MIFF 2004 FILM FESTIVAL NOTEBOOK

By Joel Johnson

DAY 7 

Day 7 of the Maine International Film Festival begins with a panel discussion uniquely titled "From Crete to California to Maine." Panel discussions, particularly like this one without a clearly defined topic, can vary a lot in how informative and entertaining they are. The panelists for this discussion are Topper Carew, Raphael Di Luzio, and Algis Kemezys. An accomplished writer, director, and producer in the film industry, Topper is here at the festival with two very personal, intimate documentary films: The Fine Art of Frying Chicken and The Robin Harris Story. Raphael, a California native, is an artist trained as a painter who is now a member of the University of Maine faculty in the New Media Department. His specialty is doing video art installations in public settings, and he is very interested in how the film/video medium can transform how we, the common man or woman, tell our stories and interact. Algis Kemezys is a fine-art photographer who has evolved into video. Algis is here with his film Faces of Myth that he shot on location in Crete. As the moderator of the panel, all I have to do is to start the proceedings, introduce the panelists, and let them go. They each have plenty to say and willingly share the spotlight with each other. There is also good input from the audience.

We then move on to—surprise, surprise—watching films. My wife and I get a chance to see the film we adopted—Isild Le Besco’s Demi-tarif. That is followed by Campbell Scott’s Off the Map and then Patrice Leconte’s Intimate Strangers.

DEMI-TARIF
France, 2004; 62 minutes; 35mm; in French with English subtitles

1/2

Demi-tarif (Half-price) is an impressive directing and writing debut film for twenty-one-year-old actress Isild Le Besco. Her film is about three children—two girls, seven and eight, as well as a nine-year-old boy—on their own. They live in an apartment in Paris with very intermittent contact with their mother and even less frequent contact with their fathers. We never meet any parents so we don’t learn anymore about them other than what a voice-over—an older version of one of the girls—is able to tell us. This voice-over input is always subtitled, and some of the children’s interactions with other adults are subtitled, but their interactions with each other are never subtitled. This keeps the focus on seeing what the children do and not on reading dialogue, but one wonders if French-speaking audiences get much more out of these interactions than non-French audiences do.  What is so remarkable about the film is how unaffected the children are by the presence of the camera. Isild’s brother Jowan Le Besco, who acted as cinematographer, deserves at least partial credit for being able to capture this action so naturally. This is what was so exciting for French New Wave director Chris Marker when he compared watching this film to watching Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless for the first time. The children seem to be acting totally spontaneously, and there is a feral innocence to what they do. Watching them frolic together unconcerned with their varying states of undress, one suspects that they could be acting exactly as the borderline incestuous brother and sister in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers would have acted at the same age. There are, of course, other valid concerns about such young children having to fend for themselves. School is something they irregularly attend, and school officials are getting very anxious to make contact with their parents to intervene in the children’s care. Their diet leaves a lot to be desired, and the resourceful children have become brazen thieves. There are hygiene and health concerns. They have no one to take care of them when they get sick except themselves and the adults involved in health care whose help they try to enlist. This is a brave first film because it addresses difficult material. There is something both delightful and disturbing about the children’s lives. The film is quite compelling, making members of the audience feel that they should provide the nurturing that these children so sorely lack.

OFF THE MAP
USA, 2003; 111 minutes; 35mm; in English



Campbell Scott was a big hit at the 2003 MIFF when he showed up with The Secret Lives of Dentists. That film was my choice for audience favorite of last year’s festival. Mr. Scott is, of course, best known as an actor, but here he is not in front of the camera—only behind it as director of the evening’s second film Off the Map. The sole showing of this film at Railroad Square’s cinema one was among the festival’s most prized tickets. This is an offbeat coming-of-age story set in the Land of Enchantment—if you haven’t committed state slogans to memory—New Mexico. Keep thinking enchantment. The film, written by Joan Ackerman and based on her play, is a recollection of tweenerhood by the adult Bo Groden (Amy Brennaman). Amy appears mostly in occasional voice-overs as she provides context for the world of her younger self (Valentina de Angelis). The young Bo lives an existence so isolated that she is somewhere “off the map” in New Mexico with her mother Arlene (Joan Allen) and father Charley (Sam Elliott). The family has opted for a “back-to-the-land” lifestyle in the early 1970s as an outgrowth of the counterculture of the 1960s. Elliott has made a living playing a slew of independent tough guy cowboy types, but here he is an artist suffering from clinical depression. Similarly, Joan Allen has usually played women with cold, brittle personalities. In this film, she gets to show an earthier, more free-spirited personality. The only other adult in Bo’s life is George (J. K. Simmons), her dad’s stolid and emotionally stunted friend. Simmons is probably best known as Spiderman’s boss at the newspaper. Bo’s world begins to change when IRS auditor William Gibb (Jim True-Frost) walks into their yard from somewhere “down the road” where his car has broken down. Gibb has arrived to check out why the Grodens haven’t filed a tax return for five years. Apparently, earning less than $5,000 a year in the early 1970s isn’t a good enough reason to neglect filing tax forms. True-Frost, playing the role that obviously would have fit Scott had he not decided to focus on directing, bears a passing resemblance to Colin Firth. The tax auditor soon gets stung by a bee and spends several days being cared for by Arlene and Bo while recovering from some type of fever. The taxman being co-opted by the errant taxpayers is not a new storyline. It was well used to comic effect in the British TV version of H. E. Bates’s book The Darling Buds of May. There the family’s beautiful eldest daughter (Catherine Zeta-Jones) changes his agenda from taxes to romance. Thoughts of romance do enter into Gibb’s thinking as he becomes enamored with Arlene whom, in addition to being his primary caretaker, he first met while she was gardening in the nude. However, Gibb shares even more with Charley. Gibb also suffers from depression. He lends antidepressants to Arlene so she can give them to Charley. He also tells Charley about his life. He has just relocated from Massachusetts to New Mexico to start working for the IRS, and he has been depressed ever since he discovered his mother’s body hanging in the front hallway of his home when he was six years old. This revelation is potentially an emotional Molotov cocktail, but the film is so delicately well- balanced that it catches the production’s underlying tone of dark comedy generating laughter—albeit nervous laughter. Soon Gibb becomes a permanent fixture in the household, and he begins to paint, following his own artistic drummer. Even as Gibb eschews the world he came from, he sparks an interest for Bo in the outside world. The film meanders (but it never feels like dawdling), taking its time to show how each of the characters begins to change over the course of the summer. There is a subtle, bitingly dark chord of humor that plays throughout, perversely enchanting the filmgoer and serving to anesthetize him or her from the pain that might be associated with some of the situations. The entire cast does an outstanding job, but the true revelation is young Valentina de Angelis. Much of the film is carried on her shoulders, and she gives the audience an authentic prototypical teen who is impatiently dealing with the “knowledge” that she is brighter than all of the adults around her. This is a very unusual film that doesn’t fall into neat genre categories (i.e., marketing niches), which probably accounts for it not yet having a distributor a year and a half after its premiere at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival. It may not be considered an easy sell at mainstream box offices, but the film garnered lots of praise from festivalgoers. (This eventually translated into being first runner-up for the 2004 Audience Favorite award.) The film earns three stars from me.

INTIMATE STRANGERS
France, 2004; 104 minutes; 35mm; in French with English subtitles



Patrice Leconte’s Intimate Strangers (original French title Confidences trop Intimes) boasts a superb cast, starting with leads Sandrine Bonnaire and Fabrice Luchini, and an interesting premise. Tax consultant William Faber (Luchini) receives an unexpected client in the form of the beautiful Anna (Bonnaire). The only problem is that she is intending to see the psychiatrist Dr. Monnier (Michel Duchaussoy) whose office is at the other end of the hallway. Before William has a clue that his usual services don’t apply, Anna has opened her heart to reveal a tangled mess of raw emotions. He is so unsettled that he sits dumbfounded, not even trying to extricate himself from the role of impromptu psychiatrist that has been thrust upon him. This is a classic mistaken identity scenario, and the audience is quickly invited to enjoy the comical discomfiture of the quiet tax consultant. We soon learn that what Anna has immersed him in is the one thing that he has consistently avoided—dealing with emotions. He seeks the assistance of his bemused former girlfriend Jeanne (Anne Brochet) who maintains a soft spot for him even though she has a new boyfriend. William eventually regains his wits and does confess that he is not who Anna thought him to be. She is upset that he did not admit this right away, and William worries that she may seek legal recourse, but strangely she has bonded to him as her “therapist.” Desperate to do a good job, he seeks the advice of Dr. Monnier. That Anna is an off-the-books client raises the amusingly tawdry suspicions of William’s matronly officious secretary Madame Mulon (Hélène Surgère). The film is a restrained, subtle comedy, and Jérôme Tonnerre’s script is intent to avoid leading the actors into the territory of broad comic caricature. Pascal Estève’s music seems to be channeling Bernard Herrmann with scores reminiscent of Hitchcock’s Vertigo and North by Northwest. This and Anna’s malevolent husband maintains a suspenseful aura of an impending thriller that keeps the audience off-balance and not able to get too comfortable in thinking that the film just wants to amuse. Mostly the film advances through the exposition and wit of the dialogue between the two leads. Unfortunately, a foreign language film that is dialogue driven at the end of the evening means that tired eyes are doing an awful lot of reading. The result is that this reviewer had to struggle to keep awake toward the end of the film. It did seem to be continuing to deliver comic bonbons since my descent into somnolence was regularly interrupted by outbursts of amusement. At the end of the evening, I am glad that Intimate Strangers is scheduled for a return to Railroad Square after the festival. I will have to give it a conditional rating three stars zz. Hopefully, it will still have the three stars when I see it again.

 

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