David Matthews

27 February 2010

Shameless
dir Jan Hrebejk
Czech Republic

Sometimes I think I feel more at home, more at ease, in a dark room waiting for a film to begin than anywhere else in the world. Can this be?

During this year’s festival I recultivated some old habits. Finding myself with time to kill before a film showing at the Broadway Theaters or Whitsell Auditorium in the Portland Art Museum, I wandered up and down the Park Blocks between Salmon Street and Portland State University, pausing to sit on a bench by the Theodore Roosevelt sculpture in the front of the museum, the trees for most part bare, showing only the first hints of bloom, people strolling along, couples hand in hand, a mother pausing to take the hand of her little girl as they crossed the street. Four clean-cut young people, two boys and two girls, stopped to invite me to a church service. I politely declined and wished them a good evening. It is good to sit for a bit somewhere for no particular reason, without purpose, no expectations, nothing to accomplish.

Last Sunday Woman without Piano finished at 3:30, and Room and a Half showed at 6:30, which gave me a good two hours to while away before heading back to the theater to rendezvous with Judith at the head of the advance ticket line, then go down to claim my place in the Silver Screen member line so I could try to save her a seat. I went for the first time in quite a while to the little coffee shop on the Park Blocks up by PSU, Madison I think is the street, for a bowl of chili and a decaf coffee. I jotted down notes about Woman without Piano and gazed out the window and overheard the conversation of two young women seated at the table next to me. The one wearing the hot red dress was telling her friend about the time in high school, which I’m guessing was no more than a year or two ago, when she clotheslined the most popular girl in school in a soccer game, the star, the girl nobody touched. She became known as the girl who clotheslined M. For the rest of the year other girls shoved her roughly into the lockers when they passed in the hall. The woman in the red dress laughed it off, enjoying the notoriety that went with clotheslining M., reveling in her outsider status. The funny thing is, this story sounds familiar, as if I have heard it before. Is it from TV or a movie and did I miss something in the conversation? Or am I imagining that? It is of no great import, just that I found the story amusing and my sense of familiarity with it intriguing.

Yesterday evening I closed out the festival with Shameless, a Czech film about a man who falls out of love with his wife because her nose is too big. Oskar has a good life, family, son who loves him, good job as a TV weather guy. It goes all to hell for him over her nose and the affair he has with the dimwitted Hungarian au pair. Zuzana kicks him out, he loses his job, he accidentally drowns the Hungarian’s pet turtle, and the downward spiral goes on from there.

To top it off Oskar’s parents encourage Zuzana to pursue a relationship with a young man she meets on the playground, himself divorced and with a daughter the same age as her son. Feeling that she would be cheating on Oskar, from whom she is not yet divorced, Zuzana asks her mother-in-law if she ever cheated on her husband. The mother-in-law replies regretfully, no, she was too puritanical. If she had not been such a puritan, she would have had a wonderful time with all the cute boys who helped her onto the tram with young Oskar’s baby carriage.

Meantime, Oskar has an affair with a famous singer old enough to be his mother who wears him out with her voracious sexual appetite. After Oskar introduces the singer to his parents, his father tells him she is beautiful now, and as long as you love her she will be beautiful until the day she dies. The affair does not last. The singer cuts Oskar loose when her ex-husband dies. At the hospital Oskar asks what he died of. Why, she says, old age, of course.

Our sympathies lie wholly with Zuzana throughout this little comedy. She is a lovely person, and Oskar is a creep, though not altogether unlikeable. His most redeeming quality is his love for his son. For this, and knowing that Zuzana overcomes her reservations and falls in love with the young man, who quite likes her nose, we might cut Oskar some slack on his flaws. There is a nice little ending with Oskar and the boy and a carp that may or may not die before they set it free in the river.

I do not generally think in terms of ranking films, books, authors, and so on; but in terms of the films I saw at the festival where I would have missed out on the most if I had missed them, it might go like this:

1a) Room and a Half
1b) Woman without Piano
2) Music on Hold, Gigante, Shameless
3) Home, Reykjavik-Rotterdam
4) The Good, the Bad, the Weird

The ranking is provisional, subject to change on a whim. I enjoyed all of them. Each, with perhaps the exception of The Good, the Bad, the Weird, would reward a second viewing. Woman without Piano and Home almost demand one.

David :: Feb.28.2010 :: House Red: Film :: No Comments »

21 February 2010

Room and Half
dir. Andrey Khrzhanovsky
Russia

I might have missed this enchanting film about the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky (1940–1996) had Judith not suggested it. That would have been a loss on several counts. Judith’s company is to be cherished under any circumstances, and she was the perfect person with whom to see this film, as she speaks Russian, has lived and traveled in Russia, has read Brodsky in Russian, and is a poet herself. So I dropped my troubled-loner persona and joined her for this 130-minute delight that passed in the blink of an eye. What could be more delightful than to hear her singing along quietly in Russian while the screen Brodsky sang what she later told me is one of her favorite Russian songs?

Room and a Half is the first feature film of director Andrey Khrzhanovsky, a 69-year-old animator, and it is quite a debut. He flawlessly employs actors, documentary footage, classical Russian music, still photos, recordings of Brodsky reading his work, and animation to tell Brodsky’s story in the form of a fictional memoir narrated by the poet as he returns by ship to Petersburg, the city of his youth, which he never in actuality saw again after running afoul of Soviet authorities and being exiled from the country in 1972.

I was dubious about the animation but found it deftly woven with the other elements into a marvelous tapestry of inspired sur-reality: cats and crows, flesh and blood and the animated variety alike, instruments of an orchestra floating through the air over the streets of Petersburg, 1960s young people conversing passionately about culture, literature, art, and politics, drinking and smoking, speculating about who will sleep with whom that night, a young boy watching his parents dance after his father returns home from the war in the East.

If my memory serves me well, Brodsky remarks while recalling his youth that for young people of that time cinema was the foremost art form and a crucial aspect of that is going  into a dark room to watch it. While I am not inclined to put a particular art form, or a single genre of an art form, ahead of all the rest, cinema has been right up there for me from the time I discovered it as a freshman at the University of South Carolina in 1970-71, and I am unequivocally with Brodsky that going into a dark room to watch it is an essential aspect of the experience. It is wonderful to be able to watch old favorites and films we missed at the theater at home on the computer or DVD or DirectTV, but that is, to my mind, a lesser experience.

Room and a Half and Woman without Piano are as wonderful as anything I have seen in some time.

The Portland International Film Festival is winding down. It has been a good run for me, though I have no doubt I missed some outstanding films. I bagged the Hungarian film Chameleon Tuesday because I was feeling crummy, an unholy combination of allergies on the rampage and a miserable day at the office. Shameless, a Czech film about which I have heard and read mixed reviews, is on the calendar for Saturday to close this year’s festival for me. For the rest, I look forward to those films that will return to town for regular theater runs later in the year.

With festival’s end I return to other work, not that it was entirely abandoned over the past fortnight. Yesterday morning I astonished myself with some notes toward a poem. A minor fiction titled Until We Remember to Dream progresses slowly, the Brontë project is ongoing, and I am thinking now that Joseph Brodsky might be a good project to take up. Either that or I could get a life, buy a one-way ticket to Paris, and let the chips fall where they may.

More anon. Ciao.

David :: Feb.26.2010 :: House Red: Film :: 1 Comment »

21 February 2010

Woman without Piano
dir. Javier Rebollo
Spain

Now this is a film, T-Bone. I hardly what to say about it, where to begin, much less end.

Woman without Piano opens with a plain, middle-aged woman, Rosa (Carmen Macha), and her husband, Francisco, in the front seat of his taxi. As he readies to head out to work, they discuss what she will prepare for lunch. Francisco is not so much distant as indifferent. There is not a hint of rapport between them.

Rosa spends the day removing women’s body hair, a little business she runs out of her home, and doing household chores. She has little interaction with her customers. The daily routine is uniformly drab. There is not a ray of light, no hint of brightness anywhere.

At midday Francisco calls to say he will not be home for lunch. Business is slow and he wants to keep working. That night, after Francisco goes to sleep, just before midnight, Rosa puts on a jet-black wig and bright red lipstick, takes out her suitcase, and walks away from her empty, meaningless existence.

A lot happens during this night. At the bus station Rosa pulls out a cigarette, only to be told by the security guard that smoking is not allowed. She steps outside for a smoke. A prostitute bums a cigarette, then a light, accepting both while acknowledging neither. A car pulls up and the driver, thinking both women are  prostitutes, invites Rosa to come along, make it a threesome. Rosa explains she just came out for cigarette because smoking is not allowed in the bus station. It goes like that.

She returns to the station where she meets a young Polish contruction worker (Jan Budek) who finds meaning in life fixing appliances. They leave together when the station closes for the night and wander through the dark streets of Madrid. What little conversation there is between them reveals less about either. They go to a nightclub, get separated. On a narrow, dark street, Rosa inadvertently bumps into a young man and is berated by him and his friend. Through the night she drinks a number of small glasses of brandy, to all appearances unaffected by it, and in place after place is told that smoking is not allowed when she pulls out a cigarette.

The paths of Rosa and the construction worker cross again. They end in a hotel room. He is asleep in his white jockey shorts. Fully clothed, Rosa gets into bed beside him. When he awakens and opens his eyes, she kisses him, leaving red lipstick smeared across his mouth. I could only think of Aschenbach, played by Dirk Bogarde in Visconti’s film version of Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice,” though the characters do not fit, the construction worker neither the older Aschenbach nor the beautiful Polish boy Tadzio, and Rosa something else altogether. I do not know what.

I also thought of the young Fellini as the film played out. Each scene is exquisitely framed and lovingly shot. The events portrayed are realistic, perfectly ordinary, yet imbued with a sublime sensibility, inexplicable, eerie, rendered extraordinary by so much that is not made explicit, and all that is left open ended.

Rebollo offers no concession to the viewer, no cheap rationale or explanation of motive. Escape is not in the cards. At the end, at the breakfast table in her home, Rosa says, “Francisco.” Her husband responds, “What?” That is it. 

There is something here of what life is that touches us in a way we cannot quite fathom,  some of us at any rate, maybe not Republicans or those tea party people, or a lot of other people as far as that goes, but some of us. This is a film.

David :: Feb.24.2010 :: House Red: Film :: No Comments »

20 February

Reykjavik-Rotterdam
dir. Óskar Jónasson
Iceland

Reykjavik-Rotterdam is a gritty thriller, dark, grim, and brutal. Kristófer is a former seaman out on probation after doing some jail time for smuggling alcohol. Married with two young sons, in love with his wife, Iris, he wants no part of his old life, but he and Iris are beset by financial woes and he lets his friend Steingrímur talk him into shipping out one last time, on a freighter to Rotterdam, to make last score that will solve his problems.

Things go awry from the get-go as Kristófer and Iris run afoul of a dizzying array of psychopathic thugs brought down on them by her halfwit, screw-up brother, and Steingrímur has his own agenda that does not have Kristófer’s best interests at heart.

Reykjavik-Rotterdam starts slowly, and it took me a while to warm up to the two protagonists. The pace picks up in Rotterdam, where Kristófer and his pal are dragged into an art heist that turns into a wild, shoot-out fiasco from which they unwittingly walk away with what looks to my amateur’s eye like it could be a Jackson Pollack canvas, an item lost on the smugglers, who would not know Jackson Pollack from Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

In the end Kristófer shows himself to be more resourceful and clever than we might think a fellow who’s been popped for smuggling three times already as he outwits the double-dealing Steingrímur, his gang, and the cops while exacting revenge on a petty tyrant of a freighter captain. He might even be worthy of Iris, a tough woman left behind to be terrorized by thugs and betrayed by the one person she thought was a friend she could turn to.

Early on, and even some way into Reykjavik-Rotterdam, I thought I would not like this one. By the time the credits rolled, I found I quite enjoyed it.

David :: Feb.21.2010 :: House Red: Film :: No Comments »

17 February

Gigante
dir. Adrián Biniez
Uruguay

Gigante will not be to everyone’s taste. Nothing much happens. If that’s a deal breaker, you should probably steer clear of this one. I rather liked it myself.

Jara is a night-shift security guard at a supermarket. A big, quiet, gentle man, he wears t-shirts with the logos of heavy-metal bands, plays video games with his nephew, watches TV, lifts weights, and moonlights as security at a night club. At the supermarket Jara sits in a control room watching the security monitors while the night shift workers clean the store and ready it for the next day’s business. He passes the time working crossword puzzles and looks the other way when cleaning women pilfer inexpensive items such as rice, pasta, and yogurt.

One night he sees a cleaning woman, moving backward as she mops, crash into a huge display of paper towels she did not realize was behind her. An officious night manager witnesses her hapless attempt to reassemble the display and berates her for her carelessness, telling her she will be fired if it happens again.

The next morning, while waiting for the bus, Jara notices the woman walk past to catch her bus. After that, captivated for no particular reason, he looks for her on the security monitors and begins to follow as she walks through the city after leaving work in the morning.

Her name is Julia, and she is from the country. She practices karate and lives in a house, perhaps renting a room, where an older man also lives. She uses the computer at an Internet cafe and has a date with a man she met on an Internet dating site.

Jara is too shy to approach Julia. The most he can do is buy a small plant that he leaves on the floor in an aisle she will be mopping with a note card on which he has written only her name, nothing more.

While he is quiet and gentle, friendly with his coworkers but keeping much to himself, Jara is no pushover. In one scene he follows the Internet date. Walking about a block behind in a part of town where the streets are empty, he sees the man accosted by three street toughs demanding money. The man has no clue what to do. The toughs only become more aggressive when he tells them he has no money and begs them to take his cell phone. Jara starts to walk away, but no, he cannot do that. Without a word he floors the three toughs with a single punch each. He and the man he rescued go to a little cafe, where they chat and he asks about the date, hoping to learn a little bit about Julia. He learns she likes heavy metal music.

In another scene he follows Julia. It is early evening. A cab driver parked by the curb, thinking perhaps to impress her with his wit, calls out, “With an ass like that you don’t need a pussy.” She ignores him. The camera follows her as she walks away. Then a horn blows repeatedly, and the camera cuts back to the cab where Jara stands with his arm through the window, calmly banging the driver’s head against the steering wheel before walking away without a word.

I trust these details give a sense of the character and the film’s feel without giving away too much. Of the ending, I will say only it is pretty much just right, an offering of possibility that promises neither too much nor too little.

Horacio Camandule is little short of astounding as Jara, who emerges as a singular, flesh and blood individual, no particularly quirky or idiosyncratic traits, no fatal flaw, not intellectual or much given to reflection, just a decent fellow. I could see myself fortunate to count him as a friend, someone to meet for a beer or hang out with in the park for part of an afternoon, though he would not share my interest in Beckett and Keats, nor I his taste for heavy metal. He is a decent fellow. There should always be a place in our lives for such people and for wonderful little films like Gigante.

David :: Feb.20.2010 :: House Red: Film :: No Comments »

14 February 2010

Home
dir. Ursula Meier
Switzerland

Home may not a good film to see with your baby on Valentine’s Day. For this one it’s just as well I’m a troubled loner.

I was drawn not so much by the premise as by the presence of Isabelle Huppert in the cast. She is among our finest actors, with a long and distinguished list of credits, among them Entre Nous (dir. Diane Kurys), Amateur (dir. Hal Hartley), and La Pianiste (The Piano Teacher, dir. Michael Haneke). She has never let me down.

Huppert is Marthe, who with her husband, Michel, and their three children enjoys a bizarrely idyllic existence in a house on the edge of an unfinished highway surrounded by empty fields. Each morning Michel drives off along a dirt road through the fields to whatever his employment is. Judith, the older of two teenage daughters, spends her days sunbathing, chain-smoking, and listening to music with the volume cranked up to ear-piercing levels, while Marion and Julien walk off through the fields to catch the bus to school. In the evening they all play hockey on roller blades on the highway.

One day out of nowhere road crews appear and next thing anyone knows the highway is completed and open and traffic whizzing by all hours of day and night, disrupting their lives and wreaking havoc on their psyches.

Michel, Marion, and Julien must climb over the newly installed guardrails and sprint across the highway during breaks in the traffic to go off to work and school. Judith is a distraction to male drivers as she suns herself in her bikini. Marthe struggles to hang out the laundry in the virtual maelstrom created by the constant stream of trucks and cars just a few meters away. The noise is incessant and intolerable.

Michel gets cranky. Marthe is a little left of normal to begin with, even by this family’s standards and even before the highway. She would unable to cope anywhere else, so moving is out of the question. Now she shows signs of cracking.

Marion, the studious counterpart to her sunbathing sister, tracks the number of autos passing by and is convinced the pollution will kill them all. She tells her brother they won’t make it through the summer as she checks his back for lead-poisoning spots.

A highway accident that causes traffic to be stopped in both directions, with men getting out of their cars to gawk at the sunbathing Judith, calls to mind the magnificent traffic jam in Godard’s Week End. It might not be too much of a reach to read Home as a 21st century update of Godard’s 1967 skewering of bourgeois values that ends in its own dark vision of rock and roll, revolution, and cannibalism in the woods outside Paris.

What begins as a quirky, farcical depiction of a family living as much as possible on its own terms in the modern world becomes a dark testament to the impossibility of that vision as they literally wall themselves off from the highway. The film becomes almost static, and a sustained, weird tension is created. Where in the world can Meier possibly be going with this?

This is a strong film, not always a pleasure to watch, somewhat like La Pianiste in that regard, though nowhere near as excruciating. Huppert is superb as a woman quietly at the end of her tether. Finally, awaking from her first sleep in weeks, she takes a sledgehammer to the cinder blocks and mortar construction put up around the house to shut out the noise of the highway and leads her family off through the fields, together except for Judith who at some point disappeared, evidently taking up with some guy who spotted her sunbathing. But where are they going? Where is there for them to go?

15 February 2010

The Good, the Bad, the Weird
dir. Kim Ji-woon
South Korea

A bounty hunter, an arrogant and dandyish, stone-cold killer, a zany thief, several bandit gangs, and the Japanese army race to find buried Qing dynasty treasure in 1930s Manchuria in this Korean homage to Clint Eastwood and Sergio Leone. Need I say more?

David :: Feb.15.2010 :: House Red: Film :: No Comments »

The 33rd Portland International Film Festival (PIFF) kicked off on Thursday the 11th. PIFF — maybe not the greatest of acronyms, but whacha gon’ do? — is an event I have relished each year since I discovered it in February 1999, my first winter in Portland.

Some cineastes like to see how many movies they can cram into the fortnight plus a couple of days of the festival. I would run myself ragged if I tried to do that. Right now it appears I will catch eight to ten films this year, extending to the festival the maxim I customarily employ with coffee and wine: drink a bit less, enjoy it more.

 13 February 2010

Music on Hold 
dir. Hernán A. Goldfrid
Argentina

Ezequiel is a music composer in the grip of composer’s block. Up against the deadline to complete the music for a film, all he can come up with is trite drivel. Plus, he is broke and behind on his mortgage, the bank is about to repossess his house, and his ex-wife is on his case to return the drill he borrowed.

When he calls the bank manager to cancel an appointment, he gets put on hold while his call is forwarded from functionary to functionary, with the usual “hold on music” in the background. Fate steps in, and one of the recordings gives him an idea for exactly the music the film calls for, but he catches only a snatch of it before Paula, an up and coming young bank executive, picks up. He jots down a few notes, but it is not enough. He remains blocked. He has to find that hold on music.

Meantime, Paula is about as pregnant as one gets and in a tizzy because she has just gotten a call from her overbearing mother, who has flown unannounced from Madrid to Buenos Aires and is eager to see her daughter and meet her grandson’s father. It turns out Paula has been afraid to tell her mother that Santiago the boyfriend did not want to have kids and split when they found out she was pregnant. She decided to raise the child by herself. Her mother will think this is a disaster, and Paula will never hear the end of it. Hence her dilemma. The only resolution she can come up with is to lie to her mother for the rest of her life.

Ezequiel is at Paula’s office trying to find that elusive recording of hold on music when Paula’s mother shows up, and Paula blurts that this is Santiago, her boyfriend, her child’s father. Ezequiel does not have a clue what’s going on but plays along, and the movie plays out from there.

Ezequiel is somewhat bumbling and absentminded, not a man adept at practical affairs, but a good-hearted fellow. Paula is headstrong and stubborn, with something of her mother’s take-charge nature, but also with a good spirit. The two rub each other the wrong way at the outset, but in the spirit of the romantic comedy begin to have feelings for one another as they bumble through one travail after another.

There is nothing profound or especially original here. There does not have to be. One mark of a well-told story is that we come to suspend disbelief and care about what happens to these people. The pace is quick, the dialogue deft, and the actors first rate. I laughed and laughed; and as those who have been around me of late might observe, I can do with some laughter in my life.

No, nothing profound. Just a delight. I would see this one again.

David :: Feb.14.2010 :: House Red: Film :: No Comments »