Gateway Cinephiles

StLIFF: The Best of the Fest

This year’s St. Louis International Film Festival was a relatively even experience in the final analysis. Most of the films I saw were noteworthy in some way. True, some were forgettable, and a handful were truly extraordinary, but for the most part the programming was modestly enjoyable and absorbing. My sense for relative quality has been sort of overwhelmed by the sheer volume of films I screened, so I’m not sure I’m even capable of ranking the best films of the Festival. That said, I’m just going to skim off the top third of the thirty-six films I managed to catch and offer this list of the works that turned my head or stuck with me. So take these as my personal recommendations when and if these films receive wider U.S. distribution or find their way on to DVD:

“Li dives into the topic of rural sex slavery in China–’bride purchasing’ is the polite euphemism–with an unblinking need to show every sadistic, ugly jot.”

“Ferocious and yet fragile, The Class is an astonishing work of social realism, one that caught my breath time and again.”

“There’s really no faulting Kurt Kuenne’s intentions or zeal in Dear Zachary, a remembrance of his friend Andrew Bagby that is as unabashedly canonizing in its treatment of the man as it is scathing in its assessment of his death.”

“Conveying the tribulations of reform and forgiveness with a knowing appreciation for its complexities, Vuletic captures the conflicting demands of law, peace, greed, and duty that overwhelm societies emerging from war’s shadow.”

“This fable of challenging, unlikely love in a contemporary Macedonia of slate skies and festering wounds ambles along with a soulful awareness of human misery.”

“Gently simmering, almost minimalist, Rodrigo Moreno’s quietly absorbing The Minder is a film that demands profound patience.”

“Proceeding much like the wandering thoughts of a reflective old man (which I suppose it is), Of Time and the City takes its sweet time getting nowhere.”

“The survivors recall the details of their trial with stunning clarity, and Arijón delicately frames their meticulous remembrances and their sobering meditations on life and death.”

“Bashir’s primary fascination is memory’s role in tallying guilt and digesting the seemingly unfathomable, and in this it attains a rattled, grief-stained vividness.”

“Earning every spasm of heartache with her genuine depiction of life’s casual cruelties, Reichardt captures a wrenching picture of the sacrifices we all make for those we love.”

“Assarat positively revels in the sheer process of a tentative romance, the ballad of looks, words, and gestures that thrill something deep within the human spirit.”

“For better or for worse, there’s no cleverness to Aronofsky’s grim gaze in The Wrestler. The film delivers a naked portrait of human endurance, fragility, and entropy, in both their physical and emotional aspects.”

StLIFF: Day Eleven

Waltz With Bashir
2008 (Israel / France / Germany)
Director: Ari Folman

Ari Folman’s troubled, magnificent Waltz with Bashir embraces a style/genre mating guaranteed to shake up cinematic expectations: the animated documentary. Wrestling with fragmentary memories of his days in the IDF during the 1982 Lebanon War–especially an unmoored, hallucinatory recollection involving flare-illuminated skinny-dipping–Folman interviews former comrades-in-arms and others who were involved in the conflict. The notorious massacre of Palestinians at Sabra and Shatila looms over the proceedings, and the film lurches with a swelling dread towards Folman’s anguished understanding of the events and his own culpability. Bashir’s visuals are stunning, and the film’s sharp contrasts in color and motion serve to deftly highlight its wickedly rendered mood and sobering themes. As in the most powerful, personal examinations of horror, it’s the details that stick: a soldier mopping gore from the inside of his tank, an RPG screaming in agonizing slow-motion through a fruit grove, a journalist walking slowly and unconcernedly through a firefight. Folman tackles the timeless concerns of warfare, particularly its sheer uncanniness, with a thematic discipline that provokes while never seeming obligatory. Bashir’s primary fascination is memory’s role in tallying guilt and digesting the seemingly unfathomable, and in this it attains a rattled, grief-stained vividness.

The Wrestler
2008 (USA)
Director: Darren Aronofsky

Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler is so narratively straightforward and stylistically reserved (though not in any way humdrum) that I can’t resist comparing it to the director’s output of glittering, coal-black nightmares–Pi, Requiem for a Dream, and the underrated The Fountain–in search of a common thread. True to form, this tale of a 1980s professional wrestler gone miserably to seed bears the stamp of Aronofsky’s unflagging absorption with self-inflicted personal destruction, agonies that promise redemption, release, and annihilation. Eschewing his usual taste for visual flash and wobbly grandiosity, the director here favors gritty realism sans Requiem’s horror gloss. For better or for worse, there’s no cleverness to Aronofsky’s grim gaze in The Wrestler. The film delivers a naked portrait of human endurance, fragility, and entropy, in both their physical and emotional aspects. As the creased and battered Randy “The Ram” Robinson, Mickey Rourke captivates, conveying both the wrestler’s pummeled dreams and the pained simplicity of his ambitions. Aronofsky shies from operatic gesturing, but he also exhibits an unfortunately limp, aimless reliance on sports film tropes. Ultimately, The Wrestler as a fascinating slice of elegant, trim realism, a refreshingly humane vehicle for the director’s compelling, if morbid, artistic sensibilities.

StLIFF: Delayed Last Words

My reviews from the eleventh day of the St. Louis International Film Festival, a couple of retrospectives, and my postmortem appraisal of the Fest will be forthcoming over the holiday weekend.  I’m heading out on business tomorrow, so there will be a slight delay in the final wrap-up.

StLIFF: Day Ten

The Trap (Klopka)
2007 (Serbia)
Director: Srdan Golubovic

Srdan Golubović’s The Trap never hits the rattling neo-noir sweet spot that it aims for, partly because the director never proceeds beyond the story’s descriptive aspects. His themes laze on the surface, stated but not completely explored. Mladen (Nebojsa Glogovac), an engineer with an ailing young son, is offered a devil’s deal by a sinister stranger: murder a man I designate, and I will pay for your child’s operation. Glogovac delivers a scrawled, tormented performance, but Golubović directs an unfortunate clinical gaze on Mladen’s plight, an odd choice given that The Trap’s most engaging potential angle is an excavation of the conflicted man’s headspace. Instead, Golubović seems overly enamored with the tale’s twists–most uninspired, a few downright thrilling–and with conjuring the particular despair of Serbian class and cultural anxieties. There’s nothing particularly unpleasant about The Trap: It’s a entertaining thriller, and doesn’t engage in any hackneyed tricks to arrive at its destination. It’s also refreshingly free of stylized anxiousness, a gray, gritty breeze in the wake of Tornatore’s mesmerizing but exhausting The Unknown Woman. Still, it feels like a missed opportunity, a straightforward examination of criminality and economic hardship lacking the electricity of a denser thematic work.

O’Horten
2008 (Norway)
Director: Bent Hamer

If Ingmar Bergman and Wes Anderson had a love child, it might look something like Bent Hamer’s O’Horten, a compelling portrait of a life in transition, daubed with bits of illuminating strangeness. With a watchable blend of staid crispness and humorous insight, Bård Owe portrays Odd Horten, a taciturn, no-nonense train engineer on the cusp of retirement. The film follows Horten through a series of set pieces that can only loosely be termed a plot: a retirement party, selling his boat, purchasing a smoking pipe, meeting a drunk on the street. The film’s essence lies in its moments and gestures, rather than in the narrative inertia of linked scenes. In short, nothing really happens, but it’s a credit to Owe’s comforting performance and director Hamer’s unhurried empathy that it still engages. Uncanny sights pass us and Horten by–a man being arrested at a restaurant, a prone motorcyclist sliding past on an icy street–with Owe providing a subtle reaction and Hamer establishing a thematic context. Melancholy and determinedly gradual, it’s not the sort of film for everyone. Its potency lies in its slow discovery of a distinctively Scandinavian mood and its gentle probing of abstracts such as dignity and contentment.

The Class (Entre les Murs)
2008 (France)
Director: Laurent Cantet

The humanistic power of Laurent Cantet’s wrenching, glorious The Class is undeniable. Its naturalistic cinematic language, serviceable and modest, never truly sizzles, but it doesn’t need to. Here is a film whose strength lies almost entirely in its vivid recreation of the intoxicating, dreadful humming of adolescence. Based on a semi-autobiographical novel by François Bégaudeau, the film features Bégaudeau himself as a French instructor in inner-city Paris. François’ class is like a boat constantly on the verge of tipping over. His students are multi-cultural, rowdy, insolent, aggravated, and fiercely intelligent in staccato bursts. Yet Cantet and Bégaudeau eschew the feel-good moralizing of countless classroom dramas for electric realism, permitting the essential conflicts modern of French society (or any society for that matter) to swirl and surface naturally. In long, mesmerizing scenes of Bégaudeau herding his class through conjugation and composition, The Class conveys the cultural minefield and Sisyphean misery that its secondary education. Cantet refuses to simplify teachers as heroes, just as he resists painting every student as a potential convert to academic success. Ferocious and yet fragile, The Class is an astonishing work of social realism, one that caught my breath time and again.

StLIFF: Day Nine

Ben X
2007 (Belgium / Netherlands)
Director: Nic Balthazar

From its loopy credit sequence–presented as though the film were an online fantasy role-playing game–it’s apparent that Ben X relies on first-time director Nic Balthazar’s knowing assurance with its narrative elements. Based on his own novel, the film confidently tackles subjects that should be challenging to translate to cinema: video games, digital socializing, and the daily tribulations of Asberger Syndrome. Looking suspiciously twenty-something and relying too heavily on bug-eyed cowering, Greg Timmermans portrays Ben, a withdrawn kid who is only comfortable in an online RPG. Indeed, Ben approaches the real world as a game, a strategy that enables him to navigate relentless bullying and social confusion. With furious, often flailing stylization, Balthazar shows us a cruel, overwhelming world through Ben’s eyes, while snippets of grave talking heads foretell that Something Bad will happen. Although Timmermans’ cartoonish presence never quite solidifies Ben’s profound agony, Ben X searingly engages as it follows his conflict with a pair of sociopathic thugs and his quest to meet up with an online romantic prospect (Laura Verlinden). Unfortunately, the film’s novel style and potent aura of despair unravel when Balthazar starts cutting corners for a twist conclusion that’s both implausible and cheaply moralizing.

The Minder (El Custodio)
2006 (Argentina)
Director: Rodrigo Moreno

Gently simmering, almost minimalist, Rodrigo Moreno’s quietly absorbing The Minder is a film that demands profound patience. The narrative is simplicity itself: We follow Ruben (Julio Chávez), a bodyguard for a government minister (Osmar Núñez), as he goes about his daily routine. Shot entirely from Ruben’s perspective, the film captures with gnawing focus the dull and demeaning nature of living in another man’s shadow, forever hovering outside rooms and idling in cars. We learn of economic crises and family troubles through snatches of overheard conversation, but the backgrounding of these concerns highlights the film’s interest in Ruben’s personal angst. They footnote the film’s “action”–Ruben standing, Ruben waiting–and draw our gaze to Chávez’s wonderfully modulated performance. Moreno leavens the dreary routine with moments of private unpleasantness: Ruben’s flaky sister, his romantic loneliness, his talent for drawing (eventually paraded for the minister’s amusement). The Minder rewards sensitivity to fine narrative details and emotional subtleties. When the concluding twist arrives–don’t fret, one does arrive–it seems entirely fitting. There’s a bit of thematic rattle to the film, possessing as it does such wide open spaces for contemplation, but it only lightly diminishes The Minder’s astute cinematic vigor.

Days and Clouds (Giorni e Nuvole)
2007 (Italy)
Director: Silvio Soldini

There’s both a sickening voyeurism and an endearing, if unreasonable, hopefulness at work in Silvio Soldini’s brutal relationship drama Days and Clouds. With a sadist’s talent for stomach-flipping emotional turmoil and an eye for tragic entropy, Soldini captures a discomfiting portrait of a middle-age relationship in decline. The marriage of wealthy professionals Michele (Antonio Albanese) and Elsa (Margherita Buy) begins to disintegrate overnight when he reveals that he was fired two months ago. Out goes the townhouse and Elsa’s academic ambitions as an art historian, not to mention the couple’s fragile illusion of marital peace. Crushed by economic realities that are alien in their privileged experience–a meager lifestyle, long hours in demeaning jobs, a grubby flat–Michele’s apathy and Elsa’s resentment grow. Soldini doesn’t evoke much sympathy for the pair, especially Michele, but he exhibits a morbid fascination with the poisonous nature of denial and silly pride. While the story is fitful, even dreary at times, it possesses an ugly authenticity, reflecting the haphazard realities of mature lives in perpetual crisis. Ultimately, Days and Clouds compels in the manner of a horrific, slow-motion calamity, leaving us wondering if anyone will emerge from the wreckage intact.

Timecrimes (Los Cronocrímenes)
2007 (Spain)
Director: Nacho Vigalando

Nacho Vigalando’s trippy, morbidly witty Timecrimes is a clever little achievement, demonstrating that an absorbing, competent science fiction film requires only four actors, three sets, and a familiar premise. Middle-aged couple Héctor (Karra Elejalde) and Clara (Candela Fernández) are just moving into a new home in the country when Héctor spies through his binoculars a naked woman lurking in the woods. He wanders off to investigate, leading to a uncanny sequence of events: an assault by a masked stranger, a flight into a series of bizarre buildings, and a journey back in time (although only for a couple of hours). What follows is a spiral of events that loops in on itself with narrative tidiness and an air of portentous self-satisfaction, as in any time travel tale worth its salt. There’s a roteness to some of Timecrimes‘ allegedly shocking reveals, and Vigalando find the brightest sparks when he plays it fast and savvy, trusting our awareness of the genre’s conventions. Never mind that the moral ambiguity to the film’s conclusion–and perhaps the absence of any Twilight Zone twist–is a touch unsatisfying. The treat of Timecrimes is the thrilling, black humor that emerges from Vigalando’s tightly circumscribed ambition.

StLIFF: The Day Eight That Wasn’t

Alas, I had to scrap my attendance at the Festival on Thursday.  However, I’ll be back tomorrow morning with reviews of today’s films.

StLIFF: Day Seven

Amal
2007 (Canada)
Director: Richie Mehta

Richie Mehta’s fable of Delhi slums and mansions, Amal, aims quite explicitly to be a Diwali Gift of the Magi. While its Indian setting is rarely superfluous, Amal’s focus on the endurance of decency and the morally eroding nature of privilege is uncluttered and accessible. The film presents autorickshaw wallah Amal–portrayed with captivating subtlety by Rupinder Nagra–as just about the most honest, patient, and gentle soul in the world. His kindness towards a grumpy vagrant triggers an amazing destiny that rushes invisibly towards him, even as he struggles with the suffocating demands of clients, his mother, and an injured orphan under his care. Implausibility worries the edges of Amal’s character, but Nagra convinces with his tentative speech and nervous smiles. Some of the film’s characters border on cartoonish, and Mehta never quite attains a needed balance between the film’s sagging realism and its fairy tale glint. While the pacing staggers around a bit initially–Mehta seems reluctant to reach obvious conclusions and essential destinations–Amal picks up steam in its second half, when the twists and revelations quickly begin to click into place. It’s no kind of masterpiece, but it is a sweet and memorable tale.

Konkakt
2005 (Macedonia)
Director: Sergej Stanojkovski

The ragged comedic swagger of Sergej Stanojkovski’s marvelous Kontakt is a complement to the tragic realism of Aditya Assarat’s Wonderful Town. This fable of challenging, unlikely love in a contemporary Macedonia of slate skies and festering wounds ambles along with a soulful awareness of human misery. The avaricious schemes of a relation brings together two social castoffs: Habitual convict Janko (Nikola Kojo) grudgingly accepts a job to renovate the dilapidated villa where Zana (Labina Mitevska) convalesces after three years in a mental institution. They immediately dislike one another. However, this is not the convenient, overwrought antagonism of a screwball comedy, but a plausible defense thrown up by souls fed a diet of mistrust, anxiety, and hostility. Kontakt weaves in other narrative threads as well as Macedonian cultural and historical embellishments, but the odd relationship between Janko and Zana is at the forefront of the film. With bouts of dark chuckles and an effortless hand, Stanojkovski renders their fitful romance so gradually its believability fades away as a concern. Never mind that portly Janko is a violent misanthrope, or that skinny Zana is an emotional cripple. The first time Janko utters the word “sweetheart”–almost off-handedly–one’s heart thrills.

The Pope’s Toilet (El Baño del Papa)
2007 (Uruguay)
Directors: César Charlone and Enrique Fernández

For all its wild-eyed melodrama, directors César Charlone and Enrique Fernández admittedly provide a scathing anti-papal thrust to The Pope’s Toilet. On the other hand, there’s nothing to suggest that this desperate, occasionally witty tale of a small-town Uruguayan smuggler and his get-rich-quick scheme–involving Pope John Paul II’s 1988 visit to the region and a pay toilet–will end happily. What else do Charlone and Fernández have other than bitter moralizing, however deserved it might be? César Troncoso delivers an engaging turn as Beto, a grasping, defeated little man who seems incapable of thinking beyond the next week, despite his airy ambitions. However, The Pope’s Toilet calls out for a more appealing protagonist; Beto’s venality only seems mild compared to the corrupt border official who bedevils him. More interesting than their clumsy characterization is Charlone and Fernández’s ambivalence about the role of Catholicism in Uruguayan society. The pontiff’s visit is little more than a financial opportunity for Beto and his fellow villagers, one that proves ultimately hollow. The Pope’s Toilet asserts with a sharpness born of disillusionment that even the tangible blessings of Catholic faith are farcical, mere honeyed promises that do little to alleviate poverty.

Stranded: I’ve Come From a Plane That Crashed on the Mountains
2008 (France)
Director: Gonzalo Arijón

The overdue documentary response to Frank Marshall’s 1993 drama, Alive, Stranded conveys with profound respect and tremendous upwellings of emotion the story of the Andes flight disaster. It’s a survival tale seemingly so familiar that the human power that underlies is often forgotten. Director Gonzalo Arijón seeks to rectify this with a stirring, sublime film that focuses on the first-hand experience of the sixteen survivors. Emulating Errol Morris with stylized recreations and an absence of narration, Arijón allows the survivors to convey the story of the crash and the ordeal that followed, dwelling not only on the grisly choices they made, but also on the sheer uncanniness of their situation. The survivors recall the details of their trial with stunning clarity, and Arijón delicately frames their meticulous remembrances and their sobering meditations on life and death. Time and again, the men profiled in Stranded return to the notion that the world in the Andes was a New World, different from the world of family, friends, and comfort they left behind. Exhibiting a mysterious blend of pain and ecstasy, they speak of sacrifice, death, and resurrection with the authority of saints. What a powerful film.

StLIFF: Day Six

Let the Wind Blow (Hava Aney Dey)
2004 (India)
Director: Partho Sengupta

Let the Wind Blow is a bleak portrait of a Mumbai college student on the cusp of several life transitions, as rumors of nuclear annihilation swirl like hot dust in the streets. Aniket Vishwasrao portrays Arjun with a fine insight into his blend of awkward charisma, embryonic sensitivity, and reflexive tendency to sabotage the few positive things in his life. Tempted by dreams of a fast buck in Dubai, enchanted by a high-caste drama club beauty, and anxious at the shady schemes of his friend Chabia, Arjun despairs of finding contentment. Political quarrels and demonstrations fill the streets, and the television pumps warnings of atomic fire. Director Partho Sengupta unfortunately gets lost in his narrative far too often, permitting vaguely sketched conflicts and portentous monologues to overwhelm the film’s appealing sense of youthful immediacy. Let the Wind Blow’s arty visual indulgences and minimalist soundtrack impress much less than Sengupta’s skill for discovering small, intoxicating details, such as an urchin hawking business self-help books or a Hindu deity who approaches Arjun for a cigarette. Lamentably, the film’s thoroughly black conclusion, plainly born of moralizing intentions, feels a little like an escape hatch.

Luxury Car (Jiang Cheng Xia Ri)
2006 (China)
Director: Chao Wang

Chao Wang’s Luxury Car strives to achieve two things: a socially relevant time capsule of China’s stumbling shift from languid rural patterns to glitzy urban rot, as well as a family melodrama about loss and secrecy. The film never quite succeeds at either, perhaps because Wang has little sense for how to effectively syncreticize these two currents. Qiming (He Huang), a schoolteacher from the countryside, comes to Wuhan to visit his urbanized daughter, Yanhong (Yuan Tian), and search for his son, missing for two years now. Unbeknown to Qiming, his daughter is working as a karaoke “escort,” and sleeping with her oily boss (He Huang). Wang studs Luxury Car with graceful moments that capture his themes with quiet assurance: Qiming gazing in bewilderment on a college campus he hasn’t seen in four decades, or Yanhong tearing away her roommate’s sex-drenched bed linens in shame. However, the film’s glacial pacing never conveys the emotional depth Wang hopes to reach, and one gets the sense that he’s slowing down to conceal his clumsy weaving of Luxury Car’s thematic elements. The result is a work too flimsy to support either its thriller twists or its endless sighs and hesitations.

Opera Jawa
2006 (Indonesia)
Director: Garin Nugroho

If Julie Taymor had been born in Jakarta, she might have created something like the surreal marathon of Opera Jawa. Garin Nugroho’s two-hour gamelan opera of the Javanese Ramayana will be wholly opaque to many Western audiences, but not due a dearth of visual spectacle or sheer cinematic novelty. Nugroho sets the tragic love triangle of Setyo, Siti, and Ludiro (that would be Rama, Sita, and Ravana for those more familiar with the Indian epic) in a contemporary rural setting. Exhibiting an eye for hallucinatory pomp and a divine patience for the operatic art form–which I found alternately dazzling and wearying–the director adds a welcome sparkle to what might otherwise be an aimless babble of exoticism to American viewers. Aimlessness is less a problem than the sharply disjointed nature of Nugroho’s storytelling; scenes dribble in without much purpose and fade away. The film is distracted, often to the point of exhaustion, with evoking tableaus and gestures rich in native semiotics, a language unfortunately lost on me. Opera Jawa has its treats, most notably a lively performance from the simian, goblin-faced Eko Supriyanto as Ludiro, but like a work from another planet, its appeal is limited.

Wonderful Town
2007 (Thailand)
Director: Aditya Assarat

Evincing more canny perception for the beauty and tragedy of life than Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s mesmerizing but baffling creations, Aditya Assarat’s touching, wrenching Wonderful Town is a tearful gem of a film. A young architect, Ton (Anchalee Saisoontorn) arrives in a Thai coastal village devastated by the 2004 tsunami. For the duration of a local project, he takes a room at a run-down hotel managed by a shy young woman, Na (Supphasit Kansen). In a manner wholly natural and wracked with authentic heartache, we watch as Ton and Na slowly fall in love. Assarat positively revels in the sheer process of a tentative romance, the ballad of looks, words, and gestures that thrill something deep within the human spirit. With empathic clarity, Wonderful Town conveys the mystery of stirrings that seem beyond elucidation. However, Assarat is not satisfied with a mere joyful anecdote, and the film admittedly teeters a bit when he begins to summon a breeze that foretells calamity. Some viewers will likely walk away disgusted with Wonderful Town’s ultimately ruinous destination. I can only marvel that in the same film, Assarat is able to realize a film of such potent longing and such cold cruelty.

Son of a Lion
2007 (Australia / Pakistan)
Director: Benjamin Gilmour

In some respects, the war-rattled Pakistani setting of Benjamin Gilmour’s Son of a Lion is almost incidental. The film assumes the shape of a thousand other tales about a father-son conflict over values, rarely discovering novel territory. However, the contemporary relevance of its cultural specifics engage, as does its grubby dusting of authentic familial pain. Eleven-year-old Niaz (Niaz Khan Shinwari) works as an apprentice in the village gun shop owned by his harsh father (Sher Alam Miskeen Ustad), a devout, humorless veteran of the Afghani mujahideen. With sensitivity and a studious gaze, Gilmour reveals that the illiterate Niaz dreams of attending school, perhaps to study music, an aspiration encouraged by his urbane uncle in Peshawar. Sher Alam will have none of it: He thinks only of his glorious battles against the Russians, his notion of Pashtun masculinity inexorably bound up with his religiosity and lust for firearms. Gilmour eavesdrops on conversations that hint at the complexity of the mainstream street-level worldview in central Asia, one characterized by hand-to-mouth despair, political canniness, and disgust with terrorists. Yet Son of a Lion’s fundamental strengths are the heartbreaking performances from Shinwari and Ustad, who lend muscular pathos to a well-worn formula.

StLIFF: Day Five

It’s Hard to Be Nice (Tesko Je Biti Fin)
2008 (Bosnia and Herzegovina)
Director: Srdjan Vuletic

Never mind the glibness of its title: Srdjan Vuletic’s It’s Hard to Be Nice is a raw fable about the curious outline that morality assumes in a wounded society. For a few weeks, we follow the darkly comic struggles of Sarajevo cab driver Fudo, portrayed with boundless appeal by Sasa Petrovic. With the fortitude of a friendly, beaten hound, Fudo attempts to claw his way out of a criminal past and into a prosperous, upstanding future for his wife and infant son. Unabashedly allegorical yet characterized by a dirty-fingernail pathos, It’s Hard to Be Nice rarely overreaches in its bitter commentary on the contemporary cultural struggles of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Partial credit goes to Patrovic, who delivers a performance of miserable humor and righteous flickers, the latter tinged with the pitch-perfect awkwardness of a newly repentant man. That said, it’s Vuletic who adeptly maintains the film’s balance of naturalism and tragic fancy, excepting some bouts of manipulative silliness at the conclusion. Conveying the tribulations of reform and forgiveness with a knowing appreciation for its complexities, Vuletic captures the conflicting demands of law, peace, greed, and duty that overwhelm societies emerging from war’s shadow.

Sinner Come Home
2007 (USA)
Director: Blake Eckard

Blake Eckard’s tale of eroding relationships and morality–and not-quite-redemption–in the ossified small-town landscape of northwestern Missouri never quite achieves the searing strength that the director hopes for. Perhaps that’s because Sinner Come Home is most potent in its quiet moments, as Eckard’s characters, particularly his protagonist Eddie (Ryan Harper Gray), suss out the pivotal conflicts in their lives in elliptical, beer-soaked mumblings. Eckard evokes Jeff Nichols’ Shotgun Stories or even Killer of Sheep in his keen awareness of the everyday indignities suffered by Americans who dwell outside the ramparts of suburban ease. Sinner Come Home, however, is no neo-realist snapshot, no matter how natural its rhythms. No, what Eckard delivers is wide-eyed melodrama, complete with unfortunate dips into wincing dialog and a tragedy that comes out of left field. The stiff, self-conscious acting of many of the performers breaks the film’s authentic spell and betrays the creakiness of a film-maker still developing his talents. Still, for all its telltale seams, Sinner Come Home offers a bold examination of the perils of rural life, absent populist mythologizing or condescension. Insightfully and without judgment, Eckard perceives the poison in the sheer boredom and dissatisfaction of a small-town existence.

Wendy and Lucy
2008 (USA)
Director: Kelly Reichardt

Unquestionably the best film I have had the pleasure to catch at the Festival so far, Wendy and Lucy is a work of riveting drama and touching humanity. Michelle Williams, all anxiousness and trembling desperation in a ragged black pixie cut, stars as Wendy, a young woman drifting her way to Alaska in search of work. Her companion is a frisky mutt, Lucy, to whom Wendy exhibits a profound and obsessive devotion that will be familiar to any pet owner. Eschewing a soundtrack or a dribble of unnecessary exposition, Wendy and Lucy portrays a few days of the companions’ tribulations in small-town Oregon, where a cascade of bad luck threatens their future together. Williams, who is essentially on screen for the entire running time, mesmerizes in a portrayal simmering with weariness, terror, and directionless anger. Employing a breathtaking, chafed naturalism, director Kelly Reichardt expertly conveys the despair of life on the American margins, where vagrancy is criminalized and loose change is tallied like the remaining days of a prison sentence. Earning every spasm of heartache with her genuine depiction of life’s casual cruelties, Reichardt captures a wrenching picture of the sacrifices we all make for those we love.

Special
2006 (USA)
Directors: Hal Haberman and Jeremy Passmore

For awhile, Hal Haberman and Jeremy Passmore’s Special succeeds as a blackly comedic take on the superhero film. In early scenes, the directors balance admittedly hilarious visual gags and absurdity with an array of straightforward themes–the wearying banality of urban life, our longing for pharmacological solutions to our miseries, and, yes, the sadly juvenile nature of comic fandom. In Michael Rapaport, Haberm and Passmore seem to have found their ideal man-child. Rapaport portrays Les, a parking enforcement officer who enters a drug trial that will allegedly boost his self-confidence. Deluded that he has acquired a plethora of superpowers–flight, telepathy, teleportation, speed, and invulnerability–Les appoints himself the city’s crime fighter. (Mostly this consists of tackling shoplifters and purse-snatchers.) The film’s initial treatment of Les–the unfortunate and softly sympathetic progeny of society’s multitude sicknesses–is fascinating, but Haberman Passmore don’t seem to know what to do him. Things go off the rails once the directors introduce a medical and financial conspiracy, and then start engaging in bizarre indulgences that smell of a misdirected pretension. Despite some engaging developments in a thin romantic subplot, by its final twenty minutes Special is stuck in a narrative and thematic mire from which it never escapes.

StLIFF: Day Four

That All May Be One
2008 (USA)
Director: Karen Kearns

Karen Kearns’ That All May Be One is less a documentary than a feature-length bit of boosterism for the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, whose American arm is based here in St. Louis. Kearns boasts a background in television and radio, and it shows. Out of native pride and an acknowledgment of Kaerns’ constraints, I hesitate to label That All Be One amateurish, but it does present itself with the earnest competence and nary a whiff of aesthetics that characterize just about every human interest segment in local newscasts. That said, as a nonbeliever, I’m perhaps an appropriate test for Kaerns’ bare bones aim: Does she render the subject compelling? I think so, but not because the glowing treatment of the Sisters’ work–at St. Joseph Academy, the Institute for the Deaf, Nazareth Living Center, and so on–is intrinsically engaging. Rather, it’s the simmering social problems beneath the surface that snag one’s attention, which Kearns intuitively backgrounds while allowing the sisters themselves to speak with veiled sharpness. If the Catholic hierarchy of the next century desires a record of where this century’s Great Schism began, they might glimpse it in the words of the sisters and laity Kaerns profiles.

The Grocer’s Son (Le Fils de l’Épicier)
2007 (France)
Director: Eric Guirado

On paper, there’s nothing remarkable about Eric Guirado’s gently empathetic The Grocer’s Son that might recommend it above any other slightly implausible tale of personal transformation in a humble setting. The vaguely misanthropic Antoine (Nicolas Cazalé) returns from the city to his family’s provincial general store after his father (the delightfully craggy Daniel Duval) suffers a heart attack. He reluctantly agrees to take over the grocery van route through the area’s remote hamlets, dragging along his spunky neighbor, Claire (Clotilde Hesme), in the hopes that his not-so-secret crush might bear fruit in the country air. It sounds trite, so why does The Grocer’s Son feel like such a fresh breeze, a holiday snapshot of the perils of family, love, human decency, and the inexorable shifts in the French culture and landscape? Guirado triumphantly wrestles against every lousy cinematic instinct and presents a subdued, finely structured work whose uncluttered and poignant realism emerges as its finest asset. The performances are commendable—particularly Cazalé, who fills out a role that tempts cheap distaste and a hasty redemption—but the film’s success rests on its simplicity. Guirado’s eye for the patterns of rural life and the novel strains they exert shine through with clarity.

The Objective
2008 (USA / Morocco)
Director: Daniel Myrick

The Objective is director Daniel Myrick’s first feature film since his auspicious debut, The Blair Witch Project, a clockwork vice of old school terror. Unfortunately, this sophomore effort is just an uninspired genre two-step, an unmemorable The X-Files episode drawn out to feature length, with all the bland beats that implies. In the mountains and deserts of Afghanistan, a squad of soldiers and a local translator follow the lead of a shifty CIA agent (Jonas Ball), who fiddles with gizmos and remains stingy with the mission details. Ostensibly, they’re seeking out a holy man for propaganda purposes, but you don’t need me to tell you there’s something else going on. Ball narrates in a grave monotone, tossing around Conrad-style mutterings plucked from the middle of creative writing class grading curve. Otherwise, The Objective isn’t really an awful film, just so thoroughly recycled in its details and limp in its execution that one wonders how Myrick managed to spin it out to 90 minutes. Admittedly, the film coaxes some arresting and terrifying sights here and there, lunging at Western fears of Islam and American illusions of omnipotence. Given that the portentous conclusion explains nothing, however, I wonder why I bothered.