The mountain came to Mohamed.
I picked up a bug that lingered and made me miserable. But I had accepted the honor of being a juror for the Kieslowski Prize at the 31st Starz Denver Film Festival, which began last week and runs through November 22. Only six foreign-language films were competing for our votes, and, either at other festivals or through the kindness of European sales agents, I had seen them all. (The prize is sponsored by Screen, for which I am a reviewer.) Something told me I should cover myself as a journalist just in case I didn’t heal in time, since I had promised to cover the event. So I made a list of films I hadn’t seen (many I had viewed at other fests) that seemed of particular interest and asked for screeners, which I received. In fact, I watched most of them on my laptop in the hospital.
Ultimately, I didn’t make it to Colorado. We did our jury deliberation over the phone (winner announced this weekend, sorry). And I am keeping my word about writing on the festival—without attending. Which begs the question, why go to festivals, especially ones with few or no premieres, unless you live in that city and it’s your only shot at seeing the stuff that’s being packed and repacked in film cans and sent all over the world that year?
That’s a big topic, but I want to make clear that the reason I offered to write something is that, once I saw the festival’s website, I realized this fest is a huge cut above the usual regional festival (even if such bland regional films as Donal Mosher and Michael Palmieri’s
October Country, Bill Ross and Turner Ross’s
45365, and Hue Rhodes’s
Saint John of Las Vegas did little to enhance the genre), with provocative programming, useful panels, and career awards given for talent—Ed Harris, avant-gardist Ernie Gehr, Hal Holbrook, and J.K. Simmons--rather than for generating media buzz. It is greener than any other festival I know, and it is the only one to my knowledge with an “animation station.” They do have a red carpet, but I doubt anyone there takes it too seriously.
More than that, I know Denver well enough to have expected a sizable Latin American selection (it has a large Mexican community), but I was shocked to find that so many of the best films were from the East (Eastern Europe, the Near East, the Middle East). I’m not sure of the reasons (and why the Kieslowski Prize there?), but who cares? Few worthwhile films from Western Europe and from the U.S. indie scene were in the mix, though you might have expected otherwise.
It’s gratifying to know that an audience in a city of Denver's size not only attends the eastern movies, they go year-round to the seven-screen Starz Film Center to view alternative cinema. (I do hope the docs they show during the year are a cut above the interesting but formless, tv-like ones screened during the festival, like
William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe, by the leftist lawyer’s daughters Emily Kunstler and Sarah Kunstler;
American Faust: From Condi to Neo-Condi, by British documentarian Sebastian Doggart; and Barbara Brancaccio and Joshua Zeman’s limp
Cropsey, about a series of murders on Staten Island.) After all, don’t we like to think that such relatively esoteric fare is appreciated only on the coasts? I don’t know them, but the programmers there cast a wide net and are open to what many middle Americans would find…strange. And you thought the host town of the 2008 Democratic Convention was merely an isolated case of urban sprawl that ends with the Rocky Mountains.
The finest of the Spanish-language films are from Mexico, as you might expect. That all involve the financial underpinnings of survival comes as no surprise, but all classes—and levels of desperation--are covered. Rigoberto Perezcano’s
Northless is a very accomplished debut. A young man, Andres, with a family in Oaxaca arrives in Tijuana with the intent of sneaking into the U.S. to work and send money back home. Perezcano does something clever here while Andres stops in Tijuana and works in a small family store. The narrative could have just bypassed that period but instead Perezcano studies the dynamics of Mexicans in roughly the same boat, sensitive people whose lives are on hold either because they are waiting to cross, or they are hoping, mostly in vain, that a loved one who made it over will return for them. This is a lovely, poignant film that accepts the sociological constraints hovering over its characters, nice people who have a zest for life but no assurance what it might bring them day to day.
In
The Tree, by Carlos Serrano Azcona, Santiago lacks Andres’s firm goal. He is a Mexican slacker in Madrid, just out of a badly failed marriage, unemployed, aimless. He moves with the speed of a slug. This quiet masterpiece valorizes the quotidian in all our lives, no matter how trivial it may seem to others. It is part of our own personal paths toward something: in Santiago’s case, salvation.
Ariel Gordon's
Black Box is more sophisticated. Its characters are from higher classes, tied up in big business, which implies corruption and dirty tricks. A slick con man whose bio is presented through animation and step printing hires a businessman to kill the president. He knows the man has a family and a terminal disease, and convinces him that his wife and children will be cared for. The desperate man accepts, quits, accepts, quits: He wants to have his cake and eat it, too. The con man is experienced, he knows all the tricks, but still, something about their sparring gets to him and the two bond and recognize their similarities.
Not that the region didn’t provide it’s share of clunkers as well. The worst film I’ve ever seen is Alberto Cortes’s
Heart of Time, a déjà vu propaganda piece out of Chiapas wrapped in a trite love story.
Except for Andrea Arnold’s Loachian
Fish Tank, from Scotland, and Dutch director Esther Rots’s surprisingly effective psychological thriller
Can Go Through Skin, the western European fare was unimpressive. So many festivals showcase them to a fault, this is not a cardinal sin; in fact, it’s refreshing. But Noud Heerkens’s Dutch movie
Last Conversation, its main idea of a single character driving and speaking stolen from Kiarostami, is as much a fraud as a bore. And Italian screenwriter-turned-filmmaker Gianni di Grigorio’s fluffy
Mid-August Lunch, about a middle-aged man stuck preparing a big dinner for some lovable old ladies, begs for you to adore it, even if it has RAI television written over every frame.
At the other extreme is
Film Ist. A Girl & a Gun, Austrian director Gustav Deutsch’s forced collection of archival footage to make some vague point about sex and death in early cinema. Playing a burnt-out actress with heavy psychological baggage, the great Danish actress Paprika Steen nearly saves Martin Pieter Zandvliet’s lazy
Applause, which would evaporate without her presence. And the French master Andre Techine is represented by
The Girl on the Train, a beautifully made if overscripted story about a non-Jewish teen who pretends she has been mistaken for a Jew and is the victim of a hate crime.
Things get so much better the further east we go. Marek Najbrt’s
Protector, from the Czech Republic, is a revelation. Frantic film noir is the appropriate style for this ‘40s-set movie centered on a married couple whose happiness is marred by the politics of the Nazi occupation. She is a Jewish actress, and her fortunes slide; he is a well-known non-Jewish radio personality whose latent opportunism serves him well under new masters. The structuring absence is the assassination of Heydrich, but it is way in the background, the better to foreground the main characters and some of their unusual acquaintances, each of whom has a different way of coping with the new leadership.
Andrey Khrzhanovsky is a Russian animator who fuses live action, animation, and doc footage in the lovely nostalgic piece
A Room and a Half, or a Sentimental Journey to the Homeland. The film’s conceit is that poet Joseph Brodsky makes a trip back to the Soviet Union after his expulsion, something that never happened, but which provides Khrzhanovsky an opportunity to observe life there over several decades through the eyes of Brodsky. The only child clearly adored his parents, and like all Russians, he adored Mother Russia.
A Man Who Ate His Cherries, by Iranian filmmaker Payman Haghani—we’re still east--is one of the discoveries of the festival. Like many good Iranian films today, it tells of an individual’s persistence in the face of adversity. Reza is a worker who must pay back his wife’s dowry in a nasty divorce settlement but hasn’t the money. He is being milked, but is stuck, and tries every possible avenue to resolve the dilemma. But there is no solution, especially in this society in which lots of laws and customs make little sense. He resorts to a dangerous scam to get the funds. The film is beautifully shot, and we fully identify with Reza by movie’s end.
A special mention: Damien Chazelle’s American indie film
Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench premiered at Tribeca. I’m not sure why it wasn’t in Sundance: This is the finest U.S. indie movie of the past year. Shot in black and white in Boston and New York, it is cinema as music, both in topic and in form, a blend of classical Hollywood musical, New Wave homage to the Hollywood musical, beatnik movie, city symphony film, and handheld camera verite—all colored by a Cassavetes-like sensibility. Some characters sing their parts: It’s ballsy, but it works. The narrative isn’t heavy, it’s more like…jazz, or blues, the three main characters living life as best they can and rolling with the punches. Justin Hurwitz’s score is exceptional, and lead Jason Palmer plays a mean trumpet.
-- Howard Feinstein
# posted by Howard Feinstein @ 11/18/2009 01:30:00 AM
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