2004 Wisconsin Film Festival
Holy crap. I managed to top my attendance this year, seeing a grand total of 17 programs (it works out to 16 features and 8 short films, though, to be fair, several of the documentaries that I saw were between the 50-60 minute range) and one lecture over the course of four days. I could of watched more, no problem, though my ass would have probably begged to differ. I’ve already told you about the first day, so I’ll give you the short and sweet of the rest (unfortunately, I don’t have time to write extended capsules or critiques of every film I saw; my friends had a baby boy on Saturday night, and I’m going over to their house this evening). Both Friday and Saturday were kind of a blur, as always, with lots of rushing to and fro; in line conversation was pretty much divided between the movies themselves and the weirdness that is the Audrey Seiler case (a kind of funny anecdote that I read in one of the local papers, apparently one of the visiting Danish filmmakers looked remarkably like the bogus kidnapper sketch, prompting several concerned looks in his hotel lobby). As for the films themselves, I didn’t see any real dogs this year, but as usual, the best films were screened on Sunday.
Friday began with a French-funded movie set in Tajikistan called
Angel on the Right (the title is in reference to a Muslim belief); I saw the film because
Film Comment ran an article on Central Asian film a few issues back, and it sounded interesting.
Angel on the Right was an interesting film about a thief returning to the village of his birth, having been tricked by his mother and the mayor so that he may repay his many debts. While in his village, he strikes up a relationship with a pretty nurse, meets the son he never knew existed, and, being the only one who knew how to run the film projector, resurrects the local cinema, showing scratchy prints of Bollywood movies.
Angel on the Right is quiet, sometimes bleak (though leavened by the film’s usage of deadpan humor), film dominated by long, observant takes and a meandering, deliberately paced storyline which culminates in a bit of magical realism that leaves the film’s main character, and the lives of those closest to him, in complete uncertainty.
That jolly good time was followed by another French-financed film, the racial/immigration comedy
Me and My White Pal, which finds an unlikely pair of Parisian friends, the white, French slacker Franck and the African student Mamadi, fleeing to Burkina Faso after some trouble with a pair of drug dealers.
Me and My White Pal was amusing and watchable, but too schematic; things that happened to Mamadi in France were pretty much repeated in Burkina Faso, though directed at Franck (example, in Paris, two old women gossip about Mamadi and his white date, in Ougadougou, two elderly African men gossip about Franck and his African girlfriend). Afterwards, I changed venues and proceeded to the Cinematheque for a screening of Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang’s newest film
Goodbye, Dragon Inn, a plot-less film set in a decrepit movie house. It’s the theater’s last day of operation, and the film follows the patrons, who may or may not be ghosts, and the meager staff as the theater screens a print of King Hu’s
Dragon Inn. Not exactly something that should be seen at 9:30pm at night (though I was alert the entire time) or if you are unsympathetic to Tsai’s style (which was viciously mocked by several theatergoers after the screening), which again is dominated by extremely long-takes, repeated actions (you see the lame ticket seller/usher, Tsai favorite Chen Shiang-chyi, walk up several flights of stairs repeatedly), and almost complete complete lack of dialogue (I think the first lines actually spoken by a character not in the King Hu film, occurs around the hour mark in an 82 minute film). Not surprisingly, for anyone accustomed to Tsai’s film, it’s quite funny, in Tsai’s typical deadpan way, and beautifully shot; I personally thought it really captured the ambiance of the decaying theater, and the effect that film can have on some people (not that everyone in the film was even bothering to watch
Dragon Inn). The best sequence of shots, is a simple close-up of Chen Shiang-chyi’s face, as she stares up enraptured at the moving images, dominated by the fluid movements of one of Hu’s warrior women, the film cutting back and forth between the action onscreen and the inaction of the spectator. For anyone interested, Tsai’s alter-ego, Lee Kang-shang, is cast as the projectionist, though interestingly, he doesn’t not appear until the actual screening of
Dragon Inn ends).
Friday night ended with a midnight screening of Johnny To’s film
PTU. It wasn’t what I expected, though once I got into to all the brutal, corrupt characters and the film’s actual lack of action, I really enjoyed it, especially the extreme black humor that the film was peppered with.
My 14 hours of Saturday cinemagoing began with a pair of documentaries, the first being
The Watershed, a somewhat compelling video project that document’s the dissolution of the director’s family in the 1970s under the twin pressures of alcoholism and divorce. Neither parent comes off particularly well, though the father comes off the worst as a rationalizing SOB still living in self-denial; one can only say thank god for the kids aunt and uncle who took them in as their mother sobered up. After
The Watershed, the festival offered up a documentary that will air later this year on the PBS program
The American Experience; called
Patriot’s Day, the film is pretty much your typical entertaining, yet middle of the road, PBS documentary, this time following the yearly re-enactment of the Revolutionary War battle of Lexington and Concord. The best parts of the documentary were when the reenactors, in full dress, were talking on cellphones or riding around in Saabs.
Afterwards, I trekked down to the Memorial Union for my next two shows, a yearly retrospective program named after Madison film society luminary Mark Bergman, this year was a screening of George Franju’s brutal yet lyrical 1960 horror film
Eyes Without a Face (loved the ending with the dogs and the doves). Following the post-film panel discussion, I saw the happy-fun movie
S21: Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, a Cambodian version of
Shoah.
S21 is a documentary, were two of the three survivors of the notorious Tuol Seng prison confront their former captors, who still continue to deny responsibility for their actions, yet reenact their daily activities in meticulous detail for the camera, easily, and scarily, slipping back into their former roles.
S21 is very dry and austere, and is not easy to watch.
I had to race to my next screening, perhaps one of the more fascinating documentaries of the festival,
Forget Baghdad (I was late, so I missed the first 10 minutes), which follows four Iraqi Jews, all members of the Iraqi Communist Party, both before and after they were forced to flee to Israel, where they faced additional struggles, especially Ashkenazi racism towards the Sephardic Jews.
Khorma was the next film, set in Tunisia, it follows the titular social outcast (he’s an uneducated orphan with pale skin and red hair; “Khorma” translates into “blunder”) during both his rise (after his guardian goes mad, Khorma is granted half of his previous position, being allowed to announce the town’s deaths) and eventual fall after he becomes arrogant and alienates the people who put him in power.
Khorma was unfortunately one of the weaker entries in the entire festival.
Saturday ended with a screening of the Japanese horror film
Ju-On: The Grudge. Uh, hmm, well it was interesting; it was creepy and atmospheric, but the story was incomprehensible. A shiny nickel to anyone who can explain to me the film’s jumbled chronology. Basically, it’s a good idea and interesting effects in search of a narrative; unfortunately, as the film’s ghosts kill more and more people, the entire enterprise becomes kind of comical, the narrative spinning it’s wheels. Another disappointment, but I didn’t hate it. It will be interesting to see the American remake.
As I said before, for some reason, the final day of the film festival typically brings us the best films of the festival (last year it was
The Son, the year before that
La Cienaga, and the year before that it was
Yi Yi and the
Gleaners and I). Sunday began with two curiously matched documentaries,
The Price of Freedom, a traditional talking-heads/archival material documentary about WWII POWs, and
Human Shield, a short, murky video documentary about the human shields who went to Iraq last year in an attempt to halt the inevitable war. The POW stories were compelling, but I’ve seen plenty of films like this before; the second film was nice, since it actually took the human shields seriously (the guy who was lampooned on
The Daily Show had a cameo of sorts in one of the still pictures).
Since Otar Left was easily the best film that I saw in the festival. A very touching, bittersweet tale about how adults are more than willing to live a lie instead of facing the painful truth (and that sometimes, lies are necessary to keep us going),
Since Otar Left follows three-generation of women living under the same roof in Tblisi, Georgia: the ninety year old Eka (Polish actress Esther Gorintin), her daughter Marina (Nino Khomasuridze), and granddaughter Ada (Dinara Drukarova). The entire film is structured around the absence of the family’s sole male member, Eka’s son Otar, a Moscow-trained doctor working as a laborer in Paris (the family is Francophile). After news arrives that Otar has died in an accident, Marina and Ada decide to deceive Eka into believing that Otar is still alive, enlisting other friends in the effort (the task of writing Otar’s letters falls on Ada, who gets to indulge her romantic fantasies, at least at first). Things comes to a head when Eka decides to visit her son in Paris, bringing her flummoxed family with her. The entire film is filled with brilliant scene after brilliant scene, and is anchored by the wonderful performance of Gorintin. (sure to top my Droogie nomination next year). I was nearly in tears at the conclusion.
Last Life in the Universe, the next film that I saw, was the second best film that I saw in the festival. I really liked Pen-Ek Ratanaruang’s last festival entry ,
Mon-Rak Transistor, but I really loved this one, which is something of an aural/visual charmingly wistful romance between a fussy, obsessive-compulsive, comically suicidal Japanese librarian (with a dark secret) and a Thai bargirl/prostitute. Think
Something Wild cross-pollinated with
Harold and Maude, but better, more fanciful, yet even darker (yakuza, etc. one of which is played by Japanese director Takeshi Miike). It’s really something one has to see. Oh, yeah, it was also shot by ace DP Christopher Doyle.
The final film of the festival was a screening of the documentary
Sumo East & West (which will air on PBS on June 8th, check your local listings). The film is about the modern evolution of the ancient Japanese sport of sumo wrestling, with an influx of Polynesian-American wrestlers from Hawaii into the professional ranks, and the rise of a world amateur movement. Very funny and informative stuff. The screening was attended by one of the featured American wrestlers, Manny Yarborough, a 6’ 8” 740 lbs. behemoth of a man; it was probably the most lively post-screening Q&A that I attended. A great little bit of fluff to conclude the festival.
My Picks for the Best Film’s of the Festival
1.
Since Otar Left (d. Julie Bertuccelli)
2.
Last Life in the Universe (d. Pen-Ek Ratanruang)
3.
Not Color Blind, Just Near-Sighted (d. Aaron Greer)
4.
Goodbye, Dragon Inn (d. Tsai Ming-liang)
5.
The Yes Men (d. Chris Smith, Sarah Price, Dan Ollman)
6.
Old Night (d. Molly M. Mann)
7.
S21 Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (d. Rithy Panh)
8.
I’m Bobby (d. Xav Laplae)
9.
PTU (d. Johnny To)
10.
Sumo East & West (d. Ferne Pearlstein) and
Forget Baghdad (d. Samir)
Raja
Englishman Thomas Fowler and his Vietnamese mistress in Graham Greene’s
The Quiet American have a distressingly natural relationship against the background of the very active (but dying) days of direct European colonialism in Asia. Transplanted to Morocco and swapping English for French, Vietnamese for Moroccan,
Raja at first glance could be dramatizing the never-seen romance between the two which is left out of Greene’s book, taking place roughly fifty years later. While neither an allegory of an older imperialism nor a topical political statement, fifty years can still shift relationships dramatically and as the film proceeds it is clear the power of Europeans of yesteryear, while not vanquished, has changed significantly.
Raja is deceptive in its low-pressure simplicity; for writer/director Jacques Doillon fifty years of changing definitions and applications of imperialism results in a delicate, but important, ambivalence between subject and ruler.
The strength of the give-and-take romance between Fred (Pascal Greggory), a “Frenchie” presiding over a sprawling Moroccan villa, and nineteen year old local orphan Raja (Najat Benssalam) is that it never truly reveals the motivations of the two. Thankfully, the contemporary setting gives Raja more independence and more power in the mating dance, despite the potent element of ingrained subservience in her background. She is not only an orphan living in the home of another lower-class family, but she has turned to prostitution in her past and actively surrenders her finances to a jobless Moroccan, Youssef (Hassan Khissal), in another of Raja’s ambiguous relationships.
Raja is hired along with a number of other girls to tend the gardens of Fred’s villa, and the owner, who seems to no occupation, no wife, and have nothing better to do than read, putter around the grounds and engage in slyly superior banter with the local help, quickly has eyes for the young woman. Actress Najat Benssalam’s beauty is understated despite her striking face and at the start it is curious why Fred quickly craves for this particular girl when, as many characters in the film point out, there are an endless parade of gold-digging women in Morocco vying for the patronage of an European. Safe in their homes away from the isolated French mansion, Raja and her girlfriends are quick to play with fantasies of a profitable marriage between herself and the Frenchie, and it is
Raja’s coy and inconclusive oscillation between fiscal motivations and those of love that sparks the dynamic between Raja and the middle-aged Fred.
Fred has other Moroccan women he is fond of, Zineb (Zineb Ouchita) and Oum El Aid (Oum El Aid Ait Youss), two married and elderly women who cook and clean for the man, as well as take on the affectionate but slightly condescended roles of surrogate mothers and advisors. Fred’s self-important confessions and sprightly philosophical discussions with them spell out his feelings for Raja as pure desire, the result of an aging body but young libido. Similarly, when Raja is hired as permanent cleaner at the villa she gives Fred a gracious kiss for a playful fist of cash, and later rebuts his serious advances while continually asking for gifts from around the house.
The continued game plays out like a lively one of chess, with expectations and counter-expectations, always trying to guess to other’s true motive. And always lurking in the background is the social and political history which informs the mindsets of the two players-why Fred sometimes thinks he can buy Raja; why Raja sometimes thinks she should milk the Frenchman; and why neither are sure exactly how they feel for each other. While Doillon never solves the mysterious relationship between Raja and Fred, their almost tactical playfulness is smartly shot and elegantly told. The fun of the movie is the game between the two, who each seem hesitant to define its result as a flight of fancy or a meaningful possibility.
Raja is especially notable for Benssalam’s radiant performance and her seeming ordinariness, which reveals rich beauty, speaks well for the humble insight of the film as a whole.
Some [kinda] Short Reviews
Never Die Alone
Never Die Alone is an unexpected treasure, a beautifully stylish quasi-noir from the unlikely source of director Ernest R. Dickerson (who?), and stars DMX and David Arquette. King David (DMX) is stabbed to death within the film’s first fifteen minutes narrates the story from beyond the grave, telling a quick-n-slick tale of his escape from the gritty Big Apple to sunny So-Cal via audio tapes he left to Paul (Arquette), the white boy who was considerate enough to drive the dying man to the hospital. James Gibson, adapting Donald Goines novel, throws everything he can into the almost trashy screenplay. With Michael (Michael Ealy), a fallen thug trying to extract vengeance from a crime the King committed in the past, the King’s disturbing California tale replete with unequal mixtures of love and drug addiction, and Paul’s obsession with the dead man’s gritty voice spitting thug literature out of cassette tapes,
Never Die Alone is a rich, if ultimately pulpy, story of urban reliance.
That Arquette’s aspiring white writer resides in the ghetto, with posters of Miles Davis and the Wu-Tang Clan adorning his apartment, and claims to use his environment to produce authentic stories (his black girlfriend asks if she is part of his artistic “slumming” research) is a poignant subplot that telling speaks for the rest of the crime drama. The film is continually populated with people who dangerously rely on illicit elements of the urban world in order to feel alive-David hooks girls on heroin so he can feel needed, Michael’s gang history provokes desire for continual bloody retribution, and Paul is obsessed to the King’s blunt street-poetics. The title of the film itself speaks towards all their need to have somebody other than themselves around to give them a reason to live. Unfortunately, in noir fashion, the circles these city-dwellers move in are those of the underworld and fate is unavoidable.
Be it on drugs, love, women, revenge, or stories to tell, Dickerson weaves an astonishingly multi-textured story that loosely and subtly incorporates several religious beliefs into broad, old-noir themes of fatalism and retribution. Shot by the brilliant young cinematographer Matthew Libatique,
Never Die Alone has an amazing visual look of richly etched grain and deep colored hues that seem to blend the opulent tones of a drug lord’s pleasure palace with the neon grime of the urban streets. A booming score mixing jazz, hip-hop, and classical orchestration simply sweetens the film’s beautiful aesthetic detail. With Arquette and rapper DMX at its head,
Never Die Alone doesn’t ask for much, but it is a slick, gritty B movie at its finest, and may prove to be the surprise of the year.
Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...and Spring
Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…and Spring is an understandably simple Buddhist parable. Though the narrative tracks the spiritual progression of a young monk through the seasons, effortlessly jumping decades with each significant change in his life, the film adheres strictly to its location in nature, a breathtakingly picturesque Korean lake on which floats a modest Buddhist temple. From this, then, it becomes clear that all the film really does is follow the seasons, and the few humans in the movie, like the temple itself, simply drift on top of the reliably shifting landscape.
One could be entirely satisfied focusing only on the film’s nature photography, as director Kim Ki-Duk has chosen a lake that seems to render an endless variety of beautiful seasonal moments-frozen waterfalls, mid-summer showers, late evening fog, autumn-crisp golden leaves-the lake seems a magical place where anything in nature that can be imagined can be found. The story itself, unfortunately, is a bit too trite. It takes the form of a textbook parable on human desire, contemplative understanding, and life’s circularity that, for better or for worse, a child could easily discern. Instead, it is the few moments in-between Kim’s larger picture that contain the film’s charm. When the child monk is foraging the lakeside picking herbs (having been warned to look out for snakes) Kim shows a deadly looking snake approaching him. The child looks up at the snake, which is merely inches away, momentarily startled. But instead of fleeing the child simply picks the snake up by the neck and casually flings it out of harm’s way.
Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…and Spring is not necessarily replete with such charming and subtly meaningful moments, but their accumulation, along with the bountiful splendor of the film’s isolated location cannot fail to move.
Shaolin Soccer
Along with the acclaimed Zhang Yimou polemic arthouse martial arts film
Hero, Stephen Chow’s
Shaolin Soccer has been kept on Miramax’s shelf to the point where both films have acquired the status of sheltered cult classics. Sadly,
Shaolin Soccer, the first (and most crowd pleasing) of the two to get a hesitant release in no way lives up to the wagonload of Hong Kong Film awards and exuberant internet praise heaped upon it. Indeed, Chow’s film may introduce a novel and highly entertaining amalgam of martial arts action films and sports success stories, but aside from the animated creativity of the special-effects laden kung-fu soccer matches the majority of the film is painfully mediocre.
Shorn of roughly thirty minutes by Miramax (who also simplified the subtitles and inserted glaring English words over store signs and notes originally written in Chinese),
Shaolin Soccer's main problem is a complete lack of thematics with which to frame the regular sports genre progression of-team is fragmented, team is pulled together, team is trained, team does well at first, team gets wake up call by losing, team regroups and wins it all. Chow plays an ex-Shaolin master Sing, and along with the rest of his dead master’s pupils, has fallen onto hard times. Golden Leg Fung (Man Tat Ng), once a famous player now a cripple vying to get vengeance on the man who crippled him and now coaches winning soccer sensation Team Evil, quickly sees the soccer potential of Sing’s cannon-like leg power. Sing in turn not only wants a better job but one that helps spread the message and ideals of kung-fu to the general populace, whom he thinks has lost interest in the art which can so easily be applied to daily life. To keep the audience on their toes Chow has cast mostly middle-aged and overweight men to play his Shaolin brothers. To top the team off (and broaden the film’s appeal) Shaolin Soccer includes an agonizingly truncated romance in the form of putting beauty Vicki Zhao under acne-heavy makeup but giving her kung-fu skills that will undoubtedly help win both the game and Sing’s heart.
Within all this are a number of fairly obvious, but nonetheless existence, themes that would give
Shaolin Soccer a purpose. Teamwork, self-confidence, unemployment, and Shaolin philosophy are all introduced into the narrative by Chow, but he focuses on none of them and it is never as clear as it should by why exactly this team is going to (and should) win, other than the fact they face a team named Team Evil. At times this lack of thematics is infuriating because Chow uses extremely witty computer graphics to envision the sports crossover of Shaolin-style soccer. Visualized more like Street Fighter meets soccer than down to earth martial arts, Sing’s team can fly, kick balls that send the opposing team flying like pins, produce bomb-like shock waves and even acquire animalistic fury. The action is fast and ingenious, the humor crude, broad and generally enjoyable, but like many kung-fu movies before it, nearly all the fillings surrounding the action leave much to be desired. See it for the cheeky and wild action, Chow’s lean athletic charisma, and the lead villain’s bizarre affinity to Hollywood producer Robert Evans. For a much better and still highly unique Asian sports phenomenon, see Fumihiko Sori’s gleefully charming 2002 film
Ping Pong.
