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Here is my journal from the 2005 Philadelphia Film Festival, which is my first festival as an official member of the press. Unfortunately, I am only able to make a few days of the festival (one does have to work and all, for now - is the Village Voice or New Yorker ever going to call?), so this is a rather truncated list of the 130 films playing in the festival (not that anyone can see all 130, due to scheduling). I'll start off with a pair of films playing in the festival that have already been seen by yours truly here. Anyway, and awaaaay we go...
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Woman is the Future of Man (2004, Hong Sang-soo, South Korea): 47
I got to see this film a few months ago (on a region 3 DVD) - This was my first viewing of Hong Sang-soo, but I had already read much about him by that point and I had heard all the praise and hoopla about him and how he was the Auteur-of-the-moment (just as Hou, Tarr and Weerasethakul had been in previous years - although so far, I wouldn't put Hong in the same league as those three) - With all that firmly planted somewhere in the back recesses of my mind, I went about dissecting Hong's most recent film - A seemingly jump-on-the-band-wagon younger version of Hou Hsaio-hsien (at least from a verbo-visual standpoint), this avatar of The Korean New Wave, suplanted a sublime undercurrent of I-just-don't-give-a-damn malaise into his filmmaking, while at that same exact moment, creating a dead-on portrayal of disenfranchised modern youth (be they Korean, French or American) - I found out later, this was also the case in his earlier Turning Gate - Maybe not yet up to the Ivy League level of Auteurism found in Hou's films (only filled with moments of beauty, not yet actually beautiful), but still possibly on the way to a scholarship nonetheless.
* no US distributor at press time
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Oldboy (2004, Park Chan-wook, South Korea): 61
Have you ever seen a man devour a live octopus, while its tentacles wrapped themselves all about his face ? - This is how I began my review on Oldboy, after seeing it at The Angelika in New York last week (prior to the festival), and I can't think of a better grabber than that to start this review of Park Cahn-wook's latest effort - Brilliantly macabre and hilariously monsterous, Oldboy plays out like a Tarantino revenge fantasy (although, being from Asia, closer to Q's original source material than his own homage-du jour) - The story of a man mysteriously locked up for fifteen years and just as mysteriously released, with just five days to find out why - Full of life (if that's what you can call its bizarro energy) and stuffed even fuller with some of the most outrageously alien revenge scenarios ever captured on film, Oldboy, the Korean New Wave's poster child of pulp fiction chic, may very well end up being the best film at the festival, and ironically one I won't technically see at the festival.
* now playing in New York City
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10th District Court, Moments of Trial (2004, Raymond Depardon, France): 68
You might gather that the daily goings-on at a petty crime district court in the heart of Paris probably wouldn't make a very enticing film premise - but you would be wrong. In the same vein as the oddly gripping National Spelling Bee Doc, Spellbound from a few years back, this French film takes the mundane and puts a humourous, unexpected spin onto things. Of course watching these idiots try to explain their way out of everything from driving drunk to stalking, is very likely going to give you a great big feeling of superiority, as I'm sure it does the obviously flustered judge - and she does this every day. An unexpectedly fun start to the festival indeed.
* no US distributor at press time
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Somersault (2004, Cate Shortland, Australia): 66
At times pretentious, at times genuine. Shortland's feature debut is the story of Heidi, a teenage girl - played with sublimely angerered coquettishness by Abbie Cornish - who, after getting caught making out with her mother's boyfriend, runs away from home. Heidi finds herself lost in a world where she believes the only way to get something is to give her body away in trade. That is until she actually falls in love for the first time - and that's when things get difficult.
Caught somewhere between teen angst and adult melodrama, Somersault plays nicely as a psychological morality tale - never quite vearing off onto those sidestreets. Layered thick - sometimes a bit too thick - with a forboding exile, and touched with just enough sentiment to still be bearable, and full of many visually alluring moments, Somersault ends up being more parts and less whole, but still an inspired quiet experiment in melancholy - as well as a very promising feature debut.
* US release is slated for August 2005
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Frozen (2004, Juliet McKoen, UK): 37
A film so thick with pretentious melodrama, you can barely make out the wonderfully yet subtly absurd performance of it's lead protaganist, Kath - played with a giddy aplomb by Shirley Henderson (such a fine and sadly overlooked Actress). Unfortunately for the film - a psychobabble diatribe on reality and sanity - Henderson is the single thing that keeps it barely bobbing at the edge of its own frozen ocean.
* no US distributor at press time
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5x2: Fives Times Two (2004, Francois Ozon, France): 66
In the subgenre of backward running films, Christopher Nolan's Memento
is the most acerbicly manipulative, Gasper Noe's Irreversible is the most quixotically monsterous, and now Francois Ozon's 5x2: Five Times Two has become the most wickedly lifelike of the entire group.
Telling the story of one couple's relationship, beginning on the finalment of their divorce and ending, five years earlier, during their first flashes of romance, Ozon, the modern master of expressionistic folly and the heir apparent to the throne of Queen Demy (as well as possibly the cinematically-begotton bastard child of Fassbinder) manages to show the ugly downfall of a marriage, from the inside out (or would it be from the endside back?).
With equal parts beauty and ugliness, Ozon's latest is a superbly drawn portrayal of inner destruction and the troubled philosophical idea of everything being doomed from the very start. Performances that cut sharply, down to the bone only enhance the inherent dangers in all relationships.
* opens on June 2, 2005 in New York City
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The World (2004, Jia Zhangke, China): 58
With all the Cinephiliatic hype that accompanied this film, it was the one festival screening at the top of my must-see list. Although slightly dissapointed, Zhangke's followup to his distantly bereft Unknown Pleasures still titilates. Full of much of the same style of twenty-something angst that dripped from his last film, The World takes its setting in an absurdly westernized Beijing theme park that tries to recreate the great monuments of the world in 1/4 scaled tourist-friendly plaster replicas. A somewhat surreal venture that hits home with a pair of still standing twin towers in the park's miniature New York City skyline.
With the "world" as merely backdrop, the real stories unfold in a cross-over parade of young disenfranchised modern youth, who have become so jaded toward the real world, they are living as if they no longer have a future to build upon. These "children" are essentially the ill-begotten fruit of the so-called "Me"-generation of self-centered greed and power-junkied robots. Constantly interrupted by cel phones, the film's youth go about their days and nights as if there was no future - just a bland and sometimes painful present.
Never as big a fan of Jia's work as many critics - Unknown Pleasures I found rather empty for all its worthwhileness - The World is more of a tired attempt at social satire than actaul satire. Photographed brilliantly (as Jia is prone to doing) and working, on at least a superficial level (several oddly placed animated sequences aside), it's as if Jia himself is as jaded and empty as his characters are shown to be.
* US release is slated for July 2005
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Land of Plenty (2004, Wim Wenders, USA): 54
Silly, amateurish, narrow-minded look at post-911 America. Trying to show the myriad shades of grey hidden between the blacks and whites of Bush's simple-minded "War on Terror", Wim Wenders only manages to show how shallow the potentially explosive subject heading really is. Partially saved by a surprisingly robust performance from Michelle Williams of TV's Dawson's Creek, Land of Plenty is far from plentiful when it comes to real answers to the enending questions of race and identity in this brave new world.
* no US distributor at press time
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Midwinter Night's Dream (2004, Goran Paskeljevic, Serbia): 44
With the grey-eyed appearance of the very war-riddled, purgatorial countryside it is meant to portray, Paskeljevic's subtle take on the tragedy of what one might call picking-up-the-pieces, plays out with a deadpan Slavic melancholy most notebly associated with the much removed Finnish filmmaker, Aki Kaurismaki. Not that this should come as much of a surprise, for both Finland and the former Yugoslavia give off the cold heat of a dank, depressive, cloud-filled world of post Soviet entropy, and both filmmakers use that forboding climate for its fullest measure and impact - although Kaurismaki is much the wiser at it.
While Kaurismaki uses his sad landscape as a metaphor for the loneliness of humanity, Paskeljevic uses his version of the landscape as a metaphor for all those dreams that have been lost due to years of war and hatred. Lead protagonist, Lazar Ristovski, a haggard slightly past middle-age man, who has just been released from prison, holds court with a cold near dead stare that shows off the sacrs of his hard-laboured life. It is Lazar's eyes that we first see, but it is the far-away eyes of a young autistic girl - squatting in Lazar's apartment, along with her weepy mother - that is the epicenter of the emotionality of the film.
Although falling - briefly - into the inevitable trap of mentally retarded hopeful blue skied cuteness, Paskeljevic manages to bring us back out into his grey-laden world, and into the harsh realities of the film's surprisingly well-crafted finale. Maybe not full of the morose surreality of Kaurismaki, Midwinter Night's Dream still eclipses its own mirror reality of life in modern day Serbia, and comes out ahead of what its parts add up to.
* no US distributor at press time
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Lakeside Murder Case (2004, Shinji Aoyama, Japan): 37
Modern-day Japanese horror is known for its super-stylized perversions and in your face jumpcuts, all meant to elicit a cerebrally hermetic psychological pandemonium. In Shinji Aoyama's Lakeside Murder Case - which is more thriller than straight-out horror - the pandemonium usually associated with its storyline of intrigue, murder and unspeakable revelations, is much more staid and much more Japanese proper.
With the stepford-like politeness often associated with the western view of Japan, Aoyama's film glides along at a steady speed, never interrupting its polite path for any cheap theatrics - or, unfortunately, any well-done theatrics either - although there is one elongated momentarium of bone-crushing brutality. Overall, a well-crafted stand-up-straight kind of thriller that sadly never pushes the envelope of arrogance that it is so much in need of doing.
* no US distributor at press time
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Or (Mon Tresor) (2004, Keren Yedaya, Israel/France): 71
Israeli cinema, inevitably so, has for so many decades, been preoccupied with a unanswerable attempt at understanding the whys and hows of their very own modern existence for so long now, that one becomes jolted awake by anything new and/or perversely post-modern. What Dover Koshashvili's Late Marriage in 2001 and Eytan Fox's Yossi & Jagger in 2002 laid the groundwork for, Keren Yedaya's debut feature, Or (Mon Tresor), builds upon with a fascinatingly claustrophobic air of urgency.
The story of Or, a beautifully beyond-her-years sexually charged teenager and her fatigued prostitution-obsessed mother, played by Late Marriage's Ronit Elkabetz. The storyline of how Or tries desperately and ultimately vainly, to winnow her mother away from the world of sex-for-money - a world that her mother cannot drag herself away from - is secondary to the feel, the mood, the ugly pretensions of the film. This is a story that with the very closeness of the camera - catching each and every pore, nook and cranny of these two women as they go about their pathetic addictive lives - Yedaya has managed to surpass any and all expectations of a post-Holocaustal Israeli cinema.
Dana Ivgi, playing Or with a frantically intellective burning, knows that she can never really save her mother from the world she lives in, yet cannot stop obsessing over the mindnumbedness of this underprivaliged seedy world they are trapped deep inside. Or's only way of forgetting her own dire straights is by giving into them herself, with casual - almost blind - sexual encounters that leave nothing for Or except both a literal and figurative bad taste in her mouth. Or (Mon Tresor), with its half French title and near apocalyptic head games, is not only the best film of the festival, but also one of the best Israeli films I have ever seen (second only to the aforementioned Late Marriage), as well as being one of the best diatribes on both prostitution and the societal reasons behind it.
* opens June 1, 2005 in New York City
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Take A Deep Breath (2004, Dragan Marinkovic, Serbia): 47
Who would have thought that a place as desolately foreboding as post-war post-Soviet Serbia could accomplish any traces of comedic storytelling, but I'm sure that is just a naive manner of thinking about a region that, though falling to proverbial pieces at the end of communism, is still a vastly rich world of literature, poetry, art, music and cinema. Rather soap operetic in nature, Take a Deep Breath still manages to elicit laughs and a sense of ironic drama, as well as giving us the performance of the lithely sexual Jelena Djokic - sort of a Serbian doppelganger of Cate Blanchett.
* no US distributor at press time
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Ma Mère (2004, Christophe Honore, France): 70
With the same deja vu repulsion that sent droves of white-picket-fenced suburbanites spewing their way out of theatres midway through such invidious fare as Vincent Gallo's Brown Bunny and last year's festival champion, Catherine Breillat's Anatomy of Hell, at least two dozen filmgoers panicstrickenly escaped the screening of Christophe Honore's Ma Mère, long before an ending that may just have caused these puritanical humdrummers to spontaneously combust right there in the Ritz East.
Languidly teetering between a blaise melancholy and downright lethargy, Honore's look at a sexually infused mother and her unnatural libidinous preoccupation with her spiritually mustered teenage son, is anything but panic-inducing. Set at a typically French pace, Ma Mère slowly emboldens itself from playful teasing to orgiastic hedonism to sado-masochistic revelry to, finally, fatalistic satiation and lambasted salvation. A epicurean near-masterpiece that secretly thrills the curiosity in all of us, while scaring the bejeezus out of all the straights in the audience (not that any but the brave were left come credit time).
The never-staid (and still georgeous at fifty) Isabelle Huppert is the half angel/half demon title mother, Hélène, and she plays the part with the same exuberant self-loathing that made her character in Haneke's La Pianiste seem all that more real and all that more tragic. Here Huppert probably leans more to the user side than the victim side, albeit an obviously mentally-disturbed and self-depricating user. Meanwhile, Louis Garrel, playing his second consecutive incestuous character (after last year's Dreamers), is Pierre, the Oedipally ensnared son to Huppert's confusion-laden Jocasta. Both actors entreanch themselves so deeply into these characters that it seems as if they no longer are characters, but are once again real, flawed human beings.
In the end (which I won't reveal here), these two would-be, could-be lovers - one a worldly lecherous queen bee of sexual deviance, the other a naive unlearned and questionably eager student - become one being and one soul. Mother and son - neither of which is a whole being on their own - become one.
* opens May 13, 2005 in New York City
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Throwdown (2004, Johnnie To, Hong Kong): 35
Under different hands, this film would probably be just another cheaply theatrical martial arts-cum-gangster flick, but in the hands of helmer, Johnnie To - a meistro of martial arts in the same vein (albeit it in a slightly lesser intensity) as John Woo - Throwdown becomes something more substantial. Okay, maybe substantial isn't the right word, but it does become something more than it probably should be - right down to To's surprisingly existential bent.
* no US distributor at press time
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