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San Francisco International Film Festival 2006

Everywhere you went at the 49th San Francisco Film Festival you could feel a song coming on.

San Francisco International Film Festival 2006

Everywhere you went at the 49th San Francisco Film Festival you could feel a song coming on. The opening night selection, Peter Ho-Sun Chan’s giddy-pensive Hong Kong hit Perhaps Love, set the tone by seasoning Chicago pizzazz with pan-Asian melancholy, and from there it was just a step to James Gandolfini doing “Lonely Is a Man Without Love” with a full backup of Queens garbage men in Romance & Cigarettes. Seijun Suzuki stuffed Princess Raccoon with ballads, calypso, rap and rock, and Robert Altman wove a plangent musical community of his own in A Prairie Home Companion, though, for sheer effect, it might be hard to top Tsai Ming-liang’s cut from cum going splat on a porn starlet’s face to the evocation of a torchy MGM-style number in The Wayward Cloud.

Melodic deluges or not, the festival offered plenty of money shots. Under the new direction of Graham Leggat, recently appointed as chairman of the city’s Film Society after years of experience in the circuit, the festival, the oldest and one of the largest in the country, took extra pains to illustrate what he termed film’s “multiplicity of visions.” Guest speaker Tilda Swinton seconded that notion in her State of Cinema address, during which the Scottish actress, a self-described communist, relished the irony in The Chronicles of Narnia of “goose-stepping over old Walt D. by having the studio make over $700 million with the help of a Red Witch.” Indeed, big-budget filmmaking this year was the festival’s unofficial bête noir, as a high volume of foreign, documentary and experimental features filled the diverse roster (even the “mainstream” entries, Art School Confidential and Prairie Home Companion, could hardly be dubbed concessions to commercialism). The internationally-flavored entries went hand in hand with a feel for burgeoning technology, represented by studies on blogging and “cellphone cinema,” though, as expected, all eyes were mainly on the films.

If the festival needed a poster boy for intransigent vision, it couldn’t do better than Werner Herzog. Riding the comeback from last year’s exceptional documentary troika, modern cinema’s most serenely rapturous explorer came to town to receive the Film Society Directing Award and attend a screening of 2005’s The Wild Blue Yonder. The subheading (“a science fiction fantasy”) is fitting, for this is a film of conflations, starting with its own raw materials—footage from “a secret NASA mission,” underwater images from the Antarctic ice shelf, and Brad Dourif channeling Klaus Kinski as our guide, a homesick alien regaling the camera in a barren, garbage-strewn burg. Combining Senegalese vocals and jazz cello, the score contributes to the unearthly schizophrenia, yet the picture melds the deliberately divergent components (images and sounds, captured versus staged “reality”) into a sublimely harmonious tone—call it somber ecstasy. The subtle self-mockery might be seen as the director’s response to critics too eager to box his later works into the limiting “documentary” category, although, with its magnificent use of deep-diving images for anti-gravitational expanses, Wild Blue Yonder attests first and foremost to Herzog’s genius for finding the transcendentally alien squarely in humanity’s own backyard.

The aural mix in Princess Raccoon is no less disjunctive, though when is consistency ever a goal for Seijun Suzuki? An impish operetta surfing effervescently on the gonzo veteran’s liquidity of form, the movie is more of a crowd-pleaser than his previous Pistol Opera, if every bit as nutty—vain regents, shape-shifting ingénues and folkloric winks cavort to a beat that goes from tap-dancing to ’50s all-girl pop to performance-art voguing. For all the grabby eclecticism of Suzuki’s raucous block party, the movie is particularly attentive to the distinctive cultures at play, from the specific Chinese attributes of star Zhang Ziyi (explored rather than camouflaged a la Memoirs of a Geisha) to the European colonialism threatening the Japanese mythology the director exults here. Carlos Saura’s own cultural celebration, Iberia, is by contrast comfortably steeped in the kind of stereotypical concepts of Spanish romanticism the director would have questioned during the ’60s and ’70s. A performance film inspired by composer Isaac Albéniz’s eponymous suite, it offers exquisitely arranged moments of sensuality via movement, color and lighting, though the choreographed smolder is scarcely more than decorative next to Saura’s more searching works.

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If balking at the seamless artifice of Iberia may sound ungrateful, watching Backstage helps appreciate its polish. Frazzled hysteria is the main ingredient in Emmanuelle Bercot’s portrait of fandom and drama queeniness, a bleary pas de deux between a leonine pop star (Emmanuelle Seigner) and the trembling young groupie (Isild Le Besco) she scoops under her wing; Mrs. Polanski does a robust send-up of Debbie Harry, but the film misses too many opportunities to study the intensity growing between an imploding diva and an imbalanced baby dyke—catfights are the closest the two come physically—to be much more than a limp, strobe-light retelling of All About Eve. All About Love, a hit in Hong Kong, is all about silliness, though it is not without a certain loony romanticism—directed by Daniel Yu, it is built on melodrama poured liberally over lost loves and second chances. The director is no Wong Kar-wai, however, and the simple-yet-convoluted plot—Andy Lau loses his wife in a crash and then stalks the woman carrying her transplanted heart, until her ex shows up, played for no particular reason by Lau in a goatee—becomes inert in a hurry, less hypnotic than somnolent.

Showing both U.S. premieres and festival-tried projects, the event was as much of a place to see new pictures as to catch up on ones that have eluded this side of the country. Chief among the better-late-than-never was Three Times, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s lovely triptych, which had already screened at Cannes, Telluride, Toronto and New York. A filmmaker of astounding visual-spatial gifts and emotional grace, Hou teleports his young characters (Shu Qi and Chang Chen play all the different couples) through a trio of incarnations, in 1966, 1911 and 2005; each third could be a pocketbook retelling of Hou’s previous films (Dust in the Wind, Flowers of Shanghai, and Millennium Mambo, say), yet the trajectory has the feel of an unfolding scroll, a continuously enriching narrative from past to present, connection to alienation, aware of a transience of beauty that is both specifically Taiwanese and affectingly universal.

Also caught in the flow of history, albeit in a far more dramatic manner, is Japanese Emperor Hirohito (Issey Ogata), a “living god” under the merciless scrutiny of Aleksandr Sokurov’s lenses in The Sun. Having already desiccated Hitler and Lenin, the Russian master finishes what could be dubbed his “bunker-trilogy” of murky titans, with Hirohito, his mouth constantly twitching, contemplating the textures of a crab while Japan burns outside. The deposed, top-hated monarch, surreally reminiscent of Chaplin on his way to meet the conquering Gen. MacArthur, provided one of the oddest, most vivid sights of the festival.

A sense of history was also prominent in several of the documentary offerings. Made from footage shot from 2002 to 2005, James Longley’s Iraq in Fragments catches moments in the lives of various Iraqi citizens, though its structure is far less fractured than the title might suggest—split into three, vérité panels, from an 11-year-old mechanic in Baghdad to a young, anti-American religious leader to a fatigued, old farmer in the Kurdish border, the progression could be that of life itself, or at least of hope, from razed urban centers to pastoral vistas routinely kept out of media coverage. In any case, the trenchant message is voiced by the young (“The world is so scary now”) and delivered by Longley’s harsh-beautiful compositions and sharp editing.

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Moving to the other side of the world, The Dignity of the Nobodies has radical firebrand Fernando E. Solanas examining the injustices of the Argentinean system with the same fiery vigor he had in the 1960s with The Hour of the Furnaces. Tracing the grave economic collapse of Argentina’s recent years, Solanas weaves a forceful mosaic of lives (the “nobodies” of the title) who may be knocked down but refuse to be grinded by the rapacious machinery of a corrupt government. The director’s activism flows through the present-tense DV camerawork, whether marching along street manifestations or interviewing picketers who fear the return of the old dictatorship. Despite the hardships, however, the picture is a remarkably hopeful one, culminating in one of the fest’s most stirring moments.

On a lighter note, Al Franken: God Spoke offers an entertaining, sometimes slapdash, sometimes incisive look at the disappearing line separating entertainment and politics. Following the SNL vet and liberal satirist through brushes with Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh and Henry Kissinger, directors Chris Hegedus and Nick Doob use their experience working with renowned documentarian D.A. Pennebaker for the film’s fly-on-the-wall perspective, though, when Franken puckishly crashes a Republican convention, there’s little doubt whom the filmmakers side with. Humor is the pundit’s political tool, but hip-hop is the main instrument of expression in Favela Rising, a glimpse at how the Brazilian group AfroReggae used music and dancing as nonviolent forms of social protest amid the despair of Rio de Janeiro’s impoverished slums. Directed by Jeff Zimbalist and Matt Mochary, it’s a vivid, exhilarating view of art as resistance, even if festival members preferred to award Staley Nelson’s Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple, a chilling look at the darkening Eden of Reverend Jim Jones; the narrative allows the surreal events to speak for themselves via vintage footage and interviews with shaken survivors, culminating in a stomach-churning evocation of the infamous 1978 communal “suicide” that claimed more than 900 lives.

Back to features with October 17, 1961, though Alain Tasma’s account of the controversial, seldom recalled 1961 massacre of over 200 Algerian protestors in Paris—a festering wound that recently provided Michael Haneke’s Caché with its main source of bourgeois anxiety—still hangs on to the documentary format for its immediacy. The eponymous date carries as much traumatic baggage in European soil as September 11, 2001 does in America, and, indeed, the film contrasts interestingly with another historical recreation, United 93: Where Paul Greengrass facilely, reductively raids Gillo Pontecorvo’s urgent style, Tasmas is more interested in the director’s examination of how imperialism mutually degrades both oppressor and oppressed.

Another peek at 1960s France came from Philippe Garrel, who distillates the hangover of the May ’68 upheavals with his lustrous, melancholy Regular Lovers. The presence of the filmmaker’s son, Louis, positions the work as a critique of The Dreamers, and Garrel’s camera movements are much less caressing than Bertolucci’s, just as his view of the potential revolution is harsher and less nostalgic; Molotov cocktails are hurled during the Night of the Barricades, but the young characters soon find themselves impotently awaiting adulthood as the moment for change passes by, vanquished. A cut from the dozing poet to a discarded axe-pick is enough to illustrate the dissipating flame of revolution, yet Garrel’s film, far from cynical, remains a tribute to the youthful characters’ manifesto: “Enough repetition. Move forward.”

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The Regular Lovers dictum is one that, sad to say, Tsai Ming-liang perhaps should consider. Wayward Cloud could work a compilation reel presented before the great Taiwanese auteur’s lifetime achievement Oscar, but as a film it feels self-cannibalized. The big event is the reunion of Chen Shiang-chyi and Lee Kang-sheng, playing the characters from What Time Is It There?—“Do you still sell watches?” she asks him, in one of the dozen or so lines, but he’s actually doing low-budget porn now, a task made difficult by Taipei’s encroaching draught. Water is a rare commodity in the director’s alienated urban sprawls, although, as always, the tone is one of deadpan comedy, spiked with lush musical interludes pouring out of the characters’ fantasies. This would have been transcendental if not so obviously a recapitulation of the filmmaker’s motifs, of which only the sex element—with several shots toeing close to hardcore—comes off as an advance in Tsai’s style.

No déjà vu for Raúl Ruiz: The Lost Domain finds the venerable Chilean prankster in fine, unpredictable form, weaving between past, present, dream and reality as freely and assuredly as the great Buñuel. Following the memories of a tale-spinning French aviator (François Cluzet) landing in 1930s Chile, the picture suggests a particularly personal project for Ruiz, delving into the sadness of a time long gone without sacrificing any of his usual mischievous formalism and pleasurable sense of dislocation.

Speaking of dislocation, A Perfect Couple offers Japanese stylist Nobuhiro Suwa’s first international production, guiding a married couple (Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi, Bruno Todeschini) through a friend’s wedding as their own marriage unravels. Just as Suwa’s H Story reworked Hiroshima Mon Amour, the movie might be his version of Viaggio in Italia, and an “artless” aesthetic (long takes and medium shots, mostly) duly follows suit. Incidentally, Roberto Rossellini’s spirit was also evoked by the decidedly un-Rossellinian Guy Maddin in My Dad Is 100 Years Old, by far the best of the festival’s shorts. Funny, lyrical and deeply felt, it features Roberto’s daughter, Isabella Rossellini, dressing up as a cabal of Roberto’s friends and enemies before hilariously chiding Maddin’s camera for its “immoral” movement.

More Visconti than Rossellini, Patrice Chéreau’s Gabrielle locates another imploding French marriage, this time around Isabelle Huppert and Pascal Greggory as an aristocratic couple in turn-of-the-century Paris. Adapting Joseph Conrad’s short story, Chéreau’s restless camerawork in the opening passages blows the dust off its fin-de-siecle society gatherings until it slows down for suffocating, Strindbergian intimacy as a sudden letter sends the characters’ stable lives into a tailspin and their emotions are finally allowed out of their corsets. The tasteful skin of Chéreau’s style all but quakes with emotional brutality, provided in no small amount by the actors’ lacerating fireworks of repressed passion.

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And that’s just a small taste of the festival’s offerings. Not that it did not have its stumbles—the horror flick The Descent, the only outright genre piece (if one doesn’t count John Turturro’s leaden-footed Romance & Cigarettes as part of the strained-whimsy genre, that is), followed a batch of cave-exploring babes only to find gore-covered stupidity, while Anders Thomas Jensen’s Adam’s Apples only went to show that you can still have the snarky insipidity of the Dogme 95 movement even without the obligatory handheld shakes. Nevertheless, the quality and quantity of films on display proved rarely less than invigorating, particularly when capped by Prairie Home Companion as the closing night picture. Like his previous masterpiece The Company, Altman’s latest takes place in a deliberately hemmed-in milieu, a night backstage during the final broadcast of Garrison Keillor’s beloved radio variety show, the better to explore the exultant feel for performance and life coursing through his large ensemble (the festival’s sweetest surprise: Lindsay Lohan is an actress). Altman directing is by now akin to Bach composing, and Prairie Home Companion shows his vision at a radiant peak, the perfect ending for an event bent on making sure artistic voices ring out as clearly as music.

Fernando F. Croce

Fernando F. Croce is a San Francisco-based film writer whose work has been published in Film Comment, Reverse Shot, MUBI, and Fandor. He runs the website CinePassion.

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