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writers gone wild!
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Sokurov's Father and Son
Together Again in the Dark
The 2003 Chicago International Film Festival
"The world moves quickly. Now, people are satisfied watching DVDs at home...But do you remember the late night showings in a theater, where a thousand people would sit together, laugh together, cry together? Even the lightest sigh would move the heart..."
The words come from Taiwanese master Tsai Ming-liang, referencing his unique tribute to the cinema in Goodbye Dragon Inn, but any film festival supplies an occasion for moviegoers to gather in the darkness once more in a new community.
For the 39th time, the Chicago International Film Festival cemented its reputation as the cornerstone of the cinematic year by unreeling over 100 new features and numerous shorts from 43 countries, and spectators did their part by flocking to buy tickets for all manner of film rarities. Even the weather helped by gracing the event with autumnal sunshine and balmy Indian summer breezes, no small matter when arctic winds could quickly turn the city into a frozen Alphaville, capital of pain.
Filmmakers, both veterans and newcomers, arrived to shop their newly minted masterworks and to hobnob with their audiences, who rubbernecked to spot the more visible luminaries such as Anthony Hopkins, Campbell Scott, Tsai Ming-liang, and Peter Greenaway, while Robert Downey Jr., Taye Diggs, and Robert Benton deplaned to pick up career achievement awards.
With such a variety of entries, each representing a different strain of cinema, it's misguided to search for consistent themes, yet many of the choices below somehow revolve around absent fathers but conclude with individuals hoping to turn disasters into new beginnings. From the festival's embarrassment of riches, the following 14 films proved rewarding as upwellings from the collective unconscious of cinema.
Has
any film introduced its heroine with more beautiful imagery than South
Korea's Oasis? Here, a snow-white dove darts into a tenement
window and flutters through the rooms, but a sudden cut reveals that
the bird's movements are actually reflections of light dancing on the
ceiling. Then, when the camera angles toward the source of the light,
we see the heroine sprawled on the floor, trying to manipulate the mirror
in her clenched, spasming hands, unable to walk from cerebral palsy.
Penetrating beneath the surface limitations that control her physical
state, director Lee Chang-dong edits to connect us directly to the woman's
thirst for beauty. The hero's problems, apart from his recent stint
in prison, include a mental deficit, but Lee boldly roots us in his
head, winning the audience's total identification with the wiry youth's
quest for human connection, his survivor's intelligence pulsing with
a young man's hormones, never mind his inappropriate behavior and sometimes
poor choices. The sharp, achingly intelligent Oasis became South
Korea's top box office hit, perhaps because it reimagines the cinema
love story in an unsettling new form, complete with its own love song.
These lovers live with deficits that become prisons, turning simple
actions into agonizing impossibilities, where even slamming a wheelchair
into a wall does not communicate its message, and where sawing down
the branches of a tree can become an obliquely touching expression of
love. With its muscular camerawork, the film also casts an unblinking
eye on the embarrassment of the abled, and the ways families can exploit
the disabled. Plot twists ultimately reveal unexpected layers of meaning
in seemingly transparent events, which then ripple and grow in the mind
with reflections on communication, criminal guilt, and the abuse of
the defenseless. Putting aside the tricky time/memory structure of his
Peppermint Candy, Lee again guides the stars of that powerful
film, Sol Kyung-gu and Moon So-ri, into boldly original work that keeps
us nailed in our seats. Now that this director has taken office as South
Korea's Minister of Culture, will his country flower with cinematic
blooms?
A
scrawny mouse struggling to free itself from a strip of sticky paper
becomes a metaphor for both protagonists of Distant (Uzak),
two cousins who enact a country mouse/city mouse polarity while trapped
in their own circumstances. One is a lean, languid, fastidious photographer
accustomed to indulging his refined tastes (his intellectual friends
squabble over Tarkovsky). The other is a young village man laid off
when the local factory closes, leaving him only with a desire to see
the world and a responsibility to send home money. Snowy vistas of Istanbul
alternate with stunning Anatolian landscapes as attention shifts from
one man to the other. The photographer pursues his career, reluctantly
tends his ailing mother, and still more reluctantly faces up to his
own shortcomings. Meanwhile, the cousin's goal of a seafaring life proves
to be a pipe-dream, as wrecked as the massive ship on its side that
forms one splendid image, while he longs to connect with a woman yet
cannot make a decisive move. With no dialogue at all for the opening
15 minutes, and much natural sound thereafter, including wind-chimes
tinkling and discreet passages of Bach, director Nuri Bilge Ceylan lets
the contrasts between the men build, leaving Turkey's economic downturn
as simply a jumping-off point to trace the nuances of alienation in
his characters. Eventually, personal frustrations boil over in the arena
of sharing the photographer's sterile electronics-filled apartment,
with the camera moving into intense close-ups to support the sincere,
thoughtful performances of the two stars, who shared the Best Actor
prize at Cannes. Despite the polished photography, playing with shallow
focus to divide visual planes, the epic widescreen seems too expansive
for the two self-absorbed characters, while the emotional content eventually
thins out as both men prove too tactful for blunt confrontations. When
Ceylan withholds details about how the intellectual contributed to the
failure of his marriage, or about what provoked the villager's final
decision, this ellipsis may seem modish and sophisticated, but life
and meaning live in those details. Considering that the film won the
Grand Prize at Cannes, its concluding image of loneliness — the
cold sea splashing across the stormy waterfront with Angelopoulos-like
drama — falls somewhat short of the intended resonance.
The
magnificently civilized A Talking Picture more than keeps the
promise of its title, proceeding via a stream of cultivated discussion
of history, largely through the person of an elegant history professor
from Lisbon University who is taking her seven-year-old daughter on
a cruise through the magical ports of call that established civilization
on the Mediterranean. Like Vasco da Gama, they are two Portuguese seafarers,
and with the same destination of India, to meet her husband, an airline
pilot. Both teacher and mother, answering the child's questions she
becomes the vehicle for Portuguese auteur Manoel De Oliveira to reconsider
first principles: What does civilization mean? What's a myth? Why are
people so wicked? What do we mean by "nature"? What's a mosque? From
the Acropolis to the pyramids at Giza to a market in Aden, the golden
sunlight illuminates the discussion, while the director notes mysterious
correspondences: a dog pulled on a leash in Marseilles is mirrored by
a similar figure in a mosaic in Pompeii. It wouldn't be a De Oliveira
movie without performance elements, so a majestic shot introduces the
Greek theater where Antigone and Medea first played, and
later Irene Papas performs a folk song for the passengers aboard ship.
At the captain's table, John Malkovich speaks in English, Catherine
Deneuve in French, Stefania Sandrelli in Italian, and Irene Papas in
Greek, with the conceit being that they all understand each other (and
even remark on the fact). Love, women, politics, and language are the
topics, presided over by Malkovich, who is surely the most effete sea-captain
known to cinema. Those seeking an eventful narrative must wait for the
final ten minutes, where the writer-director deviously changes course
and convulses expectations, casting an entirely new context for the
hundred minutes that have gone before, but only a 94-year-old director
could get away with ending on such a supremely audacious note.
A
Thousand Months (Mille Mois) revisits a particular moment
in Morocco's history, the entire month of Ramadan in 1981, just before
fundamentalism took root throughout the Muslim world, when young women
could still wear short skirts. Director Faouzi Bensaidi concentrates
not on the hardships of fasting but on the struggle for survival in
a mountain village, at a troubled time of ruinous drought, government
repression, and punishing labor that has already driven one villager
mad. At the center of attention is a little boy, a reluctant teacher's
pet who has to tote the instructor's chair to school every day, carrying
on his head the full weight of this symbol of civil authority. Used
as a go-between by his smitten schoolteacher, the boy has to deliver
(and recite) love letters that voice sentiments like "Next to you, other
women look like hairy apes." The boy's father has been imprisoned (without
trial) as a militant, but his mother and grandfather maintain the fiction
that he is working in France. The village's free spirit, the qaid's
progressive daughter, wears blue jeans and make-up, smokes cigarettes,
leads student demonstrations, and seems a touchstone of integrity. Controlling
the means of communication becomes a concern, as the engineer who runs
local TV transmission cuts off a popular soap opera for the entire village,
except for his beloved's house so that only she will know how it ends.
The boy's performance, whether playacting at martial arts postures after
seeing a Bruce Lee movie, or realizing in one piercing epiphany of mortality
that "I'm going to die!", betrays not the slightest self-consciousness.
Bensaidi's historical perspective functions as a shield that permits
a scene where the boy, annoyed by a madrasa-student who won't stop reciting
the Koran, proceeds to beat him on the head. Similarly, when guards
forbid a prison visit, the wife's protests are met with physical intimidation
and bruises, and we later see her succumbing to despair as she lets
a band of beggars snatch away her money. Whatever pressures constrained
the director, the film does seem insufficiently shaped, with the tone
wobbling from vignette to vignette among elements that could just as
soon turn comic as tragic. Then, when an extended wedding party turns
disastrous with drunken revelry, with frustrations vented, secrets uncovered,
and ending in suicide and flames, a strikingly composed shot sends a
horseman riding through the flames as the wedding tent burns and falls
apart before our eyes.
The
jazz runs hot in the delightful opening of The Triplets of Belleville,
a retro variety show of mid-1930s stars, who perform for all the swells
at the Swinging Belleville Rendezvous nitery. Django Reinhardt strums
his guitar with one hand and one foot, Josephine Baker wiggles her famous
skirt of bananas, which are plucked off by a band of lewd monkeys, and
Fred Astaire gets attacked and devoured by his own dancing shoes. But
the top act is the eponymous Triplets, sister divas who sing and swing
with tireless exhilaration. These three parallel another trio of endearing
characters: France's most unconditionally supportive grandmother, her
orphaned grandson training for the Tour de France, and Bruno, their
ungainly, slobbering, lovable dog. When nefarious gangsters kidnap the
cyclist, it's Granny and Bruno to the rescue as they pursue the culprits
across the ocean to a megametropolis called Dogville ....errr... .Belleville.
You might recognize the place from the roly-poly Statue of Liberty standing
in its harbor, or from the tubby citizens who survive on hamburgers
as their staple food (even the infants are shaped like Botero figures).
The now aged Triplets live as confirmed eccentrics, subsisting on a
diet of frogs, in a vividly drawn tenement amidst inexplicable treasures
like a bagpipe and a row of chubby Academy Awards, but retain undiminished
enthusiasm for their art. Together with grandmère, they conspire to
liberate the nephew from a life of slavery hidden behind the official
facade of the French Wine Center. With beguiling wit, the movie proceeds
to supply everything one requires in the cinema: speed, music, fireworks,
sports, explosions, humor, and spectacle (including a stunningly detailed
"perfect storm" sequence), yet still finding room for both Jacques Tati
and Canadian piano icon Glenn Gould. The brainchild of Sylvain Chomet,
this smash hit in France involved years of animation work in Brussels,
Montreal, Paris, and Riga (Latvia), to chart a third course: not the
prettified faces and chipper moral lessons of Disney, not the sub-adolescent
focus and arbitrary spectacle of animé, but a bravura mix of 3D computer
graphics styled with the flair of different artists, from the pulp newsprint
orange and green of Tintin comics to the watercolor-washed inkings of
Edward Sorel. In no way identikit Disney — in fact, one of the
villainous henchmen sports ears that look suspiciously Mousketeeresque
— the bracingly droll satire takes sardonic potshots at a target-rich
world. While good-naturedly poking US-stereotypes in the ribs, Chomet
saves special relish for mocking France's national foibles and enthusiasms,
not to mention the typical Gallic physiognomy, from the grandson's shark's
fin of a nose, to a van driver's squashed onion head, honking red nose,
and perpetual cigarette stub. Not least of the joys here is the snappy
music, including a song in Portuguese and even a witty mock-theramin
passage to accompany a doggy nightmare. Gallophiles will treasure touches
like the Tour de France's official chanteuse who is called "la Fée de
l'Accordion", while Gallophobes in the end may want to emulate General
De Gaulle and kiss auteur Chomet on both cheeks.
Fans
of Alexander Sokurov will not be surprised by the occasional stylized
dreamscapes in Father and Son, with their filtered light bending
in distorting mirrors, or by allusively religious dialogue like "A loving
son lets himself be crucified". Creating the same trance-like intensity
as the director's haunting Mother and Son (soon to be joined
by a third title in a family trilogy), this new film evokes the same
sense of love isolated in a private poetic world. Here a rooftop becomes
the privileged space where the title duo work out their charged relationship
in a series of baiting challenges and insistent provocations, a tug
of war not for dominance but separation and independence. Combative
action and feverish intimacy continue at the son's military academy,
where blond recruits push body against body in testosterone-fueled games.
Playing with the dangers of instability and the risks of heights, the
director stages movement and even fights on a plank casually thrown
between two windows over an abyss. If Sokurov made the world hold its
breath throughout the 95-minute unbroken shot of Russian Ark,
here the director fissures a scene where the son's mistress ends their
affair, citing a liaison with a new lover, with dynamic montage of overlapping
cuts. Embarrassment about this film's humid intimations of incest apparently
inspired the cold shoulder shown it by critics at Cannes. While Sokurov
chided them for being out of touch with physicality, the erotic signposts
are unmistakable: two hunky males, one twenty years older but hardly
believable as such, soulfully gazing into each others' eyes in long
intense close-ups. The very opening has the men's muscular arms entwine
during a turbulent, disturbing dream, but later when a third character arrives
in search of his father who disappeared, he can only briefly penetrate
the household. With all its poetic refinements — its arresting
images shot in locations in both Russia and Lisbon, full of discreet
underexposure and overexposure in buttery sunlight, all underscored
with wisps of Tchaikowsky and inventive electronics — Sokurov's
film cannot be reduced to its sexual meaning, but the heavy-breathing
claustrophobia belongs to the Cocteau of Les Parents Terribles.
Sexual Dependency sets out to indict machismo on two continents, from the
forced frolics of spoiled rich kids in Bolivia to the homoerotic jock-play
of drunken frat boys in upstate New York. Teen revelry is open 24 hours
here, with a centerfold-ready cast of 15- to 17-year-olds burning pure
adrenaline in crowded clubs, flashbulb-strobed fashion shows, and university
theater stages. Sex, it turns out, is rather an ordeal, whether for
the working-class schoolgirl (whose father threatens, "I'll kill you
if you get pregnant"), or the shy Colombian teenager pushed into a brothel
backroom for his initiation to manhood, or a hunky underwear model who
can't own up to his same-sex attraction and so hangs around longingly
in locker rooms. With few parental units in sight, the jailbait cast
feel free to disrobe often, encouraged by director Rodrigo Bellott,
who brings his cameras into a public shower to soap up alongside the
football team. There's no plot per se, just loosely connected characters
in successive mini-dramas, each with its own title, but this nonlinear
approach allows Bellott to double back, recycling earlier moments from
a fresh viewpoint. The narrative complexity consistently exceeds the
psychological insight, though, and then the movie brakes to a standstill
for an extended monologue that involves an heirloom mirror, a dismembered
Barbie doll, and a parking lot rape. At his best staging flashy scenes
of kinetic movement, the energetic 24-year-old director tries to pump
up visual interest by splitting the screen, the two frames showing different
angles or occasionally counterpointed scenes, though less to pursue
an experimental agenda than for sheer novelty. However admirable his
intention to fuse North and South American cinema, the director is mostly
shooting blanks with these vacuous delinquents.
In
the opening moments of Time of the Wolf (Le Temps du Loup),
a family arrives at their country cottage only to have their world of
bourgeois security destroyed by a single shock cut and a single gunshot
that kills the father. Some unspecified and unspoken darkness has fallen
over the world ("Don't you really know what's going on, or are you just
stupid?" asks the killer), allowing Austrian auteur Michael Haneke to
pull at the skin of civilization that covers the western world, stripping
it of electricity to plunge the characters into the same hellish conditions
that prevail in postwar Iraq or much of the third world. Forced into
a makeshift existence to survive in a new post-apocalyptic wolf-age,
the mother (Isabelle Huppert) leads her two children in quest of safety
and relief through the menacing backwater (she keeps asking about the
city, seeking other urban dwellers). Enclosed in primal darkness and
silence, they are reduced to primitively burning clumps of hay for some
transient, flickering light or traveling by the light of bonfires that consume carcasses of cattle and sheep, dead from contaminated water. In images
that are precise but not airless, cinematographer Jürgen Jürges —
collaborator with Fassbinder and Wenders, as well as Haneke (Code
Unknown) — provides memorably striking visuals: the pitch-black
night stretches across the widescreen, extending the darkness of the
theater onto the screen, relieved only when torches proceed along the
top of the screen, or day dawns with an almost impenetrable veil of
white smoke shrouding the countryside. With no power, movement ceases
(even a bicycle has become useless: there is nowhere to go), and technology
appears like the privilege it is for most of the world. Never romanticizing
the mother's emotional responses (in fact, others criticize her), Haneke
soon shifts the film's center away from the nominal star to the children,
both in highly sensitive performances, and then outward to peripheral
characters, probing at the human capacity for violence, until all humanity
seems to be on trial. In extremis, people cannot help but reveal their
essence as human beings, but thieves and control freaks have also survived,
as have class divisions and bigotry. With dualities of dark and light,
living and dead, Haneke's cinema of anxiety builds an austere atmosphere
of sensory deprivation where a few bars of music sound unbearably precious,
yet for once this most unnerving director allows that charity and sacrifice
are also realities. When the father's presence resurfaces, suggesting
a challenge to the finality of death, the finale mounts toward a gesture
of hope and generosity from one stranger to another, before the powerfully
enigmatic final tracking shot (but be forewarned that several animal
deaths are depicted).
"It's
the cortisone," says the doomed hero of Jafar Panahi's Crimson Gold,
to explain his lumbering bearlike body. This could be a memento of a
wartime injury, for he is an army veteran, and "the medication slows
him down," according to his pickpocket colleague. When a robbery goes
wrong near the beginning of the film, we see his death but rather than
acting as a plot spoiler, this deepens the subsequent flashbacks, where
he lives like the walking dead. As played by real-life paranoid schizophrenic
Hossein Emadeddin, this pizza deliveryman, zooming his motorocycle around
the traffic-clogged highways of Teheran at night, is a great creation.
Perhaps it's his puffy face and the dark shadows under his eyes, or
maybe it's his Thorazine shuffle and inability to summon any affect,
but — consonant with Iranian film's aesthetic of shunning emotional
indulgence — his lack of emotive response (and Panahi's impassive
camera) forces us to dig below the surface to x-ray his actions and
words. Funny when he pragmatically distributes unused pizza to some
cops, humane when advising a 15-year-old soldier that he's too young
for the army, and patient when he politely asks his desperately chattering
fiancée to " Please stop talking," he seems neither saintly nor childlike,
and the director resists turning him into a clinical case. With no dramatic
underlining to push our responses, the impact of each daily humiliation
accumulates in our minds as we measure the man's vulnerability. Dogged
by social invisibility, he feels insulted at a jewelry store by the
patrician owner ("He didn't even look at us"), and he stands next to
a wealthy playboy who tells his telephone caller "there's no one here."
The creator of The White Balloon and The Circle, Panahi
was famously arrested by American officials last year and held in chains
for 16 hours at JFK Airport in New York for resisting Immigration personnel's
demands that he get a transit visa merely to change planes. Nor has
he flourished in Iran, where homegrown cultural tyrants have banned
this film, no suprise given its portrayal of repressive entrapment by
police. Secretly staking out forbidden parties with young people, the
police are shown wielding their power with irrational authoritarian
aggression, arresting men and women as they leave, as well as parents
arriving to pick up their children. The humanism of the torn-from-the-headlines
script by Abbas Kiarostami, the director's mentor, makes its point when
the hero asks the young soldier what he does for fun: nervously looking
around, the boy replies without irony, "What's fun?" Lying in darkness
in his modest room, his beefy torso overflowing his modest bed, the
proletarian hero can only brood while outside another police raid rounds
up more people who protest their innocence. What a contrast to the palatial
penthouse duplex that he visits, with its fountains and pool, grand
piano and balcony, a showcase of the glaring economic disparities within
the Iranian theocracy. As the playboy freshly back from the U.S. keeps
repeating, "This is a city of lunatics!"
André
Téchiné's Strayed (Les Egarés) opens with b/w footage
of walls collapsing, then of horses stumbling and falling, tripping
up horses behind them. It's June 1940 and desperate evacuees from Paris,
trucks piled high with their belongings, are in flight through the countryside.
From the treetops, a tracking shot cranes down a line of vehicles until
the camera stops on the anxious face of Emanuelle Béart. She is a schoolteacher,
a widow trying to drive her son and daughter to safety, yet she refuses
a ride to a pleading soldier (it's "everyone for himself," she explains).
In the chaos of a Stuka attack on the refugees, they are joined by 17-year-old
Yvan, a near-feral survivor who patrols the forest, looting corpses
("The living might as well have it"). The magical note is struck when
he is introduced almost subliminally: first there were three people
fleeing from the burning car, then there are four. He leads them into
what we come to realize is an enchanted forest, away from the chaos
of war and suspended in time, where the quartet set up housekeeping
in a deserted manor house where the clocks have stopped. But why does
Yvan cut the telephone lines and conceal a radio? He evades questions
about his background, then his inability to read a wine bottle label
reveals that he's illiterate. No moralist, director Téchiné is interested
in framing the unexpected relationships free of everyday constraints, in a fairy tale structure, not in judging
them. The mother embodies the proper bourgeoise, mortified that she
wet her skirt with fear, protective of her family, opposed to entering
a stranger's property, but no one listens to her. Not her tough-minded
13-year-old son ("You give us fine speeches but you do the opposite!"),
nor her little daughter, who rejects a bedtime story, preferring to
play with the boys. Unable to sleep and plagued with a recurrent nightmare
when she does, Béart's reserved schoolmistress succumbs to wine and
lassitude, becoming a kind of Unsleeping Beauty. She barely rules in
the home, but when she finds a revolver that Yvan has stolen, she buries
it and refuses to tell him where ("Death scares me. I'm civilized")
for as long as they live together as a community. As master of the countryside,
Yvan provides game and fish for food, and just as the possibility of
a sexual relationship arises, two survivors from a doomed infantry regiment
appear and proceed to restart the clocks. As Yvan's concern about the
gun takes on a new meaning, the film could veer down several different
paths, but the development followed is sharp, sophisticated, and dark.
Balancing the images of wartime dislocation and instability, Agnes Godard's
tracking camerawork moves freely through the radiant fields and forests
brimming with summer abundance, but with the same tensile strength that
she brought to Beau Travail.
"They
say this theater is haunted" are the first words spoken in Goodbye
Dragon Inn, a full 45 minutes into Tsai Ming-liang's feast of minimalism.
While Dragon Inn, Tsui Hark's desert swordplay spectacle, unfolds
onscreen, its dryness becomes a witty counterpoint to the director's
longtime obsession with water. As the scratchy music of the 1966 movie
booms around the nearly empty Fu-Ho Grand Theater, one of this film's
first images shows the backs of two heads, exactly as you would see
them in the row ahead of you. Instead of celebrating the onscreen Hong
Kong fantasy, Tsai studies the audience, the receivers of the celluloid
myths, who are conceived here as ghosts, vampires, and wraiths inhabiting
the theater. Tsai teasingly watches patrons we'd rather not sit next
to, ones who make too much noise rattling their bags and eating (including
a hilarious deadpan scene of a sluttish woman, legs slung over the seat
ahead, cracking seeds in her teeth with deafening sound), while others
have designs on their neighbors' bodies. This cinema is a place where
outsiders gather for community, yet connection is fitful at best as
people remain closed inside themselves. Unafraid of slow scenes, Tsai
draws out whatever action that transpires to lengths quite beyond reason,
building and sustaining tension so that the merest turn of a player's
head amasses unaccustomed significance and, as often as not, absurd
humor. Even when a much prolonged shot, such as the cashier desultorily
picking at her fuschia-colored steamed bun, brings no pay-off, it still
destabilizes our sense of film time, preparing us for the next attempt.
Tsai's longtime onscreen counterpart Lee Keng-sheng plays the projectionist
in this anti-Cinema Paradiso. When he collects water from two
pails, he pours it into one big pail, and then tosses the water out
the window, into a driving rainstorm: this is very funny, but why? The
Taiwanese master uses offscreen space, sometimes opening on an empty
frame that a character enters at one plane and then exits at another,
and defines onscreen space when the cashier, dragging her clubfoot,
walks and climbs and walks endlessly, showing the audience every seed-spattered
inch of the cinema, like Sokurov leading the audience through the Hermitage
museum in Russian Ark. When she finally exits the frame and the
shot of the empty theater persists longer and longer and still longer,
Tsai provides only a whisper of ambient sound, enlisting your unwitting
neighbors as interactive participants with their natural sounds. Like
Buster Keaton adrift alone on an ocean liner in The Navigator,
Tsai makes deadpan poetry out of vast open spaces. If the camera rarely
moves in his cinema of stillness, each multidimensional composition
presents an image dense with striking detail, like the cashier's face
illuminated by light streaming through pinpoint dots of the screen.
When the end credits roll (the production's two cats get top billing),
nature pours rain over a woman with a red umbrella while a pop song
throbs with nostalgia: "So much of the past lingers in my heart, half
bitter, half sweet...Can't let go, can't let go."
Out
of the closet of past masterworks, Chicago Reader critic Jonathan
Rosenbaum shone a retrospective light on Benilde or the Virgin Mother,
a 1974 rarity from Manoel De Oliveira, one that signaled a new surge
of prolific output from this preeminent doyen of living directors. From
a controversial 1947 play, the film tests its characters by their reactions
to a young woman's claim that God has impregnated her in a miracle of
divine grace: her father tries to control her, her aunt confesses indiscretion
and madness in her own past, her fiancé claims he took advantage of
her while she was asleep. Who is lying? Can we know, and does it make
a difference? With creamy whites plus richly saturated technicolor,
with stormy shadows and leaves swirling, De Oliveira recalls Douglas
Sirk's melodramas, in the service of intensely dramatic questions: Did
the heroine's mother die insane? Is Benilde really bearing a child?
Can the social structure around her absorb a miracle? With unapologetic
theatricality, the camera never moves outside the home, but to complement
the ambiguities, De Oliveira inserts the occasional mysterious shot:
a vase of roses, an overhead shot pointed down a chimney looking at
the fire, and a balcony door forced open by a cyclonic wind, as well
as some aural counterpoint with the wailing of the village idiot (never
seen onscreen). Retaining the play's division into acts pointedly underlines
the performance aspect, but despite its surface lack of action, this
film is paradoxically cinematic, as stage cannot reproduce this experience
of De Oliveira directing us to watch the listener's reactions as entire
speeches are spoken off-camera. The miracle question suggests both Dreyer's
Ordet and Rossellini's Il Miracolo (and nudges at Pasolini's
Teorema), but De Oliveira nimbly steps aside just far enough
to avoid being pinned down.
For event programming, the Chicago Sun-Times' Roger Ebert brought Japan's sole professional benshi narrator, the distinguished Sawato Midori, to perform her art on Ozu's 1932 smiles-and-tears classic I Was Born But..., the delightful silent comedy of two mischievous little brothers who live in an innocent world where power comes from schoolyard attitude and strutting. When they see their father making funny faces for his boss's home movies, they revolt. Why does their father defer to him? "Because he pays me," answers the father. "Don't let him pay you! You pay him!" they cry. Too young to understand that wealth and status control the adult world ("a problem they're stuck with the rest of their lives," says Dad), they still learn just enough for the family to rebalance itself into harmony. Ms. Midori's Japanese narration added a unique dimension by voicing different styles of address for male, female, and child characters, coloring and shading stretches that usually pass without intertitles, increasing both the humor and the emotional investment despite the linguistic barrier. Though benshi-type narrators developed in other countries (such as Mexico), Japan developed the practice to an art, valuing the benshi's social purpose in interpreting the unfamiliar cultural content of foreign films for Japanese audiences. As a scholar who has researched Ozu's world and then composed original dialogue for the film, Ms. Midori herself can claim auteur status of a sort, or at least active participation in the tatami-mat master's vision.
The Chicago Tribune's Michael Wilmington revived Elia Kazan's 1961 Wild River, the evocative look back at the flooding of the Tennessee Valley in the 1930s, with Montgomery Clift romancing Lee Remick in the full splendor of classic Cinemascope.
Still more from the festival: Cinerama Adventure.
When all ballots were counted, the Golden Hugo for Best Film was awarded to Crimson Gold, with a statement by jury president Klaus Eder saying that "We hope this prize might help keep the director working and help the film get distribution in Iran."
Acting awards went to Ludivine Sagnier for Best Female Performance in Claude Miller's La Petite Lili and to Pierre Boulanger for Best Male Performance in Monsieur Ibrahim.
The Silver Hugo, a Special Jury Prize, was awarded to Distant for "its intense and elegant depiction of overwhelming loneliness," and a Gold Plaque to Goodbye Dragon Inn for its "highly distinctive vision."
The Gold Hugo for Best Documentary Feature went to Nathaniel Kahn's My Architect (USA), with secondary awards to The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (Ireland/Venezuela), S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (France), People Say I'm Crazy (USA) and Jonathan Demme's The Agronomist (USA).
The "outstanding cinematography" awards went to Denmark's Reconstruction, with FIPRESCI first-movie awards to Jérôme Bonnell's Olga's Chignon and Peter Hedges' Pieces of April, the latter also voted as the audience favorite.
The complete list, including additional awards for short films, can be found here.
Distribution: The Triplets of Belleville and Crimson Gold will open commercially, along with the festival's more mainstream offerings, including The Barbarian Invasions, The Human Stain, My Life Without Me, Mambo Italiano, Pieces of April, Shattered Glass, The Singing Detective, and Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself, and even the documentary The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. Petition your local megaplex to show the others.
November 2003 | Issue 42
Copyright © 2003 by Robert Keser
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