Even for a film festival junkie like me, the whole thing could sometimes be a little too much. After the tenth time of lining up for a film, or after suffering through another concentration-requiring scene while the person beside you loudly chows down on his nachos like a Siberian tiger gnoshing on a piece of deer leg (thank goodness for subtitles!), or after the fifth Q and A session with a film’s director full of inane questions (such as “what’s your advice for an aspiring filmmaker?” to which my response would have been “It’s to get the hell out of a film festival Q and A session and make a film! Geez!”), I sometimes wonder why my DNA wasn’t rigged to be a Cubs fan instead. Drunk on their ass wearing sweat-stained shirts in a Wrigleyville bar, they look like they live much simpler lives. Then the lights go down on a film which turns out to be exhilaratingly stimulating and transcendent, and I wouldn’t want to trade my film festival life for a Cubbie fan’s life- ever (plus, where would I get such heinous outfits?). Several years ago, that film was Michael Haneke’s Cache, which was followed the next year by Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, both of which went on to much deserved universal acclaim. This year, that wonderful film that defines my film festival experience for the year is another one from Romania, Corneliu Porumboiu’s Police, Adjective, a prime example of envelope-pushing filmmaking, which had already won this year’s Cannes Film Festival Un Certain Regard Jury Prize. My comments on Police, Adjective and two other films I saw in the past couple of days are below:
Police, Adjective - For most of the first half of the film, adult ADD-afflicted viewers would be tearing their hair out due to its numerous, mostly dialogue-less, long takes of lead star Dragos Bucur, playing a small-town detective conducting surveillance on a teenager who may be a dope-pusher, walking along grey, dreary streets, smoking, or eating chicken soup. Believe me, dolls, I was ready to catnap myself if not for the sexy remembrances of the last Bucur movie I saw, Boogie, where he was either shirtless or pantsless, and washed his, uhhmm, privates, in a sink (you know what they say, cleanliness is next to godliness, but I digress). And then powerful scenes come out of nowhere that are so full of intriguing, riveting debates about language and meaning, such as the scene between the detective and his wife on the innocuous, illogical lyrics of a song that the wife watches performed over and over again on Youtube, and I’m puzzled- where is this movie going? But there is method to this at times infuriating madness, as Porumboiu slowly, deliberately, impactfully makes vivid points about the position and power of language – it’s literal meanings, nuances, individual interpretations; it’s ability to manipulate and be manipulated, particularly in a country such as Romania with a long history of dictatorship and current struggle with operationalizing democracy. This thesis is brilliantly realized in one of the most powerful, original, intellectually captivating scenes I’ve seen in a recent film – near the end of the movie, in the equivalent of a cinematic Socratic dialogue, the detective, his immediate boss, and their police captain argue for and against conducting a drug sting by reading dictionary definitions of the words, conscience, moral, law, and police. You have to see the movie to really appreciate the greatness of this scene, and to be stopped dead in your tracks by the magnetic, mesmerizing cameo performance by the exceptional Romania actor Vlad Ivanov (who was as electric in the much longer role of the abortionist in 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days) as the police captain. After this breathtaking scene, the end of the movie becomes undeniably devastating.
Fish Tank - Any other film put side by side Police, Adjective’s master class of artistic inspiration would seem like a kindergarten lesson. Unfortunately, Fish Tank, a tediously morose, bleak, somewhat unpleasant Cannes Film Festival entry about a 15 year old girl living in the projects in Essex and the attraction she feels towards her skanky mom’s new, mysterious boyfriend, doesn’t really recommend itself with anything other than Michael Fassbender’s charismatic performance as the boyfriend (and man, when he saunters around that tacky flat’s dirty kitchen, shirtless, with low-slung jeans exposing just a hint of a butt crack, I think everyone in the theater needed an oxygen tank to continue breathing!). I’m very perplexed by the rapturous reviews this movie has received in the festival circuit. I think Katie Jarvis’ much-raved about performance (supposedly, there are whispers of Oscar) is one-note. I think she captures the adolescent anger very well, but isn’t able to temper it with graciousness or tenderness, or more importantly for this character, vulnerability. I’m also underwhelmed by the writing – I don’t get a good sense of either the resignation or the struggle against destitute circumstances that the girl and her family should have had. It seems like everyone just likes to hang around, drop F-bombs, smoke, and dance to hiphop. This film also has some of the more cringe-inducing scenes I’ve seen in this year’s festival – I will worship Fassbender’s big toe most of the time (I think he is such a great actor plus royally hot as well), but seeing him and Jarvis get it on (she’s supposedly 15!) isn’t particularly welcome. Add to that a scene when Jarvis pushes his three year old daughter into a raging river and seeing the child look like she actually is about to drown (pretty good acting and directing there), I can’t get to a vodka tonic fast enough after this movie ended.
The Rapture of Fe - As a proud Filipino immigrant, I am thrilled that every year the Chicago Film Festival manages to include at least one Filipino film in its schedule. What isn’t thrilling for me is that most of the time (except, perhaps, for last year’s Cannes sensation, Brillante Mendoza’s Serbis) the movie is one degree of separation removed from celluloid dreck. This year’s The Rapture of Fe isn’t an exception (it’s a surprising pick since Raya Martin’s Independencia and Mendoza’s more recent Kinatay, are making the film festival rounds). There’s a whole lot of uninteresting, repetitive business about a married woman, who’s having an affair with her childhood sweetheart, receiving a mysterious basket of black fruit from an unknown sender daily. The film isn’t at all suspenseful, the video photography is garish, and to be frank, done-on-the-cheap-looking, and there’s a laughable ending involving the fruit sender – a tree ogre straight from Filipino folklore and mythology (yep, you read that right). I think there’s some intent to use the woman’s “romance” with the tree ogre as a metaphor for female emancipation and independence (Fe, the main protagonist, is a battered wife but is unable to leave her husband and shack up with her lover due to the suffocating strictures that women are subjected to in traditional Filipino society), but to be honest, I really couldn’t care enough about the film to think that through.
Photo: The great, climactic scene in Police, Adjective. The Chicago International Film Festival continues until Thursday, October 22. Check out the upcoming week’s schedule here.
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