Movies into Film

14 Ways of Looking at a Film Festival (part one)

Notes on Beauty in Trouble, Hula Girls, More than Anything in the World,

The Violin, Away From Her, Jindabyne, and Belle Toujours

 

Dinner is served! Ogier and Piccoli face off in Oliveira’s Belle Toujours, the tastiest dish at this year’s PIFF. (Photo courtesy of New Yorker Films)

 

 

            Officially, I covered the 30th annual Portland International Film Festival (February 9-25, 2007) for Willamette Week. Some of what I have to say here first appeared in its pages in different form.

 

            On the surface, it may not seem as if I enjoyed myself. I panned nearly everything, and of the movies I saw but didn’t review, I hated almost all of them. I walked out on several, beginning with Czech director Jan Hrebejk’s unwatchable piece of vulgarity Beauty in Trouble, which struck me as the kind of bad film wherein we, the trapped audience members, are expected to identify with, even to applaud, the blue-collar, car-thieving vermin on-screen, except that I didn’t, wouldn’t, and couldn’t. Hrebejk’s lumpen proles and their shrieking relatives are so repellent it's impossible to feel anything other than disgust. There are seemingly endless shots of unattractive nude bodies splayed across beds, and throughout a sitcom aesthetic prevails. Foreign films pitched to the undemanding lowbrows who overpopulate American art-houses are nothing new, yet nearly every foreign film I see now has the same dismal goal in mind: to appeal to Americans who have no taste, even if the chances of said Americans actually seeing one of these bombs is fairly slim. Japan’s Hula Girls serves as another case in point. Let me quote myself from the February 14 issue of WW: “Any chance that this might’ve been good kitsch flies out the window in the face of plodding direction, overacting that’s screechy and gooey at the same time, and schizoid screenwriting that veers between pratfalls, stuck zippers, and child abuse. Coal miners’ daughters learn to shimmy when a Hawaiian theme park invades their provincial town, but the trite scenario is as rancid as last year’s sesame oil, though Yasuko Matsuyuki shows a trace of freshness as the chain-smoking, bored-out-of-her-mind hula instructor.” So there you have it: an admixture of dumb gags and emotionally exploitative sentiment, topped by an assortment of typo-ridden, grammatically incorrect subtitles – the state of foreign film in the U.S. today. (And while I’m here, I’ll add that all that (and more) applies as aptly to Almodóvar’s boring, insipid Volver, a movie so tasteless that only self-deceiving yuppies with good medical coverage could mistake it for anything but trash. The orchestral score by Alberto Iglesias was sumptuous – I’ll grant that – especially the passages for harp that Skaila Kanga played to perfection.)

 

            But back to PIFF: I had a wonderful time! I guess it was the act of seeing so many movies in swift succession again. In 2006, I attended no major festivals and two minor ones. 2006 was the year I pretty much stayed home from movies period. Whether I semi-liked something (Fast Food Nation and The Painted Veil certainly have their merits) or felt like taking an ax to it (Roger Michell’s Venus) there was never quite a compelling reason to raise quill to parchment. Of the films I managed to review over the last few weeks (and a bad day at a press screening almost always scores over a good day at work, or at least that’s how I feel now) I’m glad I met them, even if I clobbered them.

 

 

            To start with a movie I didn’t write about, I caught the Mexican film Más que a nada en el mundo (More Than Anything in the World) during PIFF’s third and final weekend. The picture appears to have been made by persons who ought to have survivor’s guilt, but owing to a shallowness of character are afflicted instead by survivor’s arrogance. In its depiction of little girls who are spooked by the specters of vampires, the movie owes a lot to Victor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive, but this is much lower than that. I kept wanting to walk out, yet on I stayed through the desperately bad performance by Elizabeth Cervantes as a single mom who never hesitates to swear in front of her 8-year-old daughter. The scuzz clings to Cervantes’ Emilia, a woman whose most treasured words are “fuck” and “asshole,” and who always needs a man around, no matter how dreary or tawdry the men may be, and they’re all dreary and tawdry, a collection of stale suits from her accounting office. The full-breasted Emilia is rarely shown without a cigarette in hand; after a while I could almost smell (and retch from) the acrid stench of the old smoke on her fingers, in her apartment carpets. As far as parenting, Emilia does just about everything wrong, mainly in persistent screaming at her lonely child. Julia Urbini does well as the tormented Alicia, and the blonde Amira Aguilar is even better in the small role of her school friend Lucia, a girl of delicate confidence who relays information about vampires in the most beautifully neutral tones. Aguilar steals every scene she’s in, and on some level the inept filmmakers must sense this: they keep cutting away from her to go back to what we’ve already seen too much of. What leaves such a sour taste about this picture is its cruel depiction of a dying elderly neighbor who wastes away on the same floor as Emilia and Alicia. He’s treated almost exclusively in horror movie terms, without dignity, without empathy, as a scapegoat for things that go bump in the night, and when the movie has the nerve to end on a sunny beach, it seems the ultimate slap in the face to this anonymous old man’s suffering. The ambient guitar strumming on the soundtrack, by a band called Austin TV, sounds quite nice; I hear a slight Bernard Sumner influence in their playing – not a bad thing to be reminded of.

 

Don Ángel Tavira plays The Violin (photo courtesy of Cámara Carnal Films)

 

 

            Additionally, I saw four other Mexican films, three of them not worth mentioning by name. But the last of these, Francisco Vargas Quevedo’s The Violin, represents a mature kind of filmmaking that’s almost completely absent, not only from this festival, but from new films that seep into the States at almost any other time. After weeks on end (or is it months or years?) of forced whimsicality from even the paltriest budgets, I knew from The Violin’s first shot that the director has something to say. Vargas assumes we know at least a bit about the recent history of Mexico or that we don’t mind doing a little work. There are no screen titles to tell us what part of his country we’re in or during which era; Martín Boege Paré’s black and white cinematography, in tandem with the poverty of the villages, could locate us anywhere in the past 50 or 60 years. In a sequence of a man being chased by soldiers, the tall grasses of the underbrush merge with the textures of the rocks, cave fissures, and mountains that define the land – a visual equivalent, surely, to the runner’s sense of headlong rush. In one of Vargas and Paré’s most magnificent touches, a scrawny peasant grandfather (unsentimentally acted by the octogenarian Don Ángel Tavira) tells his young grandson, who’s perhaps aged 10, the story of the world’s creation by the Gods, which, in short order, becomes a story of the injustice and inequality of the world; during Tavira’s fable-like re-telling, the camera rolls over nighttime exteriors, casually ambling from the ground to the tree branches up high, and beyond that to an exquisitely framed shot of a full moon – it comes into view just as the off-screen voices taper away. The Violin is a war movie. A war of disenfranchised citizens against an armed-to-the-teeth military. That we don’t know which or what war doesn’t diminish the weight of tears inside.  Since watching the film, I’ve learned that it was shown at Cannes last year, won a well-deserved award for Tavira, but to date has no U.S. distributor. I would call that criminal neglect on the part of our cultural gatekeepers. The Violin may not be a perfect work of art; humanity needs it, however, and as for Tavira, he effortlessly rises to the same down-to-earth plateau where we find Imelda Staunton in Vera Drake. 

 

Julie Christie in Away From Her (Lion’s Gate) 

 

 

            My biggest disappointment at PIFF was Away From Her, an adaptation of Alice Munro’s short story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain.” What I wrote in WW was: “I have loved Julie Christie ever since I was taken to see Heaven Can Wait as a wee bairn, and I’d hoped to love her in this, too, but Sarah Polley, making an inauspicious directorial debut, renders that impossible. Polley deprives Christie (and us) of her British accent, and without that impeccable lilt, Christie’s vocal rhythms are way off. It’s often hard to hear her – the movie’s soundtrack is a little muddy. The revelation here comes from Michael Murphy in a nonverbal role as an Alzheimer’s patient. The frowning, silent way he passively wrests whatever power remains for him, and the burbling cries he emits when someone frightens him, are devastating reminders of what superb acting is all about.” 

 

            I don’t have much to add to that, but what I will say depends on you having already read the Munro source material or seen the film at Toronto or Sundance, because I think it necessary to give the ending away in order to describe why the film is a cheat. Unless a filmmaker happens to be a very great artist, and Sarah Polley isn’t, it’s nearly impossible to transmute the ambiguity of an author’s final paragraph into visual terms that will make movie sense. On the page, Munro’s deliberate omissions (and I don’t have the book in front of me now – it’s gone back to the library) frustrate the reader in more or less the right way; what Polley aims for is a “have it both ways” ending that doesn’t push the material any further. I think the director (she also wrote the script) needed to go all the way with the husband’s betrayal of his wife. The movie stops with Grant’s discomfiture in the realization that Fiona (Christie) no longer remembers who Aubrey is. Grant, the very model of a self-righteous liberal, an over-sexed academic who screws his female students while expecting Fiona to remain faithful, (in other words, if ever there were an archetype that needed pummeling, he’s it) plans to abandon his Alzheimer’s-afflicted wife as he goes off on a loveless tryst with another woman. Polley lets Grant off the hook in an unforgivably soft ending. She doesn’t indict him. The movie needs that extra scene of Fiona and Aubrey being given to each other, of being conveniently victimized by their loved ones, and if the film should have reached an unbearable emotional intensity or a tough-mindedness not unlike the last 90 seconds of Afterglow, then I feel sure that Christie (and Murphy as well) would have given us a finale that would burn its memory into our souls.

 

Career low-point: Laura Linney in Jindabyne (Sony Pictures Classics)

 

Away From Her, as unsatisfactory as it is, doesn’t begin to compare to the disgracefulness of another literary adaptation at PIFF. Raymond Carver would roll in his grave if he could see how his psychologically incisive short story, “So Much Water So Close to Home,” has been ground into simple-minded mush. His first-person narrative portrays a woman who identifies so strongly with a murder victim (the body has been found in a river by her husband and his fishing buddies) that it all but obliterates her marriage. First-time (and, let’s hope, last-time) screenwriter Beatrix Christian trashes Carver’s basic good sense in favor of soap opera clichés about “community” that are embarrassingly outmoded in their sleeve-worn political correctness. Christian makes the murdered girl an Aborigine, thereby setting the stage for all sorts of namby-pamby non-insights into race. The screenwriter has no ear for authentic speech (jokes about the Bee Gees in 2007?), but even if Jindabyne weren’t sabotaging Carver, the movie would still be a stinkeroo on its own vapid terms.

 

And it’s essentially an exploitation picture in art-house drag, made by morons who either mistrust the strength of Carver’s material or are aggressively indifferent to it: a morgue attendant, white and female, suggests that the murder victim was “up for” being raped; a brick tossed through a van window narrowly misses an infant’s head; a filling station owned by whites has racial slurs spray-painted all over it; a pair of 7-year-olds obsessed with dead animals kill their school mascot, which, naturally in this debased scheme of things, happens to be a rodent; and so on. None of that crap, which would merit an F in any legitimate screenwriting course, is in Carver’s story. Miss Christian also takes the emphasis away from Claire, his lead character, and centers her absurd revisions on all the wives and girlfriends of the fishermen. Claire, as Carver envisioned her, might well have been a good role for Laura Linney, but Christian has reduced Claire to a nugatory non-entity who pirouettes around saying, “We’ve got to move on!” (It’s an even more insulting part than the one Linney had in Driving Lessons.) The narrative is no longer about the interior journey that one woman makes to the funeral of a stranger; that’s been replaced by lingering close-ups of the decomposing dead girl, wordless angst-ridden cries on the soundtrack (yes, I believe that is intended to be music), and by a self-congratulatory spread of so many smug liberal pieties that a single viewing of this bomb could turn a raving moderate into a staunch Republican in one shot. You need an example: Christian changes the lead male character’s occupation from an engineer to a car mechanic; evidently she felt he would be insufficiently blue-collar without her demotion of him. Why, merci beaucoup, my dear! Gabriel Byrne is a disaster in the role, anyway.  

 

            Having said that…I think I’ve arrived at a good stopping point. I’ll write about the Asian films and documentaries in another post, but I’ll close with an endorsement of the movie I liked best at PIFF – Belle Toujours, Manoel de Oliveira’s homage to Buñuel’s Belle de Jour. I won’t say much as I have a piece being published elsewhere closer to the film’s April release. It’s enough for now to recommend it for the stunning Paris locations around which Bulle Ogier, gamely filling Deneuve’s high heels, dodges her old adversary Henri Husson. What a treat to see Michel Piccoli, reprising his role as Husson, as he waltzes through this dreamlike film with a sly, ever-present smile, knowing yet never revealing a lifetime of cherished private jokes – the opposite number of his boxed-in victim in Oliveira’s much inferior I’m Going Home. – NPT

 

February 23-26, 2007

 

Movies into Film

©2007, N.P. Thompson

npt [at] moviesintofilm [dot] com

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