FESTIVAL ROUNDUP



 
 

Montreal World Film Festival

The last time I attended the Montreal World Film Festival, guest of honor Steve Martin, there to promote his hapless A Simple Twist of Fate, took part in an awkward press conference held in the middle of a shopping center (the Palais des Jardins, underneath the Festival's main hotel). While the Festival has always been known for its large selection of world cinema, Martin, uncomfortably answering questions while shoppers passed by, seemed a foot soldier in the event's futile battle to compete with the artfully staged glitz of a Cannes, Venice, or Toronto.

Returning to Montreal this year, I was surprised to find a more studiously low-key festival. Jacqueline Bisset was there to head the jury and some minor names appeared to plug films but overall, there were fewer gala events and nary a star in site. The Montreal Market seemed not the site of frenzied acquisition activity but rather a mellow spot for TV buyers to view features in and out of the Festival. And few of the Festival's titles seemed to inspire the feverish advance buzz that prompts acquisition execs to claw their way into screenings.

All of this, however, was not bad. That's because there is one simple area in which the Montreal World Film Festival excels. It's a great -- and easy -- place to watch movies. With a huge selection featuring many of the year's noted pieces of world cinema, including most of the Cannes Critic's Week, an Iranian film sidebar, and a smattering of American independents, some good and some oddly chosen, Montreal is a place where one actually gets into films and watches them in superior screening conditions. (The Festival impressively manages that rare trick of having mostly full theaters that are nonetheless easy to get into.)

Montreal has never been known for its curation of American independents. Perhaps because distributor-obsessed American indies fixate on Toronto, the best independents shown in Montreal tend to be films premiering for French-Canadian audiences prior to their Canadian theatrical runs. This year, Star Maps, Sunday, House of Yes, and In the Company of Men all fell under this category while the festival also picked up on Sundance selections Colin Fitz, George B., Franchesca Page (a spirited drag comedy that proves that it is possible to climax a no-budget film with a Broadway theatrical pastiche), and Mr. Vincent. Other American independents included, in the Competition, Bernie Casey's racial talkfest The Dinner; Christian Moore's Shady Grove; Scott Saunders' tape-to-film study of a Lower East Side slacker's relationship with his Latina wife and his middle-class sister, Headhunters' Sister; Tony Spiradakis' only sporadically effective Hollywood satire Self Storage; and Tom Rooney's premiering You are Here, a sort of no-budget Two for the Road. Shot mostly with day exteriors on a series of country backroads, the film tells the tale of a fired white collar worker who impulsively invites a lonely shop clerk on a disastrous first date to a friend's country house. Rooney has a compassionate directorial eye and a good comedic sense but his young cast of unknowns hasn't the charisma needed to conquer this mainstream premise. Better was Frank Ciota's Boston-set The North End. In many ways a working class "guys with girl problems" flick a la The Brothers McMullen, The North End is deepened by a series of engaging "man-on-the-street" video interludes that amplify the film's main themes.

The Festival also showcased another kind of American independent -- the Canadian-produced kind. Norstar's Brooklyn State of Mind, directed by Frank Rainone, and CFP's Another Nine-and-a-Half Weeks both debuted at the festival. The latter, directed by frequent Coppola editor Anne Goursaud and ghost script-doctored by a well known indie scribe, finds Mickey Rourke at his puffiest in a production alternately threadbare and overblown.

As for world cinema, this year at Montreal one could catch up with Palme d'Or winner The Eel as well as Phillip Harel's Cannes competitor La Femme Defendue, a somewhat hoary French adultery drama enhanced by its subjective camera technique. Taking the point of view of its angst-ridden protagonist, an architect romantically fixated on a young girl, the film's cinematic fetishism -- the camera serenely gazes at the face of pretty lead Isabelle Carre for most of the its running time -- may seem somewhat old hat, but it's still fascinating to watch.

Remembering the raves out of Cannes for Bruno Dumont's La Vie de Jesus, a tale of nihilistic rural French youth, I misread my catalog and wandered into Bernard Bonvoisin's Les Demons de Jesus, a tale of nihilistic rural French youth. Bonvoisin's story, however, is set in the summer of '68, and with its assortment of tough-guy poseurs, is intended as both a neo-expressionist latter day Western as well as a mordant take on class politics. Inspired, Bonvoisin says, by John Ford and Abel Ferrara, the film is often way too cool (and narratively underdeveloped), but it does have moments in the second half where violent, complicated emotions are well realized on screen. Dumont's film, on the other hand, is a more consistent and stronger piece of filmmaking. A matter-of-fact, uninflected tale of an epileptic youth who kills an Arab in a stupid bout of racist jealousy, the film's serene study of small-town French life is both emotionally affecting as well as cruelly observant.

Montreal also saw the North American premiere of Stuart Urban's Preaching to the Perverted. Starring American indie icon Guinevere Turner -- and about a year's worth of Skin Two fashions -- the film is both an eye-catching portrait of London's S/M fetish club scene as well as a formulaic British satire that sends up a stock gallery of upper-class prudes and erotophobes. More deeply erotic, although in subtle and mysterious ways, was Sogo Ishii's Labyrinth of Dreams. Best known in America for his disquieting serial-killer thriller Angel Dust, Ishii here plays with radically quiet sound design and icily composed black-and-white images to tell a hauntingly classical ghost story. Alex Van Warmerdam's The Dress tells several different stories in a La Ronde-ish tale of several different owners of a colorfully printed dress. There's real humor and emotion in several of the episodes, but the film derails during a lengthy segment featuring the director as a violent stalker fixated on a young girl. Here, the film goes for one tonal change too many.

Montreal also featured an Iranian Cinema section, although local distributor politics kept Abbas Kiorastami's A Taste of Cherries from being screened. Well received was Majid Majidi's Competition film The Children of Heaven, a Montreal Miramax acquisition. I was only able to catch Mohammad-Ali Talebi's A Bag of Rice, a sort of "Iranian film lite." A young girl faces a series of misadventures when she and her grandmother travel by bus to buy a sack of rice. Although the film features a crowd-pleasing performance by the young girl, its brand of neorealism lacks the profundities of Jafar Panahi's similar The White Balloon.
 
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