Hey folks, Harry here delighted to be presenting yet another helping of Elaine's fantastic coverage of the Rotterdam International Film Festival. This time out she's taking a look at 3 Comedies and of the 3 the one I simply must see immediately is KOPPS, it sounds genuinely hilarious from her descriptions. Here ya go...
ROTTERDAM INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
DAY 4
What's the epitome of screen eyes? I have no idea, but I imagine I must resemble it quite closely. Four days into the festival, I am looking as ghastly as I normally do after a whole festival - ghostly, one might even say. As if I'm not entirely there. And six more days to go before I can get some rest. Oh, joy!
It seems I was a bit hasty when I condemned the festival organisers for not having "Chihwaseon" on the programme. It has been announced that "Chihwaseon" will in fact screen at the IFFR - as the closing film, no less. Good call, guys. Now get Zhang Yimou's "Hero" on a screen near me (preferably before, say, September), and you will have my undying gratitude.
As for today's films, well, it's comedy time. I'm going to give you reviews of three comedies - each different from the other, but all hilarious in their own way. While I recommend all of them, I especially advise you to seek out "Kopps," of which Rotterdam had the international premiere. A send-up of almost every American action movie produced in the past twenty years, "Kopps" has all the ingredients to become a hit Stateside - lots of laugh-out-loud humour, good special effects and a "Die Hard" freak who keeps on saying "Freeze, motherfucker!" every five seconds. Shallow fare, to be sure, but very entertaining indeed.
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KOPPS
(Written and directed by Josef Fares, Sweden)
Damn, this film is funny.
Two years ago, Lukas Moodysson protege Josef Fares burst onto the scene with "Jalla! Jalla!," a multicultural comedy that proved extremely popular with the Rotterdam audience. Now the Lebanese-Swedish director is back with "Kopps," which is even more hilarious than its predecessor. Like "Jalla! Jalla!," "Kopps" is largely a family production. However, that doesn't mean it is amateurish; on the contrary, it is as slick as anything Hollywood has ever produced, and features some of the funniest scenes you'll see in cinemas all year - including some seriously un-European special effects.
"Kopps" is about four police officers in a village where nothing ever happens. They love their job, but unfortunately, the job doesn't love them; no criminal ever shows up to test their prowess, and the greatest challenge they have on any given day is preventing stray cows from trampling the flower beds in front of the station. Under those circumstances, a fully-equipped police force is clearly a waste of money, and so Headquarters dispatches a nubile inspector to the village to inform the force that their station will be closed down. Needless to say, the four friends don't want to lose their jobs, so they do what any sensible cop would do in their position: commission crimes to convince Headquarters that there is a need for a police force, after all. First they try bribing the village drunk into shop-lifting. When that doesn't sort the right effect, they resort to more spectacular crimes. Obviously, the pretty blonde inspector sent by headquarters finds the sudden increase in crime suspect, but the question is, will it stand between her and the sympathetic officer (played by the director's brother, Fares Fares) who is in love with her?
"Kopps" has many things going for it, and its original premise is just the beginning. Far more hilarious is the part played by one of the officers, Benny (Torkel Petersson). You see, Benny likes action movies. A lot. He has seen so many of them that he can't distinguish between film and reality anymore, to the point where he believes he is Bruce Willis in "Die Hard" or Sylvester Stallone in "Rambo." He is so caught up in his fantasy world that whenever a police situation arises (real or imagined), he switches from Swedish to English and starts talking a kind of American cop gibberish in which the word "motherfucker" features prominently. And when he enters his own kitchen, he does so SWAT-style - armed to the teeth, and ready to shoot whomever stands in his way.
Like his cat, for instance.
There is some riotous fun here. From the ploys the four friends devise to prevent the closing of their station to the superhero fantasies Benny lives out in his dreams, "Kopps" is a string of silly but extremely amusing set pieces that sends up everything from "Back to the Future" to "The Matrix." Although it isn't the most sophisticated humour, it is a much funnier parody than anything the Wayans brothers have ever come up with, and it is played so lovingly and presented so expertly that one has no choice but to laugh very hard indeed. This should be true for Americans as well as Europeans, for if ever a European film had crossover potential, this is it. "Kopps" is not the pretentious fare Americans associate with European cinema; it's an American film which just happens to have been made by a bunch of Swedes, a sizeable part of which doesn't even require subtitles. It's the closest Europe has ever come to producing a popcorn movie, and it's a good one, too.
So what do we call this Swedish Hollywood? Stollywood? Holmywood? You choose - after you've honoured the film with the load of popcorn and big laughs it deserves.
Freeze, motherfuckers!
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THE SEA
(Written and directed by Baltasar Kormakur, Iceland; based on a play by Olafur Haukur Simonarson)
Times were when the majority of us had no idea Iceland had a film industry worth speaking of. Now, thanks to two critically-acclaimed films in the top-20 of the IFFR (one of which has already been sold to a dozen countries), Iceland is the talk of the town. And while Dagur Kari's "Noi Albinoi" (which I will review later) may be the more popular of the two Icelandic entries, Baltasar Kormakur's follow-up to "101 Reykjavik" isn't bad, either. On the contrary, it is pretty damn good, in that nasty, vicious way which appears to be a Nordic speciality.
"The Sea" is a tragicomedy disguised as a family drama. Sixty-something Thordur, factory owner and uncrowned lord of the town in which he lives, has some skeletons in his closet. They are getting smelly, so he decides to do what he should have done ages ago: get his family together and have it all out. This is not so easy as it seems, for apart from his eldest son, who helps him run the factory, his children live far away: his daughter in Reykjavik and his youngest son in Paris, France. When everybody finally shows up for the family reunion, it turns out that they either hate each other's guts or love each other far too much. Haraldur, the eldest son, is married to an alcoholic who can't stand her in-laws but needs their money; Ragnheidur, the daughter from Reykjavik, is a bitter old hag who hates both her husband and her Nintendo-addicted teenage son; and Agust (who is supposed to be studying business in Paris but really wants to become a song writer) proudly presents his pregnant French girlfriend Francoise, but really seems more interested in his cousin Maria, who is equally obsessed with him. And in the background there are Thordur's second wife, whom no one really seems to like, and a dopey old grandmother who has a few interesting things to say about Coca Cola and eating whale meat. Naturally, these people have a few secrets of their own (not to mention some semi-criminal plans), and thus the stage is set for a confrontation - the most explosive, hard-hitting family confrontation since "Festen" (The Celebration), and a pretty funny one, at that.
Kormakur knows his comedy. The humour he uses in "The Sea" comes in many guises, ranging from obvious and fairly innocuous (the jokes about Icelandic cuisine) to harsh and pretty bizarre (the grandmother's monologues). His speciality, however, is black humour, and black it is - as black as the night that never really comes in Iceland but very much overshadows the lives of the protagonists. No one is spared from it; with the exception of Francoise, who is after all an outsider, everybody gets a jab, and more often than not, the jabs are vicious. Subtlety, it appears, is not a virtue much appreciated by Nordic people.
In many ways, Francoise the Foreigner is the focal point of the film. Because she knows as little about her boyfriend's background as the viewer, the viewer sees the story unfold through her eyes. And what he sees is an unusual (but recognisable) family saga set in an almost Edda-esque Iceland. For Iceland is more than a place where women are blonde and real men eat whale meat; Iceland, says Agust, is a place "where idiots get raped by idiots," and where those who know about it carelessly let it happen. It is a place where sons plot to have their fathers certified, and fathers beat up their sons when they choose, for once, to be honest - not with their bare knuckles, but with iron rods.
No wonder Iceland produced the Edda. A land this wild cannot but spawn destruction, can it?
Expertly told and interestingly photographed, "The Sea" is what one might call "classic festival fare." Pairing black humour with flashes of feeling (and thus eliciting compassion as well as big laughs), it should appeal to those who like "Festen" and Nordic humour in general. A warning, though - if you make the mistake of watching "The Sea" immediately after "Whale Rider," you'll find the whale jokes to be in bad taste.
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THE YEAR OF THE DEVIL
(Written and directed by Petr Zelenka, Czech Republic)
Back in 1998, Petr Zelenka won a Tiger Award with his black comedy "Knoflikari" (Buttoners). Now he is back with "The Year of the Devil," a film that could be described as a road movie meets mockumentary/rockumentary but really defies pigeon-holing. It is "This Is Spinal Tap" with some metaphysicism thrown in for good measure, and if that isn't odd enough for you, it features spontaneous combustion, too.
You have to admit that's a pretty ambitious combination.
The first person we meet in "The Year of the Devil" is Jan Prent, a Dutch alcoholic who has come to the Czech Republic because he has heard the AA is unusually effective there. Whilst in therapy, he hits on the idea of making a documentary about alcoholism, and what better subject than that famous alcoholic, Czech singer Jarek Nohavica? For unfathomable reasons, Nohavica likes the plan, and so Prent follows him and his friend Karel Plihal during Nohavica's withdrawal and on his way back to the top. On the way there, the three hook up with a folk band called Checomor, who normally only play at weddings and funerals but find themselves overnight stars when they start playing with Nohavica. They also meet Jaz Coleman, a former Killing Joke member who now conducts a Czech orchestra and introduces Checomor to shamanism. A few ghosts appear, and the band and their entourage become convinced that there is an angel in their midst. And so it goes on, until someone disappears - a case of spontaneous combustion, or so his friends argue. But does spontaneous combustion actually exist?
"The Year of the Devil" is a tough film to sell. A comedy of sorts, it has flashes of side-splitting hilarity, but much of the humour is so weird, so off-hand that its appeal will not be immediately obvious to Americans. Petr Zelenka doesn't go in for American humour; his humour is of the absurd variety, and it is delivered with such deadpan matter-of-factness that one doesn't realise until a few seconds later how funny it really is. Nor does all of it come off equally well; the humour sort of dies towards the end, when the metaphysical stuff takes over in a not wholly satisfying way. When it IS successful, though, the humour in "The Year of the Devil" is so utterly hilarious it induces stomachaches. It couldn't be anything else, what with a traditional-costume-wearing folk band learning to be rock stars and a band leader who won't let them rehearse because he thinks his lectures on alcoholism are more important. And I'm not even including the gag about playing the violin in a lift here, which is the funniest thing I have seen in the festival so far.
And yet it isn't just an off-beat comedy. A multi-genre-spanning exercise in ambition, "The Year of the Devil" is a road movie that takes its characters on a journey both physical and spiritual. At the same time, it is a kind of mockumentary, but with a twist: everybody plays himself. Nohavica and Checomor really do exist (Checomor did a gig after the Rotterdam premiere of their film), and apparently former rock star Jaz Coleman does indeed conduct a Czech orchestra, which begs a few questions about the boundaries between fiction and reality. If it is true that this foggish territory between truth and fiction is where cinema is headed, Zelenka is ahead of his time - something everybody who has seen "Knoflikari" will be ready to concede.
All things considered, "The Year of the Devil" is a pretty good film - a bit uneven, but highly original and occasionally brilliant. It may lose some steam towards the end, but that shouldn't prevent it from gaining a reputation amongst "Spinal Tap" fans - even if much of the dialogue is in Czech.
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AND BEFORE I LEAVE YOU...
... I propose a toast to "Whale Rider," which has taken over the number-one spot in the Audience Award poll. I knew it. Let the victory lap begin!
Yours in screen-eyed agony (but happily and masochistically so),
Elaine
(who is still waiting for some Korean reader to fill her in on "Resurrection of the Little Match Girl." Come on, guys - SOMEONE must be willing to post a review, right?)
