Gateway Cinephiles

StLIFF 2009: Day Eleven

The Beaches of Agnès (Les Plages d’Agnès)
2008 (France)
Director: Agnès Varda

Agnès Varda cooks up a delicious slice of cinematic heresy with her latest work, The Beaches of Agnès.  Could it be that the most invigorating film to emerge from the French New Wave’s aged auteurs in recent years is a whimsical, affecting, exquisitely crafted documentary memoir?  Octogenarian Varda, who was the odd woman out within the New Wave’s Boys Club, has created an intensely personal, utterly frank, and wholly lovely film.  With a mischievous smile that hints at both her warmth and her restless intellect, Varda narrates the story of her own life.  Self-aware yet never apologetic, Beaches strikes the tone of a shared journey.  We feel the director’s bemusement, wistfulness, and melancholy as she tours the locales and visits with the people that shaped her art.  With Beaches, Varda decisively triumphs over peers such as Rivette, Chabrol, and Resnais, whose late works (The Duchess of Langeais, A Girl Cut in Two, Private Fears in Public Places) have been trifling and ham-fisted.  The beauty of Varda’s film is the beauty of herself, presented honestly: a confident, relentlessly curious artist, whose life of achievement has not been diminished by her probing uncertainty or her persistent grief.

StLIFF 2009: Day Ten

Liverpool
2008 (Argentina)
Director: Lisandro Alonso

There are not many film-makers that simultaneously demand the utmost patience and attentiveness from their audience and also hew to scrupulous realism in their work.  This unusual pairing of qualities is what defines the downright vexing films of Argentine director Lisandro Alonso, who has made four features that exemplify the term “acquired taste.” His latest is Liverpool, which trades the rain forests of Los Muertos for dreary, snowbound Tierra del Fuego.  Structurally and thematically, however, this new film is close kin to his 2004 feature, as both train their gaze on a man on a familial quest.  Here the protagonist is the lanky, inscrutable Farrel (Juan Fernández), a cargo ship worker who journeys inland to find his ailing mother.  The delicacy of Alonso’s observational power is what makes Liverpool such a unusual species of film, but it unfortunately suffers from a suffocating emotional inertness.  Most filmgoers will likely find Alonso’s style tedious, if not excruciating, principally due to his seemingly emphatic lingering on banalities. In fact, Liverpool never emphasizes; it only invites observation. It is a grimy, ragged, uncompromising work, but so taxing that only the most disciplined cinephile would dare tackle it more than once.

StLIFF 2009: Day Nine

35 Shots of Rum (35 Rhums)
2008 (France)
Director: Claire Denis

Claire Denis’ newest film, 35 Shots of Rum, exhibits a remarkable humanism that takes its time uncoiling and working its spell on you.  With an unhurried and affectionate tone, the film weaves the story of a sagging Parisian apartment complex, where widower Lionel (Alex Descas) and his adult daughter Jospehine (Mati Diop) alternately resist and welcome the changes that life brings.  Denis demonstrates a profound emotional grace in her approach, coaxing us to share her love of her characters by permitting us to see them without pretense or flattering poses.  There is no cloying demand that we share Jo’s fondness for her father; rather Denis bestows that fondness on the viewer by shooting Descas in a way that captures the gentleness and pain of his inner life.  35 Shots of Rum succeeds because of its modesty: there is no sense that Denis has constructed this intimate tale for our benefit, and its simple themes are wondrously emergent.  Only a shocking and gratuitous development late in the film mars the pleasures of Denis’ empathic observational power, but she rights things with a melancholy, ambiguous coda that paradoxically underlines her story with admirable precision.

Three Monkeys (Üç Maymun)
2008 (Turkey)
Director: Nuri Bilge Ceylan

Noir doesn’t come much more languid than Three Monkeys, a moody Turkish thriller that concerns itself as much with hidden ugliness as it does with naked emotional upheavals.  Director Nuri Bilge Ceylan sketches this story of loyalty and lust with the thinnest of narrative lines, but via a style that practically howls its themes to the moon.  Hence the florid, queasy detail captured with his HD video: slick sweat on greasy skin, lifeless urban spaces of yellow and green, and cloudy skies that seem almost bruised.  There are dabs of magical realism as well, as a harrowing specter lurches through and clings to the lives of the principals. Shut up in a cramped apartment but miles away from each other, loutish husband Eyüp, dissatisfied wife Hacer, and troubled son Ismail contend with a maze of lies, all flowing from Eyüp’s fateful decision to take the fall for his boss’s hit-and-run accident.  Ceylan doesn’t add sufficient dramatic energy to the proceedings to justify the film’s ostentatious pacing, and Three Monkeys never feels like it connects with his thematic ambitions.  Still, as a lusciously stylized–and often deliciously ugly–glimpse of human folly, it’s satisfactory.

StLIFF 2009: Day Seven

Jerichow
2008 (Germany)
Director: Christian Petzold

Christian Petzold’s lean, sordid little thriller positions itself as a successor to the works of Hitchcock and Wilder, but its most direct ancestor is The Postman Always Rings Twice, to the point that Jerichow might be regarded a near-remake.  Here the Frank Chambers part is a penniless Afghan war veteran, Thomas, played with a distinctly Germanic heat by the chiseled Benno Fürmann (also appearing in North Face at this year’s Festival).  Recruited into the employ of snack bar entrepreneur Ali (Hilmi Sözer) through the sort of happenstance that seems endemic to noir, Thomas inevitably hooks up with the boss’ wife, Laura (Nina Hoss), a ragged blond who seems like more trouble than she’s worth.  Partzold’s script is admirably sparing and suitably tense, especially given that the bulk of story’s action occurs in sun-kissed daylight.  The film is resolutely focused on its core conflict, barely permitting any characters other than its three principals to intrude.  Its main sin is that it’s a film in search of a purpose.  At bottom, Jerichow is a skillful retread of territory that’s already been extensively explored, and Petzold doesn’t bring anything fresh other than some unconventional (but not unexpected) twists in the third act.

Note: I’m taking tonight off from the Festival to recover from a bout of illness.  I’ll be back on Saturday with reviews of Friday night’s films.

StLIFF 2009: Day Six

One Day You’ll Understand (Plus Tard)
2008 (France)
Director: Amos Gitai

Amos Gitai’s camera tightly frames his characters in his Holocaust-cum-family drama, One Day You’ll Understand, flirting with a claustrophobic atmosphere, yet it remains distractingly distant from the unfolding events.  In its slackest moments, Gitai’s style exhibits no feeling other than idle curiosity, a odd flaw given the intensely personal character of the story.   That story centers on the prying of Victor (Hippolyte Girardot) into his family’s muddled history, which thrust together Catholics and Russian Jews in Nazi-occupied France with predictably tragic results.  Unfortunately, his elderly mother Rivka (a magisterial Jeanne Moreau, one the film’s bright spots) is reluctant to speak of the past.  The film’s primary problem is that in trying to weave together two substantial thematic threads–the veiled character of post-WWII Jewish identity in France, and the challenges of birthrights–Gitai fails to give either a sufficiently rich treatment, and the results feels fumbling and hollow.  A late scene, wherein Girardot wanders his mother’s flat as it is dismantled for its valuables, plays as a pale echo of Summer Hours.  One Day You’ll Understand lacks the focus, grace, and delight for character and space that made Olivier Assayas’ film an exquisite exploration of a mundane subject.

StLIFF 2009: Day Five

24 City (Er Shi Si Cheng Ji)
2008 (China)
Director: Zhang Ke Jia

It was only last year that Zhang Ke Jia’s sad, sedate, occasionally whimsical little masterwork, Still Life, landed on American shores.  And here we are again with another difficult, gorgeous film, 24 City, that continues to express both Jia’s profound affection for his countrymen and his ambivalence towards China’s modernization.  Here Jia adopts a blended documentary-fiction approach, wherein his camera explores the ruins of an munitions complex as it is transformed into luxury high rises, and interviews former factory employees and actors posing as employees.   Even more than Still Life, 24 City is a film enamored–in a mournful sort of way–with the industrial and post-industrial spaces of China, echoing Jennifer Baichwal’s ominous and beautiful documentary, Manufactured Landscapes.  The wondrous enigma of Jia’s talent is evident here, manifest in his blending of cool observation and authentic, piercing emotion.  Grave and challenging, 24 City is a testament to the director’s novel vision, a succesion of sensory pleasures that prods expectations. Oddly enough, perhaps the most perplexing aspect of the film is its “Ocean’s Twelve moment”: the use of Joan Chen to portray a women who is known for her resemblance to Joan Chen.

StLIFF 2009: Day Four

Amreeka
2009 (USA)
Director: Cherien Dabis

Triteness wins out over heartfelt sentiment in Cherien Dabis’ take on the Immigrant Experience Film, Amreeka, a by-the-numbers celebration of tolerance, love, perseverance, etc., etc., etc.  Here the immigrants in question are divorcee Muna (Nisreen Faour) and her teen son Fadi (Melkar Muallem), Palestinians who journey to small-town Illinois where they settle in awkwardly with the Westernized family of Muna’s sister (Hiam Abbass, whom I adore… but Christ, can we give another Arabic actress a shot, please?).  Amreeka hits all the standard indie drama and comedy notes, but its approach is graceless and its insights insufficient to warrant a retreading of such familiar territory.  The narrative is tightly constructed, but utterly predictable, and the messaging is so overwarmed–Racism sucks! Family is important!–as to be off-putting.  Faour, who fills Muna with eager-to-please earnestness and anxious confusion, is likable enough, so much that the film’s best moments of humor come courtesy of her, while those at her expense just seem mean-spirited.  The film’s occasional wit enlivens its otherwise bland turns, but next to a keenly observed marvel like In Between Days, or even Sundance darlings like The Visitor and Frozen River, Amreeka is tired stuff.

Crude
2009 (USA)
Director: Joe Berlinger

Director Joe Berlinger has had a uneven career–from the definitive West Mephis 3 documentary Paradise Lost to the bafflingly ill-considered Blair Witch 2–but he’s never produced a work of socially-conscious agitprop like Crude.  While the film hews to the general tone of slicker docs like The Corporation and Food, Inc., Berlinger has a much tighter focus.  Specifically, Crude follows the fifteen-plus-year lawsuit that has pitted Chevron-Texaco against the native peoples of Ecuador allegedly poisoned by the company’s drilling wastes.  Strictly as a vehicle for raising awareness about a critical Third World environmental battle, Crude is absorbing and grimly presented stuff, with Berlinger avoiding the smugness or breeziness that plagues many progressive Issues Documentaries.  Content to let his subjects speak for themselves, the director presents the story without narration, adding only title cards to explain factual tidbits.  Accordingly, Berlinger can be forgiven the romantic character his rough style lends to this David-and-Goliath conflict, and even his dewy delight when celebrities such as the President of Ecuador and Sting get involved in the fight.  Ultimately, the plaintiffs couldn’t ask for a more straightforward, concise statement of the political, cultural, and emotional dimensions of their case than Crude.

StLIFF 2009: Day Three

Lake Tahoe
2008 (Mexico)
Director: Fernando Eimbcke

In recent years, Latin American auteurs have apparently been paying attention to Asian film-makers such as Zhang Ke Jia and Tsai Ming-Liang, tossing out those directors’ affection for surrealism, and delivering a new Spanish-language Cinema of Patience (to coin a term), a mode exemplified by challenging works such as The Minder and Los Muertos.  With its static camera work, lengthy shots, and cut-to-black punctuation, Lake Tahoe fits comfortably within this current.  It goes without saying that Eimbcke’s deliberate and often slyly funny film, which chronicles twenty-four hours in the life of a Yucatan youth, is not for everyone.  The remove that Eimbcke establishes from his subject lends Lake Tahoe the tone of an uneventful slice-of-life snapshot, but a moment’s consideration reveals that for Juan (Diego Cataño), this single day is remarkably pivotal.  He may be a bit of a cipher, but, the film’s style notwithstanding, his story is a identifiable mini-odyssey about indignities, opportunities, and reversals.  The result feels a bit slight, but Eimbcke admirably maintains a mood that is both biting and yet warm-hearted.  Lake Tahoe’s aesthetic might be stripped-down Weerasethakul, but its worldview is distinctly Coen, transplanted with emotional authority to a dusty Mexican town.

StLIFF 2009: Day Two

North Face (Nordwand)
2008 (Germany / Austria)
Director: Philipp Stölzl

Richard Wagner is name-checked in Philipp Stölzl’s Nazi-era mountaineering thriller, North Face, which is appropriate, and not just due to the swastikas.  Towering and bombastic, often in moments when such a grandiose tone is entirely unearned, the film chronicles the attempt by two German enlisted men goaded by Nazi propaganda (and a little ambition) to conquer the north face–a.k.a., “The Murder Wall”–of the Eiger in the Bernese Alps.  Stölzl’s approach is strictly Hollywood by way of Deutschland, complete with soaring orchestral gestures and a pining love interest (Johanna Wokalek, as far from her radical she-devil in The Baader-Meinhof Complex as can be.)  The director frequently overplays his hand, particularly with vaguely repugnant supporting characters that have little function other than to compare unfavorably to our Aryan heroes.  Which isn’t to say the North Face isn’t damn thrilling in the moment, particularly with Stölzi keeps his focus on the climbers’ ordeal and their astoundingly low-tech methods and tools.  With a little CGI wizardry, the film renders the Eiger as a truly terrifying creature in its own right, seemingly more at home in one of Wagner’s Teutonic myths (or Middle-Earth) than Switzerland.

XXY
2007 (Argentina)
Director: Lucía Puenzo

High-profile films that address intersexuality are few and far between–When will HBO ever pull together that rumored Middlesex adaptation?–and so it’s no small thing when a work like XXY comes along, which tackles the reality with commendable sensitivity and frankness.  Director Puenzo takes her sweet time uncoiling the story of Alex, an adolescent intersexual who has been living as a girl in an Argentine seaside town.  The story is a slight little thing, and it’s hard to shake the disappointment that Puenzo didn’t do a little more with the subject than offer a slice of Alex’s life at a critical juncture in the development of her identity and sexuality.  Furthermore, the concessions to melodrama–a gratuitous rape scene especially–make the film less potent, not more.  Still, XXY is poignant and appropriately anxious in tone, and its principal characters are full of subtly conveyed intricacies that elevate it beyond a crude coming-out story (of sorts).  Puenzo utilizes a richly presented sun-bleached aesthetic and a prominent marine life motif to fine effect.  The film’s emotional success, however, lies principally with a Inés Efron, who at twenty-two plays the fifteen-year-old Alex with a riveting blend of boldness, anger, and vulnerability.

Blackspot
2008 (New Zealand)
Director: Ben Hawker

For what it is–an ultra-low-budget bit of horror mindfuckery that employs only a handful of actors and locations–Ben Hawker’s Blackspot is a worthwhile, white-knuckle stuff.  While Hawker cribs a little from urban legend for his story, Blackspot is essentially a pleasurable mash-up of contemporary horror film tropes, Twilight Zone twists and “It-Was-All-a-Dream” fake-outs, and, most surprisingly, David’s Lynch brand of pitch-black psychological surrealism.  It’s hard not to ignore the debt to Lynch in the film’s identity-swapping and (seemingly) context-free interludes, not to mention its direct referencing of Lost Highway’s iconographic speeding interstate stripes.  Hawker nails both the distinctive creepiness of a nocturnal rural road at night as well as the flesh-crawling sense of the uncanny that pervades nightmares.  Yet he is too enamored with jump-scares and comic releases to permit grimness to overtake the film.  This is both to Blackspot’s advantage and its detriment, stranding it in a middle ground between an old-school ghost story and something more ambitious.  While Hawker eventually comes around to something like an explanation for all the preceding weirdness, it seems weak tea compared to the dizzying fear that swells the film’s best moments.

StLIFF 2009: Day One

An Education
2009 (UK)
Director: Lone Scherfig

An Education is a fairly conventional coming-of-age-story that is enlivened and elevated by abundant, magnificent acting.  To be sure, Nick Hornby’s screenplay boasts plenty of cheek and a canny, understated awareness of its early 1960s British setting.  Meanwhile, director Lone Scherfig operates in a mode that is comfortable with melodrama and also assured enough to toss aside its emotional excesses.  Scherfig permits her narrative’s most pivotal developments to unfold off-screen, but her commanding storytelling ensures that the film never misses a beat.  Everything we need to know is up there.  That said, An Education would probably have been nothing more than an old story–girl falls for charming cad, girl gets burned, girl moves on–told quite well.  It would have, that is, if not for a plethora of dazzling performances.  Carey Mulligan is almost spookily well-cast as ambitious and dissatisfied teen Jenny, but equally vital are Peter Sarsgaard in a challenging role as her creepy, oddly vulnerable, and (much) older paramour, and an engrossing Alfred Molina, proving yet again that his best characters are usually well-meaning boobs. Heck, Rosamund Pike deserves praise for lending texture to her ditsy playgirl almost entirely through sideways glances and glum expressions.