Also check out   MIFF Survival Guide 2004,
and MIFF 2004 SCOUTING REPORT, Part 1
 

MIFF 2004 SCOUTING REPORT, Part 2
WORLD CINEMA

By Joel Johnson

The programmers for the Maine International Film Festival (MIFF) have every reason to feel that festival goers will agree that this year’s program is the best ever—especially when they sample the World Cinema entries. The roster includes films that have taken prizes at film festivals, from critic groups, and from national Academies awarding their country’s equivalent of the Oscar. Many have accumulated scrapbooks of impressive reviews. Approximately ten of the seventeen films in foreign languages are already ticketed for release here in the United States. Others may yet find their way onto our nation’s movie screens. Several of those films will be distributed by major players like Miramax, Sony Pictures Classics, and Paramount Classics in the niche film business. This is not a guarantee of quality, but these companies involvement does signal that there is a greater sense that the film will attract an audience.

It should also be noted, however, that festivals are the Mecca of filmgoers who are looking for the uncommon film experience. Finding something new and different is just what many festival goers are looking for. For them, the imprimatur of a mini-major distribution company like Miramax is not necessarily a plus.

What I have tried to do in writing this scouting report is to provide some additional information about the films beyond what is available in the program guide. I have tried to suggest some questions festival goers may want to ask themselves about the type of films that they are interested in seeing and whether a particular film falls in that category. To consider exactly what type of film may wait behind the program’s glowing prose. I hope that you find it helpful.

During MIFF, Wolf Moon Press Journal will be reporting on the festival goings-on and, particularly, on many of the films. So we may be able to provide a first-hand report of whether the film with a summary that is so intriguing is really worth seeing.

The Closing Night film is Takeshi Kitano’s The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi (2003). If you have read the synopsis in the festival program, you know that an archetypal Japanese hero is the blind swordsman, and you also know that Kitano’s film made off with major festival awards at Toronto and Venice over some terrific competition. Kitano, using his acting credit Beat Takeshi, plays Zatoichi. Enlisted by two geishas seeking to avenge their parents’ deaths and opposed by gang henchman Hattori, a final showdown is inevitable. This film won five of the nine awards for which it was nominated by the Japanese Academy. Reviews have been quite favorable and some have indicated a preference for Kitano’s film to Tarantino’s Kill Bill films and Edward Zwick’s The Last Samaurai.

http://www.justice-is-blind.com/

This is my chance to promote our film! My wife and I are the adoptive film parents for Isild Le Besco’s Demi-tarif (Half-Price). Isild Le Besco is a twenty-one-year old actress whom we saw in a film a few years ago at the Montreal World Film Festival. She was quite extraordinary in the film, and we have followed her career ever since. This is the first time she has tried directing. She has won glorious praise from the legendary director Chris Marker, who has compared the excitement felt watching her new film with what he felt after first seeing Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1959)—one of the first French New Wave films. What Isild and her brother Jowan Le Besco, who was the film’s cinematographer, did that so excited Marker was film children in a very naturalistic way such that the children appear to be acting on their own impulses and not to be self-conscious at all about the camera. Whether you will be similarly beguiled by this film is hard to predict. The film seems to be more slice-of-life as there is no plot revealed in anything I’ve perused. That means that you probably won’t know right from the start of the film exactly where it is headed, but it could have you wondering if it is indeed headed anywhere.

http://demitarif.lefilm.free.fr/

Takeshi Kitano’s Dolls (2002) is a film rendition of the stylized storytelling from Bunraku theater. The film intercuts three different stories of love, loss, and grief. Meddling parents break up a loving couple, convincing the young man into a more socially advantageous match. His lover, overcome by despair, tries to end her life only to become brain-damaged. The young man leaves his bride at the altar and wanders across Japan connected by a red cord to a woman who does not remember who he is. A yakuza returns to the park where he courted a young woman to find that she has been waiting decades for him to return. A disfigured pop star meets her biggest fan. While Kitano’s film is visually rich, the stylized stories of love and guilt seem to be alien and not easily palatable to western critics.

Ferzan Ozpetek, Facing Windows’s (2003) director and co-screenwriter, is noted for producing films that are beautiful and sensual. Sexuality—particularly the desires (like homosexuality) that are hidden—has figured prominently in his films. Facing Windows follows two forbidden relationships. As a Turk living in Italy, Ozpetek has frequently incorporated East-West tension into his films. Here he has kept everything in Italy, though the film intertwines stories from the present and from World War II. The reviews seem to be mixed-to-positive, having earned a score of 53/100 from Metacritic (based on a numeric score for each critic’s review) and 63 percent favorable reviews from Rotten Tomatoes (based on the review being generally favorable or unfavorable). The primary complaints seem to be based on whether the surrealism, the heavy-handed use of metaphor, and the improbability of the story finally derail the work that Ozpetek, his co-writer Gianni Romoli, his music composer Andrea Guerra, and his actors Giovanna Mezzogiorno (One Last Kiss), Massimo Girotti, Raoul Bova (Under the Tuscan Sun), as well as other cast and crew members have done. These appear not to have been significant problems in Italy where the film won five of thirteen Davids (Italian equivalent of the Oscar) in 2003.

http://www.sonyclassics.com/facingwindows/

Good Bye, Dragon Inn (2003) is a film about the death of a movie theater. We see the last day of the theater’s operation. The title comes from the last film to be shown, King Hu’s martial arts classic Dragon Inn (1966). While that may mean something to Quentin Tarantino, it doesn’t mean that much to me. If you are an aficionado, you may recognize that Dragon Inn’s aging stars Miao Tian and Shi Jun sit in the theater audience. It is probably good that the film-within-the-film is an action picture with presumably fairly well-delineated good and bad characters as opposed to a more conventional drama. However, the attention is primarily on the patrons and staff of the once thriving cinema. The film has been quite successful on the festival circuit, garnering multiple awards at six different festivals. It shouldn’t be especially surprising that a film about the passing of a movie theater would be embraced warmly where film is loved and celebrated.

The premise of director Patrice LeConte’s Intimate Strangers (2004) seemingly stretches credibility. A woman (Sandrine Bonnaire) goes to visit a psychiatrist for the very first time. Instead of the psychiatrist’s office, she ends up in the office of a financial planner (Fabrice Luchini). She pours out her problems to him, and he almost unwittingly goes along with her mistake. This might seem like the set-up to a comedy, and to some degree it is, but LeConte makes this film a serious interaction between two troubled individuals as their “therapeutic relationship” continues even after the mistaken identity is revealed. Most of the action takes place in “therapy sessions” in the accountant’s office, and the script’s dialogue between the two leads is absolutely critical to the film’s success. This is reminiscent of the dialogue-heavy films of Eric Rohmer and reliance on dialogue in a foreign-language film can be a challenge. LeConte has two terrific leads, and I have no doubt that they have combined to create a “sophisticated fairytale” as described by the New York Times.

http://www.paramountclassics.com/strangers/

According to the International Movie Database, MIFF will be presenting the US premiere of Invisible Light (2003). This Korean American film intriguingly focuses on the stories of two different women who are linked by a man. One is a young woman who has an illicit affair with a married man. The other is the wife who has had her own affair. Each faces emotional crises and must make key decisions for her life. There are plenty of issues to think about, such as responsibility, destiny, relationships, commitment, love, family, and morality. The situations are not particularly unique, as they are the staples of soap operas and other melodramas. What is intriguing and challenging about the film is that the focus is on the internal states within the women. Showing these interior feelings on the screen can be a major challenge for filmmakers. Many ambitious films have been sunk by failing to successfully negotiate the shoals of this challenge. How well does writer-director Gina Kim do this in her first dramatic feature film? Do the characters being culturally Korean make understanding their interior life even more of a challenge for non-Korean filmgoers?

Karmen Gei (2001) is the Senegalese musical adaptation by Joseph Gai Ramaka of the 1845 Prosper Mérimée story Carmen that was popularized by the famous Bizet opera. This is one of the most enduring stories, having been adapted for film and TV nearly fifty times in a wide variety of guises from 1909 to 2003. More commentary about the film is available in Part 1 of the MIFF 2004 Scouting Report.

http://www.newsreel.org/films/karmen.htm

This is the third year that MIFF has featured a Bollywood film, a stylized Indian musical taking its name from a combination of India’s film-capital Bombay and the world film-capital Hollywood. These films are sprawling epic-length entertainment spectaculars complete with an intermission. Asoka (2001) told how an ancient peace-loving romantic prince became transformed into a bloodthirsty warrior-king. Devdas (2002) brought the classic early twentieth- century Indian novel by Saratchandra Chatterjee to the screen in its most recent film rendition. This film was the first based on the novel since 1979, but the novel has been adapted for the screen multiple times going back to 1928. Kabhi Khushi Khabhie Gham (2001), shorthanded as K3G, tells a much more contemporary story. The music is more western than it was in the other films. Once again Bollywood hunk Shah Rukh Khan plays the lead. He is supported by an equally attractive cast. The tension in this film is based on the societal and family barriers placed on romantic choice. This is a prominent theme in Bollywood films and was a factor in both Asoka and Devdas as well. These films really are long—this one is 210 minutes—and there are two other films you could see while you are watching this one. A different question is whether it will feel long. Bollywood films are similar to American musical theater in that frequently the writing only sets up the singing and dancing as opposed to just developing the story.

http://www.dharma-production.com/

http://www.planetbollywood.com/Film/KabhiKhushiKabhieGham/index.html

Maria Full of Grace (2004) arrives with perhaps the best buzz of the festival. Like last year’s American Splendor and next year’s made-in-Maine Empire Falls, this is another film produced by HBO. It is a gritty story of the choices a poor Colombian teenager (Catalina Sandino Moreno) has. Joshua Marston, directing and writing his film debut, has fashioned a tension-filled story of how young women are exploited to transport narcotics from Colombia to the United States. The film won the Audience Award at this year’s Sundance Film Festival and Catalina Sandino Moreno shared the Silver Bear for Best Actress with Oscar-winner Charlize Theron at this year’s Berlin Film Festival. Additionally, the reviews I read were quite favorable, but the ratings by 107 viewers recorded on the International Movie Database (www.IMDb.com) gave the film just a 4.9/10. This tepid response is not consistent with the festival awards and the reviews. However, IMDb uses a weighted average, and it appears that the twenty-five respondents who gave the film a 1 or a 2 have a larger impact than the seventy-eight who gave it a 7 or higher score—thirty-five of whom gave it a 10. This markedly divided response is not unusual when the subject matter is emotionally charged.

http://www.mariafullofgrace.com/main.html

The synopsis of Red Lights (2004) in the festival catalog describes a French version of the Bickersons setting off on holiday to pick up their children. Their fighting seems to escalate by the mile. The husband (Jean-Pierre Daroussin) drinks and drives—recklessly—despite his wife’s (Carole Bouquet) protests. Reading this, one may wonder if one wants to ride along with this couple. Then the husband can’t find his wife after stopping at a tavern—a stop she had warned him not to take. Soon he is racing around the French countryside trying to find her and giving a ride to a hitchhiker (Vincent Deniard). This is where the domestic drama of a family self-destructing ends, and the thriller takes over. Mystery writer Georges Simenon, best known for the Maigret series of detective novels, wrote the novel Feux Rouges on which this film is based. Cedric Kahn, an emerging director, holds the reins and has the hang-dog veteran actor Daroussin and the ageless beauty Bouquet to carry the freight. Sixty-seven respondents to the International Movie Database (www.IMDb.com) gave this an average score of 6.7/10. This is roughly equivalent to three stars.


The opening night film Seducing Doctor Lewis (2003) from Québec has the premise of a community needing to attract a physician. This medical amenity needs to be available in order to secure a factory that will significantly increase the prosperity of their small Québec community. The community needs to seduce (charm) a doctor into deciding to stay. Like all seductions, this one is based on duplicity despite its good intentions. The charm directed at the doctor has been modestly successful with critics (54/100 from Metacritic) and somewhat more so with audiences (7.0/10 from www.IMDb.com ). The film has been compared to the beguiling eccentricity that has been effective in The Full Monty (1997), Waking Ned Devine (1998), Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero (1983), and the Alaska-set TV comedy Northern Exposure. This is not bad company with which to be compared.


Jacques Rivette, one of the French New Wave directors, has continued to be active directing films well into his seventies. His latest film is The Story of Marie and Julien (2003). In reading the description of the film in the MIFF catalog, one recognizes that the story has a triangle with two women and a man. This is not, however, simply a lover’s triangle as Madame X (Anne Brochet) is being blackmailed by Julien (Jerzy Radziwilowicz)—for what is not stated—and may not be romantically linked to Julien. Julien is, however, trying to breathe life into his romance with Marie (Emmanuelle Beart). Both women are described as “mysterious.” There’s reference to intertwining “increasing complexity,” “elusiveness,” and being unsure of what is going on. This type of film is unpredictable, and particularly for film critics overexposed to every hackneyed genre concept, this can be refreshing and spellbinding. Others may find such a film tiresome and frustrating, which was my reaction to Va Savoir (2001), Rivette’s most recent film prior to this one. The reviews of Marie and Julien seem to be mixed, with some reviewers ecstatic and others complaining that the film is slow moving. Being filled with meaningful looks and having a long running time (150 minutes) can surely translate into slow moving. The film does reportedly feature some hot sex scenes with the gorgeous Beart. This certainly could liven up the film, but some feel they ill serve the film because they are at odds with the tone of the rest of story.

Veteran MIFF fans will recall that Jos Stelling was MIFF’s first winner of the Mid-Life Achievement Award. In fact, his reluctance to accept a Lifetime Achievement Award and his certitude that he still had contributions to make has left a lasting mark on the nature of the award. Over the years, he has contributed three selections to a series of short films by major film directors on erotic themes. Two of the three films have appeared at prior MIFFs as part of erotic trilogies with other directors. This year’s festival screens his Three Erotic Tales, including his new film The Gallery, together at one time. Stelling’s work is primarily visual using little or no dialogue in many of his films. These Erotic Tales all have no dialogue. Making films on erotic themes is tricky. One is dealing with very deeply held concepts of sexuality, morality, and taste. It is very easy to cross the subjective boundaries from titillatingly erotic to crudely pornographic. Concerns about taste can also result in would-be erotic films that simply are not very sexy. The two Stelling Erotic Tales that I have seen—as well as a handful of his other films—have shown me that Mr. Stelling is particularly adept at integrating humor into fantasies about the sexual potential of common every-day situations. His chief collaborator in this endeavor is Gene Bervoets who appears in all three of the Tales.

Travelers and Magicians (2004) is an ambitious follow-up to director and screenwriter Khyentse Norbu’s The Cup (1999) which told the story of Buddhist monks and, especially, Buddhist monks-in-training dealing with the all-too-worldly and world-wide phenomenon of soccer’s World Cup. In this film, there’s a traveler eager to migrate to the United States. He feels that he will be better off as the poorest American than continuing to be a government official in Bhutan. He starts off badly by missing his bus. He then begins to encounter other travelers. One is a monk who tells the story of two brothers training to be magicians. The monk’s story and those of the other travelers all have important messages about destiny and duty. These multiple storylines have required quite a bit from an amateur cast. Bhutan’s beauty seems to be the film’s strongest asset. The stories aren’t quite as engaging as the simpler tale of how the young monks will get to see the all-important World Cup championship game. Although one reviewer states the film doesn’t show enough of life in Bhutan, it does highlight the conflict between maintaining traditional cultures and surrendering to a ubiquitous American one. Although this film did win an Audience Award at the Deauville (France) Asian Film Festival, the average rating of 5.7/10 from 49 respondents approximates a two-and-a-half star rating.

http://www.travellersandmagicians.com/

Tussenland (2002) is a story of two people who appear very different (one white, elderly, native Dutch, a veteran of Dutch colonial service in the East Indies; and the other black, young, an illegal immigrant from the Sudan) and yet actually find themselves having quite a bit in common. This type of pairing is not uncommon in films as filmmakers often try to teach us that we are more alike than we are different. It’s a lesson worth repeating, but sometimes the filmmakers’ vehicles for this message leave a lot to be desired. This is not the kind of film that will be filled with cool pop culture references. The alternate title of Sleeping Rough (alluding the homeless immigrant sleeping on an outside bench) probably sets the tone pretty well that this is not that kind of movie. The filmmaker, Eugenie Jansen, making her dramatic film debut, brings her documentary filmmaker’s experience to give the film a subtle authenticity. This has resulted in the film winning three prizes and being nominated for two others at major film festivals. However, though it has won prizes, garnered favorable reviews, and the average viewer rating reported on IMDb is a respectable 6.6/10, not everyone is toasting the film. What one person may appreciate as poetic, subtle, and real, another may find sluggish and uninvolving. Some really need the clever quips and pop culture presence of mainstream films.

http://www.filmfestivalrotterdam.com/en/film/10470.html

Chinese cinema has become a much bigger player on the world stage since the 1980s. Although this increasing prominence owes much to the development of talented directors such as Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige, one star was featured in many—perhaps most—of the best-known Chinese films of the late 80s and 90s. That was the talented and beautiful actress Gong Li. From 1987 to 1999, she made twenty-two films. Then she took three years off. She returned to film in Zhou Yu’s Train (2002) directed by Sun Zhou. Here she plays dual roles. One role is Zhou Yu, the title character, who finds herself in a passionate love triangle with a talented shy writer and a down-to-earth fellow passenger she met on the train she has been taking to meet the other lover. There’s a certain nebulousness to the second Gong Li character. The film seems most notable for Gong Li’s beautiful presence and for daring (for Mainland China) sex scenes (Rated PG-13 when released by Sony Pictures Classics). The reviews sampled are tepid, acknowledging the film’s visual beauty while accusing the film of being borderline pretentious. The movie obliquely suggests that the film’s story may not be real and arises from the imagination of one of the characters. This is like making one entire season of the TV program Dallas be the product of Victoria Principal’s dream.

http://www.sonyclassics.com/zhou/splash.html



 

 

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