INDIELISBOA 2008 mop-up of quick verdicts: complete, MON.13.OCT

Published on: October 10th, 2008

Alvaro Lapa – Literature
CATALOGUE : In a journey between Viseu and Lisboa, Jorge Silva Melo rebuilds for the actor Pedro Gil his relationship with Alvaro Lapa, the interviews he filmed with the artist, the years he passed watching the growth of one of the most peculiar works in the Portuguese art scene. And the question: what is literature? A long journey of initiation, reviewing all the pictorial and literary work and ending with Alvaro Lapa's declaration: "Available, available is youth. Even if it is incapable, incompetent, harebrained, destructive. But it's available."
VERDICT :
Oblique title – Lapa (1939-2006) was a painter, not a writer – is an odd fit for what is, despite the occasional "experimental" trapping, really a pretty straightforward, orthodox (and dutifully laudatory) artist-profile documentary. Lapa himself is star of the show, a cagily crotchety but engaging and illuminating presence glimpsed via interview-footage. His paintings are also intriguing – just a pity that so many of are crammed into the running-time that we scarcely get a proper look at individual works: pausable DVD will ameliorate this problem.

Endgame 
CATALOGUE : Village of Reboleiro, north of Portugal. 103 old people live at Santa Catarina Residence. They used to be country people. The major part of those old people have missed already the idea of Time in a strange Space for them. There's a great desire to communicate, they don't want to be alone. They need to come back to their homes. They knock at the doors of each others, they pray, they walk by the residence corridors, they wait.
VERDICT :
Yet another fly-on-the-wall Euro documentary about old folks – topical stuff, given the continent's increasingly loud-ticking demographic 'time-bomb.' This one is interestingly structured, with the specific editorial angle – the importance (or absence) of religion in the subjects' daily lives – only slowly and gradually coming into focus. Some striking compositions and editing choices along the way, though this memento mori overall yields few surprises and is ultimately a cut or two below Peter Schreiner's broadly similar Bellavista.

The Flower Bridge 
CATALOGUE : Costica Arhir raises three children in his village of Acui, Republic of Moldavia. His wife has left for Italy three and a half years ago to find work, and has not been home since. In a similar situation are around half of the active population of this country. This documentary film, shot between January and April 2007, uses fictional elements in storytelling and camerawork, creating a stage where characters interpret themselves.
VERDICT :
Genial, unassuming documentary about family life on a farm just beyond the prosperous EU's borders. There's a recurrent feeling that much of what we're seeing has been staged – or rather re-staged for the benefit of the cameras. Also, the directors run the slight risk of aestheticising material that could easily be presented in a more depressingly grim manner – and, while charming enough, 90 minutes is something of a stretch.

The Mother 
CATALOGUE : Aboard a train heading towards an unknown destination, a Russian mother recounts her life with her nine children. After fleeing a violent husband, she worked in a kolkhoz with her eldest daughter, while struggling to raise her children. Despite her devotion, she regretfully notes that her sons aren't very different from the brutish men she has known. Feeling sympathy for a young boy neglected by his family, she then gave him hospitality for a time. A harrowing, raw documentary revolving around a "Mother Courage" figure caught up in social determinism.
VERDICT :
The Mother was always a key figure in Russian – and Soviet – culture, and now the nation must deal with thorny issues of birthrate and fertility. The exhausted, fortysomething 'protagonist' of this wry, somewhat over-elliptical TV-style social-issues documentary is, with her nine kids, a throwback to earlier days: whereas once she'd have gotten a medal from the state, now she faces a daily struggle to get the simplest things done. This is life in the raw and at the sharp end – with a refreshing approach to 'adult' language.

The Mugger 
CATALOGUE : All the action of The Mugger takes place in one morning. The man is about to execute a plan he has been preparing for a long time. The camera follows him around throughout all his actions. The audience becomes a privileged witness of this person's most intimate moments of anxiety and desperation that precede what is about to be a life or death decision.
VERDICT :
Real-time, seemingly Dardennes-influenced thriller is only intermittently thrilling, just as often surprisingly mordant in its dark, dry wit. Pic presents a series of situations in which the power-balance quickly changes, the audience's view of the gun-toting, sixtysomething anti-hero (who's many things, but emphatically not a mugger) going through numerous switcheroos before the bathetically quotidian climax. A nice, gnomic vignette – but what's the point?

Pink 
CATALOGUE : Vassilis Gallis is afraid of growing up. Snezana Tkatchenko is afraid of understanding. Sakis the Movie Star is afraid of feeling. Emily the Irish girl is afraid of starting over. Lauren the Wife is afraid of admitting. Agne the Teacher is afraid of living… and Father is afraid of speaking. Mother is afraid of coming back.
VERDICT :
Presumably the writer-director-star wrote that pretentious catalogue-entry – his movie is similarly self-regarding and over-egged, a solipsistic journey into the life and memories of a 26-year-old urban cinephile with various romantic/family issues. Juggles hundreds of ideas, with a lowish success-rate. There's no shortage of talent here, but wayward and undisciplined: a firmer editing hand is needed.

Railroad Crossing
CATALOGUE : Like a disoriented Ulysses, Marc doesn't know how to affront his live [sic] after finishing his career. The apathy and frustration make him finally accept a curious job in the touristic village where his grandmother lives. The relationship that grows between them, and her sudden death, will make Marc conscious about taking his own decisions.
VERDICT :
A slacker-student battles wanly with ennui – and we soon share his anomie and lackadaisical attitude, so torpid and underheated is the 'post-narrative' movie. Deliberately monotonous, repetitive and soporific, built around a notably taciturn, passive individual and featuring many gratuitously protracted sequences. Undeniably tough going, but a welcome strain of dry humour is occasionally detectable.

Running on Karma 
CATALOGUE : Former monk, now bodybuilder/male stripper Andy Lau possesses the ability to see a person's "karma", the fate that they have earned in this life for their deeds in a past incarnation. His attempts to protect young cop Cheung from her predestined horrible fate through a series of visually exultant surreal action set pieces, are doomed. The film starts as dazzling fantasy action (a shape-shifting Indian contortionist, a Human Fly) then moves through semi-romantic suspense thriller until it finally blossoms into an entirely original, structurally complex Buddhist philosophical treatise. This unexpected Buddhist turn launches the world of the film beyond typical To tragedy into an entirely new and uncanny realm.
VERDICT :
Very much a film of two halves, the first – featuring the unfailingly charismatic Andy Lau cavorting around in a surprisingly-convincing muscle-suit – disarmingly dopey, dynamic and diverting. The star's genial charm proves a nifty match for a cascadingly offbeat narrative punctuated by spooky psychic visions and romantic interludes as he conducts a cute relationship with a gamine young cop. These Hong-Kong crime-world shenanigans unfold with such brio that we wonder how the picture is going to maintain its energy-levels. Answer: it doesn't. The second half takes a jarringly serious turn with increasingly unfortunate results, bogging down with some sloppily nebulous storytelling all the way to its running-on-empty conclusion.

Sleepwalking Land
CATALOGUE : In early 1990s Mozambique, following the dissipation of the Civil War, a sensitive boy named Muidinga struggles to survive without the presence of his parents – who have long since disappeared, whereabouts unknown. As the story commences, Muidinga happens upon a diary found near a lifeless corpse that speaks of a woman on a ship seeking her estranged son. Certain that the woman in question is his mother, he embarks on a long journey in search of her, and soon gains the support and assistance of a traveling companion, the elderly Tahir. The two set out on a long trek from one refugee camp to another hoping to find at least some trace of the woman who brought Muidinga into the world.
VERDICT :
There's never any shortage of war or (or post-war) movies focussing on the plight of plucky, photogenic children, and this is a pretty good example of how not to go down this particular path. The well-scrubbede protagonist seldom looks like he's ever encountered much in the way of hardship – but then again, as the picture deploys numerous magical-realist touches, perhaps it's a mistake to take anything at face value. This approach gives the film-makers something akin to carte blanche, narrative-wise, but what results is a confusing stew of fantasy and reality, leaving the hapless viewer stumbling between levels of fiction. Tepidly conventional on most technical levels, this is evidently well-meaning stuff but too corny and stodgy to make much proper impact.

Train of Shadows 
CATALOGUE : A film posing as a re-constructed analysis of a series of home movies shot by Gerard Fleury before he disappeared looking for the right shot to complete a film he was working on about the Normandy village of Le Thuit. The footage shows his family and household staff walking around the grounds playing games. Guerin intercuts this real footage with fake b&w footage of the same location and adds color scenes which purports to show that may have occurred off-camera.
VERDICT :
The past insistently, 'cinematically' haunts the present in this technically accomplished but ultimately over-opaque examination of the creative process. Tantalising images of events long ago are examined and re-examined – in somewhat exhaustively repetitive style – and then elaborately recreated for our benefit, as a Draughtman's Contract type mystery gradually comes into focus, only to slip away from our grasp. Bold in concept but a touch too belaboured in execution, even if fragmentary grace-notes abound in this elaborate visual palimpsest.

Uprise 
CATALOGUE : He's even able to foresee the fall and of feeling in his skin the profound ruts dut out in the ground. In the same way he can know when a nurse is looking at him even with his eyed closed. He knows that by following that track and once down there, he would only find iron and flesh melted into one. He knows that if he can't spread his arm into the abyss and ransom his mother from there, he can only immerse himself in that underground he has privileged access to because he doesn't know anything else. Lonely yet unwillingly communicant – the zone greets, the zone liberates.
VERDICT :
It's anybody's guess what that pricelessly absurd catalogue-entry – obviously penned by the film-maker himself – is meant to mean, and the movie is likewise a bafflingly pretentious and incoherent wannabe-cubist 'mood-piece' that has the lineaments of challenging art-cinema (the works of Philippe Grandrieux in particular) but never threatens to be anything other than a compendium of striking images and sounds. Arty, clammy foreboding is the order of the day, with discordant soundscapes to further darken the mood – but this is a classic case of creative reach exceeding grasp. Some terrific cinematography, but the film otherwise repeatedly falls into the all-too-common trap of confusing soporific obfuscation with art.

Wonderful Town
CATALOGUE : Damage done by the tsunami has gone out of sight but is still spreading beneath the surface. "Wonderful Town" is set is a small declining village that wasn't directly affected by the tsunami but located near a southern Thailand resort area that got washed away. One day, a salesman, Ton, checks into the hotel. A little brother of the hotel's host, Wit, passes the day not doing much. When he finds out that Ton is having an intimate relationship with his sister, his rage explodes and {SPOILER DELETED}. The film exposes people who were thrown into despair and isolation against their will and how their scars affect others.
VERDICT :
For all its merits – and at times it achieves a sublime kind of "sensurround" effect – Wonderful Town is archetypal of a wider problem afflicting much of world cinema, especially when it comes to young/youngish filmmakers… The dramaturgical aspects of cinema often seem a long way down the list of priorities, and it's distressing how many supposedly serious and/or highbrow films are undermined by their screenplays' reliance on absurd coincidence(s) – though as long as contraptions such as Fatih Akin's The Edge of Heaven receive "official" and specific recognition for their scripts (F.Akin won Best Screenplay at Cannes last year), then this pernicious malady seems set to flourish even further.
                edited extract from Senses of Cinema report

Neil Young
12th/13th October 2008

IndieLisboa 2008 index page

  íLVARO LAPA – LITERATURE : [6/10] : ílvaro Lapa – Literatura : Portugal 2007 : Jorge Silva Melo : 102m : NC : 29/4 SJ
  ENDGAME : [6/10] : O Lar : Portugal 2008 : António Borges Correia : 77m : 2/5 CL
  THE FLOWER BRIDGE : [6/10] : Podul de flori : Romania 2008 : Thomas Ciulei : 91m : IC : 1/5 CL
  THE MOTHER : [6/10] : La Mère : Switzerland (Swi/Rus/Can/Fr) 2007 : Antoine Cattin & Pavel Kostomarov : 79m : IC : 2/5 VT
  THE MUGGER : [6/10] : El Asaltante : Argentina 2007 : Paulo Fendriks : 67m : VT : IC : 1/5 VT
  PINK : [5/10] : Roz : Greece 2006 : Alexander Voulgaris : 87m : IC : 1/5 VT
  RAILROAD CROSSING : [5/10] : Pas a nivell : Spain 2007 : Pere Vilí  i Barceló : 107m : IC : 2/5 CL
  RUNNING ON KARMA : [6/10] : Daai chek liu : China ("Hong Kong"/Chi) 2003 : Johnny To & Wai Ka-Fai : 93m (approx) : CL : OC (Johnny To retrospective) : 4/5 CL
  SLEEPWALKING LAND : [4/10] : Terra Sonâmbula : Portugal (Por/Moz) 2007 : Teresa Prata : 100m : NC : 1/5 CL
  TRAIN OF SHADOWS : [6/10] : Tren de sombras : Spain (Sp/Fr) 1997 : José Luis
Guerí­n : 85m (approx) : OC (Guerí­n retrospective) : 4/5 CL
  UPRISE : [5/10] : A Zona : Portugal 2008 : Sandro Aguilar : 97m : IC/NC : 30/4 SJ
  WONDERFUL TOWN : [6/10] : Thailand 2007 : Aditya Assarat : 92m : IC : 30/4 SJ