| TORINO FILM FESTIVAL 2004 : REVIEWS ROUNDUP (1 of 4) |
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| Monday, 14 February 2005 | |
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NOTE TO READERS : PLEASE FORGIVE THIS WHOLE PAGE APPEARING IN BOLD TYPE. I HAVE TRIED A DOZEN WAYS TO FIX IT, BUT IT REFUSES TO OBLIGE. The Butterflies are Just a Step Behind... Undertow... Make My Day ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ The Butterflies Are Just a Step Behind [6/10] seen at Lux, 17 Nov 04 Parvane ha badraghe mikonand : Iran 2004 : Mohammed Ebrahim Moaiery : 80mins From the official Torino FF catalogue: Neda, a young girl who lost her mother in a flood that hit their village in northern Iran, lives a life in the expanses of countryside and lake, in a small outcasts community. Her depression is incurable, even though her brother takes her to a hospital for treatment. The Butterflies are Just a Step Behind is ostensibly yet another plight-of-suffering-kids Iranian film - adhering very closely to the (perhaps apocryphal) template supposedly described by an unidentified European film festival that they would only show films from the country which feature a child, looking for something, in a rural setting. But Butterflies manages to float above the by-the-numbers aspects of Moaiery's script by means of his nimble, efficient and at times appealingly original direction - whose only real shortcomings (among some touches of heavy-handedness) are a reliance on an over-manipulative muzak-ish score, and a somewhat "over-foleyed" soundtrack, in which each characters' steps are clumsily over-amplified (they sound like they all have suction-pads on the soles of their shoes). Using notably short, elliptical takes - in contrast to many Iranian directors' fondness for punishingly lengthy sequences (and deploying Touraj Aslani's hand-held DV camerawork which smoothly glides as often as it jaggedly wobbles) Moaiery achieves some genuinely poetic visual moments: most notably a flock of flamingos taking wing above a lake, the mass of birds blurring into an ecstatic, hyperkinetic abstraction. There's even a brief one-off sequence in which animation shares the frame with live-action, when Neda's brother attempts to cheer her up as she lies despairing in her hospital bed. The brother's ideas of how to improve the mood of a depressive child are repetitive, strenuous - and, for the audience, somewhat grating. So it's all the more refreshing that, contrary to expectations from this sort of film, they prove singularly unsuccessful. Indeed, nothing actually works out the way we expect - after much trite, sentimental guff about how certain birds "can make wishes come true", both Neda's recovery (or the lack of it) and her father's search for his children are resolved in an intelligent and brave manner in the final scenes. This climax also features Neda's brother "helping" an injured flamingo to resume its place among the flock - via some distinctly rough handling which may raise cause for concern among sensitive viewers. We really do fear the worst for the hapless bird - though this does have the beneficial side-effect of fully energising our attention and interest just at the point when the film is reaching its emotional highpoint. It's a shame, then, that Moaiery goes some way to undoing this good work with a baffling, nebulous coda that will leave many audiences scratching their heads. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Undertow [6/10] seen at Empire, 17 Nov 04 USA 2004 : David Gordon Green : 107mins In 2002, David Gordon Green's engagingly understated rural love-story All the Real Girls suggested the Arkansas-born, Texas-raised, North Carolina-based writer-director was on the way to becoming one of current American cinema's most interesting and distinctive voices. Undertow, which has had a troubled release-pattern on both sides of the Atlantic, isn't quite the breakthrough Green's admirers had been hoping for - but nor is it the bubble-bursting farrago denounced by some of the more excitable critics. The main characters are teenage brothers Chris (Jamie Bell) and Tim (Devon Alan), who live with their father John (Dermot Mulroney) on an isolated farmhouse in the deep south of the USA and - for reasons never made fully clear in Green's script - don't much bother going to school. Their existence is a little too hand-to-mouth to be any kind of idyll, but the family get along reasonably well - until John's ne'er-do-well brother Deel (Josh Lucas) shows up fresh from jail, keen to track down a hoard of precious coins which he believes is stashed somewhere on the farm. Complications rapidly ensue. Originality is clearly not the film's strong suit: rare will be the viewer who doesn't feel like he or she has seen this story several times before, as Green's contrivance-laden, broken-backed script adheres slavishly to the disreputable conventions of overcooked, claustrophobic Southern Gothic - family traumas, sudden violent death, the gloweringly Evil Uncle, etc. Deel himself is clearly intended to evoke memories of Robert Mitchum's implacable baddies from Night of the Hunter and Cape Fear, although he ends up rather closer to the minor-league heavy played by Stephen Dorff in Mike Figgis's recent foray onto similar swampy turf, the dire Cold Creek Manor (which also features talented teenage actress Kristen Wilson, here relegated to a disappointingly minor role). Green, however, is aiming rather higher and classier (and "cultier") than Figgis - as signalled by the use of no less an eminence than Philip Glass for the (intrusive) score. He also clearly intends Undertow as a heartfelt tribute to the noir-inflected US auteur movies that enjoyed a brief vogue in the early seventies, with Terrence Malick's Badlands the most notable example. Green has never bothered to hide his debt to Malick - credited as producer here - and with Undertow the Malick influence is visible on nearly every frame of Tim Orr's cinematography. There's a certain flashiness to the visuals (especially the use of sudden freeze-frames during the opening credits) that will repel and frustrate as many audiences as it will impress and enthral. And even Green's staunchest defenders will surely concede that Undertow is to some extent a self-satisfied young film-maker's exercise in creative muscle-flexing (strenuously quirky non-sequitur dialogue abounds) - often at the expense of basic nuts-and-bolts storytelling, the results falling considerably short of, say, Bill Paxton's wildly underrated, ostensibly-similar Frailty. But Green remains a talent to watch, capable of primal, ecstatic moments that seem to come jolting in out of nowhere: Undertow ends with one such coup de cinema which involves the unexpected bursting of a balloon. Green's own bubble, for now, and despite this minor wobble, remains delicately intact. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Make My Day [4/10] seen at Empire, 17 Nov 04 Germany 2004 : Henrike Goetz : 8mins From the official Torino FF catalogue: Hee-Jin is a young Korean woman who lives in Berlin. She is tired of the monotonous torpor that surrounds her group of friends and decides to leave for Paris in search of love and happiness. But the reality she finds there soon disillusions her. Yet more pseudo-arthouse low-key DV, festival-fodder anomie from a debutant Euro film-maker, Make My Day (there's no German-language title) is a glum, uninflected, polyglot, largely mirthless "comedy" which features dialogue in German, Korean, English and French. The French comes when sourpuss Hee-Jin (Kim Young-Shin) arrives in France and hooks up with an equally dour oldster in a bar - a welcome cameo from none other than veteran Lou Castel (the replacement director from Irma Vep) which provides a rare high-point in an otherwise uninvolving 86 minutes. Eagle-eyed viewers with a knowledge of current German film may also spot Henner Winckler (writer-director of the excellent School Trip) during a party sequence, and it's unfortunate that the skilled Winckler - presumably a pal of Goetz, as both studied film in Hamburg - didn't help out with Make My Day's underpowered script. It's surprising, meanwhile, to find that Goetz played a significant part in another striking debut from a Hamburg film-student - she co-wrote Ulrich Koehler's Bungalow. Bungalow and School Trip weren't exactly incident-packed, but had sufficient humour and strongly-written characters to establish themselves as distinctive and worthwhile chronicles of young Germans' lives. Make My Day does have its moments, but not enough to keep us interested in Hee-Jin's somewhat contrived exploits: she's easily one of the least sympathetic and interesting characters in the whole film, which might more profitably have focussed on her no-nonsense martial-arts-tutor brother, her similarly direct best pal Judith (the engagingly Natacha Reignier-ish Sophie Huber) or even her perpetually grousing mother (Park Young-Ai). These are all promising characters, but each remain frustratingly sidelined - indeed, the second half of the film sees Goetz commit her most serious error in the introduction and development of what is perhaps the most annoying individual in any German film since Lavinia Wilson's eminently shootable fraulein from Dito Tsintzadze's San Sebastian winner Schussangst. Chad "from Granby, Minnesota" is bad enough when he's just a disembodied voice outside Hee-Jin's tent - his "American" accent so lousy we presume it's either intended as a deception (to obtain Hee-Jin's confidence) or some kind of gag. But Chad, incredibly, turns out to be for real - and Goetz proceeds to give him so much screen-time that this howlingly bad performer (whose name I unfortunately omitted to record in my notes) proceeds to derail what was already a somewhat rickety enterprise. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Neil Young 14th February, 2005 Further coverage of Torino '04 on Neil Young's Film Lounge: Reviews roundup part two : Good Morning Beijing, The Cat Leaves Home, Endless Night full list of films seen and reviewed at the festival NOTE TO READERS : PLEASE FORGIVE THIS WHOLE PAGE APPEARING IN BOLD TYPE. I HAVE TRIED A DOZEN WAYS TO FIX IT, BUT IT REFUSES TO OBLIGE. |
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