November 16, 2008
Andrew
StLIFF 2008
2 Comments
Of Time and the City
2008 (UK)
Director: Terence Davies
The rudimentary architecture that one expects of documentary films–facts, tilted this way or that, conveyed by means of a simple narrative–is nowhere to be found in Terence Davies’ Of Time and the City. Serving as both ode and elegy to the Liverpool of his youth, the film lazes through archival footage of the industrial city, most in black-in-white, some in color. Davies himself narrates–his exquisitely British voice all scratchy wool and rich cream–offering remembrances of his own life that illuminate the generalities of a bittersweet urban existence. 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. It’s the sort of film-making that throws you for a loop, if only because its approach is so unusual. (The only stylistic fellow traveler that springs to mind is Koyaanisqatsi, but only because that film is so de-personalized in comparison.) However, owing to the potency of Davies’ warm, tear-wetted poetics, the film’s meditative qualities are never off-putting. In short, Of Time and City, is a strange, beautiful little film, a memory thrown up on screen with all its indulgences and ambivalence intact.
Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father
2008 (USA)
Director: Kurt Kuenne
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. A young doctor just beginning his career in family practice, Bagby touched people across nations and oceans with his friendship and humor, before he was brutally gunned down by his lunatic girlfriend. Kuenne initially undertook Dear Zachary as a cinematic letter to Andrew’s infant son, born to the accused murderess soon after the crime. Frenetic in its pacing and bursting with pride and love for Andrew, the film zips across the world in search of a comprehensive portrait of the man’s life. As the girlfriend’s extradition proceedings crawl along concurrently, the director discovers a legion of people who adored Andrew, as well as unexpected dimensions to his life (Kuenne had no idea he was an amateur photographer.) The film’s hiccups are essentially stylistic, including a histrionic and sneering tone to the true crime elements that undercuts Dear Zachary’s naked humanity. Still, can you blame Kuenne? His closeness to the story is both its weakness and the key to its power.
Slumdog Millionaire
2008 (UK / USA)
Directors: Danny Boyle and Loveleen Tandan
Perhaps it’s the black-hearted cynic in me, but I no longer accept notions of true love and destiny built on little more than airy invocations. So it is with Danny Boyle and Loveleen Tandan’s Slumdog Millionaire, a relatively conventional–even predictable–Dickensian tale told with ingenuity, ferocity, and heaps of seductive style. Boyle and Tandan assert that Mumbai orphans Jamal (Dev Patel) and Latika (Freida Pinto) were Meant For Each Other, but we need a reason to believe it beyond their assertion. No matter. While a paucity of authentic connection is its conspicuous flaw, Slumdog’s triumph is the sheer spirit of its cinematic language. The bulk of the film is told in Kane-style flashback, as Jamal explains how he managed to breeze his way to the final question on a Hindi quiz show. Boyle and Loveleen’s approach is one of limitless energy, whether dealing in the currency of fear, confusion, despair, or pure zest for life. Despite its narrative problems–including a couple of character turns utterly bereft of motivation–Slumdog offers a tantalizing rebuttal to the Great Man theory of hstory, as evidenced by its repeated references to such luminaries. Sometimes someone is just in the right place at the right time.
Alone
2007 (Thailand)
Directors: Banjong Pisanthanakun and Parkpoom Wongpoom
I suppose it’s flogging the obvious to suggest that the rhythms and aesthetic of contemporary Asian horror are way, way past their freshness date. The essential question that one has to ask about the Thai conjoined-twin chiller Alone, then, is whether it offers anything unexpected at all. The answer is a half-hearted affirmative, if only because writer-directors Banjong Pisanthanakun and Parkpoom Wongpoom, for all their drifting in familiar gothic doldrums, have crafted a story with some novel, savage sucker-punches. Pim (Marsha Wattanapanich), the adult survivor of a pair of twins, returns to her family home, where menacing visions of her departed sister bedevil her dreams and waking hours alike. Alone’s gruesome phantasms–applied in a mind-numbing and seemingly endless pattern of lull-shock-lull–are derivative, never truly scaring on a level beyond simplistic campfire jumpiness. The film’s modest success rests on the cleverness of its narrative twists. Pisanthanakun and Wongpoom rely on hoary stagecraft to pull off their tricks–we watch a whirl of handkerchiefs while they pick our pockets–but it’s a well-earned illusion, one that seems plucked from a superior installment of Night Gallery. On balance, it’s just barely worth the musty wrapping paper.
November 15, 2008
Andrew
StLIFF 2008
No Comments
Late Bloomers (Die Herbstzeitlosen)
2006 (Switzerland)
Director: Bettina Oberli
I’ll allow that Late Bloomers manages to be “heartwarming,” but only in the most calculated and undemanding way. Bettina Oberli’s story of elderly women who open a lingerie shop in a tiny, conservative Swiss village wears its life-affirming, faux-rebellious intentions with pride. There’s not much to object to here from a storytelling perspective: Oberli introduces four women with a panoply of personal problems, adds some obligatory crises, and by the time the credits roll all is neatly (if not happily) resolved. The villains, primarily a political leader (Manfred Liechti) and the village parson (Hanspeter Müller)–both sons of the entrepreneurial women–are so aggressively loathsome that there’s no wiggle room in the story. Doubt creeps in for Oberli’s silver dames when their enterprise gets rocky, but Oberli signals with simplistic strokes that unexpected thematic shifts aren’t in order (just cheap tragedy). What we’re left with is “Be True to Yourself” pablum, served up with rich helpings of schadenfreude and a knowing condemnation of rural Swiss stuffiness. The film’s saving grace is Stephanie Glaser as ringleader Martha, a widowed hausfrau portrayed with a fine blend of tentativeness, moist romanticism, and comic spunk.
Vanaja
2006 (India)
Director: Rajnesh Domalpalli
Overflowing with aimless melodrama, Rajnesh Domalpalli’s sprawled (though not sprawling) Vanaja is covered in the fingerprints of Dickens. Set in the Indian state of Andrha Padresh, the films follows the luminous Vanaja, a skinny, low-caste fifteen-year-old brought as a servant into the household of her Brahmin landlady, where the precocious girl hopes to learn the art of Kuchipudi dance. The story slogs through endless back-and-forth that isn’t worth recounting in detail: friendship, discovery, temptation, rape, pregnancy, politics, blackmail, and death. It’s not that Vanaja is incoherent–first-time director Domalpalli handles this behemoth with skill–just unnecessarily convoluted and thematically sketchy. In short, there’s an undisciplined whiff to it, all the more frustrating given that Domalpalli discovers some gorgeous sights, especially in the small, human details. The film’s dramatic heft relies overwhelmingly on the strength of Mamatha Bhukya’s performance as Vanaja, an eye-catching, textured portrayal despite is unevenness as written and delivered. It says something that the central pleasure of Vanaja is Bhukya’s hypnotic Kuchipudi dance routines. Domalpalli is most confident when reveling in the aesthetic joy of this gawky adolescent conjuring something so exquisite from mere motion and color.
Blind Mountain (Mang Shan)
2007 (China)
Director: Yang Li
Conceptually, Yang Li’s terrifying, exhausting Blind Mountain is a stone’s throw from Deliverance, save that his heroine, Bai Xuemei (Huang Lu) blunders into her nightmare ordeal not via foolish adventurism, but rather naiveté at the hands of vile predators. 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. His approach invites squirming, but only because there’s no inkling that Li is exaggerating the horror of the general reality with his fictional specifics. Blind Mountain is the sort of film that’s not really “entertaining” in the least, but nonetheless harrowing and sobering. Ferocious and narratively merciless, it takes us deep inside the tribulations of Bai’s kidnapping, rape, and enslavement by a family of barbaric farmers, emphasizing not just the harsh physical details but also the young woman’s inner hell. All the more remarkable, then, that Li achieves this focus while indulging a fascination with the miserable gray-green landscape of China’s impoverished countryside. The film’s bleak naturalism calls attention to the story’s inertness–in 95 minutes, not much truly happens–but this too is a part of the film’s horror, one that paints escape as an illusion.
The Unknown Woman (La Sconosciuta)
2006 (Italy / France)
Director: Giuseppe Tornatore
Lurid and relentless, The Unknown Woman is a thriller that would catch the attention of Hitchcock, Argento, and DePalma–although they would no doubt find much to pick at in the roteness of its third act, as well as its refusal to conclude with dignity. Oh, but there’s bloody pleasure to be had in the first forty-five minutes, as director Giuseppe Tornatore weaves a mystery spattered with sex, savagery, and sinister intentions. Kseniya Rappoport, all hangdog eyes and chilly Slavic ferocity, holds the film together as Ukranian anti-heroine Irena, who engages in an elaborate scheme to ingratiate herself into the household of a wealthy Italian jeweler (Claudia Gerini), with clear designs on the family’s young daughter. Stacatto bursts of flashback intrude into Irena’s conspiracy, heightening the menace by revealing the lost happiness and nightmarish abuse of her past. This is a woman who has nothing to lose, but what she wants–revenge? money? family?–flutters tantalizingly in our peripheral vision. There are some twists that strain credulity, but Tornatore generally keeps things humming along until a conclusion that he doesn’t how to cut short. The black sizzle is by then gone, aside from a bitter, devastating answer to a lingering question. Still, what a ride!
November 14, 2008
Andrew
StLIFF 2008
No Comments
Humboldt County
2008 (USA)
Directors: Darren Grodsky and Danny Jacobs
The tale of a medical student who bumbles into a marijuana farming community, Humboldt County has all the ingredients for a sincere puff of humane drama, despite its at times condescending tone. The fairly ho-hum narrative arc never misses a beat, yet it’s still a pleasure to watch it unfold. Credit Grodsky and Jacobs’ nimble script, fine editing from Ed Marx, and Ernest Holzman’s adaptive, sneakily effective camera work. Humboldt boasts some amazingly potent long shots, whose strength lies in the centrality of their human subjects and their lack of showiness. Brad Dourif and Frances Conroy deliver astonishing, husky performances far better than any indie coming-of-age drama should warrant. Grodsky and Jacobs are plainly striving for a tale of personal transformation, and on that score Humboldt never quite ripens. The problem lies in the mismatch between the film’s aims and Jeremy Strong as protagonist Peter. Strong reads as a sort of older, broader, more wilted Michael Cera, and in another film his starched, stammering schlemiel routine might have been bitterly funny. Yet Peter’s sheer anxious discomfort in his own skin is too pronounced in a role that needs a touch of melancholy despair and callous apathy.
November 13, 2008
Andrew
StLIFF 2008
No Comments
The 2008 St. Louis International Film Festival is here at long last! This year I’m taking my vacation time to attend as many films as possible in the Festival. How many films? Forty-three feature films in eleven days. You read that right. Every morning throughout the Festival, I’ll be posting my thoughts on the films I saw the previous day. Check back every day for oodles of commentary on a whole mess of international cinema. The Festival features some marquee names in independent film, whose work I don’t intend to neglect, but my itinerary is slanted a bit towards Asian and Eastern European/Balkan films. You’ll find the complete itinerary below the fold.
Read the rest…
