SAN SEBASTIAN FILM FESTIVAL // DONOSTIA ZINEMALDIA : September, 2009 : all 16 online, Mon.30.Nov.
for Tribune magazine : overview report including comments on
Naharro & Pastor's Me, Too
Cristian Jimenez's Optical Illusions
Nicolas Pereda's Perpetuum Mobile
Pelin Esmer's 10 to 11
Javier Rebollo's Woman Without Piano
stand-alone review : Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus
scroll down for :
JEON Kyu-hwan's Animal Town.
Fernando Gonzalez Molina's Brain Drain.
Telleria & Mazo's The Cloud-Painting Machine.
Isaki Lacuesta's The Damned (Los condenados)
Philippe Van Leeuw's The Day God Walked Away (aka Rwanda : The Day God Walked Away)
Israel Adrian Caetano's France (aka Francia).
Hana Makhmalbaf's Green Days.
JEON Soo-il's I came from Busan.
Santiago Loza's The Invention of Flesh.
Enrique Buchichio's Leo's Room.
Miguel Angel Jimenez Colmenar's Ori (aka Two).
Jabi Elortegi's Perfect Happiness.
Andrea Olabarria's Rough Winds.
Gustavo Montiel Pages' Tide of Sand.
Javier Fuentes-Leon's undertow (contracorriente).
Tom DiCillo's When You're Strange (aka When You're Strange : A Film About The Doors).
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Animal Town
Self-consciously gloomy depiction of severely damaged lives in modern-day South Korea, quickly shot (on video) to become one of the very first fictional pictures on the film-festival circuit to take the global financial crisis as its backdrop.
According to writer-director Jeon Kyu-hwan's picture (made in strict accordance with default, uninflected art-movie techniques familiar from so many countries) much of S.K. has become a post-industrial, poverty-racked dystopia where times are near-uniformly hard – though there's still some taunting evidence of affluence here and there in the cityscapes - crime is rife and criminals are unreformable degenerates.
As shot by Kim Jin-kyung and edited by Han Jong-hoon and Park Hae-o, the first half sets the bleak scene ("we guys are screwed") with reasonably absorbing grittiness, developing a pair of storylines involving a recently-released ex-con (Lee Jun-hyuk) and the church-going family-man (Oh Seong-tae) we deduce was somehow connected with his crime – though neither of the pair are ever what you could call sympathetic. There's a third sub-strand involving garbage-collecting street-kids that feels tacked on to the main narratives.
When the various storylines converge, they do so in regrettably melodramatic, coincidence-reliant, credibility-snapping fashion. The overwrought climax is laughable (deus ex machina – or is it divine retribution? – in the form of a rampaging wild boar!), offensive in its implications (regarding the rehabilitation of offenders), implausible in its details (a character suddenly turns violently psychotic, then suicidal – "trying to take the easy way out?" he's scolded. "You low-life freak!") and, worst of all, excessively clever-clever, culminating in a "twist" revelation that any reasonably attentive audiences should be able to second-guess long before halfway.
Animal Town is reportedly the middle section of a trilogy, following 2008's Mozart Town and with Complex Town slated for 2010. Forewarned is forearmed!
Brain Drain
{WALKOUT}
Not so much "American Pie" and "Spanish Paella" – at least, that's the blatant intention behind this deliberately puerile teen-oriented comedy, which proves Europe can be just as adept as Hollywood at churning out infantile high-schooler fare.
Ludicrous, slim plot – which "echoes" recent Hollywood guilty-pleasure Sex Drive, among other forerunners, involves various (25+ looking) Spanish doofuses cheating their way into Oxford University to aid one of their number's quest to woo a brainy beauty. The lovelorn chap in question is Emilio (Mario Casas) a supposedly "geeky" lad with spectacles, lank hair and bad skin who's all too obviously a male variation on Ugly Betty: the big nerd-to-hunk makeover is a question of "when" rather than "if."
The ersatz "Oxford" campus is good for a few semi-inadvertent laughs (watch out for the daft cameo by 'Stephen Hawking') but the whole thing feels tiresomely slapdash in its conception and execution, slathered with zany "muzak" (score by Manel Santisteban) that chiefly serves to minimise the comedy value – though the latter is actually preferable to the string of soppy, English-language songs that clog up the soundtrack.
Overall there's very little here to detain audiences beyond the target demographic of immature, easily-pleased Spanish popcorn-munchers. I bailed after a notably unfunny and desperate-to-shock "raunchy" set-piece that takes place in the university's morgue. Strictly bogus, muchacho.
The Cloud-Painting Machine
A stodgily bittersweet evocation of a sensitive lad's coming-of-age in the dunnish Bilbao of the 1974. Written and directed by duo Aitor Mazo and Patxo Telleria, the picture trundles ponderously along in agreeable enough fashion as a careful evocation of mild teenage travails, until tragedy strikes the family - in somewhat arbitrary fashion - to spice up the latter stages. The comedies and misfortunes of a not-exactly-deprived adolescence, with sentimental life-lessons delivered in square, bald fashion.
The appealing protagonist/narrator Asier (Bingen Elorza) is a would-be artist, from a talented family (hotheaded older brother and factory-worker dad [Mazo also paint), but is somewhat held back by his colour-blindness. Contending all the while with his increasingly active hormones, he eventually manages to transcend his limitations ("sometimes a slip becomes a stroke of genius").
Rather more successfully than the film-makers, in fact, as the picture - many scenes smokily backlit, via Gaizka Bourgeaud's cinematography - is something of a slog for those who aren't especially interested in the milieu. To be fair, some of the sepia-tinged visuals quite nicely suggest slightly faded colour photographs of the era (the whole thing does feel rather like it's based on the director's own fond memories of growing up.)
A knowledge of the area's politics of the time may not entirely be an advantage, however, as there's surprisingly little sense of how Franco's national government suppressed the Basque country in general and its biggest city, Bilbao, in particular (apart from a somewhat underwhelming incident in which the police violently close down a Basque-cultural street fiesta).
The writer-directors are much too busy concentrating on their principal recurrent visual "flourish", whereby the image freezes and quickly turns into a "painted" scene - typical of their over-egged, stilted approach to the artistic process. The Quince Tree Sun it most certainly ain't.
The Damned
A lot of gong but disappointingly little dinner in this nicely-crafted, atmospherically slow-burning tale of ex-firebrand revolutionaries and how they deal (or not) with the painful issues of their past. Set in a carefully unspecified country - which we take to be Argentina, despite the jungle-bordered terrain - it follows a group of mainly middle-aged friends as they dig for the remains of a long-deceased colleague.
As the characters explore their remote surroundings, a world of verdant ominousness is subtly sketched. Several wry points are made about how today's young people ("more superficial" but also more "peaceful") lack the causes and energy that motivated their parents and grandparents: the elders want the kids "to see what the dead are, how hard it is to stay alive." But the nature of the relationships between the various individual characters never quite come into focus, meaning they often feel primarily like mouthpieces for writer-director Isaki Lacuesta's ideas (he co-wrote the screenplay with Isabel Campo.)
As shot by Diego Dussuel and scored by Gerard Gil, the film is undeniably intriguing in its moody intensity, and it's commendable that the temptation to insert flashbacks was resisted - allowing the script to instead explore the character's own ruminant, conflicting retrospectives in their own words. With narrative very much a secondary or tertiary concern, Lacuesta - the 34-year-old Catalan making a quietly promising transition to features after more documentary-based works (Cravan vs Cravan [2002]; The Legend of Time [2006]) - loosely fingers and re-fingers certain key narrative threads, as if he's gently, repetitively strumming on guitar-strings.
Trouble is, The Damned (unfortunate choice of English-language title, one already taken by Luchino Visconti and Joseph Losey, among others) can't quite seem to make its mind up whether it wants to be a probingly philosophical think-piece dealing with extremely weighty subject-matter, or a sinister, novelistic kind of highbrow thriller.
Eventually the story's ambiguities feel more like obfuscations and gnomic evasions - despite the best efforts of the strong ensemble cast (standouts: Daniel Fanego, Arturo Goetz). And towards the latter stages the air of monotonous humourlessness becomes increasingly suffocating as it becomes apparent that Lacuesta is all about posing arch questions and only vaguely hinting at possible solutions.
Jorge-Luis Borges covered very similar thematic terrain in less than four pages via his 1944 story Theme of the Traitor and Hero* - and Lacuesta, evidently content to operate squarely within established art-film contours (and longueurs), can currently only dream of such incisively terse economy.
The Day God Walked Away (aka Rwanda – The Day God Walked Away)
An appropriately grim recounting of the Rwandan genocide from the perspective of a single victim – Tutsi nanny Jacqueline (Ruth Keza Nirere), who is employed to look after the children of a wealthy Belgian family. When news arrives that Hutu fighters are approaching, the Belgians flee but Jacqueline refuses to accompany them, instead hiding out in an attic and only emerging when the coast is clear, some hours later. She discovers that the Belgians' house has been wrecked and almost totally stripped – and that, nearby, her own children have been murdered. Retreating into muteness and into the camouflaging obscurity of a nearby forest, Jacqueline is on a constant state of alert as the marauding, machete-wielding Hutus go about their bloodthirsty business in the surrounding area.
Largely dispensing with both music and dialogue, Van Leeuw – the experienced cinematographer making a belated debut as writer-director - plunges us into a convincing recreation of Jacqueline's dire, nerve-frazzling plight. Amid thick vegetation (this is a place "where only man is vile", as the saying goes) and the occasional appearance of unexpected fauna, we observe her travails at first hand in what becomes a dutiful tribute to human resourcefulness and resilience.
The stripped back, bare-bones style is somewhat reminiscent of writer-director Van Leeuw's countrymen, the Dardennes brothers – while Deliverance also comes to mind at certain junctures during our heroine's protracted forest ordeal, which for long stretches seems to unfold in something akin to real time.
Indeed, when the chronology starts skipping forward – after Jacqueline comes across a badly injured man (Afazali Dawaele) and the pair warily set up "house" in the woods – the effect is disorientingly jarring, this the post-apocalyptic 'Adam and Eve' scenario (a true 'Nightmare of Eden') recalling both Terrence Malick's Badlands and Michael Haneke's The Time of the Wolf.
Days and nights in the forest, then, recounted by cinematographer Marc Konincx (Van Leeuw performed similar duties on Bruno Dumont's Life of Jesus [1997]) and editor Andree Davanture with a dogged directness that absorbingly avoids conventional narrative development. The focus is instead often on examining the planes and contours of Nirere's mask-like face as Jacqueline holds on to body, mind and soul in the face of elemental extremities.
Unfortunately in the final act Van Leeuw's script feels the need to move towards conventional closure – achieved by having Jacqueline (quite understandably) lose her grip on sanity. When she goes off the rails, so does the cumbersomely-titled Day God Walked Away, Jacqueline's suddenly wild and reckless actions sitting awkwardly alongside the poise and restraint that's prevailed for the vast bulk of the running-time.
France (aka Francia)
{WALKOUT}
I gave this pretentious, arch examination of a contemporary urban dysfunctional family unit my usual two-reel minimum before bailing out. Story concerns a winsome, introverted little girl Mariana – as played by young Milagros Caetano, presumably the director's daughter, who's the best thing about the picture. Her feuding parents (Lautaro Delgado, Natalia Oreiro) have long since ceased being a romantic couple but have, it seems, recently been forced to cohabit again by economic circumstances – a news broadcast speaks of "general insecurity."
Carlos (Delgado) is hollow-eyed, pasty-faced, morose - an unappealing and unengaging protagonist, especially when his discontents boil over into domestic violence against his ex Cristina (Oreiro.) Mariano understandably retreats into her own private world – she decides that she would prefer to be called Gloria - in a plot which is reminiscent of those "misery memoirs" which clog the world's bookshelves.
But director Caetano – whose best previous effort A Red Bear (2002) also dealt with the fears of children – has loftier ambitions (What Mariana/Gloria Knew?, perhaps), tricking up this rather simple story with all manner of arch affectations, starting with his decision to have the title appear as part of a poem that unfolds on screen no less than 12 minutes into his brisk 77-minute running-time.
Obliquely "artistic" editing by H. O. Ester chops scenes up to elliptical fragments, and Uruguay-born, Argentina-based writer-director Caetano is also very fond of such gimmicks as split-screens and mini-screens within screens (cinematography by Julian Apezteguia). But this, paradoxically enough, chiefly serves to emphasise the essential drabness of the exercise, and the viewer's patience is very rapidly exhausted.
Caetano somehow scored a slot in Cannes competition with 2006's overcooked Chronicle of an Escape - aka Buenos Aires 1977. On the evidence of France, however, he's slipped some way down the South American pecking-order in double-quick time.
Green Days
Admirers of American pop-punkers Green Day be warned – this film is Green Days, plural, the title referring to the colour worn by opponents of Iran's perpetually controversial President Mahmoud Ahmedinajad. These include the picture's almost constantly anguished protagonist Ava (actress billed under the same moniker), a playwright whose works dramatise, in cringe-inducingly symbolic fashion, the plight of the nation's oppressed and ignored.
This is very much a picture of two halves: when Ava is bemoaning her fate, or when we glimpse extracts from her productions, Green Days feels cack-handed and amateurish, very much the work of a 21-year-old writer-director. It's hard to see whether the movie is analysing Ava's political naivety ("Mr Khatami, where is the key to our happiness?" she asks, attending a rally for Ahmedinajad's electoral foe) or sharing it. A little of the character's tremble-voiced solipsism goes a long way, adding to the atmosphere of crude agit-prop that pervades the early and middle sections.
In the latter third, however, Green Days switches emphasis and allows in many other voices: the over-cooked quasi-fictional elements recede in favour of pleasingly chaotic documentary sequences as 'Ava' wanders the streets chatting with folk who pass by in cars or on foot. Horn-honking night-town sequences have a rousing vibrancy as the atmosphere of Tehran tumult is strikingly evoked via Mohammad Yazdi's newsreel-style hand-held cinematography and Babak Karimi's editing.
Best of all, a wide range of first-person testimony and opinion - including some unexpectedly staunch defences of Ahmedinajad - is elicited from representatives of Iran's famously youthful, restive population. Many of them, mercifully, prove much more eloquent and engaging than the whining Ava, who's more impressive as interviewer than interviewee.
As a time-capsule glimpse behind the headlines, Green Days would make a fine double-bill with Petr Lom's "straight" documentary Letters to the President, which is also making the rounds of the film-festival circuit, and likewise clocks in at just over 70 minutes. Lom is leagues ahead of Makhmalbaf when it comes to the editing and structuring of his material, however: Green Days, for all its immediacy and urgency (the end credits are riddled with English-language typos – we're told that artworks are being "sub pressed" by Ahminedjad's ministries) is torpedoed by its awkward integration of fiction and non-fictional elements.
There's precious little in the way of explanation, exposition or context, Makhmalbaf preferring to waste seemingly endless minutes to Ava's rambling discontents. Even the staunchest advocates of Iranian freedom might end up finding themselves momentarily sympathising with those who'd "sub press" such monotonous hectoring.
I came from Busan
A teenage mother gives her baby up for adoption – with unfortunate consequences – in this dank, sluggish drama from Jeon Soo-Il, writer-director responsible for the 2007 masterpiece With a Girl of Black Soil. (In between he also made a film entitled Himalaya – Where the Wind Dwells which, despite starring South Korean superstar Choi Min-sik, barely registered on the international film-festival circuit.)
To describe this mopey affair as a come-down would be charitable – indeed, with the exception of one imaginatively-shot and strikingly economic sequence in which a karaoke session turns unexpectedly violent, it's pretty hard to reconcile the two films as being the work of the same individual.
Set on the waterfront of chilly, gloomy port-city Busan (a.k.a. Pusan), the film conforms all too unimaginatively to the default modes of arthouse cinema familiar from the work of Belgium's Dardenne brothers and their countless imitators. This means that Jeon, cinematographer Kim Sung-Tai and editor Kim Jeong-min deliver a succession of long, wordless scenes in which our pretty/vacant, 18-year-old heroine In-hwa (Park Ha-seon) trudges around her oppressive environment, wrestling her way through indecision.
"Times are hard these days," she is told at one point, a fact convincingly illustrated in repetitive episodes of downbeat urban anomie. Extended sequences revolve around the blank-faced munching of noodles; exposition is related via a series of longish phone-calls; we return again and again to the protagonist's spartan dockside flat; she strikes up a low-key semi-friendship with a neglected waif.
The prospect of raising a child in such an environment is not, shall we say, presented as a positive one. But once the baby is given up for adoption, things start to go badly wrong – not only for In-hwa, who succumbs to mental imbalance (she becomes so zonked-out that she barely registers when a drunk drowns before her very eyes), but also for the movie, which quickly tips into daft melodrama.
Confrontations with an implausibly unhelpful government official spiral into absurdity when the functionary deploys violence to deal with his latest troublesome "client." And a weird, brief coda in which In-hwa journeys to Europe in search of her rejected offspring culminates in a wince-inducingly stilted English-language "conversation" with the 'adoptor' – a change of scenery, from dingy docks to airy Alps, which seems motivated more by the requirements of the international co-production financing than by organic storytelling development (if she's so cash-strapped, just how does In-hwa afford to jet halfway round the world?)
The result is a movie which feels like an opportunistic journey into damaged, deprived lives – a wallow in misery, tinged with irony ("Adoption Is Hope" a poster reads), of the sort which never goes out of favour among funding-bodies or film-festival programming departments. Jeon is capable of so much better – even a monster-movie entitled It came from Busan, along the lines of Bong Joon-ho's The Host, would have been emphatically preferable to this water-treading misfire.
The Invention of Flesh
{WALKOUT}
Quite early on in The Invention of Flesh, a Christmas tree is glimpsed – just for long enough so we know that it is the holiday season, though the mood among the film's alienated, taciturn characters is nobody's idea of festive fun. Even earlier – in fact, during the very first seconds – we are treated to a close-up shot of female genitalia, presented in resolutely untitillating fashion, so we know that what follows will probably deal with sexual inadequacies and dysfunctions in reserved, detached style.
And the ensuing scenes sketch, in near-wordless fashion, the doings of a colourless man (Diego Benedetto) and a volatile woman (Umbra Colombo), who's much given to smoking in ruminant fashion. These gnomic episodes are punctuated with portentous classical music. Not a great deal happens, though we detect that there are some aspects of a plot involving a model – whose work involves posing as a dead body for the benefit of medical students – and a journey she undertakes in the company of a morbid bloke, who is apparently one of the students.
Dull visuals (cinematography by Guillermo Saposnik) depict drab characters who have all the pep of hypnotised zombies. And whatever is ailing these hapless folk, their miseries are evidently intergenerational: they have inherited their torpor and dysfunction from their elders, and to their own offspring they will impart a similar legacy. What does it all add up to? Presumably the latter reels reveal all.
Two were more than enough for me, and I fled the airless atmosphere of pretension that pervaded the cinema, wondering what had gone wrong with writer-director Santiago Loza, whose Extrano (aka Strange, 2003) had offered the mild promise of better things. A false dawn, it would now seem.
Leo's Room
The sexual dysfunctions of a good-looking Montevideo student in his mid-20s are unfussily explored in Leo's Room, an easy-going drama (with droll comic elements) that seems to suggest that accepting one's homosexuality can still be something of a big deal in Uruguay - even in its cosmopolitan capital - though there's no explicit reference to any particular social problem relating to the issue in what one presumes is still a staunchly Catholic country.
In sessions with an avuncular but somewhat ineffectual psychiatrist (the currently ubiquitous Arturo Goetz, who has much more to do in The Damned {see above}), the puppyishly oversensitive Leo (Martin Rodriguez) gradually comes to terms with his desires. He even gets himself a too-nice-to-be-true boyfriend, Seba (Gerardo Begerez, engaging), but it becomes plain that he's still suffering to a certain degree of arrested development – frustrating, as we quickly develop quite a "rooting interest" in this nicely-matched pair's development towards full-fledged couple status.
Complicating things for Leo – and the movie – is the presence of Caro (Cecilia Cosero) a former schoolfriend whom he happens to bump into, and who is dealing with significant personal problems of her own. The diffuse screenplay doesn't seem to know which story it wants to tell, with the result that it never really cuts very deep or delivers much in the way of surprises. Leo is, for all his confusions and immaturities, a not-untypical representative of the internet generation – indeed, he's arguably one of the least interesting characters on view, with the absence of a father figure in his life implicitly advanced as an "explanation" for his difficulties in general and his sexual hang-ups in particular.
Best value is provided by the brief appearances of Rafael Soliwoda as Leo's live-in landlord Felipe – from whom he rents the pokey, underfurnished habitacion of the title (poster on wall: "I'm searching for freedom") - an unflappable couch-potato whose cereal-munching, TV-glued inertia makes the feckless Leo look like a paragon of decisive dynamism.
Me, Too
"You wanted a normal son, right? Well, you've got one. And normal people f*ck! At least from time to time…"
:: See Tribune report.
Optical Illusions
"More than clever concepts, what we need here is real life!"
:: See Tribune report.
Ori (aka Two)
Some big themes are tackled in underpowered, torpor-inducing fashion in this gloomy drama set in the southern Caucasus – an area that's been so often blighted by conflict, most recently the 2008 border dispute between Russia and Georgia.
Filmed in what looks like the immediate aftermath of that brief but unpleasant spat (maybe it was even still ongoing), the picture examines the toll exacted on individuals attempting to live relatively normal lives under tough geo-political circumstances they can neither understand nor affect.
Two main narrative threads unfold in parallel: one of them concerns Tblisi-outskirts taxi-driver Giorgi (Giorgi Goguazde) and his wife Nino (Kathuna Shurgaia); the other Tazo (Tazo Terunashvili), a lad who has fled the frontlines to stay in the remote farm of his vodka-swilling uncle Beqa (Beqa Gautarazde)
As recounted via Luis Moya Redrado's screenplay, these stories don't converge or illuminate each other in any particularly productive or helpful way, the main emphasis instead being upon the evocation of peri-urban claustrophobia – oppressive Soviet-era tower-blocks proliferate – amid airier sequences where the surrounding countryside is explored ("when all this is destroyed, the mountains will still stand.")
But even the latter, via Gorka Gomez Andreu's suitably elemental cinematography, offers scant respite from encroaching woe: there's a visit to a neglected hilltop monument dating from 1983 and testifying to the enduring comradeship of the Russian and Georgian peoples (such savage irony!). Not far away, mortal hazard lurks via anti-personnel mines – a legacy of conflict which provides the film's most suspenseful and protracted sequence, a scene which ultimately peters out into bathetic gallows humour.
Scored (by Miguel Angel Jimenez Arnaiz) with mournful strings amid the susurrations of an incessant wind, proceedings feature a considerable amount of bald symbolism – a chained bear, an endless and fruitless drunken search in a farmhouse kitchen for an elusive rat – along with numerous mopey, sub-Dardennes walks that repeatedly underline the utter hopelessness of lives permanently conducted at 33 1/3 RPM.
These are, needless to say, circumstances and catastrophes which emphatically deserve to be brought to international attention: even when, as with the South Ossetian spat between Russia and Georgia, a conflict makes the global headlines only for a couple of weeks, its repercussions may be felt for years or even decades at the local level.
But Ori (Georgian for "two") nevertheless comes across like an excessively mannered exercise in ennui and portentously sonorous gravity, as if the simple combination of important subject-matter and snail-paced art-cinema techniques was enough to automatically endow it with special significance.
Perfect Happiness
{WALKOUT}
A concert-pianist is forced to deal with long-buried incidents relating to her teenage years – when she became inadvertently involved with violent Basque nationalism – in Perfect Happiness, a potboiling TV-style drama executed by small-screen specialist Jabi Elortegi with a bare minimum of originality, suspense, flair or inspiration.
The action begins with a clumsily-handled sequence in which our heroine Ainhoa (Anne Igartiburu) is knocked over by a car in the centre of Barcelona. She's hospitalised, and it appears that she will probably never play professionally again – giving her plenty of time to mull over events of her distant past. We thus move clunkily back and forward between time-frames, flashing back to a crucial moment in Ainhoa's childhood.
At fifteen (as played by Aia Kruse), found herself near the scene of an assassination one rainy night, and when her photograph was printed in the local paper (via a chain of implausible circumstances) it appeared that she might actually have been a witness. The script – credited, surprisingly, to no less than four writers -thus melodramatically examines how hapless individuals can so easily become swept up in the political intrigues of others.
There are also romantic angles during both time-frames, with the older Ainhoa the focus of amorous attentions from a security-guard employed at her swanky apartment complex. This chap (Alberto Berzal) is thus the latest in what's becoming a very long series of movie-characters who are smitten after observing a woman by means of closed-circuit TV cameras.
With so much revolving around Ainhoa, it's unfortunate that she never really comes to life as a character, especially in her modern-dayt incarnation. One newspaper critic bemoans her latest "cold, soulless" concert, and while Perfect Happiness (named, with thudding irony, after a piece of music she plays) isn't quite as sterile or forbidding as that, nor does this flatly-shot enterprise provide much to detain audiences uninterested in the travails of pretty classical musicians and/or the nuances of recent Basque history.
Perpetuum Mobile
"This is just how things are."
:: See Tribune report.
Rough Winds
{WALKOUT}
Embarrassing to find such inept fare programmed for such an august and prestigious film festival – its presence in the San Sebastian lineup deriving more from the Basque-country origins of director/co-writer Olabarria than any consideration of intrinsic merit. Set and shot in the US, the resolutely Anglophone Rough Winds doesn't even have the distinction of furthering the spread of the Basque language. While it is commendable that this particular festival should take such pains to showcase and encourage Basque film-makers, a certain degree of quality-control is nevertheless essential, otherwise the results are unfortunate for all concerned.
Especially the audience, if they have paid to endure in a cinema a film which more properly belongs on TV, specifically what in the States is known as an "afterschool special" slot. Even in such a setting, the deficiencies of Rough Winds, examining the dysfunctions and insecurities of a loosely-connected group of suburban teenagers and post-teenagers, would surely be glaringly apparent. Equally flat and underwhelming on the eye as on the ear (cinematography by Matt Greene), with off-puttingly "dead" post-synched sound, the film features extremely variable acting (a couple of the performers, especially the appealing Jessica Brydon, acquitted themselves respectably given the circumstances) and is largely content to deal with cliched situations and stereotypical characters.
There is little sense of place, as the location is an unspecified area of middle America (it was apparently shot in Fort Lauderdale, Florida), and the overriding impression is of scriptwriters (director Olabarria and her collaborator Doug Klozzner) ticking off the malaises of the current internet-fixated generation: suicidal tendencies, peer-pressures, self-image issues, homophobia and sexual-orientation confusion, eating disorders.
The latter is dramatised by having one of the main characters (a nice girl led from the straight and narrow by her dim-bulb pals) spew a torrent of inexplicable brown sludge into a toilet-bowl. Your humble reviewer, already somewhat nauseated by the general ineptitude on view, bolted streetward at the next convenient opportunity.
10 to 11
"Collections aren't for sale."
:: See Tribune report.
Tide of Sand
An egotistical photographer cracks up amid the isolated splendours of coastal Patagonia in this atmospheric but overwrought psychological drama from 55-year-old Mexican writer-director Gustavo Montiel Pages. Montiel's last feature as a director would appear to have been 1982's Entre parentesis (co-directed with Simo Fabregas), since when he has been mainly working as a producer.
Tide of Sand was for some reason publicly projected in San Sebastian via fairly cheap-looking non-digital video, which did few favours to Carlos Rossini's cinematography. This is a shame, as the big sky, big sea country of southern Argentina provides a diverting backdrop for a claustrophobic tale of the simmering jealousies – and subsequent homicidal rages – experienced by its protagonist. He's the scowling, charismatic, egotistical Juan, aka 'Lobo' (Damian Alcazar) a moody, spiritual chap who self-consciously embodies the stereotype of the tormented artist ("only suffering gives any sense to life," he explains.)
The sand of the title is a recurrent feature both in our anti-hero's moody monochrome photography – often encrusted on the naked bodies of his models – and also in the film itself, as characters are fond of allowing themselves to be buried up to their necks in the stuff, all the better to focus their minds on metaphysical matters.
"After a while, a kind of inertia sets in, and you become a part of the landscape," as someone remarks, neck-deep in beach. Indeed so, but that sense of inertia may also spread to the viewer long before the bungled third act and the credibility-straining finale, though the very last shot (over which the credits gradually roll) is worth sticking around for.
undertow
Likeable, small-scale metaphysical gay romance – think Truly Madly Deeply meets Brokeback Mountain with a touch of Claudia Llosa's Madeinusa - about the "forbidden" relationship between two straight-acting, thirtyish blokes in a small Colombian fishing village.
Santiago (Manolo Cardona) is a well-travelled, quietly Bohemian artist/photographer who, while not exactly flaunting his sexuality, doesn't hide it under a bushel. His bisexual paramour Miguel (Cristian Mercado), conversely, maintains a conventional facade - to the extent that he marries and impregnates the unsuspecting Mariela (Tatiano Astengo).
The plot pivots around a tragic, offscreen development which occurs, rather suddenly, around halfway – and which it wouldn't be fair to divulge here, as the narrative technique in feature-debutant writer-director Javier Fuentes-Leon's script relies heavily on the steady parcelling-out of information.
Suffice it to say that what has been a straightforward depiction of social dynamics becomes something more fable-like and allegorical, stranger and richer. That much-abused term "magical realism," so routinely applied to any kind of weird-leaning Latin American literature and cinema, is as good a fit as any.
undertow is persuasively acted by the appealing leads, with Astengo coping solidly with what is necessarily the trickiest role – shades of Anne Hathaway in Brokeback Mountain. It's shot by cinematographer Mauricio Vidal to evoke a strong, unobtrusive sense of place in this airy frontier between land and sea (it's never quite clear to what extent homosexuality remains taboo in this Catholic backwater).
Pleasingly soapy in its storytelling convolutions – or rather telenovela-ish - undertow builds engrossingly and satisfyingly towards a climax… only to continue for nearly another half-hour, this overlength indicative of structural problems in the screenplay rather than with Roberto Benavides' editing. Overall, it's sufficiently unusual and adventurous to be worth a look, especially for programmers of gay-themed festivals, proving that Llosa's Madeinusa wasn't a blip in terms of raising the profile of cinema from this particular corner of South America.
When You're Strange (aka When You're Strange – A Film About the Doors)
"[Jim] Morrison is both innocent and profane," we're informed at one point in When You're Strange. "No-one has had this exact combination before." Really? No-one ever? Ever ever? The statement is typical of the redundant narration that plagues this disappointingly two-dimensional picture from start to finish, though the fault is entirely that of director Tom DiCillo – who wrote the damn thing - rather than Johnny Depp, who reads it out and does his best to invest proceedings with the necessary air of hip, savvy loucheness.
And that's a rather stiff task, given DiCillo's deficiencies as a rock-journalist: this is very much one fan's rather breathless, trite account of his favourite band. Or rather, despite the picture's semi-official full title, of frontman Jim Morrison. Because while the rest of the outfit continued for a couple of albums after their vocalist's premature (but, given his penchant for excess, hardly unpredictable) demise, the story very much begins and ends with the man who famously dubbed himself, in a typically self-regarding and sophomoric bit of anagrammatic wordplay, Mr Mojo Risin'.
Less biography than "authorized" hagiography, the picture is notably evasive on the well-chronicled issue of Morrison's drug use – this detail perhaps a factor in the filmmakers having gained access to previously inaccessible archives.
It's a tale with which many of us are familiar – perhaps excessively so – thanks to movies such as Oliver Stone's laughable The Doors (1991) and Danny Sugerman and Hopkins' justly acclaimed Morrison biography No One Here Gets Out Alive (1980, worth a look even for those who can't stand Morrison and his seemingly permanent personality-cult).
But at no point does DiCillo bring much new to an already overladen table, at no point does he go to the bother of bringing in any external voices to provide a different perspective, to provide cultural or historical context. This might not have been a problem if he himself had anything particularly fresh or interesting to say. But whatever his talents as a fictional film-maker (and he did make the delightfully sharp Living In Oblivion, albeit back in 1995), DiCillo is strictly meat-and-potatoes as a documentarian.
A chronological plod that functions passably as a very conventional, repetitive, cliche-ridden introduction to a supposedly envelope-pushing band, When You're Strange is saved by that array of previously-unavailable contemporary footage, encompassing both on and off stage material and edited together by Micky Blythe and Kevin Krasny. This alone will make it must-see viewing for any Doors aficionado, and the excerpts – regrettably, we never get a single song all the way through – have enough brio and immediacy to make us understand why people got so excited about an quartet which, nearly four decades on, seem very much like a footnote in musical history rather than any kind of seminal chapter.
Woman Without Piano
"Everything can be fixed… Repairing gives meaning to our lives."
:: See Tribune report.
Neil Young
October/November, 2009
—————————————————————————————–
Animal Town : [4/10] : South Korea 2009 : JEON Kyu-hwan : 96m : Kursaal ( ‚¬6), 24th September
Brain Drain : [3?/10] : Fuga de cerebros : Spain 2009 : Fernando GONZALEZ MOLINA : 105m (w/o @ 50m) : Principe ( ‚¬6), 24th September
The Cloud-Painting Machine : [4/10] : La máquina de pintar nubes : Spain 2009 : Patxo TELLERIA & Aitor MAZO : 102m : Principal (cp), 23rd September
The Damned : [6/10] : Los condenados : Spain 2009 : Isaki LACUESTA : 104m : Principal (cp), 24th September
The Day God Walked Away : [6/10] : Le jour ou Dieu est parti en voyage aka Rwanda : The Day God Walked Away (Rwanda : Le jour ou dieu est parti en voyage) : Belgium 2009 : Philippe VAN LEEUW : 100m : Kursaal ( ‚¬6), 26th September
France : [3?/10] : Francia : Argentina 2009 : Israel Adrián CAETANO : 77m (w/o @ 38m) : Principal (cp), 23rd September
Green Days : [5/10] : Ruzhaye sabz : Iran/France 2009 : Hana MAKHMALBAF : 72m : TVE (cp), 26th September
I came from Busan : [4/10] : Yeong-do da-ri : South Korea 2009 : JEON Soo-Il : 83m : TVE (cp / paid ‚¬6), 25th September
The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus : [5/10] : UK (/Can/Fr) 2009 : Terry GILLIAM : 122m : TVE (cp), 25th September
The Invention of Flesh : [3?/10] : La invención de la carne : Argentina 2009 : Santiago LOZA : 80m (w/o @ 45m) : Principal (cp), 25th September
Leo's Room : [6/10] : El cuarto de Leo : Uruguay 2009 : Enrique BUCHICHIO : 110m : Kursaal ( ‚¬6), 23rd September
Me, Too : [7/10] : Yo, también : Spain 2009 : ílvaro PASTOR & Antonio NAHARRO : 105m : Kursaal (cp), 23rd September
Optical Illusions : [7/10] : Illusiones ópticas : Chile (/Por/Fr) 2009 : Cristian JIMENEZ : 105m : Principe ( ‚¬6), 23rd September
Ori : [4/10] : aka Two : Spain/Georgia 2009 : Miguel íngel JIMENEZ COLMENAR : 85m : Principal (cp), 24th September
Perfect Happiness : [4?/10] : Zorion perfektua aka Felicidad perfecta : Spain 2009 : Jabi ELORTEGI : 90m (w/o @ 40m) : Kursaal (complimentary), 25th September
Perpetuum mobile [7/10] : Mexico(/Can) 2009 : Nicolás PEREDA : 87m (timed) : Principal (cp), 25th September
Rough Winds : [2?/10] : aka Días de viento : USA 2009 : Andrea OLABARRIA : 110m (w/o @ 30m) : Principe (complimentary), 26th September
10 to 11 : [7/10] : 11'e 10 kala : Turkey (/Fr/Ger) 2009 : Pelin ESMER : 110m : TVE (cp), 24th September
Tide of Sand : [5/10] : Marea de Arena : Mexico/Argentina 2009 : Gustavo MONTIEL PAGES : 93m : Antiguos Berri (paid ‚¬6), 22nd September
undertow : [6/10] : contracorriente : Colombia 2009 : Javier FUENTES-LEON : 100m : Antiguos Berri ( ‚¬6), 25th September
When You're Strange : [5/10] : aka When You're Strange – A Film About The Doors : USA 2009 : Tom DiCILLO : 85m : Kursaal ( ‚¬6), 24th September
Woman Without Piano : [7/10] : La mujer sin piano : Spain (/Fr) 2009 : Javier REBOLLO : 95m : Principal (cp), 23rd September
key to cinemas:
TVE = Teatro Victoria Eugenia; Principal = Teatro Principal; Principe = Cines Principe; Antiguo Berri = Cines Antiguo Berri; Kursaal = Kursaal Palace
…
cp = complimentary entry via press-accreditation (press screenings are open to the public); timings are approximate unless otherwise noted; films seen in San Sebastian / Donostia, Spain, at the 57th San Sebastian International Film Festival (aka Donostia Zinemaldia)
Order of merit
————————
1. Perpetuum Mobile [7/10]. 20/28
2. 10 to 11. 20
3. Me, Too. 20
4. Optical Illusions. 19
5. Woman Without Piano. 18
—–
6. The Day God Walked Away [6/10]. 17
7. Undertow. 16
8. The Damned. 16
9. Leo's Room. 15
———-
10. The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus [5/10]. 13
11. Tide of Sand. 13
12. Green Days. 13
13. When You're Strange. 12
—–
14. Ori [4/10]. 11
15. I came from Busan. 10
16. Animal Town. 10
17. The Cloud-Painting Machine. 10
(18. Perfect Happiness [4?/10]. 9?
—–
19. Brain Drain [3?/10]. 8?
20. France. 7?
21. The Invention of Flesh. 6?
———-
22. Rough Winds [2?/10]). 3?
* epigram
So the Platonic year
Whirls out new right and wrong
Whirls in the old istead;
All men are dancers and their tread
Goes to the barbarous clangour of a gong
W. B. Yeats : The Tower
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