| CITY OF DOG : Jose Luis Torres Leiva's 'No Place Nowhere' [7/10] |
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 In 2003 Cuban director Fernando Perez won a stack of international awards for his film Suite Habana (Havana Suite), an impressionistic, fragmentary, 84-minute documentary portrait of a city "where life is lived at a unique pace." And it stank, reducing the Habaneros to hapless pawns illustrating the director's trite ideas. Around the same time Jose Luis Torres Leiva was making No Place Nowhere, on paper a not-dissimilar film-poem, life's-rich-pageant exercise shot in and around La Matriz, a working-class district of Chile's spectacular coastal port of Valparaiso. And while Torres Leiva's results aren't entirely devoid of pretentiousness or, even at 71 minutes, the occasional longueurs, he hits the target much more often, and with much more illuminating and entertaining consequences, than Perez's ludicrously overpraised misfire. It's an auspicious debut for the 30-year-old film-maker - who has a real flair for framing and composition - despite being perhaps just one or two edits away from being something really remarkable. Torres Leiva's focus is on the quotidian stuff which is so often taken for granted in modern life: the colour and texture of brickwork; the way people walk down the street; the shape of a flight of steps; the light of the sky; the beauty of a dark cloud. And the dogs: Valparaiso apparently has a large population of stray or semi-stray canines, and La Matriz would appear to be no exception. So frequently do they find their way into shot that Torres Leiva seems to be preparing for a film version of Alan M Beck's cult 1973 monograph The Ecology of Stray Dogs. They often steal the show from the humans alongside whom they appear to exist in remarkable, easygoing harmony - indeed Valparaiso, or rather La Matriz, comes across like an exceedingly nice place to visit, or even to live (despite one somewhat worrying shot of an army water-cannon, which we deduce is being used to disperse a left-wing march). We get a real sense of the place's atmosphere, and Torres Leiva manages this without resorting to tourist-board-type vistas of what is by all accounts one of the most visually breathtaking of all major conurbations. This is, then, a city-film in the noble tradition of Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera - despite the fact that Torres Leiva never leaves the confines of one particular locale (he perhaps should meet Bosnia's Pjer Zalica, whose Kod Amidze Idriza ['At Uncle Idriza's] he originally translated into English as 'Days and Hours in My Neighbourhood', until abbreviating the title to just the first three words). Torres Leiva compiles a priceless anthropological record - both pictorial and aural - of a place and time, eschewing narration and allowing the locals to speak for themselves. Indeed, one of the major plus points of No Place Nowhere is the fact that the presence of the camera is so often remarked upon by the participants: even a rather uncomfortably Perez-ish sequence in which folk 'pose' mutely for Torres Leiva's lens is rescued by the cheeky comments of passers-by ("Seduce the camera!") Jocular references to "the documentary" abound, a rather pleasant change when it's almost invariably the case that directors prefer to pretend that their film-making apparatus doesn't exist. The soundtrack, like the images, are punctuated with lovely little epiphanies - a snatch of Nirvana (the band) heard in a back lane; a church congregation belting out a version (initially incongruous, on reflection less so) of Simon and Garfunkel's 'The Sound of Silence'. It's unfortunate that the latter is almost immediately drowned out by the string duo (a violin plus a larger instrument - perhaps cello?) whose rehearsals provide much of the soundtrack: in an almost Godardian touch, the pair's contributions sometimes suddenly fade in and/or out, and Torres Leiva's habit of often showing us the musicians in action recalls Godard's use of the Rolling Stones on One Plus One and Les Rita Mitsuoko on Soigne ta droite. It's not a bad idea per se, but doesn't quite work - the images and sounds of the city are more than enough to maintain our interest, and the strings add a layer of unfortunate artsiness that isn't to the film's advantage: Torres Leiva's choice of subtitle ('Notes on Documentary about Fiction') is similarly unhelpful, and doesn't really do justice to the simple riches to be found in the film itself. Neil Young 2nd December, 2005 NO PLACE NOWHERE : [7/10] : Ningun lugar en ninguna parte* : Chile 2004 : Jose Luis TORRES LEIVA : 71 mins (timed) seen on DVD at home in Sunderland (UK), 2nd December 2005 - with thanks to Jose Luis Torres Leiva  * full English-language title No Place Nowhere : Notes on a Documentary about Fiction full original title Ningun lugar en ninguna parte : Apuntes para una ficción sobre el documental |
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