From the Ledge

More film festival watching this week.  I really like the thought of having festival “hotspots” around the two theaters where festival goers can stop in and refuel in between screenings (and I, of course, had quite the re-fuelling at Pops for Champagne one evening), but I’m not really sure it’s working.  I think downtown is too spread out with too many options for people to go to, plus I don’t think JBar or Le Passage are top-of-mind when one thinks of places which encourage esoteric, cerebral, film-history referencing conversations.  Duh! Good try, Film Festival organizers, but better luck next year with your choice of hotspot venues.  Here’s some more of the films I’ve seen the past several days:

Tokyo Sonata (Japan) – I’ve never seen any of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s previous works, but it seems like this is a notable departure from his usual focus on the horror and suspense genres (or J-Horror, as film geeks like to put it).  It’s a very Japanese (meaning really slow and tedious for the most part) contemporary drama about a Tokyo family alienated from one other – the father lost his job but because of shame cannot bear to tell his family about it; the rebellious older son plans to join the US military with or without his parents’ support; the precocious younger son is taking piano lessons on the sly; and the long-suffering, devoted mother is just trying to keep the delicate, frayed family ties together (Kyoko Koizumi as the mother gives the film’s most radiant, most impressively complex performance).  But there are also astounding, searing scenes of clarity, despite all the minimalism:  on a job interview, when the middle-aged father is humiliatingly asked to sing a karaoke song to “demonstrate his job skills” by an arrogant twentysomething manager, we clearly get the great generational chasm in modern Japanese society without elaborate exposition.  Although the last third of the film clearly differs in tone and sensibility from the first two thirds, I liked it the most, since it is surprising, inventive, thoroughly engaging, a great depiction of how surreal everyday life can turn out to be.  This film won a Jury Prize in the Cannes Film Festival’s Un Certain Regard section, the section devoted to “audacious” filmmaking. 

Dead Girl’s Feast (Brazil) – This film is a leading contender for the 2008 Film Festival’s most overwrought, most pretentiously incoherent, most artistically vapid prize.  You gotta have several of these kinds of films every festival year, the kinds that desperately scream “I’m an artsy film festival movie that no one with an iota of taste will like!!!”.  The thin premise of a village’s preparations for the 20^th year celebration of the death of a little girl they venerate because of the revelations she makes through a tempestuous (and pretty hunky) male medium, who also happens to like wearing housedresses, seems to have given director Matheus Nachtergaele the inspiration to go hog wild on the wackiness.   A live chicken’s throat being slit on camera, moody religious rites, an incestuous relationship between the medium and his father, an old woman talking to a Barbie doll, gratuitous male nudity, I mean, you name it, it’s in this movie.  Oh, there’s also a dance number by the Space Triplets, a group of Amazon Indian girls in hotpants, capes, and blonde hair extenders.  Yeah!  Ultimately this film, although beautifully photographed, says nothing interesting or provocative about Brazilian religious life, about the erosion of cultural traditions and mores, or about the concept of masculinity in Brazil.   What a waste.

Hunger (United Kingdom) – Definitely one of the best films of 2008.  Visual artist Steve McQueen makes an amazing, noteworthy debut with this film about, very loosely, Irish Republican Army (IRA) leader Bobby Sands’ 1981 prison hunger strike which resulted in concessions from the Thatcher government regarding the treatment of political prisoners.   It is a film of stunning images, both hauntingly beautiful (such as when the police officer grabs a smoke outside the prison’s walls with snow falling around him), or chillingly, excruciatingly, but memorably, brutal and violent (such as when the same cop is assassinated while visiting his mother in the nursing home).  The scenes of the beatings of the prisoners are so impressively shot – cringe-inducing, yes, but with so much rhythm, precision, astounding photographic angles, and fluidity that they become a visual chamber orchestral piece.  The images in the film look like they will not be out of place in the cutting-edge art fair, the Venice Biennale (which McQueen has participated in).  But Hunger is also a film about ideas.  There’s an exceptionally-written and jawdroppingly-acted 20 minute, single take, debate between Sands (played with so much commitment and intelligence by Michael Fassbender) and a Catholic priest who has come to visit with him, on the nature and impact of convictions and unwavering beliefs.  This is a film for everyone who believes in the power of cinema to move and transcend – a film that continues to make film festivals like Chicago essential.

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Tags: Chicago International Film Festival