MIFF 2004 FILM FESTIVAL NOTEBOOK
By Joel Johnson
DAY 3
By Joel Johnson
Well, here we are at day 3 of the Maine International Film Festival. Alice
and I have decided to each check out different films. I decide to try
Zhou Yu’s Train featuring Chinese
star Gong Li and Guy Maddin’s Cowards Bend the Knee, while Alice will
watch the Maine-made Baby, It’s Cold Outside and the Korean film
Invisible Light. We then will watch the Naked Proof together
before heading to the Waterville Opera House to watch the Empire Falls
clips and Pollock as part of the MIFF tribute to Ed Harris.
Zhou Yu’s Train
China, 2004 97 Min. 35mm In Mandarin
with English subtitles
1/2
Zhou Yu’s Train is a very beautiful looking film. This is partly due
to the presence of the beautiful first lady of Chinese cinema Gong Li, but
the film also provides a lot of attractive scenery, both rural and urban, from
China. Gong Li plays two roles. She plays Zhou Yu, the title character, and
also Xiu, a young woman who is reading the book of poetry entitled Zhou
Yu’s Train and retracing the story. Zhou Yu is an artisan who paints on
porcelain. Zhou Yu falls in love with Chen Ching, a librarian and aspiring
poet, and she travels by train twice a week to be with him for passionate
trysts. It is also on the train that she first meets Zhang Jiang, a
veterinarian. Her relationship with the shy poet Chen Ching begins to falter
when Zhou Yu begins to promote his poetry. She sets up readings to which no
one comes and makes plans to finance publishing his book. He seems to be
uncomfortable with the added attention and with having someone else
directing his life. Though, when the government decides to cut positions
where he works and offers openings in Tibet, he accepts the transfer. Zhang
takes an interest in Zhou Yu and seems to be able to rearrange his life on
the spur-of-the-moment to serve as her guardian angel and friend—this
initially platonic relationship eventually turns romantic. The film consists
of multiple scenes that cut back and forth from these characters with little
context cues as to their chronological sequence. One is always a bit
unsettled as to exactly what is happening. Was Zhou Yu supposed to be a real
person or a creation of the author of the book? Is she in love with her two
men at the same time or sequentially? Is this a great love story or simply a
film about love affairs with too little story? Or should we accept it as
poetic without making the narrative demands that we apply to prose. The film
is open to interpretation on these issues and several others. This film—that
I would retitle Those Who Love Me Should Take the Train (loosely
borrowed from Patrice Chereau’s 1998 film)—needs each viewer to make his or
her own choices. For me, this is a two and a half star film.
Cowards Bend the Knee
Canada, 2004 60 Min Video in English
I next
go to see Guy Maddin’s film Cowards Bend the Knee. The
Winnipeg-based Canadian makes films unlike anybody else’s. This is
frequently stated about lots of directors, and technically, it would be true
that each filmmaker has his or her own uniqueness, but Maddin does things that are
so very much different from anybody else. This film is in sepia with the
images deliberately degraded so that it looks like an old silent film—it is,
in fact, a new old-looking silent film. This is not exactly the cutting edge
of the medium, but that is hardly the whole story. There is a very bizarre
story with elements of tawdry melodrama, horror, sports (hockey) movie, and
naughty peep show all jumbled together. It is film à la Cuisinart. Maddin
makes David Lynch’s entire quirky oeuvre look like The Straight Story.
Intriguingly, the film intermittently hits notes of outrageous hilarity and
then somber ones of pathos. Unfortunately, for me there simply is not enough
of either. I lose interest in the characters. I can’t give this anymore than
one star, but you may have a greater tolerance for novel—truly novel film
experiences than I do. It is noteworthy to mention that Cowards was
screened with the Quay Brother’s short The Phantom Museum. This
twelve-minute piece of filmmaking is full of intriguing and comical images—a
delightful short.
The Naked Proof
USA, 2003 100 Min. 35mm In English
The third film was The Naked Proof. Director and screenwriter Jaime
Hook and coscreenwriter Debbie Girdwood have fashioned a very funny
low-budget philosophical comedy from the college-set film genre. This type
of film that addresses philosophical issues tends to be far overshadowed by
the films focusing on the beer-and-babes majors. This also is a college film
in which the main characters are graduate students and faculty—usually the
butts of the jokes in the babes-and-beer movies. Playwright August Wilson
introduces us to the crux or the conundrum of the film and then turns us
over to the cast. Henry Rawitscher (Michael Chick) is an eight-year doctoral
student trying to prove that other people really exist. His dean, a
delightfully unctuous Matt Smith, gleefully delivers the ultimatum that
Henry needs to finish his thesis in a month—there will be no further
extensions. He suddenly finds himself confronting a beautiful pregnant woman
named Miriam (Arlette Del Toro), whom he doesn’t know, trying to get into his
apartment. Was she real or a product of his imagination? Soon he finds his
life taken over by this delightful woman. This film’s humor is dry, deadpan, and thoughtful. It needs and gets effective acting
from Chick, Del Toro, and several supporting players. Clearly, this is
delicate material that could mirthlessly flounder or veer unevenly into
over-the-top camp. Hook and company keep things on the rails throughout.
Though it is leisurely paced, there are no real dead spots. This is a film
that deserves a life after the festivals. Is there a distributor willing to
release it? Hopefully, at the very least, it will appear at a video store
near you in the not-too-distant future
Pollock / Empire Falls Clips
USA 2000 122 Min. 35mm In
English (plus preview clips from the unreleased Empire Falls)
1/2
Tickets to the evening showing of Pollock are the hottest tickets of
the festival. While Pollock is a powerful film directed by Ed Harris
about the famed abstract artist Jackson Pollock, featuring his own
Oscar-nominated performance and Marcia Gay Harden’s Oscar-winning Best
Supporting Actress performance, the real draw was nineteen minutes of scenes from
the Maine-set and Maine-made Empire Falls plus the film’s trailer.
The scenes reveal fine acting by Harris, Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Helen
Hunt, Aidan Quinn, and several other cast members. The dialogue that
delightfully snapped off the pages of Richard Russo’s Pulitzer Prize-winning
novel has largely been preserved in its entirety in the script. This
certainly confirms the insider statements that the film looks like a
terrific screen adaptation of the novel. The film is scheduled to be
broadcast on HBO sometime in 2005 in a final form that is expected to be in
the neighborhood of three plus hours in length, but a very special local
screening is anticipated.
The film Pollock is a terrific film, and though
Mr. Harris invites anyone who only wants to see the Empire Falls
clips to leave, few people do so. This film addresses the life of an artist
and his creative genius. This is very challenging material for filmmakers.
It requires that the filmmaker be able to enter into the mind of the artist.
This is impossible to fully accomplish, and most biopics of artists and
writers tend to focus on their usually chaotic personal lives. Some even
ignore showing the mechanical performance of the creative process—artists
at their easels or writers with their pens. While these films often do not provide
deeper understanding of the creative individual’s genius, they at least show
how it occupied the person’s life. Harris has taken on a most difficult
subject. Jackson Pollock used the canvas to project and objectify his inner
states. The paintings he created could represent anything, everything, and
nothing. Critics and patrons alike were agog at his unique work. They
lavished bombastic praise and cruel denigration in equal measure, depending
on whether he was considered “hot” or not. Though the film spends much more
time showing Pollock in the midst of his creative process than is typical
for a film about an artist, the film is really about the demons he
experienced and the means he used to control them. We sense from seeing
Stella Pollock’s (Sada Thompson) stony matriarch that growing up a Pollock
was not easy. Harris effectively shows Pollock as a man with inner torment
and also shows how he counterproductively relied on alcohol. He was a man with great
artistic sensibilities but little skill in addressing the day-to-day
necessities of real-life. He was able to “do” art, but he was unable to talk
about it. Lee Krasner (Marcia Gay Harden) was a crucial person who allowed
him the opportunity to focus primarily on his art. She truly was the midwife
to his artistic accomplishments. She could do that, be an artist on her own,
or rear a child. But she certainly could not do the first and effectively do
either of the latter two. The childlessness was a source of Pollock’s
deepest pain about the relationship. The film is a window into the art scene
in the 1940s and1950s, bringing to life Peggy Guggenheim (Amy Madigan) and Clem
Greenberg (Jeffrey Tambor) among others. The film takes us to Pollock's highest
success and then fairly quickly, though painfully leads us through his
anticlimactic decline. One wonders if a postscript would have served the
film better. Still the film is a great achievement, particularly when the
director has to also be fully engaged in projecting a cauldron of inner
feelings to the audience.
ADDENDUM
Baby, It’s Cold Outside
USA, 2004; 107 minutes; video; in
English
I’m Alice Crandall Johnson, Joel’s wife. This is my first venture into
writing film reviews. Joel has already told you that I attended two films he
did not. The first film I saw was Baby, It’s Cold
Outside—a classic “fish out of water tale.” In this case, it’s a
Floridian and an anteater from the tropics coming to Maine for late fall and
winter. I liked the story, but I was much more sympathetic to the anteater,
Antiny, than I was to the lady from Florida. The acting in the film is
somewhat uneven. I think this film would do well as a direct-to-video/DVD
selection. It works as a family film with the expected ending. I don’t know
if the DVD would include a Making of Baby, It’s Cold Outside
featurette, but I would love to know more about its filming in one of
Maine’s driest (no snow) years. The director talked about needing a snow
wrangler for the entire shoot.
Invisible Light
Korea, 2003; 78 minutes; 35mm; in English and Korean with English subtitles
The second was the Korean film Invisible Light.
This is a much more difficult film to review. I find Joel’s phrase “this
puts the foreign back in foreign film” applies. It is a study of two women
connected through one man. The connection between the two women is not
overtly dramatized. Each woman is dealing with deep emotional turmoil. The
camera stays with each woman for extended periods of time without dialogue,
voice-over, or definitive emotional expression. I was taken in by the visual
sense of the film but left the theater wanting resolution.
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