| Film Festival Report : ROTTERDAM 2008 |
|
|
| Monday, 18 February 2008 | |
 AS one of the world's busiest ports - and a city which has, for various historical reasons (including notoriously cataclysmic carpet-bombing during World War 2), become accustomed to traumatic upheavals - it's perhaps appropriate that Rotterdam should host a major international film-festival which always now seems to be in the midst of some kind of chaotic flux. In the last year Sandra Den Hamer - who's been involved in organising the event for over two decades, becoming sole Artistic Director for the 2006 and 2007 renewals - abruptly quit her post in favour of a new job at the Amsterdam Film Museum. The board of directors couldn't find a permanent replacement and so selected one of their own - 37-year-old Rutger Wolfson - as what was initially announced as an interim appointment. And also a part-time one, as Wolfson has continued to run the well-regarded Vleeshal art-gallery-cum-exhibition-space-cum-museum in Middelburg.  As the Vatican discovered with John XXIII, however, supposedly "stop-gap" candidates can often prove to be surprise packages on a grand scale - and while the self-effacing, genially approachable, fresh-faced (he's only a year older than the festival itself) Wolfson isn't anyone's idea of a radical reformer, the rumours are that he may end up running the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) in 2009 and beyond. Rotterdam - by public ticket-sales, second only behind Berlin among European events of its type - is much too big for one individual to be able to put an individual stamp on the programming, of course, In fact, Rotterdam is much too big full stop: over 200 features are shown every year, including a worryingly large number of sub-standard titles. Indeed, taking "pot luck" at IFFR is normally a recipe for disaster - attendees soon learn to obtain recommendations from friends, reviewers and the internet before selecting their screenings. The way forward may to be for IFFR to select fewer movies (say 150) and show them more often - far too many of the screenings sell out several days ahead, indicating a mismatch of supply and demand which Wolfson - or whoever ends up getting the top job- must acknowledge and address.The film I was quickest to recommend - when asked - was definitely Alice's House (A casa de Alice) by Chico Teixeira, a belated and remarkable first narrative feature by a 49-year-old who has been making documentaries since the late eighties. What starts as a quietly innocuous study of Sao Paulo family life builds and builds - so that, before halfway, we've become sucked into the rhythms and dynamics of Alice (Carla Ribas) and her world. She's an unremarkable woman, and while some of the events that befall her have (deliberate) echoes of the telenovela soap-operas she loves to watch, the picture careful steers clear of contrivance and melodrama. How refreshing to find a director who knows what he wants to do and straightforwardly does it - without any unneccessary fanciness, distractions or overreach. This feels like a real family living in a real house - its atmospheres, jealousies and joys will be familiar to anyone, anywhere, who has experienced any kind of domesticity. Cinematography, editing and performances (especially the superb Berta Zemel as Alice's aged mother) are all spot on - indeed, it's hard to put a finger on a single major flaw anywhere in this little marvel of a film. My "silver medal" would go to Rush Hour by Vincenzo Marra, a 35-year-old Neapolitan whose Land Wind (Vento di terra) was one of the discoveries of IFFR 2004. On the evidence of these two features, Marra is perhaps the most consistently interesting - and promising - of the younger Italian film-makers. And, as incarnated by glossily-handsome newcomer Michele Lastella, Marra's protagonist - Rome-based tax-policeman Filippo Costa - joins the fictional ranks of fascinatingly amoral, ruthlessly rapacious schemers like Tom Ripley, Patrick Bateman, Damien Thorn, Nick Beal and Stephen Rojack. As we watch him progress through - and beyond - the ranks, picking up a rich, older paramour (top-billed Fanny Ardant) en route, it soon becomes clear that Filippo's charms are only skin deep - and audiences who want to have sympathy for their protagonists may find the picture's steely gravity off-putting. But, as with Land Wind (both films have oddly 'oblique' titles), Marra's ambitions are wider than his intimate, unfussily straightforward style would seem to suggest. Here he's laying bare the corruption and moral vacuum which, his final shot indicates, has always been crucial to Rome's (and, by extension, Italy's) splendour and affluence. Familiar material, of course - but handled in an absorbingly crisp, mature manner. And, given the recent high-level Machiavellian shenanigans in Marra's native land, all too depressingly topical. Of the other new titles, keep an eye out for Dust (Staub) by Hartmut Bitomsky - 65-year-old doyen of German cinema, acclaimed critic and, in his capacity as a teacher at various film academies, a key influence on younger, better-known directors such as Christian (Yella) Petzold. As the the saying goes - dust we are, to dust returneth. And director/narrator Bitomsky returns to dust again and again, from dozens of different angles, as he crafts this quizzically engaging, insatiably curious analysis - part educational essay, part philosophical tract - of the universe's smallest visible component. It's rather like a charmingly extended Open University programme: we're taken into the high-tech lairs of various boffins, scientists, experts - and also the homes of various lay oddbods - all of whom either work with, or against, dust. Or sand, or fluff - there are several divagations (some of them "dustier" than others) as Bitomsky sardonically explores promising tangents, his gravelly voice marked by a steady-burning enthusiasm for his subject. Of course, it's really about the people on view - a chance to encounter the kinds of quotidian eccentrics one seldom finds in cinema, even in the realm of documentary. Rather noisier delights were provided by REC - a rock-the-house Spanish horror movie from Jaume Balaguero and Paco Plaza which rivals Hollywood's Cloverfield in terms of hyper-kinetic hand-held camerawork - both films are ostensibly "found footage" presented without adornment or comment. In the case of REC, the peril is rather smaller-scale than the rampaging Cloverfield monster: think 28 Days/Weeks Later and you'll be nearer to the mark. The film is released on 11th April in the UK and will be reviewed more comprehensively nearer the time. It marks a welcome return to the kind of audience-pleasing, unashamedly "genre" material with which Rotterdam was for so long associated - most of it outre material from East Asia (represented this year by such extravaganzas as Matsumoto Hitoshi's amiably berserk Dai Nipponjin) and which - most unfortunately - fell from favour under Den Hamer's tenure. One strand of programming that has always been very strong in Rotterdam is retrospective and archive material, and Wolfson oversaw a triumphant selection in his debut year under the heading Piece Unique, comprising features and shorts from "one-time-only" film-makers (perhaps a coy comment on his own "interim" status?) - including such gems as Samuel Beckett's FILM (1965), a nightmarishly hilarious excursion into deadpan surrealism directed by Alan Schneider.  It was marvellous as always to see Leonard Kastle's 1969 trash masterpiece The Honeymoon Killers up on the big screen - but the film is "revived" relatively often shown in UK cinemas, and so wasn't exactly a "discovery". Rather less exposed - inexplicably - is Wanda (1970), the only film made by Barbara Loden (also known as Mrs Elia Kazan). This is a landmark American independent film which fully lives up to its reputation in loftier cineastic circles - why on earth isn't it more widely shown (or known)? In a grim, coal-mining, back-of-beyond Pennsylvania, fading beauty Wanda Goronski (writer-director-star Loden) impulsively walks away from her unsatisfactory life in search of -- what, exactly? Adventure? Fulfilment? A change of scene? It's unlikely that even Wanda - inarticulate, petulant, child-like - could articulate what it is she seeks. She hooks up with a jittery, sweaty weirdo (Michael Higgins) - who turns out to be a misanthropic career-criminal. The ensuing 'bank-job' sequences seem to have been spliced in from another picture entirely - elsewhere Loden achieves a rare kind of freewheeling, gritty lyricism, including one extended, spellbindingly atmospheric scene (as Wanda and her new 'friend' drink beers by their parked car, and watch model-aeroplanes fly in the rural dusk) that's decades ahead of its time. The bold, saturated colours of Loden's palette, meanwhile, echo the contemporary photographs of William Eggleston and Stephen Shore, and anticipate the 16mm experimentations of James Benning. It wasn't quite a one-woman enterprise, however: the film was shot and edited by Nicholas T Proferes - another inexplicably unsung talent - and one, who, unlike the much-missed Loden (who passed away, aged only 48, in 1980), is thankfully still with us. Proferes teaches film at Columbia University in New York - but, as Hartmut Bitomsky's Dust proves, academia's gain doesn't necessarily have to be cinema's loss. An ideal guest for IFFR 2009, perhaps? Neil Young 12th February, 2008 for Tribune magazine  REVIEW-BY-REVIEW COVERAGE |
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
