Father Geek here with another group of film reviews from the Seattle International Film Festival. Damn! Harry and I are going to be in Seattle July 18-22 doing a series of public appearances, but man I wish this fest was happening then and not now. Oh well, Que sera, sera... I'm sure you Northwest geeks will find plenty for us to do that's cool. Here's Harold Hellman of Movie Geek Central...
SECRET BALLOT written and directed by Babak Payami
written and directed by Babak Payami
From an amazingly simple premise, writer-director Babak Payami spins a subtly funny and very human story of the conflict between viewpoints old and new.
On a rugged island off the coast of Iran, a soldier's boring but comfortable routine is interrupted by the arrival of an election agent, there to collect votes from the island's citizens. Not only is the soldier unaware that this is election day, he's discomfited by the fact that the agent is a woman. Eventually she overcomes his reluctance, and he drives her around the island, where the very idea of voting butts up against centuries of tradition.
It's a strikingly minimalist film, from the austere landscape to the near-stationary camera to the almost total lack of character development beyond the discussions of the present situation. The movie prepares us for this style in the opening minutes, giving us the soldier's sleepy morning routine as he trades shifts with the one other man in camp, and letting long silences elapse while he thinks about which question to next ask his compatriot.
And after the agent arrives and she begins her assignment, her interactions with the locals form a lesson, in microcosm, about all the difficulties in bringing such a modern innovation to a stubbornly third-world country, and illuminates the objections of the citizenry to the methodology -- and even the fact itself -- of the election. The agent remains cheerfully optimistic, and the soldier increasingly dubious, as she confronts prospective voters who turn out to be illiterate, or others who express angry disappointment in the slate of candidates as shown on the official list. In one small settlement, the women say they can't vote until their husbands return and give their permission; in another, the agent tries to explain why a twelve-year-old is too young to cast a ballot.
All along the way, the soldier quizzes the agent about her work, asking if she thinks it really matters. She has a starry-eyed answer for everything, ascribing all sorts of potential benefits to the election; meanwhile, he seems cynical not because he has specific criticisms but simply because the agent represents Change, which he clearly regards with distrust. Their relationship is basically a metaphor, of course, the liberal reformer and the militaristic establishment, but it's done simply and straightforwardly and works quite nicely.
The film's humor, also, is very quiet and subtle; the most obvious gag involves a stoplight in the middle of the desert. But because the opening minutes have attuned us to extremely subtle shifts in behavior, we can chuckle when, for example, the soldier shrugs off the agent's skepticism about his instant identification of a criminal at a distance: He ran because he's a crook, the soldier reasons, and because he ran, we can conclude he's a crook. Simple.
Some of the most vital cinema in the world right now is coming out of Iran, and "Secret Ballot" is no exception. It manages the trick of telling a story that's both culturally specific and universally human, and while it's probably too small and slow for mainstream viewers, and while the analogy and thematic exploration might be a little obvious, fans of world cinema will probably consider it a tiny jewel.
HEJAR: BIG MAN, SMALL LOVE written and directed by
Handan Ipekçi
I was interested in this film primarily because of its background. Although initially banned in its home nation, Turkey, it was subsequently selected as that country's official Oscar submission, after which, apparently, the authorities rethought their position. The festival booklet wasn't entirely clear on the history, but what was there was enough to spark my curiosity.
The subject of "Hejar," unsurprisingly given the controversy, is the relegation of Turkey's Kurdish minority to second-class status. In the film, state policemen show up at an apartment where Kurdish activists are hidden; they're essentially executed ("resisting arrest," of course), but a little girl is missed in the chaos. She winds up across the hall in the care of a retired judge, who takes a dim view of Turkish politics, but does nothing about it beyond sitting in his apartment reading books about democracy. The story, then, is how this rather grouchy man is forced to confront reality and is brought out of his shell by the adorable child -- named Hejar, hence the title -- essentially dropped into his lap.
Yes, this is one of those movies that make their points by focusing on small, helpless children with big, sad eyes; compare "Kolya" and "Central Station" and any number of other similar stories. "Hejar" is the most shamelessly sentimental of the bunch, showing us how the grumpy old judge, who initially forbids the speaking of Kurdish in his presence, eventually gives in to necessity and calls his housekeeper, who speaks the language, to translate Hejar's words. The judge also embarks on a quest to solve the mystery of the girl's identity, and to see if he can figure out where she belongs.
It's a very episodic tale, broken into a series of incidents that, really, could happen in any order. Here's the scene where they visit the park and she finds a kitten; here's the scene where they go to a restaurant and the waiter gives the girl a piece of chocolate. Here's the judge on the phone, yet again trying to call the one phone number he knows is somehow connected to her. And so on, and so on, throughout the film. Hejar is unremittingly sullen and uncooperative; the judge is forever torn between protecting her and simply calling the police and getting her out of his hair. The events of the film are mostly sweet and charming (and, when focusing on the neighbor woman who's in love with the judge, pretty funny), but there's almost no development or rising emotion in the story, and at two hours the film is at least twenty minutes too long. Also, the musical score is aggressively manipulative; there's one melancholy cue that pops up predictably at least a dozen times, and at other moments the music explodes with a shrill "something bad is about to happen!" riff that provokes giggles from the audience instead of chills. The most engaging scene in the film happens at the two-thirds mark, when the judge makes a breakthrough and meets Hejar's relatives, but it's mostly because something different is finally happening.
"Hejar" is a fairly ordinary schmaltzfest that's interesting solely for its view of Turkey confronting a rather ugly side of itself. It has almost nothing to offer cinematically, but for anyone interested in the country's sociopolitical situation, it can be considered a minor milestone, presented in a very familiar package.
RAIN written and directed by Katherine Lindberg
Set in a dead-end Iowa town, "Rain" has a very strong sense of place, but its story is assembled from prefabricated parts straight off the "gothic tragedy" shelf. I like the cast, and the mood of the film is impressive, but I kept waiting for something, anything, to actually surprise me. It finally happened two minutes before the credits rolled, which is, unfortunately, not a good thing.
Here's a list of the cliches: The most upstanding, admirable man in town has the most screwed-up family. Marital infidelity is dealt with by application of a firearm. "The bank's gonna foreclose!" The big turning point towards the end is accompanied by a rainstorm. In keeping with the low-rent-Faulkner feel of the piece, the possibility of incest is introduced about halfway through. And so on.
It seems like writer-director Katherine Lindberg wanted to make a movie set in a very specific and not-often-seen setting, and she should be commended for her strong evocation of the environment. We definitely get a feel for the small corn-belt town, with its long, narrow roads, friendly but insular populace, social preoccupations, and so forth. However, Lindberg was apparently at a loss about what story could be told in this place, and wound up recycling the material of Tennessee Williams and other similar writers: Everybody's desperately unhappy, the town is a pit of despair, and all it takes is one minor incident to set off a chain reaction of tragedy and destruction. And even the environment stops being interesting once we realize that the film's core image, a train barrelling through town, is being repeated every five or ten minutes. Outside life, in other words, is passing them by; thank you very much, but we get it already.
The cast is fine -- Melora Walters, from "Magnolia," does sad and haunted as well as anyone, and Jamey Sheridan is fine as the the upstanding man-about-town -- but they're hung out to dry by the script's cliches. The cinematography, also, is murky and dark, almost palpably sticky, making it sometimes hard to tell who's doing what to whom for the first moments of a few scenes. And the film is almost entirely devoid of humor, a necessary ingredient in these hypertragic tales of unrequited love and emotional stagnation; as if to prove this, at the screening I attended, there were a couple of awkwardly inappropriate chuckles during the film's second half, so desperate was the audience for something, anything, to lighten the oppressive mood.
Lindberg shows that she's skilled at establishing a setting, and even better at working with her actors. If she had written a good, original story to go along with it, she would have had something.
THE HAPPINESS OF THE KATAKURIS directed by Takashi
Miike; screenplay by Yamagishi Kikumi
Well, now I've seen everything. And all in the same movie, no less.
I exaggerate only slightly. In the film's opening moments, which goes from a woman's unpleasant discovery in her soup to the Claymation (!) presentation of a weird little monkey-creature's life cycle, director Takashi Miike tells us to be ready for quite literally anything. And he doesn't fail to deliver: While telling the darkly comic story of a bad-luck family trying to run a vacation resort without guests -- this general premise, incidentally, is taken from a South Korean film called "The Quiet Family" -- he layers on slapstick, brief gore, a horny sumo wrestler, more Claymation, quick snapshot-formatted flashbacks, a volcano spewing threatening swirls of smoke, sequences of pure horror...
...And musical numbers. Yes, with singing and dancing. There's even a lush nightclub-type performance with on-screen karaoke-style subtitles.
In the hands of a lesser director, this would be an unholy mess, but Takashi more than manages to hold it together. He does it by starting crazy and getting crazier, so part of the fun, right away, is in seeing what insanity the film will give us next. The family's first musical break comes as they discover a guest (their first, yet) dead in his room, his key stuck in his neck; the song is minor-key rock opera, and the choreography, cramped in the tiny room, is jagged and angular, at least until they kick down a wall, "Hedwig"-style. But then, within a few minutes, we find ourselves in a period-tinged flashback, an elaborately romantic primary-and-pastel production number that wouldn't be out of place in "An American in Paris."
Takashi just keeps topping himself, piling madness upon joyful madness, until we're gasping from overload. It's almost two hours of unbridled cinematic invention, a deliriously entertaining phantasmagoria like nothing else I've ever seen. And then, against all odds, Takashi manages to throw on a sweet and genuinely moving climax, apparently just to show he can. It's truly amazing.
Yes, some of it is cheesy and dumb, and yes, a lot of it is way over the top. No, not all the storylines work (a bit about a navy hunk starts strong but ends anticlimactically). True, your grandmother would probably think it's "too weird" and wonder aloud why you're laughing so hard. The film is easy to dismiss as a wannabe-cult flick, the type of bizarre experience that's relegated to the midnight-movie circuit but gets no further exposure.
It would be a shame if that happens, though, because in many ways "The Happiness of the Katakuris" suggests a whole new cinematic niche. It throws in everything except (and maybe including) the kitchen sink, and makes the outrageous creativity of the film an experience in itself. It's goofy and demented at the same time, it moves at a blisteringly fast pace, and it's so eager to please that it's almost impossible not to like. I can't say enough about it; highly, highly recommended.
THE PIANO TEACHER written and directed by Michael Haneke, from Elfriede
Jelinek's novel
Just because a movie is about a seriously screwed-up situation and characters, that doesn't necessarily mean the movie is similarly screwed up; a film's objectivity should be considered separately from its subject material. But at the same time, just because a film deals with heavy emotions and is sometimes suffocatingly difficult to watch, that doesn't necessarily mean it's important, either.
Because "The Piano Teacher" focuses on a woman whose desperate unhappiness and lifelong repression manifests as extreme sexual masochism, some viewers will condemn the film on that basis alone. That's a narrow, limited stance, obviously; anything can be the subject of a film as long as it's handled with intelligence and insight. But at the other end of the scale, some viewers will praise the film simply for its subject, and call the film brave and uncompromising and profound. These people will have been fooled into thinking that "The Piano Teacher" is actually about something. There's interesting stuff in it, but the movie as a whole just doesn't resonate.
Isabelle Huppert plays Erika, the teacher of the title. She's a taskmaster, closed, bitter, and cold. She may not enjoy making her students cry, but then she doesn't avoid it either; their emotions seem alien to her. She lives with her mother in a twisted relationship; the mother (who doesn't even get a character name) is cruel and controlling, and literally tears unapproved purchases out of her daughter's hands. But then Erika surprises us: Just when we think we've seen everything about her, she goes to a sex shop, enters a video booth, and does something so unexpectedly vile that our jaws drop. From that point on, her icy demeanor, while essentially unchanged, reads totally differently; we begin to see that her chilly exterior is masking a desperate fragility. And when she retreats to the bathroom and breaks out the razor blades, lacerating herself in much the same way she lacerates her students, we know she's got serious problems.
At this point, the movie hasn't really tipped its hand. We know we're seeing a character study, and we can certainly appreciate the remarkable portrayal being turned in by Huppert. There are moments in the film where the camera simply gazes at her extraordinary face for long, quiet seconds, and we can read every tiny twitch of her eyes or skin. It's a hauntingly complete performance; one scene features a lengthy static shot of just the back of her body and head, and we can still tell what she's thinking about.
But then she meets Walter (Benoît Magimel), a piano prodigy in her mid-20's, and her veneer begins to crack. She takes a serious risk indulging a voyeuristic urge at a drive-in, and eventually begins to open herself to him. He seems receptive, but finds her sexual fantasies, which revolve around her humiliation, unappetizing and disturbing. Now the film begins to reveal its premise, and initially it's fairly interesting. It gets correct, for example, the fact that Erika's sexual game hinges on power, and that while she wants Walter to dominate her, she still essentially wants to be in control.
As the film progresses, though, and as Erika begins to spiral into confusion and chaos, we start to wonder if there's a point to all of this. Obviously, repression is bad; that's a no-brainer. The film seems to be suggesting that because Erika has kept her urges private for so long, she's unable to deal with them in a rational or practical manner. She's been hiding her fantasies her whole life, and the pressure has built up to an insane degree, such that when she finally does take the lid off, she basically boils over and self-destructs. But is that it? Does the movie have no deeper wisdom to offer?
The film's setting and its use of classical music does create some interesting cognitive dissonance at certain points, and the emotional transitions, as is typical in this sort of Euro-art production, are often abrupt, both extreme and oblique, in a way that suggests something is going on beyond what we see on the surface. More often than not, though, these choices seem like a simulation of depth rather than actual complexity or insight; the film asks us to think about what we're seeing, to assemble the apparently disparate ingredients, but careful consideration reveals that those ingredients are all that's there. The film also clearly believes itself to be mature and sophisticated for its willingness to so directly and explicitly address its difficult psychosexual theme, but in reality, when you realize what's really being suggested, the movie is actually quite harshly conservative, and in fact borders on reactionary hysteria. Nowhere is this more clear than in the closing minutes, when the film lays its cards on the table and it becomes clear just how empty and pointless the whole exercise has been.
That's too bad, because Huppert's performance is simply stunning, a wrenchingly fearless exploration of a specifically damaged individual. The film this is in service to, unfortunately, is unworthy. "The Piano Teacher" fails not because it's about a sick, confused person; it fails because it has nothing to say about that person beyond the obvious.
