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2nd Crossing Europe Film Festival : Linz, Austria, 26th April - 1st May 2005
at Moviemento and City-Kino cinemas, and the KAPU music-venue
official site : www.crossingeurope.at
PART TWO ... Changing Destiny, Netto, Sorry About Kung Fu and The Wedding
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CHANGING DESTINY : [3/10] : Nemmeno il destino : Daniele GAGLIANONE : Italy 2004 : 110 mins
Alessandro and Ferdi are friends from secondary school and live in
a dilapidated industrial town. Both are looking for their own place
in the worlds, for an oasis in the rubbish left behind by the deserted
factories. Their family situation is far from pleasant... Nemmeno il
destino is a story about the outer suburbs. The outer areas of a town
and of the soul, of physical and mental space...
(Rotterdam film festival official catalogue)
Having seen two of the three Rotterdam film festival 'Tiger Award' winners at the Dutch event - fine Spanish documentary The Sky Turns and reprehensible Russian drama 4 - I was keen to catch up with the 'missing Tiger' at Linz. Changing Destiny (the Italian title actually translates as 'Not Even Destiny') unfortunately turns out to be much closer in terms of quality to the latter rather than the former - it's a nicely-shot-and-edited but gratingly mannered and deeply pretentious coming-of-age tale about a trio of Italian teenage lads. Fellow Italian Rotterdam title Vento di terra (not in competition) deals with some similar themes in a much more engaging and penetrating fashion - then opens out into a much broader context with its audacious final reel.
Changing Destiny focusses on sensitive Alessandro (Mauro Cordella), who struggles to cope with a mentally-ill mother ('Lalli'); hothead Ferdi (Fabrizio Nicastro), who struggles to cope with an alcoholic father; and Toni (Giuseppe Sanna) - well, we never find out that much about amiable jock Toni, as he exits the scene quite early on. This is a shame, as Sanna is easily the most accomplished of the three actors on view and Toni makes much better company than either the introspective Alessandro or the 'wild child' Ferdi. It also doesn't help that the overemphatic Nicastro is fatally indulged by director Gaglianone, who co-wrote the broken-backed, repetitive script with Giaime Alonge and Alessandro Scippa, adapting Gianfranco Bettin's novel.
There's something annoyingly self-conscious about Gaglianone's surfeit of "style" throughout - undoing the strong work by cinematographer Gherardo Gossi (the screen glows with cobalt-tinged hues) and editor Luca Gasparini. But the wheels really start to come off the wagon shortly after halfway, when Ferdi also exits the narrative in rather more melodramatic style than Toni's pleasingly enigmatic departure. This - and a confession from his increasingly unstable mother - sends Alessandro over the edge into delinquency, and he ends up in a youth-offending institution where he's set back on the straight and narrow by Lorenzo a perpetually-exasperated, rough-and-ready counsellor.
Lorenzo is played by Stefano Cassetti, the blazing-eyed, ferociously charismatic actor (a former teacher, as it happens) who made a striking screen debut as the title character in Cedric Kahn's acclaimed French picture Roberto Succo (2001). Oddly, Changing Destiny is only his third screen credit - he was also in 2003's Luc Besson-produced motor-racing drama Michel Vaillant. He's clearly a choosy bloke - which makes his selection of the Changing Destiny decidedly baffling. Perhaps he realised that he would be able to steal the picture without too much effort - and he's certainly the best thing on view. If only Lorenzo had been given more to do! As it is, his belated appearance ensures even the most bored viewer (and there will be plenty of those by the time he arrives) will remain in their seat till the end - but even Cassetti's valiant, all-stops-out turn isn't anything like enough to "change the destiny" of such a fatally overcooked project.
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NETTO : [7/10] : Robert THALHEIM : Germany 2004* : 88 mins (timed)
Marcel is so stubbornly a single father that his son stays with the mother.
After years of no contact 15-year-old Sebastian is fed up with mother's
new life and moves in with his dad. The father obviously needs the youngster's
coaching in his searching for a new job. The two indeed develope something
of a comradely partnership. However, this special relationship is put to the
test when Sebastian introduces his father to a beautiful girl named Nora.
(Crossing Europe film festival official catalogue)
An odd synopsis, that one - not least because it hints at some kind of budding affair between sad-sack fortysomething Marcel (Mark E Smith lookalike Milan Peschel, excellent) and teenager Nora (Stephanie Charlotta Koetz). More importantly, nowhere is it mentioned that Marcel is a proudly old-fashioned, born-and-bred East German, and that his son Sebastian (Sebastian Butz, matching Peschel every step of the way) is from the "other side" of the now non-existent Berlin Wall. This is a historical culture-clash tragedy-tinged comedy-drama every bit as precise and acute as Wolfgang Becker's worldwide arthouse smash Good Bye Lenin! - although the fact that the picture is shot on (almost entirely hand-held) dogme-style DV rather than celluloid will probably prevent Netto from obtaining anything like that kind of exposure or financial success.
Which would be a real shame: Netto was named Best German Film at the 2005 Berlin Film Festival and, when push comes to shove, is probably a slight cut above Becker's effort in terms of believability and coherence - and also because it doesn't overdo the 'broken-dream-Ostalgia' stuff, nor does it need to ever explicitly talk about its GDR/DDR subject-matter.
It's definitely much more deserving of distribution in UK cinemas than the so-so French product (Kings and Queen, etc) which routinely clogs up our release-schedules. Despite its 'arty' rough-edged feel, Netto is really quite a crowdpleaser - although one which resists any temptation of hankies-at-the-ready sentimentality. The relationship between the embarrassing Marcel and the embarrassed Sebastian is never anything than utterly convincing, and while getting to know his long-estranged son does help Marcel get his life back on track, there's no feeling that what we're watching is any kind of trite homily.
What we get is, instead, is a funny, moving, strikingly confident and well-written debut-feature by 30-year-old writer-director Thalheim - one which, if anything, could easily be 10-15 minutes longer than its brisk running-time. Specifically, editor Stefan Kobe should probably have left in the scene where Marcel visits the Europe-conquering cut-price supermarket which provides the film with its name (and which should therefore not be Anglicised as Net, despite what the Crossing Europe catalogue might claim).
As it is, calling the picture Netto without actually showing a Netto supermarket gives proceedings a slight air of enigmatic pretentiousness which is quite at odds with Thalheim's generally no-nonsense approach. Music, for example, is kept to a bracing minimum - indeed, almost all the tunes we hear are those which Marcel plays on his stereo: and he's a diehard fan of Peter Tschernig, the "Johnny Cash of East Berlin." The Tschernig angle is one of the picture's several amusing running jokes - building to a very satisfying payoff in what's otherwise a slightly fuzzy climax. Tschernig is sensibly making the most of this high-profile, semi-ironic "tribute" - and although his culture-specific appeal is unlikely to travel very far beyond Germany's borders, Netto looks certain to find a warm welcome on even the furthest-flung cinema screens.
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SORRY ABOUT KUNG FU : [6/10] : Oprosti za kung fu : Ognjen SVILCIC : Croatia 2004 : 74 mins (timed)
Sorry For Kung Fu is a comedy about a xenophobic Croatian family that
encounters their worst nightmare. This satire takes place just after the recent
war in former Yugoslavia - a war that was sparked by far smaller ethnic
differences than those in the film - which gives the film a further ironic element.
The film is a comic drama where everything is turned upside down. The things
get quickly out of control, yet our heroes - driven by their beliefs - are hardly
aware of it. Nothing works the way they want and this creates both comic and
tragic situations.
(Ognjen Svilcic, Crossing Europe film festival official catalogue)
Sorry About Kung Fu went down conspicuously well at Crossing Europe in Linz - in notably gangbusters style with Greg, Rebecca, Paco and Leo, the party-all-night gang responsible for comparatively raucous fellow Linz-entry The Plague. I wasn't quite so bowled over, partly because I was rather more impressed with another post-Balkan-conflict wry comedy, Pjer Zalica's Days and Hours which I saw the day before. That said, Sorry About Kung Fu has a lot to recommend it - and not just the amiably cutesy, oddball title. The 74-minute running-time is a plus (particularly at a film festival such as Linz's), although it does kind-of put Svilcic in unfavourable competition with Slovenia's Jan Cvitkovic, who clocked in at a mere 68 minutes with Bread and Milk (2001) - still comfortably the pick of the post-Balkan-conflict-wry-comedy genre.
Sorry About Kung Fu may not be quite in that league, but it is an enjoyably droll, deadpan affair examining a country - Croatia - on the cusp between a very long, bloody past (the film opens with a quotation from a 15th-century statute) and an uncertain, probably rather prosperous future, with tourists flooding to the Dalmatian coastline and EU membership seemingly only a few years away. Old and new values come into melodramatic collision around the central figure of Mirjana (Daria Lorenci), who returns home to her family's isolated rural farmhouse after a spell in Germany (that dangerously modern, progressive place) with a major surprise for her stick-in-the-mud parents.
It wouldn't be fair to go into details here - Sorry About Kung Fu is essentially a one-joke picture, but the joke is a pretty good one, and it doesn't really matter that Svilcic occasionally seems to be stretching short-film material to bare-minimum feature-film length. He's strong at laconic, observational scriptwriting and establishing characters with just the simplest of brush-strokes: the 'fixer' cousin and minefield-clearer 'Mate' are vivid creations, while the pair of onlooking, nearly wordless yokels (whose shenanigans kind-of-explain the title) are especially good value for their limited screentime. And although city-boy Svilcic (from Goran Ivanisevic's coastal-resort hometown Split) is probably guilty of exaggerating the backwardness of these rural folk, there's no malice in his caricature. Easy to say that from the comfort of my British flat, of course - the residents of certain backwater villages in Croatia may perhaps beg to differ...
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THE WEDDING : [8/10] : Wesele : Wojciech** SMARZOWSKI : Poland 2004 : 109 mins
I've heard - more than once - an opinion that The Wedding should never
be presented outside of Poland, because it depicts our country in a way we,
Polish people, don't want to be seen by foreigners. Needless to say, I was
curious to hear the foreigners' reaction. Surprisingly, The Wedding became
the most wanted Polish film of 2004/2005.
(Warsaw film festival director Stefan Laudyn, Crossing Europe
film festival official catalogue)
My Big Fat Polish Wedding? Thankfully anything but. Feature-debutant Smarzowski manages to take one of the most worn-out sub-genres in recent cinema - chaotic comedy nuptials - and produce something delightfully scabrous, bracingly misanthropic, uncompromisingly intense. Easily the pick of the dozen or so pictures I saw at Crossing Europe 2005. That said, this Wedding isn't for all 'guests' - you may well feel in urgent need of a shower after 109 minutes of a picture whose celluloid seems brutally soaked in sweat, blood, vomit, piss and lashings of cheap (Slovakian) vodka.
It's the wedding day from hell - the ceremony passes with only a slight hitch, but the problems only really start with the reception. Disaster piles upon disaster, rooms become smoke-filled zones of Stygian gloom, and anything that can go wrong does so - largely through the venality and corruption of the participants. Nearly all of whom end up staggering, fist-throwing, bile-spewing drunk long before the first painful rays of sunshine poke above the horizon. It's a very long night.
There are no real innocents on view, but chief among sinners is the father (Marian Dziedziel) of the bride (Tamara Arciuch), a thoroughly immoral rogue whose flaws of character bring about punishment of a relentlessly escalating and pleasingly extreme kind as the hours pass. Everybody seems to be on the take or on the make, from the crooked lawyer to the feckless police to the hired-muscle mafia to the emphatically less-than-pious local priest. The achievement of Smarzowski's script is to be simultaneously utterly Polish (the title extremely familiar to local audiences from S.Wyspianki's 1901 play and A.Wajda's 1973 film-version) and recognisably universal: this is pitch-black satire, with everything crucially cranked a couple of vivid notches into caricatured extremity.
Half Vinterberg's Festen ("happy" celebration occasions family-implosion), half Altman's A Wedding (inconvenient death-of-elderly-relative around halfway), The Wedding follows the courage of its own sour convictions all the way down the line, Smarzowski's unerring control of tone (and impressive marshalling of a flawless large ensemble cast) more than compensating for the slightly episodic way in which events relentlessly unfold. There is a romantic ending, of sorts - but so very hard-won that it feels anything but sentimental. Those with sensitive stomachs should stay well away - like that bootleg Slovak vodka which is gulped down in liver-mushing quantities, The Wedding will leave you delirious, intoxicated, just a little bit demented. But it's only next morning that the impact really hits.
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Neil Young
6th June, 2005
(all seen 29th April at City-Kino)
click here for reviews part three (No Frank In Lumberton, The Czech Dream, etc)
* Some sources list Netto as a '2005' film.
** Wojciech aka Wojtek
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ORIGINAL SHORT-FORM REVIEWS WRITTEN AND POSTED HERE 8th MAY ...
Changing Destiny : Grindingly pretentious drama about the travails of three teenage lads in the last year of school. Flashy cinematography and editing tart up a hackneyed, cliche-ridden, underwritten tale of ostentatious bleakness. Performances are mixed, though Stefanio Cassetti (from Roberto Succo) shows up near the end and manages to turn in a striking, energetic turn. But otherwise this one's a dud - notwithstanding its Tiger Award at the Rotterdam Film Festival...
Netto : Will inevitably be compared with Good Bye Lenin - picture is a father-and-son piece in which dad is an unreconstructed East Berliner, teenage kid a skateboarder open to 'western' influences. Picture looks rough thanks to being shot on hand-held DV, which will inevitably mean it doesn't get as much exposure as Lenin. But if anything, this is marginally the more satisfying work - outstanding performances from the two leads, and engaging, no-nonsense work from debutant writer-director Thalheim.
Sorry About Kung Fu : A young woman returns to her home in a remote Croatian village after spending time in Germany. She's pregnant, and there's no sign of the father - which doesn't go down well with her old-fashioned parents. Complications ensue. Pleasingly droll comedy of family dysfunction, and the friction between backward-looking oldsters and the new generation which is keen to spread its wings. A touch padded-out, however, even at 71 minutes - this material might have worked better as a 30-40 minute short. That catchy title does fit the picture, sort of...
The Wedding : Bracingly scabrous, misanthropic chronicle of the wedding-day from hell. Everything that can go wrong, does go wrong. Shades of Robert Altman's A Wedding in the title and in some of the shenanigans, but this is a different beast altogether: rooms fugged up with cigarette smoke, endless quantities of Slovakian vodka being sloshed down, fingers getting shot off, priests and lawyers on the take... Stomach-churningly convincing stuff.
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