| 7th TRANSILVANIA INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL (CLUJ, Romania): Sheila Seacroft's dispatches |
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| Saturday, 07 June 2008 | |
 films reviewed below WED : The Man Who Walked THU : The Village Called Sands; Tackey; Football Undercover; Las Meninas FRI : Go With Peace Jamil; Nothing Personal; Tale 52; Shakespeare and Victor Hugo's Intimacies; Seven Days Sunday SAT : The Flower Bridge; Boogie; Gruber's Journey; Import/Export SUN : Milky Way ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Wednesday 4th June Hot and sticky Cluj after a hot and sticky Rome and a long and late flight from Fiumicino - the passengers actually applauded as we came in to land, so relieved were they it was all over. Goodness the city's looking smarter, only a year on. More chic clothes shops, a mall, coffee bars, a cycle lane down the wide main boulevard which was under some serious reconstruction last year...much nicer for the people who live here, of course, but I do hope it doesn't lose its raffish charms entirely. Already I'm mourning the disappearance of the little hole-in-the-wall doughnut shop where I used to snatch a quick lunch en route between cinemas. A hot dog outlet stands next to its derelict premises, painted flowers still cheerfully decorating the windows. Late arrival though it was, I was in time to take advantage of the goulash party: hot stew, mamaliga (the buttercup-yellow maizey national stodge of Romania), and sour cream. Nice. Then to my favourite cinema, the Arta, to get a first film under my belt...  THE MAN WHO WALKED 5/10 L'homme qui marche : France 2007 : Aurelia Georges : 82mins : seen at Cinema Arta Based on the true story of a Russian emigre, Vladimir Slepian, it follows the life from 1974 to the nineties of oddball Victor Atemian, a translator who is taken up by the smart bohemian set in Paris in the 70s, both for his odd looks and his dada-esque writing. In his one published work, which he performs, he imagines himself as a dog, and this motif carries on throughout to his final demise on the pavement, oh so symbolically, outside left-wing intellectuals' watering hole Les deux magots. Atemian is played by Cesar Saracho, (The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes), an actor who looks as if he has strayed out of a Cocteau movie. Times change, Mitterand gets in, the Wall comes down, but none of these things touch Atemian, whose graceless and unworldly manner leads to him being gradually dropped by his 'friends' until he ends up destitute on the streets, eating left-overs from a college dining hall, then nothing. His weird winsome ways and soulful skinniness soon begin to pall, as do the mannered and terribly French clichés ('I was 18 before I saw the sea - is that not strange?' asks a girl soulfully and inconsequentially in a bar). It's oddly unengaging, and full of froideur and self importance. Thursday 4th June THE VILLAGE CALLED SANDS 8/10 Nisipuri : Romania 2008 : Claudiu Mitcu : 78 mins : seen at Cinema Victoria This utterly charming film, made by team with no training or experience in filming, looks at a scruffy little fair in an impoverished corner of south western Romania. The picture builds up with interviews with local children, inhabitants, and the sometimes jaundiced stall holders, as the area is prepared. Opinons vary as to how long the fair has been coming to town, but it's been here every 29th August for as long as anyone can remember. Basic, shoddy affair though it is, with its lucky wheel made of nails and its boxing booth with the most ancient and misshapen punchball you've ever seen, with dodgy meatballs (horse? donkey??) and tawdry prizes ('what will I do with a mobile camera strap?' asks a bemused little boy) it's the fair everyone remembers from their childhood, and it makes people happy - sunburnt lads getting tipsy and showing off, kids getting sweets from indulgent grandads, girls eyeing up the glittery jewellery stall. 'There is no fair without a merry-go-round' (or rather 'marry-go-round', as the subtitles happily have it), declares the merry-go-round man, and the most beautiful and joyous image of all is a slow take of the simple machine as it starts up and whirls its customers up and around against an afternoon sky. As the sun sets the punters turn homeward on their various vehicles (' I come on the tractor, but I've got an Opel at home.'). A delight. TACKEY 6/10 Tache : Romania 2008 : Igor Cobileanschi : 76 min : seen at Cinema Victoria A broad comedy about death and the fear of death. Tache ia a gravedigger who responds to the news that he has cancer by planning himself the most sumptuous funeral he can, with pride of place on a hummock in his own cemetery. A tart with a heart who picks up clients at the graveside, the local undertaker with his 'Princess Di's very own hearse', a best friend with a liking for the girls, a philandering cemetery owner, his wife and several children, form a comedy of errors which constantly frustrates his aims, until a surprising development alters the outcome altogether. Great ensemble playing, warmth, and many tiny incidental pleasures. FOOTBALL UNDERCOVER 6/10 Germany 2008 : David Assmann, Ayat Najafi : 86 mins : seen at Cinema Arta Marlena, member of Berlin women's football team BSV AL Dersimspor, whose partner is Iranian, gets to know about women's football in Iran and determines to take her team over there to play the Iranian national team. They, plus their Manager (who is Turkish) are keen, and we watch the hoops they have to jump through to fix it up and eventually arrive in Iran, where of course they will have to play in scarves and long trousers. The authorities blow hot and cold, partly depending on the international situation, but eventually against all the odds the match takes place. After rather too long exposition, with somewhat staged-looking discussions between the women to carry along the narrative, the film takes off and becomes thoroughly engaging when we get inside the ground (via camerawomen only, of course) during the match and see the reality of what iranian women supporters have to put up with, including a loudspeaker harangue from the morality police at half time not to be indecorous - 'if you want to sing and dance, go to the disco.' Ironically the manager and the film's directors (one of whom has been the major fixer of the trip) are not allowed inside to watch, putting them in the position of women outside male matches. Along the way we meet characters on either side, from Susi the German striker, a strong, wild spirit who likes to play with men because women aren't competitive enough, to two Iranian players, one of whom, very outspoken, is inexplicably dropped from the team. Like Offside, also on the theme of women and football in Iran, it's both a shocking look at gender discrimination, and a testament to female spirit. LAS MENINAS 7?/10 Ukraine 2008 : Ihor Podolchak : 99 mins : seen at Cinema Victoria "Las Meninas is not a film about a story; it is a film about senses.... It is one of those rare films that invite you to a sort of interactive screening experience. It can be said that it is a daring, modern avant-garde experiment, a cross between film and visual arts." Thus speaks the Rotterdam Film Festival catalogue, about this first film by Podolchak, a visual artist. It's a difficult film which demands a second look, and a film which tantalises the viewer to make interpretations of and connections between images which are never resolved. The human tendency to look for a plot is constantly thwarted, which would make this considerably difficult viewing, were it not that the film itself is so utterly beautiful. A troubled family occupy an idyllic country house, full of memories, or things that never were, or desires. Sadness, sexuality and yearning, household routines and horror, combine and are overlaid to present the most exquisite yet troubling images, with an exhilarating, terrifying soundtrack by Oleksandr Schetynsky. Baffling, disturbing, but totally mesmerising. Friday 6th June GO WITH PEACE, JAMIL 8/10 Ma salama Jamil : Denmark 2008 : Omar Shargawi : 87 mins : seen at Cinema Republica A searing look at Arab immigrant experience in Europe from the inside, this terrific first feature is set in a Copenhagen which scarcely ever looks like a northern European city, where vengeance and hatred are turned, not, as a western viewer first, perhaps, imagines, on the non-Islamic community in the form of terrorism, but on fellow Moslems, in an uncontrolled cycle of vengeance and violence between Shia and Sunni. Jamil, good father and son, but with a murky history himself, is inextricably caught up in duties to friends, family, and his religion. Sheer heart-in-mouth elements of thriller plus individual moral anguish have tremendous power, as swirling, violent chases down the mean streets of the city carry us along with the action, while stark use of close-up express individual anguish and palpable rage. The storytelling may be at times muddled, but in the end that doesn't really matter much, nor do the occasional almost Hardy-esque plot contrivances. From the House of Atreus down to the Corleone clan, how to stop a cycle of vengeance has been a moral dilemma at the heart of drama, and here it is presented in stunning new shape. NOTHING PERSONAL 7/10 Nichego lichnogo : Russia 2007 : Larisa Sadilova : 92 mins : seen at Cinema Republica While on the one hand this film has the dark political texture of surveillance and intrusion into individual lives, with overtones of Coppola's The Conversation, it is first and foremost a personal tale of obsession, loneliness and of what it means to come close to another. Zimin, a phlegmatic private detective who specialises in surveillance, never wants to know the background of the jobs he is given. A certain fastidiousness makes him want to keep a distance from the often sordid or avaricious motives of the paying customers. But when he bugs the flat of Irina, a lonely, unglamorous single woman, he finds himself unintentionally becoming drawn in to her problems. An unexpected plot development reveals to him and to us that his interest goes beyond the professional, and he allows himself to become more entangled in her life than he knows he should. Watching and listening to her private emotions and piecing together her life becomes important beyond reason to him, pointing up his own emptinesses. Valeri Barinov' superb understated performance as the flawed but sympathetic Zimin takes us along as co-witnesses through the grimy anonymous suburbs and the banal but passionate lives lived there. TALE 52 6½/10 Istoria 52 : Greece 2008 : Alexis Alexiou : 98 mins : seen at Cinema Republica From one obsession to another. Next film up was a flawed but intriguing attempt at showing inside the mind of an unstable obsessive trying to make sense of a relationship break-up. Iasonas is a quiet professional who one night meets and is instantly attracted to Penelope. The build up of their relationship is sketchy, as it's the breakdown that counts. Suddenly, she is no longer there, and with a series of time shifts we begin to inhabit Iasonas' skewed perception of what might have happened. Most of the action is in the claustrophobic flat the couple come to share, but we are really inside his troubled head, and different ‘versions' crowd in, edging each other out of the way, some innocent and positive, others very dark indeed. Ominous sinister manifestions, like the mould that grows on the walls, together with simple objects - a pair of shoes in a box, a picture of a beach, or a real beach, clingfilm, a spot of toothpaste on a shirt, heave with significance. Where did it start to go bad, at what point was the wrong path taken, the wrong reaction given, and to what terrible depths, exactly, has it gone wrong? - are some of the questions from which Iasonas tries to construct his skewed versions of reality. Everything is open to many often overlapping interpretations. A pity the whole is rather overwrought and there are somewhat too many iterations of possibilities - but for the most part it compels attention, and there are real shocks and a powerful mood of dread. SHAKESPEARE AND VICTOR HUGO'S INTIMACIES 8/10 Intimidades de Shakespeare y Victor Hugo aka Intimacies of Shakespeare and Victor Hugo : Mexico 2008 : Yulene Olaizola : 80 mins : seen at Cinema Victoria Hard to believe that this accomplished and assured documentary was a film school exercise. But Yulene Olaizola had had its conception in mind for years, from the stories her grandmother Rosa told of the handsome young lodger who lived at the top of her house in the 80s, painted the strange pictures on the walls, and played such an important role in her emotional life. Always mysterious and almost certainly gay,(not easy at that time and in that place), he was a poet and musician as well as an artist, and a strong relationship developed between him and Rosa, whom he called his muse. Still strikingly beautiful and with a face the camera loves, Rosa tells her tale imperiously and not without humour, pacing through the house where she still lives that is full of memories. The director's intimate knowledge of her location allows it almost to become a character in its own right, and we drift through it like invited guests, Rosa holding court, always aware of the camera yet totally at ease, lively and composed, as a she tells her stories, often joined by the more phlegmatic long-time servant Florencia with her own more down to earth memories. The fabric of the house, mirrors, drapes, fine old lived-in furniture are like witnesses to their stories. But the general feeling of a pleasant, harmless and creative young man slowly and almost imperceptibly leads on to something maybe more sinister (but then again maybe not), and a shocking end confounds the amiable picture we first felt drawn to. Winner of prizes at Buenos Aires and Mexico City, this film went on to be awarded the Transilvanian Jury prize here at the end of the Festival. SEVEN DAYS SUNDAY 6/10 Sieben tage sonntag : Germany 2007 : Niels Laupert : 79 mins : seen at Cinema Victoria Another film in the main competition and very much fancied, this is based on the story of two notorious Polish teenage killers-for-kicks. Relocated in this version to a grim housing complex in Leipzig, we meet choirboy Adam who lives alone with his weary grandmother, (we later learn his father is in prison) and his wild friend Tommek, for whom he clearly nurses feelings of more than friendship, so that he is unmoved by the pretty blonde neighbour who longs for a relationship with him. Tommek is clearly the more full of rage and amoral of the two, so when it's Adam who, on a bad night of drunkenness and frustration, suddenly declares that he is going to kill someone, why does it not become more interesting? The young, late night, audience actually laughed, and not in a nervous way. Laupert goes out of his way to point out how he does not attempt to show why these two's lives take such a dark course, but he really needs to give us more than the usual thwarted ‘forbidden' love, boredom, and poverty of expectation, to make anything really engaging about these characters. There is a difference between ciphers and unknowable minds. When the final violence comes, I was surprised how un-chilled I felt, though Laupert's sharp editing and dark palette of a grim loveless landscape promises good work to come Saturday 6th June In my hotel on the outskirts of town I get awakened by a crowing cock each morning, then it's a brisk walk in, through a different side of Cluj. Calea Motilor, one of the main arteries leading from the west into the city, is busy with crammed trolley buses, a tree-lined street where ordinary life goes on, a children's hospital, a butchers, glimpses of gardens and smart or ramshackle buildings through broad gateways, a university department, small food shops, ‘Second Han  d' clothes emporiums, bars, the ubiquitous copying shops, in a range of building styles with traditional solid one-storey C19th houses nestling beside their upstart crumbling concrete 60s neighbours. Many show signs of former glory, the aspirations of earlier optimistic times, plaster decorations, carved wooden doors, the wear and tear of over a hundred years of use stuck over with modern keep clear signs and tattered flyers, elaborate tiled roofs and ornamental wooden or ceramic mouldings along eaves, often bedraped with an array of electrical wires of dubious safety. It's in a city's ordinary streets like these that you get its real flavour and history. One evening I passed my turn and on the next corner, beside a modest bar, found a plain black marble memorial to four people killed on that spot in the uprising of December 1989. THE FLOWER BRIDGE 9/10 Podul de flori : Romania 2008 : Thomas Ciulei : 87 mins : seen at Cinema Arta In a shabby living room a small boy is having vivid blue dots painted all over his face. He has chickenpox, and his father is painting the spots with a medication to stop them itching. Shades of blue play their part in the intense beauty of this film, from the summer skies to the winter mists to the paint on the walls, a beauty that only underlines the sadness of the situation. Costica is raising his three children alone on their small farm in Moldova, while his wife is away in Italy working to pay off their debts and put the children through school, a situation that currently affects almost half the population of the country. An eccentric, likeable man, three bright children, they are happy against the odds, in a life of hard drudgery with little time for childhood or teenage pleasures, a life of coping with bitter cold and ever-present mud, and the battle to keep their ramshackle house clean. Phonecalls, letters and presents arrive from the absent mother, but she is still no nearer returning home. The Bridge of Flowers was an event in 1990 when Moldovans and Romanians linked across the Prut river which had been an enforced boundary since WW2 between Romanian and Soviet Moldavia, a Berlin Wall of the East. It is here also in the flower seeds which the mother sends to her family, a poignant token of their togetherness. There's plenty of humour, but this is the saddest film of any I had so far seen at the festival. The scene where the family all work cheerfully together sowing on the field, father digging the furrows, daughters sowing, son covering, is indescribably poignant as the camera pulls away to show the vast field behind them. Life is hard. BOOGIE 6½/10 Romania 2008 : Radu Muntean : 102 mins : seen at Cinema Republica One of Romania's most esteemed directors, an internationally known actress and a universal theme should ensure this film's success beyond its native country and the art house circuit. Bogdan (‘Boogie' to his friends) is on a seaside holiday with his little son and pregnant wife (Anamaria Marinca), he's doing well, working hard, happy... and then he runs into two old friends from his ‘Boogie' days, and everything becomes confused. Drinking, smoking and picking up women are things he's given up, but his wife's antipathy to his old friends and all they represent provokes a reaction and a potential marriage-damaging night on the town. Boogie is a kind of reasonable everyman trying to reconcile different compartments of his life and decide who he really is. By the end of the film husband and wife have both grown up a little. It's naturalistic, contemporary, and as far away from 4 Months..., 12.08 East of Bucharest, or Mr Lazarescu as can be - a portrait of normal middle class married life, now, not great or exceptional but relevant and assured. GRUBER'S JOURNEY 5/10 Calatoria lui Gruber : Radu Gabrea : Romania 2008 : 96 mins: seen at Cinema Victoria Last year Gabrea brought us THE BEHEADED COCKEREL, a story of the rise of fascism and the persecution of Jews in the Fagoras area of Romania, through the perspective of its young people. This film deals with the pogrom of Iasi, a town in the north east of the country, through the eyes of an Italian journalist. Curzio Malaparte, friend of Mussolini and war correspondent with the German army in Romania, has a problem - a debilitating allergy which threatens to prevent him going to the Front. Given the name of a specialist, Dr Gruber of Iasi, he travels there for a consultation. There he has to be put through the hoops of officialdom, increasingly tragicomic and frustrating, and I'm afraid to me increasingly irritating to watch. The outcome is signalled from the beginning, and I felt aggravated beyond belief by the buffoon-like characters and constant repetition of situations. As in his previous film, the view of a relatively unknown aspect of WW2 is of interest to western European audiences, but nothing new about persecution is really said, and I'm not really sure what the point of the exercise is. IMPORT/EXPORT 9/10 Ulrich Seidl : Austria 2007 : 135 mins : seen at Cinema Republica The imports and exports in this devastating film are human, two powerless individuals travelling in different directions between east and west. Olga, a nurse with a baby, cannot make ends meet in the Ukrainian hospital where she works, and, after an unsatisfactory dalliance with the TV sex trade, she leaves her child with her mother and moves to Austria, where, with no employment rights, after a series of unskilled jobs she becomes a cleaner in a geriatric hospital. Paul, a failed security guard in Austria, travels with his scumbag stepfather to deliver battered old gambling machines to the Ukraine. Both are good-hearted and willing, both meet with temptation but keep their integrity, but the dice are loaded strongly against them. Uncomfortable subjects -the sex trade, appalling living conditions and the horror of extreme old age, are confronted head on, the latter particularly distressing, and the story becomes far more than that of a pair of vulnerable individuals who deserve better than they will ever get, but a universal cry of despair. The mirroring of their travels is echoed by Seidl's symmetrical framing which adds a grace and elegance to the most sordid scenes, and his use of sound is compelling, particularly devastating in the final scene with the night time moans of the female patients, with the cry of death, death, death piercing through. Great performances throughout, and particularly from Ekateryna Rak as the spirited Olga, who keeps a glow of innocence about her, and whose despair breaks your heart. Sunday 7th June MILKY WAY 8/10 Tejut : Benedek Fliegauf : Hungary 2007 : 82 mins : seen at Cinema Arta A perfect treat for a Sunday morning, Tejut is a set of 9 vignettes, each a static camera shot, before which human figures move, shapes take on meaning and some mystery unfolds. The episodes encompass a day, moving from windy dawn for two people in a tent, to a hill above a night-time city. Playfulness is uppermost, as signalled in the opening sequence, and in the comic inflation of a bouncy castle against a bleak flat landscape. Each has its moment of revelation, and those with a possible story to piece together, such as the harbour scene, are less successful than the more gnomic, like the cyclists climbing and descending the heap of stones under a tree which holds a huge menacing nest. Though classifiable as experimental art cinema, the observing eye is warm and sympathetic, there are no words, only sounds, human, natural, mechanical. Like poems, or, say, enigmatic short stories from Borges, they tantalise, intrigue, or chill. The final sequence is full of joy. Sunday morning and everyone's carrying flowers - elaborate lily concoctions, huge perfect roses, or homely little bunches proffered by elderly Roma ladies on street corners. Church bells, and people dressed in their Sunday best chatting outside churches, otherwise relatively quiet streets, but the tables along the Boulevard Eroilor are filling up in the warm sun. What a pity one of the proprietors decides it's a good idea to turn on his music (oh no, Mick Hucknall!) full blast. Most shops are shut, but the market's still busy, now in its new indoor home round the corner from its old narrow pitch (now occupied, somewhat symbolically, by parked cars and McDonalds tables). You can track it back to its new home via the procession of people with plastic bags sagging with strawberries or cherries by the kilo. After my last film,there's a pleasant lunch for all those leaving in a little corner of the oldest part of the city centre. Traditional fare - stuffed cabbage leaves, cold meats, sharp salty cheese, the ubiquitous cucumber (a regular presence at the breakfast table - but how unlike our dull watery English specimens) and huge spring onions. Pancakes are promised, but we have to leave too soon for our flight, leaving Cluj to its sunshine for another year. Sheila Seacroft still online : Sheila's dispatches from Cluj 2006 and 2007 |
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