It’s hard to believe that it was just one week ago that my vanpool was cutting folks off on 520 and dumping me into traffic so I could make the first “regular” movie of this year’s festival.
I was glad to have the chance to see Animatrix on the big screen. I liked it better than The Matrix Reloaded, but since I know absolutely nothing about anime (I think this is the first one I’ve seen in a theater!), I don’t feel qualified to rate it. I certainly enjoyed the experience, and some of the artwork and animation was stunning. "The Second Renaissance" Parts 1 and 2 gave me some good Matrix background (I made the big mistake of not rewatching The Matrix before going to see Reloaded), and My favorite segments were "Beyond" (very cool dithering effect) and "Kid’s Story." Overall, it was great to see such a variety of art and animation styles.
I loved The Sea, which is one of my favorites of the festival so far. It’s directed by Baltasar Kormákur, who also wrote and directed 101 Reykjavik back in 2001. The Sea has some similar themes to 101 Reykjavik (a pregnant foreign girlfriend figuring out Iceland, family drama, consensual incest), but where Kormákur’s first film was played for laughs, The Sea is more of a tragedy—though there are still some very funny scenes (I credit the Spanish half of Kormákur’s parentage for this—Spaniards are especially gifted at marrying tragedy and comedy). Set in an island fishing village (just like Respiro—is that this year’s secret festival theme?), Thordur, the family patriarch, summons his kids (one son works in the family business; another has fled to Paris where he’s a songwriter; the only daughter lives in the capital) for a gathering of the clan. When you include Thordur’s crazy mother, his second wife—his first wife’s sister—her daughter, and the siblings’ wives and kids—it’s a recipe for disaster. As well as the family saga, there’s a secondary but very much related plot about fishing quotas, immigration, and preserving local communities in the face of globalization. The music was fabulous; but I realized watching The Sea that I’d probably go to see just about any Icelandic movie just to hear the language.
Dirt, a made-for-Showtime, shot-on-video movie about the life of an undocumented Salvadoran who entered the United States with her family 12 years ago and now earns her living as a cleaning lady, was surprisingly good. Julieta Ortiz was great as Dolores—not too put upon and certainly no exploited angel. An interesting film that gave a pretty effective sense of the life of one particular “illegal” family living in New York.
A day of great movies was rounded out by Yossi & Jagger, the story of two officers in the Israeli army who fall in love. Jagger is one of those good-looking charming guys that everyone loves; Yossi, the company commander, is more uptight, and is unwilling to come out, even outside the context of the army. Although there was nothing particularly news in the gay love story, it was very nicely done, and I was fascinated by the scenes of life on a small Israeli army base (a 12-man post near the Lebanese border). A fascinating movie, despite some technical shortcomings.
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SIFF, Day 7
It’s Thursday, and I’m starting to be aware that my movie feast will turn into a virtual movie famine when I return to work next Monday.
My first film of the day was one I hadn’t intended to see, since I’d been warned it was “non-linear” —not something I have a lot of patience for usually—but there had been a change to the press screening schedule (all full-series passholders can attend press screenings) and just before it began, I learned that the next movie was Hukkle from Hungary. Fortunately, there was time for me to exchange a few words with the guy sitting in front of me, who’d seen it before, and his spoiler (I won’t repeat it, though it’s given away on the excellent official Web site) transformed my experience and made it my favorite film of the festival so far. It’s a very simple movie with no dialogue (though there is some folk singing in the last five minutes), just beautiful photography and sound recording of life in a rural Hungarian village. The director, György Pálfi, offered the following explanation on the Web site:
The film is basically a film style game in which, behind the idyllic locations and images [lies] the story, as the most popular persons on a magic picture from the turn of the century; often you have to turn the images upside down, you have to forget the images you have really seen to find the thing you are looking for.
After the splendor of the rural Old World came American Splendor, the story of Harvey Pekar life that won the Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance festival. It’s a very good movie, making interesting use of comic book techniques (American Splendor, Pekar’s long-running comic book series, drawn by some of the best artists in the business, takes stories from his real life experiences—overheard conversations, his massive curmudgeonliness, his family life), and nicely incorporating actors playing Pekar, his wife, his buddies, etc., with the real people concerned, but overall I was slightly disappointed. Pekar’s rather dull life (although he’s now retired, the guy spent decades as a file clerk at a VA Hospital in Cleveland, Ohio, so his basic story is one of underachievement and resentment) has been mined pretty extensively over the years, and there’s just not much left. Plus, he’s a grouchy asshole—and admitting that doesn’t really take out the sting. The gimmick of blending actors playing Pekar, family, and friends, with scenes involving the real people is great (especially in the scenes from Pekar’s appearances on the David Letterman show, though there were rather too many of them), but ultimately it felt to me that there was too much gimmickry and not enough “there” there. I’m sure it’ll be a big commercial hit, though.
After the press screenings I walked down to the Harvard Exit for Sudeste, a slow-moving and rather mysteriously motivated Argentine movie about Boga, a young man who lives on and from a river that flows into Buenos Aires. It’s full of huge life events—his father’s death, coming across a gangster who’s been shot in the stomach, helping the gangster “pursue his business interests”—but at the same time it’s really quite boring. A nice slice of life, but not very exciting.
I saw some good Brazilian movies last year—also very much focused on women’s lives—so I had high hopes for The Three Marias. Unfortunately, I was disappointed. The movie looked magnificent—the wide cinemascope photography; the beautiful colors; the stylized production design—but once again, there wasn’t much there. It’s your basic clan revenge story: When all the men of a family are cruelly killed by a rival clan, the matriarch gathers her three daughters and gives them explicit instructions about how to redeem the family honor. As low a tolerance as I have for blood and gore, in this case the movie might’ve been redeemed by a bit of splatter; with all the action off camera, there was no obvious path to satisfaction.
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Friday, May 30, 2003
SIFF, Day 6
If it’s Day 6, it must be Wednesday, by which time I was well and truly in the SIFF zone: I haven’t read a newspaper properly for days; I’ve barely used my voice (when I got home the other day it took me all my time to make conversation with R, so unused to human interaction have I become), the cat keeps looking at me as if to say, “I wish you would either go on vacation or stay home—but this sleeping here then disappearing for 12 hours has got to stop.” And my eyes hurt—I wonder how those six-movies-a-day types are coping.
But on Day 6 I see …
Buffalo Soldiers, a controversial anti-Army (well, really it’s anti-incompetent leadership) film that has languished unreleased for two years because post-9/11, Afghanistan, and Iraq, the filmmakers seem to think the time just isn’t right for the ’00 era’s own Catch-22. Set on a U.S. Army base in West Germany just as the Berlin Wall is starting to tumble, Joaquin Phoenix is excellent as Ray Elwood, a conniving clerk who runs rings around the hapless colonel in charge, played very charmingly by Ed Harris, until Scott Glenn comes to the base and tries to get in the way of Elwood’s schemes. Elwood’s scams aren’t penny-ante stuff—we’re talking arms-running and smack-cooking—but he’s still an extremely likable character, which is quite an achievement. There are some very nice set pieces (a smacked-out tank crew driving through a German street fair then laying waste to a gas station is particularly over-the-top fun), and I found myself really getting into it. An enjoyable mainstream commercial movie—too bad it’s being seen by so few people.
H is the sort of movie I would only see at the film festival, and only then when nothing else is playing. It’s a sort of South Korean Silence of the Lambs with the Hannibal Lector character seeming all the more creepy because he’s also rather ordinary—there’s no charismatic muzzle-wearing going on here—but the mystery lies in the fact that the murders are continuing even with the serial killer banged up in prison. As someone who doesn’t much care for horror movies/gore-fests, it just wasn’t my cup of tea, but if I were an aficionada, I suspect I would’ve liked it even less because it wasn’t terribly innovative (though there is a surprise in the final reel). Although the main investigator was a smart, cool woman, she was directed to show no emotions, and it’s very hard to sympathize with a blank-faced hero.
Like Respiro, The Lover suffered from my having seen it in the context of the film festival. It’s a subtle, melancholy Russian movie about a man who, shortly after her sudden death, discovers his wife was having an affair for years. He finds the lover and over the course of the movie gets to know him rather well. The movie felt like it would be more natural as a stage play—the script was really excellent—and the acting was also very good, but it was rather too slow and ponderous, or at least slower and more ponderous than what I was craving right then.
War hit the spot nicely—although it’s very nationalistic and anti-Chechen, it’s an engaging mainstream commercial movie told from the perspective of a Russian soldier who’s being investigated for his role in a raid on a Chechen stronghold where guerrillas were holding a Danish woman and a Russian soldier as hostages for ransom. Ivan is an English-speaking Russian soldier who was released by the guerrillas because he’s worthless to them; when an English actor, released at the same time so he can amass a 2 million pound ransom for his fiancee, fails to come up with the exorbitant sum, Ivan helps him retrieve Margaret and gain revenge. I suspect that my lack of familiarity with the action genre pumped up my enjoyment—I haven’t seen Rambo or anything from that series, but I suspect there’s nothing really new in War. Still, there were enough other themes amid the shooting—the cruelty of governments who blindly declare their refusal to negotiate with terrorists even as their subjects are hideously abused; the unwillingness of the Russian hierarchy to admit the truth of the situation in the Caucasus; how conscription, especially when conscripts are sent to a dangerous place like Chechnya, turns ordinary men into killers; and the lack of support for Russians too poor to buy their way out of military service who serve their time and return to find zero prospects in civilian life—to satisfy my yearning for “meaning” in the movie.
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Thursday, May 29, 2003
SIFF, Day 5
This is usually just about the point where I wonder if I goofed by devoting one of my precious vacation weeks to SIFF—after all in the land of the free, time off work is at a premium; my employer is considered generous in giving 17 days annual leave—but I certainly haven’t seen any stinkers yet, and since I can only manage one movie per weekday when I’m working, I wouldn’t have seen a fraction of these fascinating movies otherwise.
And lest anyone think I’m some sort of SIFF hero, forget it, I’m a lightweight, since four films is as many as I can comfortably handle in a day, five as an absolute max (quite a few folks see six on a weekday—three press screenings, then the 4:45, 7, and 9:30 shows; and that’s every single day. Ken Rudolph, who’s keeping a journal of his festival viewing, usually sees five films a day (and I bet he’d see more if he hadn’t already watched a lot of the movies at other festivals or for the Academy’s foreign-film committee).
As per usual, my sleep is getting messed up by spending almost the entire day sitting in a darkened room. It’s peculiar, I don’t have nightmares about gory scenes or endless loops from the movies, I just keep waking up every hour or so, which I suppose signifies that my brain is still working through all those subtitles and mysterious motivations. This seems to happen to me every SIFF.
So, Day 5 was Tuesday and I saw …
Julie Walking Home is a lovely family film by Agnieszka Holland—in the sense that it’s about family dynamics rather than that it’s G-rated. Julie finds her husband Henry with another woman in the marital bed and goes ballistic. During the first difficult week after her discovery, their son Nicholas is diagnosed with cancer, and after a lot of yick-yack Julie takes him to Poland to visit a Russian healer (played fabulously by Lothaire Bluteau), who eventually becomes her lover. I’ll say no more, but you can find the whole spoiler-pocked synopsis on the movie’s official Web site.) There are some great things in the movie—Miranda Otto is marvelous as Julie, and the script is very well-conceived, but for my taste Holland crammed in too many elements. By introducing a million themes, it becomes a huge hard-to-digest banquet rather than a delicious and perfectly adequate meal. I also admit that I don’t care for kids-with-cancer movies, somehow the little bald heads feel exploitative as every parent in the audience sees their worst nightmare—and in this case every sibling was drawn in as Nicholas’ twin sister also worked through the agony. (I can still be a heartless bitch, though, since I’m neither a parent nor a sibling.)
I was keen to see Respiro, because it’s getting the full Sony Pictures Classics treatment with lots of postcards piled up in indie cinemas for months now. It’s beautifully shot—the sun and sea in Lampedusa, a remote island off Sicily are just gorgeous—and the story is very simple: Grazia, played by Valeria Golino, is a free spirit who—in the context of the village she lives in where gossiping, casual cruelty to animals, and strict rules of behavior are the norm—seems mentally deranged to her small-minded neighbors. Rather than have her sent off to an institution in Milan, her son—who shows remarkable love and concern for Grazia despite his cruel behavior in the rest of the movie—helps her to escape, sort of. I’m afraid that this is the sort of movie that suffers from being seen in the film festival—coming after weeks of X2 and The Matrix Reloaded, it would’ve seemed like a breath of fresh air, but even 14 movies into SIFF I was already longing for something beyond beautiful scenery and existential cries for freedom. For some reason I became fixated with the island’s variety of Vespa-powered vehicles—not only the standard scooters but also Vespa trucks and Vespa cars. (There’s an excellent IMDB reader comment about Respirohere.)
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised is an awesome documentary about the April 2002 coup attempt against Venezuela’s democratically elected president, Hugo Chávez. As I wrote at the time, there was massive confusion in the international news media about what happened—Chávez was said to have resigned, his supporters were accused of firing into a crowd of opponents, etc., etc., but an Irish film crew in Caracas to make a movie about Chávez just happened to be on the spot capturing the rally that was used as an excuse to set off the coup, the truly hideous crap being spouted by the private Chávez-hating TV channels, the chaotic events in the presidential offices of Miraflores Palace (which they never referred to as a palace, although that’s the standard Venezuelan description), and the nasty set of upper-class, light-skinned socialites who took over and proceeded to suspend the constitution, fire the national assembly and the supreme court, and generally show themselves to be anti-democratic to the core. The filmmakers, Kim Bartley and Donnacha O'Briain, aren’t impartial, but given the almost universal bias against Chávez, it’s about time the other side of the story was heard. (Tooting my own horn, I’ve written a lot about Chávez, without repeating the anti-left rhetoric I think.) Unfortunately, Scenes From an Endless War, the 30-minute film that accompanied Revolution was the worst kind of half-assed propaganda that makes me despair for the contemporary left. The fact that the audience got all excited about stupid “jokes” about Rumsfeld and Bush depressed me no end—the corporate interests and the right wing of the Republican Party are venal and scary enough without making stuff up about them.
I almost didn’t go to see So Close from Hong Kong—I’m generally not a fan of Asian movies and I know nothing of kung fu, but JFC what a marvel this was. A sister assassination act kicking bad-guy ass all over town, an endless parade of shots of the sisters in underwear or tiny shorts, Carpenters songs, a smart woman cop who kicks ass just as well as Sue and Lynn, and a tiny hint of girl-on-girl action/attraction! All done in a nicely ironic tongue-in-cheek tone. Forget Charlies Angels, this is the chick flick of the year!
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Wednesday, May 28, 2003
SIFF, Day 4
A Great Wonder—a documentary about the two of the “Lost Boys of Sudan” (and one lost girl) who were relocated to Seattle after fleeing Sudan when their parents were killed—or believed killed—in their homeland’s long-running civil war. The director, Kim Shelton, was either extremely fortunate or did excellent research to find her three main subjects: Abraham has trouble with his foster family and after Sept. 11 thinks that everywhere he goes is doomed to discord; Santino is a handsome, charismatic chap who has been on TV and on the cover of the Seattle Times Sunday magazine but who was considered too old to go to high school even though he never had any formal education (other than English lessons in a Kenyan refugee camp); and Martha is a quiet, composed girl who had the good fortune to wash up in a loving, affluent foster family but who must’ve lived through hell on the long march from Sudan. The movie was well-edited and nicely focused, and it allowed the kids to be kids: Abraham clashed with his structure-loving foster family and his ingratitude was a typical teenager reaction. In the end, the story of the thousands of kids who were orphaned (effectively or literally) and walked through 1,000 miles without food or support is so amazing it raises the film to another level.
The Education of Gore Vidal was fascinating because Gore Vidal is fascinating, but I was disappointed in the documentary itself, which was bog standard and unimaginative. I started to suspect it was sponsored by Vidal’s publisher, because the tired old scenes of famous liberals (Eli Wallach, Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins, Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, etc.—Ed Asner must’ve been busy with I’d Rather Eat Pants) reading excerpts from the American Chronicle series was one cliché away from pages flying off a calendar to express the passage of time. All that said, it did make me want to read at least some of Vidal’s novels.
The Other Side of the Bed was a fun Spanish movie about two couples and their cheating ways. Especially fine were the frequent lapses into song—or vague proximities thereof—complete with back-up vocals and dancers. All four main actors (including Paz Vega of the incandescent Lucía y el Sexo and Natalia Verbeke who played the female lead in Son of the Bride/El Hijo de la Novia and the underrated film Jump Tomorrow) were excellent, as was Maria Esteve as jabbering Pilar, who, I discovered when looking her up on IMDB is the daughter of Antonio Gades, possibly the most important flamenco dancer of the late-20th century (and the star of such movies as Bodas de Sangre, Carmen, and El Amor Brujo). Cojonudo, tio!
Doing Time is the sort of movie you can’t avoid associating with the word “quirky.” It’s composed of several vignettes of life in a very regimented Japanese prison (I was very aware of walking home in a march not unlike the prisoners’), and certainly to this gaijin, much of the discipline seemed comical. The obsessive focus on food (with loving, mouth-watering descriptions of the prison meals) made me leave the cinema absolutely starving. It was also hard not to think how much easier these prisoners had it than the young women in The Magdalene Sisters. I didn’t quite get the opening scene of men crawling through fields in combat gear, but I later learned from the program that the film is based on “the real life prison adventures of cult manga author Hanawa Kazuichi, who did time for unlawful gun possession.”
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Tuesday, May 27, 2003
SIFF, Day 3
I spent Sunday in the Pacific Place mall, though since the shops opened after I entered the cinema complex and had closed before I left it, I might as well have been in Timbuktu.
Angela is yet another “based on a true story,” this time the chronicle of a woman involved in the Mafia drug trade in Palermo, Sicily. Although there’s not much to the pretty straightforward recounting of events, I enjoyed the movie. There are some lovely atmospheric shots of the ancient winding streets of Palermo, and it gave a powerful sense of a huge conspiracy against the forces of law (a huge number of “ordinary people” were shown to be complicit in the drug trade) and the inability of the Italian legal system to fight organized crime. It says something for the film that it got me to identify with a coke dealer to such an extent that I admired her cool poise as she executed deals, resented that she was excluded when the men talked business, and felt a sense of outrage when her beautiful long red nails were unsentimentally sheered off when she was imprisoned.
There was almost a fist fight before the start of L’Auberge Espagnole when some passholders didn’t make it into the screening and others moaned that they had to sit at the front when there were empty seats reserved for the platinum passholders. The full house was slightly surprising given the movie’s commercial opening this Friday! It would be pretty much impossible for me not to like this film, given all the parallels between its subject matter and my life history—living in Spain (check), sharing an apartment with a multinational bunch of young foreigners (check), learning to speak castellano de puta madre (check), etc., etc.—but after seeing two of his movies in the space of 24 hours, I’m starting to think that director Cédric Klapisch is one of those rare directors who can combine “meaning,” for want of a better word, and commercial crowd-pleasing. It’s a fun, funny movie with some serious underpinnings, and it deserves to be seen if only because it incorporates the most potent Spanish fantasy imaginable—a foreigner seducing (or being seduced by) her flamenco teacher! It was only right at the end of the movie that I realized Roman Duris, the guy the lead was the same actor who’d played the drummer in When the Cat’s Away and the main protagonist in Tony Gatlif’s brilliant 1997 movie, Gadjo Dilo. Wow! It wasn’t just the haircut and the preppy clothing—the guy can really act!
JFC, I hope I don’t see a more intense movie than The Magdalene Sisters for the rest of the festival, even though it was brilliant. A fictionalized story about three young women sent to work—as slaves, basically—in the Magdalene laundries in the early 1960s, as the Guardian’s review put it, “This is tough, angry, muscular film-making—it has a kind of 120-degree proof passion which makes most other Irish and British cinema look tame and lame.” I agree with the Guardian’s reviewer that the invented “what happened to …” stories were a mistake, unnecessarily blurring the lines between fact and fiction. Peter Mullan had already convinced us of the totalitarian nature of Roman Catholic church in Ireland and shown us how easily a parallel state (since the girls “imprisoned” in the laundries were treated far more cruelly than any jail inmates I’ve ever seen on film, and they were “sentenced” for life) can degrade and dehumanize people. Geraldine McEwan was magnificent as the avaricious Sister Bridget—it was hard not to compare the role with her portrayal of Miss Jean Brodie 25 years ago—though everyone was excellent.
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Monday, May 26, 2003
SIFF, Day 2
On Saturday morning I headed down to Pacific Place for a day of mall-living—well, cinema-and-corridor-outside-dwelling, technically. A slightly abbreviated movie day because someone from my vanpool was hosting a fancy (and bibulous) 30th birthday dinner party in the evening but some good movies nevertheless.
Invisible Children was part of the Films4Families series, four movies shown at 11:30 on Saturdays at Pacific Place that parents are encouraged to bring their kids to. It was a wonderful film, but not, I think, suitable for children with all its black magic, political commentary (including Commies spouting off about “value added,” which I’ve never heard mentioned in an English-language movie but which has popped up in several Spanish-language films), and animal abuse. It’s Colombian, set in a small town in the 1950s, and although the territory is familiar “boys' coming of age” stuff, it was very nicely done. Eight-year-old Rafaelito has a crush on a cute but slightly stuck-up girl, Marta Cecilia, and becomes obsessed with making himself invisible so he can get right up to her and figure out what she's really like. He gets a book about becoming invisible from a “witch man” who plies his wares at the port and enlists his two best buddies to help him work the spell, which involves getting their hands on the gizzard of a stolen black hen, the heart of a cat (there’s a nasty scene with one of the boys and his family pet), and a picture of the Virgin Mary taken from a scapulary. Aside from its unsuitability as a movie for children, which was the programmers’ fault (not only did it have all those iffy themes, but kids can’t handle subtitles anyway—just because a film is about children doesn’t mean it’s for children), I really liked it. It was interesting to see the politeness of the children, the arrival of television (to watch a girl from the village compete in the Miss Colombia contest), the influence of the church—not exactly malign but not entirely benign either; the Commies, full of slogans but impotent and irrelevant; soldiers used to fighting guerrillas given the job of guarding a cemetery, and warm loving families.
Owning Mahowny was a Canadian film based on true events (a big theme in this year’s festival), specifically Toronto assistant bank manager Dan Mahowny’s embezzling of more than C$10 million to feed his gambling habit in the early 1980s. Mahowny, as played by Philip Seymour Hoffman (and I’m sorry, but all the PSM roles are starting to look alike to me—if you rely on your atypical physique too much, if your body doesn’t change, your acting doesn’t change), was a “pure” gambler, who eschewed the perks of gambling—the sex, drugs, and flashy hospitality—and would sit impassively playing for hours. Other members of the audience seemed to like it, but for me it was too much "tell don’t show"—it was impossible to see (from the movie makers showed us) why Mahowny’s girlfriend (played by Minnie Driver) would stay with him since we never saw any possible justification for her loyalty—just the myriad ways in which his gambling addiction screwed up their relationship—even the stealing and gambling seemed random. John Hurt was pretty good as a casino manager desperate to part Dan from "his" money, but somehow I’m never convinced by Hurt when he uses an American accent.
Cédric Klapisch is one of this year’s “Emerging Masters,” and When the Cat’s Away, from 1996, was the film they chose to choose from his “backlist” (his 2002 film L’Auberge Espagnole is also in the festival). A few minutes in, I realized that I’d seen it before, though I can’t recall where. It’s the story of an awkward, lost young woman who finds a rich community in the Paris neighborhood where she’s been living without making connections, when the old woman minding her cat, Gris-Gris, loses him. It’s a little bit heavy-handed (the old ladies who are being evicted so that moronic scenesters can move in end up singing an old song about the glories of Paris—in one of the real neighborhood bars, not the flashy, expensive one Chloe used to patronize), but it’s also a really sweet story about finding friends and connections where you live, with good if unglamorous people, rather than putting on clothes that don’t suit you and going out to alienating places looking for relationship. Some good acting and a nice acknowledgment of the complexities of life.
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Sunday, May 25, 2003
SIFF, Day 1
Ah, the glorious day dawned … the opening of the 2003 Seattle International Film Festival. It was a bit of a stretch to get to the Harvard Exit in time for the first movie (4 p.m. on a weekday? Where do these other people work? Not on the east side I’m guessing.), but even though I lost my jacket and my phone along the way (I think—I hope—I just left them in the van in my headlong rush to get into the theater before they closed the doors), I made it to see …
Under Another Sky, an Algerian-French co-production, focused on the life of Samy, a young Frenchman of Algerian descent (perhaps just on his mother’s side), who, after getting into some serious but unpremeditated trouble at home is sent to live with his ailing grandfather and cousins in Algeria. It’s one of those movies where, if you’re avoiding spoilers, the plot boils down to very little—a young French-Algerian guy has to flee to the land of his ancestors but doesn’t fit in very well—but it was still a fascinating look at being an outsider. Samy now looks like the people around him, but he still doesn’t fit in—he can’t speak Arabic, he knows nothing of Islam, he is totally unaware of all the political and social signifiers that surround him or of the history of the independence struggle in Algeria. In some ways he’s a reminder of colonialism, despite his heritage. Samy was a cipher: When faced with tough problems, he strikes out, not violently against others, but against himself—punching a bag until he’s physically spent, slapping his head, going at the ground with a pickaxe until his hands are mincemeat. Despite his physical strength (as Ken Rudolph observed, Samy’s “ripped body is photographed with loving attention”), he’s very vulnerable, almost soft. Although the movie had a lot of ponderous scenes where nothing much happened, I liked the way the director, Gaël Morel, weaved in the constant presence of danger—from thieves, or terrorism, or random events. The tone of the movie reflected that feeling generated by the action of the move where nothing much happens, then something massive and life-altering just comes out of nowhere.
This was a great SIFF opener—the kind of movie that gives you a glimpse into at least one part of another culture. I actually prefer my first SIFF movie to be something where nothing much happens—it’s good re-education after a few months of Hollywood. (The last two movies I’d seen in the cinema before this were X2 and The Matrix Reloaded!)
Then came Autumn Spring, an excellent film from the Czech Republic about an old couple (both characters are 76, to be precise) and the struggle to “grow up.” Fanda and his pal Ed love to act—usually they live out fantasies of wealth and influence—visiting mansions and taking advantage of the lavish perks laid on by the folks trying to land a rich buyer, but sometimes just for the fun of it, to get a kiss from cuties riding the subway without a ticket or to cheer up a depressed old man. When Fanda goes too far, his long-suffering wife Emilie, who frets about practical matters like who’s going to pay for their funerals, tries to divorce him, but the patient judge asks just the right questions so that she reconsiders. Fanda is so grateful he gives up all his idiosyncrasies and bad habits and becomes a crossword-working couch potato who Emilie can’t stand. I won't spoil it by telling you how it all works out in the end, but suffice it to say it's lovely.
The film is a fabulous ode to not giving up the ghost just because you’re old, and an inspiration to see the incredible actors—who, even though I’ve never seen them before, I can tell are geniuses of the art—strutting their stuff. Because they really were very old people—not middle-aged gorgeous stars made up to look like crinklies—their vulnerability is heart-breaking in an unsentimental way (I was really afraid that they’d fall over and break a hip every time they went out on all their adventures, or even on tasks as basic as doing the shopping or heading off to the train). Apparently, the actor who played Fanda became seriously ill soon after the film wrapped and committed suicide last April. It saddens me to think how awful the American version of this film would/will be.
The movie also made me realize how much Russian I’ve learned. At first the Czech language blew my mind—I couldn’t even tell where words ended and new words began—but after a while I sort of tuned into it and noticed how similar it is to Russian, though I suspect that without the crutch of the subtitles I’d never have realized that.
By the way: Apologies for the mess in the post below. I somehow lost the edit function, but my cries for help from the Blogger folks have gone unheeded. The caption was supposed to say:
This afternoon, R and I did our first ever property viewing. Even though almost all my friends have already bought houses—decades ago, some of them—I’ve always resisted. Part of it is the driving thing: I love my neighborhood and really don’t want to leave it, but it’s ridiculously overpriced and thus out of our reach. I don’t want to live in the boonies, where we could afford to buy, because since I can’t drive, won’t drive, I’d feel trapped and far away from it all. Plus, a lot of houses seem boring, and who wants to drop all their dosh on something boring?
So, when R’s art teacher mentioned these artists’ lofts, we were both sort of fascinated. They’re not quite our current neighborhood, but near enough. And lofts? Artists? Nothing boring there, eh? Positively Tribeca-ish, in fact. So, when we realized we were nearby (we’d been driving by still more friends’ just-purchased-but-not-yet-moved-into house), and noticed there were balloons all tied up outside (which we reckoned—only half-correctly as it happened—signified an open house was going on), we figured we might as well check it out.
So, there we are, drooling all over this truly gorgeous loft space, which is totally and undeniably out of our price range, when I notice that there are some photos on display. When I take a look, I recognize someone I worked with for about three years at my previous place of employment. Now, this wasn’t a massive soulless corporation, but a tiny, right-on, strive-and-struggle-sister kind of place where we shared everything. That cat sitting quietly on the bed a few feet away wasn’t just any cat, that was the cat my former co-worker loved so much and whose every temperature or unexcused absence she’d worry herself into a state about!
As if that wasn’t spooky enough, just about this time last year, R and I went to a retirement party for someone who’d been my boss at the right-on place of employment. The loft-dweller arrived late because she was just returning from her honeymoon. When we’d talked for a few minutes, we realized we’d all been in Paris at the same time; in fact, we’d been staying about four blocks apart, and all four of us had been at the Pride celebrations at the Place de la Bastille at more or less the same time just a week before!
Unfortunately, I doubt that all these coincidences mean she and her man would be willing to halve their asking price for us!
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Junio, Meet Fidelio
Man, I’m a bad blogger. As soon as I get in a mood, I spend all my time sulking instead of working out my mardiness in my blog.
Yesterday started all wrong. Going into the weekend I had two “appointments” scheduled for Saturday: brunch at 10:30, then dinner at 6, preceding the opera. By 9:20 a.m. I’d had two phone calls, each canceling or postponing the day’s activities. Both people had iron-clad excuses, and I didn’t blame them a bit for denying themselves the pleasure of a Junio encounter, but that didn’t stop me spiraling into a vortex of self-pity. Abandoned! Deserted! Left to face the world alone! Yeah, right. After several hours of pouting, I finally got dressed and headed out for a head-clearing walk and a spot of retail therapy. After a few hours of CD browsing, everything was just fine—though I used up all my available blog time whining and clicking through racks of CDs.
Still, I did go to the opera—albeit alone. It was Jane Eaglen as Leonore in Fidelio, and it was fab. (Eaglen’s a bit of a blogger herself, well, OK, an online diarist. She’s been keeping an occasional online journal [which is to say she posted more entries than I’ve managed in the same period] since Fidelio rehearsals began April 7; you can check it out here. She also kept a journal of the Seattle production of Tristan and Isolde; and here’s a Slate “Diary” she wrote in October 2001.)
Fidelio is one of those operas that are hard to swallow. In it, the wife of a political prisoner passes for a man, takes a job in the jail where her husband’s banged up as part of her search for him, and saves him from an evil tyrant. As part of her deception, she must allow her boss’s daughter to fall in love with her so convincingly that her boss offers her the daughter’s hand in marriage. Why this is different from the numerous operatic “trouser roles,” where a woman, usually a lithe young contralto, plays a male part—usually (but not always) a sexless “fixer”-type character—is hard to say, but both times I’ve seen Fidelio, it stretches credibility, even for the opera.
The first time around, the Leonore/Fidelio character (Fidelio is Leonore’s drag name) looked like a butch dyke—the hair, the clothes, the hanging keys. Jane Eaglen didn’t look like a lesbian, but she wasn’t terribly convincing as a woman trying to pass for a man. For one thing, she’s a big girl—a very big girl—and she’s got a MASSIVE voice, a huge, belting soprano. While everyone else was in uniform (the prison guards), rags (the prisoners), or drab everyday clothes (the young woman with a crush on Fidelio, the tyrant, the prisoners’ wives), Eaglen’s figure was disguised in a massive great coat. A smart move from a costume design point of view, but still a little bit unsatisfactory. The first rule of cross-dressing is not to stick out, and Leonore looked different from everyone else. But how could she not? I love Jane Eaglen just as she is—it's not that I want her to change her appearance—but her size does make for some suspension-of-disbelief issues (though whether they would've been solved by some slip of a girl playing the part is very doubtful). Of course there was another verisimilitude issue when Florestan—Leonore’s husband who’s been imprisoned in a tiny dark cell for two years, surviving on next to no food—was a chubby man who looked like a “before” picture in one of those “Body for Life” diet challenges.
Fidelio is Beethoven’s only opera, and you can tell. It’s not a smooth, flowing work—it’s rather choppy, full of different styles of music—and it’s notoriously hard to sing because Ludwig V. didn’t quite understand the capabilities of even trained voices. Still, the themes are incredibly “of our time”—liberation from tyranny, the importance of faith and love, etc. Doing it in contemporary dress drilled that home extremely effectively—right down to the people looking for their loved ones with photo posters, as in the Buenos Aires Plaza de Mayo or the post-9/11 New York City “have you seen” flyers.
This was the last performance in the “Mercer Arts Arena,” and those quotes indicate that the venue’s title is a bit of a con job. The Mercer Arena, the building’s name for all but the last 18 months, is usually a hockey venue—not a skating rink, but the space where Seattle’s minor-league hockey club, the Seattle Thunderbirds, used to play most of its home games. When Seattle Opera finally raised the cash to build a new opera house, they had to knock down the old building, and since they couldn’t afford to go dark for two seasons, they transformed the hockey venue into an “arts arena.” To be fair, the acoustics have been pretty decent, and on a couple of occasions they’ve managed to transform the proscenium into a pretty impressive reproduction of an opera stage. Since the old opera house was pretty crappy (some very iffy sight lines, for example), the actual opera experience was pretty decent, but when it came to pre-, mid-, or post-show time, the arena was pretty deficient: terribly inadequate toilet facilities, especially for women; narrow dingy corridors, adequate for grabbing beer and a hot dog at the hockey game, but not suitable for the opera crowd; and nowhere to see and be seen. Last night, Speight Jenkins, the company’s general director, gave a little speech before the performance, much of which consisted of apologizing for the bathroom lines and promising that the new venue would have more women’s toilets than any other opera house in the world!
The only thing I’ll miss about the Mercer Arena is the long-haired couple who sit in front of us. The man and the woman both have ass-length hair: straight and red in her case; blondish and wavy in his. Both of them would spend entire intermissions playing with their locks—caressing and stroking them, then when a strand fell out, wrapping it around their fingers or tugging on it as if testing the tensile strength. Funnily enough, though both had extremely healthy hair—the lustrous shine was straight out of a commercial—it didn’t really suit them. As is often the case with long hair, their crowning glory was impressive—you could appreciate the genes, good nutrition, and hair-care regime that gave them such lovely locks—but the curtain-like effect of all that hair didn’t necessarily complement their features in the way a well-done cut might’ve.
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Monday, May 12, 2003
The Dancer Upstairs
Among the hip and happening things detailed in my May Day Project entry (two hours standing in line, people, now that’s entertainment) was a trip to the Harvard Exit, one of the venues that will soon be my home from home, to see The Dancer Upstairs. Now, I yield to no one in my admiration for Javier Bardem, but I’m afraid this movie was a bit of a mess. The trailer was magnificent, so perhaps the movie would’ve been better if it had been cut it by about 130 minutes? (That’s far too nasty, but even after seeing the trailer at least 15 times—I guess the movie’s release was put back because it started running back in January then disappeared for a couple of months—every viewing increased my eagerness to see the film. And John Malkovich really did need a bossier editor.)
OK, let me start with the good stuff so I can disguise what a raging bitch I am: As always, Javi was cojonudo. He’s an amazing actor—one of the few that can actually achieve the trick that every uninspired director seems to ask of his cast: look through a window pensively, let the viewers know you’ve just had an epiphany, and make everyone think you're, like, rilly rilly deep. Usually this just makes the actors look like gormless oiks who have forgotten what they’re supposed to be doing; I could watch Javi look through a window for hours. Laura Morante is beautiful in a way that only talented actresses can be—whatever they’re wearing or doing or saying, they’re so gorgeous you just fall in love with the character. I don’t think she could play an unsympathetic character. (I mean, has Meryl Streep ever pulled that off? Think again, the answer’s no.) The movie was ambitious—I mean actors usually try something easy for their first feature—a family drama (or this or this) or a crazy stalker movie)—but John Malkovich had to adapt a tony novel centered on geopolitical issues and Greene-ian personal tensions.
Ach, but I’m afraid his vision didn’t quite match his ambition. For a start, it was a huge mistake to have Spanish- (and some Italian-)speaking actors working in English. I know the book was written in English and the director is American (albeit a famously multilingual one), but it MADE NO SENSE to have the dialogue be in English, in or out of the context of the movie. If anyone thought that losing the subtitles would make it more attractive to a wider movie audience, they forgot to consider the small question of comprehensibility. Even as someone who spent two years teaching English to Spaniards (well, trying to) and who thus has a well-tune ear for mangled Spanglish, at least one-fifth of the dialogue was tortured beyond my understanding. It’s a terrible disservice to the actors, if nothing else. In many ways, The Dancer Upstairs is a 130-minute ad for subtitling. (Besides which, the Quechua dialogue was subtitled anyway.)
As if that wasn’t enough, there were also major pacing issues—another problem typical of actors’ projects. I guess (literally) it’s that actors always look for award-bait passion-packed scenes—so actor-directed movies, especially first efforts, are usually migraine-inducing climax-athons. The Dancer Upstairs had the opposite problem—long, languorous sections where nothing really happened, the sudden bursts of action, then a long burst of nothingness, then another burst of action that viewers hadn’t been prepared for. There were some major plot holes too.
Nice soundtrack, though.
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Sunday, May 11, 2003
May Day, May Day
Never one to miss out on a meme, here's my contribution to the May Day Project.
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Wednesday, May 07, 2003
Twister!
Yipes, an on-the-spot report from as close as you can get to the eye of a tornado and still stay dry (and safe). I spotted this post on my first visit to Kestrel's Nest. What a time to randomly select it from Anita's daily crawl!
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Tuesday, May 06, 2003
I Listen, Part 3: Electronica/Curated Mixes
I suppose at some point in this project I might find a category that doesn't send me into fits of explanatory apostophizing, but, well, not yet. These really do go together, in my mind at least. (Don't forget to hover!)
Funnily enough, after a weekend spent immersed in music (listening to it and making mix CDs, but also celebrating the arrival in my mailbox of the magazines Songlines and fRoots and the purchase of Jockey Slut), today I went to see a movie where even the most deprived corner of the world is suffused with music—a fat dude tinkles the ivories of his accordion outside the shipping container home of the poorest but kindest family in the world ™, the Salvation Army band serenades soup kitchen diners, the world’s most evil thugs ™ turn on the radio to accompany their senseless beating of a down and out, and lonely people listen to tunes as they go to their single beds. The saddest moment in the movie is when one of a soon-to-be-cruelly-parted couple says, “Let’s just sit quietly for a few minutes.”
I still don’t know what to make of the beginning of Aki Kaurismäki’s Man Without a Past—the main character is inexplicably beaten so viciously that he flat-lines in the emergency room—an end that’s for the best in the judgment of the jaded medical team not-all-that-mercifully tending him—but as soon as they leave the room, he sits bolt upright, resets his destroyed nose, semi-dresses, and staggers off to the Helsinki “beach”—a part of town where the lost layer of society ekes out a living bunking in shipping containers, going out to dinner at the Salvation Army soup kitchen, and not saying a whole heck of a lot.
It’s a very spare film—the characters don’t waste words, and, apparently incapable of lying, they find themselves shut out of a “society” that requires names and numbers, no matter how fictional—absurd and heart-warming without driving viewers for their hankies. For me, watching Finnish movies is like watching Iranian movies: I enjoy the experience, but all the time I’m in the cinema I’m intensely aware that I’m having an iceberg experience—at least 75 percent of the movie’s meaning and symbolism is lost on me.
The film’s official Web site is fascinating—full of irony (I think; I’d hate to play cards with a Finn; they seem to wear their poker faces 24/7/365!) and factoids. For example, the actress who plays the thrift-store manageress and sings incongruously with the rockabilly Salvation Army band has been recording for 50 years and was the first Finn to earn a gold record. Also, the dog that played Hannibal is the daughter and granddaughter of dogs who starred in earlier Kaurismäki movies.
Oh, but talking of movies, we’re only four days away from the unveiling of the Seattle International Film Festival schedule, and the teases from the press screening announcements have been driving me crazy. On Tuesday night there’s a special preview night for Cinema Seattle members, but I can’t decide whether or not to go. If the actual schedule isn’t revealed, it might be even more frustrating to get tiny glimpses than to be almost completely ignorant until Thursday morning when all is revealed. It’s the only day of the year I buy the Seattle Times—and I throw away the rest of the paper as soon as I’ve grabbed the SIFF pullout.
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I Listen, Part 2: "World Music"
I have no PC scruples against the term "world music," but whenever someone asks me what kind of music I listen to, I always feel foolish answering "world music," even though it is my staple fare. It's a cold, half-academic sounding term. That's not to say that any of the other available labels—global rhythm, ethnic groove (!), mondomix, roots music—feel any less awkward. It would be one thing if I were a “specialist”—when I stuck to flamenco, that would’ve been an easy answer—but these days I’m definitely a dabbler rather than a connoisseur.
So here's what I've been listening to in the last few months (don't forget to hover over the links):
