Hey folks, Harry here with the 3rd day of the Seattle Film Festival.... This seems less interesting of a day than the other 2, but hey... they can't all be Teenage Hookers and fucked up Experiments! WHY CAN'T THEY? Because then we'd be bored of Teenage Hookers and Experiments, and wouldn't that just be a sad sad sad world? Well, here's our faitfhful correspondent... Harold Hellman...
Harold Hellman here with capsules from SIFF, Day Three.
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LOVELY AND AMAZING
-- written and directed by Nicole Holofcener
For a particular type of viewer, Nicole Holofcener's new film "Lovely and Amazing" will be a warm and sensitive character study, a funny and fulfilling slice-of-life dramedy akin to her earlier "Walking and Talking." Other kinds of viewers, though, will call the film anything from self-indulgent and annoying to boring and pointless. I consider myself more of the former; I hope from my description of the film that you'll be able to tell whether or not you tend to the latter.
This is one of those movies that replaces conventional plotting with a scenario of interconnected relationships, and then observes as the characters explore (and sometimes screw up) those relationships. Explaining the premise in terms of all the interpersonal connections would be tantamount to spoiling the plot, so, briefly: The central relationship triangle in the movie involves a mother (Brenda Blethyn) and her two adult daughters (Catherine Keener and Emily Mortimer). The mother, wealthy and retired, pesters the older daughter about her lack of employment, comparing her life unfavorably to that of her sister, a working actress. Revolving around this core are the older daughter's husband (Clark Gregg) and the other's boyfriend (James LeGros), plus characters played by Jake Gyllenhaal, Michael Nouri, and Dermot Mulroney. In addition, the mother has, for reasons debated by her daughters, adopted a young black girl (Raven Goodwin), rescuing her from an unpleasant life; this girl's story winds throughout the film as an unpredictable wild card, providing counterpoint to the main themes.
Unlike "Walking and Talking," which focused on how relationships work, the subjects of "Lovely and Amazing" are self-image and insecurity. The mother, for example, worried about getting old, is scheduled for a liposuction proceure. The actress is so concerned about how she comes across that she actually interrogates a lover regarding her flaws, in one of the film's best scenes. The adopted girl compares her black skin to her mother's, and manages to deceive somebody into straightening her curly hair without her mother's knowledge. And Keener's character is a frustrated artist and unhappy wife whose personal dissatisfaction leads her to make some truly unfortunate choices in the film's last half-hour.
While I liked the movie quite a bit, my wife, who saw it with me, asked afterwards, "What was the point?" She also enjoyed it, but she was unclear why we were spending time with these particular people, and seeing these specific moments in their lives. It's a good question, and one for which I don't have a ready answer; I suppose it's merely a matter of taste, a question of whether you enjoy simply spending time with a group of mostly likeable but deeply flawed people, and seeing them muddle through their lives. My wife didn't necessarily want the film to spoonfeed its meaning to her, but it was a little too formless for her taste.
But for myself, I appreciated the loose, open tone of the movie, and laughed in all the right places, which are numerous. Holofcener has a definite eye for the subtleties of behavior, and draws great comedy from moments as simple as the frustration of getting caught behind an indecisive person in a fast-food line. I didn't mind that there weren't Big Lessons in the film; the emotional experience itself, for me, makes "Lovely and Amazing" a success.
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TAKE CARE OF MY CAT
-- written and directed by Jeong Jae-Eun
Charming and bittersweet, if quite a bit overlong, "Take Care of My Cat" has a lot more on its mind than the deceptively simple surface might indicate.
This South Korean film centers on five girlfriends, inseparable during school but now finding it difficult to stay connected as they transition into adulthood. "Transition" is the key here, as that's at the heart of all the film's issues. Besides the typical coming-of-age conflicts common to this type of story -- jobs, money, boyfriends -- the friends also find themselves drifting apart as they get involved in new pursuits. Some changes are positive; some are harder to take.
The girls also struggle to navigate the complexities of a rapidly changing culture. Their parents and authority figures are distressed to see the girls casually rejecting traditional ways; instead of pursuing conventional choices, they gab on their ever-present cell phones and try to find new paths in the world. One of the girls begins to surrender to conventional patterns, causing additional tension in the group. Another girl begins to fall away from her friends, feeling alienated from their lives, and winds up in not a small amount of trouble.
The film is perceptive and insightful, finding subtle amusement in all sorts of unexpected places: the anger one girl's stern father displays at being confused by the menu at, of all places, Tony Roma's, or a four-way split screen as the girls share a particularly gossipy cellular conversation. Despite the humor, there's a definite undercurrent of sadness to the film, as it's by no means clear that any of the girls will accomplish any of their goals, let alone find any degree of happiness.
As much as I liked the film, though, I have to admit that it's probably fifteen or twenty minutes too long. This may sound like an odd complaint, given how frequently I rail against lazy artificiality in cinema, but there's just too much life in this film. Writer-director Jeong Kae-Eun shoots for and achieves a loose, naturalistic tone, bordering on veritÈ, and imposes very little overt manipulation on the plot. The result is a world that's vital, emotionally engaging and thoroughly persuasive -- but the tradeoff is that by the ninety-minute mark we begin to wonder where the story is headed. A stronger hand here, and a more clearly drawn throughline, would have improved the story's drive quite a bit.
That said, I wound up liking the movie a lot, despite its length and lack of structure. I liked and understood all of the girls, I empathized with their struggles, and in the end I was moved by the two that chose to make a major life change. "Take Care of My Cat" would certainly benefit from another pass at the editing table, but as it is it's a warmly involving piece of storytelling.
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A SAVAGE SOUL
-- script by Alexandre Astruc, Mitchell Hooper, Eric Neuhoff, and Alain M. d'Inguimberg, from a story by Jean Giono; directed by Raoul Ruiz
Last year, it took half the festival before I found myself enduring a bad movie I should have eliminated. This year, I crashed into it on the third day. I hope that isn't an omen.
The half-empty theater was the first clue. Word of mouth gets around pretty quick with the festival audience; good movies pack in the crowds twenty minutes before the screening starts, and based on how long it took for the audience to trickle in, the first screening of "A Savage Soul" had evidently been a dud. I was fully prepared to give the film a chance anyway; as it turned out, I shouldn't have bothered.
The story centers on Therese (Laetitia Casta, making her acting debut), a linen maid who elopes with her boyfriend (Frederic Diefenthal) and starts a new life as a kitchen helper in a new town. There, she attracts the attention of a local noblewoman whose giving, charitable nature crosses the line into pathology; with the help of her husband, Therese shamelessly and parasitically manipulates the noblewoman and her husband (Arielle Dombasie and John Malkovich) into the poorhouse. With her benefactors ruined, Therese moves on to new opportunities.
Although the festival catalog describes all of this as "a haunting story of socioeconomic Darwinism," in point of fact it's merely two hours of awful people treating each other horribly and taking cruel advantage of the few good-hearted individuals in the town. Over the course of the film, I kept waiting for there to be a point to anything; unlike "Lovely and Amazing," above, whose purpose is simply character interaction, "A Savage Soul" acts as if the story is in service to some greater philosophical ideal. In other words, this is exactly the sort of self-important Euro-art movie that drives me crazy, in that it's so caught up with a belief in its own significance that it forgets to engage its audience. Compare, for example, the superficially dissimilar but ultimately equivalent "Ulysses' Gaze" from a few years ago, which was a pointlessly self-indulgent exercise in sheer artistic arrogance that nonetheless managed to deceive a fair portion of the audience that, because it's Long and Deadly Serious, it must be About Something. Balderdash, I said then, and tommyrot -- and I repeat that here.
To those of you who are wondering how Laetitia Casta handles her first screen role, I'll say that while she actually isn't that bad as an actor, she makes a terrible mistake in choosing this as her debut. It's an insanely difficult character, one that would frustrate and challenge the most talented actress, and Casta simply isn't up to it. The result isn't as embarrassing as if, say, Fabio were to attempt "Macbeth," but Casta just doesn't yet have the chops for this. Her character narrates the film in flashback voice-over, which means the whole movie is placed in the hands and heart of this pointlessly hateful and deceptive parasite. If she were to display some joy in her manipulations, we might connect with her and appreciate her successes the way we do a film-noir femme fatale, but Casta, in her inexperience, approaches the character and her circumstances with a deadening literalism. To be fair, this is probably more the director's fault, but it proves to be a major miscalculation for everyone, and basically sinks the film. (And by the way, to those who started wondering when you saw her name, no, she doesn't strip off. Pervs. Go back to Google.)
"A Savage Soul" is so overbearing and weighty that it's unable to lift its own feet and simply move. It hangs on the screen, conceited and inert, and utterly fails to communicate anything of worth. It's the kind of movie that, rather than simply winning acclaim, is made with the arrogant expectation that it will. Guess what, guys: If you spend more time fantasizing about the awards you're going to win than actually thinking about the movie you'll win them with, you wind up with nothing.
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More to follow!
Harold Hellman
