| FESTIVAL FARE : 'Comets' / 'Reel Paradise' / 'Fallen' |
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 Till Endemann's Comets [6/10] Yet another addition to the perennially-popular 'urban intersections' picture: this one (set in the prosperous German city of Mannheim) openly tipping its hat to the 'daddy' of the sub-genre, Robert Altman's Short Cuts, by including a plot which features a baker and a birthday cake. In such movies there's invariably some kind of natural phenomenon which brings everybody together (though seldom geographically) at the end: the earthquake in Short Cuts, the frog-rain in Magnolia. And here it's the presence in the sky of a new, bright comet - discovered by an amateur astronomer stargazing through a smallish telescope in his Mannheim allotment. This unlikely discovery requires a certain leap of faith, as does the quaint idea that comets are only visible for one particular night: the stately progress of Hale-Bopp through the northern hemisphere's constellations back in 1997 seemed to take weeks, perhaps even months. Eric Mendelsohn's American indie Judy Berlin (2000) stretched the laws of physics even further with its hours-long solar eclipse, an impossibility which gave proceedings a certain archly surreal other-worldliness. Here the comet's brief visibility smacks rather more of scriptwriting contrivance - but there's enough good stuff in Endemann's script (co-written with Stefan Beuse) to compensate. That said, Comets' cross-section of modern German society isn't an especially wide one: though the age-span encompasses troubled teens and romantic pensioners, everyone we see is well-educated, articulate, and reasonably well-off. The schlubby factory-worker facing impending redundancy can afford a dwelling with conspicuously large rooms (and high ceilings), and even that allotment-based astronomer lives where and as he does due to tragic family circumstances rather than economic penury (telescopes don't come cheap). Everyone, however, seems to be coming up to a particular personal crossroads. Being a son of the old West Germany, Endemann is too rational and post-Enlightenment to go in for anything that smacks of mystical jiggery-pokery: this high-tech society has clearly moved on from the era when comets were greeted with awestruck terror as harbingers of apocalypse. But there's a more than a hint of transfiguration in the air as the heavenly body peeks through the clouds, presiding over the coming-together of disparate souls; the wiping-clean of messy slates; the discovery of the magical among the mundane. This type of transcendent humanism won't be to all tastes - after teetering on the brink of giddy darkness, he pulls back and strives a little too hard for a kind of can't-we-all-just-get-along optimism. But thanks in no small part to his uniformly impressive cast - veteran Kyra Mladeck especially empathetic and poignant - he ultimately manages to sweep us along... 'Ladies und gentlemen, ve are floating in space...' Steve James's Reel Paradise [6/10] After years successfully promoting US indie films - as chronicled in his best-selling book Spike, Mike, Slackers and Dykes - John Pierson decided to spend a year reviving the world's most remote independent cinema: the '180 Meridian' on the Fijian island of Taveuni, which until relatively recently had shown Bollywood pictures to the wealthy Indo-Fijian resident. Aided by his wife Janet and children Georgia (15) and Wyatt (13), Pierson showed many of the latest Hollywood movies for free - to the delight of the local kids, and the dismay of the island's church-leaders. The final month of the Piersons' stay forms the basis for this watchable, if troubling, documentary by James of Hoop Dreams and Stevie fame. As the self-aware, culturally-savvy Pierson himself remarks, the quixotic set-up isn't too dissimilar from Peter Weir's The Mosquito Coast (1986, based on Paul Theroux's novel) - and while his fate is less grim than that suffered by Mosquito's Allie Fox, Pierson's abrasive approach regularly creates plenty of friction. There's a certain car-crash fascination in seeing this lanky, bespectacled New Yorker mis-handle situation after situation: his confrontations with his Australian landlord Andrew Coghill make for especially uncomfortable viewing. Pierson's family integrate rather more smoothly: Janet's friendliness impresses the locals; Georgia and Wyatt rapidly accumulate Fijian friends, the latter (articulate, personable and precociously level-headed, very much the star of the show here) assimilating with remarkable smoothness. What documentaries need, however, is drama: Pierson suffers ongoing problems with his projectionist(s); valuable equipment is stolen from the Piersons' house (the film showings mean everyone knows when the residence is unoccupied); Georgia's rebelliousness threatens to get out of hand; John comes down with Dengue fever. Some of issues here are, however, so basic you wonder why they hadn't been resolved over the course of the previous eleven months. Wouldn't it have made sense, for instance, for Pierson to have at least familiarised himself with the antiquated projection equipment as soon as personnel threatened to become an issue? These concerns point to the wider question of Pierson's motivation: though visibly delighted at his audiences' visible delight, he freely admits he came to Taveuni in search of raw material for a book, Given his background he surely also had some inkling that this kind of documentary would also result. The whole exercise (/stunt?) doesn't seem to have been very well thought through - and while there's a very brief mention of the project being funded by Pierson's wealthy showbiz pals, we get little idea of the finances involved. Pierson, meanwhile, goes out of his way to antagonise the island's religious authorities - his timings force the islanders to choose between mass and the mass-media delights of the movies. This sometimes gives proceedings a slightly phoney air, as if Pierson was amping up and revelling in the various crises, knowing that this would provide director James with meatier footage. It's also unfortunate that, over the course of quite a long feature, we find out so little about the history of Fiji in general and Taveuni in particular, other than asides from Pierson about how the church "pacified" the islanders of previous generations. So by the time the family depart (leaving the cinema 'dark' - all very Last Picture Show) we're not really that much the wiser about how the islanders live, and the factors shaping their society. Are the Piersons, and by extension James and crew, really little more than well-meaning but patronising tourists? Was it really necessary to provide subtitles when the islanders speak English? Yes, they have accents, some of them quite strong... but there are moments when we can't quite make out every word of what the Piersons are saying, and these are presented without subtitles - creating an us/them dichotomy which Reel Paradise should surely have been careful to avoid. In the end, however, this is still a very watchable, original and strangely compulsive affair: not so much 'Cinema Paradiso' or 'Cinema Pacifico' as 'Cinema Purgatorio'... or perhaps 1970s BBC children's sitcom Potter's Picture Palace - as rewritten by Joseph Conrad. Fred Kelemen's Fallen [6?/10] For roughly half its length Fallen seems to represents arthouse (or rather 'film festival') cinema at its most austere, bleak, slow and forbidding. In ostentatiously long and eventless takes, we share the company of Matiss (Eugenis Dombrovskis), a slightly scruffy archivist in his early thirties who lives in the Latvian capital, Riga. One night, walking across a bridge, he sees a young woman - later identified as Alina (Aija Dzerve) - standing as if ready to jump. Egons walks on into the shadows - and hears a splash, then a cry for help. Instead of jumping in, Egons calls the police who quickly arrive on the scene. But there's no body to be found. With little else going on in his life, Egons (who looks a little like a young, benign James Remar) becomes mildly obsessed with finding out what happened - and his amateur sleuthing brings him into contact with Alina's volatile boyfriend Alexej (Nikolaj Korobov)... It's only when Alexej enters proceedings - first via photographs, then in the flesh - that Fallen finally shakes off its torpor. Thanks partly to Korobov's impressively surly, physical performance, a little bit of energy is belatedly injected into what had seemed like an exercise in pretentious, punishing ennui. Korobov isn't on screen for that long, but his arrival heralds a second half which is notably more rewarding and engrossing than the first. Though the early stretches are such tough going many viewers will have beaten a path to the exit. On the technical level, and from the very first shot, there is much to admire and appreciate (if not exactly like) about Kelemen's distinctive - and uncompromising - film-making aesthetic. He seems to have spent as much time working on the soundtrack as on the black-and-white visuals, which aren't the greatest advert for DV-to-celluloid blowup (he's his own cinematographer, as well as being one of three credited editors.) Kelemen's own score is suitably doomy while the impressive 'sound department' consists of Ruslans Gailitis and Ilvars Vegis: this latter pair responsible for a variety of atmospheric, skilfully-timed 'noises off' including birdsong, barking dogs, and pop-music cuts which are chirpily, amusingly incongruous in such a grindingly, audaciously dour context. Neil Young 6th January, 2006 COMETS : [6/10] : Germany 2005 : Till ENDEMANN : 90 mins (timed) : recent film festivals include Hof (German Film-Days). REEL PARADISE : [6/10] : USA 2005 : Steve JAMES : 110 mins (timed) : recent film festivals include Sundance and Puerto Vallarta. FALLEN : [6?/10] : Latvia/Germany 2005 : Fred Y. KELEMEN : 85 mins (timed) : recent film festivals include Rotterdam, Buenos Aires Independent, London. All seen on DVD at home in Sunderland (UK), January 2006. Comets, 5th January (with thanks to Nina Heyn and Ernst Ludwig Ganzert) Reel Paradise, 6th January (with thanks to Steve James) Fallen, 6th (with thanks to Tony Earnshaw and Fred Kelemen) |
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