ROTTERDAM Film Festival part THREE (31st Jan)  'L 'intrus, '  '3-Iron, '  'Whisky, ' etc

Published on: February 26th, 2005

official site : www.filmfestivalrotterdam.com

3-Iron [8/10]
Lost Embrace [6/10]
My Generation [4?/10]
Black Swans [5/10]
Whisky [8/10]
L'Intrus [9/10]

3-IRON : [8/10] : Bin-jip : South Korea 2004 : KIM Ki-Duk : 95 mins

I approached 3-Iron - for some reason shown under the untranslated Korean title Bin-Jip ( 'Empty Houses') in Rotterdam – with trepidation. Though I'd long been repeatedly assured by reliable sources that Kim is one of the world's most interesting current film-makers, I hadn't been very impressed by the two features of his that I'd actually seen: The Coast Guard and The Isle. As a result, I wasn't massively bothered about never having caught Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter… and Spring, which everyone reckoned to be his masterwork.

And I was somewhat skeptical when I started to hear rave reviews about 3-Iron from fellow critics who'd seen it at the Venice Film Festival where it premiered – going on to beat off stiff competition from the likes of Vera Drake, Birth and Claire Denis' protean masterpiece L'intrus (see below) to win the international critics' prize as well as three other Lido gongs. So I resolved to give Kim one last, final chance – if 3-Iron had landed in the rough, I probably wouldn't bother with his work again. Ninety-five minutes later I exited the cinema with a big daft smile plastered all over my face, having just swallowed a hefty slice of humble pie, Korean-style.

Because 3-Iron, despite a somewhat flat look to Jamg Seong-Back's cinematography, is quite simply a delight. The story is original but essentially quite straightforward: mute twentysomething Tae-Suk (Lee Seung-Yeon) rides around the suburbs of an unnamed city on his motorbike, sellotaping take-away restaurant flyers to the doors of houses. A few days later he passes by again and, if the flyer is still in place, he knows the occupants are away. This enables him to break in – but he Tae-Suk isn't a criminal, more a very active, invasive type of Good Samaritan. He tidies up, fixes broken implements and departs leaving the house in rather better shape than when he'd arrived – to the bemusement of the returning occupants. One day he finds himself in a fancy house with photographs of a model, Seon-Hwa (Jea Hee), on the walls. But as he goes about his usual business, he's unaware that Seon-Hwa is actually still in the house – brutalised into silence by her golf-crazy husband (Gweon Hyeok-Ho). It looks like Tae-Suk has an especially tricky "repair" job on his hands…

After a slowish start, in which Tae-Suk's muteness comes across like a rather cutesy plot contrivance, 3-Iron soon establishes an enthrallingly patient, calm mood – one that seems to emanate from the unflappable, almost infinitely resourceful and practical central character. And of course when Seon-Hwa enters the picture, she too communicates without words – but Kim handles this so nimbly that only the most literal-minded viewer will object. Plausibility really isn't a factor here – and that's just fine. Only in retrospect does it seem odd that none of the houses into which Tae-Suk breaks have burglar alarms; that the holidaying occupants are quite remarkably (and ill-advisedly) informative and specific in the answering-machine messages they (all) leave before they go; that they all seem to return at strikingly inopportune times. And watch how unerringly Tae-Suk he hits his various targets when he starts deploying Seon-Hwa's husband's golf clubs and balls as impromptu weapons.

This is nothing, however, compared with the practiced physical agility Tae-Suk displays in the second half of the picture, when the police finally catch up with him and he's treated to some unexpectedly brutal punishment: what we're watching is very much a morality tale, with Tae-Suk enduring the suffering of a modern, secular kind of saint. He reacts by becoming something rather less (or perhaps more) than corporeal – though to go into exactly how and why wouldn't be fair, as Kim develops the character and his situations with something of Tae-Suk's own innate grace and skill. The final third of 3-Iron combines comedy and tragedy with a metaphysical, transcendent extra dimension of the kind you very rarely come across in cinema – we tiptoe into the sort of wordless terrain more usually occupied by radical modern choreographers like Pina Bausch, without never lose sight of the characters and plot. Because this is a very human, accessible, witty kind of experimental cinema: not quite a hole-in-one, perhaps, but a pretty strong albatross all the same.

Neil Young
26th February, 2005 (seen at Venster cinema – press show)

LOST EMBRACE : [6/10] : El abrazo partido : Argentina (Arg/Spn) 2004 : Daniel Burman : 100 mins

After 2002's Every Stewardess Goes to Heaven, Lost Embrace is another light-and-likeable character-based wry comedy-drama from Burman, this time co-writing the script with Marcelo Birjmajer. Burman is Jewish, an Argentinian from Polish stock, and so it's very tempting to see the film as autobiographical: the central character, and chatty narrator, is Ariel Makaroff (Daniel Hendler) – Jewish, an Argentinian from Polish stock.

Feeling constricted in a dysfunctional country still suffering the effects of the recent dire financial crisis, Ariel becomes increasingly attracted to the idea of escaping to Europe – his Polish ancestry could come in very handy in visa applications. This doesn't go down too well with his mother Sonia (Adriana Aizenberg), who runs a small lingerie shop ( 'Elias Creations') in an old-style Buenos Aires shopping arcade. Ariel helps out in the shop, which brings him into contact with the various other colourful denizens of the "galleria," as the mini-mall is styled. The older galleristas recall Ariel's father Elias (Jorge D'Elia), who left the family in mysterious circumstances around the time of Ariel's birth. One day, quite out of the blue, Elias returns…

The amiable Lost Embrace, which is divided into a series of short chapters each with their own intertitle, feels rather like a Jewish, non-criminal little cousin of Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets, with Hendler's Ariel in the equivalent of Harvey Keitel's  'Jimmy' role of the decent, put-upon young lad struggling to reconcile his own needs (spiritual, social, financial, emotional) with the demands of the chaotic, claustrophobic urban world around him. Burman's script doesn't have anything like the depth of Scorsese's work, of course – he's content to craft vignettes of engaging, humanistic cuteness, droll jokes-without-punchlines which hit the mark often enough (and sidestep sentimentality with sufficient agility) to ensure the film doesn't outstay its welcome.

On the directing side of things, however, he often lets his material down by trying a little too hard – intrusive, plinky-quirky muzak on the soundtrack (score: Cesar Lerner), flashy jolt-editing (Alejandro Brodersohn), zoom-happy camerawork (cinematography: Ramiro Civita) and over-familiar, uninspired, hand-me-down visuals. Saying that, he knows how to get the best out of his cast – Lost Embrace is full of believable, vivid supporting performances, ensuring that we really do feel like we're peeking behind the scenes at a real galleria. And he has a real trump card in Hendler, who proves here that the easygoing, blokeish charisma he displayed in previous pictures like The Bottom of the Sea was no fluke. On the evidence of that movie and Lost Embrace alone, indeed, it's clear that Argentina – for all its recent misfortunes – at least has one of the most watchable and likeable leading men in current world cinema at its disposal. Even if he is Uruguayan…

Neil Young
26th February, 2005 (seen at Venster cinema – press show)

MY GENERATION : [4?/10] : Mai jeneorisheon : (South) Korea 2004 : NOH Dong-Seok : 85 mins

Talking  'bout My Generation? Sorry, I can't add much to the debate. Because I lasted about ten minutes into this no-budgeter before heading for the exit – I wasn't really in the mood for such low-key delights, and felt much more like the  'thriller' on offer elsewhere in the cinema: Colette Bothof's Black Swans (see below). From what I saw of Noh's debut feature, it should instead have been called My Diary or My Video-Camera: fragmentary sequences showing scenes from humdrum, suburban everyday life, rather uninterestingly edited together.

Some kind of narrative slowly developed around a bloke sitting at a desk, but I simply wasn't sufficiently engaged to remain in my seat. This is one of the perils of big film festivals like Rotterdam – if a picture doesn't grab you in the first 10 or 20 minutes, the "grass greener on other side of fence" feeling kicks in and it's all too easy to bail out and try the next screen: channel-hopping on a grander scale, I suppose. A more patient critic might have given My Generation longer before  'zapping' into the next auditorium, and I can only offer my apologies to the director. Thanks, but Noh thanks…

Neil Young
26th February, 2005 ("seen" at Cinerama cinema – press show – walkout)

BLACK SWANS : [5/10] : Netherlands 2005 : Collette BOTHOF : 88 mins

Why so many Dutch films so half-baked these days? The ones I've seen in the last couple of years tend to be reasonably well-acted, competently directed, based on scripts which have the potential to rise above the ordinary. But something goes wrong. Is it a desire to avoid "artiness" and succeed in the tough commercial marketplace against stiff international competition? If so, there's something wrong with the recipe – fingers crossed Paul Verhoeven can ride to the rescue later this year with Black Book, his first Dutch production in two decades.

Rising red-haired starlet Carice Van Houten is among the cast-list in Black Book, and her natural, unadorned appeal is one of the main reasons to see the similarly-titled Black Swans – a watchable tale of amour fou which unfolds in the scenic backdrop of Spain's southern coast. She plays Marleen, who's working in an old people's home to brush up her Spanish. Her path crosses that of another  'exiled' Nederlander – Vince (Dragan Bakema), a handsome but slightly dangerous sort (of Balkan ancestry?) who isn't not averse to the odd bit of shady criminality. A relationship soon develops – one whose intensity Marleen isn't yet mature enough to deal with…

Clocking at a lean 88 minutes, Black Swans works best as a character-study of the two mismatched lovers – she reads a book, he prefers to play his GameBoy. There's no backstory, no discussion between Vince and Marleen about the coincidence of their shared nationality – all we have to go on is what happens in the here and now. This is a very attractive couple, enjoying an idyllic romance in a very attractive location – though the doomy strings which accompany their lovemaking signal that a happy ending is a very unlikely prospect.

For a while, Arend Steenbergen's provides more than enough to keep us interested: we can see that Marleen, who surrounds herself with the elderly at work, is in danger of becoming old before her time. Her drab existence is in dire need of spicing up – which Vince is so well-equipped to provide such stimulation he comes across almost like a fantasy-man homme fatal boyfriend, conjured up by Marleen's overactive imagination. But Vince is emphatically real, with his feet squarely on the ground – too squarely, perhaps, as we can see he's beached (literally and metaphorically), stalled in transit, unable to complete his escape (tellingly, he can't even swim).

And it's the misguided Marleen who isn't quite  'all there' – when she loses her marbles, so Bothof and Steenbergen start to lose their grip on the material: the picture runs out of gas at roughly the same time as Vince's ancient scooter. Promising noirish thriller angles are abandoned in favour of undercooked psychological histrionics: Marleen becomes the stereotypical  'crazy woman' familiar from countless previous movies – she self-mutilates to erase the tattoo she's unwisely had done in celebration of her love for Vince, and even spends time in an old-school mental hospital. As the final act unspools, it becomes increasingly apparent that the film-makers haven't properly thought through how their plot is going to develop: the ending feels like an arbitrary, unsatisfying downer, tacked-on for the want of a proper conclusion. Their Wild Swans, then, offer a somewhat bumpy, disappointing ride – even if the views are invariably pretty nice.

Neil Young
26th February, 2005 (seen at Cinerama cinema – press show)

WHISKY : [8/10] : Uruguay (Uru/Arg/Ger) 2004 : Juan Pablo REBELLA & Pablo STOLL : 99 mins

If you liked Since Otar Left and Uzak  ­- and if you didn't, you weren't paying attention – then you'll definitely find Whisky an eminently palatable tipple. Like those Georgian and Turkish mini-masterpieces (which impressed arthouse audiences worldwide in 2004) the second movie by writer-directors Rebella and Stoll is a comedy about dysfunctional family relations – a comedy so dry and deadpan it could easily be mistaken for drama or even tragedy, where the humour is at least as often to be found in the silences and camerawork as in the dialogue. Four years elapsed between Rebella and Stoll's debut 25 Watts (2000) and this followup – but you don't come up with something so well-crafted as Whisky overnight: every word, gesture and shot is weighed and expertly slotted into place. The result: this is that rare feature which boasts the compactness and uninflected economy of the finest shorts.

Indeed, so rich and wise is the intelligence on show it's a surprise to find that both directors were born as recently as 1974 – there are a few young people on show here (including a nifty cameo from Lost Embrace's Daniel Hendler), but the three principal characters are all clearly on the "wrong" side of 50. Tall, taciturn Jacobo Koller (Andres Pazos) owns an ailing sock factory in Montevideo, though the running of the place is largely left to the ultra-dependable, taciturn, middle-aged manager Marta (Mirella Pascual). Each day at the factory is identical to the last – until Jacobo receives a letter from his younger brother Herman (Jorge Bolani) in Brazil, with whom he has very seldom previously communicated. One year before, their mother passed away – and although he missed the actual funeral, Herman is now keen to attend the Jewish matzevva ceremony in which the gravestone is put into place. But Jacobo is ashamed that, when Herman arrives, he will discover that his elder brother is unmarried – so he asks Marta to temporarily "pose" as his wife.

Complications ensue, with Marta – a woman alongside whom even Vera Drake would appear somewhat glam – quite unexpectedly emerging as the film's central character. It's a marvellous role for a more  'mature' performer, and Pascual turns in one of the year's outstanding performances a woman who belatedly, heartbreakingly glimpses what might just be a rare second chance for happiness (or, as the nimble-minded, palindrome-spouting Marta might put it,  'ssenippah'). Whisky is a slowburning tale of quietly desperate lives, played out against a low-key backdrop of economic hard times – the economic crisis which has inspired so many notable films from nearby Argentina in recent years has clearly had repercussions far beyond that country's borders.

But Rebella and Stoll's script (co-written with Gonzalo Delgado Galiana), while clear-eyed about the misery of these unfulfilled existences, don't wallow in misery: each of the three main characters ends up notably better off than when we first meet them, through surprising means which it wouldn't be fair to reveal here. Suffice to say that the seemingly reckless casino system employed by one of the brothers is the one which is most strongly recommended by gambling experts. The title, however, can be quite safely explained: it's really nothing to do with the drink at all:  'whisky' is what South American photographers apparently ask their subjects to say in order to produce the appearance of a grin ("cheese" is the English equivalent). And, once you've seen it, the title is a brilliant fit: just thinking about Whisky is enough to stimulate a warm, genuine smile.

Neil Young
26th February, 2005 (seen at Venster cinema – press show)

L'INTRUS : [9/10] : aka The Intruder : France 2004 : Claire DENIS : 130 mins

Oh, brother. Where do you start with a picture like L'intrus? Where, more's the point, do you end? Any magazine looking to take on a new reviewer could hire a screening-room, show the applicants this uncassifiable, transgressive, hypnotic, cold-fever-dream of a film and demand a 500-word verdict, to be completed within an hour of lights-up. It's likely that ten different critics will come up with ten completedly different reactions to the movie, however – each of them valid. Would any of them even agree on a synopsis?

For what it's worth, here's mine: sixtyish Louis Trebor (craggy, inscrutable Michel Subor) lives alone with his two dogs in a rural cottage near the French-Swiss border. Among his neighbours is a vivacious dog-breeder (Beatrice Dalle) with whom he has a jocular relationship. Louis clearly has some kind of a shady past, and is now an extremely rich man. A young man (Gregoire Colin) who lives in the nearby town, is married to a border-guard and may or may not be Louis's son. Louis suffers from cardiac problems, and pays for a heart transplant. Then he decides to go to Polynesia in search of the son he hasn't seen for many years – perhaps has never seen. The mother was a local woman, and when it becomes known that Louis is on his way, the islanders  'audition' young men – looking for a candidate they can pass off to Louis as his son. Louis embarks on his trek, making the final leg by sea from Korea on a vessel he himself may have designed. At every stage of the journey, mysterious figures abound…

Some facts: the screenplay is by Denis and Jean-Pol Fargeau, reportedly based on L'intrus – a memoir written in by heart-transplant recipient and philosopher, Jean-Luc Nancy (NB – for Nancy, the  'intruder' was the cancer from which he suffered in the aftermath of his transplant and provoked by the use of "immuno-suppressors"). According to the '05 Rotterdam catalogue, "another source was In the South Seas (1896) by Robert Louis Stevenson," while Variety magazine's Jay Weissberg also detected a significant debt to F W Murnau's "classic tragedy of Polynesia, Tabu" from 1931 (which, according to Time Out's Tony Rayns, itself "plays as a pre-colonial anachronism, rather like one of Melville's South Seas novels). The austerely beautiful cinematography is by Agnes Godard, editing by Nelly Quetter, the outstanding, guitar-based music by Stuart ("S.A.") Staples, of Tindersticks fame. The sound is by Jean-Louis Ughetto and Christophe Winding. A production of Ognon Pictures, the producer was Humbert Balsan, who committed suicide on February 10th, 2005.

Here, for the want of anything more coherent, are my (tidied-up) notes:

how fit together? if, in fact, it fits at all: internal / external journey.
metaphysical thriller – Haneke's  'Code Inconnu' the only real precursor.
poetic, mysterious, inscrutable : que pasa?… intriguing coolness sustains interest.

border incident… title:  'the intrusion'?… crossing the border
limpid widescreen – evocative, sparing music (excellent)…  
clarity of images /// obscurity of events
we neither know nor especially care what's going on
it shouldn't work, but somehow does…
it's anything-can-happen day – 2h10mins flies past!

iconic Dalle - led by huskies! /// is Golubeva the angel of death?
post-narrative … pulled along through the snow – beguiling
everything we see is a form of intrusion…
dreams and reality are integrated… to stunning effect
pace : leisurely… globe-trottingly enigmatic (france > korea > leeward islands)

"it seems you've led a life full of surprises and variations": Michel Subor (excellent) as Louis Trebor James Goldsmith/Charles Gray lookalike – new heart, new life… south-seas adventure: Conrad's  'Victory' – the illusion of escape

unashamedly, an art picture (cf Lisandro Alonso's Los Muertos) – accessible?
a new syntax of moviemaking… like Louis, gives bare-minimum away
very pleasurable sensual experience: but slight nagging doubt, brainwise.
a question of TRUST… compellingly original in plot and style.
masterpiece or bust : benefit of the doubt given. masterpiece.
last shot: pure exhilaration. "Queen of the Northern Hemisphere" indeed!

A cop-out? Maybe. A response? Definitely. More to come, any road. Denis' Beau travail was pretty good, but overrated – this time she's vaulted far beyond. I knew as soon as L'intrus ended, I want and need to see this film again. I sincerely hope I get another chance.

Neil Young
26th February, 2005 (seen at Cinerama cinema – press show)

click here for other entries in the Jigsaw Lounge Hall of Fame (films rated 9/10 and 10/10)

click here for reviews of Rotterdam films seen on the next day (1st February)

click here for full alphabetical list of features seen at Rotterdam '05

official site : www.filmfestivalrotterdam.com