MIFF 2005 FILM FESTIVAL NOTEBOOK
By Joel Johnson
DAY 2
Day 2 kicked off with the 2005 Screenwriters Panel at 11:00 a.m. on
Saturday, July 16th. The Johnsons kicked off their Day 2 by arriving at the
Screenwriters Panel at 11:10. We probably mostly missed the formal
introduction of the panel members and learned what accomplishments they had
been achieved that warranted their selection to this panel. By the time that
we arrived they were, nonetheless, well ensconced in discussing an integral
part of the process of turning a writer’s script into a film. That integral
part of the process is making “the pitch” or simply “pitching.” For New
Englanders, the word “pitching” tends to conjure up the perennial weakness
of our beloved Boston Red Sox. In the world of film and television, it is
the “pitch” the sells individual scripts, whole concepts for television
series, and the individual writer as a valuable talent. Jeffrey Sweet, who
would be leading the two screenwriting workshops all afternoon on Saturday
and then again on Sunday morning, emphasized the importance of being able to
include a vivid visual description in the pitch. Lorraine Turgeon emphasized
the different pitches needed depending to whom you are pitching. She also
shared the very many opportunities to pitch one’s story ideas or scripts.
Many film festivals have screenwriting contests as does MIFF. She cited the
Austin Film Festival as having an emphasis on the role of the screenwriter.
She also described “pitchfests” that demand writers be able to distill their
sales pitch down to just a couple of minutes. Phil Lasker, a successful TV
writer with Golden Girls as well as a film screenwriter, emphasized knowing
your pitch audience and believing that the pitchee really wants to like your
script. The final filmmaker describing the pitch process was Maine-based
filmmaker Huey. His presentation about pitching included a five-minute video
of footage he had shot for his film Wilderness And Spirit: A Mountain Called
Katahdin that he had used to secure financing for it. As a documentarian, he
can not provide the shape for the final film by providing a script that
would be the blueprint for a fiction feature film. It was also significant
to note that Huey had made a presentation to a group of local individuals
who have supported various arts and described it as a good day raising $20,
000. Even the low-budget projects the others were talking about would run
into the millions. Unfortunately, we were not able to attend more than about
45 minutes of the panel in order for us to catch our movies.
Land of Plenty
Wim Wender’s Land of
Plenty was my first film of the day. The main character is a young woman
named Lana (Michelle Williams) who is coming home to the United States in
2002. She has been raised by missionary parents mostly in Africa, but is
coming from Israel. We will eventually see her exchange e-mail with Israeli
and Palestinian friends about a variety of topics including the peace
movement and boyfriends. She will work as a missionary at a homeless shelter
in Los Angeles. She also has another mission. We are also introduced to a
middle-aged man named Paul (John Diehl) patrolling Los Angeles looking for
suspicious activity that may be related to the terrorists who perpetrated
September 11th. He spies a young Middle Eastern-looking man receiving boxes
marked “Borax.” Paul follows him in hot pursuit, but somehow loses him.
Eventually, the worlds of the three characters Lana, Paul, and Hassan will
intersect. A tragedy will occur. The film meanders and many audience members
will likely be anxious for the film to get on with it, but the film is a
meditation on faith, family, forgiveness, poverty, hunger, the war against
terrorism, and the Vietnam War. It has its own statements to make, but it
most wants us to think about the issues. Michelle Williams is very appealing
as a young woman who could be anyone’s daughter, anyone’s niece, anyone’s
friends’ daughter, and anyone’s friend. John Diehl takes a role that could
be monstrous and gives it a big helping of humanity. I liked this film quite
a bit.
The Ballad of Jack and Rose
The next
film was Rebecca Miller’s The Ballad of Jack and Rose. We had seen
this film a couple months ago and so were seeing it for the second time. It
certainly held up for a second viewing and is very much a multi-layered film
that despite the painful issues at its heart is very compassionate to each
of its characters. Miller has been able to get outstanding performances from
her actors and during the post-film Q and A credited their efforts in making
the film work. Different actors just might not be able to make the
characters in the script at all convincing. The primary responsibility for
this belongs to Daniel Day-Lewis as Jack and newcomer Camilla Belle as Rose,
but Miller also specifically acknowledged the work of Catherine Keener as
Jack’s girlfriend Kathleen whom he invites to come live with him without
consulting Rose and Ryan McDonald as Kathleen’s aspiring hairdresser son
Rodney.
Nathalie
Anne Fontaine’s film
Nathalie is a very interesting film. It is powered by three terrific
performances by Fanny Ardant, Emmanuelle Béart, and Gerard Depardieu.
Depardieu plays an understated role as Bernard, a businessman caught in a
dalliance by his wife Catherine (Fanny Ardant). Convinced her husband is a
conniving serial adulterer, she hires Beart’s Marlène, a prostitute, to be
Nathalie and Nathalie’s assignment is to entrap him into an affair. We see
Nathalie make her initial approach to Bernard. Soon we are treated to a
dance as Catherine tries to solicit Nathalie’s tales of the affair with
Nathalie alternately withholding and then disclosing the lurid details.
Soon, however, the worlds of Catherine’s daily domestic life and the shadowy
world of sex-for-hire begin to intertwine. The film deals as one might
expect with some unsavory aspects of sexuality, but the actors make the film
entirely compelling. It is both sexy and thought-provoking.
Le Goût des Jeunes Filles
Our final
film was John L’Ecuyer’s Le Goût des Jeunes Filles based on Dany
Laferriere’s script from of his own book. Laferriere is a Haitian émigré
living in Quebec and the film is a Quebecois production shot in Guadeloupe
about coming of age in Papa Doc Duvalier’s Haiti. The film is set in 1971
and Papa Doc has just passed away. There is uncertainty on the island and
Duvalier’s Tonton Macoute is definitely on edge about potential opposition.
After a run-in with one drunken Tonton Macoute, the author’s alter ego
Fanfan, a budding scholar, takes shelter at the house of the beautiful Miki
and her beautiful girlfriends. These young women use their charms to get
what they want from various male admirers, including members of the Tonton
Macoute. That Fanfan is just across the street from his home where his
mother widowed by the loss of his father at the hands of the Tonton Macoute
is waiting heart-broken add to the emotional brew of overheated adolescent
sexual desire and abject terror. The film feels a little lighter than some
of the violence and terror might lead one to expect. It feels much more like
a confection than a taut drama, but then the adolescent imagination often
overplays the drama of one’s own life. The film has to step lightly between
dangers that are both real and imagined. The lovely young women, especially
delightful Koumba Bell as Miki, certainly amply provide the sexually
provocative enticement that is powerful for Fanfan and the rest of Haiti’s
menfolk.
Additional Capsule Reviews of MIFF Films
Festival
Jim and Tom Isler spent eight
days in March, 2004, with Dede Waite’s Theater Company at Falmouth High
School as they prepared for and then performed at the Maine State Drama
Festival. Falmouth High School is one of the premier drama programs in Maine
having advanced from regional competitions to the State Drama Festival eight
times in the last 10 years with four state titles. The drama competition
places rigorous time parameters on both cast and crew. The crew have a
maximum of five minutes to prepare the set for the performance and the play
must not exceed 40 minutes in length. Exceeding those time-frames means the
team will be disqualified. The film is basically slices of the experience
shared by Waite and her charges over those eight days. The film has no
narrator and just a handful of captions. We see them backstage working on
the set, doing make-up and costumes in the dressing rooms, working in
rehearsal, talking about the competition, waiting to perform, and goofing
around. Waite is an intense, demanding, confident, and supportive director.
These are characteristics shared by her cast and crew. Those expecting the
film to cover more or less equally all of the competitors in the Festival
will be disappointed. The film shows only a few seconds of the plays being
performed by the other schools. We do get to see several excerpts from The
Theater Company at Falmouth High School’s production of The Good Doctor
which is Neil Simon’s imagining of Chekhov creating his plays. The film does
capture Waite’s personality and she was clearly comfortable enough with the
filmmakers that she makes some fairly candid statements. The students were
also pretty comfortable, but it is clear that they sometimes seemed to feel
the need to play to the camera as opposed to the camera simply recording
what was happening. The only time the point of view changed to someone
outside the Falmouth camp was when the judges are seen giving feedback.
Veteran MIFF attendees will recognize Tom Misner, former director of the
Waterville Opera House, as one of the three judges. This is not a film about
some stupendous accomplishment. At the risk of dating myself, this is
neither the “Impossible Dream” nor the “Miracle Mets.” The students and
their director simply work hard at being part of stage production. The
ending is a little confusing. However, when young people and schools are
attacked as being “no good,” this film stands as a document for what young
people can focus on and accomplish.
Winterwalk 2003
Home video record of an arduous 385 miles
snowshoe trip across northern Labrador during winter and early spring while
hauling toboggans loaded with two hundred or more pounds of food and gear.
You think Maine has long, cold winter? It’s nothing compared with Labrador!
There are some interesting and comic bits where one gets a feel for the
difficulties of living in this environment just doing the most basic of
survival tasks. However, it is clear that the video was something extra that
was done after all the other tasks were completed. One videographer even
confessed as to how shooting the video was getting him out of doing other
work. The video lacks a consistent focus and no one seems to have had much
thought about using the video to tell a comprehensive story. There is no
explanation as to why people are doing this trip nor what they expected to
accomplish by doing it. Admittedly, just being able to say that one did this
is a significant accomplishment. This is a film for those who really love
outdoor adventure or those craving cooling relief from a rare Maine tropical
heat wave.
Beauty Academy of Kabul
Liz Mermin’s
documentary may be as important a documentary as will be seen at this year’s
MIFF. It shows the challenges faced in dealing with and within Islamic
societies. The movie illustrates the devastation of Afghanistan through more
than 30 years of political unrest and 25 years of outright war against the
Soviets, the Americans, and, most frequently, against each other. The
destruction of buildings and infrastructure is so severe that it underscores
how we have failed in the rebuilding process after our initial victory.
Afghanistan is an insular country that has maintained the traditional way of
life that it had had for centuries. In the last century or so, this
traditional society has had to cope with the challenges to those traditions
presented by the modern world. However, unlike an insular nation like Japan
in the 19th century that embraced the advances offered by the West,
Afghanistan has an entrenched cultural and religious resistance to the
progress touted in the West. The Taliban can be seen as a counterrevolution
to reverse and punish the apostasy of what one of this film’s Afghan
expatriates refers to as progressive period during the 70’s when women
wearing miniskirts worked in offices. There may be no greater flashpoint for
deeply traditional Islamic societies and the West than in the roles of
women. The Beauty Academy of Kabul, started by near evangelical American
beauticians and expatriate Afghans, brought an opportunity for women to
serve a market that had just been liberated from the repression of the
Taliban. The film clearly shows that the desire to be aesthetically pleasing
resides within the individual. Choices in style and fashion to maximize
one’s appearance may be affected by the opinions of others, but clearly
Afghan women felt empowerment through their appearance even when the men in
their lives and society at large disapproved and punished them. That Afghani
women palpably feel oppressed and fear the wrath of their husbands, fathers,
and brothers as the rule and not the exception provided a major educational
experience for the American teachers. The film also showed how, despite
their good intentions, the American instructors frequently started with
considerable ignorance of Afghani society and sometimes appeared to be
cultural imperialists foisting their American ideas onto their charges. The
Afghani women bore much of this with good humor and showed obvious
enthusiasm for the training and the work. They were delightful subjects who
were impressive in their devotion to their families, their dedication to
their craft, and their simple humanity. That humanity “healing their nation
one person, one woman at a time” is cause for optimism. Yet it is also
striking how Western values as romantic love and gender equality seem
virtually preposterous to the Afghani women. This is a sobering reminder of
the challenge we face in our ongoing efforts to win the peace in
Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere.
Day 3 -->
