Once again the time of film festivals is upon us – but I won’t be reporting from Sundance or Berlin, but once again from that other great festival: the International Film Festival Rotterdam, celebrating it’s 40th edition this year by being bigger and better than ever. With around 350.000 visitors, it’s one of the biggest cultural events in the Netherlands, and while Rotterdam usually lacks the big names that come to Sundance or Berlin we more than make up for that with the fantastic and incredibly diverse line-up. Everything from mainstream releases to obscure hand colored 16mm experiments has it’s place here, and everything in between as well: pretentious French and Latin-American art-house productions, Japanese action extravaganzas, historic retrospectives and world-premiers are thrown together into one big overstuffed program that principally avoids Red Carpet-style events and doesn’t always aim to please but does strive to give the viewer a complete picture of cinematic past, present and most notably the future.
The main-program is reserved for first or second time directors who compete for three Tiger Awards. Christopher Nolan won one in 1999 for Following (and the festival is sure to remind you of that feat every chance it gets…) and the program is always full of daring and innovative films. The festival has always had a focus on south-east Asian cinema, but literally every region in the world is featured in some form.
Anyway, enough free publicity and fanboy drooling. Let’s review some movies. I’ll keep ‘em short and the spoilers light!
One of the more crowd-pleasing programmes on the festival is called Water Tiger Inn and features an historic oversight of Wuxia films from China, the earliest being Red Heroine from 1929 (!!). I was planning on seeing that later this week, but the program was changed alas. My first film on Thursday night was Reign of Assassins by Taiwanese director Su Chao-pin, although the co-directing and producing credit for John Woo seems to overshadow him a little bit. From marketing perspective quite understandable, but perhaps also misleading: there’s not a single dove or yakuza-shooting-two-guns-while-falling-in-slow-motion-shot in this film. Instead, we’re presented with a lush and traditional Wuxia film that while it doesn’t score big in originality, does succeed on pretty much every other level. The look of the film is beautiful, presenting a fully realized and romantic Chinese past familiar from this genre, it has beauties and brutes, good choreography, mixes comedy, drama and action convincingly and best of all a great lead performance by Michelle Yeoh as a former member of squad of assassins whose violent past catches up with her. Taking the loot from her final assassin-mission, she moves to the capital and tries to restart her life. A little naive of course, and soon she has to pick up her sword and fix her very deadly but slightly flawed 41 Stroke Shedding Water Technique to protect her life and new love. Highly recommended, mostly for Michelle Yeoh’s performance.
My second day gave a fully booked 6-film program, starting with the very experimental and charming Gravity was everywhere back then by US filmmaker Brent Green. It’s a film documenting the director’s re-enactment of the story of eccentric Leonard Wood and his lover Mary. When Mary gets sick, Leonard decides to built a bizarre house in his backyard, truly believing it will act as a healing machine for his wife, to connect her directly to God’s miracles. All this happened somewhere in the seventies, and the director rebuilds the long since demolished house in his backyard, and has actors playing the parts of Leonard and Mary. The charming strangeness of the subject is enhanced in the format of the film: a bizarre mix of pixilation and animation, giving the whole film a very distinct feeling and creating a unique visual world and language to tell a unique story.
Next up was La Belle Endormie by French director Catherine Breillat. A somewhat mysterious and ambiguously anachronistic amalgamation of two fairytales (Sleeping Beauty and the Snow Queen), it’s at its heart a study in the development of young girls into adulthood and the discovery of sexuality. A few years ago I saw the French film innocence (Harry featured this in his dvd column a couple of months back): a mysterious film about pre-pubescent girls giving up their innocence in order to grow into the mysterious species called Teenage Girl. La Belle Endormie feels a bit like a companion piece to that film. It avoids literal interpretation, and has a loose narrative that starts in fairytale-times, passes through dreamland and ends up in our world, matching the heroines journey from childhood’s romantic ideals to very real sexuality. On a bad day I would categorize this as pretentious French art-house faire, but I guess it was a good day since I was very charmed by it’s lighthearted nature. Also, it has naked lesbian Gypsies, French super models and midgets.
More serious cinematic work was up next in the form of the world premiere of Flying Fish by Sanjeewa Pushpukumara from Sri Lanka. It’s an impressive effort from a mostly inexperienced crew (first time director, first time DOP, mostly amateur actors) that follows the lives of several people in the Sri Lanka countryside, still influenced heavily at the time by the conflict between the government and the LTTE (Tamil Tigers) striving for an independent country for the Tamil population. The civil war ended last year with the destruction of the LTTE forces, but most of the underlying conflict is still there. The director drew from his childhood experiences and stories he saw and heard to construct a story of the colliding trauma’s of several people. Featuring heavy sexuality, one castration (which elicited very unmanly screams from half the audience) and beautiful symbolic shots, it’s a bold debut for a director and a exemplary Tiger Award competitor.
Next up was the American feature A little closer by young director Matthew Petock. It’s a small intimate drama following the summer-adventures of a young single mother and her two sons, each one dealing with their own stages of sexual and romantic development. The mother visits the weekly local dating night, hoping to meet a man to support and satisfy her. 16 year old Marc has a girlfriend and is determined to lose his virginity. The twelve year old Stephen has a crush on his teacher and is about to transition from childhood into young adulthood, being confronted by the accompanying moral questions and demands. The film focuses on the actors, and Petock shows a real talent to get great performances out of his cast. It’s an economic film, at just over 80 minutes it wastes no time but does give each character a very real and complete journey and you really get the feeling that they all reach a next stage in their individual development, and through that, even manage to grow ‘a little closer’ to each other. And great for festivals: I was just able to squeeze it in my program between two longer films.
On Friday I also saw the Sri Lankan film Karma by director Prasanna Jayakody (Sankara, 2006). A feature about love, death, disease, guilt, birth and more great themes, it didn’t impress me that much. It’s not a bad film by any standard and has a fantastic sound design, but I would instead recommend the brilliant and thematically related Mundane History (2009, Anocha Suwichakornpong) wich one a Tiger Award last year.
My final film of the day was the British social drama Tyrannosaur, the feature debut by celebrated actor Paddy Considine (In America, Dead Man’s Shoes, Hot Fuzz). Another film that made me think my life isn’t all that bad (which was pretty much the theme for the entire day, together with uncomfortable blowjobs), it follows the explosive Joseph (Peter Mullan), an unemployed alcoholic man with anger management problems as he develops a friendship with a Christian charity-store owner (Hannah, played by Olivia Colman). Joseph is not a nice guy: the film opens with him killing his own dog in a fit of rage. His instant sadness makes him however not unredeemable, and thus the audience willingly goes along in his struggle for a better life. While it’s easy to interpret the title as referring to him, we gradually learn not only the true reference, but also that Joseph is not the only monster. And again, none of the other monsters appear to be entirely unable of redemption, a theme conveyed to us by the strong acting of every character, however small, in the film. I loved Joseph’s neighbor who has a pitbull as his external demon and his own anger issues but also shows fear and uncertainty in his confrontations with Joseph. Does it all lead to an unavoidable violent clash at the ending of the film where everyone gets what they deserve? Perhaps it does, perhaps not, but I will say not only did the film make me feel pretty good about my own life of relative luxury and excess, but also about the prospects of the people portrayed in the film. It’s a classic British social drama in that it seems a little cynical about the ability to escape the social class you find yourself in, but it also follows the same tradition in finding the joy of life in dark situations and celebrating them cinematically. The film is great to look at, starring fantastic close-ups of Peter Mullan’s weathered features. A self-assured and successful film, I’m already looking forward to Paddy Considine’s next effort, either as a director or actor.
Well, that should do for now. No films for me today because of family obligations, but I’ll be back tomorrow and the whole of next week, and if you decide to publish this I’ll be happy to file more reports on more movies you’ve probably never heard of before and probably won’t see in a theater near you. Thank god for the internet!!
Greetings,
dapascha
