film 24 hours after Far from Vietnam made me wonder what Chris Marker could have made of those crowd scenes. Talk about paling in comparison.

Birds

Dir. by Gabriel Abrantes
I saw the double bill of Birds and Viola because so many friends — really, everyone I spoke to who had seen any of Piñeiro’s work — told me to. So I went into the screening without having even read the program description, which in hindsight I regret. Birds is a lo-fi, 16mm mash-up of ideas, most of which flew by me (no pun intended) on a first viewing. Told in Greek and Creole, it adapts Aristophanes’ comedy The Birds, turning it into an ironic commentary on the legacies of colonialism in Haiti. I hope to see Birds again before writing more about it. I suspect it will reward the effort.

Viola

Dir. by Matías Piñeiro
The great discovery of TIFF 2012, Viola is a fantasia on love that dances between dreams, theatrical performances, and a kind of hyper-sensual reality. “When he was singing, I thought I truly loved him,” the title character says in the film’s closing line. It’s typical of Piñeiro’s fluid perspective — a wistful, past-tense comment on a joyful present. Had I not known Piñeiro is barely 30 years old, I might have guessed this was an “old man” movie. His acute attention to potential love (or infatuation) is almost nostalgic, as if that surplus of feeling is so profound because it was always so fleeting. There are three kisses in the entire film, each significant in its own way, but like the particular scenes from Shakespeare that he cuts and pastes into his dialog, all of Viola is charged with barely-suppressed desire. I don’t know how else to put it: this is a really horny movie.

Except for a brief interlude in which we see Viola riding her bicycle through town, delivering packages for her and her boyfriend’s music and film bootlegging business, Piñeiro and cinematographer Fernando Lockett adhere to a unique visual strategy throughout the film. Each scene is built from only a handful of shots. Characters are typically framed in close-ups, usually from slightly above and with a very shallow, always-shifting depth of field. The camera moves often but in small and smooth gestures. And, most importantly, nearly all character movement happens along the z-axis.

That’s all worth mentioning, I think, because the form of the film — or, more precisely, the video; Viola is the new standard by which I’ll judge other indie DV projects — is so integrated with its content. Piñeiro often builds scenes around three characters. In some cases all three participate in the conversation (my two favorites take place in a theater dressing room and in the back of a mini-van); at other times, two characters talk while a third remains just outside of the frame, either literally or metaphorically. Viola is a talky movie, and its eroticism (for lack of a better word) is in its language and in its shifting compositions of faces. Piñeiro seems to have found a new form to express the the classic love triangle. The best comparison I can think of is the cafe and tram scenes in Jose Luis Guerin‘s In the City of Sylvia (2007).

According to Andrea Picard’s excellent program note, Viola is the second film (after 2010’s Rosalinda) in a proposed series “inspired by Gérard de Nerval’s Girls of Fire, an 1854 collection of short stories and sonnets each named for its eponymous heroine.” I can’t wait to see the rest.

Wavelengths 4

More to come in my full write-up for Senses of Cinema.

September 10, 2012
TIFF 2012 – Day 3

Gebo and the Shadow

Dir. by Manoel de Oliveira
I won’t pretend I know anything about Raul Brandão beyond what I’ve just learned from his Wikipedia page — that he became a journalist while working in Portugal’s Ministry of War, that the most productive period in his writing life came after retiring from that career, that he’s an important figure in Portuguese Modernism. Gebo and the Shadow, the latest film from 103-year-old Manoel de Oliveira, is as far as I can tell an adaptation of one section of Brandão’s 1923 novel, Os Pescaderos, a sympathetic study of the beautiful and tragic lives of the hard-working residents of various fishing villages.

Although Brandão is a generation older than Eugene O’Neill, de Oliveira’s film plays out like A Long Day’s Journey into Night. Stagy even compared with de Oliveira’s other recent work, Gebo and the Shadow is built from several long, late-night conversations that lead inevitably toward ruination. “It was you and her that bound me to life,” Gebo (Michael Lonsdale) tells his wife Doroteia (Claudia Cardinale), and in that one line is contained all of the film’s tragedy. The daily labors of life, the lies and deceptions, the sacrifices — Gebo’s every action is made in despairing love and generosity for Doroteia and their daughter-in-law Sofia (Leonor Silveira).

Cinematically, Gebo and the Shadow is a fairly simple film. (I heard one other critic at TIFF refer to it as a script table-read.) The opening moments are fantastic, though. The first shot (shown above) is an unnaturally lit, not-quite-realistic image of Gebo’s son João (Ricardo Trepa), who we see in profile, his face and body casting black shadows. (This allusion to the film’s title is obvious to me only in hindsight.) After a quick, impressionistic recreation of one of João’s crimes, de Oliveira cuts to the small room in which nearly all of the remainder of the film occurs. Sofia stands in front of a window, illuminated by candlelight, and as the camera dollies, we catch a glimpse of Doroteia in reflection. It’s a lovely shot that reveals the full physical space in which the characters exist, while also setting up the female leads as mirror images of one another. An especially nice touch is that the first image of Doroteia is blurred. At first it’s possible to mistake her for a literal reflection of Sofia, one of the film’s many reminders of the passage of time. (No reminder is more shocking than watching the aged faces of Cardinale and Jeanne Moreau.)

differently, Molussia

Dir. by Nicolas Rey
Nicolas Rey introduced differently, Molussia with a long quotation from an essay by Günthers Anders in which Anders critiques the common usage of the word “totalitarian.” Rather than an adjective by which one speaker defines himself in opposition to another (it’s always the other power or system that is “totalitarian”), Anders argues that totalitarianism is instead characterized by its “sense of the machine.” “What can be done, needs to be done,” he writes. Once a technique is discovered, it will be marketed until a need for it is created, which can then be exploited for profit. Resistance, as they say, is futile. Rey smirked while quoting Anders again during the Q&A: “Nothing discredits a man more quickly than critiquing a machine.”

The essays Rey quoted were written some thirty or forty years after his only novel, The Molussian Catacomb (1932-36), a collection of brief, witty, and incisive conversations between prisoners in an imaginary fascist country. Rey’s remarkable adaptation is built from nine reels of hand-processed 16mm film and shown in random order (making 362,880 possible versions of the film). Each includes a voice-over reading of a passage from one chapter of the novel, juxtaposed against images of landscapes, a soundtrack that mixes machines and natural sounds, and occasional portraits of the residents of Molussia (most of the film was shot within close driving range of Rey’s home near Paris). My interview with Rey and a much longer write-up about the film will be included in the next issue of Senses of Cinema.

Night Across the Street

Dir. by Raul Ruiz
Long John Silver, rhododenrons, retirement parties, desert landscapes, Beethoven, pink walls, mysterious assassins, four-letter words, childhood memories, gun barrels, a beautiful dancer, bicycles, Antofagasta, classroom anxiety, shiny faces, a man who never speaks, ugly video, ships in bottles, a last desperate gasp of life, and ghosts and ghosts and ghosts.

That’s all I’ve got.

Wavelengths 2

More to come in full write-up later this fall.

September 8, 2012
2009 SFIFF Diary 2

Oblivion (Heddy Honigmann)

Four years ago, on my first trip to the San Francisco International Film Festival, a couple friends and I had our liveliest debate after a screening of Ellen Perry’s The Fall of Fujimori, a documentary about Peru’s recent political history told mostly in the first person by Fujimori himself. On one side of the debate were those of us who felt the strength of the film was its subtle ironies, particularly its use of the contemporary context (the early days of Bush’s war on terror) to undermine the elected dictator’s self-aggrandizing justifications of his anti-democratic domestic policies. On the other side were those who argued that people in power are afforded ample opportunity to speak for themselves and that the filmmaker was morally obligated to condemn Fujimori outright. It was a fun — and heated — exchange. Heddy Honigmann’s latest film is a fascinating answer to that discussion. Oblivion is also told in the first person, though this time mostly by aging, blue-collar workers who, in several cases, literally served (whether food or drink or services) several past presidents and dictators, including Fujimori. I’ve only seen two Honigmann films, but in both I’ve been startled by the candor she elicits from her interview subjects. Here, her camera lingers awkwardly on a man who admits with some shame that after working for more than 30 years in one of Lima’s finest restaurants, he had never had an opportunity to take his wife there. A 60-year-old leather worker hides his face when he’s overcome by emotion while remembering all he lost during the days of runaway inflation. An adolescent shoeshine boy stares blankly into the camera and tells Honigmann, “No, I don’t have any dreams. No, I don’t have any happy memories.” She intercuts these stories with footage of young, self-taught jugglers and acrobats — homeless kids — who perform in busy intersections during red lights. They’re graceful and full of life, their performances have a startling and kinetic beauty. The juxtaposition is complex and loaded with ambiguities — a reflection, I suspect, of Honigmann’s personal relationship with her home country.

Everything Strange and New (Frazer Bradshaw)

To recycle a line I’ve used before, I’m often more interested in what a film does than what it’s about, and Bradshaw’s first narrative feature, Everything Strange and New, does quite a lot. The opening shot (pictured above) is a long, static take accompanied by an explosion of percussive, dissonant music — a self-conscious announcement that this is not another of those suburban stories about disaffected fathers and husbands. As it turns out, it is one of those films, but I’ll credit Bradshaw for his experiments with the genre, particularly his working-class lead character, Wayne, and for his often fascinating photography. One or two shots approach Bela Tarr territory (if Tarr shot a low-budget dv movie). Had the film ended 20 minutes sooner, I would have even applauded Bradshaw’s success at blending avant-garde techniques with more naturalistic storytelling. But a plot turn in the final act — and, more importantly, Bradshaw’s cynical handling of it — caused me to reevaluate everything that came before. Everything Strange and New is cruel to its characters in a way that comes off as smug rather than searching.

35 Shots of Rum (Claire Denis)

I’ve already written a bit about this film, but I want to quickly mention a scene that, to me, encapsulates all that distinguishes Denis’s take on the small, family drama from most other films in the genre. The morning after the “Nightshift,” Noé (Grégoire Colin) announces to Gabrielle (Nicole Dogué) and Joséphine (Mati Diop) that he’s leaving for a job in Gabon. Rather than dealing explicitly with the fallout from his decision, Denis cuts, instead, to a closeup of Lionel (Alex Descas), who’s walking home, presumably after a one-night-stand. She then cuts on an eyeline match to Joséphine climbing precariously out of their top-story window with a bottle of cleaner and towels in her hand. We are given, cinematically, the perspective of a father watching his child in danger. Or, at least that’s how I read the image the first time. On repeat viewings, there’s something much more interesting in Lionel’s expression: his intimate and hard-won understanding of his daughter’s behavior, his realization that she’s cleaning, which means that she’s upset, which means that it’s his job to go soothe and protect her. This plays out in the next few minutes in a wonderful scene in which their history is revealed through gestures. There’s text — Joséphine shaking out the bedsheets, looking through family photos, and arguing with her father — and there’s subtext — not only the loss of their mother/wife but also their deep familiarity with each other and with moments like this. (We can immediately imagine them having a hundred other similar confrontations — her cleaning, him stoic, with arms folded.) Characters in movies expertly express their feelings; real people, in my experience, typically don’t. Yet those of us in successful, long-term relationships manage to communicate anyway. 35 Shots of Rum is rare for managing to capture that peculiar kind of intimacy on screen. Ozu would approve.

Zift (Javor Gardev)

A Bulgarian film noir? Yes, please. Although a bit too stylized (in the Tarantino sense) for my tastes, Zift is a hell of a lot of fun and could probably find a decent audience in the States if a distributor packaged it properly. (First-time director Gardev must surely be taking studio offers for his next film as we speak.) The movie borrows liberally from classic Hollywood noirs, most notably a reenactment of Rita Hayworth’s iconic number in Gilda, and the black-and-white cinematography honors that legacy while updating the camera movements for contemporary audiences accustomed to a more frenetic pace. The two lead actors are fun discoveries, too, particularly Tanya Ilieva, who, frankly, is one of the sexiest women I’ve ever seen on screen. Zift was on my radar last September at TIFF, so I’m glad to have finally had a chance to catch up with it.

Wild Field (Mikheil Kalatozishvili)

Wild Field belongs to a class of films I’m drawn to at festivals. I rarely expect them to be great (and they rarely are), but I see them less for their stories or formal innovations than for the opportunity they provide to watch people in a part of the world I would never have a chance to see otherwise. (Tulpan is another recent example.) Wild Field is set in a remote region of the Kazakh steppes, where a young doctor lives Thoreau-like, tends to a handful of locals, and pines for his girlfriend back in civilization. Although I can’t find confirmation for this, I suspect this is an adaptation of a novel. I can imagine the protagonist’s inner life being a playhouse of ideas for a gifted writer, and the moments of magical realism that pockmark the film could flower beautifully in prose, but Kalatozishvili fails to find a cinematographic analogue, and the pacing of the film suffers for it. Still, I was perfectly content to study the landscape and faces for 90 minutes or so.

April 30, 2009
Los Muertos (2004)

Dir. by Lisandro Alonso

I’ve been trying to catch up with the work of a few of the highly regarded directors who will have new films at TIFF this year, and this morning I watched Lisandro Alonso’s Los Muertos, which, at least on a first viewing, is one of the most exciting and important films I’ve seen in some time. I just regret that I hadn’t had a chance to see it before watching Alonso’s Fantasma at TIFF ’06. I was put off by what I felt was a misanthropic streak in that film, though after having spent 80 minutes with Vargas now, I wonder how different my experience of it would be.

I’m tempted to call Los Muertos “important” because it complicates a tendency of contemporary art cinema. So many of the films I like fall into particular formal habits: long takes, static cameras, expressionless faces, an avoidance of close-ups and reaction shots, little non-diegetic sound, and a curious attention to physical space (typically the natural world — trees, leaves, grass, bodies of water, etc.). It’s become a kind of formula, and critics and cinephiles who are drawn to these kinds of films are prone, I think, to be a bit too forgiving of their faults. Like, I remember watching Naomi Kawase’s The Mourning Forest last year and thinking, “Okay, this movie has everything I like in a film, so way does its stab at transcendence seem so totally calculated and false to me?”

What fascinates me about Los Muertos is that it explores the connection between form and content by taking all of the tropes of “transcendental cinema” and staining them, by narrative means, with dread and violence. It reminds me of Brian Eno’s answer (apocryphal, perhaps) when he was asked if he was the father of New Age music: “No, my music has evil in it.”

June 29, 2008
2007 TIFF Day 5

I’m the wrong person to write about No Country for Old Men. It’s exactly the film I was expecting, so I’m not sure why I came away from it so disappointed. The crowd had something to do with my reaction, I’m sure. As with Cronenberg’s A History of Violence, which I saw here two years ago, also at the massive Ryerson auditorium, I was surrounded again by viewers who laughed at and applauded the bone breaking and blood splattering. I don’t blame them, really. The Coens give Javier Bardim many of the best lines. His ruthless murderer, Anton Chigurh, has an irresistible charisma, which I’m sure will be interpreted as the seductive power of Evil or something. But I just don’t really care. It’ll win a million Oscars.

I deliberately scheduled several films this year from South America, and also films by young female directors. I think I’m in search of another Lucretia Martel. Encarnacion is Anahi Berneri’s second narrative feature, following 2005’s A Year Without Love, which I’m now curious to see. I enjoy finding films like Encarnacion at TIFF — small character pieces that get the details right. Erni, the film’s protagonist, fits somewhere in that long line of movie heroines who, having reached a certain age, find their beauty fading and their place in the world less secure. I couldn’t help but think of All About Eve, Opening Night, and All About My Mother. Twenty years past her heydays as a calendar pin-up and B-movie queen, Erni now lives alone in Buenos Aires, where she continues to hustle for work on television and in commercials. The dramatic line of the film takes her back to her home town, where she reunites with her disapproving sister and helps to initiate her beloved niece into adolescence. The strength of the film, though, is Silvia Perez’s performance as Erni. A character who could very easily be made maudlin or pathetic has, instead, a curious grace and independence. I love the scenes between her and her occasional lover. A kind of Third Wave hero, she visits and leaves him at her own will.

Last summer, Nick Rhombes offered a couple fun posts about the “radical beauty” of contemporary CGI spectacles. Watching Superman Returns while listening to his randomly shuffling iPod proved an interesting experience, he writes. “My theory is that we don’t see the beauty and artistry of these CGI films because we have never really learned how to appreciate them. Watching them with random music frees us from the prison-house of narrative compulsion; we see them with new eyes. With open eyes.” When I wasn’t laughing at the ridiculous trainwreck of a film that is Elizabeth: The Golden Age, I was thinking of Nick’s posts. There comes a point when these Hollywood picture shows become so incoherent, when the camera movements become so unmotivated, and when the performances become so irrelevant that there’s nothing left on screen but pure Surrealist spectacle. And people say avant-garde cinema can’t find an audience.

Wavelengths concluded this year with a performance of Bruce McClure’s Everytwo Circumflicksrent…Page 298. Before the screening, McClure passed out ear plugs, telling us that he had come to accept that loud noise was an essential component of his process but that he recognized others might not be so disposed. He also expressed an interest in the ways that audiences choose to modify their experience of art — wearing ear plugs to rock shows, for example. His performance featured two modified projectors, each displaying a small circle of light that flickered and shifted focus. The soundtracks of each film had been altered by hand, and the rhythmic loops generated by them were then processed through two guitar pedals, which McClure “played” live. The result was overwhelming — loud, disorienting, hypnotic. At the risk of slipping into cliche, I would call it a performance of elemental cinema: sound and light projected in time. It was a great way to cap the Wavelengths programs.

September 13, 2007
2007 TIFF Day 4

Lucia Puenzo’s XXY, in case you haven’t heard, is a coming-of-age story about a hermaphrodite. Alex has lived the first fifteen years of her life as a girl, but the inevitable onset of sexual desire — bewildering enough to those of us not suffering from gender confusion — has done a number on her and also on her parents, who have gone out of their way to protect Alex from discrimination and from the well-intentioned curiosity of doctors. Rather than castrate Alex as an infant, they decided to allow her to choose her gender when she was ready. XXY examines the consequences of that decision. What I most liked about the film was its treatment of that post-pubescent madness we all suffered through. Another important character, a young boy struggling with some sexual confusion of his own, is as awkward, gangly, and desperate for affection as Alex is. I actually wish Alex had been a “normal” girl or boy because the enormity of her “situation” dominated every scene, allowing little breathing room for the characters to transcend the roles as written. I believe it was the Variety reviewer who described XXY as a very good after school special. A bit harsh maybe, but not far from my own take.

Secret Sunshine. I hate to write capsule reviews of films like this — sprawling, complex stories that pull off the remarkable feat of being simultaneously tragic, charming, inscrutable, and sublime. The tone of this thing could have collapsed at any moment; Lee Chang-dong is some kind of genius for pulling it off. Secret Sunshine is about a young woman, Shin-ae, who moves with her son to the small town where her now-deceased husband was born and raised. There she meets several locals, including a persistent suitor (Song Kang-ho in my favorite performance of the year), a pack of gossipy housewives, and a pharmacist who is convinced that Shin-ae would find true happiness if only she would turn her life over to Christ. After several plot turns that I refuse to spoil, Secret Sunshine becomes, among many other things, the truest depiction of evangelical Christianity I’ve seen on film. Fortunately, Lee’s film is not evangelical itself and, instead, wrestles with the strangeness and disappointments of faith in a way that The Mourning Forest, with its contrivances, could only mimic. Damn, I love this film.

And speaking of wrestling with faith (which, by the way, is far and away the dominant recurring theme of this year’s festival, or at least of my programmed version of it). I’ve gotten in the habit of describing Saverio Costanzo’s In Memory of Myself as a genre film, a suspense thriller in which the central, driving mystery is faith. It might be strangest film I’ve seen all week, with shades of Kubrick and Dreyer and a formal rigor I wasn’t expecting and have yet to fully process. I honestly don’t know if it’s a good film but I enjoyed every minute of it. I’m reserving all judgment until after a second viewing, which I hope comes sooner rather than later.

Hannes Schupbach’s Erzahlung is a commissioned portrait of Cesare Ferronato, an 80-year-old Italian sculptor. I’m a total sucker for films that document the artistic process, especially when they allow us to observe hands in action, but what most charmed me about this 40-minute, silent picture was its focus on Ferronato’s domestic life. There’s a wonderful moment, for example, when we watch him and his wife (I assume) play a game of chess. For Shupbach, there’s no distinction to be drawn between art-making and love and work and community — each is absolutely integral to the other.

Seeing Heinz Emigholz’s Schindler’s Houses on the massive screen in Varsity 1 was a real treat, but I really wish it had been programmed at any time other than 10 pm on Sunday night. I stayed strong for the first 75 minutes, but the last 25 are a bit of a blur. Fifteen challenging films in three days did me in. Schindler’s Houses is assembled from static shots of the homes and buildings Rudolf Schindler designed in and around Los Angeles between 1921 and 1952. They’re arranged chronologically and include both exterior and, in many cases, interior shots. The sheer quantity of footage has an interesting effect: Rather than the dusty curiosities you might find in a coffee-table collection of architectural photographs, the buildings shift and morph as they find new contexts. They’re domestic spaces that continually evolve to satisfy the tastes of their occupants. They’re material objects with material values (it’s impossible to watch the film and not be reminded of California’s real estate bubble). They’re objets d’art, relics of Modernism. Emigholz matches Schindler’s eye for composition; like Erzahlung this is another meeting of artists. As an aside, I would love to see a remix of this film using only shots of bookshelves (apparently a hallmark of Schindler’s designs). I have a fixation with browsing others’ bookshelves and found myself wanting to linger just a bit longer in front of those we see in the film.

September 13, 2007
2007 TIFF Days 1 and 2

My favorite scene in Persepolis takes place at a small kitchen table in the childhood home of writer/illustrator/co-director Marjane Satrapi. An anxious neighbor has dropped in to tell them that her 14-year-old son has been recruited to join the fight against Iraq. Satrapi’s mother — fearless, kind, intractable — comforts her friend, promising, “We’ll talk to him.” The scene ends with a simple voice-over: “Because of my parents, the boy did not go to war.” It’s the kind of moment that could very easily have been cut from the film for the sake of pacing. (And Persepolis does, I think, have some minor pacing problems.) But it’s the level of specificity in the scene, and in the film at large, that makes it so compelling. That moment at the kitchen table so radically transformed Satrapi’s understanding of her parents that now, more than two decades later, she’s still meditating on its significance from the vantage of adulthood. I should also add that the film’s animation is a real pleasure to watch — witty, surprising, and beautiful.

All of Fengming, A Chinese Memoir is summed up in the opening minutes of the first interview. He Fengming takes her seat in front of the camera, where she will remain for nearly all of the next 180 minutes, and begins to tell the story of how her life was forever changed in 1949, when at the age of 17 she left the university to join the staff of a newspaper. “And that,” she laughs, “was the start of my revolutionary career.” Her laugh is sarcastic and a little bitter. “We were so naive back then,” she later tells director Wang Bing. “Back then,” she and her husband were branded as “Rightists” by the Party and were separated from each other and from their two young sons in order to undergo rehabilitation at labor camps. Her husband died in his; she returned briefly to her family before being detained again during the Cultural Revolution. We learn relatively late in the film that Fengming wrote a book-length account of her life in the late-1980s, which proves to be an important detail in understanding the form of Wang’s remarkable film. Shot entirely in long static takes, with only a handful of cuts and quick dissolves, it seems to present an unedited account of Fengming’s story. But her story has been edited — over the course of nearly sixty years, changing slightly with each of the tellings and each of the hours spent hunched over a typewriter and notepad. So, for example, when she describes the night when she discovered her husband had died, her language takes on an uncharacteristic literariness, with extended metaphors and hand-picked symbols. Recounting this most “rehearsed” of her memories, she remains composed and calm, despite the horror and sorrow. When she describes a more recent event, however — one that occurred after she’d written her book and that she’s yet to fully integrate into her life’s narrative — she chokes and sobs. I have two pages of hand-written notes on Fengming, one of my favorite films of the fest, and hope to return to it later.

Hou Hsiao-hsien might be my favorite living director, so I had assumed that the lukewarm reviews of Le Voyage du Ballon Rouge coming out of Cannes weren’t to be trusted. I was right. At this point, midway through the festival, Voyage is among my two or three favorites. I’m hopeless when it comes to writing about Hou, whose films are visceral and emotional experiences for me. A friend asked after the screening if I thought the red balloon was integral to the film — if it was necessary at all — and I realized in answering that, for me, the balloon had acted as a kind of emotional locus: a splash of color and beauty, less symbol than catalyst or accelerant.

Last year at the festival, I assumed I had missed something when I came away ambivalent from Manufactured Landscapes. I discovered Friday night that what I had wanted from Jennifer Baichwal’s documentary was, in fact, something closer in spirit to Peter Hutton’s At Sea, a 60-minute, silent triptych about the birth, life, and death of a modern ship. Hutton’s film begins at a massive boatyard in Korea — one of several aspects of At Sea that reminded me of Claire Denis’s L’Intrus — where we watch, in a series of strange and awesome compositions, the workings of modern technology at its most forceful and elegant. In the middle act, Hutton turns his camera to the sea itself. He booked passage on a trans-Atlantic freighter and filmed the water as it churned beneath him and as it turned the moon’s reflection into abstraction. And the final twenty minutes take place on the shores of Bangladesh, where poor men and boys participate in a growing and dangerous trade: breaking ships with their bare hands and the simplest of tools. The structure of the film makes a compelling (if obvious) argument: “The developing world is our dumping ground,” as Hutton said during the Q&A. But that was less interesting to me than the form of his shot selection and cutting. When a member of the audience challenged Hutton, suggesting that his film would be as effective as a series of still photos, Hutton, non-plussed, responded with a phrase I’ll be regurgitating for years. (I’m paraphrasing.) “It’s very difficult for us to watch a silent film today. Cell phones ring. We’re easily distracted. I’m interested in countering the emotional velocity and the visual velocity of contemporary films.” The film’s form, then, which deliberately challenges our “emotional velocity,” offers a more radical political position than its content, I think.

At the very end of Mutum, a middle-class, urban doctor rides into the isolated Brazilian village where the film takes place and offers a young boy a pair of glasses, opening his eyes to the world around him. I was relieved during the post-screening Q&A to hear director Sandra Kogut acknowledge the similarities between herself and that doctor. I’m deeply ambivalent about films like Mutum. They’re a kind of genre, really — stories of the poor in the developing world, shot by well-educated, middle- to upper-class filmmakers, that are then taken to film festivals, where they’re easily digested by well-educated, middle- to upper-class audiences. A surefire cure for those annoying bouts of liberal guilt that plague folks like me. When children are the focus of the story, it’s even easier. Kogut seems to be aware of all of this and has crafted a solid film from the source material, a classic Brazilian novel by Joao Guimaraes Rosa. The key to the film’s success, I think, is Kogut’s camera, which never escapes the subjective perspective of her protagonist, a ten-year-old boy who struggles to make sense of the adult world around him. Because of that p.o.v., the film is full of ambiguities and, occasionally, oversized emotion. This is Kogut’s first feature, and I look forward to seeing whatever comes next from her.

September 7, 2007
The End and the Beginning (2006)

Dir. Eduardo Coutinho

“We want to hear stories,” director Eduardo Coutinho says early in this film, which is built almost entirely from interviews he conducted over a two-week period in Paraiba, a backlands town in in the northeast of Brazil. Specific stories. Intimate, personal stories. Ten minutes or so into the film, as a man in medium close-up describes the hard circumstances of his life, Coutinho drowns him out with his own voice-over narration, informing us that this story won’t do, that it lacks the “closeness” he’s seeking. And so, with the help of Rosa, his young guide, he focuses instead on the community where she lives, a small network of aged kin who’ve given their lives to the hard land they live on.

Many of the people Coutinho interviews inhabit the same homes where they were born six, seven decades earlier. Their skin is hard and deep-lined, and their stories are similar: each began a life of labor during childhood, only a few received a formal education; there were marriages (most of them successful, or so they say) and many, many pregnancies. We learn about all of this from their lively, impassioned, and occasionally bitter remembrances. Coutinho, we discover in a surprising two-shot near the very end of the film, sits quite close to his interviewees (typically, they’re framed in tight close-ups), earning their trust and fondness.

Very much like a film I saw here at SFIFF two years ago, Raymond Depardon’s Profiles of Farmers: Daily Life, The End and the Beginning is, in Coutinho’s words, “a tale of a life that is rapidly disappearing.” Frankly, I remember almost nothing of Depardon’s film, but I suspect Coutinho’s will linger with me for quite a while, partly due to the charm of his subjects, but also because, in acknowledging its position as a work of documentary — the first words of the voice over tell us that the film “began from scratch”; the crew simply drove out of Rio de Janeiro and showed up in Paraiba — The End and the Beginning also serves as a kind of test case, giving a media(ted) voice to people who have never had one before but never pretending that such mediation is without moral and political consequence.

When Coutinha returns to each of his interviewees to say a final goodbye, there is genuine sadness in their faces (or at least in the faces that made the final cut). Earlier, one man in particular had expressed misgivings about appearing on camera, saying that he felt his words would be spoken “in vain.” When Coutinha asks him what he means, he says, “a word in vain is a word with no future.” The line resonates throughout his final on-camera appearance. In the intervening days he’s apparently thought a great deal about filmmaking. He suggests, even, that Coutinho shoot him from a different angle, then he laughs, and instantly we imagine him alone in front of a mirror, turning and looking through the corners of his eyes at his right profile then the left and back again. Given an opportunity, finally, finally, to tell his story, he regrets that the chance has passed so quickly. “You’re a smart and interesting man,” Coutinho tells him. “I have more to tell,” he says.

April 30, 2007
Three for Three

Perhaps it’s simply the inevitable result of paring down my schedule from 44 films in 2005 (only 35 of which I actually saw) to “only” 33 this year, but my sense while researching and planning over the past weeks was that TIFF’s lineup is stronger, top to bottom, this time around than in previous years. I’m a bid disappointed that neither of my favorite filmmakers, Claire Denis and Hou Hsiao-hsien, has a new film here, but, otherwise, I feel good about all of my picks. None was chosen simply to fill a hole or out of convenience. None feels like a risk. And so far, three films in, my excitement over the quality of this year’s lineup has been confirmed.

After spending two weeks meticulously filling in my TIFF spreadsheet, I was surprised to find Climates, the latest film by Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan, at the top of the heap — surprised, mostly, because I’d never seen any of his previous work. I rented Distant (2002) last week and was completely captivated by it. Even before reaching the scenes that make explicit reference to Tarkovsky, I was smiling at the more subtle allusions — the clanging wind chimes, the mothers and sons, the struggling, alienated artists. How could I not love a film that was so obviously an homage to my all-time favorite, Mirror?

Climates didn’t move me quite so powerfully, but it’s a very good film nonetheless. Ceylan and his wife (Ebru Ceylan) play the starring roles, a couple in the final throes of a failing relationship. He is older, a university professor struggling to finish his thesis; she is an art designer working to establish a career in television and film production. The film opens as they’re breaking up and then follows him over the next few months, as he attempts to begin the next — and hopefully more satisfying — phase of his life.

Climates includes three or four key scenes — a daydream at the beach, a night in a hotel, and a brilliant sex scene — that will certainly be among my favorite moments of any film I see this year. Often employing incredibly shallow focus, Ceylan taps into that transcendent Tarkovsky “magic” by shattering his images into abstraction and, in doing so, offering shards of subjective emotion. At times, I was reminded of Denis’s sex scenes in Friday Night, but I haven’t decided yet if she and Ceylan are working toward similar ends. After I get home, I hope to give more thought and time to Climates, which, like Atom Egoyan’s Calendar, also uses photography and ancient religious architecture to raise questions about memory and national identity. (That last phrase is such an art film cliche [or maybe an art film criticism cliche], but I’m confident it’s true in this case, and it will make this film fun to write about and discuss.)

12:08 East of Bucharest (Corneliu Porumboiu) is set on December 22, 2005, the sixteenth anniversary of the overthrow of communism in Romania. A small town news anchor celebrates the event by inviting two men to join him for a live, on-camera discussion of their experiences in 1989, and he frames the chat with this central question: “Was there or was there not an actual revolution in their home town?” (That question, actually, is a more accurate and literal translation of the film’s original title.) Did anyone participate, locally, in the dangerous rebellion against authority, or did they simply join the national celebration after the revolution was complete?

12:08 East of Bucharest is neatly divided into two acts. In the first we meet the three main characters: a drunken school teacher, a retired principal, and the television “journalist.” The film works so well largely due to the lead performances, each of which is sympathetic and often hilarious. Porumboiu, an efficient storyteller, gives us snapshots of each man’s life and of life, in general, in 21st century Romania, begging the larger, more important question: what is the legacy of the revolution, and who, if anyone, benefited from it the most? When the three characters finally come together for the shooting of the TV program, the film shifts gears, and the final 45 minutes or so play more or less in real time. Their discussion, including the comments of call-in viewers, is pointed and at times even touching. It is also really, really funny. 12:08 East of Bucharest lends itself to over-simplified discussions of postmodernism and history, establishing “facts” before quickly dismantling them again as distorted and subjective memories. For every history of the revolution there is a counter-history, but Porumboiu, I think, finally comes down on the side of “the people,” in a liberal, humanist, and barely-political-at-all sense. For that reason — along with the laugh-out-loud comedy — I can see this becoming one of those films that, if properly marketed, is the foreign language film talked up by Americans who see only one or two foreign language films a year.

Judging by the snores, giggles, and sighs of frustration I heard around me in the theatre, I’m likely among the minority when I call Hamaca Paraguaya (Paz Encina) a stunning piece of filmmaking. It is the prototype of the “boring art film.” By my count, in fact, there are only fourteen camera setups in the entire movie, and they’re employed with an almost geometric rigor. By the fourth sequence in the film, its rhythms become obvious — they’re observable and dissectable. I’m tempted even to plot out the film’s form on graph paper. But the strict construction is only so interesting and effective because Encina maintains a constant tension between it and what really drives her film: the mysterious grief and love shared by the main characters, an aging couple who await the return of their son from war.

I use the word “mysterious” not because the couple’s love and grief are unmotivated. The plot, spare as it is, explains their son’s reasoning for going to war and it informs us that the man and woman have been together for decades. Rather, the “mystery” of the film is the mystery that haunts and shapes so much of human experience. It’s our strange tendency to deflect grief by talking about anything — anything — other than that which grieves us. It’s the rituals of intimacy. It’s the pendulum swings between hope and despair. I have a lot more to say about this film, and look forward to doing so when I have more time.

September 10, 2006
Little Sky (2004)

Dir. by María Victoria Menis

Félix (Leonardo Ramírez) is a young drifter who, in the opening act of Little Sky, jumps from a train, stumbles into conversation at a local bar, and finds himself working for room and board at a small farm. Its owners, Roberto (Dario Levy) and Mercedes (Mónica Lairana), seem content on first glance, but Félix soon discovers that Roberto’s drunken violence is the source of Mercedes’s quiet reserve and depression. When Mercedes finally leaves her husband, Félix takes her infant son Chango, with whom he has developed a close bond, and flees for the economic promise of Bueno Aires.

Like a Frank Norris or Theodore Dreiser novel, Little Sky drives steadily toward its inevitable, and inevitably dark, conclusion. Despite his genuinely good intentions, Félix’s dreams of providing the stable family for Chango that he, also an orphan, lacked are romantic lies, and we in the audience can see it coming for miles. But Menis’s direction makes it a fairly compelling story, nonetheless. I quite liked the first half of the film and particularly enjoyed her handling of Félix’s and Mercedes’s relationship, which manages to avoid the most obvious of narrative cliches: the stud drifter bedding the sexually repressed, kept woman (see Schizo). Levy also gives what at times is a nicely sympathetic performance as the abusive husband.

Soon after Félix and Chango arrived in Buenos Aires, however, I lost interest in the film and began waiting for it to end. Films of the type that play at film festivals typically resist narrative closure; they delight, instead, in ambiguity, allowing viewers to draw conclusions of their own. I’ll admit to a strong preference for this type myself, but I’m beginning to wonder how often “ambiguity” is, in fact, a cheap excuse for sloppy writing. Little Sky is clearly intended to be a social film with political ends, and so I recognize Menis’s need to carry her story through to its predetermined, tragic finale. But I think it would be a much better film if she spent even more time developing her three main characters at the farmhouse and ended it on the train to the city. Ambiguity. Just how I like it. So can this desire for ambiguity be a political or intellectual cop-out? That question, to be honest, interests me more than this film did.

September 14, 2004