13^th Ljubljana International Film Festival

Ljubljana, Slovenia, 11-24 November 2002
www.ljubljanafilmfestival.org/13/index2.asp

FILMS SEEN, NOT IN COMPETITION

ABSOLUTE HUNDRED

7/10

Apsolutnih sto : Yugoslavia 2001 : Srdan Golubovic : 93mins

A tough urban thriller from Yugoslavia, Absolute Hundred has more than enough originality in its themes an execution to lift it above the glut of mafia-themed crime-dramas currently flooding out of eastern and central Europe.

In a rifle-sport ‘shooting gallery’ in modern-day Belgrade, the most promising talent is 19-year-old Sasa (Vuk Kostic), already Yugoslav junior champion and tipped for success in the imminent World Junior Championship in Paris. Sasa’s preparations go smoothly until his brother Igor (Srdan Todorovic) sells the gallery to gangster Runda (Milorad Mandic). Igor was formerly an Olympic-hero marksman himself, but ended up using his skills as a sniper in the mid-90s Bosnian conflict. Shattered by his experiences, he has declined into heroin addiction and now owes money to various shady underworld figures. Sasa must use his own firearm talents against the thugs if he’s to save his brother – and his own career – from ruin…

Making a confident feature debut, director Golubovic hails from a music-video and advertising background – and it shows. His flashy visual style is complemented by similarly bold, in-your-face contributions from cinematographer Aleksander Ilic, editor Stevan Maric and Andrej Acin, whose score propels the movie forward from the striking opening titles. But thankfully there’s real substance to the script (by Golubovic, Biljana Maksic and Djordje Milosavlejevic), which unfolds against an unusual sporting backdrop - like the Coens with bowling in The Big Lebowski, Golubovic is fascinated with the bizarre mechanical and techical apparatus that surrounds this lane-based subculture.

Just as Sasa is ‘ice cold on the line’, Golubovic’s strong eye pays precise attention to detail - this must be the most promising directorial debut with a sniper theme since Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets in 1969, though here the shootists are relatively heroic and sympathetic figures, a world away from Bogdanovich’s indiscriminate, gun-toting psycho. In each case, however, the sniper figure is used to dramatise social issues: nihilistic alienation in Targets, and, with Absolute Hundred, in an ambitious allegory of Yugoslavia’s changing character over the past decade.

At the end of the film Sasa watches a video-tape of Igor’s Olympic success, and as the red-starred Yugoslav flag rises in triumph it’s a genuinely poignant moment of all-to-transient glory. Because we know that, while Igor’s rifle started off as an emblem of the sporting excellence used by ‘iron curtain’ countries (like Tito’s Yugoslavia) as a PR weapon during the decades of the Cold War, it was soon ransformed into a literal weapon in an actual war during the bloody Balkan conflicts – whose Sarajevo epicentre featured the notorious ‘sniper alley’. Then, passing into Sasa’s hands, the rifle is converted to ‘civilian’ use against the mafia-type gangsters who have wreaked so much havoc in eastern and central Europe’s post-Communist vacuum.

This political subtext gives Absolute Hundred an unexpected resonance for what is, essentially, a well-acted but small-scale family crime-drama. And the amping-up of the stakes involved, not to mention Sasa’s transformation from quietly-spoken lad to steely-eyed killer, is thankfully much less jagged than the similar trajectory traced by the hero of Ken Loach’s overpraised Sweet Sixteen - a more melodramatic excursion into similarly tough, teenage turf.

(seen on video, Cankarjev Dom, Ljubljana, 21^st November 2002)

FREEDOM

7/10

La libertad : Argentina 2001 : Lisandro Alonso : 73mins

Though only 73 minutes long, Freedom begins with an unusually protracted set of opening titles – bold red letters quickly flash up against a black background, detailing the many people involved in the production.. Pounding techno music promises a slick, hip, tough urban thriller. But then the film begins: a man sits eating some kind of meat with a knife, illuminated by a campfire. In the background, lightning flashes on the nocturnal horizon. The camera does not move. After a couple of minutes, one last caption reveals the film’s title: La Libertad.

For the next hour or so, we follow the man – Misael (Misael Saavedra) - over the course of one day. We see him at work in the morning: long sequences in which he chops down trees in a quiet, sunbaked corner of the Argentinian Pampa. Misael prepares the trunks for sale, and a neighbour and his son arrive in a truck and help  him transport the goods to the buyer. Misael and the buyer haggle over the price of the trunks. Eventually a deal is struck and money changes hands. Misael goes to a local store and buys cigarettes, food and drink. He calls home and asks after his sick mother. That night he catches an armadillo, and cooks it over his campfire. In the background, lightning flashes on the horizon. The camera does not move. After a couple of minutes, one last caption reveals the film’s title: La Libertad.

Neither documentary nor fictional feature, Freedom is in many ways a remarkable film. By paying such close, patient, attention to apparently ‘mundane’ happenings, Lisandro achieves a process of transfiguration comparable to that wrought by James Benning in Los and El Valley Centro – in films like these, the buzzing of a fly constitutes a major event. Leaving the cinema and returning to the ‘real world’, viewers may see their surroundings in a slightly different way.

But Freedom will undoubtedly frustrate and even enrage many. As with Benning, the static shots in which ‘nothing happens’ deliberately flirt with tedium – boredom is a very dangerous weapon in the film-maker’s arsenal, and Lisandro isn’t yet sufficiently experienced to deploy it so effectively as Benning or, say, Tarkovsky. At times, the long takes feel gratuitous – tiptoeing towards Carlos Reygadas’ insufferable Japon, which Freedom superficially resembles (both won major prizes at the 2002 Rotterdam Film Festival).

While Japon bluffs profundity through its ostentatiously painterly camerawork and classical score, Freedom succeeds by being much more focussed, much more assured of its own methods and destination. The images are often beautiful, but this is, emphatically, a film about work, and the simplest processes of human activity life. Misael works, rests, then sells the product of his work. He eats, then shits out the waste products. He takes money from the trunk-buyer and spends it in a store. In a sequence which may well disturb many, he hunts, traps, kills and eats an animal.

In short, Freedom condenses the essential activities of mankind into a small time-frame. The philosophical and allegorical angles are plain. So plain, in fact, that Lisandro does his film a disservice by saddling it with such a portentous title as Freedom (almost as bad as Reygadas, for whom ‘Japan’ supposedly symbolises rebirth.) Lidandro may as well have called the film  ‘Freedom? Discuss!’ or perhaps ‘Capitalism.’ A simple Misael would have done the job just fine. We can work out the rest for ourselves.

(seen Kinoteka cinema, Ljubljana, 23^rd  November 2002)

HUMAN NATURE

5/10

Michel Gondry : USA (US/Fr) 2001 : 96mins

The second of Charlie Kauffman’s uniquely oddball scripts to make it to the screen, Human Nature feels like it was written a long time before his first, Being John Malkovich – it’s like a rough draft for that film’s monkeys-and-infidelity subplots. In Malkovich, director Spike Jonze wisely played things as straight as the increasingly bizarre plot allowed – fellow commercials/music-video wizard Gondry tries a little too hard for cult status, and the strain shows. The result feels like a zany, breezy half-hour sketch awkwardly padded out to feature length.

Though structurally complex to the point of clutter (events are told in flashback by three protagonists) Human Nature is essentially a spoof of the man-or-beast genre. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Greystoke, Frankenstein, L’Enfant Sauvage, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser and The Elephant Man all spring to mind at various stages as geeky, sexually repressed Professor Bronfman (Tim Robbins) sets out to ‘civilise’ a thirtyish man (Rhys Ifans) who’s been raised as an ape. Bronfman and shapely assistant Gabrielle (Miranda Otto) name him Puff, and the man-ape’s rapid development soon brings him into contact with a kindred spirit - Bronfman’s neglected girlfriend Lila (Patricia Arquette), whose life has been blighted by an excess of body hair.

The ensuing convolutions are seldom plausible, nearly always extremely silly, but not entirely unfunny. Robbins gets all the best laughs as the psychologically brittle Bronfman, but Ifans, Arquette and Otto aren’t anything like so well-served, and struggle to make sense out of their underdeveloped characters. In particular, Lila’s antics – body-shaving, nudity, forest-singing – veer too close to humiliation for the endlessly game Arquette. And, as usual, a little of Ifans goes a very long way.

(seen Kino Vic, Ljubljana, 18^th November 2002)

click here for reviews of competition highlights City of God, Saturday and Seafood

click here for the remainder of the competition movies

by Neil Young