Karlovy Vary International Film Festival

Karlovy Vary Film Festival Appoints Agnieszka Holland as Jury President, Honors Oliver Stone

Ryan Lattanzio — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 18:39:01 GMT

The 48th Annual Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in Czech Republic announced today that American auteur Oliver Stone will be honored with the Crystal Globe Award for outstanding artistic contributions to world cinema. While Stone's last film was the less-than-outstanding "Savages" in 2012, the writer-director has won three Oscars and helmed many memorable classic films, from "Salvador," "Born on the Fourth of July," and "Platoon" to "Nixon," "JFK" and "Wall Street."

In addition, thrice-Oscar nominated Polish director Agnieszka Holland (holocaust drama "In Darkness") will serve as president of the jury. Holland and her jury will give out Crystal Globe Awards for Best Feature, Actor, Actress, Director and a Special Jury Prize.

The festival runs June 28 to July 6, and the lineup will be announced in June.

6 Personal Highlights From The Film Festivals Of 2012

The Playlist Staff — Fri, 28 Dec 2012 17:12:09 GMT

We're generally anti-navelgazing here at The Playlist, but being the end of the year, it can't really be avoided. As we continue to take a look back at the cinematic year of 2012, we're trying to shake things up and keep things fresh outside of the usual Best/Worst lists. This year saw The Playlist making a presence around the world at more than a handful of festivals. And while you've already read our reviews and news, we thought we'd give you a taste of the experience of attending these festivals. Even if you can't make Cannes or board a flight to Marrakech, we hope this helps in translating what it's like to run around a foreign country with nothing more than a laptop and a love of cinema. So, without further ado, here are six personal highlights from the various film festivals in 2012 we attended.

Telluride - Marion Cotillard’s Tribute/The “Lowlife” Sneak Peek with James Gray
For me, attending the Marion Cotillard tribute in Telluride was just a way to catch up with “Rust & Bone” which had already screened at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year. The tribute to her, at only 37 years old, felt, well, premature to be honest, but it was essentially just mild icing on the cake. Not only did “Rust & Bone” turn out to be one of my favorite films of the year, but the tribute was a surprising and fascinating conversation with an artist who is clearly doing some of the best work of her career. And frankly, it's never too early to ring the bell for the actress. Candid, funny and charming, Cotillard won over the audience easily and the clips of her films put into perspective some of the great things she has done so far, including some of the notable achievements she’s pulled off in her short U.S./Hollywood career so far. The tribute also put into perspective that, at 37 and only having worked in Hollywood ostensibly since “La Vie en Rose” (though she had done a few American roles before that), she had already worked with Ridley Scott, Christopher Nolan, Steven Soderbergh, Michael Mann, Woody Allen, Jacques Audiard, Tim Burton and Abel Ferrara to name a few.

So the tribute turned into a great little meal instead and it even came with a fantastic cherry on top. Director James Gray (“We Own The Night,” “The Yards”) showed up, regaled the audiences with stories about Cotillard (he cast her before even seeing her act) and teased the audience with a five minute clip of his upcoming 2013 film “Lowlife,” which stars Cotillard as a Polish immigrant in 1920s New York who is manipulated by Joaquin Phoenix and then potentially saved by a magician played by Jeremy Renner. It’s likely no secret that many Playlist members are fans of the undervalued Gray and so getting a sneak peek of the film -- with its gorgeous chiaroscuro lighting from DP Darius Khondji and its moody operatic tone in general -- was a total treat. That was what I would call a great and immersive festival experience, all and all. I would also be remiss if i didn’t include being in attendance at the world premiere of Sally Potter’s comeback with her devastating “Ginger & Rosa” featuring a lovely and heartbreaking standout performance by Elle Fanning, who mark my words, will have many Academy Award nominations (and possible wins) under her belt by the time she’s 30. She is the real deal. (Rodrigo Perez) All of our 2012 Telluride coverage can be found here.

Sundance - World Premiere of ‘Beasts of the Southern Wild’
If you’ve never been, scheduling your Sundance Film Festival can be extremely nervewracking. With 200+ films playing for 10 days, there’s no way to catch everything, so you just do the best you can to see as many quality films as you can. (Identifying which are the quality films beforehand can be a nearly impossible task, and skipping over a film that ends up being the breakout hit of the fest is something that every critic and festivalgoer fears.) While I was drawing up my schedule for Sundance 2012, one film I had completely skipped over was “Beasts of the Southern Wild” from first-time director Benh Zeitlin.

Since I hadn’t seen Zeitlin’s short “Glory At Sea,” all I had to go on was a single image featuring a young girl with fireworks and a description which read: “Hushpuppy, an intrepid six-year-old girl, lives with her father, Wink, in “the Bathtub,” a southern Delta community at the edge of the world.” Despite appearing in the U.S. Dramatic Competition section -- known for producing breakout hits over the past years like “Blue Valentine” and “Winter’s Bone” -- the synopsis sounded like something that could very easily go wrong and be absolutely painful to sit through, so I planned to skip it.

Shortly before gearing up for the fest, with my schedule nearly in place, I spoke to my cousin, who told me he’d worked on a little film the previous summer and that I should let him know how it turned out. I noticed that my schedule had a hole that Friday morning when his film was scheduled to have its World Premiere, so I decided to give it a shot. Obviously I had no idea when I sat down for my very first screening of the fest that this would become the hottest ticket of the fest, sending other critics scrambling to get into subsequent screenings. That film turned out to be “Beasts of the Southern Wild” and when the lights went down I, like most in the audience, was swept away.

I’m not sure if it was exhaustion or emotion but I found myself almost inexplicably moved to tears. It wasn’t a dramatic moment that brought on the waterworks, it was a simple music cue. As Hushpuppy and her friends marched over the hill to the swells of “The Confrontation” tears began streaming down my face. Listening to it now, I still get goosebumps. The feeling in the room was electric and afterwards the film’s young director and stars received a standing ovation. It was, obviously, a highlight of the festival, but I still wasn’t sure if it would have much commercial appeal. But I figured that if it got picked up by a carefully-curated specialty outfit like Oscilloscope (who seemed a natural fit), it would eventually find an audience.

Imagine my surprise a few days later while standing in line for another screening, I overheard a Fox Searchlight executive who was asked by a friend what was his favorite film of the fest so far? His answer was “Beasts of the Southern Wild.” The next day it was announced that they had bought the film. If you had asked me beforehand which film might’ve been most likely to be picked up by FS, I probably would’ve said “Safety Not Guaranteed,” (which seemed like it could’ve been a “Little Miss Sunshine”-sized hit in their hands). But credit to Searchlight for buying ‘Beasts,’ a film that doesn’t fit any pre-existing template, and managing to turn it into an arthouse hit.

Much has been made about the Sundance effect of festival crowds hyping a film that can’t possibly live up to those expectations outside of Park City, but there’s still something magical about being in the room for the very first screening of that special film that everyone will still be talking about 12 months later. In a few weeks I’ll be going back for my third round of Sundance, crossing my fingers that I don’t pass over that special film hiding in plain sight on the schedule. (Cory Everett) - All of our 2012 Sundance Coverage can be found here.

Cannes - The Weinstein Sizzle Reel Presentation
While other film festivals around the world have secret screenings and other surprises for movie fans, the Cannes Film Festival’s prestigious nature hasn’t seen them follow down that path. While one always hears rumblings of various films showing footage for buyers (if I remember correctly, “Cloud Atlas” was being shown off back in May for very select people), what The Weinstein Company pulled off was rare indeed. The distributor invited a modest number of film writers and sites (including us) for a special presentation that turned out to be sizzle reel footage from “Django Unchained,” “The Master” and “Silver Linings Playbook” (each link has that initital report). Now, bear in mind, this was months before any trailers or advertising dropped for any of the movies, but looking back, it’s impressive to see the Harvey Weinstein machine in action. Indeed, the famed producer personally introduced the event (catered too, which means a lot to fest journos who usually don’t eat very well), held in a decent-sized hotel screening room, clearly proud of the movies he would be repping for Oscar season. And while it was fantastic to get an early glimpse of all three films, it’s even more impressive to note how passionate Harvey can be. While he can still be a polarizing figure, this event cemented that there are few who will get behind a movie and run with it the whole nine yards like he does. This impromptu gathering may not have made waves with the public at large, but it’s Harvey doing what he does best, zeroing in on those who can start the conversation, and starting the kind of slow build that reaps rewards (and awards) later on. (Kevin Jagernauth) -- All Our 2012 Cannes Coverage can be found here.

Fantasia - Midnight Screening Of “Miami Connection”
There are few screenings in my life that will ever match what I witnessed at the Fantasia Film Festival showing of “Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World” a couple of years back. Fantasia has one of the most vocal and entertaining audiences (in the best way possible) you’ll ever get the chance to experience, and they nearly tore the roof off in appreciation of Edgar Wright’s film. In short, they participate (applause, cheering, and much more), so a midnight screening of rediscovered ‘80s trash “Miami Connection” seemed the perfect fit. And Fantasia did not disappoint. Even though it wasn’t sold out, and didn’t quite reach the heights of ‘Scott Pilgrim,’ the audience rocked with the adorably awful movie, audibly ooh-ing and aah-ing at the right dramatic beats for the orphan subplot, and appreciatively receiving the action scenes. For someone who often sees films with hushed colleagues at press screenings, Fantasia is always a great reminder that cinema is also communal, with room to be silly and blow off steam. (Kevin Jagernauth)

Karlovy Vary - “What is this Film Called Love” Screening & Mark Cousins Interview
By contrast with some of my colleagues’ highlights, the first of mine took place in a sparsely populated theater in Eastern Europe at 9 AM; the press screening of Mark Cousins’ “What is this Film Called Love” at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. Frankly, while it was circled on my increasingly ratty and dog-eared schedule, it was always one of those films that looked like it might get shunted in favor of another movie, or a bit of a lie-in, but however the stars aligned, I found myself there, a few minutes early in fact, and with no particular desire to see whatever incest drama had the 10 AM slot (I’m guessing here, but there were a lot of incest dramas).

That day, that week, that month I had a bunch of things on my mind -- Life Decisions that had to be made -- and I think the quiet emptiness of the darkened theater appealed to me, too. Then the unmistakable voice of PJ Harvey roused me from my reverie, and I watched this guy ramble around Mexico City talking in voiceover to a laminated picture of Sergei Eistenstein for 79 minutes. And I cannot tell you why, but somewhere along the way (actually I know the precise scene), a dam broke in my brain and suddenly all my thorny decisions were made.

Sometimes a film, good, bad or indifferent, just finds you at the right moment. And this is what happened here. The weird thing is I still can’t claim that my experience had anything to do with the film’s quality - I grappled with the task of reviewing it somewhat objectively, and failed, (see here.) But I unequivocally admire the bravery of the endeavour, and the film’s simple faith that if you try to be as honest as you can, you may lay yourself open to accusations of self-indulgence, pretension, grandiosity, or dullness to most of the audience, but maybe you also make something that someone three rows back on the left will respond to in some unforeseeable, wholehearted way.

I emerged buzzing from the screening into the bright Czech sunshine, and immediately went off to set up what proved to be a hugely enjoyable interview with Cousins, whom you simply can’t have seen the film and not feel like you know. And that in itself was part of what made the experience so great, not just the film, not just the chatty, relaxed interview, but to be at the sort of small, well-run, helpful festival where you can stumble into the press office all screen-blind and incoherent, and be sitting at a table in an outdoor café with the director ten minutes later.

Films can be massive - of this we are reminded every day at the multiplex. But films can also be tiny, minuscule yet weighted with a heart of gold. And if you’re lucky enough to find the right one at the right moment, movies, I have always believed, can help. “What Is This Film Called Love” didn’t solve my riddles but it did remind me of how to do that for myself, by just being unapologetically what it is: open-hearted, curious, unafraid of ridicule, brave. It is all those things, and it is also a far-too-personal, doodly, meandering mess. I couldn’t have had a better time with it. (Jessica Kiang) -- All our coverage of the 2012 Karlovy Vary International Film Festival can be found here.

Marrakech - James Gray Interview
So we’re running the severe risk of James Gray overkill here, but interviewing the director at the Marrakech International Film Festival was also a highlight of my festival year, and not just because he proved such an interesting and articulate interviewee. Not doing press for a film per se (“Lowlife” will probably premiere at Cannes), and in his capacity as a Jury member, the erudite Gray seemed to have thoughts about cinema more generally on his mind, and the role of criticism and the place of narrative and… basically a bunch of things that we don’t often get to talk about with the filmmakers we admire.

The resulting expansive, thoughtful and often passionate reflections on the nature of modern American filmmaking can be read here, though I may have done them scant justice in written form. Thing is, if you get the chance to hear this guy talk at any point, I’d jump at it -- it’s hard to communicate just how refreshing it can be, in these days of soundbites and taglines and PR speak, to hear someone so amply qualified talk in complete sentences about the medium we love, peppered liberally with anecdote and analogy. Gray believes that the discourse around film is important, but on this evidence his contribution to that discourse, not just as a filmmaker but also as an observant and engaged commentator, may itself be hugely valuable. (Jessica Kiang) -- All of our 2012 Marrakech Film Festival coverage can be found here.

Karlovy Vary Film Fest Review Roundup: 'Boy Eating The Bird's Food,' 'Camion' & 'Your Beauty Is Worth Nothing'

Jessica Kiang — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 13:38:02 GMT

"Boy Eating the Bird’s Food"
For the first few minutes of “Boy Eating the Bird’s Food” (“To agori troei to fagito tou pouliou”), the feature debut from Greek director Ektoras Lygizos that premiered In Competition at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, one could be forgiven for believing him to be heavily under the influence of his countryman Yorgos Lanthimos: the film starts with a slightly surreal sequence in which the central character, played by Yiannis Papadopoulos, goes to audition/interview for a peculiar job which requires him to sing in an oddly creepy falsetto. The bleached-out grade and handheld, close-up-heavy camera work add to the claustrophobic discomfort, but it soon becomes clear that this is not a Lanthimos-esque carefully constructed alternate universe. Instead ‘Boy’ lays claim to some sort of grim realism, in portraying in unflinching detail, the descent of its protagonist from poor, struggling loner to utterly isolated, poverty-stricken, borderline insane weirdo. It’s not exactly a barrel of laughs.

The relentlessly depressing vibe could, of course, be entirely appropriate if the film had an edifying agenda that brought the narrative out of the specific and into the general, but though some critics have managed to identify topical or allegorical elements to the film, we have to confess they passed us by. In fact, the film is so narrowly focused on the lead that almost no context is admitted, and while we know it to be set in modern-day Greece, we get very little sense of place or culture. Without this colouring round the edges, the dogged cataloguing of this young man’s miseries starts to feel almost exploitative -- if not of the character then certainly of the audience.

In or around the point that we watched our hero masturbate into his hand and then, gagging, eat his own ejaculate, we did start to wonder why we were putting ourselves through this. If the desire was to shine a light on the grim reality of the disenfranchised in today’s Athens, then why do we see him leave a paying job in a telesales centre because the banal grind of the work is beneath him? There are forces at work here outside of societal failure, like his mental deterioration that leads him to make more and more erratic choices. As a result at some point the film resigns its right to make sweeping statements about the human cost of the failure of the Greek economy, in favour of wholeheartedly becoming a psychological portrait of a singularly disturbed individual.

The actor Papadopoulos, commended by the Karlovy Vary jury, does a remarkable job with the merciless material, and the film has identified an interesting, little-seen phase of devolution: the moment that deprivation and harsh circumstance cross the line into abject penury and homelessness. These elements could have combined to much greater effect, instead we get an ordeal that doesn’t really justify the unpleasantness of the watching with any kind of insight. Apparently the generic term for this sort of recession-era social realism is “povertainment”. We could wish this entry in that dubious canon was just a little more povertaining. [C]

"Camion"
A lovely, if tiny, little film, director Rafaël Ouellet’s “Camion,” which got its world premiere at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, is the touching story of an aging trucker who is involved in an accident, and his two sons who come back to spend some time with him in the aftermath. The generous, unshowy performances, the apparent simplicity of the narrative and the specificity of its setting and milieu (small-town Canada) render it perfect festival fare, if a difficult sell outside of that rarefied circuit. But it’s the honesty and the warmth of the treatment that make it, if not essential viewing, then certainly a very absorbing, engaging, likable way to spend 95 minutes.

When widower Germain (Julien Poulin) decides to leave decades of trucking behind due to his inarticulate guilt and grief over his role in a fatal accident, his son Samuel (Patrice Dubois) worries about him, and drives back home, picking up his shiftless brother Alain (Stéphane Breton) on the way. Samuel and Alain are both responding in different ways to the challenges of adult life: Alain mostly by avoiding them, and Samuel by embracing the joyless responsibilities of his job as a night janitor. Without ever sinking into sentimentality or bathos, the film really surprises with its gentleness, and the affection with which Ouellet treats his lead trio. They talk (or they don't), they reminisce, they occasionally drive each other mad, and that’s really about it. This is not a film that relies on devastating revelations or dramatic reveals, it’s a soft, slow burn in which a fragmented family comes back together, and very gently and not in such a way that they might acknowledge or even notice, save each other.

Again, its scope is exceptionally narrow, and if anything it could be accused of being a little unambitious. But it’s hard to stay mad at it when its truthfulness and poignancy is inarguable. And indeed there is something kind of admirable about its un-flashy, quiet optimism. At a festival especially, it’s good to be reminded that stories do not have to be bleak or without hope to feel true and resonant, and here Ouellet is brave enough to allow his characters, with their good hearts and good intentions, to learn enough about each other and themselves so that we can go into the credits on that rarest of things: an entirely earned and satisfying, "happy" ending. [B+]

"Your Beauty Is Worth Nothing"
It’s become almost a cliché: for a quick shortcut to immediate audience sympathy, tell the story of your film through the eyes of a child. But that doesn’t make it less effective, especially when the child’s performance is so wonderfully well-observed and affecting as that of Abdulkadir Tuncer in Hüseyin Tabak’s feature debut “Your Beauty Is Worth Nothing” (“Deine Schoenheit Ist Nichts Wert”), which played in competition at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.

Set among the Turkish immigrant/refugee population of modern-day Vienna, the story revolves around little Veysel, a daydreaming stutterer struggling to assimilate into his German-speaking school, who escapes the bullying in the classroom and the problems at home between his parents and his increasing wild, gang-affiliated brother, by fixating on his classmate and neighbour Ana, and by listening to the music of his namesake, Turkish poet and songwriter Asik Veysel. Indeed, the film’s title is taken from one of Veysel’s songs, which itself plays a pivotal role in the plot.

The sweetness of the little boy’s dreams is offset, though, by the gathering stormclouds of familial and societal strife. And sure enough, his Turkish nationalist brother and Kurdish ex-guerilla father mutually disown each other in a hail of recrimination, after which his brother’s arrest make the possibility of deportation a grave reality for them all.

For the most part, Tabak negotiates the segues from harsh reality to childish romance deftly, and we get a touching picture of how, for Veysel, they are so interrelated as to almost be indistinguishable, and how he can come to believe that if he works hard at one simple task, he might be able to save his family and win the girl in one fell swoop. In that effort he is abetted by the initially reluctant Cem, a macho neighbour who ends up becoming something of a surrogate parent/best friend to the little boy -- a relationship totally sold by both the actors involved, and that gives yet another winning dimension to the story.

Like its protagonist, the film may be just a little too moon-eyed and slight to cut through the way it should, but as a heartfelt, goodnatured coming-of-age story, with a little melancholy political commentary in the background, it is surprisingly affecting. And as for its undeniably liberal agenda? Well, if the filmmakers wanted to give a human face to the effects of often impersonal immigration policies, they did well to choose a face as angelic and lovable as Tuncer’s. [B]

Karlovy Vary Film Fest Review Roundup: 'Shameless,' 'Hay Road' & 'Nos Vemos Papa'

Jessica Kiang — Sun, 15 Jul 2012 15:30:50 GMT

"Shameless"
This year at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, a mini-trend emerged in the form of incest movies, with films that dealt, overtly or tacitly, with the taboo liberally dotting the programme. “Shameless” (“Bez Wstydu”), the debut feature from young Polish filmmaker Filip Marczewski, is, as the title suggests, certainly on the overt end of the spectrum as regards to putting an intra-sibling affair front and center of the story. But while there is much to admire, especially for a novice filmmaker, here the film would have benefitted from spending less time on the splashy, logline-grabbing brother/sister romance, and a little more on the supporting cast and subplots that actually turn out to be a great deal more intriguing.

Tadzik (Mateusz Kościukiewicz) arrives home after a spell in college, interposing himself into the life of his emotionally unstable half-sister, Anka (Agnieszka Grochowska), with whom he has an unwholesome fascination. Anka is determined to make things work with her fiance, however, a local neo-Nazi leader who is spearheading racist attacks on gypsy settlements, just as Tadzik befriends a young gypsy girl who cherishes dreams of escaping her own proscribed future.

Tadzik’s obsession with his sister, which causes the breakdown of all of the other relationships within the film, escalates to the point of consummation, but as much as the leads both turn in excellent performances of conviction and depth, the real discovery here is Anna Próchniak, in her first film role, as Irmina, the young gypsy. Hers is a truly luminous presence and both her story and that of the local neo-Nazis feel more important and more arresting than the illicit activities of the central duo, however transgressive. With Próchniak all but offscreen for the last third of the film, interest flags considerably.

Still Marczewski is definitely a director to watch, for his deft handling of politically tricky subject matter and for his ability to get remarkable performances from his actors. Once he hones his storytelling instincts to the same degree, he’ll be a force to be reckoned with indeed. [B]

"Hay Road"
For any fan of the Western form, the premise of “Hay Road”(“Estrada de Palha”) sounds intriguing if familiar: deep in the Finnish countryside (OK, we had to look that up, but somewhere snowy anyway) a self-exiled loner receives word of his brother’s murder, and sets out on a journey back to his Portuguese hometown to exact revenge and claim, as his own his brother’s widow, the woman he has always loved. But as spartan as that description may be, it’s Dickensian in detail compared to what actually happens in the film, in which our hero sets out to achieve all of the above, but in defiance of narrative convention, and indeed of audience interest, actually ends up pretty much failing to Do What A Man’s Gotta Do on every level. No doubt director Rodrigo Areias is using some of the genre’s conventions and jettisoning others in pursuit of a philosophical agenda, a trick pulled off to various extents by films like “Dead Man,” “Meek’s Cutoff” and “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.” But honestly that level of sophistication, if such it is, was lost on us amid the meandering, loosely-plotted episodic feel, and the frustrating blankness of our central character, played by Vítor Correia (from some angles very Selleck-ian, so there’s that).

There’s a nice sequence in which he goes to jail and despite a mile-high language barrier an unlikely bond springs up between him and a black fellow prisoner, but even that opportunity is squandered too soon, proving only a brief point of buddy-movie action and engagement that highlights the rest of the film’s glacial pace and absence of characterisation. And the film’s potentially fascinating setting, in the politically charged period just before the Portuguese monarchy was deposed, is also frustratingly never brought into center stage: instead it haunts the fringes, providing motivations and context for a host of lesser characters which we, sans PhD in Portuguese history, can only scramble to discern.

There are some pretty shots, to be sure, and the open trek across snowy wastelands had a certain stark beauty, but with amateurish performances from the support, and one of over-earnest wordlessness from the lead (an early moment in which he looks up dramatically from a letter and gazes off into the middle distance as though THINKING was a sad signal of Acting Technique to come), create too much of a remove for any real investment to happen.

Part road movie, part western, part meditation on the nature of...we know not what, we could maybe have given the film more props if it hadn’t overtaxed our patience so much. As it is, it feels overlong at 95 minutes and will leave you not greatly enlightened at that end of that time as to what it was really trying to say. [C-]

"Nos Vemos Papa"
Co-writer of 2010’s “Leap Year,” a Mexican film we reviewed at VIFF ‘10, Lucia Carreras makes her directorial debut with “Nos Vemos Papa,” an almost hermetically sealed film about grief that strays early on from thoughtfulness into ponderousness and never really returns. More’s the pity, because the performances are soulful and committed, particularly from lead Cecilia Suárez who is onscreen almost every moment and who really sells her role as Pilar, a woman so completely adoring of her father that she essentially unravels following his death (thematic comparisons to the aforementioned “Leap Year” abound.)

Unfortunately, Carreras allows that unravelling to take place at an excruciatingly slow pace, with minimal dialogue and minimal human interaction, and becomes overreliant on Suárez’s haunted, bewildered expression to communicate the inner story. And when Pilar’s monomania devolves into quasi-incestuous territory (she fantasizes about having sex with her father, only to be discovered, in flagrante, by her horrified brother), even then the opportunity for drama is ignored in favour of Pilar mooning about again, now in her brother’s house, exerting a creepy but wordless and unexplored influence over her niece. The fact is, that while the restraint demonstrated by Carreras may possibly ring more truthful than a more hysterical approach, it is not exactly cinematic, and so we get extended periods of the movie which feature nothing but Pilar moving slowly from room to room, picking things up… and… then… putting… them… down… again.

A rather bleak ending, in which her brother more or less washes his hands of her and she almost joyfully reverts to her quietly deranged former way of life, in which she simply imagines her father to still be alive and carries on conversations and plays games with him, does prompt some interesting questions about familial duty and whether you should intervene in someone’s insanity if it is the only thing keeping them content. But by that stage the film has rather overstayed its welcome anyway. Pilar seems destined for a fate as a lonely, Grey Gardens-style shut-in whose only company is a ghost animated solely by her grief. But the real mystery is how the hell we can watch and understand all that, and yet remain largely unmoved. [C]

Mark Cousins On ‘What Is This Film Called Love,’ PJ Harvey, 'Prometheus' & “The Sadness Of Time Passing”

Jessica Kiang — Sat, 14 Jul 2012 16:33:02 GMT

Having seen and loved Mark Cousins’ almost unreviewably subjective “What Is This Film Called Love” on its international premiere at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival last week (read about that experience here), we got to sit down with Cousins in person pretty much immediately afterwards. And it felt rather like walking straight back into the film we had just left: ‘What Is This Film’ is so unapologetically personal that it’s difficult to escape the feeling that, like him or not, you kind of know Cousins by the end of it.

The man we met entirely bore our own impressions out. As erudite and passionate about films and filmmaking as you would expect from the creator of the mammoth, already canonical 15-hour-long “The Story of Film,” there is also a restless energy about him, and a friendly informality that entirely gels with the persona he projects onscreen, and that made it an easy pleasure to chat to him about the music, the inspirations and the challenges behind making his "ad-lib" of a film.

How do you think a film as personal and individual as this one will be received?
“Well, I just felt that if I was completely honest about my own emotions then people might see something [in it]. Some will say it’s just an ego trip or something…” says Cousins, later adding, “I’m sure I’m going to get horrible reviews! I can already see the one star ratings.”

However the few times it has screened to date have also brought their fair share of positivity, our own included: “film bloggers [who’ve seen it] so many of them have reviewed it as a personal letter to me, and talked about their own lives. [Er, guilty!] The fact is, when you make something like this, you don’t know what you’ve made, but if it makes people reflect on their own emotions, then that’s fantastic...I know I’ve made something that is sincere and captures those three days in my life, three days I can never get back. I was on my own and just as alive as I've ever been.”

It’s the kind of personal essay that could easily have remained a putative pet project, or just a scribble in a notebook. At what point did it really become a film?
“I’m always making things, and I did it to fill my three days. But no, I didn’t know what it would turn into. I knew I was being stimulated by thinking about Eisenstein’s ideas, so I went home and showed my editor: ‘I’ve just shot this thing, there might be something here and I know it’s from the heart.’ So we started to cut it (we cut very fast)...and we got it to 75 minutes and looked at it and thought ‘oh! There could be something here.’ And then we sent it to PJ Harvey.”

Cousins had included in the rough cut the PJ Harvey track “To Bring You My Love,” which is also in the final film, and sent the early edit to her to see if she would allow its use. Her response, he suggests, was instrumental in building his confidence about the project. “She sent me the most beautiful letter back saying she’d been inspired by the film and ‘Here are two new tracks as well, would you consider using them?’ And we used them, of course. So the first piece of music in the film is a PJ Harvey song that had never been used in public before, and it’s about Mexico -- by pure chance.”

He is well aware of the alchemical effect her tracks have on the film. “I said to [her afterwards] ‘Your music lifts this film off the ground,’ which I really think it does. Also what she does is she genders the film in a very interesting way. Surprisingly I would have made a more feminine film if it hadn’t been for PJ Harvey. Her music is hard and her voice is [growls huskily] so she provides this quite masculine element to what’s otherwise quite a gentle thing. I love that.”

Aside from Harvey, how did you approach the soundtrack?
“We had used some of the music of Simon Fisher-Turner’s as guide music -- he’s done music for silent films and Derek Jarman films -- and we sent it to him and he [also] wrote a lovely email back, and so I started become encouraged, particularly by the music. Music people understand, you can sit in your bedroom and write a song or you can make music in your computer about you, your personal life, your sense of joy. But we’re slightly more embarrassed about making really personal films. Music people get it -- so maybe music people will get my film down.”

Later we return to the subject in the context of the love theme from “Vertigo” by Bernard Hermann which Cousins also uses, in defiance of poor beleaguered Kim Novak. “We had cut that sequence and because that first shot is of travelling, it’s very like ‘Vertigo,’ so we tried the Hermann music and I loved it. I’m not afraid of a little cliché, and I think it’s gorgeous, so we put it in and… I sent it to PJ Harvey and Simon Fisher-Turner and Tom Luddy who runs the Telluride Film Festival and a bunch of others and said, ‘Look, I know I have to pull out the Bernard Hermann music because it’s too cliched’ and they all said ‘Don’t.’ So I left it in. I loved it and I loved combining it with the poetry from Norman MacCaig -- the simplest of techniques.”

Speaking of MacCaig, you allude to and sometimes quote from a lot of literary influences.
“I was reading a lot of Virginia Woolf -- she is brilliant at the personal, my favourite writer, the way she writes about her own thought processes, and going walking and daydreaming. I have to say I think Virginia Woolf was the first great documentary filmmaker even though she never made a documentary film.” At other times Cousins uses lines from Frank O’Hara and Joan Didion, while also frequently referencing, of course, Eisenstein's theories and ideas. But it’s not just the poetry and prose he directly refers to that exert their pull over the film’s direction. “I’m very very interested in Asian philosophy, that sense of the ‘ongoing moment’ -- I love that phrase -- and I love a phrase from Roland Barthes that ‘every photograph is light from a distant star.’ So there’s always a sense of having travelled, of moving.”

As much of an "ongoing moment" as it describes, there is a melancholy, nostalgic aspect to the film too.
“Well, every mile forward is a mile lost...I realised as I was cutting it that I was making something quite sad about leaving youth behind. I’m 47 now, so youth is gone -- it was gone years ago. But there’s a sadness about that -- a sweet sorrow. I wanted to make a film about the sadness of time passing.” Later he relates this back to a formative film in any cinephile’s canon: “When I first saw ‘Citizen Kane’ I was a teenager and it just looked to me about technology and the brilliance of film. Now when I look at ‘Citizen Kane’ it’s an elegy for lost youth; it’s about that single moment in time that he’s trying to recover.”

With any personal essay, the issue of authenticity arises. How much of what we see is narrative overlaid after the fact, and how much of it reflects the experience you had at the time?
“Everything.“ replies Cousins immediately. “I was taking notes all the time, you see my notebook occasionally [in shot] and when I’m filming I’m often writing the commentary while the shot is running, so very little changes in commentary at all. Everything is true, even the feel of the dream sequences, like that song I heard 'Avenues and Alleyways,' so all of that is exactly what happened. The only time when the film starts to lie is when Eisenstein writes back to me, but up until that moment everything is pretty much what happened...and was exactly what I thought."

As something of an expert on Classical cinema now, how do you view technological developments like digital and 3D?
“First of all I would say that the art of cinema itself is at a very high level right now...I think 3D and digital haven’t changed cinema fundamentally, it is always going to be about the joys and sorrows of being alive. Right from first moment cinema had an impulse toward reality, and toward dreams, and it still does -- you still see very realistic work and very dreamlike work. So I would argue there hasn’t been a fundamental change in cinema, what has changed is how we watch it.”

A positive answer, but are there trends in current filmmaking you dislike?
“I hate the last acts in American cinema. Nearly always I feel as if [I wish] I’d walked out. The first 40 minutes of ‘Prometheus’ I thought was spectacular then it just piled on the plots too much. As Ozu said, as Cesare Zavattini, the great neo-realist said, ‘plot can become a bully,’ and strongarm the film in a certain direction. I like a bit of plot but it needs to be balanced within the narrative -- action and stasis is a balance that I love in cinema. So I wouldn’t say there’s a filmmaker that I hate, but there’s a tendency to overplot which I hate.”

And finally, you collaborate with Tilda Swinton on various art- and movie-related projects. What can we expect next?
"Each thing Tilda and I do is a one-off. We did the Ballerina Ballroom, we did that whole [mobile cinema driving through the Scottish Highlands], then we went to China and created a magical forest in the China Film Archive, and then we did a flash mob Laurel and Hardy dance. Each one is its own thing, each one is quite childlike in its approach, like a little experiment...We’ve been talking to some activists in Libya who want to bring some old cinemas back to life and have asked if we could help out, I’d love to maybe go and do that, and try and help local filmmakers and activists to create a filmgoing scene.”

Thanks for your time. And for your film, come to mention it.
“I didn’t think I’d be talking about it -- this is really the first time I’ve talked about ‘What Is This Film Called Love,’ so thank you. It’s really helpful for me to talk about the film.”

Karlovy Vary Film Fest Review: Leila Hatami Shines In Wry, Tragicomic 'The Last Step'

Jessica Kiang — Sat, 14 Jul 2012 16:12:02 GMT

If last year’s fantastic “A Separation” put Leila Hatami on everyone’s World Cinema Movie Star radar (you’ve got one of those, right?), then “The Last Step” ("Pele Akher"), which premiered at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival and is directed by her husband, Ali Mosaffa, may be the film that consolidates her position. But while it has already deservedly scooped her the Best Actress award in Karlovy Vary, we shouldn’t let her shimmering but grounded portrayal outshine the film itself. Also the recipient of the International Critics' Prize, the movie engrosses from beginning to end as an inventive, playful, semi-tragic drama of marriage, jealousy, love, death and filmmaking in modern-day Tehran. Perhaps it twists and turns once or twice too often, but even if it does it's crucial to note that its failures are never of ambition or intention. As such it is exciting to see a filmmaker strain at the bounds of his talents and chafe against the restrictions of conventional narrative cinema, especially with what is only his second directorial work.

From the outset, the film is meta to the point of absurd. Mosaffa, an actor-turned-writer/director and Hatami’s real-life husband, also stars in the film as her husband, Koshrow, while she herself plays Leili, an Iranian movie star of no little renown and acclaim. Mosaffa’s character is an architect/engineer, a creative endeavor that parallels that of a filmmaker in many ways, not least in the niggling attention to detail. Here, the titular "last step" refers to the one imperfection in Mosaffa’s greatest building achievement -- the house he lives in with his wife sports an outdoor staircase in which the last step is a different height from the others. It is a source of tragicomic angst to Mosaffa, and compounds a certain existential ennui that is setting in, something only increased by the diagnosis of an illness, and his perception of the growing chasm between his slower, less showy labors, and his beautiful wife’s meteoric career. We know all of this because of Koshrow’s lugubrious voiceover that frequently comes to us, “Sunset Boulevard”-style from beyond the grave. Because yes, early on, he dies, and from that point on the film skips around in time, pivoting around the point of his death, gradually revealing more to the audience of his final hours, and thus gradually making more sense of the glimpses we catch of the aftermath, sometimes days, sometimes weeks, later.

It really is hard to overstate the impish delight director/star Mosaffa seems to take in playing around with flashbacks and flashforwards as a means to pointing out the absurdities and pomposities of his onscreen alter ego. Koshrow emerges as well-intentioned but directionless, with too much leisure time on his hands in which to overanalyze his life, and too little inclination to really attempt to communicate directly with those around him. Feeling like he's past his prime and suspecting his wife of harbouring secret feelings for another, he simultaneously suffers a crisis of confidence while also taking himself way too seriously, and even death doesn’t let him off the hook. It should be said that because his is the only head we ever enter in this way, it’s hard for any other character to attain quite such depth -- for this reason alone, Hatami’s performance is remarkable in rounding out a character who in other hands could just just have been the sounding board for Koshrow's neuroses. Other characters do not fare quite so well, but Mosaffa's performance is engaging enough, and Koshrow’s interior life is rich enough, that we don’t particularly miss them.

To those for whom the unappealing tag “world cinema” comes with associations of Important Issues and Weighty Themes, worthily but turgidly laid out for your education rather than your enjoyment, the playfulness and didacticism-free approach of “The Last Step” may well be a breath of fresh air. While very different in story and style, it pulls off a trick similar to that of “A Separation” in that it espouses a very specific situation so completely and honestly, that it doesn’t matter that the situation may be very far removed from the experience of, say, the average Western filmgoer. The trappings of these middle-class Iranian lives may differ from those of the viewer, but the fears and joys, irritations and moments of grace happen so naturally and so believably that they transcend national, religious, ethnic and social barriers, while never compromising on the specificity of the film's setting.

“The Last Step,” with all its quirky messing-with-the-form and jumbled-up chronology is too self-conscious to be a film that everyone will enjoy, and at times it jolts the viewer out of its world trying to regain its footing after a particularly jarring ellipsis. But for those of us who dig a little cinematic iconoclasm, if it’s done with verve and intelligence, those faults can be overlooked in favor of the the prize beneath: an idiosyncratic, imaginative film tinged with ironic melancholy that is not afraid to have fun with filmic convention, or to poke fun at itself. [B+]

47th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, Days 6 & 7: 'To Kill a Beaver,' 'La meilleure facon de march,' 'Death of a Man in Balkans' and More

Meredith Brody — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 22:04:06 GMT

I slam three cups of coffee, and go see “Zabric Bobra,” aka “To Kill a Beaver,” an intense Polish film about a rogue operative who’s hiding out in a country farmhouse and hooking up with a local wild child while plotting some kind of complicated revenge. I’m impressed with the strong performance of the lead actor, Eryk Lubos. I’m also quite favorably impressed with a long and convincing sex scene that actually raises a blush on my maidenly cheek (as in, it’s hot). The director, Jan Jakub Kolski, is blurbed as “the master of Polish magical realism.” This one is more realistic than magical. Much later, checking his 14-film filmography online, I realize I saw his “Venice” (more magical than realistic) last year at the Seattle International Film Festival. I’m continually reminded during film festivals of just how much more there is out there than any human being could possibly keep track of.

I say goodbye to the young woman from Prague sitting in front of me and rush off towards a 12:30 screening of “Dreams of a Life,” a grim documentary made for British TV. It’s about a woman whose dead body wasn’t discovered for three years, sitting on a sofa, surrounded by dusty Christmas presents she’d just wrapped, with the television still on. Oy.

While standing in line for it, I run into Gabe Klinger. “I thought you’d left!” I say. “ I am leaving,” he says, “I’ve just interviewed Kenneth Lonergan,” nearly levitating with pleasure. Lonergan’s “Margaret,” whose long problematic creative saga (seven years in the making! Several lawsuits!) and multiple versions are currently being given “The Magnificent Ambersons” treatment in the press, is playing here. I saw it under considerably calmer circumstances in San Francisco some months ago and am confused as to what all the fuss is about.

“Dreams of a Life” is grim but compelling as director Carol Morley, intrigued with the tiny story she reads in the newspaper about the death of Joyce Vincent, advertises for people who knew her and pieces together her life after the fact, combining talking-heads footage with imagined re-enactments of her life. I can’t help but think of the more stylish and powerful (and strange) work of Errol Morris, but even drawing a comparison with “The Thin Blue Line” or “Tabloid” places “Dreams of a Life” in excellent company. (Later, reading about Morley online, I see that Morley used a similar technique and advertised for people who knew her in her early and apparently sex-and-alcohol fueled years to make her first documentary film, “The Alcohol Years.”)

I’m surprised and flattered when Festival artistic director Karel Och comes up to me and invites me into his sanctum sanctorum, asking if there’s anything they can do to make my Festival a little easier. I ask for a ticket to today’s 5:30 screening of the Iranian film “Peleh Ahkar,” aka “The Last Step,” directed by Ali Mossafa and starring his wife Leila Hatami, who was so good in last year’s Oscar-winning “A Separation.” That way I can see the 3:30 p.m. press screening of “Smrt coveka no Balkanu,” aka “Death of a Man in Balkans,” without having to leave early and get into the dreaded (though effective) rush line.

Ticket obtained, I can relax while watching what I think of as the “Balkan suicide film”. (Suicide is a recurring theme here.) When I read its program blurb, I’m intrigued because it says the movie is shot entirely in one take. I think of Sokhurov’s propulsive “Russian Ark,” and Hitchcock’s witty “Rope.” But in the event the one take means a fixed camera (supposedly the computer camera of the suicidee), before which the action is played out like a one-act play. My mind wanders and I think of the more fluently filmed recent productions of Britain’s National Theatre, mendaciously called National Theatre Live, of which I’ve seen Helen Mirren in “Phedre”, James Corden in “One Man, Two Guvnors”, Arnold Wesker’s “The Kitchen,” and one version of the double-cast “Frankenstein,” among others. They’re what I term “better than nothing,” i.e., not seeing real live theater at all. I would happily see lots of stuff I can’t travel to or afford, filmed exactly like “Death of a Man in Balkans,” whose Croatian humor is going over better with most of the rest of the audience than it is with me.

The highly-anticipated “The Last Step,” about an actress who’s just lost her husband to an accidental death, confuses the hell out of me. I grow groggy somewhere in the middle (happily, a rare occurrence, which I credit to lots of judiciously ingested caffeine and no midnight movies), but I’ve lost the narrative thread long before then. I just don’t get it.

Afterwards, in the same main Festival hall, “Polski Film,” a hometown favorite (before the screening fully thirty members of the production are introduced onstage, including the second assistant cameraman and a woman who’s either the casting director or the costume designer, holding her jolly fat baby whose first premiere I assume this must be. It’s about a reunion of four well-known Czech comic actors (well-known in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, though not to me, of course), making a movie together in which they play themselves, financed and made in Poland (which leads to, yes, all kinds of Polish jokes). I try gamely to follow, but it’s as though I’m an alien who’s never seen TV or films, watching a movie about the reunion, say, of Beyond the Fringe or Monty Python. As Variety might say: US prospects iffy. (Or any other country that doesn’t speak Czech or Polish).

I must be growing up. Years ago if I saw two movies in a row that I didn’t understand at a festival I would grow morose and question my entire existence. Tonight I merely chalk it up to life’s rich pageant and turn in early, resisting the probably sure-fire charms of “Grabbers,” a comedy thriller about drunken Irishmen and bloodsucking aliens screening at 10:30. Plenty of chances to be enthralled or baffled again soon.

Which means twelve hours later, at a 9:00 a.m. screening of Christian Petzold’s slightly Hitchcockian, smoothly-told “Barbara,” set in grey and sinister 1980s East Germany, very watchable, but with a surprisingly Ladies’ Home Journal-fiction ending. Still, I’ve been hearing about Petzold’s as an interesting director for some time, and was not convinced by his installment of the three-part television movie Dreileben, the only other film of his I’ve seen. I look forward, now, to seeing more of his work (though I don’t go to amazon.de and order any DVDs).

At 11:30, I see “For Ellen,” another in the unfortunately-titled mumblecore genre, a thin tale of a rocker (played by Paul Dano) who tries to re-connect with his 6-year-old daughter as his abandoned wife divorces him. Produced by Bradley Rust Gray (whose “The Exploding Girl,” starring Dano’s companion Zoe Kazan, was my introduction to the genre a few years ago at the Berlin Film Festival), and directed by So Yong Kim, the film co-stars, among others, an almost-unrecognizable Jena Malone, and, to my embarrassed surprise whe I read the credits unscrolling onscreen afterwards, Jon Heder – because I thought the actor merely looked quite a bit like Jon Heder, in certain shots and angles. I must be losing my touch – or he is.

At 1:30, “Waga haha no ki,” by Masato Harada, or “Chronicle of My Mother,” a soapy story of three generations of a wealthy and successful Japanese family. An honored author tries to work out his relationship with his aging mother, who abandoned him as a child, as well as with his long-suffering wife and several children. Note to blurb writers: try to avoid mentioning Yasujiro Ozu; comparisons with the master will only result in disappointment. Not a good sign that I’m paying more attention to the sets and costumes than the rather stodgy narrative.

Afterwards I permit myself a treat: a new print of Claude Miller’s “La meilleure facon de marche,” presented in honor of the French film journal Positif’s 60^th anniversary. They programmed the rather baffling “La Nave delle Donne Maledette” (1954) in similar celebration at Il Cinema Ritrovato last week in Bolgna. This seems a happier choice, at least until the Positif representative introducing the film points out that Miller recently died (before his film “Thérèse Desqueyroux” closed this year’s Cannes film fest), and that both Patrick Dewaere and Christine Pascal later committed suicide (I knew about Dewaere, but Pascal was a new one on me), helpfully telling us the methods. Buzzkill!

Fortunately, the film is compelling enough that I forget the grim introduction. I’m reminded of Pagnol’s delightful and touching “Merlusse,” and in this instance (unlike the Ozu reference above), the thought honors both Pagnol and Miller. I’m so enthralled that I can almost ignore the storm that scarily shakes the tentlike temporary structure (grandly called the Espace d’Orleans) we’re watching the movie in, whose enclosure by rubbery walls smells more like a chlorinated swimming pool with every day that passes.

In the event, we exit calmly, and I actually behave like a human being and join my possibly-sister Mimi Brody for a dinner she’s organized with the delightful Jessica Chiang, late of Malaysia, now living in Dublin, who’s reviewing Karlovy Vary for Indiewire’s Playlist, and whose pieces on Szabo’s “The Door” and “Brian Eno: 1971—1977: The Man Who Fell to Earth” I couldn’t agree with more; David Martos, a radio journalist from Madrid; and Marian Masone, programmer at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. We wander around and stumble into the Ristorante Pizzeria Venezia, a recommended spot that I had poo-pooed because I wanted Czech food, damn it!

I am thrilled to find, alongside the pasta and pizzas, roast knuckle of pork with cabbage and horseradish dumplings (which I would have if it wasn’t such a hot and sultry night) and lamb knuckle with buckwheat dumplings. Others have mushroom risotto, vegetarian lasagna, and pizza; I have a beautifully fried pork schnitzel (two huge ones, actually), and garlicky spinach, although now looking at the menu (you can find EVERYTHING online!), I wonder how I could have bypassed the stouchane bramboury se slaninou, ciboulkou a petrzelkou -- i.e., mashed potatoes with bacon, onion, and parsley – on the five-language (Czech, Italian, English, German, Russian) menu.

Afterwards we scatter, to movies various: I take Mimi’s tip and go see a three-part program devoted to an obscure-to-me Armenian documentary filmmaker, Artavadz Pelesjan, described as a genius ideologically kindred to, oh, just Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov. Beware the overselling: I am underwhelmed by the two short documentaries of his we see, one half-an-hour long, with some astonishing footage of shepherds and farmers battling the elements, and a ten-minute one, mostly about a country wedding. I’m even less taken with the opaque, overcut 50-minute “documentary” about him, aptly described as an “atmospheric mosaic.”

Oh well. I trudge back to the hotel. I turn to the Internet, and while writing up the day’s screenings and researching the death of Marie Prevost, stumble across the intriguingly if clunkily titled “Dangerous Curves atop Hollywood Heels: The Lives, Careers, and Misfortunes of 14 Hard-Luck Girls of the Silent Screen,” by one Michael G. Ankerich. A couple of clicks – it’s so easy! – and it’s on its way to me. It may even beat me home.

Karlovy Vary Film Fest Review: Based On Real Events, 'Piazza Fontana: The Italian Conspiracy' Is A Stylish, Densely Plotted Treat

Jessica Kiang — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 21:59:01 GMT

A deserving winner of the Special Jury Prize at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, “Piazza Fontana: The Italian Conspiracy (Romanzo di una strage)” is a film so skilfully and stylishly put together, that so easily slots into the familiar "procedural" genre, that it almost left this festival attendee feeling guilty, on two counts. Firstly, in amongst the less accessible, though often equally worthy fare that made up a great deal of the programme, the film was remarkable for its commerciality. And by that we don’t mean to damn with faint praise, simply to state that it’s the kind of film that hardly seems to need festival exposure in order to find its audience. And secondly, ‘Piazza Fontana’ is based on true events -- a bomb exploded in the titular piazza in Milan in 1969, killing 17 people -- yet the film’s impeccable aesthetic had us more often admiring the tailoring of a jacket than feeling the weight of real-life tragedy.

But if there is a certain bloodlessness to the way the filmmakers approach the topic, it’s that same careful, considered vibe that serves them well in negotiating the murky, choppy waters of Italian politics in the 1970s. Almost impossibly twisty-turny, we are presented with a picture of a state in which nothing is simply black or white, right or left, good or bad. Within every level of society -- from the government, through the police and secret service, and down to the gangs of anarchists, socialists and neo-fascists who meet in dirty back rooms and cellars to talk revolution -- idealism wars with pragmatism, and loyalty with betrayal. The arcane political manoeuverings and double dealings continue for more than a decade and remain to a certain degree unresolved to this day, leading to the a downbeat, slightly ambiguous denouement. And indeed, one of the most remarkable aspects of the film, and one that shows a certain, very specific flair on the part of the director (Marco Tullio Giordana) and editor (Francesca Calvelli) is in how very subtly it evokes the passage of such a long period of time, and thus avoids ever feeling fragmentary or stop-start. Somehow the story strands don’t lose urgency or momentum over the long span, but occasional intertitles, evolving fashions and glimpses of Calabresi’s wife in various stages of pregnancy, and the the child itself as a baby, and then an infant, feel entirely unforced and germane to the narrative, while also serving to orient us in time. We can only imagine it must have been one of the trickier aspects to pull off, making it all the more impressive that the resulting film feels so slick and knitted-together.

The story runs as follows: police chief Luigi Calabresi (Valerio Mastrandrea) is put in charge of the investigation into the December 1969 explosion, but finds the task of pleasing his superiors and serving the cause of justice further complicated by the death of a key suspect while he is under interrogation. Over the course of the following decade, the picture that Calabresi begins to discern of the truth of the bombings becomes both more vivid and more involved, as his own position becomes increasingly more compromised and dangerous. In its real-life associations, its heavy reliance on the ins-and-outs of police procedure and its open, somewhat mid-air ending, the film evokes David Fincher’s “Zodiac,” while its almost fetishistic attention to period detail, and its muted, textured interiors also put us in mind of Tomas Alfredson’s “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.” While some might wish for a bit more grit, fans of those films, and of cerebral, intelligent, procedural thrillers that do not compromise on the complexity of their political and historical context, will appreciate the film’s meticulous, cool-to-the touch approach. [B+]

47th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, Day 5: 'Army of Shadows,' 'Holy Motors' & 'Trains of Thought'

Meredith Brody — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 17:48:53 GMT

It’s taken several days for the mystery of ticketing for press members to be revealed to me. It took two requests at an information counter to turn up a schedule of press screenings, and two visits to the special ticketing booths inside the accreditation room to learn I can request up to four tickets a day, and that tickets are available for both that day and the next.

It’ll be a relief not to spend hours in the rush lines, though they’ve been the source of interesting conversation, and so far I’ve always gotten into whatever screening I was rushing, which is the whole point, anyway. However, as is often said about the Karlovy Vary festival, it has a very young audience, especially among the all-you-can-eat Fest pass holders, and I sometimes feel like the oldest person at a rock concert, standing among them. (Of course nowadays the oldest people at a rock concert are often onstage.)

First screening, 9:00 a.m., “Alp”, aka “Alpis,” by the Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos. It’s his fourth feature film, none of which I have seen. “Dogtooth,” two years ago, which won the Un Certain Regard award at Cannes and was subsequently nominated for an Oscar, was his breakout film. I have seen last year’s “Attenberg,” which he produced and acted in, which I found fitfully charming.

I don’t connect with “Alpis,” which is described as a black comedy, although I would term it a grey one, both aesthetically – it seems to have been shot with absolutely no thought for lighting – and because of its somewhat lackluster humor. The main character is a quirky nurse, and I find myself thinking longingly of “Nurse Jackie,” starring the indomitable Edie Falco, which has more wit and pathos in half-an-hour (more like 21 minutes on Showtime, preparing for the syndication run) than “Alps” does in an hour-and-a-half (which feels longer). I am surprised, later, when I find it cited by my friend Gabe Klinger in the Reviewers Recommend column in “Screen Daily” as one of his four films to watch (alongside “Margaret” by Kenneth Lonergan, “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet” by Alain Resnais – which Gabe hasn’t seen but is looking forward to – and a program of rare Antonioni shorts. That’s what makes horse races!)

At 11 a.m. I give myself a little gift: watching Jean-Pierre Melville’s implacable “Army of Shadows,” about the French resistance during WW II, on the main Festival screen. Any guilt I might feel at seeing a movie again is instantly erased when it begins: I remembered it as being black-and-white! So now I can (hopefully) remember it in color.

It’s a masterpiece – I would say it is Melville’s masterpiece, except in truth I think it’s only one among many. Critic Rui Noguiera, long-time Melville associate and author of the essential “Melville on Melville,” who introduces the film, says that it’s become a part of history – not just film history, but history in general.

I’m going to a new venue, the Cas cinema right across the river from the main theaters in the Thermal, so I get there early and find that it has its own little café attached, with a pleasant terrace, from which you can see the L’Oreal makeup truck offering free makeovers, a variety of buskers, and marketers handing out freebies ranging from whiskey shots to balloons. (This is the most festive festival I’ve ever attended.) I myself lust after the small stuffed animal which looks like a bright-orange Pink Panther, mascot of the main Festival sponsor, the electricity company. The Pink Panther clone shows up, life-sized, in a series of mercifully brief and actually witty short films that play before every Festival screening, spoofing film genres including horror, romance, and crime. I look for the toy in the Festival shop, without success: it seems you just have to stumble across somebody giving them out. I also wish that the gorgeous Art Deco Crystal Globe award given for Lifetime Achievement in the Festival would be duplicated and sold – as keyrings, or bedside lamps! I’m there.

I sit on the terrace, but I can’t quite figure out exactly where the cinema entrance is, so I ask a guy sitting next to be wearing a Festival lanyard and badge. It turns out that he is a Belgian filmmaker, just arrived, who not only has no idea that the café he’s sitting in is part of a cinema, but that, entirely coincidentally, it’s the location where his film, “Hors les murs,” is going to be shown the next day, as I point out. I tell him, truthfully, that it’s on my short list (“I like romantic triangles,” I tell him), but in the event I don’t manage to see it.

I spend about 3/4s of an hour in line, chatting with an obsessed French cinephile whose hobby is attending film festivals – though he doesn’t see as many movies in Paris, where he lives in the suburbs – to much trouble to drive in! When I mention the Lumiere Festival in Lyon, which somehow he hasn’t heard of, he brightens; his daughter lives there, so he can sleep for free.

At 3:30, I see “For dig naken,” aka “For You Naked,” a Swedish documentary made with a hand-held digital camera by a young girl, whose family friend is a famous Swedish artist who’s looking for love after the break-up of a tempestuous 12-year relationship. He meets a younger Brazilian guy online, and she chronicles three years of their up-and-down relationship. I’m utterly charmed by it, and amazed at how honest and introspective the subjects are. It’s the kind of small gem you stumble across at film festivals: highly unlikely to get a massive release, or to be picked up by a specialty house, or even eventually turn up on U.S. television.

In fact, the main reason I came to this screening was to be in a good position for the screening occurring immediately afterwords in this theater, another documentary entitled “Trains of Thought,” because it’s about one of my obsessions, subways. I’m not exactly a trainspotter, but if a city I visit has a subway, I’m going on it. (Or, if I live there, I’m using it. I was in love with L.A.’s subway when it definitely wasn’t cool.) The film was made by an Austrian filmmaker, Timo Novotny, who I haven’t heard of, although his previous film, “Life in Loops,” which played at a previous Karlovy Vary festival, was apparently a remix of Michael Glawogger’s “Megacities,” made with Glawogger. I’ve just seen almost all of Glawogger’s work in an intense weekend at the Pacific Film Archive, curated by Dennis Lim and with Glawogger in attendance.

I would love to see “Life in Loops,” but I find “Trains of Thought” kinda relentless, kinda slick, with a too-propulsive score by Sofa Surfers, an Austrian band that’s new to me but not, it seems, to a lot of fans in the audience. Although Novotny says afterwards that he wanted to emphasize the differences among the subway systems he chose to explore, I think he’s shot them in too uniform a style. And I would have liked more of an emphasis on the history of the various subways than the impressions of its riders.

But the more that I think about it, the more I realize that, as critics often do, I’m complaining because Novotny made HIS subway film rather than the one that I would have. I would actually happily see it again. I would actually happily see “Trains of Thought 2” (a suggestion I shout out during the Q and A afterwards, when people ask why Novotny didn’t include this or that subway system).

In theory, I have time to squeeze in another screening (or, hey, a real meal or a shower or a nap) before I see Leos Carax’s “Holy Motors” at 10:30 p.m. in the main Festival theater. But I am so psyched to see Carax’s first feature film since 1999 that I choose to get into the rush line almost immediately after seeing “Trains of Thought.” I’m so eager to see it on the big, big screen in the Grand Hall that I have even already attempted to buy a hard ticket, to ensure my entrance, but it’s sold out.

Its second screening, scheduled three days from now, is going to be in the aptly-named Small Hall, which seats 241, as opposed to the 1145 – and more, if you count the standees and stair sittees – that would be breathing alongside me in the big room. I am definitely a size queen when it comes to screen (and audience) size: I have long lamented the state of art house exhibition in the Bay Area.

I am quite overwhelmed by “Holy Motors,” a mad but gorgeous fairy tale in which Carax’s film double, the astonishing and repellent Denis Lavant, changes character (literally, in the back of a limousine driven by the iconic Edith Scob, and figuratively) in a number of amazingly imagined vignettes. The Festival program blurb rather artlessly states (right there in black and white!) that “according to many [“Holy Motors”] should have won the Palme d’Or this year at Cannes…” Having not seen most of its competition (but having been underwhelmed by Haneke’s Palme d’Or-winning “L’amour,” a couple of nights ago), I can’t agree for sure, but it’s certainly the most visually stunning and formally inventive film I’ve seen in a long time. I kind of love it, even though I think Carax has a nasty imagination and a cruel streak. (I can’t stand the way he has chosen to depict Paris, in a deliberately ugly, deformed, although admittedly non-cliched way.)

Afterwards I run into Mimi Brody (no relation, although we like to pretend we are sisters, or maybe I like to pretend we are sisters), who left the UCLA Film Archive for Chicago to program the Block Museum film program at Northwestern University. Apparently our friend Gabe Klinger has assembled a motley crew to celebrate his last night in Karlovy Vary. Director/critic Dan Sallitt, Mimi, Gabe, me, and four or five others (several of whom I recognize from the Toronto International Film Festival) stand around aimlessly in the carnival atmosphere outside the Thermal hotel, trying to figure out where to drink or eat or eat and drink.

Splinter groups break off and eventually most of us meander along the river towards Aeroport, one of those enormous noisy nightclubs that I might have been tempted to enter in my youth. Tonight I hang out outside, chatting with the impossibly charming Karel Och, artistic director of Karlovy Vary, whose second festival this is. As only the best festival directors can, he appears to be everywhere during the Festival: introducing films, hosting dinners, standing outside this vibrating club in the wee hours, available to all.

He’s made of stronger stuff than I am. I turn towards my hotel and, hopefully, sleep (although the raucous sounds of celebrating from the Festival’s open-air Jameson Festival Lounge, conveniently located just up the hill, will continue until 6 a.m. Like some alky bars in NY and SF, the Festival Lounge closes for THREE WHOLE HOURS between 6 a.m. and 9 a.m. Its Facebook page [!] claims that it closes at 4 a.m., but I am proof to the contrary. Although I am intrigued by its signature Jameson ginger cocktail, I will not, in fact, enter it once during its Festival lifespan.)

As I said above: this is the most festive Festival I’ve ever been to. I admire Gabe for being able to leave without a backward glance – although, of course, to borrow a line from Brecht/Weill, he’s only en route to the next whisky bar, i.e. another intriguing film festival in another seductive town. (I have known Festival gypsies that skip from one to another, some for work, some for play. It can become an addiction.) But I seek REM sleep.

Tomorrow, after all, I’m starting with a Polish drama at 10 a.m., with four or five other movies to follow. It’s a tough job, but somebody has to do it.

Kenneth Lonergan On The Inspirations, Performances, Resonances & Structure Of 'Margaret'

Jessica Kiang — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 15:56:01 GMT

This is part 2 of our “extended cut” of the Kenneth Lonergan interview we conducted at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival last week. You can read Part 1 here. “Margaret” was released on DVD and Blu-ray this week in a set that includes both the theatrical and extended cuts of the film. You can read about the differences between the two right here.

Your lead character in “Margaret” is a teenaged girl. You are not now, nor have ever been, a teenaged girl. How did you find your way in to that character, and what do you say to those who find her irritating?
“There are some characters you think of and they’re really vivid to you and they’re easy to write and it doesn’t really matter who or what they are," replies Lonergan. "I don’t know why whatever this is fed itself into the life of a teenage girl. But I had been very interested in teenagers and that combination of sensitivity and dramatisation that they have. And very, very strong reactions to things that adults are more accustomed to, and not necessarily in a good way. They somewhat enjoy the drama which adults also don’t do because we understand it’s all very serious and nothing to enjoy. [But] the energy and wish to correct things that many teenagers have, well, I don’t find that irritating at all. She’s very belligerent and pugnacious but she didn’t just cry and go home and write in her diary, she really tried to do something about what happened, which I think is to her credit.”

Once the character occurs to him, very little changes on that level in the rewrites. “Only if they’re poorly written in the first place,” says Lonergan. “If I have a vivid idea for a character then I’m very happy and I just listen. When it’s going poorly I have to think, I have to make things up. The trick is to think of something that comes alive to me and then it’s alive…”

What inspired the story?
“I don’t know if it was the inspiration but it started with an incident that happened to this girl that I knew in high school. I was 17, I didn’t know her very well but I had lunch with her and she told me this story that had happened to her, exactly as it is in the film and I always thought it was interesting and so many years later I wrote the film.”

“She actually turned up at a screening in New York, and I said, well there’s this girl, Jill B., who told me this story about going to buy a cowboy hat on Broadway and waving at a driver... and then, sitting in the audience, this 49-year-old woman waved at me, and it was her. I hadn’t seen her since high school, and we were not very close friends either, we just had lunch once. I was embarrassed, but she loved it. She said she did, she was cheerful, she said hello. I’d always wondered if she was out there somewhere.”

Did you find personal experience informed the story in other ways?
“Yes. A lot of the material of the school comes from my experience in school as a pupil. The English classroom scenes…there was an argument about 'King Lear,' the exact same argument when I was in 11th grade. And the history class that I took, my American History class had two teachers and they were both very liberal progressive, one of them had worked in the labour movement and our first American History class was about what a rat Abraham Lincoln was...The girls smoking marijuana in the park that was me and my friend Matthew smoking on the exact same rock and our English teacher caught us and said ‘you can’t smoke a jay’ and we made fun of him. And Matthew Broderick [who is still Lonergan’s best friend], he went to that school too and Matthew remembered that, you remember [Broderick's character] the teacher drinks the orange juice and eats the sandwich during the argument? Matthew remembered that our teacher was a diabetic, I’d forgotten and he said ‘Don’t you remember? He had a sandwich and a glass of orange juice in class… can I have orange juice?’ ”

Other characters too, were drawn from life, including one of this writer’s favorites, Emily, Monica’s bereaved best friend. “She was based on a friend of mine who has passed away now, one of my best friends. Emily…has one or two facets of this very multi-faceted woman who was much more positive and had an enthusiastic, brilliant side to her. Emily I think is very intelligent and a good person and moral so most of her character was taken from that friend and then transformed. When you use a real person as a model it always gets transformed a bit by the circumstances and by the act of writing it.”

Other works of art feature largely, from opera to Shakespeare to the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem from which the film draws its name. How did you come across these various pieces?
“I have only ever memorized three poems...I happened to know that poem, and it appeared somewhere in the middle of my writing and as soon as it did I knew what the film should be called -- it didn’t have a title for a while. And then when the poem appeared in the classroom and I saw it was very much the topic...it’s funny when you write. I had a very good time writing this script because I did this experiment where I knew what the structure was and what was going to happen, so I tried not to think at all. I tried to turn off my conscious mind and that’s why the first draft of the script, it was never meant to be shot, but it was 306 pages, because I let scenes go on. I knew where it was going and I knew where the beats were and I just kind of closed my eyes, and it’s amazing what happens when you do that. I had a wonderful time writing it and it was very easy to cut a hundred pages out of it in two weeks -- you know when she goes to see the bus driver in Brooklyn, that scene is probably six pages long and it was sixteen pages long when I wrote it. And the poem just appeared and I felt it was right.”

And as for the segment used in the climactic opera scene? “I had never heard it before. I knew that the end of the film was going to be the two of them at the opera listening to something beautiful. I have a CD called 'Great Duets from Opera' and I heard the piece and thought, well that’s it. And like so many things it turned out to be perfect because it’s two women singing -- one goes, then the other goes, then they sing in unison and then they start to separate, which is what happens after the film is over, she’s gonna grow up and go away. I was very pleased, and that happens all the time: you pick something by accident and it turns out to go along with everything that’s been happening in your mind.”

Tell us a little about the time (2003ish) and place (New York City) setting of the film.
“One thing about if you grow up in New York City, or I suppose Prague or Paris or London, you don’t know that that’s not the whole world. If you grow up in Kansas you know you’re in a small town and there’s a big world out there. You grow up in New York City on the Upper West Side and you think that’s it, everywhere else is the country, the sticks. It’s not snobbery it’s just a different kind of provincialism. The politics are very uniform, it’s all very liberal you can’t find a Republican anywhere in the entire neighbourhood; it’s largely Jewish secular intellectual -- lawyers, doctors, not very rich but in those days it was upper middle class. It’s a very particular segment of New York. The Upper East Side, for instance, is very wealthy and more snobby, the Upper West Side was more working professional. When I was there -- well, we’re all very wealthy by world standards but by Manhattan standards…Also you are taught to have some sort of social awareness of other people and problems, but I don’t know if it is the most effective political background to come from. You know the phrase ‘kneejerk liberal’? It’s different now.”

And what about the difference between the New York City of 2003, when it is set, and that of today? “In 2003, every time an airplane went by you went ‘Oof,’ felt nervous. That’s not the case any more. That lasted for about 5 years… so [back then] everyone was a bit nervous and on edge. It was a bit different for a few years and unfortunately I don’t think the difference has sunk in in quite the way that I wish it had. For a moment it felt like, I felt like, the U.S. had joined the rest of the world, and then two weeks later all the TV commercials were back and it was all the same again. And I don’t think it’s very different now from how it was in 2000."

How much did you consciously create “Margaret” in opposition to prevailing trends in mainstream filmmaking?
“I try not to work in reaction to other works of art because then I’m having a conversation with something that’s going to disappear eventually. It wasn’t a deliberate reaction to the conventions of film so much as it was an interest in trying to write and shoot the film in a particular way that seemed right for the story. Particularly the two elements of her becoming aware that she is not the only person and there are literally millions of people around...all living lives and doing things just as important to them as her life is to her. And then the other thing was the nature of an adolescent’s point of view is they tend to do things with a soundtrack behind them in their minds … I tried to make it so that there would be nothing in the film that wouldn’t really be there in real life. I wanted to try to show everything, and keep her relationship with her mother and her school and her teachers and her friends and her father amd everything going. I didn’t want to take out my part, or there’s this one scene with her girlfriend that I could have taken out but then she would have had only boys to talk to so I wanted to try to show her whole life. And that dictated a different structure.”

How did it feel to have the film take so long to come out?
“When I thought the movie would vanish from screens I was very disappointed and very upset naturally and when it came back to life I was extremely pleased. It was only a few months -- September and October were bleak and then in December, I think, is when we opened in the U.K. and the Twitter campaign started (I don't know what Twitter is, I can almost send an email). I was shocked. It was wonderful...I was very happy for the actors, especially Anna [Paquin] because she's so wonderful and she worked so hard...She knew the script comma by comma, every sentence...Within ten, fifteen seconds of missing some little thing she would want to go back and start over again. And she shot every day, for 48 days out of 50."

Are you bitter on her behalf that she didn’t get an Oscar nomination?
Lonergan shrugs dismissively. “That's all show business. All that's very nice when it happens but you have to tell yourself that it doesn't matter. It’s especially hard to do that when it's going your way, but I was taught it's more important to do good work.”

Speaking of actors, here you reteam with many people you’ve cast before. Are you forming a troupe?
“Only out of cowardice. They’re all very good actors and I’m conservative, so I prefer to work with people that I know are going to do well. But it slowly grows because you can’t always find everyone. But yes, most of the people on the film I had worked with before... Actors who are that good are rare so try to find them and work with them again if you can.

Do you improvise and/or rehearse?
“We don’t do improv but we did rehearse for 4 weeks about 4 hours a day which was very valuable because there’s no time to rehearse on a movie set in any meaningful way... And then, yes, within the boundaries of the story if you don’t give [actors] freedom to do what they know how to do there’s no point, you should be a novelist...And some actors like to work alone -- Matthew and J, my best friend and my wife, don't like me to speak to them. And Anna Paquin likes to have a lot of direction."

You yourself have taken roles in both your films. Is acting something you’d do again?
“When I lose some weight,” says Lonergan sheepishly. “I liked to act in high school, though I never wanted to be an actor -- I have very limited range --- but I like to do it and no one else will cast me...In fact, my three most enjoyable days on the film were the two days where we did the opera and the day when I was acting because Matthew Broderick came in and was the director for the day. I didn’t have to do anything but do my scenes so it was wonderful.

It’s been a long haul. Was it hard to let go of “Margaret” after all these years?
Lonergan smiles ruefully and shakes his head. There is definite relief in his voice. “Easy. It was easy.”

Kenneth Lonergan Discusses The Changes In The New Cut Of 'Margaret,' Digital Vs. Film, 3D & More

Jessica Kiang — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 15:04:00 GMT

Of the many interpretations of the story of its tortuous, years-long journey to the screen, for a time the favored narrative for "Margaret" ran something like this: overambitious director of indie-darling first feature, dashes sprawling, pretentious sophomore effort on rocks of own hubris -- chaos, bitterness, lawsuits ensue. It’s the kind of Hollywood story that writes itself, based around some putative generalized notion of The Director as a towering Wellesian figure of limitless ego and myopia-verging-on-madness where his creations are concerned.

But, even if you haven’t met director Kenneth Lonergan and discovered him to be pleasant, self-effacing and unusually thoughtful in his responses to your questions, there is another way to read the “Margaret” story, one that doesn’t rely on those cliches. In this take, a disparate collection of smart and dedicated people identified enough greatness in the original, undoubtedly messy cut, to launch little less than a crusade to get the film out of the edit suite and into theaters. It is a story of a loosely-formed coalition of filmgoers, critics and filmmakers that united under the “Margaret” banner (or hashtag) with no agenda other than liking the film and feeling it deserved a chance. For posterity’s sake, we hope that’s the way the story will be told: as a measured triumph, albeit one that took a very long time to achieve.

And it is still unfolding. Today, Kenneth Lonergan’s “Margaret,” a film we greatly admire, comes to DVD and Blu-Ray, in its theatrically-released 150 minute version, as well as a new 3-hour long cut. And we’re marking the occasion by sharing with you the first part of a marathon interview we conducted with Lonergan at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival last week -- part 2 will run tomorrow. And both will be available as a special lengthier cut later in the year, worked on by Thelma Schoonmaker. (Kidding.)

So what is the nature of the new version out on July 10th?
“It’s not a director's cut,” says Lonergan. “We’re calling it an extended cut. It’s a different version. A director’s cut is where they take the movie away from you and chop it to pieces and send it out without your permission...This is just another version with a little bit more of everything in it.”

In fact, Lonergan isn’t certain it’s anything like his "definitive" version. “Whether it’s better or worse, I don’t know. It’s longer, but it’s a DVD so you can turn it off or fast forward,” he quips. “But no I don’t think I prefer it. It’s different, it’s nice to be able to take your time. I know 2 1/2 hours seems like I’m already taking my time but there are so many characters, there is so much that happens to her that it was nice to have another opportunity to look at it.”

One of the criticisms of the theatrical release was a certain unevenness in terms of pacing, does the new cut make a difference there?
“It’s hard for me to judge, I’m sure it does. In the theatrical release there are many things suggested, which I hope is interesting, and this version I hope draws you in in a different way...In both versions I tried to pace it more like normal life and less like a film.”

And, as though aware that he has now earned something of a reputation for a “longer is better” approach, he goes on to say “I saw the second version of ‘Lawrence of Arabia,’ [recently]. I love ‘Lawrence of Arabia,’ I’ve seen it dozens of time (I don’t watch many films, I see a few films many times) and I’m just like, why in the world did he add 15 minutes more of horses and camels charging through the desert? Why? There’s only a few extra scenes, just many more camels and horses. There were enough camels and horses before - they were great. So maybe the extended version [of “Margaret”] will be like that but... maybe not.”

How do you feel the prolonged process of getting “Margaret” to this stage will affect your approach to future projects?
"That’s a good question. I've been thinking about that quite a lot myself... I don't know the answer. I'm at the point where nobody bothers me when I'm writing, but it's very hard to edit, because everyone gets very nervous.”

His personality, he suggests, is not best suited to that situation. “Nobody really did anything wrong, exactly, it's just everyone was very frightened and nervous. Some people can have fights and then go back to work; I have a big fight and I shake for the rest of the day. Or even if it's not a fight, it's just a conversation, and a problem comes up I think about that [constantly], so I very much need to be left alone completely and that's the one thing that's very difficult for people. Understandably. I mean, write a cheque for $12 million dollars and you wanna make sure it's going to come out all right, it's reasonable. But I need to find a way to separate the two things... Not that it was all bad, the film came out very well, I'm happy with the result and I'm happy that people seem to like it. So I don't know what more I can ask for. Except to be younger.”

In some ways, Lonergan seems to feel the perceived success of his first film, “You Can Count On Me,” fed into the difficulties of the “Margaret” process: “[Filmmaking is] the most collaborative art form in the history of the world. As a director, if you write the film, you're the only one there from the very beginning to the very end...And everybody comes in and, this is not false modesty, but I really don't know very much. To go from never having directed a film before to directing one film is a perpendicular learning curve but at the end of it you still don't know that much,“ he insists. “With the first film everyone helps you because they know you don't know anything but with the second film, I'd had a little bit of success so everyone thought that I knew something when I came back. So...I knew a little bit more the second time, but when I would say ‘You have to explain this to me,’ I got this ‘Oh, he’s being funny, he’s full of shit, his movie was at Sundance’ bullshit, so it was very hard to explain how stupid I was sometimes.”

An interesting aspect of the film’s protracted birth was the Greek chorus of opinions voiced about it, positive and negative. Do you read reviews?
“Some of them. Maybe about a dozen. I shouldn’t read any of them, but if they’re complimentary I can’t help it.” We suggest that he must have read quite a lot from us, in that case. “Yes, Indiewire has been very supportive. [And when] you read things... and you agree with them and didn’t think of them it’s fun and interesting.” Of course, the converse also holds, and Lonergan responds to some of the opinions he disagreed with definitively. “I don’t agree that [Lisa is] unsympathetic. Some people find her repellent, dislikable, horrible, awful, but I don’t find her any of those things. And I don’t find the mother self-centered. That reading I find very interesting because everyone who writes that [review] cares very much about their job and how they’re received and whether it’s going well, as in ‘I liked your article very much/I hated your article...’ But the mother, because she is concerned about her play is perceived to be self-centered... I think the mother is just a woman in her 40s trying to live her own life and trying to help her daughter but getting shut out completely. I think in the extended version that element comes out a bit more, and some of the more sympathetic side of what happens with Lisa comes out a bit more.”

Looking to the future, have you any new film projects lined up as yet?
“I have couple of different films that I'd like to do and I don't know which to do. I did a play 2 years ago called ‘The Starry Messenger’ with Matthew [Broderick] and J. [Smith-Cameron] and Catalina Sandino Moreno which I really thought was very good and I'd like to make a film of that. And I have two scripts that I'm writing and I've about 25 pages apiece and I'm stuck on both of them. And all of the plays I've written -- I'd like to make movies of all of them. But I'm concerned that my wife [Lonergan is married to 'Margaret' star J. Smith Cameron] just got a job on a TV show that shoots in Georgia, a Sundance Channel show, and she's going to be away, so I'm concerned about our daughter, and making a film because it really is all-consuming. Unless I can get European work hours. Clint Eastwood work hours, Woody Allen work hours -- if I could get that I'd do another film right away.”

Would you consider directing someone else script?
“No, I don't like directing. I only direct my own screenplays because there's no other way to protect them. Along the way I've become interested in directing, but I started out doing it to protect the work.”

What do you think of recent developments in filmmaking technology, like digital and 3D?
“I think it’s appalling. Except for ‘Hugo’ which is the only time I’ve seen 3D used [right]...and it’s incredible. [But] I’ve seen children’s movies in 3D and it’s horrible, only occasionally good. I mean, it’s very good that they can make dragons and dinosaurs and I like that kind of movie and I like science fiction movies very much, but I’m very much afraid that digital technology is going to destroy film completely and it just doesn’t look as good. I sat in a color timing session for the DVD and I was frightened by what you can do. Because it’s ‘Oh his face is a little dim, can you make it brighter?’ and then the light is wrong and now his shirt is wrong, and it’s like filling in a coloring book, and then the ambient light for the whole room is different, it’s gone, it’s not there… I also think this is one reason that now so many films have a stylized look, because in a computer it’s much easier to color time something if everything is blue or everything’s red, or everything’s saturated. But to capture real light, film does it still much better, and there’s a lot of people working very hard to destroy it forever so it will be a very short-lived thing. And perhaps I’m wrong and digital technology will be able to be as good as film some day, and I certainly enjoy watching the ships crashing into each other in the ocean and the fake CG, and the dragons in ‘Harry Potter,’ I love them, but I’m afraid film is like black and white - no one’s going to know how to do it in 20 years.”

Perhaps part of this fear springs from Lonergan’s own love for classical Hollywood filmmaking. “I like older movies, I prefer them generally to contemporary films. But contemporary directors - Almodovar, I think he’s wonderful, of course Scorsese, Stanley Kubrick, (who’s not contemporary anymore but nearly so). I think Paul Thomas Anderson is wonderful. Werner Herzog, I’m crazy about him as well. [But really] William Wyler, Carol Reed, Howard Hawks, John Huston... William Wyler I think is my favorite director probably - there’s so many. Francois Truffaut. I always leave people out. I’ll go home and be like ‘Oh! I forgot! Joseph Mankiewicz!’”

Of course, Scorsese famously helped you with the edit of “Margaret.” What is your relationship with him like?
“He was very helpful just with advice on how to proceed and he also worked on the film with me for a few months -- the spring before the release, in May/June/July. He's been wonderful to me for a long time now. I love him.

Part 2 of our interview, including a closer look at “Margaret,” will post tomorrow.

Czech List: The Best Films From The Karlovy Vary Film Festival

Boyd van Hoeij — Mon, 09 Jul 2012 17:13:48 GMT

The 47th edition of the Karlovy Vary Film Festival came to a close this weekend in the famous spa town in Bohemia, in the wooded western part of Czech Republic. The fest’s biggest gong, the Crystal Globe, was awarded to Norwegian competition film “The Almost Man,” from director Martin Lund, one of those rare instances in which the strongest film in the lineup also walked away with the top prize. The international jury was chaired by Richard Peña, the film program director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York.

Being an A-list festival, the large event has the burden of having to program premieres for its competitive strand, making the competition rather hit-and-miss and often too dependent on the quality of the available titles in any given year. But since the festival, the biggest film-related gathering in Eastern Europe, presents over 200 films in all, including a separate competition for titles from the former Eastern bloc, called East of the West, and a third competition focused on nonfiction features, there are always new gems to be found.

Here are ten films that premiered at Karlovy Vary this year that festival programmers, distributors, sales agents and cinephiles should be aware of:

“The Firemen’s Ball”
The best Eastern European film to screen at the event was without a doubt the gloriously restored version of Milos Forman’s most famous Czech film, “The Firemen’s Ball.” Made before Forman came to the U.S. because of political reasons (where he would go on to direct Oscar magnets such as “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and “Amadeus”), this hilarious parable of the communist system and the widespread greed and corruption it generates in full view of the masses was shot in the Czech countryside with local, nonprofessional actors. It was banned upon release by the authorities, though French film lovers Francois Truffaut and Claude Berri took the film abroad, where it was shown to great acclaim. Now digitally restored by a new fund of which the Karlovy Vary fest is also part, the film was shown in Vary with a new documentary short about the making of the tragicomedy that will no-doubt find its way onto the bonus disc of any new DVD release. The spotless restoration, however, must be seen on the big screen to really appreciate the beautiful work of renowned cinematographer Miroslav Ondříček (he would go on to shoot films such as “Silkwood;” “The World According to Garp” and “Amadeus”).

“Dom – A Russian Family”
Part complex Russian family drama set on the beautiful steppes, part protracted and ultraviolent showdown that tries to outdo Tarantino at his most self-indulgent, director Oleg Pogodon’s “Dom – A Russian Family” is that rare hybrid of a film that could appeal to lovers of 19th century Russian literature and genre buffs who love to see stuff being blown up real good. In the tradition of the Western, it starts with the arrival of a son at the isolated mansion of a large extended family. He has been in jail for years and is happy to be reunited with his loved ones, though his next-of-kin have all sorts of unresolved issues with him, not least the fact he’s arrived with a coterie of heavily armed men in impeccable black suits and white shirts on his tail and that the latter group can’t wait to kill him and don’t at all mind shooting any family member who seems to be getting in the way of their goal. The first half of the film, which dissects family attitudes and its complex history, offers a microcosm of Russian society and the Russian soul, while the extremely violent second part is a protracted shootout staged in a balletic, visually sumptuous way that turns all the bloodshed into a mesmerizing, almost abstractly beautiful spectacle.

“The Almost Man”
The winner of the fest’s Crystal Globe for best film as well a shared Best Actor prize for lead Henrik Rafaelsen (recently seen in the Norwegian hit tragicomedy “Happy Happy”), “The Almost Man” chronicles not only the arrested development of a Norwegian man in his early thirties but explores a complicated concept that’s hard to visualize: why do we something do things we can’t rationally explain? Taking the opposite route of Judd Apatow and his cohorts, the film is a finely staged and exquisitely observed drama, flecked with moments of dark humor, that follows the titular protag, Henrik (Rafaelsen) as he and his girlfriend move into a new home, Henrik starts a new job and tries to behave like an adult at parties, though he’d much rather be out drinking with his highschool buddies. Though a little bit heavy-handed in one sequence – in which Henrik pisses all over an illustrated book of Peter Pan; yes, he doesn’t want to grow up either, we get it – the film is otherwise an artfully restrained look at the slow road to adulthood that trusts the audience enough to let it make its own connections and draw its own conclusions.

“Camion”
The other standout in the competition was the fourth film of French-Canadian director Rafael Ouellet, “Camion,” a restrained family drama about two sons who travel back to their widower father’s rural home after the old man, who’s not far off from retirement age, has had a serious road accident while driving the titular truck. Though the accident wasn’t the truck driver’s fault, it killed someone and the man is visibly shaken by the events and wonders what there’s left for him to live for. His two sons, a Montreal janitor and a bum who’s been hiding out in New Brunswick on insurance money, are clearly not that close to their father but take it upon themselves to keep the man company and shake him out his lethargy. Finely observed and well-acted, this unassuming drama, in a mixture of French and English, hits all the right notes.

“Piazza Fontana: The Italian Conspiracy”
The latest film of Italian director Marco Tulio Giordana, whose epic “The Best of Youth” remains a favorite of many cinephiles, is “Piazza Fontana: The Italian Conspiracy.” Again a historical drama, this film looks at the Piazza Fontana bombing of 1969, which killed 17 and left 88 people injured. Again written by historical fresco-specialists Sandro Petraglia and Stefano Rulli (“Best of Youth,” “Crime Novel,” “My Brother is an Only Child”) this is another incredibly dense drama that explores a dark episode in recent Italian history that might perhaps not entirely make sense for those unfamiliar with the period but which nonetheless impresses with its veracity and sheer filmmaking verve (another recent Italian arthouse hit, “Il Divo,” also contained many specifics that probably went way over the head of international audiences and that film did quite well nonetheless). Comic Valerio Mastandrea, as the police inspector charged with the investigation, anchors the film with a solid turn in a very serious role.

“What Is This Film Called Love?”
Unclassifiable is probably the best word to describe “What Is This Film Called Love?” a film essay sketch that viewers will either love or hate. After the 15-hour documentary “The Story of Film,” which is still making the festival rounds, Scotland-based film critic and director Mark Cousins decided to make a film that would not require six years of preparation and production. Instead, while on a stopover in Mexico City for three days with nothing planned, he takes a Flip camera and a laminated photo of his hero, the Russian director Sergei Eisenstein, and takes to the streets of the sprawling city, reflecting out loud about the things he encounters and talking to Eisenstein as if he were his travel companion (his “amigo” actually visited the city some 80 years earlier). Not coherent by any stretch of the imagination, it is instead a stream-of-consciousness of musings on film, art and life and how these are or might be connected. Pretentious or deep, or maybe both, this is indeed an unclassifiable piece of work that should get discussions going at any festival at which it’ll screen.

“Shameless”
Every festival worth its salt needs at least one film scandale and this year’s pick for that slot in Karlovy Vary is probably “Shameless,” a Polish East of the West entry that combines Jewish themes, Neo-Nazis and brother-sister incest. The feature debut of director Filip Marczewski (an Oscar nominee for one of his shorts) sketches the lives of a teenage brother (rising Polish star Mateusz Kościukiewicz, from Sundance title “All that I Love”) and his older sister (the luminous Agnieszka Grochowska, “In Darkness”) over the course of the male sibling’s eventful summer holiday, which he has planned to spend with his sister despite the fact she has a sleazy live-in boyfriend who is much older than either of them. Though it explores some complicated and dark themes, the film, written by Grzegorz Łoszewski, remains surprisingly light of touch for most of its duration, with a tone generally closer to familial melodrama than full-on tragedy. Even the unavoidable sex scenes are tastefully filmed, so the biggest shock of all, seen what the film is actually portraying, is how tame it all feels.

“She Male Snails”
A visual tone poem, a mood piece and an entrancing mix of documentary and dream-like fiction, the semi-experimental “She Male Snails” was, somewhat surprisingly, originally shot for Swedish television. A portrait of transgendered artist Eli Leven in which transgendered director Ester Martin Bergsmark has inserted herself, the film explores the lives and friendship of both and their shared dream world, in which a boy who feels like a girl dreams up a third gender in order to cope with the world. Using bold colors and sound, the film is first and foremost an ode to life and individuality that survives and stays strong not despite but exactly because of the drab and dull surrounding universe.

“Beyond the Hill”
Not to be confused with Cristian Mungiu’s Romanian drama with a similar title, “Beyond the Hill” is the impressive feature debut by Turkish Emin Alper, which inscribes itself in the slow-moving, observant tradition of Turkish cinema that’s currently en vogue and in which the landscape is an extension of the psychology of the characters. Set on a rural estate of an elderly farmer who has invited his grown-up son and the latter’s teenage boys, Alper’s film, which first premiered in Berlin and also played Tribeca, expertly uses the titular offscreen space to explore scapegoat mechanisms in Turkish society. The use of occasional point-of-view shots that are unwittingly (for the viewer) inserted in the flow of the story add a further layer of visual sophistication.

“Our Children”
Belgian director Joachim Lafosse is probably the most talented French-language filmmaker to emerge from the country since the Dardenne brothers. His fifth feature, “Our Children,” was inspired by a true case of a mother who suffocated so much in her marriage that she killed her own children. The film, which premiered in the Un certain regard section at Cannes, was one of the most talked about films at that festival. Its presence at Karlovy Vary further reinforced the impression it’s on its way to a long and healthy fest and arthouse future. Starring the Dardennes’ Rosetta, Emilie Dequenne, in a tour-de-force performance as the mother, and reteaming the actors of Audiard’s “A Prophet,” Tahar Rahim and Niels Arestrup, as the husband and the couple’s sugar daddy, respectively, Lafosse’s masterful film accumulates enough quotidian but nonetheless telling detail to make audiences understand – if not condone – what the mother does. The claustrophobic visuals, always partly out of focus, further add to the atmosphere of oppression. They suggest at once that someone is spying on the proceedings, perhaps half hidden behind a doorway, and that real privacy doesn’t exist, while also visualising what could be described as the mother’s blind spot in her brain – the place where she goes when she commits the unspeakable act on her own offspring.

Karlovy Vary Film Fest Review: 'Leave Me Like You Found Me' A Minuscule But Truthful Portrait Of A Compromised Relationship

Jessica Kiang — Fri, 06 Jul 2012 19:57:17 GMT

“They were nice,” says Erin (Megan Boone) of some passersby, to the boyfriend with whom she has recently reconciled with after a year-long hiatus, as they trek though the woods on a camping holiday. “Everyone’s nice when they’re on vacation.” Cal (David Nordstrom) replies drily, before promptly going on to prove that that’s simply not the case. Screening at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, Adele Romanski’s partially Kickstarter-funded debut film is minutely small in scope, taking place over a few days in a national park, with two other campers and an unseen bear the only notable players aside from the lead pair. Its narrowness of focus is both a strength and a weakness -- Romanski is impressively insightful and surefooted on this limited canvas, but so much so that one kind of wishes she had set herself a broader remit, even if the result might not have been so elegantly contained.

As it is, “Leave Me Like You Found Me” is a careful, premeditated film, that feels as though a real perfectionist has gone over every line of the spartan script to make sure every moment rings with the same well-observed truthfulness. From what they say to each other, we gradually piece together a fragmentary picture of Cal and Erin’s relationship history. They had been long-term girlfriend/boyfriend until they split up. The reasons are only hinted at, but nonetheless haunt the fringes of their conversations; no one wants to dwell on past miseries when trying to start over (a phrase used frequently), but hurt was done, and neither can wholly let go of that either. And so their relationship occupies an interesting, and only rarely depicted space, where they enjoy neither the blush of getting-to-know-you passion, nor the comfort and trust level of long-time lovers. The love that exists between them, if such it is, feels less like a source of joy and strength, than it does a thing they have resigned themselves to.

If their reasons for breaking up are never exactly made manifest, their reasons for getting back together are more overtly analyzed by the pair, with those discussions usually initiated by Erin. Ultimately, they missed each other -- Erin dreamt about Cal, Cal expected each ringing phone to be a call from Erin. And so coming back together seems a logical bit of repair work, refilling the gaps in each other’s lives like so much Polyfilla. But neither seems to have considered how not liking how you felt without someone is not necessarily the most positive reason to decide you should be with them. Add to that the natural inclination to idealize the ended relationship while they were apart, only to have to face those realities that nostalgia had glossed over, and you have a quite a few pounds of barometric pressure bearing down on an already fragile foundation.

Romanski controls the tone tightly, managing to negotiate the ever-widening divide between their close moments and their arguments gracefully and believably. And the setting against these lovely backdrops of ancient trees and clear lakes definitely adds a layer of claustrophobia-by-counterpoint to the film. Structurally the narrative is intriguing too. It is almost as if the couple start off united by the desire to make it work this time, by the beauty of the landscape and by their simple satisfaction at being together again. But that mood only lasts until the first irritation, the first bitten-off comment, which is dismissed, but never resolved (none of their disagreements are, really). And so the pendulum swings between lovey moments and resentful arguments and silences, in an arc that grows wider as each day passes, before culminating in a hateful, recriminatory fight where Erin exclaims “Why did I forget what this was like?” which is followed, surprisingly, not by a break up, but by a scene of murmured reconciliation. On this ambivalent note the film ends, and if as viewers, we can’t help but see the relationship as fatally compromised, it seems it might be some time more before the participants themselves realize that the chasm between the good times and the bad becomes simply unbridgeable.

We could wish it was a little more daring, a little more outre or a little more transgressive, because if “Leave You Like Me Found Me” has one chief positive effect, it is not really on account of this film, but the one that might come after. Romanski is undoubtedly a filmmaker to watch, and the subtlety and restraint with which she infuses her debut makes us very curious to see where she goes next. Especially if she proceeds with a little less caution, and allows herself to color outside the lines a little more. [B]

Karlovy Vary Film Fest Review: 'Tremors' Meets 'The Guard' In Fun But Familiar Horror-Com 'Grabbers'

Jessica Kiang — Thu, 05 Jul 2012 22:04:27 GMT

Perfect fodder for a late-night festival audience (especially one prone, as the Czechs are, to spontaneously bursting into generous applause at certain satisfying story beats) UK/Irish co-production "Grabbers," directed by Jon Wright, played to a raucously positive reception last night at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. And it's a fun ride, and while it doesn't reinvent the "Tremors" and "Slither" modern-b-movie wheel, it adds a few neat touches to that formula. It's a shame it ultimately favours repetition over originality, for as anyone with even a passing knowledge of those films knows, proceedings run on very predictable lines, leaving the more inspired elements of the story frustratingly underdeveloped.

Set, like the brilliant but underseen "The Guard," in the west of Ireland, and similarly featuring Irish policemen and women (Gardai) as the protagonists, "Grabbers" takes place on a small isolated island off the coast, on which the small town boasts a single pub, a population of sailors, fishermen, and drunkards, and two Gardai. When the senior of the two takes a two-week holiday, the younger (Richard Coyle), himself a perma-drunk alco with little but scorn for his job, is partnered with peppy, ambitious, up-from-Dublin and by-the-book Lisa (Ruth Bradley). At which precise point, of course, a giant squidlike alien that sports grabby tentacles for tongues (hello again "Tremors") and spawns multiple sluglike offspring ("Slither," you dog!) starts picking people off, so the mismatched pair are forced to work together to... are you getting as bored reading this as we are writing it? Ok, that's a little unfair, as the plot details do not adequately convey the level of charm the actors, especially our destined-for-each-other lead duo, bring to rather hackneyed roles. And we haven't really even got to the big sell yet, the twist of Irishness that obviously made it into the film's pitch logline and is in itself so inspired that you can see greenlights igniting a mile away: the creature thrives in water, and drinks blood to live, but is discovered to have a violently toxic reaction to alcohol. So the obvious solution, when a storm threatens, no help is available, and no evacuation possible, is to get everyone on the island, in local parlance: pissed, locked, gee-eyed, bollixed, hammered. In a word: drunk.

Honestly this premise is so ripe with potential that we just can't believe no one's done it before: a pub's worth of rowdy intoxicated locals battling alien beasties with nothing but their prodigious capacity for booze standing between them and annihilation? We're there! But the film falls a bit short in really letting that concept fly as high as it should, or last as long as it should: the plotting gets in the way of the lunacy, such a pity. Far be it from us to encourage less professionalism in anyone's approach to filmmaking, but for our money, a little less deferential attention could have been paid to the he-has-to-go-there-to-get-that mechanics of the narrative, in favour of a little more time with the assorted batshit poitin-fueled locals taking on an otherworldly menace armed with flamethrowers made out of Super Soakers. Even the ultimate takedown is orchestrated by the two leads, as opposed to the whole community, and in general the film feels like it misses as many opportunities as it takes.

There are occasional laugh-out-loud moments, for sure, and the winningness of the leads makes the inevitable climactic clinch actually rather affecting, but "Grabbers" could have been so much more than the derivative me-too it turns out to be. Thankfully, the films it derives from are themselves a pretty good time at the movies, so while it might not linger with you very long after you leave the theatre, while you're there at least, it's a likable way to spend 94 minutes, if not quite a blast. [B]

Our Karlovy Vary Film Fest Reviewer Experiences A Personal Epiphany At Mark Cousins’ ‘What Is This Film Called Love’

Jessica Kiang — Thu, 05 Jul 2012 19:19:00 GMT

OK, this is going to be a tricky one. Celebrating its international premiere at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, having only screened before at the festival in Edinburgh, the new film from Mark Cousins had an effect on us on such a completely subjective and personal level that it all but defies attempts to marshal those scattered impressions into a coherent, generalised review. But said effects were so positive for us, we're going to try anyway. Essentially, we were charmed beyond belief by this rambling, philosophizing self-described "ad lib" of a film, but we absolutely can't guarantee the same reaction from anyone else.

That said, perhaps that very uncertainty is part of the film's appeal: we've spoken to enough other people who had similarly individual, gut-level responses to hazard that part of its magic is in its reflecting-pool-like quality. Something about it demands that you map your personal experiences onto the very personal experience Cousins is having onscreen, and, if you're lucky, the points of confluence and convergence of his story and yours may provide surprisingly actionable insights into your own life. Or you might find it insufferably student-y and pretentious. Good Lord, we are tempted to write every sentence of this review twice over, exchanging positive adjectives ("whimsical" "inspirational" "beguiling") for negative ("messy" "amateurish" "boring") and suggesting you take a delete-where-appropriate approach.

Let's try again. To gauge which category (lover or hater) you might fall into, assess your reaction to the following summary: in conscious counterpoint to the six years of rigorous research and disciplined craft that went into his 15-hour documentary opus "The Story of Film," Cousins "goes dark" in Mexico City for three days, his only companions being a tiny dv camera, a notebook and a laminated photograph of Sergei Eisenstein, to which he addresses many of his voiceover musings. He walks the streets his hero also walked, describes his dreams and his love of nakedness, recites poetry, has revelations and walks some more. Sound intriguingly offbeat to you? Enjoy the ride. Sound dangerously self-indulgent? Proceed with caution.

Because of course it is totally, unapologetically self-indulgent, which is perhaps why it prompted such a self-indulgent response. And for us it stops short of pretension because of the playfulness and capriciousness on display. Cousins comes over as an erudite, intellectual man, well-read and unafraid of talking seriously about serious subjects. But he is also witty, self-effacing and in possession of a keen sense of the absurdity of what he's attempting and the high probability it will be misunderstood, or turn out just plain boring. At other times he's downright silly, and crucially, he's never afraid to change his mind. If you are so inclined, he's a terrific traveling companion.

And for all the shaky cam (apologised for repeatedly), and the absence of sync sound (remarked upon, explained) right down to the threadbare budget which demands, amusingly, that a scene in which he's talking about an Elvis Presley song playing in a cafe has some stock music-sounding rockabilly over it instead (he draws our attention to this, too), there are lovely, impressive flourishes here and there that even detractors would be hard-pressed to deny. The camerawork, achieved on the tiny handheld camera, is often quite beautiful, capturing majestic vistas and scrappy details alike. The PJ Harvey tracks that open and close the film are apropos, lovely and harsh the way only she can sound, and setting a tone by turns questing, nostalgic and regretful, that suits the film entirely. In fact the whole soundtrack is pretty choice, with the all-over-the-map narrative allowing those PJ Harvey tracks to sit comfortably alongside the utter cheesiness of Tony Christie's "Avenues and Alleyways," which nestles up in neighbourly fashion to Bernard Herrman's "Vertigo" love theme (yes, somewhere, Kim Novak is scrubbing herself raw in the shower). And Cousins' inspirations are writ large too, not only by Eisenstein’s theoretical work, but Virginia Woolf, Joan Didion and the poetry of Frank O'Hara all exert their pull in his mind, and therefore on the film's direction and narrative. If you're gonna borrow interest, they're pretty much impeccable sources.

And for all its episodic monomania, you have to credit the bravery of the endeavor, or perhaps at least its endearing foolhardiness. There is nowhere for Cousins to hide here, nothing included that he didn't choose, no opinion expressed that is not his own, however influenced. He risks ridicule on the one hand, and the probability of henceforth dealing with oversharing, overfamiliar fans who feel they completely know him as a result of seeing this film or the other. We wonder if he will at any point get sick of the conversations he has invited?

So have we made the point yet? It's undoubedly not for everyone, or possibly even most people, and unlikely to impress even the whole hardcore of arthouse aficionados, let alone the multiplex crowd (though it's also unlikely to be screened in the average multiplex, so that's lucky). But all those caveats aside, let me lapse for a moment from our Playlist-mandated first person plural, to tell you about the great time I had with this film. It didn't just entertain me, it inspired me, and actually kind of helped me, like some sort of gonzo I Ching.

So with just one further reminder, that the grade appended here is entirely the grade for the experience this writer had, and in no way an attempt to categorize the empirical merits of the film (maybe a B-?), or to predict what general reaction might be (oof, can we give it a range? Yes? Then A-F), let's cross the finish line. "What Is This Film Called Love," as off-the-cuff and wonky and idiosyncratic as it is, didn't just make me think about things in my life, it prompted me to decide. Whether that makes it a good film or not is up for debate, but in that light it would be disingenuous, not to say dishonest, of me to grade it any lower. [A-]

Karlovy Vary Film Fest Review: Thomas Vinterberg's 'The Hunt' Will Come After You And Not Let Go

Jessica Kiang — Thu, 05 Jul 2012 18:05:48 GMT

Like many directors who make a big splash with an early feature, Thomas Vinterberg did not have an easy time of it thereafter. And while we don’t particularly understand the critical opprobrium heaped on, for example, “Dear Wendy,” a film this writer admires, it’s clear that he has not fully lived up to the potential on display in his landmark 1998 film, “The Celebration.” After all, that film not only launched his career into the arthouse stratosphere, it launched a whole movement, and has arguably never been bettered as the definitive iteration of what Dogme should and could be.

Interestingly, “The Hunt,” which played this week at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, returns to themes explored in that earlier film, specifically the breakdown of interpersonal relationships under the pressure of revelatory accusations of sexual abuse. But here Vinterberg is unconstrained by Dogme, er dogma, so the film is in a style more classical than experimental, more deliberately staged and, frankly, more beautifully shot than “The Celebration.” However if you’re worried that this might mean a loss of immediacy, let us quickly disavow you: “The Hunt” is quite one of the most brilliantly unsettling, tension-laden films we’ve seen in a long time, and it achieves this by allying us so completely with its lead that the nightmarishly unjust situation he finds himself in becomes our own. In fact, by the end of our screening, people on all sides of us had their hands steepled in front of their faces as though they were watching a horror. Or rather, we think they did. Our own fingers may have been partially blocking our view.

Lucas (Mads Mikkelsen, in a masterly Cannes Best Actor-winning performance) is a teacher now working in a kindergarten following the closing of his school. He’s adored by the kids and has a close circle of male friends (a circle that only sometimes includes their wives) with whom he has established a tradition of a boozy annual hunting trip. He is estranged from his wife but hopes that his son will come to live with him soon. He becomes tentatively involved with a woman he works with. He is, absolutely, a decent guy, perhaps even lovely. And then one of the children, in response to a perceived slight, accuses him of abuse and his life falls apart. Even worse, it is the daughter of his best friend who makes the initial accusation, and even worser, soon other children "remember" instances of abuse too.

To its credit, the film attempts no did-he-didn’t-he tricksiness. Instead we know from the outset that Lucas is innocent of the charges laid against him, and so we get to experience his hurt, his incredulity, his incomprehension at his gradual alienation from friends and ostracisation from the community, with a similar sense of helplessness and impotence. It has been said elsewhere that the kind of paralysis he experiences is one of the film’s flaws -- that in real life, he would be lawyering up or leaving town or, well anything but the kind of martyr-like behaviour that Lucas displays here. But honestly, we never felt that for a minute. Put it down to Mikkelsen’s consummate talent, but every moment of inaction on his part feels totally honest -- he is a good man stunned into passivity, who has no secret arsenal to raid when he discovers that innocence and decency are not adequate defences.

Another problematic element for detractors has been one of believabilty -- could it possibly happen that one child’s frustrated imagination could spread so quickly, like a virus, infecting everyone with suspicion that instantly metastasizes into condemnation, which itself turns rapidly into a desire for vengeance? But again, we found the portrait of small-town herd mentality frightening in its believability: it is no less possible an occurrence than the Salem witch trials, and those did actually happen. And here events are anchored by another remarkable performance, this time by Annika Wedderkopp as the little girl who starts it all. Her Klara is innocent and cunning, sweet and self-centred, guileless and capable of conscious acts of duplicity and cruelty; she is a child portrayed as we rarely see children portrayed, but the character feels no less truthful for it.

Without wishing to spoil anything, the final coup de grace, that can either be seen as ambivalent (whodunnit?) or definitive (nope, we cannot go back to the way we were; sometimes things are broken beyond fixing) is simply the last in a long, long line of disquieting, not to say upsetting moments. And if the film were not put together with such skill, it might feel exploitative of the audience in that regard. But it’s a smart film too, with just enough glimpses of warmth and humanity amid the bleakness to keep it compelling, rather than depressing. For anyone with even a halfway developed sense of justice “The Hunt” may prove stressful, frustrating, even enraging, but it’s also an unbelievably effective watch, that, if nothing else signals an undeniable return to form for Vinterberg, and yet another blistering performance from Mikkelsen. See it, if only for the debates it will cause afterward. [A-]

47th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival - Day Four: Garrone’s 'Reality,' Loznitsa's 'In the Fog' & Hillcoat's 'Lawless'

Meredith Brody — Thu, 05 Jul 2012 17:29:00 GMT

As a gift to myself, I “sleep in,” which means I don’t force myself awake, bolt three cups of coffee, and rush out to an 8:30 or 9 a.m screening. Instead I wake up in a more leisurely fashion and write in my room. Then I bolt three cups of coffee and rush out to stand in the rush line for an 11:30 a.m. screening in the big Festival Hall of Matteo Garrone’s Cannes entry “Reality.”

Inside the theater I run into my old friend and alternative press colleague Dan Sallitt, who’s here with his third feature film, “The Unspeakable Act.” He’s already in love with Karlovy Vary, both the town (which my Indiewire colleague Jessica Kiang called “obscenely picturesque” in one of her posts) and the festival. He arrived late last night, and headed out at 11, in the vague hopes of finding some food, right into the amazing sideshow carnival atmosphere of bars and food stalls lining the promenade between the Thermal and the river. It’s the most festive festival he’s ever been to.

I saw his film on DVD, back in the Bay Area, before I knew it was playing here (it debuted at the Edinburgh Film Festival, which means that it can’t play at Karlovy Vary in competition, and also played at the BAMcinématek in Brooklyn). I liked the deadpan dramedy about the real love that “can’t speak its name,” incest, with an especially impressive performance from lead actress Tallie Medel, whose debut this is. I’d much rather have seen it on the big screen of course, especially here, where I’ve found the audiences among the best in the world, intensely directed towards the screen, quiet and focused. There’s only the occasional unwelcome glow of a cellphone. Dan, who also writes about film, understands the film geek’s compulsive need to see fresh celluloid. Feed me! We both hope I’ll get another chance to see “The Unspeakable Act” on the big screen.

“Reality” has an entirely different tone than “Gomorrah,” the modern-day crime film that considerably raised Garrone's profile on the international film scene. It’s a comedy (with tears) about the reality-tv culture that’s deforming society. I love its bright colors, swift opening pace, crowded shots, assured acting (I’m reminded, again, of the strong Italian faces seen in yesterday’s Taviani brothers film, “Cesare deve morire,” not to mention the inevitable Fellini comparisons, that turn up in the program-book blurb.) I am myself something of a victim of reality-tv culture – just check the Season Passes on my TiVo. CBS takes its Big Brother franchise seriously enough to file a lawsuit against ABC’s Glass House, about to debut on ABC.

The film slows down and loses its way a bit in its second half, and its ending, such as it is (once again I want to say it doesn’t end so much as stop), is somewhat anticlimactic.

I walk right out and get right back in the rush line for “V’Tumaine” at 2:00 p.m. It’s a.k.a. “In the Fog,” by the Byelorussian Sergei Loznitsa, which won the FIPRESCI critic’s prize at this year’s Cannes festival. It’s a dark, serious, well-acted and compelling drama about collaboration and betrayal between Russians and Germans in a small Russian village occupied by the Germans during WW II. I tell the woman sitting next to me that I think it’s ironic that the film itself is a collaboration between German and Russian production companies (among others), but she doesn’t seem to agree. After all, 1942 was 70 years ago!

Waiting (again) in the rush line for the 5:30 screening of “Romanzo di uno strago” (aka “Piazza Fontana: The Italian Conspiracy,” by Marco Tullio Giordano), I’m given a hard ticket by a woman who has an extra, at the last minute. She gives me a brief tutorial on ticketing for the big Festival Hall, which I’ve yet to understand because the rush line is let in after all the remaining seats are opened up. It sees that advance tickets for this room have assigned seating, but if you’re not in place 5 minutes before the movie starts, all bets are off and not only can the rushees sit anywhere, hard-ticket holders who don’t like their seats can move. A fairly polite melee ensues. In virtually every screening I’ve been to, the room ends up full (even overfull, with people sitting on steps or along the walls) or very close to it.

“Piazza Fontana” is a relentless investigation of the events surrounding a politically-motivated explosion at a bank in Rome on December 12, 1969. It’s reminiscent of Hollywood docudramas such as “Call Northside 777,” but in a stylized fashion. I enjoy it so much that I feel a little guilty, as in this is a movie that actually has commercial prospects outside the art house and festival circuit. It’s the first movie in the dozen-film official competition that I’m seeing here (I saw the psychological drama “Nos Vemos Papa,” by Lucia Carreras of Mexico, in Morelia last October.)

As it turns out, I’m staying in the main hall all day, which is less of a failure of imagination on my part than an addiction to the huge screen, excellent audience, and impeccable projection. At 8 p.m., I see another film in the official competition, “Kamihate shoten” (“Kamihate Store,” byb Tatsuya Yamamoto of Japan). Before the movie, the director and some of his colleagues are introduced onstage. The lead actress, Keiko Takahashi, a glamorous woman of a certain age, comes out in the first full-on red carpet gown I’ve seen here, a long burgundy fishtail number with art-nouveau black embroidery and a low-cut back enhanced with layers of black-embroidered ruffles. She’s really working it, too, walking slowly, more like a Ziegfeld girl than a runway model.

I am not surprised when she turns out to be playing a thoroughly deglamorised, harshly-shot depressive in the movie, proprietor of a small shop where people intending to commit suicide off a spectacular nearby cliff stop to purchase a roll and a container of milk as a final ritual act. The film was introduced with an allusion to “The Shop on Main Street” (1965) the famous Oscar-winning Czech film from Jan Kadar, but I find it more like “The Little Shop of Horrors,” in that suicide is not my favorite subject (I note from the program book that it’s a topic that will crop up again in the ensuing days).

The final big screen epic of the day is “Lawless”, a big new American film from protean singer/songwriter/screenwriter Nick Cave and his fellow Australian, director John Hillcoat. I missed their previous collaboration, the well-reviewed 2005 Western “The Proposition” (hey, you can’t see everything!), but I did see Hillcoat’s grim Cormac McCarthy adaptation, the apocalyptical “The Road” (2009).

For almost an hour before the film, waiting in the inevitable rush line, I chatted with an enthusiastic film student from Prague, Jana, a real wild-eyed cinephile, who’s attending Karlovy Vary for the sixth time and tells me she either sleeps in a tent “or in a room with fifty other people,” surviving on a couple of hours’ sleep a night. She tells me that she’s a big fan of Shia LaBeouf. “Lawless,” a violent Prohibition tale set in backwoods Virginia (where somehow Chicago gangsters still turn up with machine guns) looks fabulous on the big screen. The lead actors, especially chunky Tom Hardy, Colin Clarke (an Australian familiar to me from the Irish-American TV series Brotherhood), and to a lesser extent LaBeouf, have made the brave decision, not unlike Benicio del Toro’s performance in “The Usual Suspects,” to talk in accents that are nearly unintelligible. (Hardy gets a number of laughs by merely grunting.) I find myself wishing I could read the Czech subtitles.

Guy Pearce has also decided to invent a (somewhat more intelligible) accent, along with a flamboyant dandyism that would serve him well in any production of Oscar Wilde’s or Noel Coward’s work. It’s a performance I watch with some open-mouthed amazement – calling it “over the top” doesn’t quite do it justice. The women glimpsed along the sidelines, Jessica Chastain and Mia Wasikowska, both shot so they glow, give more naturalistic performances.

An improbably domestic coda sends me out into the night chuckling. I’ll be back in the same room in just about eight hours to see a Greek black comedy (with some suicide thrown in).

Karlovy Vary Film Fest Review: Even Helen Mirren Can't Save 'The Door'

Jessica Kiang — Tue, 03 Jul 2012 19:27:40 GMT

If you were to attempt to genetically engineer the perfect film for Karlovy Vary, Eastern Europe’s biggest film festival and one of the oldest in the world, your checklist of ingredients might include: an internationally revered film star lead, a respected veteran European director, a Central or Eastern European setting, and a story in which both the Holocaust and post-WW2 communism figure largely. Maybe throw in a little subtext about class division and gender roles for good measure. “The Door” is a new Helen Mirren film from Hungarian director István Szabó ("Meeting Venus," "Being Julia,""Mephisto"), set in 1960s Budapest and detailing the relationship between a wealthy female novelist and a strong-willed cleaning lady, who may or may not be harbouring dark secrets regarding her actions during the war. It pretty much hits the jackpot, or rather it would have if it was good. It’s not.

The film’s problems manifest themselves early, often and intrusively. Aside from Mirren, the cast is largely Hungarian, with the other lead role taken by a German actress, Martina Gedeck, but they all speak in accented English. In itself this isn’t an issue, it’s a conceit we’re all used to, but here, the awkward second-language pronunciation is rendered even more marble-mouthed by some obvious dubbing, and the truly clumsy, and occasionally unintentionally funny, dialogue. The script feels as though it was written by someone without total command of the language, or written in a different language and translated into English; the non-colloquial phrases come forced and unnatural out of the actors' mouths, and that’s not even mentioning the frequently redundant, frequently overwrought feel to the speech. A sample exchange occurs early on between the writer and her husband, as they watch from a window while Emerenc (Mirren) runs home in theatrical terror during a thunderstorm. “What is the matter with her?” whispers the wife. “She’s terrified by the storm. There must be some reason for that,” replies her husband, leadenly foreshadowing the later sequence which explains the origins of her astraphobia. And in a flashback later, Emerenc as a child is forced to watch the slaughter of her pet calf by her grandfather, who intones something along the lines of “You must look. You must! Because you must learn never to love! So you will never know the sorrow that caused your mother to take her own life!” We were a little jealous of the Czechs in the audience who got to read these words in subtitles, rather than try to be convinced by them emerging from a human mouth. In fact, we’re pretty much certain they had a better time than we did with the film for that reason.

But it’s not just the dialogue that chugs and clunks. The film is paced and edited very oddly, with long stretches of relative langor interrupted by bursts of sudden frenetic activity -- the aforementioned flashback is a case in point. Narrated by Mirren in bizarrely breakneck-speed voiceover, the fateful thunderstorm is rendered as a moment of pure gothic, almost camp; this sits oddly amid the supposed naturalism the rest of the film tries to achieve. It feels like it comes from a different film. And the editing issues don’t stop there. They range from the macro: the way events in the film crash into each other, and the way people make inexplicably melodramatic choices and speeches with no relation to what came just before, to the micro: it’s not a big deal, but during Emerenc’s breakdown scene where she beats the dog it’s really hugely obvious she’s not actually beating the dog. The animal lover in us rejoices, but the film-goer despairs.

However, Mirren is consummately watchable, and here turns in a vanity-less performance in which she plays and looks her actual age, if not a little older. In unflattering clothes and clumpy shoes she’s a million miles from the chic, glamourous woman she is in person. And outside of her appearance, her performance is an interesting and totally committed one. Her Emerenc is sharp to the point of rude (and beyond that point occasionally), formidable, suspicious and stubborn. It’s a portrayal that’s commendable in making us understand how the woman can become so well-loved without ever stooping to being likeable. But even Mirren can’t quite sell us on the tonal contortions the script forces her to perform. She embodies the pragmatic, guarded, caustic character of Emerenc rather brilliantly, but the film’s lapses into hysterical, overegged melodrama do not serve her well.

We get very little sense of time and place, though both are potential sources of great interest: perhaps it’s the English again, but we never really get a feel for Budapest or Hungary, as the geography of the film, outside of flashback, is mostly confined to two houses, a street and later a hospital. And while the costumes and set dressing are no doubt period accurate, we don’t really feel the '60s either -- Gedeck’s character being a successful female novelist in the days before women’s lib is all but unremarked upon, and a gossamer-thin subplot in which she worries about the ramifications of accepting an award from the Communist regime evaporates as quickly as it appears.

The truth is, that were Mirren not in this film there would be no reason to see it at all. And even with her in it, at the height of her powers and undeniably committed to the role, it still barely passes muster. A disappointing missed opportunity for what could have been a banner film for the region, with international appeal. [C]

Karlovy Vary Film Fest Review: Lifers Imitate Art In Prison-Set Shakespearean Docudrama 'Caesar Must Die'

Jessica Kiang — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 17:56:00 GMT

In a prison in Rome, real-life convicts prepare to mount a production of William Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar,” and as the night of the public performance draws nearer, their real lives and the play’s narrative conflate to the point of indistinguishability. So runs an approximate logline for the Taviani brothers’ “Caesar Must Die” which arrived at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival trailing glowing reviews and the Golden Bear from Berlin in its wake. And given that summation, it’s easy to see why it won – there are few themes more festival-friendly than the interrelatedness of art and life. But there’s a difference between suggesting that such a relation exists and exploring or commenting on its nature, a difference the veteran directors, and the more breathless of the film’s admirers, seem only sporadically to acknowledge.

Not that there is not a lot to enjoy here. The film is undeniably moving at times, and there are moments of metatextual elegance that feel as though they tremble on the brink of genuine insight. The largely non-professional cast (only the lead, Salvatore Striano who plays Brutus, is now a professional and only since receiving a pardon having served a term in this very prison) and the completely authentic surroundings (the film is shot on locations within the prison walls), lend proceedings a welcome rawness, only a little romanced by the extensive use of black and white photography. And it is never less than absorbing. Moving us onward in the wider story as we move later through the play is a clever touch that means that forward momentum is at all times maintained, and performance night becomes the convergence point for the climaxes of both strands.

But the film’s strength and point of differentiation -- using real-life prisoners to play the roles -- also proves its chief flaw. There is a lack of focus around quite what the directors are trying to get at; we were told before our screening that their aim was to show that prisoners are human too, which sounds simultaneously like it’s too small an ambition for such an overtly experimental approach, and too large a claim for the resulting film. Because once the film gets going, we get very little of the prisoners’ lives or thoughts outside of the play. The art and artistry of Shakespeare's play and the mounting of it doesn't just gradually commandeer the film, it swallows it whole at an early stage, with the movie only occasionally referring back to the psychologies of the actual inmates. And, yes, that they live vicariously through their roles, and that from the tedium of prison life the play provides an escape so seductive they spend every waking moment thinking about it, may be precisely the point, but for the audience a little more context would have been welcome.

Such reorienting moments do occur, infrequently. Aside from the device of onscreen titling suddenly informing us of the 'actors'' crimes and sentences when they first gather as an ensemble, there is a rather lovely sequence in which their voices, seemingly reading letters home, are overlaid over shots of the prison exterior at night, and drifting past tiny window after window, we sense the lives, dreams and frustrations the huge, solid building confines. And on a couple of other occasions the actors lapse into ad libbing off the Shakespearean text, prompted by some unexplained rivalry or personal revelation. But these moments are too few, and too staccato in their punctuation of the play's narrative to give us anything more than brief, snatched-away glimpses at the men beneath the men beneath the robes.

Because that's the crux of the matter. We are not watching Cassius. Nor are we watching a prisoner playing Cassius, as we might be were the film a straightforward documentary about a prison theatrical production. In fact, we're watching real prisoners play prisoners playing their roles in "Julius Caesar," so the reality of their situations can feel simply too far removed to have any resonance. This is exacerbated by the style of acting these non-professionals employ - perfect for high theatrics, it is just too big, too forced in the non-Shakespearean moments. Again, that doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing: the complex layering is a potential source of immense richness. But we never get a sure enough throughline of directorial intent or guiding principle, and so it becomes difficult to navigate the often conflicting currents of artifice and authenticity that flow through the film.

So how much of the interest in any given scene is borrowed from Shakespeare and how much actually earned through canny directorial choices and compelling film craft? There is no doubt plenty of the latter on display – some of the scenes are laid out exquisitely, like the stabbing scene rehearsed in a tiny prison yard with added Greek chorus in the shape of three watching guards, or the dueling speeches scene (sidebar: is Brutus’ “not that I love Caesar less but that I loved Rome more” vs Anthony’s “Friends, Romans, Countymen” the precursor of the rap-off? All this needs is an MC shouting “boom!” every time a barb lands). But it is telling that these are the film’s most successful moments – they are pure theatre reimagined as pure cinema, but the reality of the actors’ backgrounds is all but absent from these sections. They’re simply very imaginatively staged Shakespearean set pieces. And that’s not to detract from that idea -- the Shakespearean reinterpretation/restaging boogie has yielded some compelling results, “Richard III,” and “Coriolanus” spring to mind -- it’s just that this film sells itself on the extra layer it adds, then fails to deliver on those terms.

It’s by no means a poor film, and certainly doesn’t want for talkability, as this 1000-odd word review might suggest. But in this clash between art and life, art gets all the best lines, the most coherent characters, the most creative treatment and the most screen time. On this slanted playing ground, is it any wonder art wins hands down? And so we emerge with a film that, for all the interesting questions it poses, really owes the vast majority of its watchability not to the non-professional actors, or the writer-directors, or to the intriguing premise, but to some guy called Shakespeare who’s been dead for 400 years. “Julius Caesar” is a cracking play. “Caesar Must Die” is a good testament to that, but if you’re looking for a whole lot more, we’d have to say the emperor is rather underdressed. [B]

Karlovy Vary Film Festival: Helen Mirren Talks Women In Filmmaking, Violence Vs. Nudity, 'Hitchcock' & More

Jessica Kiang — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 16:04:00 GMT

The organisers of the Karlovy Vary International FIlm Festival, taking place this week in the obscenely picturesque spa town of Karlovy Vary, Czech Republic, have hit on a canny strategy. The festival’s programming has for some years now been above reproach in every respect, something that has not always been the case in its storied 47 year history, that at one point saw the event pretty much shunned because of its apparent kowtowing to the communist powers-that-were. But those problems are a distant memory now, as this year’s carefully curated selection can attest: they may not get glitzy, high-profile Cannes-level premieres, but the film choice shows astonishing range, refreshing eclecticism and a deep passion for bringing challenging cinema to an apparently very enthusiastic and responsive Eastern European crowd. But the problem then becomes one of profile, and one of the ways the organisers have found to raise theirs, is with their honoree list. Leaning somewhat in the last few years toward the "established international grand dame" faction, (recent recipients include Judi Dench and Isabelle Huppert), this year the festival honors both Helen Mirren and Susan Sarandon. Mirren, here also promoting her new film with Hungarian director Istvan Szabo “The Door” (our review is coming soon), was up first, accepting a lifetime achievement award Friday night and then speaking to press Saturday morning.

She may have been a few minutes late but disarmed us as all immediately by calling out her apologies as she entered and blaming her tardiness variously on jet lag, broken hairdryers, husbands and being unable to find her make up. Needless to say, she looked immaculate. And said husband, director Taylor Hackford, himself also an Oscar-winner as she reminded us brightly (he won for a short film in 1979, and was later nominated for “Ray”) accompanied her, occasionally contributing anecdotes and tidbits, but mostly this was the Helen Mirren show. It was pretty much a sell-out.

1. Mirren is a passionate advocate of filmmaking roles for women at every level of the industry.
In her speech the night previous, Mirren had paid tribute to the remarkable career of Nora Ephron, viewing it, and her own lifetime achievement award, in the light of the role of women in the film industry. Noting how much things have changed even over the past few years, she mentioned approvingly the number of women serving on juries here, but went on to lament their underrepresentation in behind the camera roles, from directors right down to crewmembers. When she returns to Karlovy Vary in five years time, she said, she hopes to see a 50% representation of female-directed projects. “Actually no,” she laughed. “ I want 85 percent.”

On Saturday the theme continued, with Mirren mentioning often how very masculine a place a film set usually is, in both cast and crew. Not only did that make her celebrated nude scenes harder to perform, it also informed some of her more recent choices, like “Calendar Girls”: “The idea of doing a film with 6 or 8 women, who were all friends of mine...we just had an incredibly good time, laughing all the time. You never get to have that experience...it’s usually 5 or 10 male characters for every female.”

But if writers are worried about being able to deliver rounded female characters, she has some sage words of advice, apropos for someone who has twice recently appropriated roles intended for men (in ”The Tempest” and “State of Play”): “I always say to writers, ‘Don’t worry about writing roles for women, just write it as a man and give it a woman’s name. Let us do the rest.’”

But later she clarifies “I don’t complain about the roles for women in film, I complain about the roles for women in life” before tipping her hat to the new generation of female politicians and public figures that, she believes, are part of a (too slow but we’ll take what we can get) sea change in terms of gender perceptions, not just in the movies, but in every sphere of life.

2. Nudity may sometimes be exploitative, but she finds it less disquieting than violence
The inevitable nudity question arose, specifically whether she regarded her own experiences in the buff on film as exploitative or empowering. She replied, “You can look at it either way. I never felt particularly empowered by the experience, it was something I just had to get on with. And it was part of my personal journey towards a kind of liberation, but where it crosses the line into exploitation…I don’t think anyone’s ever clearly defined that.”

Her thoughts on the strange hypocrisy around sex vs violence, however, are clearly defined. “I think it’s kind of appalling in the industry at large that violence and torture are more acceptable than nudity and sexuality. I think that’s an appalling revelation of something very unpleasant in human nature. And you can’t lay all the blame for that at the feet of filmmakers because they know what the public want and they pander to that. So it’s something in all of us and we have to look at ourselves, really.”

3. She appears to have one of the happier Hollywood marriages we’ve witnessed
Mirren and Hackford met on the set of “White Nights” and after becoming an item worked together once more on “Love Ranch.” Apparently Hackford has proposed other collaborations, but Mirren says, with brutal candor/humor “the roles simply weren’t good enough.” But in case you think that may have put a strain on their relationship, the pair are quick to eulogize each other, with Mirren admiringly describing how Hackford essentially put together the entire “Love Ranch” project from scratch, and Hackford going on to say of his wife:

“You see the result of Helen’s work on the screen, but the other experience that you can’t ever understand is the joy of working with her on set. There are certain actors you can ask almost anything of and they’ll be able to do it, and translate it into something that makes you look better. Some actors, you ask them to do it this way and do it that way…they come up against a stone wall. There are certain actors, and Helen is one of them, that you can really get everything you ask for and that is such a pleasure for a director. And for the other actors with her -- because leadership on set comes from the director, but when your star is literally being there, not going to their trailer, doing the hard work as asked, it has a very salutory effect on the other actors and makes for a much better film.”

Aw. You guys!

4. Mirren, refreshingly, doesn’t want to direct, and would choose film over theatre.
Mirren once directed a segment of the TV omnibus "On The Edge" and of that experience she says, “I loved the process, I even had advice…in my bedroom. I came to the end of the experience absolutely having loved it, thinking what a great job directing is, what fun it had been, and ‘I’m not going to do this again.’ Because actually, I’m an actress. I chose to be an actress… I was asked to do a long-format thing also for TV and I said no, because I love being an actress, I think it’s my chosen destiny and I don’t want to change paths. But I still want very much to encourage women and hope to work with many female directors in the future.”

Furthermore, when asked about her preference between her film and theatre work, instead of coming over all misty-eyed at the purity of the theatrical acting experience, she said, “my answer to that is usually whichever one I’m not doing at the time… but if I ultimately had to choose, I would probably choose film. I’ve come to absolutely love the process of filmmaking.”

5. She counts her character in “The Door” as one of the most difficult acting challenges of her life.
“It was perhaps the hardest film I’ve ever done. It doesn’t look like that to the eye, but I felt a responsibility, that it was a Hungarian story, a whole central European story, the World War Two [aspects], the communist experience… So I felt an incredible weight of responsibility and felt all the time I was falling very short… The only great advantage was I wore absolutely no make up, so I didn’t have hours of preparation. It only took 5 minutes to get ready and that was fantastic.”

And later she elaborated further: “...[my character] has an incredible mystery about her…is she actually a really evil character or is she a very noble character? And you just don’t know because she’s so uncommitted. In a way that’s harder to play.”

6. Looking at painting of Elizabeth II and footage from her childhood helped her inhabit the role of “The Queen."
“Compared to the first Elizabeth, who really controlled her image, Elizabeth II has been extremely liberal. She allows many portraits, and she allows the portraitists to do anything they want -- for example she was recently painted I think with her eyes closed -- and it’s like your portrait of the Queen, it’s not a perfect replica, it’s your impression. The minute I thought of my work as a portrait -- my personal portrait, there’s a lot of me in it, like there’s a lot of the painter in a portrait -- it freed me from the terror.”

Here Hackford chimes in with the complementary story of Mirren’s research approach to the role, saying that despite the wealth of more recent material available to her, she kept watching the footage of the Queen as a young girl, and ignoring the videos where she was at the age Mirren would be playing her. “I said ‘We’re running out of time and you’re not going to have a chance to look at the meat of this role.' And she said ‘Once she puts the crown on her head she becomes THE QUEEN. If I want to know who she was, I look at her as a little girl.’”

7. She had myriad reasons for taking the role of Alma in the upcoming “Hitchcock.”
“It was a fabulous script. And I got to work with Anthony Hopkins. And to do a film in Los Angeles, it was shot in Los Angeles which is very rare nowadays, so I could be at home with my husband. And speaking of women in film, Alma [Reville, Hitchcock’s wife and the character Mirren plays] was one of the great unsung heroines of film. She was extremely productive in making Hitchock’s masterworks and he himself gave her all the credit in the world for her contribution. So it was a great chance to bring Alma out of the shadows.”

“Hitchock” is slated for a 2013 release, so she may be beaten to the Alma Reville punch by the formidable Imelda Staunton, who portrays her in the similarly themed HBO/BBC production “The Girl,” due to air this year. But we’d lay money that Mirren will not be outshone, in a bet that pretty much no one will take.

Karlovy Vary Film Fest Review: Fascinating Subject Almost Trumps Staid Format In ‘Brian Eno: The Man Who Fell To Earth 1971-1977’

Jessica Kiang — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 14:04:00 GMT

A documentary about just 6 years out of a 42-odd year career, that runs two-and-a-half hours long and rarely strays from bog-standard talking head/rote archive footage format? Yes, it sounds unbearable, and probably would be were its subject anyone but Brian Eno, a definite, no-joke candidate for The Most Interesting Man In The World (sorry, Senor Dos Equis), at a period in his life which was arguably his most creative. (Very arguably, and we’d probably be the ones to argue, having had some exposure to the Eno of the ‘80s, ‘90s and today). Still, there’s no denying 1971-1977 in the visionary musician/artist/producer’s life was a dynamic one, and the film exhaustively maps it out: his early Roxy Music days; his initial solo music career; his burgeoning confidence with the new technologies that essentially become his instrument; his multiple collaborations with artists known and unknown; his embracing of cybernetics; his championing of avant garde music in the form of Island-funded label Obscure Records; the coining of the term “ambient”; and finally up to the start of his most indelibly famous association with David Bowie on Low and then Heroes. At the same time, the minute approach means we also get a good sense of his expanding musical consciousness, and a strong appreciation for how, in just half a decade he could go from insistently referring to himself as a “non-musician” to being the consummate musican’s musician, without ever really troubling the space in between. It’s pretty much a superhero origin story for modern music geeks.

So it is a real shame, then, that the documentary itself doesn’t take its cue from the groundbreaking flair of its subject. Contributors are well-chosen and, for the most part articulate and passionate about their subject (Eno biographer David Sheppard is a particular pleasure), but they are largely covered in face-on head-and-shoulder shots, in front of dull, unchanging backgrounds, and the reliance on these segments to convey the narrative, coupled with the frequent use of explanatory voiceover, makes the film feel deadeningly talky when you’re not 100% riveted by what’s being said. Similarly, the music itself is transcendent (often literally) but too frequently director Ed Haynes makes use of archly counterpoint stock footage to fill in where no music video or live performance footage exists (or is available to him). There's only so often one should ever go to the well of black-and-white images of ladies in bloomers dancing to pioneering electro-rock tracks, and the quota here is filled quickly. But perhaps the most glaring lack is of footage of Eno himself. Despite the film’s generous running time and the narrowness of its focus in the context of Eno’s whole career, disappointingly it only yields a couple of clips of the man himself, both culled from later interviews for, we have to presume, other projects.

We feel that lack, not least because the picture that does emerge of Eno, in marked counterpoint to the chilly intellectual vibe one could mistakenly ascribe to him, is of a tremendously warm, friendly man who is tirelessly generous with his creativity, and genuinely collaborative in approach, even as his individual sensibilities are coalescing. Time and again his genius for drawing great work out of others, leading by example, and rarely allowing ego to foreground his own contributions, is referred to by the assembled journalists, admirers and sometimes those collaborators themselves (krautrocker Hans-Joachim Roedelius of Harmonia and Cluster; bassist Percy Jones, among others). The fact is, we had always admired Eno, but here we start to really like him -- we’d love to get to spend a little more time with him.

Nor do we get David Bowie, or Bryan Ferry, or John Cale or any of the higher-profile people who were such an influence on, and who were so influenced by, this prodigious talent. The film’s small budget shows in this regard, and again it is a pity because those famous names may not have contributed much to the actual story being told, but they would have lent a gloss of prestige to the rather creaky made-for-TV-and-not-even-primetime feel.

It’s not surprising, then, that is a rare big-screen airing of a film that has been available on DVD in many territories since early last year. And if our own experience here was marred a little by, of all things, poor sound quality (wherever he was, sonic perfectionist Eno no doubt experienced an uncanny quiver of horror at the precise moment the speakers started to fuzz with bass overload), still it’s a life and early career that is actually so fascinating that it not only kept our attention, more or less, to its end, but actually had us looking forward to more. Or rather, hoping for another installment, more imaginatively put together (why not use some of the man’s own Oblique Strategies?) and better funded, starting where this one ends. After all, there is plenty of material remaining unmined; here, we don’t even get to Music For Airports, let alone the Talking Heads period, let alone his projects in other media -- his books, his art -- let alone his 2009 album with David Byrne.

If you adore Eno or are just Eno-curious, or somewhere in between, this documentary does enough to satisfy, if only because the story it ploddingly lays out and the 70s music landscape it sketches is such compelling subject matter. But especially compared to the rash of superior music docs that have made a splash of late (“Shut Up and Play the Hits” and “Searching for Sugar Man” for example, both of which are playing here at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival) it’s simply not shiny enough to draw in the neophyte, and perhaps that is the documentary’s greatest failure. Eno’s is an oeuvre more people should know: it is central to our conception of electronic music today. Quite beside that, the multi-multi-hyphenate Eno's example is utterly inspirational to anyone with any kind of creative leanings. But the film, being so cramped in its own artistic ambitions, and having such a relative paucity of top-flight contributors, is unlikely to draw in anyone but the established Eno devotee. And so it preaches to the converted, which is a great shame, because Eno’s church, on this films’ own evidence as well as that of our own ears though the decades, deserves to be much, much broader. Forgive us our evangelism -- we’re members of the congregation. [B-]

Four Film Festival Advertisements You Must Watch

Dana Harris — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 02:55:43 GMT

In the annual movie-awards hoopla over who's got the best what, it's easy to overlook one of the best bests: Best Film Festival Advertisement.

They're tricky to produce: The ads must convey a sense of what the festival's about and what makes it unique while steering clear of the temptation to go the pomp-and-glam route. Because while festivals sound glamorous, and some can be, they're all going to look shabby next to what Hollywood can provide.

Better to highlight your quirks (festivals specialize in indie film, after all). And best of all if the festival has the courage to not take itself too damn seriously.

That last bit must be one of the hardest hurdles to overcome because festivals have many voices and it's easy for a great idea to be crushed in committee. Here's four that weren't.

Adweek highlighted three ads from the just-ended Whistler Film Festival, but this one is my favorite as it renewed my faith in princesses:

I wrote about this one, from the Santa Barbara International Film Festival, in February. Festival director Roger Durling loved it, but apparently, some Santa Barbara board members were not amused to see this play in front of the 2011 films.

There's also John Malkovich in excellent form in this 2010 ad for the Karlovy Vary Film Festival:

And this one with a genius cameo by -- not going to spoil it.

Karlovy Vary Film Festival Honors "Restoration" & More

Brian Brooks — Sun, 10 Jul 2011 10:41:17 GMT

Israeli director Joseph Mahmony's "Restoration" won the Crystal Globe, the top prize at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, over the weekend, taking nods with France's Pascal Rabate for "Holiday's by the Sea," which earned the director the Czech film even't Best Director Award.

Also taking home prizes this weekend in the resort town's fest were David Morse (Best Actor Award, "Collaborator"), Stine Fischer Christensen (Best Actress Award, "Cracks in the Shell"), "The Good Life," by Eva Mulvad (Best Documentary over 30 min.), and Czech film, "Nicky's Family" by Matej Minac.

The 46th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival took place June 29 - July 7 in the Czech Republic resort city.

Full list of Karlovy Vary International Film Festival winners wtih information and descriptions provided by the event:

Grand Prix - Crystal Globe:
"Restoration," directed by Joseph Madmony (Israel)

Best Director: "Pascal Rabate," for "Holidays by the Sea"

Special Jury Prize:
"Gypsy," directed by Martin Sulik (Czech Republic)

Best Actress: Stine Fischer Christensen for her role in the film "Cracks in the Shell" / Die Unsichtbare

Best Actor: David Morse for his role in the film "Collaborator," by Martin Donovan

Best Documentary Film over 30 minutes: "The Good Life," directed by Eva Mulvad (Denmark)

Best Documentary Film under 30 minutes: "Declaration of Immortality," by Marcin Koszalka (Poland)

[For a full list of awards, visit Karlovy Vary's website.

Triumph of the Woman! 'Chick Flicks' Abound at Karlovy Vary Fest

Basil Tsiokos — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 07:23:25 GMT

The weather may have been unseasonably chilly for the first half of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, but it didn't have a noticeable impact on the enthusiasm of the crowd. The event takes place in a small spa town and draws thousands of attendees, many of them student backpackers from all over Eastern Europe and beyond. As a result each public screening attended was packed, with student pass holders filling every empty seat and then spilling into the aisles. When not in cinemas, these young audience members, many of whom set up a tent city in a nearby stadium for their stay in Karlovy Vary, would drink and carouse through the early morning hours on both banks of the Teplá River that runs through the heart of the town. Add significant attendance by international and local press and industry, and the festival cuts an impressive figure in the international film festival landscape.

In conversations with other international press and industry professionals attending Karlovy Vary this year, many noted what seemed to be an increased presence of films centering on women. Attending the Czech Republic's most celebrated cultural event for the first time, I can't easily determine if this female focus is in fact unusual or not. Some prior attendees did note that it was interesting that these women's films come into prominence in the first year of longtime fest programmer Karel Och new role as Artistic Director, taking over the position from Eva Zaoralová, who instead served this year as Artistic Consultant.

Regardless of whether this was a deliberate programming move or just happenstance, femme feature-length films were represented in virtually every section of the 46th annual event. Also noteworthy is that, of the roughly two dozen titles that featured female protags, about half were also directed or co-directed by women.

Perhaps presaging the fest embrace of the distaff side, Karlovy Vary launched last Thursday night with Cary Joji Fukunaga "Jane Eyre," which also spotlighted a strong performance from this year's Crystal Globe Lifetime Achievement Award recipient, Dame Judi Dench, who was in attendance opening night to accept the honor. The fest will come to a close tomorrow night with Woody Allen's "Midnight in Paris."

Among the women's pictures screening here that have already generated attention at other events over the past several months are Eva Mulvad "Grey Gardens" redux, "The Good Life;" Athina Rachel Tsangari deliciously provocative "Attenberg;" Wim Wenders tribute to the legendary Pina Bausch, "Pina;" Abdellatif Kechiche controversial Venice competition title "Black Venus;" Ole Giaever Sapphic "The Mountain," which premiered in Berlin; Lisa Aschan coming of ager, "She-Monkeys;" Alice Rohrwacher Director's Fortnight title "Corpo Celeste;" Jannicke Systad Jacobsen Tribeca screenplay winner, "Turn Me On, Goddammit;" Joe Wright's teen girl assassin pic "Hanna;" and Andrey Zvyagintsev Un Certain Regard closer (and jury award winner), "Jelena."

Other Karlovy Vary films spotlighting the fairer sex that I didn't get a chance to screen include Christian Schwocow "Crack in the Shell," referred to by many here as "the German 'Black Swan;" Montxo Armendáriz "Don't Be Afraid," a disturbing story about child abuse; Joshua Moore's Cassavetes-inspired relationship drama, "I Think It's Raining;" Urszula Antoniak sophomore effort, "Code Blue," a portrait of an emotionally disturbed nurse; Zuzana Liová's "The House," about a daughter's conflict with her father's expectations; Andreas Horvath & Monika Muskala's documentary competition title, "Arab Attraction," profiling a feminist who becomes the second wife of a younger Yemeni man; and a retrospective screening of Barbara Loden's 1970 Venice award-winner, "Wanda," her only film.

The women-centered films I did view at the festival display a wide range of tones and approaches, though most share a certain bleakness that seems especially fitting for an Eastern European festival.

"Women With Cows"
One of three documentaries screened with a female focus, Swedish director Peter Gerdehag's portrait of sisters Britt and Ingrid makes its international premiere here in the documentary competition. The film is a sort of mix of "Old Partner" and "Grey Gardens" - but instead of oxen and a mother-daughter pair, Gerdehag profiles a pair of sisters and their relationship to the cows on their family farm. Britt loves cows - she has essentially given up her life for them, putting off marriage until it was too late so she could tend to the farm she inherited from her father. Walking literally doubled over due to a badly healed back injury sustained from tending to her beloved bovines, she appears to be grazing alongside her thirteen cows when she walks. Her physical limitations and advanced age make it difficult for her to keep up with the farm work - half of the milking she does ends up outside of the bucket - so she depends on her younger sister, Ingrid, who decidedly doesn't share Britt's enthusiasm for cows, but begrudingly helps out. When Ingrid's own health is threatened, she refuses to work the farm any longer, leading to difficult decisions for Britt's animals. Gerdehag's film is as modest as Britt's farm, which is to its advantage. It presents a portrait of sisterhood, stubbornness, and frailty which is sometimes humorous and sometimes deeply poignant, and made it one of the most memorable of the films I saw at the fest.

"Coal in the Soul"
Martin Dusek & Ondrej Provaznik's documentary also focuses on two women - but in this case, what connects them is not family ties, but coal. Brown coal deposits under Horni Jiretin may mark the end of the small Czech village in northern Bohemia. Libena, a mother of two and a spokeswoman for the coal company that aims to flatten the village to get access to the resources, is almost disturbingly enthusiastic about her job and the benefits mining has brought to her life and to the region. In decided contrast, Hana, a resident of Horni Jiretin and the warden of a castle, is resolute in wanting to preserve her home and its cultural landmarks, and wary of the company's claims of environmental stewardship and recultivation. Both women are clear in their convictions, resulting in an engaging and very personal approach to an issue-oriented project. Dusek and Provaznik's hour-long film claimed the Best Czech doc at Jihlava last year.

"Marija's Own"
On the sixth anniversary of their grandmother Marija's death, director Zeljka Sukova and her two sisters organize a commemorative celebration in this Croatian film included in the fest East of the West competition section spotlighting Eastern European cinema. After Marija's granddaughters introduce themselves to the camera, one of the sisters reveals that she is in fact an actress playing the part of Sukova's sister, signaling that this is a hybrid documentary. Attending their party are a half dozen of Marija's relatives and old friends, and in between drinking, eating, and reminiscing about the departed, they enjoy the bizarre song stylings of a famous Czech band, Midi Lidi, and are challenged to come up with the gravestone decoration, which was left blank at Marija's burial. The pitching sessions (and crude drawings) for the latter are truly remarkable and hilarious, especially a couple of the older women's suggestions involving an invalid Pope John Paul and some pigeons. While the viewer may not be completely clear on where the reality ends and the fiction begins (and I'm not sure why the fiction might be needed at all), there's something that works more often than it doesn't in this odd duck of a film, and attains a level of genuine affection that cuts through whatever artifice is brought into play.

Ziska Riemann's "Lollipop Monster." Image courtesy of Karlovy Vary Film Festival.

"Belvedere"
Bosnia & Herzegovina's Ahmed Imamovic also brings his film to Karlovy Vary for its European premiere in the East of the West competition, and, like Sukova's film, centers on dealing with the loss of a loved one. The film's protagonist, Ruvedja, is a widow, living as a refugee from the 1995 Srebrenica massacre. Though she has family around her, including her paraplegic brother Alija, she feels the haunting presence of her husband, leading her to stand vigil with other war widows seeking information on the location of their lost husbands' and children's bodies, and, most significantly, to stalk the man she blames as the perpetrator of the massacre. Meanwhile, her nephew, Ado, reflects the desires of a younger generation to move past the war and escape his surroundings, winning a spot on the local version of the "Big Brother" reality show, much to his mother's consternation. Shooting in stark black and white - counterpointed with the glossy, color "Big Brother" sequences - Imamovic evokes a classical atmosphere that lends both weight and timelessness to Ruvedka's tragedy.

"Salt White"
The final East of the West competition title with strong female leads is Georgian director Ketevan Machavariani's "Salt White," making its world premiere at Karlovy Vary. Two of its three protagonists are female - the waitress Nana and the young homeless girl, Sopo, joined by Abkhazian refugee-turned-policeman, Niko. On the coast of the Black Sea, their lives intersect as they try to make peace with their pasts, break free from the constrictions of their present routines, and forge a better, or at least different, future. For her feature debut, Machavariani has chosen a story that appears simple on its surface, but the characters bear the imprint of decades of political and ethnic turmoil. The monotony and hopelessness of their day-to-day lives are a result, and what "Salt White" tries to explore, to some success, is what happens when circumstances force them to seek an escape and consider the possibility of something different somewhere. It perhaps takes a bit too long to get there, but that in itself echoes the realities of its characters.

"Bedouin"
Looking to the festival's main Competition, this international premiere by Russian director Igor Voloshin follows a Ukrainian woman, Rita, to St Petersburg, to act as a surrogate for a gay Russian couple. While she attempts to act businesslike with her clients, calls from her frenzied mother reveal Rita's motivations for taking on this job - her daughter, suffering from leukemia, is in need of costly medical treatments to have even a slim chance of surviving. As her daughter's condition worsens, Rita must quickly adapt to rampant corruption and crime to achieve her goals, and ultimately take her chance on a last, desperate hope. While the film as a whole just didn't work for me, the main performance is certainly notable - lead Olga Simonova makes for a striking, if dour, presence in the film, willing to go to what few would argue are unlikely lengths to save her child, but her doggedness does carry the audience through the story, despite its at times far-fetched developments.

"Lollipop Monster"
Also screening in the main Competition, and also uneven, German Ziska Riemann's debut brings together a pair of teenage girls - alternative, dark-haired stunner Oona and the more strait-laced blonde Ari - in an unexpected but organic friendship. Oona's bohemian artist family is shaken up after her mother's infidelity leads to her father's suicide. Ari's home life is just slightly better - her clueless mom coddles her malingering brother while her ineffectual father looks on - leading her to rebel first by acting out sexually, and later by adopting some of her new friend's darker trappings. Additional betrayals push both characters past the brink in a not-entirely-convincing climax, but despite some significant missteps in plot, tone, and character (all of the adults are either willfully or ignorantly thoughtless and inconsiderate to the leads), Riemann and her young actresses bring a welcome injection of energy and brashness to the proceedings.

"Stranger Things"
Nearer the opposite end from "Lollipop"'s comic-book pop stylization is the reserved kitchen sink realism of Eleanor Burke & Ron Eyal's film, which made its international premiere in the Forum of Independents section. Coming off a Grand Jury win at Slamdance at the beginning of the year, "Stranger Things" tells the significantly more subdued story of another, much less flashy Oona - this one a dowdy thirty-something daughter who is also dealing with a parent's death (clearly another theme in the fest lineup). Cleaning up her eccentric mother's home to put it on the market, Oona, a would-be anthropologist, slowly begins to come to terms with missteps she's made in her life after she encounters Mani, a homeless man who attempts to take refuge in the empty house. A quiet film that may be just a bit too slight for some viewers, "Stranger" impresses with its deliberate sense of pace and very believable, convincingly awkward performances that impart an authenticity that pays off for patient audiences, despite an ending that doesn't quite ring true.

ABOUT THE WRITER: Basil Tsiokos is a Programming Associate, Documentary Features for Sundance, a documentary film and festival consultant, and a regular contributor to indieWIRE. Follow him on Twitter (@1basil1) and visit his blog (what (not) to doc).

John Malkovich Will Present His Fashion Line at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival

Bryce J. Renninger — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 09:02:07 GMT

Buried in the lineup for the 46th Annual Karlovy Vary Film Festival was an announcement that John Malkovich will hold a fashion show for Technobohemian, his "nontraditional" men's clothing line, using top Czech actors as his catwalk models.

Explaining the title on the Technobohemian website, Malkovich says,"'Technobohemian' is a phrase I read in a yet unpublished Italian novel. I lift it with the author's permission and I will endeavor to use it well."

Malkovich, who launched the line in 2009, said in a statement to the film festival:

Sometimes I draw inspiration from the cinema, sometimes I look at people on the street. There is a strong correlation between the job of the designer and the actor who takes on different roles each time transforming itself. I like to experience the transformation even in the clothes we design, every transformation is basically a confirmation that we are constantly being born."

In 2009, Malkovich was honored with the Karlovy Vary Crystal Globe for Outstanding Artistic Contribution to World Cinema.