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San Francisco International Film Festival 2007

The San Francisco International Film Festival might be forgiven for a bit of self-love.

San Francisco International Film Festival 2007
Photo: IFC Films

Having just rounded out its fifth decade as the longest running American film fest, the San Francisco International Film Festival might be forgiven for a bit of self-love. In addition to the guest lineup of local megastars (George Lucas, Robin Williams), there were the “we rock” vibes emitted by Fog City Mavericks. Better suited for a cable premiere, Gary Leva’s fluffy love letter to Bay Area filmmaking was instead granted centerpiece status, in return giving Frisco its wettest recorded tongue bath. Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, Clint Eastwood and Philip Kaufman are among the interviewees, but no Easy Riders, Raging Bulls downfall arc here; the trajectory of San Francisco directors is presented as a steady ascension, buoyed by oft-repeated ideas of artistic independence. It’s one thing to trace a straight line from Eadweard Muybridge’s photographic experiments to the Skywalker Ranch, or to completely ignore the most memorable SF-set films (Vertigo, Point Blank, Petulia) in favor of a couple of Pixar sketches; it is quite another to give me Chris Columbus the auteur.

No need for such cheerleading: the program by itself was enough proof of the festival’s dedication to vital cinema, with a strikingly varied line-up of international works for cineastes to lose themselves in. Emanuele Crialese’s Golden Door, a remarkable reinvention of the immigrant-saga format, opened the fest and summed up everything great about it with its fierce expressiveness and curiosity toward new worlds. Crialese’s rich imagery (resplendently captured by the great Agnès Godard) was matched by Pedro Costa’s in his bone-dry, poetic, spectral Colossal Youth, another film of precise yet mysterious movements. Having not seen the Portuguese filmmaker’s earlier work, it’s difficult to imagine how the rigid aesthetic (suffocating compositions, incantatory non-performances) might fit in his last installment of a trilogy about slum dwellers in Lisbon’s Fontainhas district; what is unmistakable, however, is Costa’s masterly control of space and his investigation of it as a crossroads of lost souls. Challenging pictures of narrative innovation and cinematic sensuousness, Golden Door and Colossal Youth indelibly illustrated the “voyages of exploration, discovery and transformation” promised by executive director Graham Leggat as the fest’s main thrust.

Cyrus Frisch’s Why Didn’t Anybody Tell Me It Would Become This Bad in Afghanistan was another promise fulfilled, namely the fruit of the “new technological platforms” discussed in last year’s Kinotek program. Offered as the first feature-length work shot on a cellphone (a decision, Frisch assured me, more budgetary than conceptual), it feeds off a sense of free-floating anxiety and finds hitherto unknown textures amid the heightened blotchiness of the camera’s pixilation. Scarcely living up to its provocative title and groping through its new format, Frisch’s film is a muddled mix—half genuine discovery, half excruciating private reel—but a searchingly modern one. The modernity of such experiments was pointedly balanced by screenings of silent movies like Victor Sjöström’s great The Phantom Carriage and Allan Dwan’s graceful The Iron Mask, the latter introduced by pioneering film historian and documentarian Kevin Brownlow. A much deserved winner for the Mel Novikoff Award of cinema appreciation, Brownlow was as diligent as ever in his conservationist efforts, presenting invaluable glimpses of lost silents, introducing one of his documentaries (Cecil B. De Mille: American Epic), and reminding viewers of the need to look backward as much as forward.

The festival was full of such contrasts. Flanders and The Violin both dealt with the cruelties of people at war, yet where Bruno Dumont’s new film sees the battleground as an extension (crystallization, really) of his vision of a senseless world, Francisco Vargas Quevedo’s portrait of wartime resistance views military nightmares as devastating intrusions into severe but hopeful human landscapes. The rural patches and battered deserts of Flanders give Dumont as ideal a canvas as the imagined Vietnam of Full Metal Jacket did for Kubrick, but the director’s ponderous approach has by now become calcified to the point of unintentional lampoon. There are evocative moments—a cut from the blood on a prepubescent insurgent’s head to the blood bubbling between the heroine’s thighs back home—but here Dumont’s Neanderthal brooders and weighty glares amount to little more than a lengthy, existential shrug.

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Humanity gets a fairer share in The Violin, and the wider variety of emotions on display makes the violence endured by the characters more affecting. Set during an unnamed Latin American country’s civil war, Vargas Quevedo’s film pits guerrilla rebels against oppressive military forces, with an elderly violinist (a wonderful Ángel Tavira) traveling between the two groups in an effort to help out his son, one of the rebels. The story’s penchant for peasant nobility and aged sagacity is kept in check by Vargas’s unsentimental admiration for the characters’ revolt, and by a sensitivity to the complex emotional connections of music that brings to mind Ichikawa’s The Burmese Harp.

Defiance is also the subject of Im Sang-soo’s The Old Garden, even if filtered through a thick curtain of disillusion. The virile anger marking much of the new South Korean cinema is accompanied here by the bitter melancholy of the protagonist, a socialist activist (Ji Jin-hee) arrested in the aftermath of the Gwangju Massacre in the early ’80s and released in the new millennium to face “freedom shock.” “Life is long and the revolution is short,” it is said as he sees his former comrades as pale shadows of their former militant selves, yet Im rejects defeatism by insisting on the critical reconsideration of historical wounds still palpably felt today (as in Im’s The President’s Last Bang, the film has brought him his share of controversy back home). The Old Garden’s politicized disgust shames The Caiman—likewise a leftist’s lament, Nanni Moretti’s so-called return to his early political works is instead a slack, pusillanimous comedy about the Italian film industry, with its supposedly subversive subject (a schlock producer takes over a new project without noticing the movie is really an attack of Berlusconi’s machinations) shoved aside in favor of fatigued jibes at movie-star vanity and bourgeois domestic troubles. Moretti himself appears as one of the actors playing the political leader in the film-within-a-film, but his point seems to be the obsolete nature of political films nowadays, coupled with the belief that “it’s always a good time for comedy.” Offered as Moretti’s Sullivan’s Travels, The Caiman is barely his Hollywood Ending.

Continuing with auteur entries, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Hana brings his themes of struggling familial communities and spiritual dislocation to what is possibly the least urgent samurai saga ever. The hero (Junichi Okada) is a swordsman burdened with the duty of having to avenge his slain father, but he’s more interested in teaching the kids in his dilapidated village to read, or in chastely courting a local widow. Mock duels are held because “real fights are scarce” in 1701 Japan, but when the father’s killer at last appears, Okada is reluctant to bring violence; so is Kore-eda, who, with the film’s gentleness and mild scatology, seems to preserve the child’s view from Nobody Knows even in ronin territory. The picture may at times get too winsome for its own good, but that’s nothing compared to the insufferable cuteness of Gardens in Autumn, where the tone of deadpan cloying is set in the very opening (a batch of old Parisian gents surveying a warehouse of coffins as if looking for a coat). Deposed diplomats and African squatters all figure in Otar Iosseliani’s comedy, which is so mellow about its own elfin absurdity that it dissolves long before Michel Piccoli pops up in granny frock and drag. A similar desperation befalls Tom DiCillo’s Delirious, where the teaming of a choleric paparazzo (Steve Buscemi) and a sweet, homeless aspiring actor (Michael Pitt) suggests an oblivious parody of Midnight Cowboy. At one point Elvis Costello appears to pitch a musical about Britney Spears (“Imagine Tennessee Williams…only not so gay”), a project that sounds more interesting than this film, which proceeds like a vague Sundance memory from 1996.

Costello is on hand to tear into “The Butcher Boy” in The Old, Weird America: Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, a fond documentary of the filmmaker, musician, painter and record collector responsible for the revival of American folk music in the ’50s and ’60s. Lou Reed, Nick Cave, David Johansen, Sonic Youth and Beck are among the musicians heaping praise (and performing vintage favorites) on the late, eccentric Smith; a less reverential approach than Rani Singh’s might have better captured the subject’s personality (Terry Zwigoff would have been a good choice), but, then again, the subject of the film is not so much the man behind the revival as the revival itself, with the preservation of long-forgotten songs emerging as a heartening recognition of priceless cultural artifacts, a heritage exhilaratingly remembered and rescued from oblivion. This threat looms large in The Rape of Europe, also a chronicle about the dangers many cultural treasures face over the years. The rape of the title refers to the degradation of European artworks during World War II, when museums were pillaged and invaluable works were at best looted, at worst burned. Suggesting Hitler’s status as a mediocre painter as a driving force behind the Nazi depredations, the documentary depicts harrowing ramifications of the Fuhrer’s lunatic ideology in the wartime treatment of such “degenerate art” as works by Van Gogh, Matisse and Picasso. It’s a tragedy that still continues, the movie argues, in the ensuing legal battles over the paintings—a cultural degradation that lingers in the competing price tags pinned to art.

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No less valuable than rare records or paintings are the stories told by the aged residents of a small village in the Brazilian northeast in The End and the Beginning. Like the other documentaries, Eduardo Coutinho’s film is about preserving a country’s history, with the many recollections ultimately forming a kind of oral map of regional troubles and glories. A procession of weathered, humorous storytellers (“Come on in, poverty ain’t contagious,” says one ancient farmer to the interviewer), it is also an example of the on-the-road quality of much of Brazilian film history, a quality that extends to the festival’s other Brazilian works. Ricardo Elias’s The 12 Labors charts a young delivery boy’s trajectory through São Paulo, with the Herculean reference of the title possibly acknowledging Brazilian cinema’s other famous appropriation of Greek myth into modern-day society, Black Orpheus; the welter of incidents is gracefully woven, but the mystery of the characters’ lives is needlessly diluted by pretentious voiceover. The need to travel is notable in the other entries by its absence: The characters in both Fish Dreams and Love for Sale are trapped in dead-end communities and yearn to break away. Kirill Mikhanovsky’s film follows intersecting lives in a small fishing town, while Karim Ainouz’s traces a young woman’s self-inquiring journey as she lives with her family and ends up offering her body as the prize of a raffle in an attempt to get money to leave town; both are quite beautiful in their ethnographic detailing, the former enriched by the director’s outsider curiosity and the latter bolstered by Hermila Guedes’s lovely performance.

The “society of fear” of post-9/11 America is the subject of Strange Culture, San Fran native Lynn Hershman Leeson’s account of the Kafkaesque spiral experienced by conceptual artist Steve Kurtz after his wife died in her sleep in 2004 and his scientific studies were used to bring bio-terrorist charges against him. A mix of news footage and reenactment (with Thomas Jay Ryan and Leeson axiom Tilda Swinton appearing both as the real-life married couple and as themselves), with Kurtz himself commenting on his ordeal, the film is as much of a multimedia project as its subject’s exhibits, with its engaged outrage tempered with a lightness of touch that rescues the film from being a picture of slogans. A bit of Leeson’s humor would have helped Niki Karimi’s A Few Days Later…, the Iranian actress’s directorial debut. Despite a sly nod to her own minimalist style when a client dismisses her character’s graphic design as “too simple,” it’s for the most part a placidly dour piece of alienation. Yet it is also a thoroughly personal account of muted anxiety, expressed through narrow framing and left scrupulously unresolved. The Island, meanwhile, opens with anguish (“O Lord, have mercy on this sinner,” chanted over the wintry Russian expanses) before sneaking sharp humor into its story of a traumatized WWII victim who becomes a monk in a White Sea monastery. As the monk reveals a prankish streak and locals come to see him looking for miracles, Pavel Lounguine’s film shifts from the angst of mid-period Bergman to flashes of divine buffoonery of Rossellini’s Flowers of St. Francis (the signature shot is a lateral pan that creates a solemn Orthodox mural only to spot one of the monks facing the wrong way).

With such distinguished titles as Alain Resnais’s Private Fears in Public Places, Guy Maddin’s Brand Upon the Brain! and Hal Harley’s Fay Grim, it’s a shame the festival chose La Vie en Rose as its closing feature, but, then again, what fest doesn’t want a punchy finale? And punchy is how one feels after Olivier Dahan’s draggy, superficial biopic of the legendary Edith Piaf, which hits you over the head with “tempestuous” time-hopping bits to cover up its hoary showbiz clichés. Marion Cotillard labors through a parade of Oscar clips, all teeth and eyes, while every opportunity for deeper inquiry is thwarted. (Why plop Marlene Dietrich next to Piaf in one scene if the picture hasn’t the slightest desire to examine their relationship?) In at least one way, the film is faithful to the festival’s border-erasing goals: It proves that the French can fashion dreary, awards-grabbing biopics just as well as the Americans.

The San Francisco International Film Festival runs from April 26—May 10.

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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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