Longing                                  [6/10]
Germany 2006
Starring : Andreas Muller, Ilka Welz
Director : Valeska Grisebach
UK release date : May 18th

YOU may never listen to Robbie Williams - specifically his anthemic track 'Feel' - in quite the same way after seeing Longing, the much-anticipated feature-film debut of writer-director Grisebach. Grisebach made quite a splash with her 64-minute mini-feature Be Me Star (2001), a work whose unorthodox length meant its showings were restricted to the international film-festival circuit. She spent the best part of half a decade researching and making this follow-up, and while this larger canvas proves more of a stretch than Be My Star's piercingly-observed miniature, there's clearly a lot of talent on display here. This is most evident during a remarkable sequence in which the protagonist - metalworker and part-time fireman Markus (Muller) slowly dances, drunk and partnerless, to the strains of Robbie's aforementioned ballad.

It's an ecstatic, transcendent scene, one whose power and grace overshadows everything that comes afterwards. And it comes at a pivotal point in the (slender) narrative: Markus, happily married to Ella (Welz) and a doting parent to a young son, is away on a fire-brigade training exercise in a nearby town. Following his imprompt dancefloor whirl, he meets and beds a waitress (Anett Dornbusch) at the local restaurant - waking the next morning with few concrete memories of what's gone before, but realising that he's now in love with two women at the same time. This leads to a full-blown existential crisis which Markus resolves in a drastic manner which comes across as implausible and melodramatic, but is apparently based on actual events.

One is inclined to give Grisebach the benefit of the doubt on that score: her film is a serious work of moods and atmsopheres, where looks and silences speak just as eloquently as dialogue. A slow-burning psychological study of a seemingly ordinary man in the grip of extraordinary passions, Longing is a studiously detached, demanding affair which is perhaps a little too enigmatic for its own good at times. But while it perhaps doesn't quite justify Grisebach's exalted standing in certain movie-snob circles, taken in conjunction with Be My Star it does suggest she's an artist whose future engagements with cinema look likely to yield intriguing rewards.

Neil Young

.......................................... original review (Izola report) ............

INDIELISBOA film festival report

 THE FOURTH edition of IndieLisboa - more formally known as the Festival Internacional de cinema independente - unspooled from April 19th to 29th in Lisbon, confirming and enhancing its status as one of the more vibrant and inventive newer additions to Europe's bulging film-festival circuit. Portugal has been somewhat overdue such an event, and the rise of IndieLisboa neatly mirrors the way local hero Pedro Costa has, in the last few years, emerged as one of the names to drop among the hardcore arthouse cognoscenti: his latest opus Colossal Youth (screened at last year's London Film Festival) reportedly came within striking distance of carrying off the Palme d'Or at Cannes last May.

It would be nice at this point to report that IndieLisboa showcased a new generation of Portuguese talent following in Costa's trailblazing wake - but the most buzzed-about new homegrown title, Rio Turvo by 46-year-old avant-garde experimentalist Edgar Pêra, sadly wasn't completed in time for the scheduled press screening and I sadly had to depart Lisbon before its public premiere. The one Portuguese feature I did manage to catch was Shadows - A Sleepwalking Film by João Trabula, and the less said about that staggeringly pretentious misfire the better.

Better instead to accentuate the positive and, as befits a city and a nation with such a long and proud seafaring history, in many instance the richest pickings were those works which had "travelled" the longest distance to Lisbon's screens. While American "indie" cinema has been riding high at the Oscars and the global box office in recent years thanks to the likes of Little Miss Sunshine and Crash, genuinely independent - i.e. low-budget/no-budget, off-radar, in-your-face, confrontational and/or transgressive - has also enjoyed something of a mini golden age. Travis Wilkerson's Who Killed Cock Robin? is a prime example of this most encouraging trend.

Recently trimmed down from a longer version originally shown back in 2005, WKCR? is a gritty and uncompromising study of a man, an area - and by extension, a whole country - in rapid, terminal economic decline. Inspired by an actual murder case which took place in his home town of Butte, Montana, Wilkerson has constructed a lightly fictionalised narrative around three friends struggling to adapt to the bleak post-industrial realities of their environment. Formally innovative in its mixture of various film and video formats, the film is a powerfully evocative study of desperate times. While undeniably tough going at times, Wilkerson's terrific use of music proves crucial in maintaining our engagement and we're rewarded with a poignant finale that's unexpectedly shattering in its impact.

Mike Ott's Analog Days offers a marginally more optimistic prognosis of the prospects facing small-town America's disaffected youth. An ambitious, authentic-feeling chronicle of a group of friends at a medium-sized California campus over the course of a summer, it updates American Graffiti and Dazed and Confused to the post-Slacker generation who don't want to fit into to the mainstream consensus of a state ruled by Schwarzenegger and a nation ruled by Bush. Ott's dialogue nimbly balances humour and seriousness, and his project - though clearly funded on the proverbial shoestring - is executed with a professionalism and slickness which could easily propel him into a Hollywood career, though it's perhaps to be hoped that he will instead continue to plough his own furrow on his own terms.

Two further American selections at IndieLisboa focussed squarely on female protagonists, though to wildly different ends. Born in Leningrad (now St Petersburg) but a resident of North America since the age of nine, writer-director Julia Loktev belatedly follows up her award-winning 1998 documentary Moment of Impact with a debut fictional feature, Day Night Day Night. Nothing if not topical, the film follows - in claustrophobic ultra-proximity - a fragile-seeming young woman (Luisa Williams) as she prepares to carry out a suicide bombing in Manhattan's crowded Times Square. Strongly reminiscent of both Lodge Kerrigan's missing-child drama Keane (2004) and Santosh Sivan's 1999 Indian nailbiter The Terrorist, Day Night Day Night gradually asserts its own identity thanks to unexpected moments of jet-black humour, and through the sterling efforts of Williams, who carries pretty much the entire movie - just as her character totes her explosive-packed rucksack - on her slender-looking shoulders.

In Kevin Jerome Everson's Cinnamon, meanwhile, star Erin Stewart is much more often concealed from our view. The actress's character - also called Erin - is a drag-car racer who spends much of the movie crammed inside her vehicle's tiny cockpit, and/or with her face hidden from view via her bulky helmet. Everson - a prolific film-maker whose features and shorts seek new approaches to African-American experience - takes an oblique, impressionistic approach to character and plot, compiling a profile of a woman and her chosen subculture via blurry fragments, minimal dialogue, and distorted digital video. The results may frustrate those in search of conventional narrative structure and closure, but successfully negotiate a tricky line between fiction and documentary in a slow-burning, beguiling fashion.

If American independent cinema has enjoyed a resurgence over the last few years, the remarkable run of innovative and compelling work from Germany - which has been under way for well over a decade - shows little sign of abating. This phenomenon (often mysteriously under-reported in the UK) received due recognition at IndieLisboa thanks to a special programme curated by maverick Cologne-based critic Olaf Möller (European editor of America's most respected cinema magazine, Film Comment). Under the banner Novo cinema alemão: this "New German Cinema" section comprised features and shorts made since the death of Rainer Werner Fassbinder in June 1982.

Pick of the bunch was perhaps Berlin-based Christian Petzold's The State I Am In from 2000 - one of the most remarkable European (never mind German!) films of the decade - the story of a teenage girl who tires of life with her perpetually on-the-run dissident/ex-terrorist parents. As has been mentioned in these pages before, the fact that none of Petzold's films have managed to obtain British distribution is little short of a disgrace, one which hopefully may soon be remedied after the uniformly strong reaction accorded to his latest, Yella, winner of a Silver Bear at February's Berlin Film Festival.

And it's certainly heartening to see that another of the most lauded members of what we might call the post-Fassbinder generation, Bremen-born Valeska Grisebach, has obtained UK distribution with her very first full-length feature, Longing (see above). Coincidentally, among Möller's selections for Lisbon was Grisebach's 64-minute 2001 debut Be My Star, a tale of teenage love which avoided the countless cliches of the sub-genre - and thus announced the arrival of yet another vibrant voice in a European film scene that's arguably never been able to boast so much fresh, confident, independent talent.

Neil Young

these articles written for the next issue of Tribune magazine



........................................ full JL Lisbon coverage