Rotterdam roundup: ‘Agrarian Utopia’ [6+/10]; ‘Blind Pig Who Wants To Fly’ [2/10]; ‘Jerichow’ [7/10]

Published on: February 23rd, 2009

   You don't have to be a Manchester City supporter to know that Thailand – of which the club's recently-departed and highly controversial owner Thaksin Shinawatra was Prime Minister from 2001-2006 – is in a right mess at the moment. Reports from the country, specifically those involving the heavy-handed suppression of any dissent directed towards either government, the church or the monarchy, have been alarming human-rights organisations for several years.
   It's therefore no small matter that film-maker Uruphong Raksasad, whose 2006 debut Stories from the North attracted favourable reviews on the festival circuit, should with his latest work Agrarian Utopia choose to tackle his country's problems in such an uncompromising and direct fashion. At the end of the film a protestor is heard to remark that "thugs rule the country; the people are in misery", and it's evident that the picture's slightly pretentious-sounding title (there's apparently no Thai-language version of the name1) is intended as a deeply ironic apellation.
   Bookended by newsreel-style footage of urban demonstrations, the bulk of the running-time is dedicated to a very close, intimate inspection of rural lives in one particular settlement – remote and too tiny to even be properly called a village. In this verdant, big-sky wetland terrain where the vivid, virid colours, captured by limpid high-defintion digital video, seem to include a million shades of green, the inhabitants eke out a living from the rice-fields and their buffalos as best they can, under the thumb of seldom-seen landlords: they are "farmers for hire… [with] no lands of our own."
   Raksasad has clearly had to stage (or rather re-stage) several scenes for the benefit of his camera(s), and there are aspects of a constructed narrative structure here and there in what is reportedly a more-than-usually tricky hybrid of documentary and fiction. At times his eye for composition and framing runs perilously close to aestheticising the "misery" of his subjects: he has to walk a precarious line between recording the humdrum reality of their existence while ensuring that the results remain engaging and involving over the course of what is a somewhat ambitious running-time – Stories from the North was a nine-part movie that nevertheless clocked in at a lean 88 minutes.
   Agrarian Utopia does represent a step forward from that modestly promising debut, though it's still not without significant flaws. Raksasad's default mode remains an all-too-familiar one of ethnographic, humanistic study – unadorned by narration, expository captions, score or interview – and there's the sense that the participants are to some degree playing "roles" that the film has assigned them. There are, for example, several conspicuously glum mealtimes where uneducated families commune in the kind of cautious wordlessness that one finds much more often in documentaries than in real life.
   On the other hand, this is no chronicle of unalloyed grimness, and the title isn't perhaps so ironic: rice-farming is tough, but it's evidently much preferable to the existing alternatives ("factory work is shortlived") and there are several scenes where these simple, old-fashioned ways reveal enviable characteristics. Community and family bonds compensate for material shortages, and a meal of honeycomb is pronounced "delicious." Someone proudly points out "we're not starving here"… yet. As Raksasad suggests, however, it's questionable at best whether the lifestyle presented here is sustainable in even the medium term, especially with such incompetence at the top levels of government – we hear pointed comments about Thailand's scandalously "unfulfilled potential."
   Raksasad himself is more a case of potential than fulfilled achievement – he's moving in the right direction, however, and in the latter stages of Agrarian Utopia there's a remarkable, extended sequence set during the rainy season showing the mucky business of buffalo-ploughing, children running through rainy fields, and a nocturnal montage of rushing clouds and revolving stars. It's breathtaking, transcendent, sublime stuff, made all the more effective by the decision to replace the soundtrack with a stretch of total silence. Though by far the most "artsy" segment of the film, this is a tantalising glimpse of what might have been if the director hadn't been so content to adhere to the standard modes and tropes of the form – but it's just a little too little, just a little too late.

   Pretentious and offensive in roughly equal measure, Blind Pig Who Wants To Fly is a wildly (over-) ambitious feature debut by the 30-year-old writer-director known only as 'Edwin', after some well-received shorts. Here he seeks to refract the recent turbulent history of Indonesia through the country's complex ethnic and religious structures – via a time-hopping, interlocking, synopsis-defying narrative about a handful of characters in present-day Djakarta.
   Early stretches present a sprightly, quirkily comic series of vignettes that introduce us to the main dramatis personae - including a gay couple with powerful government/military connections, a middle-aged blind dentist who operates by touch rather than sight, and a young woman who becomes a national celebrity by means of a rather hazardous firework-in-the-mouth trick.
   The early stretches' agreeably gnomic air of mild absurdity beguiles, but very rapidly gives way to more ponderous, slow-paced, increasingly heavy-handed sequences in which dead-serious issues of cultural identity and political strife are dealt with in a manner that comes across as juvenile, flippant and opportunistic.
   Typical of Edwin's approach is his (mis-)use of the Stevie Wonder song "I Just Called To Say I Love You", which is sung and listened to at very frequent junctures throughout in a manner that's initially amusing, but which quickly becomes gratingly annoying without any noticeable dividend.
   Even worse is the unwholesome dynamic between the dentist and the gay couple: the former needs a big favour from the latter, the price of which turns out to be the old chap's reluctant participation in a particularly humiliating sexual threesome. Edwin lingers on the dentist's acute anal discomfort during a truly tasteless scene that culminates with a priceless shot of his surgery floor: his dark glasses, having fallen off his head during coitus, are joined on the deck by a big dollop of fresh white semen.
   In a film which ostensibly seeks to expose the unfair treatment of religious and ethnic minorities, such a sordid and negative presentation of an embattled (sexual) minority is questionable at best, blatantly homophobic at worst (regardless of whatever the director's own orientations may be.)
   Then again, it's hard to draw much sense out of a film which, at just seventy-odd minutes, becomes such an unendurable, repetitive and aribitrary mish-mash of elements and ideas – Edwin clearly hoping that his frustratingly pointless exercise in obfuscation will be interpreted in certain quarters as some kind of Personal Artistic Statement.
   Blind Pig Who Wants To Fly - the title refers, with typical pseudo-poetic symbolism, to the farm-animal we glimpse from time to time in various stages of distress – does little credit to the Rotterdam Film Festival, which programmed it into its main competitive section, nor to the festival's own Hubert Bals Fund, which contributed significantly to its finances. The HBF has no shortage of vocal detractors – Canadian magazine CinemaScope identified it as part of "a general trend in major festivals to appeal their colonial guilt" – and such woefully misguided enterprises aren't exactly an advertisement for the fund's ongoing existence.

  
Still perhaps the least internationally-recognised of Europe's front-rank writer-directors, Germany's Christian Petzold seemed on the verge of a belated major breakthrough with 2007's Yella - winner of Best Actress at Berlin (for his frequent collaborator Nina Hoss), his first picture to obtain UK distribution, and perhaps his most all-round satisfying work since the film which remains his masterpiece, 2000's The State I Am In (his theatrical-feature debut.)
   And Jerichow has been received with ecstatic praise in certain quarters – especially, it's interesting to note, among those 'pockets of resistance' who'd previously been immune to Petzold's immaculately crafted psychological thrillers. In his report from Toronto Film Festival, Michael Sicinski of The Academic Hack website described it as "a film that picks up the Sirkian project from Fassbinder in a way that seems, for the first time, completely logical, as though we've finally found the heir apparent. In any case, I doubt I'll see a finer film this year than Jerichow."
   Pretty heady praise, but after a first viewing I can't quite see where Sicinski is coming from. This is an absorbing page-turner of a movie, one which takes James M Cain's lean-and-mean 1934 novel(-la) The Postman Always Rings Twice and updates it to the rural but claustrophobic-feeling area just west of Berlin, around the small town which provides the film with its intriguingly quasi-biblical title ("Now Jericho was straitly shut up because of the children of Israel: none went out, and none came in" – Joshua 6:1).
   The three main characters are a hotheaded former Afghan serviceman (Benno Furmann), the Turkish snack-van magnate (Hilmi Sozer) he starts working for after a (bizarre) chance encounter, and the latter's dissatisfied, abused wife (Hoss), with whom he soon commences an affair. The basic dynamic is drawn from Cain, but Petzold himself cites Vincente Minnelli's film Some Came Running (1959) as a significant influence, and fans of Patricia Highsmith – Petzold should surely adapt one of her novels for the screen sooner rather than later – may spot a couple of sequences and touches that nod to her oeuvre.
   As we have come to expect from Petzold, the early and middle stretches of Jerichow unfold with gripping precision – though it becomes increasingly debatable whether his detached, classical coolness is really appropriate for the raw, hurtling, doomed carnality of Cain. The film's pacing feels a little off – there's a certain urgency that's lacking, and there's something not quite right with the structure: barely has Petzold delivered the big twist that markedly diverges from Postman's template, than his narrative comes to a jarringly abrupt halt.
   A second viewing might yield greater depths, but so far I'd say this is Petzold essentially treading water – experimenting with genre as he goes along, without coming up with anything particularly startling or revealing. Then again, perhaps it's churlish to complain: Petzold-by-numbers is still significantly more accomplished and worthwhile than what the majority of the world's current writer-directors come up with when operating at the top of their game.

Neil Young
23rd February, 2009

AGRARIAN UTOPIA : [6+/10] : 122m : Thailand 2009 : Uruphong RAKSASAD : seen at Cinerama cinema

BLIND PIG WHO WANTS TO FLY : [2/10] : Babi buta yang ingin terbang : 77m : Indonesia 2008 : 'EDWIN' : seen at Pathe cinema

JERICHOW : [7/10] : 93m : Germany 2008 : Christian PETZOLD : seen at Doelen centre cinema, Rotterdam

all films seen in Rotterdam, 31st January 2009 at IFFR Rotterdam (public screenings / complimentary tickets)

Rotterdam Film Festival 2009 : Jigsaw Lounge index page

1Or maybe there is – one online source cites Sawan banna as the film's "original" title.