The tone of the 36th edition of New Directors/New Films (March 21-April 1) might be encapsulated in the words of a character from
The Great World of Sound, a first feature by Craig Zobel: "Fuck 'fair.' Life ain't fair." In fact, if the miserabilist flavor of the festival is any indication, the world (hedge fund managers excepted) is not a happy place.
Many of the 26 films in the fest (a joint venture of the film department at the Museum of Modern Art and the Film Society of Lincoln Center), featured the proverbial little guy ground down by poverty, war, incarceration, or just old age. This parade of misfortune threatened to become a downer. But a couple of standouts —
Day Night Day Night [pictured above] by Julia Loktev and
Red Road by Andrea Arnold — transformed their grim content, through accumulated detail and the musique concrete of everyday sounds, into riveting cinematic realism. Both films are marked by icy control and withholding of crucial information. Both induce paranoia: either we’re under surveillance or menaced by a bomb. Both work an intimate canvas, while opening a panorama on big issues.
Day Night Day Night — Loktev’s astonishing first feature which became a fest talking point — follows a polite 19-year-old girl of unstated origins and motives as she's prepped by her handlers to become a suicide bomber, and then deposited in Times Square. The first half, shot in a leached light, watches the girl ritualistically wash, depilate, brush teeth. She barely speaks; it’s that awful light that voices her state of mind. Moments of gallows humor surface as the girl "models" a series of teen uniforms and knapsacks; and makes a bomber's final video, the handlers blotting a shiny nose and fitting her out with a cartridge belt, as if for a graduation photo.
But it's in the second half in Times Square, shot in raucous color, that Loktev gets all cylinders firing, staging a battle between mundane life — munching a sticky candied apple, the proximity of overweight tourists slung with cameras — and the heavenly rewards envisaged by the girl. In a laugh out loud sequence (yes, even in this context) a bling-laden dude hits on the girl, saying “Why don’t you love me — I'm somebody," a plaint that echoes throughout the fest.
In
Red Road from the U.K., Jackie (the superb Kate Dickie) works as a CCTV (closed circuit television) operator, scanning the mean streets around the Glasgow projects. One day she's jolted to discover a man from the past on her screen, apparently on parole from a 20-year prison sentence. Jackie stalks, then seduces him in a scheme to exact revenge for a crime revealed only in the third act.
If Loktev reels in the viewer with gallows humor, Arnold does so with a sex scene that had everyone talking in last year’s Cannes. That the woman is violating, in a sense, the man (for a change); that she’s both aroused and cratering with hate evokes a netherworld of eros seldom seen on screen. And by canting much of the story through CCTV, Arnold endows a tale of female rage with a larger resonance.
Though less powerful than Arnold's and Loktev's, other films in this internationalist lineup also documented “Life on the Margins.”
What the Sun has Seen from Michal Rosa is an omnibus tale involving several down-and-outers scrounging for money in southern Poland, whose lives eventually intertwine. It also typifies the miserabilist film that remains as dreary as the pain it documents. More engaging is
The Only One from Belgium's Geoffrey Enthoven, which indicts the ghetto that society erects for its aging population, extracting humor from the refusal of an ornery codger to be shunted into a nursing home, and his desire, at eighty, to kick up his heels.
Padre Nuestro (which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance) by talented Christopher Zalla plumbs the plight of Mexican illegals struggling to gain a foothold in the States. While getting trucked to New York, a wily teen steals another boy's money and letter of introduction to the father he's never seen, then passes himself off as the son. Though the plot is gimmicky, give Zalla credit for refusing to sentimentalize immigrant life, and exposing a subculture rife with mutual exploitation. He nails the feel of what it's like to be cast out, penniless and on the street. And his camera captures the gaunt whites and menacing shadows of neighborhoods where Hubert Selby's Tra La La (from
Last Exit to Brooklyn) might have felt at home. Like
Day Night Day Night, this film uses light to illuminate the heart of darkness.
All horrors pale, though, beside those unveiled in
War/Dance by husband and wife team Sean Fine and Andrea Nix Fine. In Northern Uganda, a rebel group has shattered the lives of three children, who now live in a large refugee camp. The film is part straight-to-camera testimonials from the children (one was forced to become an assassin), all the more wrenching for being voiced in neutral tones; and part rehearsals for a National Music Competition held in Kampala. Paradoxically, from the worst circumstances, the filmmakers have spun an upbeat mood — but the pandering, "personal best" note violates the suffering of these children.
A subset of “Life on the Margins” might be dubbed “The Great American Underbelly.” In
The Great World of Sound, a feature that plays like a doc, Craig Zobel casts a cold eye on hucksters looking to sucker amateur musicians out of $3,000 by promising to cut, then promote a CD. Martin and Clarence, the company's A-team, set up shop in cheesy motels across America to offer local "talent" a shot at the gold ring.
At the screening I attended, the audience laughed at the guys' ploys — "It's all about the song"; "Do me a favor and take a chance on your future" — to get singers to part with money they didn't have. I found the thing more appalling than funny. Zobel exposes a culture of workers so bummed by wretched jobs, they’re putty in the hands of scammers (who in turn get screwed). As in
Padre Nuestro, bottom feeders target an even lower link in the food chain — which made me think of Herbert Marcuse’s claim that the ruling class is invested in keeping the underclass at each other’s throats.
Audience of One, a doc by Michael Jacobs, inspects another dubious pocket of America. Richard Gazowsky, a pentecostal pastor, claims he’s been mandated by God to film a sci-fi blockbuster called
The Shadow of Joseph, with a projected budget of $50 million. Jacobs walks a fine line between mocking this spirited man’s aspirations — as well as a congregation with crosses tattooed on their hands, and the borderline types he casts in the film — and treating the pastor's endeavor with respect. Though it's windy in the way of many docs — just because it's real doesn't make it watchable — Gazowsky exemplifies the tenacity and, yes, insanity necessary for any creative person, religious or otherwise, struggling to get their dream out in the world.
So what about love? While last year’s ND/NF offered a slew of odd couples, this year
l'amour was in short supply. Is the world of emerging filmmakers too embattled for such luxuries? An exception was
Euphoria from Russian playwright Ivan Vyrypaev, the strangest, most gorgeous film of the series (though I heard it dismissed as "arty”).
From the opening scene of a motorcyclist zooming toward us with a mad grin, accordion music clanging (the guy never appears again, by the way) we're on unfamiliar ground. At the center is the adulterous passion of a couple, who wander the Russian steppes in some demented remake of
Elvira Madigan. “Since they have never been taught to love and to be loved,” says the director, “they cannot cope with the euphoria that has seized them." In an instance of the film’s impudent tone, the lover says, "Don't worry about your husband, I'll kill him if necessary.” Unscrolling in some Wild West of the heart,
Euphoria bears re-watching — in one haunting shot, the lover lies in a boat under the stars, gliding diagonally up the screen. And the desolate landscape, with its curving River Don and roads cut into the land like the "earth work" art of Walter de Maria, acts as a fourth character.
From Argentinian filmmaker Alexis Dos Santos comes
Glue, which could be subtitled "Horndogs in Patagonia." Lyrical, hormone-addled, and largely improvised, the film turns digital video into a painter’s brush. In one scene, three teens sit around giggling, witless — a mobile hanging in the face of one — talking about absolutely nothing. Perfect! Never separated from his red knapsack with raccoon tail, Dos Santos charmed the audience at the festival’s public screenings, which include often revelatory Q&A’s with the artists.
Jean-Pascal Hattu based
7 Years on stories collected from women involved with men in the slammer. The erotic triangle formed by a woman, her husband, and a warden is not so much kinky as a desperate strategy to build bridges between a cruelly separated couple. The acting is impeccable; Hattu is a talent to watch. The much-touted
Once, from Irish director John Carney, follows two broke musicians, who launch a career together and edge toward love. I found it enervating, but at least it didn't wrap up in the way viewers were primed to expect.
Not surprisingly, several films explored the search for roots and origins. In
Cowboy Angels, a misfire by Kim Massee, a neglected boy launches a search for his dad, but the studio concept on an indie budget made an unhappy mix. Far more engaging was Congorama from Belgian Philippe Falardeau, about a man's search for his birth parents in francophone Canada. Demanding much of the viewer, this convoluted journey — that at moments has its head up its ass — deconstructs the whole notion of narrative. Catch it for the great Olivier Gourmet alone, whose myopic gaze suggests he's trying — vainly — to figure out why he was put on earth. The feature
Stealth by Swiss Lionel Baier sends a young man named Lionel to Poland to unearth his origins. Part of the fun is figuring out which is the actual Baier and which is a screen persona.
A writer’s character comes to life, causing no end of trouble, in Paul Auster’s slumberous
The Inner Life of Martin Frost, which kicked-off ND/NF. What likely worked as a print parable about the writer’s psyche got lost in translation to the screen. A zippier take on the writer’s life is
Reprise from Norwegian Joachim Trier. When two young men launch careers as scribblers, one perseveres, the other goes bonkers. Rather than the story per se, what’s original is the cheeky form, flouting linear time, winging it with voiceovers, wandering off on hypothetical riffs, and generally thwarting expectation at every turn. Whew! Exhausting. That Trier is a former skate board champ helps explain the twisty momentum of this film.
Labels: Festivals
# posted by Webmaster @ 4/23/2007 01:36:00 PM
