2006 MIFF FILM REVIEWS (Part 2)
By Joel
Johnson
13 (TZAMETI)—This movie is a midnight,
moonless and power-out dark (something we literally experienced the evening
we saw this film) pulsating thriller. Director Géla Babluani has fashioned
this moody film from a disquieting score, murky black and white
cinematography, terrific ensemble acting headed by the director’s brother
George, and his own spare script centered on a most horrendous premise.
Sébastien (George Babluani) is an immigrant barely surviving in France doing
odd jobs, and when it looks like he won’t be paid for his most recent job,
he decides to follow instructions for an opportunity intended for his
recently deceased employer. What Sébastien finds is grotesque and hellish. A
certain Michael Cimino film comes to mind. If one accepts the film’s central
premise, there will be few films that could reproduce this film’s riveting
emotional power. I personally found the premise to be so extreme as to
stretch beyond the bounds of credibility. However, how often have the limits
of human depravity been found shocking? Countless times. We will definitely
hear and see more from Géla Babluani. We may well have the opportunity to
see this film remade in English as it is currently in the film gestation
process called “in development.”
Children’s Shorts—
After seeing 13(TZAMETI), we decided to skip the concentration camp
film KZ in search of something a little lighter and settled on the
five short films (Mr. Mergler’s Gift, Through My Thick Glasses,
The Ballad of the Purple Clam, The Man Who Walked Between the
Towers, and Catfish Blues) grouped together in one screening as
Children’s Shorts. Mr. Mergler’s
Gift is about a young Chinese girl
who serendipitously becomes the last and most extraordinary piano student of
Mr. Mergler, who is dying from cancer. The gift is meant both ways as one
given and one received. While not inappropriate for children, this would
seem to be a film much more targeted for adults and certainly not for very
young children. The animated Norwegian-Canadian coproduction Through My
Thick Glasses has a grandfather telling his granddaughter about his
childhood experiences during World War II just to get her to put on a hat
before going out in the middle of winter. It starts out a bit slow and
really doesn’t get going until his auntie starts kicking butt to save his
bacon.
The Ballad of the Purple Clam
is a Maine short with a revenge theme suggesting the Moby-Dick of the
mudflats. This clearly is one of the festival favorites. Some folks have
been following it around the festival, seeing it three times. The Man Who
Walked Between the Towers is a terrific animated version of a
true adventure story. As an acrophobe, I found myself better able to deal
with 13 (TZAMETI) than walking a wire between the towers of the World
Trade Center. The kids seemed to fare better than I did. Please heed this
advisory: Don’t try this at home or anywhere else for that matter.
Catfish Blues is the animated story of a twelve-year-old black boy
heading off to Memphis and Chicago to become a big-time jazz musician,
encountering racism and prejudice along the way. This final film has some
material that could be quite disturbing, but the film touches on this
material briefly, spending much more time on the boy’s family and on his
music.
PUENTE DE VARSÓVIA—Pere Portabella’s
Puente de Varsóvia (Warsaw Bridge) is a strange sort of film that
has elliptical storylines, an abundance of odd and beautiful images, lots of
terrific music, and fires off ideas about as quickly as an automatic weapon.
Before you get the wrong impression, I must admit that I do not actually
know what this film is all about. This is definitely an “ideas and images”
film that some critics will find absolutely irresistible. It could take a
few viewings to be able to put this together into something resembling a
coherent narrative, and it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that no one has
been able put together all the puzzle pieces. It has a large cast of
characters—some who look a lot alike and few who are introduced by name.
They come and go and then some show up again and again. Portabella provides
some images that may have not ever been in a film before. This is not for
film viewers who want a straightforward story and do not want to have to do
a postmortem on the film just to figure out what it was about. I would like
to see this film again, but I would try to see it relatively early in the
day when I was fresh and not as the last film of a long day.
SARDAR—Director Bolat Kalymbetov’s
film is an epic that blends history and folktales. Inspired by heroic
tales of Sardars (warriors) of yore, three boys decide to defend Kazakh
nomads from the rapacious Junglars. The story jumps in time, and the boys
become young men. They seek to find fathers who have joined the fight before
them. Eventually they will free a princess captured by their enemies. Two of
the young men will be smitten by her, and this will lead to tragedy.
Sardar is a gorgeous film with terrific natural beauty as the setting
for the film’s action, and there is plenty of swashbuckling action. Due to
the source material being folktales and the episodic quality of the film,
non-Kazakh audiences may feel somewhat disoriented. This probably won’t be
helped by some abrupt editing and sequences that the subtitles seem to have
neglected. It is worth noting, however, that the subtitles that are there
are very readable without any obvious mistranslations. The acting is
occasionally wooden and non-Kazakh audiences may wish for more character
development as this epic unfolds in a relatively economical ninety-five
minutes. This will not be the easiest foreign film for American audiences,
but its action-oriented story about an unfamiliar Eurasian people should
keep their attention once they are in the theater. The challenge would be
getting them there.
THE HIGHWAY (TRASSA)—Director Sabit
Kurmanbekov’s short The Highway (Trassa) screens with Sardar.
This is a twenty-five minute film without dialogue, showing a man just
waiting in his car by the side of the road in the middle of a desert having
a series of encounters with passers-by, including the police, a traveling
salesman, and a wedding. There’s no real narrative, but the film does have
nice cinematography and some humor. It probably could use a little more
humor and a little shorter running time.
THE HOUSE OF SAND—Andrucha Waddington’s
The House of Sand immediately announces itself as a special movie
with its opening aerial shots of the sand dunes of northern Brazil’s coastal
desert. The cinematography of Ricardo Della Rosa is absolutely sensational.
The film is a three-generation story written by Elena Soarez, Luiz Carlos
Barreto, and Andrucha Waddington for real-life
mother and daughter actresses Fernanda Montenegro (1999 Best Actress Oscar
nominee for Central Station) and Fernanda Torres. They play mother,
daughter, and granddaughter at different stages of their lives (the film is
set in three time frames, from 1910 to 1969). The two lead actresses deliver
terrific performances and receive solid supporting work from the rest of the
ensemble. I have to say that when I first read about the storyline for this
film and learned that it was deliberately paced, I was concerned that the
audience would feel that they had been wandering lost in the desert for
fifty-nine years. Although the characters have ambivalence about their time
in the desert, Waddington and company give the film a steady pace that never
lets the audience feel abandoned there. I have seen several films during the
festival that I have either enjoyed a great deal or admired for the quality
of the filmmaking (this includes some that I did not particularly enjoy),
but so far this is the first film that swept me away with both a moving
story and its filmmaking craft.
MY BROTHER…NIKHIL—Although American
films have been addressing AIDS and homosexuality for a couple decades,
Director Onir’s My Brother…Nikhil is a groundbreaking film for Indian
cinema in doing this. Although the film is purportedly based on a true
story, the Indian authorities insisted that it open with a statement that it
is fiction. It tells what happens when a young man is found to be
HIV-positive and how Indian families and society fail to support those with
HIV infection. Nikhil is a golden boy who is the pride of his family,
succeeding athletically, academically, and musically. His life totally falls
apart, and he is even quarantined by the authorities after he is discovered
to be HIV-positive. The moral implications of the behavior that transmits
HIV makes Nikhil a dubious character for Indian society and, most painfully,
for his parents. Though he does have a few close friends, including Nigel,
with whom it is suggested he has a homosexual relationship, his strongest
support comes from his sister Anamika. The film intersperses vignettes from
Nikhil’s life with direct testimony from family and friends about their
memories of Nikhil and their feelings about their relationship with him.
These sequences are very poignant, but the acting does occasionally seem
quite forced when the film is trying to give us the happy banter of family
gatherings. There is a theme song that floats through the film that starts
to feel hackneyed. This is a film that has noble intentions though somewhat
faulty execution.
1/2
PARINEETA—Pradeep Sarkar’s Parineeta
revisits traditional Indian themes of personal desires filtered through
family loyalty and romance confounded by the stark realities of the Indian
class system. Based on a 1914 novel by Saratchandra Chattopadhyay, the film
has been set in 1962 Calcutta and deals with a family with three beautiful
girls trying to survive economically. There are a rich businessman
Navinchandra Roy (Sabyasachi
Chakravarthy),
to whom the first family is deeply in debt, and his musician son Shekhar (Saif
Ali Khan), who has had a relationship since childhood with Lolita (Vidya
Balan), one of the girls. Navin disapproves of both his son’s music career
and Lolita. Navin is especially anxious to foreclose on his neighbor’s home
because he wants to convert it into a hotel. As if we couldn’t already
figure out that Navin was up to no good, his deep rich bass voice is
regularly accompanied by a thunderclap whenever he’s being mean spirited and
evil. There’s a wealthy older suitor for Lolita, and Shekhar is the target
of a manipulative potential bride who is the daughter of Navin’s wealthiest
business associate. Although the film has multiple songs and a few
production numbers, the film is a little more reticent than the typical
Bollywood production about just having the characters break out in song.
Much of the music is woven into Shekhar’s life as a musician, and the
production numbers come from visiting nightspots. Typical of Bollywood, the
film heavily lays on the melodrama and clearly goes over the top in a scene
where Shekhar literally and figuratively breaks through the barriers erected
by his father. The two leads are both attractive and sympathetic. The film
begins at a wedding ceremony and, predictably, the film eventually allows
the right couple to be wed.
RANG DE BASANTI—Rakesh
Omprakash Mehra’s
Rang de Basanti covers a lot of territory in delivering a very serious
message that provides an opportunity for Bollywood films to expand to beyond
the usual audiences. First of all, the film begins in England with a young
Englishwoman, filmmaker Sue McKinney (Alice Patten), deciding to come to
India to make a film about the Indian Independence movement during the
1920s. She has been inspired by diaries written by her grandfather (Steven
Mackintosh) about the courage and ideals of the young freedom fighters that
he encountered as part of the British Empire. She finally recruits a group
of young Indians to portray the characters in her docudrama, but they are
Indian “slackers.” They are more interested in girls, beer, music, and
parties than the ideals that motivated the characters they play. They feel
alienated from the Indian political process because they feel it is
hopelessly corrupt and impossible to improve. Gradually, they find a
contemporary injustice that helps them imbue the spirit of the
revolutionaries. Along the way, the film is playfully hedonistic and follows
the development of two romances. These are probably the most conventional,
music-filled Bollywood sequences. We also see abundant flashbacks of the
attempts of the British to suppress the nascent movement for Indian
Independence and the individual roles of the characters in Sue’s film. These
sections are sepia toned with a soft focus. We periodically see the news
coverage of a government scandal that unfolds into the tragedy that takes
over the film. The film is quite violent and without equivocation calls for
people to take responsibility for the political system around them to
address injustice. This is a much more contemporary and universal political
message than usual for Bollywood films. It is certainly open to
interpretation as to what role the filmmakers may see for violence in this
process. Sue had been a catalyst for awakening her friends to an
appreciation for having ideals and standing up for them, but she is clearly
a bystander at the film’s denouement. This is a long film with a lot of
elements to balance, which it mostly does with aplomb, so that the dramatic
payoff—despite some blatantly predictable developments—is worth the wait.
Not only that, but the film’s message will root around in one’s brain long
after leaving the theater.
1/2
GYPO —Jan Dunn’s Gypo is the
first British “Dogme” film, which means that it follows strict guidelines
for making a film “real” and not a product of Hollywood filmmaking tricks.
This can be very successful with stories that need intimacy and documentary
realism. This film is about families and how we treat outsiders. The
outsiders are gypsies from the Czech Republic who are subject to
discrimination and abuse because they threaten to take jobs away from the
natives even while there are employers all too willing to exploit the
immigrants with lower wages. If this sounds familiar, this part of the film
could have been done anywhere in the United States with immigrants from
Mexico and Central America. The film also features a neglected and abused
middle-aged wife dealing with her struggling family. She unexpectedly finds
love with a young gypsy woman. The Dogme filmmaking style is somewhat
distracting, but eventually the storylines are woven into a powerfully
moving story. The film follows first the wife (Pauline McLynn), then the
husband (Paul McGann), and finally the young gypsy named Tasha (Chloe Sirene).
The rest of the cast looked a bit familiar—but my wife and I watch a fair
amount of British television. This won a British Independent Film Award for
Best Achievement in Production and it is easy to see why it was chosen to be
so recognized. This deserves to find an audience, and I hope to see this
again.
1/2
