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SHEILA SEACROFT WRITES, 'LIVE' FROM CLUJ : EXCLUSIVELY FOR JIGSAW LOUNGE.
reviewed : Slumming [7/10]; Megacities [8/10], The District [9/10], Taxidermia [9/10], The Elementary Particles [4/10], Our Daily Bread [7/10], Ode To Joy [5/10]
further reports : part two ... part three
6 June 2006
Arrival day. Breathless rush-hour entry into Cluj ("capital" of Transilvania) a bustling little city that looks as if it's going places. Despite dust and fumes in the air from the many road improvements going on and ridiculous rush-hour traffic, it's a handsome city that feels buoyant and friendly. Somewhere Udo Kier is presenting the entirety of Lars Von Trier's TV epic The Kingdom. But I'm too late for that. First film for me is at the Cinema Arta, a delightful Modern Style little cinema near the university, all boxy blue and yellow interior, deep plush creaky seats just like the little suburban cinemas of my youth. The odd person leaving through the velvet curtains at the side doors let in waft of late evening sunlight. It feels a good place to be.
Slumming
Austria 2006 : Michael GLAWOGGER : 96mins (approx) : 7/10
I'm hoping to catch all three of Michael Glawogger's films showing here, but as I'm arriving on the 5th day I am seeing them in topsy-turvy fashion, which may in fact prove illuminating. First up is this most recent, unusually from Glawogger not a documentary.
The hard hitting opening sets the nerves jarring, as a drunk storms through a metro train raging within at bureaucracy and all the ills of his life. Contrapuntally we meet Sebastian, a rich unlikeable young man who spends his time 'slumming': visiting lowlife bars and observing people as they move through the city, making superior assumptions about their lifestyles, and meeting up with girls via chatrooms for his own arrogant amusement.
Their paths cross one night when he and his compliant friend Alex find the drunk asleep dead to the world on a bench, and think it is a particularly funny wheeze to take him in their boot over the border to Czech Republic and dump him there without any ID. So far so grim.
But the great strength of this film is its mood change: quirky humour creeps in, people are more resourceful than you would think, cold hearts can be melted, and redemption of a sort arrives for all the characters.
Not only was this my first film of the festival, it was also the first film I've ever been present at with a dog in the audience. A little white terrier-type, who sat with his master near the front, after frolicking outside with his big friends, a pair of very beautiful long-haired black hounds, outside. Not a yap was heard.
Megacities
Austria 1998 : Michael GLAWOGGER : 90 mins : 8/10
Second Glawogger, from 8 years earlier, also in the Arta cinema, is very different yet very recognisably of the same spirit. A documentary about the poor and dispossessed of the great cities of the world, it asks the question, why do we live, how do we get from day to day? Stunning images of people's lives across the world, from metal-beaters and dye-workers in India to hustlers in New York to a burlesque dancer in Mexico City.
It's a total onslaught on the senses: visually amazing images of beautiful squalor and horror pin you back in your seat. How can the lingered-on image of still-twitching slaughtered chickens spattering their blood onto the wall behind the bin into which they're thrown be so lyrically beautiful? But it is... beauty is truth? The lucky ones, perhaps, have a reason for getting through the days, like the Mexican mother of three who divides her time between helping her kids out with their homework and being touched in every intimate part of her body onstage.
But for most, work is a dreadful, hard, killing ordeal, like the dye-stained men or those who sift through the foul rubbish in Mexico City. It's a devastatingly depressing film, morally and physically painful to watch. Whether the final images are optimistic for the future or are doubly depressing as we think what future the beautiful unscathed children really have in store is doubtful. But see it if you can..
7 June 2006 (Hungarian Day in Cluj)
The District!
Nyocker! aka Districtul!
Hungary 2004 : GAUDER Aron : 90 mins (approx) : 9/10
Today being devoted to all things Hungarian, the first up for me was Districtul, a totally hilarious animation that's like a cross between Jan Svankmajer and South Park. It's a modern variant on the Romeo and Juliet story, the warring families here being Ukrainian v Gypsy underworld. It's bursting with life, rattles along at a great rate, with a fantastically inventive plot and great music. It's highly satirical, with a clear Eastern European slant, but eventually all the world leaders get a look in, even a cute little Tony Blair. The audience roared with laughter, clapped, cheered, and the cinema almost erupted when towards the end a hapless President Bush mistakes Bucharest for Budapest, with somewhat momentous results. I guess it was the Hungarian half of Cluj who were out for it. Considering full length animation is one of my least favourite forms of cinema, the fact that I'd happily watch this again tomorrow if I could has to be a pretty high recommendation.
[click here for Neil Young's review of the same film]
This was my first film at Cinema Republica, the largest in the city, a spacious steeply-raked 60s interior with the low-backed seats of the period when we weren't encouraged to lay back and snooze. It's round the corner from the outdoor market, where the strawberries are heaped on stalls smelling like they're freshly picked and the peppers piled up like shiny primary-coloured toys.
Taxidermia
Hungary 2006 : PALFI Gyorgy : 91 mins (approx) : 9/10
A quick dodge through the sunny rush hour streets got me to the third festival cinema, the Victoria, a later art-deco style than the Arta, this one all curves and metalwork, unfortunately done out in shades of pink and rather claustrophobic. Suitable then for Taxidermia, a very powerful film, not for the faint-hearted, from which I am still recovering. Everyone I've spoken to about it suspects it is a great film, but no-one, myself included, is quite sure: we all feel we may have been shell-shocked into admiration.
It's the tale of three generations of men, all very much into stuffing, of one kind or another. All manner of body parts are on show, mostly unappetising, and every bodily fluid has its moment (except, on retrospect, snot). There are so many aspects and so many ways you can look at it - at times it's a political and social satire, a poem on the body, a family drama, a raucous comedy, an absurdist surreal work of art. I haven't got my head around it all yet, and probably never will. To reveal any of the plot or situations would take the edge off the constant weirdness and shock value of the thing. We (the capacity audience) were completely taken up with it: laughter, moans of disgust or even disbelief throughout. But however horrific it's constantly entertaining, mesmeric, and often weirdly beautful to look at.
The Elementary Particles
Elementarteilchen aka Atomised
Germany 2006 : Oskar ROEHLER : 113 mins (approx) : 4/10
After two super films it just couldn't last. And it didn't. I was persuaded to go along to the late-night showing of this film by colleagues keen to see it, who had all read the book, by Michel Houellebecq (a cult favourite in its time.) The protagonists are two half-brothers, sons of a hippy mother, who have been unaware of each other's existence until adulthood, and are as unlike as can be. Michael is a brilliant but dull scientist with no emotional life; Bruno is an unbalanced, unhappy teacher who can't keep his thoughts off sex (except with his wife). Moritz Bleibtreu does his best with this highly unsympathetic character, while Christian Ulmen sleepwalks through his role as Michael, expressing boffin-like disengagement with a tip of his head, a half smile, and a flare of his nostrils.
The plot is hackneyed, the characterisation poor, it has every cliche in the book, and worst of all it tries to bamboozle the audience with solemn faux-scientific talk, all sorts of nonsense about world-shattering gene research which were are meant to believe boring old Michael has discovered. The ultimate McGuffin. The tone is very strange: the audience didn't know whether they were supposed to laugh at the absurd situations... but they did. It should either be bleakly funny or appalling when a son shouts at his mother on her death bed, here it was just embarrassing.
The 'bittersweet' ending was sickening. It's one thing to make a silly romance of stock situations (cancer, sex clubs, hippy camp, fancying your pupils, paralysis)... it's quite another to put on a serious face and pretend it's all terribly meaningful in a universal way. Apparently M Houellebecq's book is rather different and totally bleak in its ending. But I still won't be reading any of his novels.
June 8 2006
Our Daily Bread
Unser taglich Brot
Austria/Germany 2005 : Nikolaus GEYRHALTER : 90 mins approx : 7/10
A grim film with which to start the day, Our Daily Bread is an unforgiving look at the mechanised world of food production, from cattle to chickens to fruit and veg and even salt. It's beautifully made, reminiscent of Kubrick in its symmetry and its presentation of machines as monumentally powerful beings. The humans manning them are slight, disengaged, a soft contrast... but just as relentless, scooping up tiny chicks, stuffing baby pigs into castrating machines (a truly awful image), sawing open carcasses, killing. One young woman has the air of a madonna in her skyblue plastic apron, sitting languidly cutting the feet off dead chickens.
I seem to have seen an awful lot of innards in the last few days, so it was a relief when the camera went into the glasshouses and fields to see crop spraying and harvesting - this last quite a gentle occupation which did at least call for some judgment on the part of the operatives. The rural scenes are even occasionally lyrical, an olive tree being mechanically shaken of its fruit, a field of yellow sunflowers turning up their heads to the sky and trembling as they are sprayed by an equally yellow plane.
A group of teenaged school children were in the screening, and became restless - I can't really blame them. It's relentless, and sometimes stunningly so, but there is a point when relentlessness becomes tedium, and this film did teeter on that brink occasionally. Over-protracted by at least 10 minutes, rather than reinforcing its message it lost impact by lingering a little too long. But, for the most part, riveting and undeniably important in its themes.
Ode to Joy
Oda do Radosci
Poland 2005 : A. KAZEJAK-DAWID; J.KOMASA; M.MIGAS : 112 mins : 5/10
Theme of the day for me seems to be the over-long film... And here we go again. A film of three parts by different directors all looking at the phenomenon of young people leaving Poland for London, all featuring the coach station in Warsaw. In the first section (the best) to the background of a miners' strike a girl returns from London to an unsatisfactory situation at home, her hard-won money for cleaning floors for a year coming eventually to nothing.
The second section sees a volatile rap musician fighting against compromising his lifestyle, the last concerns a disaffected student who has left university and returned home to a dead end job in fishing. Finally all three come together on the coach to face an uncertain future.
They're all interesting, both from the point of view of a look at a particular social phenomenon at this particular point in time, but also each having something to say about young people anywhere at the point at which they must make decisions about moving on in their lives.
However, portmanteau films tend to work best if there is a contrast in tone combine with an overriding theme, like the recent Tickets. All put together in this way these stories are too alike and monotonously grim. And they all could all have been shorter and thereby more powerful. Despite the cumulative effect of the three together obviously being an aim, I would say that each as individual short films would have been more effective.
[click here for Neil Young's review of the same film]
further reports : part two ... part three
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