Gateway Cinephiles

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.

StLIFF: Day Three

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.

StLIFF: Day Two

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!

StLIFF: Day One

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.

Turtles All the Way Down

Synecdoche, New York
2008 (USA)
Director: Charlie Kaufman
Viewed: November 9, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print

Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut, the maddening, devastating Synecdoche, New York, wanders in the twilight world usually reserved for the bleakest of existential novels. It reflects a disquieting comfort with the folding of reality and mind within the dark whorls of creative frenzy, as well as a gluttony for morbidity that borders on the obscene. This is a film that has no use for reason. However, its nightmarish illogic is so powerfully rendered and so robustly intuitive that it demands our attention, devours it even. With Synecdoche, Kaufman has created his densest and most sublime film to date, striking a dizzying balance between conventional romantic tragedy and unabashedly grave philosophical conundrums. This film has perplexed me, but I cannot stop marveling at it. Much like Tarsem Singh’s phantasmagorical hymn to storytelling, The Fall, Synecdoche hums with the electricity of a novel form of cinematic life, a grand work teetering on folly. It must be seen to be believed.

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St. Louis International Film Festival: Prelude

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.

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Quick Review: I’ve Loved You So Long

I’ve Loved You So Long (Il y a Longtemps Que Je T’aime)
2008 (France)
Director: Philippe Claudel
Viewed: November 11, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print

Kristin Scott Thomas is the skin, flesh, and bone of I’ve Loved You So Long. Director Philippe Claudel, in his first feature film, is keenly aware of how central his lead actress is to the potency of this studious, intimate drama of forgiveness, forgetting, and starting over. Thomas’ presence hovers over every moment of the film. Claudel spends long minutes waiting with a cinematic exhale caught in his throat, savoring the way Thomas glances, sighs, smokes, and stands. The entire story–of a woman’s entry into her younger sister’s family life following a prison sentence—seems to lie in the veteran actress’ eyes, so dense, luminous, and haloed with middle-aged wear and beauty. Never mind the hackneyed bits and dramatic missteps. (Wine-lubricated confession at a French dinner party? Check! Tear-smudged, slightly underwhelming revelation? Check!) Marvelous to watch, are Laurent Grévill and Frédéric Pierrot, who charm Thomas’ Juliette in scenes scripted with distinctly Gallic confidence and deep currents of hope. I’ve Loved You So Long just might be the film of Thomas’ career. It succeeds despite an unsatisfying final act and too much narrative thumb-twiddling. It succeeds because Thomas is just that damn good, and Claudel bottles every spark she generates.

Manic Pixie Dream-Girl

2008 (UK)
Director: Mike Leigh
Viewed: November 11, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print

Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky is a slippery little film, a work that appears–at first glance–to rest on the spritely shoulders of one Poppy Cross, as portrayed with rabbit-punch wit and astonishing texture by Sally Hawkins. Indeed, Hawkins is undeniably the blazing celestial orb of positivity of this slice-of-life dramatic comedy. Making Sally Hawkins charming is an amateur’s trick, demanding nothing more than attiring her in “crazy” outfits and letting her goggle and guffaw through a flurry of sitcom scenarios. (Driving lessons! Visiting her sister! Flamenco class!) However, Leigh’s magic lies in the way he shifts our attention from Poppy to the world around her, never mind how enchanting a heroine she might be. Quite improbably–and in spite of her saccharine eccentricities–Poppy emerges as a rounded character, one who permits us a bit of projection for our own everyday tribulations. Shock of shocks, before long we realize that Happy-Go-Lucky is not merely touting the power of optimism, but calling our attention to the ley-lines of misery that flow between annoyances, social ugliness, and outright tragedies.

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Motherhood, Interrupted

Changeling
2008 (USA)
Director: Clint Eastwood
Viewed: November 5, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print

The most rote film that Clint Eastwood has directed in at least a decade, Changeling is a grim, sprawling, fairly unremarkable period drama. It’s not a bad film by any means: gloriously detailed, solidly acted, and shot with a cool, painterly eye. It’s also maddeningly predictable to the point of tedium, and at least forty-five minutes too long given the absence of any narrative shakeups. Is is really possible that the man behind the Olympian deconstruction of Unforgiven and the bleak soul-searching of Million Dollar Baby could create a film bloated on such uninspired to-and-fro? The term “well-made” as backhanded compliment never seemed more appropriate: Changeling is a film that cues its required quota of approving nods and gasps of outrage, an archetypal Serious Adult Drama. Again, not a bad film by any means, but I can’t shake the impression that it’s a step backwards for the veteran American un-auteur.

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