Ljubljana, 5.49pm Friday
NB : I'm working on an odd Slovenian keyboard, and cannot get brackets, dashes or italics. Apologies.

Flying visit to Ljubljana, arriving just in time last night to hightail it to the Komuna cinema in the city centre for the 6.30pm screening of A Prairie Home Companion ... something of a raging mustsee following the death of director Robert Altman earlier this week. Picture worked a treat, despite my being half deaf in one ear due to the aeroplane and a headcold Ive has since Turin. Setting is an old theatre in St Paul, Minnesota (twin city of Minneapolis, just across the river), where for 30 plus years an oldstyle radio variety programme has been recorded live. Currently presented by gangling, agedschoolboyish Garrison Keiller (as GK, ie himself), and this is the last show before the theatre is torn down in the name of moneygrubbing progress.
   Radio station which makes the show has been bought by soulless corporation (pointedly, topically Texan). Film follows the orderly chaos of the final night, which features a death, several numbers by sister act Meryl Street and Lily Tomlin, several more by cheeky cowboys Woody Harrelson and John C Reilly, various comic/musical interludes. Backstage, an oldschool private eye type (played by Kevin Kline as a cross between Basil Fawlty and Philip Marlowe) is bemused and bewitched by a statuesque blonde in a white trenchcoat (Virginia Madsen)... And so it goes, not much plot, considerable charm, definite valedictory feeling in the air undercut by Altman's trademark detachment and mild cynicism. Doesn't linger very long in the memory, but I had a dopey grin on my face for much of the runningtime... a very nice way to bow out.
   No such luck at this morning's very busy 10am screening of Babel at Kino Vic. Expectant, studenty crowd lured in by starry cast (Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett), pedigree of director A G inarritu (21 Grams, Amores Perros) and writer G Arriaga (those two plus Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada), plus some ecstatic American reviews... Picture has found much less favour with the highbrow magazines like Film Comment and Cinemascope, and while I can't quite join in with those publications' withering dismissals, nor I am I capable of giving the film a positive review.
    Arrived at screening to be told that screening was sold out; after some negotiation, I emphasised my press credentials and a ticket was found. After all this palaver, I was not going to vacate my seat ... even when I realised the film was playing without the English subtitles advertised in the festival publicity. Then again, subject of Arriaga's script is communications between people and nationalities, so it was somehow perversely appropriate that most of the dialogue was incomprehensible to me, even with the 'assistance' of Slovene subtitling. Film is divided between three main geographical locales, telling an interconnected tale which revolves around the shooting of an American tourist (Cate Blanchett) while on holiday in Morocco.
   I understood most of the Morocco sequences, which feature Pitt as her husband; not so much of the Mexican sections, in which Pitt and Blanchett's young children are taken from their San Diego home by the housekeeper entrusted with their care (she has to attend a family wedding); the section that gave me most trouble was the one about a hormonallytormented Japanese schoolgirl who is what used to be called 'deafmute'.
   The Japanese parts, even though I wasn't sure what was going on most of the time, seemed to work the best, whereas the Mexican and Morroccan bits were hamstrung by the wildly melodramatic way various members of the same family endure dire extremis at pretty much exactly the same time, for totally different reasons. Convoluted, histrionic shenanigans delivered with an offputting portentousness which easily outweighs the pleasures of Rodrigo Prieto's oftenstriking cinematography. Also dodgy in the way that the shooting of a white woman is treated as an earthshatteringly traumatic event, whereas a similar but more serious incident involving a Moroccan boy is whizzed over with unseemly haste...
   I may well catch Babel (which incidentally features an insultingly tiny role for that fine British actress Harriet Walter) back home when I'll be able to see it with English subtitles, but it was something of a slog at the best part of 2.5hours this morning, and I can't say I'm particularly looking forward to enduring it all again.

Neil Young
24th November, 2006

A Prairie Home Companion   7/10   Robert ALTMAN, USA 2006* 
Babel   4?/10   Alejandro GONZALEZ INARRITU, USA/Mexico 2006


Sheila Seacroft's reports from the festival's first week

Jigsaw Lounge at last year's LIFFe





* according to IMDb, A Prairie Home Companion runs 105 minutes; Babel runs 142. I saw A Prairie Home Companion at Kino Komuna; Babel at Kino Vic; both were public shows.