Harry here and on the sixth day, Elaine needed clones... her lovely body just betrayed her, that acute noggin of thought became overcast with imagery and ponderings upon too much and just fritzed out all together. She needed rest, wine, patat met and more than anything... time... time to sort the films out. As anyone familiar with any ONE MAN/WOMAN coverage of a film festival may be familiar with... there comes the midway crisis... where suddenly... it is impossible to meet your self-imposed deadline. Where you realize, you are so freaked over writing, that you have forgotten to simply enjoy the time and to relax and remember... it is about film. About sitting in that theater and smiling... awaiting the next one with anticipation, with hopes, with the desire to fall in love, fall in that beautifully transcendent joy that it is to find a movie you know nothing of and call it your own. Well Elaine has thankfully recovered from the typical film writer exhaustion... and she has the latest bevy of beauties to tell ya about...
Hi Harry,
I owe you an apology for the lull in my coverage. As
you know, I intended to send in daily reports, but as
the festival progressed, I discovered that even the
most devoted correspondent occasionally needs a break.
I have recovered from my collapse, though, and am now
ready to resume coverage of the second half of the
festival, which featured some pretty amazing films.
DAY 6
Day 6 was a regular festival day in that it offered
one bad film, one OK-ish one and two excellent ones.
Rather less typical, though, was the highlight of the
day - a ten-minute Swedish short entitled "Music for
One Apartment and Six Drummers" which absolutely
brought the house down. A film without dialogues,
"Music for One Apartment and Six Drummers" follows the
exploits of six utterly cool people who break into a
stranger's flat with the sole purpose of making music
in it. Not having brought any instruments, they use
furniture and random utensils such as light switches,
perfume sprayers, hair dryers and cupboard doors in a
way which would make the Einsturzende Neubauten green
with envy, coming up with a different sound in each
room they tackle. The film was screened prior to
"Dogtown and Z-Boys" and drew more applause than the
main feature, which was received quite
enthusiastically, as well.
LOVELY RITA (Jessica Hausner, 2001)
The title to Jessica Hausner's debut film is ironic. The eponymous heroine, a teenager played by Barbara Osika, is not lovely at all; on the contrary, she is sullen, egotistical and irresponsible, and has the kind of drawl that makes one wish to shut her up, by forcible means if necessary.
To be sure, Rita has a lot to be sullen about. The school she attends is an old-fashioned nuns' school where classmates throw furtive glances at her while praying "Dear God, we have certain selfish classmates who think only of their own gain; help them find themselves." The English teacher won't give her the lead in the play her class is staging. The neighbours won't allow her to see her only friend, their 11-year-old son, because she has tried to have sex with him. And worst of all, her father insists that she put up a happy face, even though it is obvious that she is miserable.
Hausner does a good job illustrating the stifling
restrictiveness of the Austrian bourgeoisie, where
toilets must always be covered and teenagers are
locked up in their rooms for skipping school. She also
paints an interesting (if occasionally annoying)
picture of adolescence, with a heroine (ahem) who
literally spends a third of the film in the dark.
However, Osika is no Christina Ricci (alas), and the
ending to the film is ridiculously abrupt, even if
there can be no doubt as to what it portends. And if
ever a case is made against the use of digital video,
"Lovely Rita" will be Exhibit A.
DOGTOWN AND Z-BOYS (Stacy Peralta, 2001)
I was shocked when I discovered that "Dogtown and Z-Boys" was not to be shown at last year's Amsterdam International Documentary Festival. Fortunately, Rotterdam made amends, and rightly so.
"Dogtown and Z-Boys," narrated by Sean Penn, is about a group of young Dogtown surfers who revolutionised skateboarding in the 1970s. The documentary (made by one of the surfers, who is now a professional film-maker) follows them from their clan-like Dogtown Pier surfing days to their fragmented, occasionally mundane present-day lives, stopping along the way to explain how they went from surfing ocean waves to surfing asphalt waves, how the Californian heatwave of 1975 resulted in "vertical" skateboarding and what backyard swimming pools have to do with halfpipes.
This quite simply has it all. Apart from telling the story of a bunch of street kids who became heroes, a sport that rocked the latter part of a decade and a huge talent who tragically wasted it all on drugs and women, it boasts superb action footage, sensational photos, flashy editing and a period soundtrack which every serious music lover will want to possess. It is witty, it is poignant, it has style, it has attitude, and most of all, it is true, all true.
I could mull over a tagline of my own, but in the
absence of inspiration I will appropriate one of
Herc's: "Dogtown and Z-Boys" is better than most
motion pictures. Do not miss.
NO MAN'S LAND (Danis Tanovic, 2001)
At the risk of telling you something you found out for yourself ages ago (the film was released in most places long before it reached Rotterdam): "No Man's Land" is a fabulous war satire, and possibly the greatest anti-war film since "Apocalypse Now." Well, at least since "Three Kings," with which it shares some thematic similarities.
"No Man's Land" is a Beckett-like situation play in which the Bosnian conflict of 1993 is reduced to a single trench between enemy lines. In that trench, three soldiers (one Serb, two Bosnians) who could have been friends if circumstances had been different find themselves confronted with propaganda-fuelled antagonism, ineffective UNPROFOR soldiers, ambitious reporters and a highly symbolic, indefusable, EU-made bomb which threatens to blow everything up. While they wait for something to happen, for someone to free them from their plight, shocking things happen around them. The most shocking thing of all, though, is that the characters don't seem to realise how bad the muddle in which they find themselves really is, as illustrated by a statement one of them makes while reading a paper: "Rotten mess, that Rwanda place."
Critics will say that "No Man's Land" is a concatenation of cheap gags and cliches, and that the role the media play in war events has been depicted better elsewhere. All this is true, yet for some reason the film works amazingly well. The cliches about German Punktlichkeit and Grundlichkeit, French-English antagonism and French soldiers who insist on speaking French are funny, and the criticism of the media, if unoriginal, hits home. Most of all, though, "No Man's Land" is a startling look into the kitchen of the UN peace force, which in its desire for neutrality proves utterly ineffective.
Despite some stiff competition from Iranian revolution
drama "The Hidden Half" and Canadian Inuit drama
"Atanarjuat, the Fast Runner" (both of which I will
review later), "No Man's Land" took the Audience Award
in Rotterdam. It should go on to grab Best Foreign
Film honours at this year's Oscars, and deservedly so.
THE ORPHAN OF ANYANG (Wang Chao, 2001)
Roughly speaking, there are two kinds of debut films: one which attempts too much and so drowns in overkill, and another which attempts so little it comes off looking horribly amateurish. "The Orphan of Anyang" is an example of the latter. Made by a critic who used to be an assistant to Chen Kaige, it is a 30-minute story stretched out over 84 minutes, with neither good performances nor alluring camera work to make up for the occasions on which hardly anything happens on screen.
The film is about a 40-year-old man who, sitting at a roadside restaurant to have some noodles, gets a baby thrust into his arms. The note attached to the baby says that if he promises to look after the child, its mother (a prostitute) will make sure that he gets 200 yuan a month. Hard up, the man accepts the challenge, and gradually he is transformed into a real father. For a while, he and the child live together; then the mother of the child moves in with them, and it looks as if a happy family might be emerging. But then the woman's pimp shows up with a wish to abduct the child, and things start to go awry.
The above sounds like an interesting premise, but unfortunately, Wang does little to flesh it out. The story remains as bare as the characters' faces, which hardly register any feeling during the emotional upheaval through which they are put. And to make it just a bit harder for the viewer to identify with the characters, Wang creates a literal distance between the actors and the audience, too. Using only master shots, many several minutes long, he refuses to focus on anything in particular and leaves in a lot of footage which others would have cut. The result is a film which boasts all of four (4) close-ups, and a noodle-eating scene which goes on forever. Even Melies did better than that, I think.
One could call this realism - an attempt to prove that Chinese street life is indeed drab and depressing, and that country bums do indeed slurp noodles for minutes on end. One might also call it an ode to Hou Hsiao-hsien, Jia Zhangke and others of their ilk. For my part, though, I am inclined to call it bad film-making - amateurish, uninteresting and utterly frustrating.
NEXT UP FOR REVIEW:
- Catherine Breillat's "Fat Girl"
- Gerardo Tort's "De la calle"
- Jacques Rivette's "Va savoir"
- Sandrine Veysset's "Martha... Martha"
- Takashi Miike's "The Happiness of the Katakuris"
... all of which, in their own way, are brilliant.
Elaine
