| INDIELISBOA 2007 : 4th Independent Int'l Film Festival, Lisbon (part one : Thursday and Friday) |
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 OVERVIEW for Tribune magazine HELPLESS [5/10] AOYAMA Shinji : Japan 1996 : 80m Aoyama's promising but wayward debut feature traces the misadventures of a demented yakuza gangster, his mentally-disturbed sister, and their slackerish teenage pal over the course of a single day in September 1989. His technique is consistently impressive: compositions, editing, camera angles and movements, and the use of music are all intriguing, offbeat and striking. But they're placed at the service of a woefully undernourished plot which is punctuated by - and gradually becomes overwhelmed by - sequences of offputtingly flip, nihilistic violence. It's a bit like the kind of thing MIIKE Takashi tried several years later with Gozu, only without that picture's wit, zest and energy. Helpless seems to hover close to the brink of comedy at many junctures - we're not that far from the amblingly amiable, semi-rural slacker drolleries of YAMASHITA Nobuhiro - but Aoyama seems keen to ensure that the tone remains steadfastly dour and grim throughout. As seen here, modern Japan is a zone of ennui and anomie, encroached upon by American culture at almost every turn: it's clearly no accident that the picture's sociopathic, young 'hero' Kenji (ASANO Tadanobu at his most disconnected and becalmed) is seldom seen without his Nirvana 'Nevermind' T-shirt. Though initially an enigmatic and engaging presence, Kenji loses our sympathy and interest as his bottled-up frustrations find release via homicidal violence: when Kenji goes off the rails, so does the movie. seen at King cinema, 19th April I AM A SEX ADDICT [5/10] Caveh ZAHEDI : USA 2006 : 98m Extended monologue from writer-director-star Zahedi, recounting - in blisteringly honest and frank detail - painful episodes from what seem to be his own sexual history. His various girlfriends and wives, we learn, have expressed different attitudes to what he candidly describes as his "prostitute fetish", ranging from disgust/outrage to freewheeling acceptance. This anecdotal chronicle - which contradicts Oscar Wilde's famous assertion that the only way to overcome temptation is to immediately yield to it - is illustrated in numerous inventive ways on what Zahedi admits (in one of countless deconstructive, post-modern moments) is a very low budget. Dramatised re-enactments (in which Zahedi plays himself) are interspersed with brief sections of actual home-movie footage; there are real and simulated stills; and animated interludes, some of them using the techniques Richard Linklater deployed on Waking Life (in which Zahedi also "appeared".) A prime example of 'cinema as therapy' (see also Tarnation, Filmman, and the self-lacerating masterpiece of the blossoming sub-genre, Gunnar Goes Comfortable), it's essentially a solipsistic, narcissistic affair - the unpreposessing Zahedi proving (shades of Wallace Shawn's character from Manhattan?) somewhat implausibly attractive and fascinating to a series of beautiful women - and as such relies heavily on its protagonist's nerdish likeability. He's like a cross between David Byrne and Woody Allen, and the latter's Annie Hall seems to have provided him with particular formal and tonal inspiration. But after a while his X-rated confessions take on a monotonous, repetitive air, and it becomes apparent the material doesn't really stretch to feature-film length: fatally, for what's seemingly intended as a comedy, there are precious few laughs to be found. seen at the festival videotheque, 20th April . . . . . POSTSCRIPT : looks like I may well have missed the point with this one... TWO PUNKS [4?/10] Chinpira : AOYAMA Shinji : Japan 1996 : 101m (walkout after approx 60m) Follow-up to Helpless (see above) sees Aoyama take a step backwards: he's again concocted a rather loose plot about yakuzas, near-yakuzas, and various hangers-on, and again suggests that story, dialogue and characterisation aren't his strong suits. This time around, however, the visual and aural flair so evident in his debut are much less evident, and none of the performers can rival the watchability of Helpless's leading-man Asano. Aoyama's fondness for frequent, out-of-the-blue violence is even more apparent here: while no doubt an accurate representation of volatile underworld life in mid-90s Japan, it does come across rather like an immature film-maker rather lazily indulging his sophomoric fantasies. Overall: paceless hard going for disappointingly little real reward. seen at King cinema, 20th April BE MY STAR [7/10] Mein Stern : Valeska GRISEBACH : Germany 2001 : 65m The courtship rituals of ordinary Berlin teenagers - apparently 14, though they look and act a little older - are chronicled with tact, sensitivity and a certain detached bemusement (or perhaps bemused detachment?) in this much-praised, award-winning debut. This kind of low-key observational approach, often applied to youthful characters, quickly became a dominant sub-genre of serious-minded German cinema in the current decade, and Be My Star is executed with sufficient skill and verisimilitude to take its place alongside the likes of Bungalow, School Trip and The State I Am In and more recent variants such as Ghosts, Netto and The Unpolished. Grisebach - who shifted her focus to the adult world, with more uneven results, in her 2006 follow-up Longing - trains a sympathetic eye on adolescent concerns which are all too easy to dismiss as the messy consequence of volatile "hormones": the dialogue and emotions ring convincingly true throughout the economic running-time - indeed, the film deftly manages to pack a "full" feature's worth of experience into its compact, hour-long structure. seen at Londres cinema, 20th April Neil Young April 2007 INDIELISBOA REPORT PART TWO : SATURDAY, SUNDAY AND MONDAY |
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