Hello again guys,
My final week at the festival here in Holland has given me a few more cool films that deserve mentioning. I missed a whole bunch of screenings due to back problems, but still saw enough to have an ultimately rewarding festival experience. A spoilerwarning is hereby served…
First up is Paranoid Park by Gus van Sant. For his latest feature he picked up some kids through MySpace and cast them as his lead actors in a film about a young kid in Portland's skating scene. The title refers to an actual place in Portland where many skaters and people living on the edges of society hung out, although the location was changed for the film. Based on a recent novel by local author Blake Nelson it tells the story of 16-year old Alex (played by Gabe Nevins, who was 15 at the time), an adolescent who's still adjusting to taking his first steps in an adult world. He is a beginning skater, and with his friend they look up to the scene at Paranoid Park, talking about maybe going there, maybe not just yet. When they do, Alex is involved in an accident that is resolutely making him face up to the challenges of adulthood, and he is forced to make a very moral decision: will he be honest and tell or cover up?
The film is more interested in the effect that this dilemma has on Alex's psyche than on the actual resolution of the conflict, or even the accident itself, which is only presented halfway through the film. So the narrative isn't completely linear, and while there's a semi-thriller feel to the whole thing, with detectives asking questions and casting suspicious glances, the film focuses more on Alex within his social environment. There's a plotline about his girlfriend Jennifer and her determination to lose her virginity to him (and immediately call her friend afterwards: "oh my god, we, like, totally just did it!") but this event seems suddenly at lot less important to Alex.
The whole thing is filmed in warm and breathtakingly beautiful shots by Christopher Doyle, who used different cameras (digital, both Super8 and 35mm) to capture different moods and do cool stuff like to follow skaters around the skatepark with Doyle (presumably?) trailing close behind on a board or skates himself. Paranoid Park fits nicely in Van Sant's recent 'American youth' films, and combines bits and pieces from different genres to come up with a result that's both traditional and experimental in a very satisfying way.
Right after this screening I was off to the next venue to catch Swedish director Roy Andersson's latest offering You, the living. A few years back, I saw his Songs from the Second Floor at the festival and like many, I fell for Andersson's mix of dry wit and sarcasm and meticulously concieved and constructed sceneries. You, the living has the same style, so we are again presented with a long series of loosely connected scenes of humans doing what they do best: suffer, be tragic and pitysome, but also funny, determined and endearing. The mood is slightly less dark and grey than in SftSF (the abbreviation thing doesn't seem to really work here), but only slightly. The world seems about one notch more realistic (with still several more notches to until we reach cartoon-level. don't worry), and there's less guilt and death, and a bit more romance, but there are also the familiar overweight men with grey hair and moustaches, the occasional surreal occurrence here and there, and there's a trick that doesn't go entirely as planned, again. Throughout all the misery his characters seem to endure, Andersson does seem to have a little more hope this time out, although the picture of Don Quixote on the wall in the very first scene does put all the valiant efforts of this world's inhabitants in a somewhat cynical perspective. Oh yeah, that and the massive attack by a multitude of B52's on Stockholm.
Japanese director Ishii Yuya's Of Monster Mode was a pleasant and humorous film based on a line from a 17th century poet that "people are nothing but monsters". We follow several characters who are indeed having trouble to get along in a humane fashion. A woman abuses the naïve enthousiasm of her somewhat simple nephew to help her sell freshly baked buns and a man has left his wife for another woman after their son has died in an accident. The distraught wife ends up taking off with the nephew, who is dressed in a weird green Martian-suit for the entire film, which ends up making him look like an unripe tomato.
Some films look like they were made by people on serious mindaltering substances. While this can be a lot of fun, most of the time it is not really a recommendation for the film as a final product. But when your film is actually about taking drugs, it generally does seem to help. This as an introduction for my next bit, something about a weird festival-only type of film: Wadley by French/Mexican director Matias Meyer. This was his first feature film (although still relatively short at 60 minutes) and the screening I went to was in fact the world premiere. The film is one of the rare kind where you can literally sum up the enitre thing with a tagline: "Wadley: A guy walks into the desert and takes peyote!" And I really do mean that literally. In fact, this film is probably unique in the fact that the tagline and the entire script might just very well be the same single line.
So, very minimal stuff going on here. A guy (played by Leonardo Ortizgris) walks into the desert and takes peyote. We see him start off from the train tracks and find his way into the desert, where he searches for the small peyote buds. The location where they shot the film is a place where the peyote is known the grow, and the town of Wadley was apparently the place where Led Zeppelin wrote Stairway to Heave, as the director informed us. Our character finds the peyote, harvests, ingests, he trips, the film ends. There's virtually no dialogue, and we don't get to know who the guy is, or why he goes there, why he takes peyote. In the Q&A afterwards, the director said it could be the guy was from a big city, and came to confront himself with nature, but a film like really only works because in the absence of a driving narrative of psychological drive for the protagonist the viewer is allowed to come up with one on their own. The man vs himself and nature would ofcourse be the dominant interpretation here, but there's room for lots more.
The film was shot in four days with a minimal crew. The camerawork by Gerardo Barroso Alcalá done with simple handheld and long shots, and the festival catalogue places the film in the 'long take tradition of Lisandro Alonso or Gus van Sant'. The biggest problem with filming people on psychedelics is ofcourse that the whole thing is mainly an internal psychological experience and that people on drugs generally seem pretty lame and goofy, so basically like sober people. Ortizgris is on his own and seemingly a fairly introvert type of guy, I mean, he barely even flinches when drinking the gooey peyote mixture, which has one of the most vile and bitter tastes ever presented to the tastebuds of mankind, so for the rest of the trip he is fairly subdued as well. Which ofcourse works fine for the whole 'open to interpretation' angle of the film. So, how to judge something like this? Well, the film ended up on place 173 out of 196 on the Audience Award list, so there's that one the one hand. On the other, the director did tell us gleefully that the scene where the wild horse spontaneously showed up, they were all just, like, on their peak man, totally tripping, wow. They selected the scene for the poster of the film. If you would too, you just might get a kick out of Wadley.
My final day gave me four films, two of which featured in the Cinema Regained: Pièce Unique program, which had films from directors who made only one. First of these was a personal highlight: Phase IV by Saul Bass, made in 1974. IMDB lists its tagline as "Ravenous Invaders Controlled by a Terror Out in Space Commanded to Annihilate the World!", which makes the film sound like a fifties B-movie extravaganza, but that doesn't really cover it. I saw this film on, I think, German television when I was maybe eight or nine years old and it has stayed with me ever since. At first because it made me terrified of ants for a while, but mostly because it was for me one of the first films that showed me how cool cinema could be, that science fiction doesn't necessarily involve outer space, monsters and laserbombs and that a film can be both entertaining and have something to say, although I probably wasn't quite sure what that was at the time. Anway, I have been searching for this one for quite a while, and it doesn't seem to have a proper DVD release, so if someone could get to that: yes, please. I'm sure I'm not alone in this feeling.
In the film, by the man mostly known for his opening titels for other people's films, we follow a scientific experiment that monitors an ant colony that, like many others simultaneously around the world, has started showing signs of an evolutionary leap and an emerging aggressive intelligence. The title Phase IV refers the final stage in this process. The set-up for the film is very simple, our protagonists are the two Scientists involved (yes, one does turn into a Mad one at some point) and a young girl from a nearby farm whose family was killed by the advancing and aggressive ants. They run their experiments from a small sealed off building, which in the bare desert landscape looks like a moonbase. One scientist is a biologists, while the other specializes in cryptology, trying to set up a system of communication with the ants. The most interesting characters of the story, however, are the ants. Bass focuses much of the films running time on their actions, and the film is loaded with absolutely brilliant macro-shots of tiny ants looking like they have an actual purpose that goes beyond their standard instincts. There's one sequence in particular that shows how the ants transport a small lump of poison the scientist used against them to their Queen, who can then create ants resistant to its effect. The soldiers doing the transporting aren't however, and they can only carry the poison a short distance before someone else has to take over, only to die himself minutes later. Bass, who worked with expert insect photographer Ken Middleham, manages to create real empathy for the ants, along with a strong sense of mystery about their ultimate purposes.
The film is straight from the seventies in every way, a very good thing in my book, and a joy to finally see again on the big screen, even if it was programmed for only one screening in the most crappy 'cinema' (a theatre studio in the back of a restaurant, with sounds from the kitchen joining the uncomfortable rustling of the audience in their small wooden chairs) at the festival. What a shame…
Right after Phase IV I saw in the same theatre the black and white film The Honeymoon Killers (1970) by also one-time director Leonard Kastle, playing in the same program at the festival. Kastle made the film in a reaction to Bonnie and Clyde, which he thought glamourized the violent nature of the real-life crimes they portrayed too much. So he took his own real life crime, in this case the dealings of serial killer couple Raymond Fernandez and Martha Beck, also known as "The Lonely Hearts Killers", did extensive research and wrote his own film. In a bizare piece of cinematic history, Martin Scorcese was initially hired as the director, but was fired after filming uneditable master shots for a week. Donald Volkman replaced him, but eventually Kastle decided to direct the damned thing himself. Turned out to be pretty damned good too, and Francois Truffaut has once named it as his favourite American film.
Raymond and Martha (played by Tony LoBianco and Shirley Stoler) meet through a dating agency, and setup a crime spree where they swindle middle aged lonely women out of their saving with Raymond wooing and marrying them and Martha posing as his sister, killing most of their victims when they're done.
The film is very straightforward in its approach, and there´s no sentimentalizing, psychologicizing or glamourizing of either the victims or the killing couple. The murders are nasty and realistic, and the killers, while still being ruthless, are portrayed as real humans reacting to their own actions. Narratively speaking, it's not as neatly structured as a classical narrative, as it follows the real life story of Raymond and Martha (as far as I can tell, that is) and ends with their arrest (they were both electrocuted in 1951). Leonard Kastle didn't stay with filmmaking after this despite offers to do so, but continued his true profession: composing, although he has written a few unproduced screenplays.
My final two films were Casting a Glance and Redacted. The first one is an 80-minute study by filmmaker James Benning of the artwork Spiral Jetty (1970) by Robert Smithson in the Great Salt Lake in Utah. A quite wonderful experience, and with enough time to reflect on the amazing fact the the screening was sold out, with people still coming in twenty minutes after it started, and everybody absolutely glued to the dialogue-less endless series of shots of the strange structure (it's pretty much what you think it would be: a jetty in the form of a spiral) appearing on the screen. Or maybe sleeping, which is quite a wonderful experience as well.
Redacted by Brian de Palma offers no such soothing experiences. The setup is wellknown by now, I guess: the film is a fictional compilation of different media expressions of events surrounding a real-life event: the rape and murder of a young Iraqi girl by American soldiers and the killing of her family. The film is a powerful and strong condemnation of the US military presence in Iraq, while still portraying an honest picture of the situation, with the soldiers terrorized by imminent insurgent attacks and the constant prospect of death. Some of them get to indulge in their already present immoral urges, others get dragged along, others don't know how to react. None of them seem to be properly guided by their superiors.
As horrible and compelling as the events portrayed are, the film impresses most on a cinematic level, as it seems to be a true 21st century-style representation of certain aspects of this particular modern conflict. Most of us, luckily, don't have to join in the actual military part of this whole war on terror/war in iraq thing (is it the same??), but almost everyone in the media-connected world has an opinion about it and can join in on the 'war of opinions', an argument all based on filtered, or as the movie's title says it, redacted information about the facts. There´s lots to argue about in this film as well, and the constantly shifting viewpoints might keep your own opinions shaking a little too, something that again plays along with the 21st century thinking feel of this film. Opinions sometimes seem a lot ´looser´ now than they used to be, with so much information coming at us to process, categorize and judge.
In the end, maybe unsurprsingly considering his reputation, DePalma seems to say we should trust the image, trust what we see with our own eyes, unfiltered and unredacted. It´s horrible enough without ideology or politics twisting our perceptions around. Redacted is an angry and tough film that doesn´t aim to please, but it is very much worth your time and attention, for either your cinematic or political fix.
Well, that´s it again for me this year. Would like to have seen and reviewed more, but ah well... This can't always turn out as planned. For instance, I missed the surprise film, which surprisingly turned out to be Lars and the Real Girl. (I probably could have known it wouldn´t be There Will Be Blood, since that was selected for Berlin.)
Tiger Awards for best feature-debuts went to Wonderful Town (Aditya Assarat, Thailand), Flower in the Pocket (Liew Seng Tat, Malaysia) and Go with peace Jamil (Omar Shargawi, Denmark). The journalists at FIPRESCI chose El cielo, la terra y la lluvia by Chilean director José Luis Torres Leiva, while Persepolis took the Audience Award.
Thanks for posting / reading and greetings until next year,
dapascha
