BORN AND BRED : [6/10]
Nacido y criado
Argentina (Arg/Ity/UK) 2006 : Pablo TRAPERO : 100m : seen 19/1 at Kulturhuset (public show)
   After 2004's ebulliently engaging - and intimately autobiographical - Rolling Family (aka Familia Rodante), writer-director Trapero takes a slight backward step with his uneven followup Born and Bred: the painful story of a how a Buenos Aires yuppie copes with the aftermath of a shattering domestic tragedy. Part of the point of the film is that the audience never knows more than the protagonist Santiago (Guillermo Pfening, looking like a cross between Gael Garcia Bernal and Jeremy Davies), and only learns the full truth about that shattering domestic tragedy at the same time as he does. So it isn't fair to go too far into the exact nuts and bolts of the plot: suffice to say that, after surviving a terrible car crash involving his wife and young daughter, Santiago checks himself out of hospital and flees to remote, wintry southern Patagonia - where he takes odd jobs in a tiny 'town' built around a small airfield. Here he loses himself in manual labour, casual sex, sense-dimming drugs and the chatty companionship of his new neighbours and colleagues. But from time to time his emotions - a gruelling combination of grief, guilt and bereavement - rise irresistibly to the surface...
   Born and Bred works best as a character-study of a man who was once a well-heeled 'boss' and who has voluntarily become an ordinary 'worker', one step away from a hobo: Trapero makes some subtle but telling points about exploitation and class, tracing the personal and economic relationships that define the community in which Santiago finds himself. Trapero's direction is sensitive and ambitious, placing his human participants against a vast, stark natural background - captured in crisp, evocative fashion by cinematographer Guillermo Nieto, aided by a twangly score (by Palo Pandolfo, Luis Chomicz and Las Voces Blancas) that adds to the film's atmospherics and only occasionally becomes intrusive.
   There's much to like, then, about Born and Bred - such a shame that the film is undermined by basic weaknesses in Trapero's script, co-written with Mario Rulloni. The early sections and middle sections, introducing Santiago and patiently establishing our empathy with his situation, are slow-burningly effective. But as the film progresses, there's the sense that Trapero and Rulloni aren't quite sure where to take Santiago - and us - next. And when we - and he - discover what's actually been going on, it feels a little like a cheap, somewhat arbitrary twist. The big final-reel 'revelation' comes too quickly, too confusingly, so that many viewers will end up baffled and frustrated. This haziness neutralises much of the film's hard-earned emotional resonance - and gives the unfortunate impression of scriptwriters' contrivance, rather than feeling like a story that's developed organically from the characters, their situations and their environments.

RELATIONS : [6/10]
Swjas aka Svyaz
Russia 2006 : Avdotia SMIRNOVA : 80m : 19/1 at Verdensteatret (public show)
   The theme of adultery has long been catnip to film directors and scriptwriters - though it's customary for the subject to be tackled once the individuals concerned are some way into their careers, and have thus accumulated a store of 'experience' around the global film-festival circuit and on far-from-home movie-sets. A touch surprising, then, that Smirnova should address the subject in her very first film as a director. But Smirnova isn't solely interested in infidelity per se: the illicit affair economically depicted here over the course of 80 (commendably) brisk minutes - between Moscow-based businessman Ilya (Mikhail Porechenkov) and St Petersburg magazine-editor Nina (Anna Mikhalkova) - is used as a means to explore the slippery moral situation which, the film strongly hints, is now endemic among what's known as the 'New Russians.'
   Following the fall of Communism, Russian society has endured a predictable and protracted period of volatility in many aspects - touched upon here via subtle, often indirect references to Putin-era developments - and, Smirnova indicates, the shock-waves have also had a major impact on the nation's most intimate and personal relationships. She examines this situation by showing the consequences of the affair not only on Ilya and Nina, but on their nearest and dearest - and does so with a welcome avoidance of melodrama and overcomplexity, instead emphasising the ironic and comic aspects of the lovers' tricky situation.
   A focussed, character-based piece of shifting moods, Relations employs one very notable stylistic flourish: as Ilya and Nina's relationship evolves from puppyish infatuation to something rather more clear-eyed, Lev Ezhov's digital cinematography gradually moves from a glowing gauzy romanticism to a kind of stark, realistic grittiness. It's a somewhat crude storytelling technique, but an undeniably effective one. Smirnova's real trump card, however, is the bearishly charismatic Porechenkov - best known in Russia as being the longtime friend and collaborator of Night Watch star Konstantin Khabensky. With minimal obvious effort, he somehow makes an essentially unpleasant character empathetically likeable and on this evidence the 37-year-old Porechenkov - who resembles a youthful cross between Gerard Depardieu, Man of Marble's Jerzy Radziwilowicz and A Very Long Engagement's Clovic Cornillac - is most definitely a name to watch.

BORDERPOST : [7/10]
Karaula 
various* 2006 : Rajko GRLIC : 94m : 19/1 at Fokus (public show)
   Though by any standards an accomplished and engaging work of cinema, Border Post is historically notable as a co-production between Croatia, Serbia-Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Slovenia and Macedonia (plus the UK.) It's the first time that the ex-Yugoslav countries have collaborated on such a project, and as is therefore itself cause for interest and celebration: especially as the film itself, set high above on the shores of Macedonia's Lake Ohrid, takes place in 1987 - just before Yugoslavia started its vertiginous slide into civil war(s). 
   Our hero is Sinisa (Toni Gojanovic), a medical student from Split enduring his year of compulsory military service. A happy-go-lucky sort, he makes the most of his posting to a hilltop post near the Albanian border under the command of booze-soaked Bosnian veteran Pasic (Emir Hadzihafizbegovic). Pasic is keen to be transferred, even keener to visit his wife Mirjana (Verica Nedeska-Trajkova) who lives in the nearest city. But when Pasic contracts syphilis after a visit to a prostitute, he's advised by Sinisa that the penicillin "cure" will require three weeks to remove the tell-tale symptoms. Pasic speedily concocts an alert about Albanian troops massing menacingly on the border - cancelling all leave ... for three weeks ("until we get his dick sorted out, we're at war with Albania!") Pasic needs to get messages and money to Mirjana, enlisting the trusted Sinisa as go-between - but the fresh-faced lad isn't quite so innocent as he may appear...
   With the aid of some unexpectedly striking cinematography from Slobodan Trninic (who makes the absolute most of Ohrid's spectacular vistas) and a soundtrack featuring some choice cuts of 1980s Yugo-pop, Grlic - adapting Ante Tomic's novel - impressively shifts his picture's tone as the plot gradually gathers speed. We move from the Bilko / M*A*S*H / Buffalo Soldiers khaki-knockabout of the gleefully foul-mouthed early sections, through to more romantic and serious moods (even tragically melodramatic) in the later acts as Nedeska-Trajkova's sensual, intelligent Mirjana becomes an increasingly prominent element in an otherwise testosterone-heavy ensemble. The life's-rich-tapestry approach taken by Grlic is at once utterly 'Balkan' and yet, thanks to the strong performances and witty script, fully accessible to wider audiences. Knowledge of the impending Yugoslav cataclysm, however, adds a crucial extra element of poignancy and irony to even the funniest and breeziest of moments.

RESTART : [2/10]
Czech Republic (Cz/Fin) 2005 : Julius SEVCIK : 85m : 10/1 at Fokus (public show)
   Restart is a film about insecurity, jealousy and fears of infidelity; it features numerous fantasy sequences in which the supposedly 'wronged' partner speculates about their other half's illicit affairs, and imagines scenes of cold, sweet revenge. This might suggest that the film intended as a 21st century update of Preston Sturges' 1948 minor classic Unfaithfully Yours - except writer-director Sevcik's frenetic, over-cooked aesthetic strongly suggests his cultural scope of reference begins and ends with adverts, pop videos, and the most glossily hyperkinetic movies of the current decade. As Pauline Kael once said about Alan Parker - he's got style to burn, and that's exactly what he should do with it.
   Strip away the ostentatiously eye-popping, instantly-dated visuals (a barrage of offkilter camera angles; random freeze-frames; arbitrary shifts to fast/slow-motion and/or monochrome and/or computer-distorted images) and the instantly-dated, Ibiza-cacophonic soundtrack - and what you've got have is a rather flimsy, underwritten tale about eminently dislikeable people being beastly to each other. Front and centre is Sylva (Lenka Krobotova), who - in a misguided April Fool's Day prank - pretends to break up with her boyfriend Martin (Filip Capka), saying that she's been sleeping with his brother Robert (Vaclav Jiracek). Martin fails to see the funny side and goes (understandably) AWOL, sending Sylva on a frantic nocturnal quest around the vomit-strewn, unsympathetic city in search of her errant (ex-?)lover.
   If it was Sevcik's intention to indict the shallow, solipsistic hedonism of his contemporaries (like Sylva and Martin, he's in his mid-to-late twenties), Restart succeeds all too well. Partly thanks to the fact that numerous scenes are played out twice (once as fantasy, once as rugpulling reality), an 85-minute running-time seems like an eternity stuck among these whining, self-obsessed, immature, oh-so-cynical nitwits (most of them employed, it would seem, in the wonderful world of advertising.)
   At times it seems like a droll, deadpan, wicked parody of modish, coked-up, over-adrenalised, zeitgeist-surfing film-making - but then Sevcik, belatedly bringing the lovers back together in the final reel, aims for a (cheap, phoney) emotionalism that suggests the whole thing really should be taken at face value. An uncomfortably conservative, moralistic tone is also discernible here - strongly implying to both audience and characters that safe, conventional relationships are best, and that post-modern, nihilistic cleverness has no place in the matters of the heart. A pity, then, that Sevcik himself should be so guilty of the exact same post-modern, nihilistic cleverness when it comes to his own time-wasting excuse for movie.

Neil Young
28th January, 2007

NB all details (titles, timings, years, countries, etc) are from TIFF film-festival catalogue

* Borderpost is officially a co-production between Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia-Montenegro, Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia, Macedonia and the UK.

INDEX to our TIFF 2007 coverage