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Fret not if you couldn't get to Park City this year, the New Directors/New Films series, sponsored by the Museum of Modern Art and The Film Society of Lincoln Center, brings Park City to you! This year's line-up includes no less than five Sundance champs: Phil Morrison's Junebug, Jorge Gaggero's Live-in Maid, Jeff Feuerzeig's The Devil and Daniel Johnston, Henry Alex Rubin and Dana Adam Shapiro's much-hyped Murderball, and Zézé Gamboa's The Hero, which opens this 34th edition of the series. This year's lot is particularly strong, recalling the 2002 edition, which featured Atanarjuat and Late Marriage, and includes 25 features and eight shorts from over 20 countries. There are many highlights, among them Robin Campillo's zombie film They Came Back and Fernando Eimbcke's Jarmuschian Duck Season, and two powerful docs about the horrifying effects of democracy and globalization on third world countries: Our Brand is Crisis and Darwin's Nightmare, respectively. Anyone who hasn't seen Chris Landreth's Oscar-winning Ryan can now enjoy it before Oskar Roehler's Agnes and his Brothers, which plays on the last day of the festival and takes its inspiration—for better and for worse—from one of the very best German films of all time, Rainer Werner Fassbinder's In a Year of 13 Moons. With more than half the films facing uncertain futures (only 10 have distribution deals), see them while you have a chance. For a complete schedule of films, screening times, and ticket information, please see the festival's official site, and for full reviews of these films, please click on the pictures below. Ed Gonzalez
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For giving an ethnographical face to post-war Angola, the importance of Zeze Gamboa's The Hero shouldn't be underestimated. Thirty years of civil strife has left the people of the country broken, both in body and spirit, and in the many traumas suffered by the characters in the film, Gamboa sees a different strain on the body politic. It's not important to understand the nature of the wars that plagued Angola for more than three decades because the focus here is on the victims of those wars and how their traumas overlap and finally converge.
A film that seems to have been made under the influence of illicit drugs, you may need to be in a K-hole to remotely enjoy Mila from Mars. A girl flees her psycho boyfriend in the city and ends up in some kind of frontier community populated by senior citizens who export marijuana. It's there that the old folk care for Mila, deliver her baby, and allow her to enact scenes from The Clan of the Cave Bear with some Buddhist rock-climber named Teacher, who enters the film out of nowhere in order to knock some sense into the girl. Pity no one is as generous to the film.
When former Bolivian president Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, known as Goni to his people, hires the firm operated by Stan Greenberg and James Carville to run his reelection campaign, the spectacle of ballot-counting and angry mob scenes echoes the election horrors that put Bush II in the White House not once but twice. Riveting through and through, Our Brand is Crisis unravels like a political thriller, evoking the failure of the capitalistic, neo-liberal Goni to spread democracy in a country whose people have been crippled by poverty and disenchanted by the man's undelivered promises.
When a boy's mother goes away, he and his friend plan a day around video games, bottles of soda and pizza delivery, except the world seemingly conspires to ruin their lazy Sunday afternoon: a next-door neighbor wishes to use their oven, a delivery man is refused payment, and the lights frequently go out. Like the painting of ducks that hangs over the television, these distractions reveal to Flama and Moko the untapped realities of their world. Eimbcke understands the boredom and confusion of the adolescent experience, and in many ways Flama's flat comes to represent the thorny crawlspace the boys must navigate before reaching adulthood.
With Live-In Maid, Norma Aleandro continues to prove that she's one of our greatest living actresses; like Annette Bening in Being Julia, she makes a middling film seem great. Jorge Gaggero's first feature-length production takes place in late 2001, when Argentina's economy, weakened by countless deficits and tax increases, reached an all-time low; this is the backdrop for this story about a divorced bourgeois woman, Beba (Aleandro), who can no longer afford to pay her maid's salary.
Zombie films dictate that the walking dead, no matter how quickly they move, will tear off a piece of your face if you give them a chance. But in They Came Back, the 70 million people who return from the dead simply look to re-indoctrinate themselves into society, and in the provincial French town where the entirety of the film's action takes place, the population must cope with the emotional and social ramifications of this re-assimilation. They Came Back is a triumph of internal horror, and unlike M. Night Shyamalan's similarly moody freak-out The Sixth Sense, Robin Campillo's vision of the dead sharing the same space as the living isn't predicated on a gimmicky reduction of human faith.
Unlike Gabriele Muccino, Andrea and Antonio Frazzi don't make human misery seem fashionable, but there's still something disingenuous—dare I say coy—about the way they evoke the horrors of their character's lives. From the intense Frogger-style road crossing that opens the film to the psychotropic, MTV-style flashes that structure the film as a series of flashbacks leading up to the moment when Rosario boards a train for a destination unknown, the film's visual frills betray the reality of its main character's hard knocks life, suggesting the filmmakers don't trust in the material enough to simply let it be.
In some ways, Magdalena Piekorz's The Welts isn't much different from The Holy Girl and other films by female directors [Kent] Jones cites in his review—like Claire Denis's L'Intrus and Chantal Akerman's Demain on démenage—in its unmistakable stubbornness, except the film doesn't so much adhere to private rules or logic but to the dictates of stick-it-to-daddy melodramas like Shine, Swimming Upstream and Affliction, and if I didn't know The Welts was adapted from the stories of Wojciech Kuczok, I would have gathered that the whole experience of making the film was an exorcism for the director.
There's a thesis paper waiting to be written about the effects of Short Cuts on today's generation of new filmmakers: Call it "Car Crashes, Hospitals & Clowns: Cultural Fragmentation and the Robert Altman Mosaic." Clorox, Ammonia and Coffee! is considerably less miserable than Free Radicals, but it's also more schematic. Beginning with an overhead shot of the town where its characters live, something about the film brings to mind The Sims (the angular hedges of people's homes; the way Hoel's snaky camera jumps from story to story); to wit, these are not lives that seem to operate by any sort of natural logic—it's Hoel that pulls the strings.
A lethargic mood piece, South of the Clouds is all subtext, which might explain why the production company’s synopsis for the film is loaded with information that simply cannot be gleaned by anything that transpires on screen. Sixty-year-old Xu is perpetually depressed, and his relationship to his daughter—who wants to open an exercise center but can’t get her father to front her the cash—is friendly but awkward. Why Xu is so glum and impatient when it comes to his daughter is uncertain, and his trip to Yunman seems to have less to do with any lifelong baggage than the recent death of his best friend, whose funny workout regiments intermittingly interrupt the glacial flow of the film’s first half.
Primo Amore is as moody as Matteo Garrone's previous feature, The Embalmer, from which it seems to have pilfered much of its metaphoric import: Somewhere in the woods of Verona, in a gothic abode that may have been an inspiration for Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, a goldsmith, Vittorio (Vitaliano Trevisan), and an art school model, Sonia (Michela Cescon), enact a masochistic game that could have been concocted by Catherine Breillat. Call the film Anatomy of Jenny Craig.
In a Year of 13 Moons is the influence for one of the three major plotlines that makes up director Oskar Roehler's mosaic of miserabilism, in which three brothers are defined entirely by what they'd like to do with their sex organs: Agnes (Martin Weiss), a transsexual, reunites with an old flame soon after she's dumped by her abusive lover; Hans-Jorg (Moritz Bleibtreau) is a librarian and Peeping Tom convinced that his father abused Agnes; and Werner (Herbert Knaup) loses his bearings after his obsessive-compulsive wife refuses to put out and his irritating son videotapes his every faux pas. The film is never boring exactly, but it still lacks the wit, formalist rapture and social insight of the Fassbinder films it aspires to be. | |
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Beginning with a shot of its 17-year-old lead picking cabbages so she can exchange them for rabbit hides, Sequins never starves for mystery. The film casts a mesmerizing spell, and true to its metaphysical fixation with the art of embroidery, characters often feel like strands undone from an uncompromising human tapestry. In spite of this allegorical undertaking, the film never feels overly precious or pretentious, like David Gordon Green's Undertow or Siegrid Alnoy's She's One of Us.
Sometimes if you don't buy what a character does during the first five minutes of a film, it's impossible to swallow anything else they might do that falls just outside the realm of common sense, like standing buck naked in the snow while your hunky boyfriend drives off in a rage. Somersault's 16-year-old lead runs away from home after getting caught kissing her mother's boyfriend. Why the girl decides to make out with the tattooed lug while her mother is in the house strains for logic: it's just an excuse to subject the catatonic tart to more horrors.
A young man is forced to take his crotchety father on a cross-European trip to Saudi Arabia so the older man can go to Mecca. Along the way, the world seems to secretly conspire with the father to enlighten the son. Though it humanizes Islam for the nutjobs in the world who believe all Muslims belong to extremist terrorist groups, Ismaël Ferroukhi first film is really nothing more than a road movie that operates under the contrived assumption that old people are smart and young people are big dumb animals.
Morrison understands that the people of the South feel very different from the people in the North, and his melancholic imagery and dissonant use of sound echoes this conflict. But Junebug shouldn't be construed as some contrived depiction of culture clash: Even without Madeleine in the picture, George's family remains unhappy. Why they're estranged is never clear, but such details aren't important to Morrison—he's more concerned with the way people, their surroundings, and the past communicate via some form of mystical osmosis, and he conveys this sensation with subtle narrative nuances and breathtaking visual textures.
Even if nothing grows in this breathtaking but barren domain of the world for the wind to blow through, Liu Hao's transcendental study of landscape still begs comparisons to Abbas Kiarostami's Through the Olive Trees and The Wind Will Carry Us. At first, the local townspeople resent Deshan (Sun Yunkun) and his wife (Jiang Zhikun) for their sheep, but soon others begin to chip in and Two Great Sheep reveals itself as a metaphor for collectivism, except I'm not exactly sure if Hao is for or against Bolshevism.
Because the jokes fly as fast and hard as the wheelchairs, Murderball brings to mind Timmy and Jimmy's cripple fight from South Park. This is the kind of comparison the filmmakers and subjects would gladly welcome, because that's how "cool" Murderball is (at one point, a quadriplegic's girlfriend talks about missing "the people" at the morgue she used to work at)—hell, I'd even wager that the "Sexually Reborn" video Rubin and Shapiro show clips from is meant to evoke all those educational videos Phil Hartman's Troy McClure used to host on The Simpsons.
After being introduced into Lake Victoria sometime during the 1960s, the Nile perch would go on to devastate the natural ecosystem of the world's second largest lake, a place often cited as the origin of all human life. With Darwin's Nightmare, Sauper evokes a horrifying vision of globalization gone terribly amuck, less a nightmare than a vicious domino effect. This is a film with a lot on its plate, and while Sauper strains to connect the AIDS crisis in the region to the perch nightmare, the message that globalization in the region has become tantamount to human slave trade is never lost.
Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck's Young Rebels is a unique documentary experience, an intimate look at the roots of hip-hop in Cuba. In Cuba, hip-hop artists have very little access, if any, to recording studios, which means the music they make is entirely homegrown—raw, frustrated and immediate, this is music produced by people trapped in amber, and the purity and infectiousness of songs like "El Fuego" (someone get me a copy, quick!) evoke the political spirit and resonance of early American hip-hop, a time before the bling-bling mentality sold out the genre.
Private evokes a series of days in the life of an affluent Palestinian family whose home is taken hostage by Israeli soldiers who wish to use the house as a watchtower. "Shadows are not real," Mohammad (Mohammad Bakri) tells one of his children, sound fatherly advice that takes on great aesthetic and philosophical meaning when the Israelis come charging into his house in the middle of the night: Prohibited from using the upstairs part of the home, the family is confined to the shadows of their living room when the sun goes down.
Johnston, like Klaus Nomi and Robert Crumb before him, is often called an "outsider artist," a label one of the subjects from Jeff Feuerzeig’s The Devil and Daniel Johnston shuns. But Feurzeig’s documentary understands—like Andrew Horn’s The Nomi Song—that there are people like Johnston who don’t seem to live in the same space as the rest of us. Patti Smith might say that Johnston, like Nomi, hails from "a place called space."
Kontroll explores a man's looming sense of isolation from the world after a serial killer begins pushing people in front of oncoming trains inside a Budapest subway. Like Pen-ek Ratanaruang's Last Life in the Universe, the film is another "chill out" production at once lovely and sinister. In much the same way that the narrative's non-stop panic lacks a social context, the lead character's disconnect from the world starves for nuance, but the boys and girls are pretty to look at and the film itself is amusing and seductively dreamy—like being at a rave and coasting on a mellow tab of X.
L'Esquive shocked audiences last month at the César Awards when it won the prize for Best Film, but what were people reacting to exactly: the fact that Abdellatif Kechiche made a better film than Les Choristes, or that L’Esquive has earned comparisons to a certain Larry Clark provocation? The film consistently teeters on the brink of tragedy but dares to end on a chipper note, a slap in the face to viewers who aren’t content with the tragedy inherent in the bad behavior of its kids.
Insofar as Nakagawa creates for his characters a world of suspended animation, the film is bound to earn comparisons to Last Life in the Universe, but while the director displays an incredible command of widescreen (for sure, his postcard shots of Okinawa are nothing short of breathtaking), the film's whimsy is more precious than magical-realist. |
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