David Matthews

Morgen
dir. Marian Crisan
2/20 2:30pm Cinemagic
(100 mins)
Schedule is subject to change. Check the PIFF 2012 website for schedule updates, ticket info, and other neat stuff.

Morgen is a quietly nice little film set near the Romanian border with Hungary. Nelu is a security guard at a grocery store where he patrols the aisles wearing a jacket with the words “Predator Security” emblazoned on the back. His is an uneventful life shared with his grumpy wife and a lackadaisical dog in a rundown farmhouse outside town. One day while fishing Nelu catches a Turk, a bearded little fellow with a hangdog look about him and no papers. Nelu speaks no Turkish. The Turk speaks no Romanian. Still they talk to one another, the Turk’s words not provided with subtitles, so the audience understands him no more than Nelu does. Nelu takes the Turk under his wing and endeavors to help him cross the border into Hungary to make his way to Germany, where it seems that he is bound. Obstacles pop up in the form of Nelu’s wife, who is adamant that she does not want a stranger in the house, and a pair of border security guards who want only to see the Turk moved on to another jurisdiction where he will be someone else’s problem. Meantime Nelu’s attempts to smuggle the Turk across the border prove comically inept. I could only be touched as the two men bond after a fashion and Nelu refuses to abandon his friend. Not my favorite of the festival, not a film of which I would say that you should make an effort to see it, Morgen is nonetheless rewarding. It draws us a little bit from our own world and a bit into another that we might carry with us as we leave the cinema.

Toll Booth
dir. Tolga Karaçelik
2/23 8:30pm Pioneer Place 5
2/25 3:30pm Lloyd Mall 6
(96 mins)

I did not see this one coming. What begins as a mildly, somewhat quirkily humorous story about a man with a boring job and a seriously ill yet domineering father turns into an account of the toll booth attendant’s descent into madness.

Kenan does not join in the workplace banter or engage in chitchat with the drivers who pull up to his toll booth. He asks for the ticket, tells the drivers what is owed, and counts out their change. The festival program note describes him as taciturn. A coworker calls him Robot. At home his relationship with his father is marked by tension and simmering rage that never quite erupts. The father wants to fix Kenan up with a woman from the neighborhood who stays with him during the day while Kenan is at work. She is a perfectly nice young woman and clearly receptive to the idea. Kenan is not interested.

At night Kenan stays up trying to fix his father’s old car, the source of a lone fond memory from a boyhood where his mother died of cancer and his father grew embittered and distant. Kenan keeps his attempts to restore the car secret from his father, who never finds satisfaction with anything Kenan does. Beset by hallucinatory dreams, he sleeps fitfully at best. As he slowly unravels, he begins to hallucinate at the toll booth, one day suffering a minor meltdown as he imagines his father as the driver of the car pulled up to his booth, mocking him with accusations of secret desire for the neighbor, that he stares at her ass and fantasizes about humping  her. As a consequence his superiors transfer him from the busy, high-profile toll plaza to a remote outpost where he will be the only attendant and perhaps four cars pass through during the entire shift. One of those cars is the exact same model as his father’s car, and it is driven by a beautiful woman who shows up precisely at 10:20 each morning. Kenan is enchanted at the first encounter. Soon enchantment turns to obsession.

The pace is slow; a woman behind me in line for yesterday’s documentary about Gerhard Richter likened it to watching paint dry. I would not quibble with her assessment. The drying paint bubbles over on occasion into unanticipated humor, as when a white-haired, bearded fellow suddenly appears weaving between the vehicles lined up to pay their tolls, chased by a woman attendant screaming, “You here again, you perv! I told you not to come back. I will fuck you up!” She has to be pulled off the poor fellow, a truck driver who we are left to imagine did something to offend her, perhaps ogling as he looked down from the truck cabin or making some proposition to which she was not amiably disposed.

Dream and reality, whatever either may be, slip into and out of one another. Kenan’s grip becomes ever more tenuous as the film builds to a conclusion of mesmerizing intensity. When the lights came up at the end, a woman in the row behind me exclaimed this was the best one she had seen yet and invoked Fellini. I thought of Bergman.

David :: Feb.19.2012 :: House Red: Film :: No Comments »

Goodbye First Love
dir. Mia Hansen-Løve
2/17 8:45pm Cinema 21
Schedule is subject to change. Check the PIFF 2012 website for schedule updates, ticket info, and other neat stuff.

Goodbye First Love is a sweet film. At the outset Camille is fifteen and in love with Sullivan, older but not by a lot, perhaps a couple of years. Those who speak so knowingly of such things in segments on public radio and popular books, offering up generous recommendations for self-help, doses of therapy, and pharmaceutical cocktails, might say Camille is a tad obsessed. Sullivan loves Camille in turn but tells her they need more in their lives than each other, a reasonably perceptive observation while also rationalization for his trip to South America with two friends. At first Sullivan writes frequently, and Camille pushes pins into a map to plot his journey. As happens, after a time Sullivan’s letters cease to arrive. Eight years pass. Camille sets out on a career as an architect and finds new love. Then a chance encounter brings Sullivan back into her life. The two young people discover their love neither over nor a whit less complicated than before. Løve paces her film with exquisite patience, an evocation of profound feeling, melancholy, and surpassing tenderness.

David :: Feb.15.2012 :: House Red: Film :: No Comments »

The Front Line
dir. Hun Jang
(133mins)
2/22 6:00pm Whitsell Auditorium
Schedule is subject to change. Check the PIFF 2012 website for schedule updates, ticket info, and other neat stuff.

I saw The Front Line because I was able to catch a press screening yesterday afternoon and that is what was playing. An excellent film with a fine cast offers a fresh take on some conventions of the genre, among them the stupidity and callousness of commanding officers, insubordination, drug addiction, romance, and fraternization with the enemy, along with familiar types, the grizzled sarge, the wise guy, the new kid. A young South Korean officer sums up: “The enemy isn’t the commies. The enemy is the war.” At the end a North Korean officer no longer knows what they were fighting for. “It has been so long. I forgot.” That I walked away empty is a testament to The Front Line‘s effectiveness in conveying its theme of the awful waste and stupidity of war.

David :: Feb.14.2012 :: House Red: Film :: No Comments »

PIFF 2012: Snows of Kilimanjaro (France)
Snows of Kilimanjaro
dir. Robert Guédiguian
(107 mins)
2/13 8:45pm Lloyd Mall 6)
2/16 8:30pm Lake Twin Cinema
Schedule is subject to change. Check the PIFF 2012 website for schedule updates, ticket info, and other neat stuff.

Director Robert Guédiguian returns to Marseille and working-class concerns that occupied him in Marius and Jeannette (1997), a film I recall seeing some years ago and liking, though details escape me. The recollection led me to Snows of Kilimanjaro (no relation to Hemingway) at the film festival, and oh am I delighted that it did, for Snows of Kilimanjaro is a wonder, glorious in many ways. I adore it.

The film opens on the Marseille waterfront where union workers are gathered outside a plant whose workforce is being downsized due to globalization. The twenty men who will lose their jobs are determined by a random drawing conducted by Michel, the union representative. To the surprise and dismay of Raoul, Michel’s comrade, lifelong friend, and brother-in-law, Michel draws his own name from the box. As union representative he did not have to include his name in the drawing, but to allow himself preferential treatment would be unthinkable.

Michel will be okay even with the early retirement he did not seek. He has his pension, and his wife, Marie-Claire has her work, and they have their children and grandchildren. Perhaps most of all, Michel and Marie-Claire have each other. Although Snows of Kilimanjaro is not a love story, the relationship between Michel and Marie-Claire is as beautiful a depiction of love as I have ever seen in film. This love is nothing like the love described by Batiste in Les enfants du paradis, an impossible love that Garance tells him exists only in dream, not in reality, to which Batiste responds, “Dream, reality, it’s all the same or what’s the use in living.” The love of Michel and Marie-Claire is rooted in a shared life and the shared values that shape it, family and work, and sense of our common humanity as socialists in the tradition of Jean Jaurès (1859–1914), whose name Michel is given to invoking.

The younger workers who have been downsized are not as fortunate as Michel. They have not been employed long enough to qualify for a pension. Other jobs are difficult to find. The bitterness and desperation of one unemployed young worker leads to a crime that traumatizes Michel and Marie-Claire, Raoul, and Raoul’s wife, Marie-Claire’s sister, Denise, and moreover gives rise to a crisis of conscience. Michel wonders if he the union was wrong to decide the layoffs with a random drawing that had a more severe impact on some than on others. Was the union too ready to compromise with management? Might there have been a better way? He also wonders if he is right to enjoy a comfortable retirement, albeit one for which he has worked and sacrificed his entire life, while others cannot find work and provide for their families. Has he ended up just another comfortable bourgeois?

I do not want to say too much about the plot because the way it plays out is handled so by deftly Guédiguian. The characters are finely wrought and realistic, their actions believable. I simply like Michel and Marie-Claire and care about what happens to them. Snows of Kilimanjaro is about principles, conscience, integrity, family, human relationships, ordinary life, a serious film in the very best sense. I give this one all the stars in the sky.

David :: Feb.13.2012 :: House Red: Film :: No Comments »

Clown: The Movie
dir. Mikkel Nørgaard
(88 mins)
2/16 8:45pm Whitsell Auditorium
2/18 5:30pm Lloyd Mall 6
2/20 8pm Pioneer Place 5
Schedule is subject to change. Check the PIFF2012 website for schedule updates, ticket info, and other neat stuff.

Clown is the movie for you if you like your humor crude and sophomoric. Pals Frank and Caspar plan a canoeing vacation because the women will not want to accompany them on it. Caspar dubs it the Tour de Pussy, pretty well establishing the guys’ intentions and the caliber of wit on display in this film. Just before they set out, Frank’s girlfriend informs him she is pregnant and considering an abortion because he is not father material. Whereupon Frank abducts his eleven-year-old nephew and brings him along on the canoeing trip, thinking somehow they will bond and thus demonstrate he is father material. There ensues a succession of clunky mishaps, silly behavior, pot, sex, penis jokes, man-flirting gone awry, a busload of drunken high school students, and armed robbery, all absent a hint, an iota, a scintilla of subtlety, understatement, or cleverness, not a moment of pathos or sense of anything genuine that might lead to empathy. I could have done without this one.

David :: Feb.10.2012 :: House Red: Film :: No Comments »

Café de Flore
dir. Jean-Marc Vallée
(120 mins)
2/11 5:30pm Lake Twin Cinema
2/13 6:00pm Lloyd Mall 5
2/20 7:30pm Cinema 21
Schedule is subject to change. Check the PIFF2012 website for schedule updates, ticket info, and other neat stuff.

Café de Flore is composed of twin tales of love and obsession. The parallel storylines involve a man with every reason to be happy and the lucidity to realize it and a boy with no reason to be happy and without the lucidity to realize it.

The first story is set in contemporary Montreal. Antoine Godin is about 40 years of age and seemingly has everything: a dream job as a DJ, two beautiful daughters he loves dearly, a fine house, life with a woman with whom he is passionately in love. Alas, Antoine and his ex, Jacqueline (Vanessa Paradis, Adèle in Patrice Leconte’s La fille sur le pont), still have feelings for one another that grow darker and more obsessive with time, however much they try to put those feelings behind them.

Meanwhile, so to speak, in Paris in 1968 a single mother struggles to raise her son with Down syndrome. She is devoted to her son, her efforts heroic, her love genuine and deep, so deep that love and devotion lead to obsession that can only end badly.

Jean-Marc Vallée employs two plot devices that ordinarily put me off. Here they serve the director and the film well. Although the film is perhaps a bit longer than it needs to be, a minor point, Vallée effectively employs repetition to build suspense, not least by raising the prospect that the story’s conflicts might be resolved in a horribly clichéd manner almost sure to mar everything, at least for this viewer. It turns out that the climax is sufficiently inventive to be satisfying despite elements of contrivance. Cliché it is not. More cannot be said of any of this without giving away too much.

Café de Flore may not be quite on a par with the previously reviewed The Salt of Life and Where Do We Go Now? Nonetheless, it conveys considerable dramatic tension, suspense, characters with whom we might not identify but can care about, and on occasion a measure of wit. That is pretty good.

David :: Feb.10.2012 :: House Red: Film :: No Comments »

Where Do We Go Now?
dir. Nadine Labaki
(100 mins)
2/11 8:30pm Whitsell Auditorium
2/13 6:00pm Lake Twin Cinema
Schedule is subject to change. Check the PIFF2012 website for schedule updates, ticket info, and other neat stuff.

 Where Do We Go Now? starts slowly. I found myself wondering if this might be a film with an admirable theme but not compelling cinema. It turns out I could hardly have been more mistaken.

Where Do We Go Now? is funny, full of wonderful, crusty, earthy humor, and deeply moving. The setting is a small, remote village surrounded by the sectarian fighting that plagues the country. The men of the village, Christian and Muslim alike, are all hotheads, ready to go off at any provocation, real or imagined. The women, Christian and Muslim, have buried too many husbands and sons. They are united in their efforts to prevent the fighting from spilling over into their village. Their schemes range from the age-old tactic of withholding sex to a faked miracle, bringing in Ukrainian girls from the Pleasure Palace Nightclub to provide a distraction, and serving up hashish cookies to calm down the men. Finally, Christian women put on the chador and prostrate themselves, chanting, “Allahu Akbar,” while Muslim women worship as Christians and go out into the street flaunting dresses that reveal bare arms and legs. They tell the baffled men, “I’m one of them now.”

The sense of tragedy is not diminished by the humor with which the film abounds. The people of the village are caught up in awful circumstances not of their making. Still they have life to live, and humor is as much part of it as  the rage, grief, and loss that bring even faith into question. In a scene that calls to mind Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, a Christian woman asks the Virgin how she can allow the senseless deaths of sons of the village entrusted to her care. As with Bergman’s knight, the woman’s anguished questions receive only silence in response.

When yet another absurd death occurs, a terrible happenstance one night when two boys take a turn down the wrong street, things appear more hopeless than ever. The imam and priest, allied with the women, meet in the confessional to converse in private. The imam says, “We are in the shit. They are all out of control.” The priest replies, “Dear imam, my hands are tied. I already helped them fake a miracle. I won’t even get into hell now.” Yet the women, the imam, and the priest never just resign themselves to their fate.

I first attended the Portland International Film Festival in 1999, my first year in Portland.  Each year since I have looked forward to the festival as a high point of my winter. I have never been disappointed. This is the context in which I remark that I have gone whole festivals without seeing a film I like as much as Where Do We Go Now? and The Salt of Life.

David :: Feb.05.2012 :: House Red: Film :: 1 Comment »

The Salt of Life (Italy)
dir. Gianni Di Gregorio
(90 mins.)
2/10 6:00pm Lake Twin Cinema
2/12 5:45pm Cinemagic
Schedule is subject to change. Check the PIFF2012 website for schedule updates, ticket info, and other neat stuff.

The 35th annual Portland International Film Festival (PIFF) kicks off on Wednesday the 9th. My first thought when the festival program arrived in Saturday’s mail was to go through it and highlight the films I wanted to see. I gave that up somewhere around Lebanon—the program is arranged alphabetically by country–when I realized I was highlighting almost everything. Perhaps the better approach is to go at it day to day for whatever strikes my fancy at a particular moment.

 This year my schedule allows me to catch some of the festival press screenings at Whitsell Auditorium, a nice benefit of Silver Screen Club membership I have not previously taken advantage of. Monday I saw Gianni Di Gregorio’s gently melancholic comedy The Salt of Life (original title: Gianni e le donne). Writes Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian (Salt of Life — Review):

This thoroughly delightful Italian comedy by screenwriter-turned-auteur Gianni Di Gregorio is a kind of romantic realist-fantasia with Fellini in its DNA, and a little of Woody Allen. . . . also a very rare example of a movie whose starring role has been given to a real human being with a real human face.

That pretty much nails it. The setting is contemporary Rome. Gianni is 60ish, retired and living on his pension. His wife works, their daughter lives at home while attending the university, and the daughter’s slacker boyfriend has more or less taken up residence. The wife and daughter are absorbed in their own lives, to which Gianni sometimes seems not terribly essential as he does the shopping, walks the dog, and runs assorted errands. His days pass uneventfully.

Valerie De Franciscis reprises her role from Mid-August Lunch (2008) as Gianni’s mother, a wonderfully cranky old lady who lives in a splendid house in a fashion well beyond Gianni’s means to support. She is given to calling on him to come over and prepare lunch for herself and her cronies as they drink expensive champagne while playing poker at 11 in the morning, which he does in dutiful and exasperated good humor, same as when she phones at all hours of day or night for him to come over and adjust the television when the picture gets out of whack.

As in Mid-August Lunch food is as much part of the ensemble as the actors and the city of Rome, whether it is breakfast Gianni prepares to serve his wife in bed, lunch enjoyed with white wine on a sidewalk table outside a small restaurant, or dinner with an old flame.

For all this Gianni’s life is missing something. It is not that he is caught in an existential crisis over which he anguishes or obsesses. Rather, there is a vague listlessness to it all, no bounce in his step. He knows he would like something more from life than ending up with the three old men who sit in front of the café all day talking about football. But what that might be, ah, who knows, much less how to get it?

Gianni’s friend Alfonso suggests he have an affair. After all his mother’s nurse is a knockout, and she is right there in the house. Gianni does not take Alfonso seriously, but once the idea is planted, he is bemusedly intrigued. There follows a series of modest, harmless, halfhearted flirtations that need not pan out to add a bit of flavor to Gianni’s life. Hopefulness is seasoned with the bittersweet in just right proportion, as when his hopes are raised when his mother’s nurse says she dreamed about him, only to be dashed when she adds, “you were my grandpa.” Later he wonders aloud, light-heartedly to be sure, why he never married the old flame, to which she responds, also light-heartedly but maybe not altogether so, “because you’re an idiot.”

In lesser hands The Salt of Life could just another more or less amusing tale of an aging Lothario. That it is not that at all, that it is so much more, is a tribute to Di Gregorio as writer, director, and actor. He has given Gianni—and this film—a real human face. That is no small thing.

David :: Feb.02.2012 :: House Red: Film :: 1 Comment »

I did not know Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn before Drive, winner of the Best Director Prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival and recipient of considerable critical claim. Refn’s credits as writer and director rather improbably include the TV movie Miss Marple: Nemesis alongside the films Pusher, Pusher II: With Blood on My Hands, Pusher III: I’m the Angel of Death, and Valhalla Rising. After viewing Drive and reading about his other work, I would say it takes something of an imaginative leap to picture Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple in Refn’s hands.

Drive is more than a bit violent and bloody for more taste, yet compelling. Ryan Gosling’s stoic protagonist is a Hollywood stunt driver who moonlights as a getaway driver. Refn sees the taciturn, preternaturally cool driver as a mythic, fairy-tale hero, a knight in shining armor who saves the damsel in distress. This archetypal figure is grafted onto the existentialist antihero of classic noir who lives not so much outside legal and moral conventions as oblivious to them. Not that he is nihilistic. Far from it, he is bound by a strict moral code and sense of right and wrong that lie beyond articulation.

There is a woman, Irene (Carey Mulligan, whom you may recall from Lone Scherfig’s fine 2009 film An Education). Their paths cross by chance, mutual attraction communicated by shy glances and gestures. There are complications in the form of a young son and an imprisoned husband. When the husband returns home after release from prison, he senses there is something between his wife and her friend. He is bothered by this but lets it go beause he wants to put his criminal past behind him and make a life for himself and his family. In classic noir fashion, the past’s grip is not easily shaken, leaving the two men bound together on a doomed course undertaken because it is the only way they can see to protect the woman they both love.

To say the driver has a dark side is insufficient. There is something more than dark, something deeply bad and wrong, in the excess of violence coldly exhibited, without frenzy or fury, beyond any need of the moment. Thus Refn and Gosling collaborate to make the driver repulsive as well as appealing, for he is both. Contrast him with Lisbeth Salander in Steig Larsson’s trilogy about the girl with the dragon tattoo. No less capable of extreme violence than the driver, Lisbeth does horrible things to very bad people who would inflict as bad or worse on her if they could, and in some instances have done so. Though there were moments I cringed when reading or watching those scenes, I found myself cheering, albeit with something of a guilty conscience, as Lisbeth meted out a brutal justice. I felt nothing like that when the driver stomped the man in the elevator, however clear the man’s bad intent toward the driver and Irene. Is Lisbeth more simpatico because she is a woman brutalized and abused by men from childhood? Or it more that Larsson provides a backstory to give us a sense of why Lisbeth is as she is, it humanizes  her, while Refn’s driver remains a cipher, a mystery, not a realized individual for whom we might feel sympathy if we had a sense of the source of that capacity for violence within him.

The supporting cast is exceptional. Bryan Cranston (Hal in the television series Malcolm in the Middle) demonstrates again what a fine actor he is in a supporting role as Shannon, a mechanic and low-level hustler who perhaps sees himself as something of a mentor to the driver. As given to jittery chatter as the driver is silent, Shannon sets the tone early as he jabbers about a getaway car he’s prepared. “You look tired, kid,” he says to the driver. “Can I get you anything? Benzedrine, Dexedrine, nicotine…oh, that’s right, you don’t smoke.” Mulligan as the femme, Oscar Isaac the husband, Ron Perlman and Albert Brooks the hoodlums, are equally up to the task. Brooks in particular has been singled out, deservedly, for his performance.

In the end I do not know that I would recommend Driver, certainly not without reservation and caveat, and I feel no inclination to see it again. Yet Refn’s film is compelling enough for me to anticipate checking out at least one screening in the series Driven: The Films of Nicolas Winding Refn, on the NW Film Center calendar for March.

Interviews with Nicolas Winding Refn

• Brandon Harris, Nicolas Winding Refn, “Drive” [ ], Filmmaker, September 14, 2011
• Matt Singer, Nicolas Winding Refn on “Drive,” Ryan Gosling’s jacket, and his “Logan’s Run” remake, September 14, 2011
• Steven Zeitchik, Ryan Gosling and Nicolas Winding Refn share the ride, Los Angeles Times, September 15, 2011

David :: Jan.16.2012 :: House Red: Film :: No Comments »

A friend read a review of Pedro Almodóvar’s new film and thought it sounded creepy. The blurb I read did not draw me in, but I saw The Skin I Live In anyway because it is by Almodóvar. After Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, All about My Mother, Talk to Her, Bad Education, to name a few, Almodóvar is an auteur whose films we see because they are Almodóvar. His name should always come to mind when we think of the foremost filmmakers of our time.

The Skin I Live In is intellectually horrific, psychologically suspenseful, and a zany tale of vengeance and madness, in other words, vintage Almodóvar. Held captive on the palatial estate of an unhinged but gifted plastic surgeon (Antonio Banderas) is a beautiful woman (Elena Anaya) on whom he experiments to develop a synthetic skin for burn victims. The woman’s identity and how these circumstances came about are a mystery until a man in a tiger costume comes to the door and rings the bell. The tiger is Zeca the criminal, whose appearance precipitates flashbacks to a tragic sequence of events that began six years earlier.

English plastic surgeon Nigel Mercer says, “I take my hat off to Pedro Almodóvar: this film about a deranged plastic surgeon is absolutely brilliant. My wife was so disturbed after watching it that she started asking me some concerned questions about what my job actually involves.” (Laura Barnett, Another View on The Skin I Live In, The Guardian, 13 September 2011)

For Almodóvar no subject is taboo, no scenario too far-fetched. Themes of identity, sexual and otherwise, are familiar ground for Almodóvar; here they form a unifying thread. The film starts a little slowly, then unwinds quite nicely. The storyline is outrageous, and Almodóvar makes it work, with a denouement where the inevitability of a tragic justice is followed by a touching and unanticipated reunion.

David :: Dec.12.2011 :: House Red: Film :: No Comments »