for TRIBUNE : Viennale report, part 2 (including ‘Kaboom’, ‘Wild Grass’, ‘Dance to the Spirits’)

Published on: November 22nd, 2010

Viennale 2010 poster

“Boom!” boomed Richard Burton in Joseph Losey’s 1967 movie of the same name – “the shock of each moment of still being alive!”
   Forty-three years later we have Gregg Araki’s Kaboom: a title, albeit lacking an exclamation-mark, which promises an even bigger psychological jolt – and which duly delivers on that promise, with suitably apocalyptic, consistently entertaining consequences. Indeed, it was, pound-for-pound perhaps the most purely satisfying of all the new movies at the 48th Vienna International Film Festival (‘Viennale’ for short), an event noted for rather more challenging, austere fare (think Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Marie Straub, James Benning) but which has long made room for the higher-quality examples of lower-brow cinema.
   Kaboom, which proved ideal late-night fare at Vienna’s 700-seat, 1960-era Gartenbaukino, is the tenth feature by the 51-year-old Japanese-American director Araki, who in the early nineties established himself as a standard-bearer for what became known as New Queer Cinema via experimental-tinged, youth-oriented dark comedies such as The Living End (1992), Totally F*cked Up (1995), The Doom Generation (1995) and Nowhere (1997).
   After something of a lull, Araki enjoyed a return to the limelight with the more serious Mysterious Skin (2005) and then the cult-favourite comedy Smiley Face (2007) – paving the way for Kaboom to world-premiered earlier this year in the august surroundings of the Cannes Film Festival. Kaboom was one of two Cannes ‘Palm’ winners to receive an Austrian premiere at the Viennale – the other being Thai auteur Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, recipient of Cannes’ top prize, the Palme d’Or.
   Kaboom showed in an out-of-competition slot on the Croisette, and so had to be content with the newly-constituted ‘Queer Palm’ – for which any film showing at the festival with gay themes was eligible. Let’s hope that this prize – plus the picture’s warm reception at the recently-wrapped London Film Festival – is enough for some adventurous distributor to give the movie a spin in British cinemas. One major ‘hook’ is the presence of fast-rising star Juno Temple – 21-year-old daughter of Julien Temple (of The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle infamy), and previously best known for her performance as a sexually-precocious teenager in Joe Wright’s Atonement.
   Temple steals every scene of Kaboom in which she features as the implausibly-monikered ‘London’, a British student at an unnamed American campus whose many conquests include the picture’s confused, gay protagonist Smith (Thomas Dekker). Smith is the befuddled focus of a truly bonkers plot that involves mysterious disappearances, premonitory dreams, parapsychological powers and a millenarian religious cult with its finger on the nuclear button. Bold, fast-moving and consistently hilarious, Kaboom is a polymorphously perverse, unfussily inclusive paean to the power of good sex – regardless of orientation or gender – and proved so infectiously persuasive that there was a distinct your-place-or-mine vibe detectable among the Gartenbau’s mainly youthful patrons as they mingled in the lobby before heading out into the chill October night.
   Though fictional features are very much part of the Viennale’s raison d’etre - with Apichatpong’s dream-like, horror-inflected rumination on mortality (reviewed on these pages last week) very much one of the 2010 highlights – this is a festival which has long been associated with the best of the documentary tradition.
   And while a couple of the “big names” in the field proved to be on slightly underwhelming form – Thom Andersen’s 16mm short Get Out of the Car and Patrick Keiller’s Robinson In Ruins - these disappointments were counterbalanced by strong work from less familiar sources. From China, Yang Lina’s French co-production Wild Grass (Ye cao) takes us into an orphanage for disabled children in the coastal city of Qingdao (the former German colony better known to westerners, especially beer-drinkers, under its old name of Tsingtao.)
   Yang started shooting here back in the mid-90s, concentrating on a small handful of the residents, and returned over a decade later to see how her subjects – now on the verge of adulthood – were getting on. Editor Mary Stephen does a fine job of condensing what must have been a mass of video-footage down to 75 minutes, in a picture which doesn’t flinch from the most harrowing of details and goes about its business with an admirably unsentimental empathy. No mere ‘misery memoir’, Wild Grass - on balance a much more impressive achievement than Alain Resnais recent picture of identical title - is a compelling, touching chronicle of friendships maintained under tough circumstances (“we’re all in it together – we were brought together by mistake.”)
   Another study of troubled young lives, albeit in drastically different economic and social circumstances, was provided by Maria Speth’s 9 Lives (9 Leben), which takes a strikingly original approach to familiar-sounding material. Her seven subjects are men and women in their late teens or early twenties who have spent time living rough or on the streets – almost invariably as the result of broken homes or unbearable family dysfunction. Speth, making a feature-documentary debut at 43 after acclaimed fictional works such as Madonnas (2007), takes an austere formal tack, shooting with high-definition black-and-white video in a white-walled studio that makes a suitably neutral backdrop for these highly emotional, dramatic testimonies. Self-edited by Speth with an unobtrusive rhythm that sustains our interest over 106 minutes, 9 Lives is a classic example of humanistic, out-reaching cinema, allowing relatively unmediated access to a stratum of society which most of its audiences would otherwise very seldom experience.
   An even more dramatic and extreme example of cinema’s power to show us what is otherwise hidden, Ricardo Iscar’s Dance to the Spirits (Dansa als esperits) examines – in detached, quizzical style – the clinic of Mba Owona Pierre, a practitioner of traditional medicine in a remote, thickly forested corner for Cameroon. With its preoccupation with non-corporeal beings and mysterious energy-sources, Dance to the Spirits would make an ideal double-bill companion with Uncle Boonmee, both movies treating exotic supernatural possibilities as something everyday – for Iscar and Apichatpong alike, the boundaries between the living and the dead as fragile and perishable as their chosen media: celluloid, video, the flickering of projected lights on a receptive wall.

Neil Young
9th November, 2010
written for the 18th November issue of Tribune magazine
(part one was in the previous week’s edition)
Jigsaw Lounge ‘s 2010 Viennale index-page .

DANCE TO THE SPIRITS : [7/10]
Dansa als espirits : Spain/Cameroon 2010 : Ricardo ISCAR : 78m approx : seen 24/Oct/10 at Urania : 19/28

KABOOM : [8/10]
USA(/Fr) 2010 : Gregg ARAKI : 86m approx : seen 24/Oct/10 at Gartenbaukino : 21/28

9 LIVES : [7/10]
9 Leben : Germany 2010 : Maria SPETH : 105m approx : seen 29/Oct/10 at Künstlerhaus : 18/28

WILD GRASS : [7/10]
Ye cao aka Les herbes sauvages de Qingdao : China/France 2010 : YANG Lina : 76m approx : seen 27/Oct/10 at Urania : 19/28

All films seen in Vienna. All tickets: complimentary — Viennale film-festival