INDIELISBOA REPORT PART ONE (THU and FRI)

OVERVIEW for Tribune magazine


DAY NIGHT DAY NIGHT          [6/10]
Julia LOKTEV : USA 2006 : 94m
If you've seen Santosh Sivan's Indian pulse-quickener The Terrorist (1999), and also Lodge Kerrigan's 2005 indie-drama Keane, then imagine a cross between the two - and there you pretty much exactly have Day Night Day Night. It's a topical (or should that be "tastelessly opportunistic"?) tale of a young, female suicide bomber, recruited by an unidentified organisation (seemingly radical-leftist in orientation) to blow herself up in Manhattan's crowded Times Square. Picture deploys the old Hitchcock idea of building suspense by letting the audience in on the "ticking bomb" very early on: tension relies on the "will she/won't she" question. Not without moments of black humour here and there, but is otherwise a straight, claustrophobic narrative in which information is portioned out piecemeal, if at all: we have to come to our own conclusions about the motives of the protagonist and her shadowy "controllers", though the location of the attack - here a cacophonic cavalcade of capitalistic excess - provides crucial contextual clues. As the putative "martyr", Luisa Williams is very seldom off-screen and so must carry the movie, like her rucksack nail-bomb, on her slender shoulders: it isn't a spoiler to reveal that, in those terms, she accomplished her 'mission.'
seen at Sao Jorge theatre, 21st April

PARAGUAYAN HAMMOCK          [5/10]
Hamaca Paraguaya : Paz ENCINA : Paraguay 2006 : 78m
So what is a Paraguayan hammock? And what makes it different from, say, a Bolivian hammock or an Argentinian hammock? Don't look for such answers here: the only hammock we see, and we see it for extended periods of the running-time, is too far away for us to really get a very good look at it. Director Encina is particularly fond of such shots, during which her two protagonists - an elderly married couple - are similarly distanced, meaning it's impossible to tell their ages with much precision, or even whether or not their lips are moving when we hear them talking. This latter point is crucial to a film which is as much about sound as it is vision (and how the two can play off against each other). While the images reveal relatively little, much information is imparted via dialogue (the pair kvetch at each other, in a repetitious, circular, Beckettian style, when not expressing their worries about their son, the latter recently departed to fight in an unspecified war) and sound-effects: the barking of the son's semi-abandoned dog, and the rumble of thunder which brings with it the threat of imminent rain. Slow moving to the point of soporific ennui, Paraguayan Hammock is clearly planned and executed with a particular precision, but this ends up defusing much of the power of what is evidently painful, even tragic material. The cumulative impression is of an overextended short, made by a director more concerned with formal experiment than with exploring the emotions of her characters, and who falls into the common error of mistaking pacelessness for profundity. It's an impressively ambitious and audacious work in many ways, but one which leaves the viewer somewhat cold and uninvolved. Audiences are instead advised to seek out Mexico's El Violin, which traces vaguely similar thematic terrain in a rather more accessible and rewarding style.
seen at King cinema, 21st April

OFFSIDE          [7/10]
Jafar PANAHI : Iran 2006 : 88m
No surprise that Offside has proved catnip to audiences and film-festival juries wherever it's played around the world. This is a consistently entertaining comedy about a very serious theme, namely the fiery way many Iranian women respond to the repressive strictures of their state. The action unfolds over the course of a single day, around a (real-life) crucial football game between Iran and Bahrain which will decide whether or not the former will qualify for the 2006 World Cup. The outcome of the match is less important, however, than the fact that female spectators are excluded from attending the game - not that this stops many women and girls from trying to gatecrash the stadium, their gender disguised by masculine clothing. Panahi concentrates on a handful of female fans who, rumbled by the authorities, are kept in a makeshift kind of 'holding pen' until the final whistle. They protest the unfairness of the situation with the soldiers tasked with enforcing the law, and it's to Panahi's credit that the latter are as skilfully and convincingly characterised as the more lively and more obviously sympathetic females. The use of humour as a weapon against authoritarianism - and its more absurd excesses - is by no means a new one, but Offside feels entirely fresh and energetic thanks to the pungent evocation of the matchday atmosphere and the inspirational resourcefulness of the indefatigable characters. A sudden detour into maudlin sentimentality very late in the day is the only real mis-step, but otherwise this is a film which shows impressively nimble footwork on the way to its eminently laudable goal.
seen at Londres cinema, 22nd April
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................................... NB : it turns out there is one woman who's allowed
to watch football in Iranian stadiums: learn more about her HERE

SHADOWS - A SLEEPWALKING FILM          [2/10]
Sombras - um filme somnambulo : Joao TRABULO : Portugal 2007 : 85m
Reality, myth, memory, desire, history and dream collide - with dazzlingly, jaw-droppingly, exquisitely pretentious results - in the snail-paced Shadows, all-too-accurately subtitled A Sleepwalking Film. Shot on monochrome digital-video, the film isn't without the odd visually striking moment or two - clouds over a landscape, mist on hilltops, fog on rivers, etc. But these 'grace notes' are scant compensation for a screenplay that overdoses on philosophy and theology to an offputtingly indigestible degree. There's little "plot" as such, though some vague sense of narrative may be discerned from time to time: a ruminative chap in a well-appointed country house seems to be musing on his ill-spent past, and examining how the misadventures of himself and his family mirror those of his nation. Numerous sequences are remarkable for their po-faced fumblings towards profundity, but the nadir is reached when we see a behatted, staff-bearing, bald magus figure out on a midnight ramble, who is then confronted by a cackling dwarf illuminating the scene with a storm-lamp. The pair exchange gnomic insults, culminating in the magus accusing the dwarf of being an incarnation of the devil: it's jarring to hear such "politically incorrect" bilge in 2007, but the scene, like the movie as a whole, is much too hamfisted to be considered truly offensive.
seen at Forum Lisboa cinema, 22nd April

CINNAMON          [6/10]
Kevin Jerome EVERSON : USA 2006 : 71m
Everson's beguilingly arty blend of documentary and fiction comes across like a weird blend of Monte Hellman's Two Lane Blacktop and Robert Altman's The Company. A character-study of Erin, a twentyish black woman who works in an office by day and spends all her free time drag-racing, it combines Hellman's laconic, four-wheels-good driving-as-existentialism with Altman's detached examination of a milieu which he doesn't pretend to fully understand, or even have that much interest in. Everson may of course be as much of a drag-racing nut as his protagonist (an actress playing a role, though audiences unaware of this fact may actually take her for the focus of a straight documentary) but his focus is really on the avid passion displayed by others, especially when channelled into technical discussions of speed, torque, etc. Erin is advised that she must "aim" the car rather than "drive" it, but Everson takes much more of a hands-on, experimental approach: the drag-racing sequences (which build to an unexpectedly tense finale) alternate with dreamier sections in which Erin wanders in the countryside, captured via blurry video-imagery of sun-dappled grass and trees. Cinnamon is an enigmatic (the title is never explained or even mentioned), impressionistic affair, whose often-subdued pace and airy tone stands in stark contrast to the pedal-to-the-metal acceleration deployed by its heroine: we shall know her velocity, indeed... 
seen at Londres cinema, 23rd April

Neil Young
April 23rd-30th, 2007