Palm Springs International Film Festival: Day 3

Day three was entirely given over to the debut features of first time directors, a proposition which can be wary-making to say the least. None of the films was bad, each had a number of things going for it, but each was at least a little bit green. That’s the way these things tend to go. These were noticeably virginal works. Again, the audiences were full of people whose reasons for attending the films that they attend – only to grumpily carry on, bitching and moaning about the content and approaches to content of each film – perplexes me to no end. It were almost as though these people had done no reading up on the films, had never seen any films not necessarily intended for mass-market appeal (or if they have seen such films they have completely forgotten not having enjoyed having done so), or are simply an especially cantankerous bunch of retirees and entitled occupants of gated communities. It is amazing and not a little bizarre to sit in a theater next to a couple in their seventies who are themselves sitting down to their fourth film of the festival having despised in their very marrow the first three. I was talking about this w/ film scholar and horror specialist Charles D. before the screening of Home (as well as various other subjects including, memorably, how eXistenZ is in part an allegory about the pleasures and anxieties associated w/ anal sex), and he told me about a particularly crusty group of fogies who had come very near to tearing him a new asshole in one of the festival’s incredibly long lineups earlier in the day for having hade the temerity to defend the Haneke. While I am getting annoyed w/ my regularly having to shush people during screenings who are light years beyond the age where the should know better, I continue to find this all rather amusing. Americans are famous for knowing what they want. In Palm Springs, lately, I have seen them very clearly able to express what they don’t want. It remains to be seen if they know what they actually do want. What, I keep wondering, are all these seemingly hopeless cases finally doing here? It were as though they’d wandered in baffled, fresh off the golf course. Anywho, without further ado:

Samson and Delilah

An in-demand cinematographer in Australia since the late nineties – both operating the camera and directing his own screenplay w/ Samson and Delilah, an ambling, dreary, and clearly deeply personal Aboriginal love story punctuated w/ quick combustive pops of shivery violence – Aboriginal filmmaker Warwick Thornton, who is here in town w/ his film, has attracted plenty of worldwide festival attention w/ it (he won the Camera d’or at Cannes). It is an accomplished and uniquely naturalistic film, if often excessively precious, that follows two non-actor Aboriginal leads playing characters presumably not unlike themselves, but w/ quizzically biblical names, as they escape lives of hopeless repetition and violent reprisal in their Central Australian desert community for lives on the lam that are no less bleak but which do yield to light at the end of their proverbial tunnel. He is fifteen-year-old Sampson, speaking only once in the film w/ so disabling a stutter that he can barely manage his name, escaping violence at the hands of his brothers who comprise a reservation house band and are eternally practicing the same reggae number outside the gutted room where Sampson, mostly dressed in a tattered black Birthday Party T-shirt, passes most of his time huffing petrol on his filthy mattress and listening to a beat-up old radio. She is sixteen-year-old Delilah, not much of a talker herself, taking care of her aging Nana whose Aboriginal art she assists w/ the production of and which we subsequently find out is being exploited for profit, sans remuneration, by whites. When Nana dies, Delilah is beaten up by the female elders in the tiny, dusty community as part of a traditional ritual that Thornton is suggesting betrays a cruel part of his community’s archaic traditional system of cosmic justice that perhaps needs to be rethought. The two youngsters, emotionally, spiritually, and physically bruised by their concurrent beatings, flee to civilization in the community’s one and only truck, only to find themselves surviving by the skin of their teeth, squatting under an elevated highway in the occasional company of a mentally ill freestyling drunkard who offers them occasional morsels of food and not-so-sage advice (he is the only Aboriginal character who speaks English, or says much of anything at all, in the film), all the while singing to himself about spaghetti, Jesus and various other matters of the heart. The film is beautifully shot, especially adept at its use of early morning and late afternoon light which it uses like expertly manipulated dollops of oil paint, and the non-actors extremely compelling and proud, especially Marissa Gibson as the endlessly suffering but enigmatic and determined Delilah. The whole thing does, however, feel a little on-the-nose and twee. Themes of addiction, exploitation, disenfranchisement are par for the course and by and large are not handled w/ much subtlety, though the film itself at the same time does anything but beat you over the head w/ itself. Its tone remains relaxed and fluid. The passage of time is registered in multiple unique ways and is part of what Samson and Delilah is best at capturing, along w/ a kind of quiet love which is more about survival than romance, and which does not correlate w/ the gauzy and inflated kind that Delilah fantasizes about whilst locked in the truck each night, before they leave town, whilst listening to Spanish love ballads. The film works far better as a parable than as a work of social realism, though despite this the ending, which finds the teenage duo ensconced in unlikely domestic bliss, fails to convince for all its happily-ever-after earnestness.

B-

Home

Ursula Meier’s promising debut takes off from an admittedly brilliant originary conceit which is captured ingeniously in the film’s triumphant final shot: the road movie’s conceptual inverse, in which our focus remains on something fleetingly glimpsed out of the window of a passing car instead of remaining in the vehichle. Home is the story of a family of five who have lived next to an unfinished, unopened superhighway for ten years and whose lives are thrown into a state of crisis when it finally one day out of the blue is opened to traffic. The parents happen to be played by Isabelle Huppert and Olivier Gourmet, two of cinema’s finest actorly students of the infinitesimal. It takes what would have been a wonderful sight gag in Tati’s Trafic (’71) and fashions from it a sweet feminine fable that is grounded in the body, the sensorium, domesticity, and the intimate-if-messy biological imperatives of family life. Shot by one of my very favorite DOPs in the world, Agnès Godard, best known for her extraordinary work w/ female directors, especially Claire Denis (probably my favorite contemporary filmmaker), the final shot was far from being the only one to steal away my breath. The camera is a roving presence, deftly framing and darting about within compressed zones of ecstatic back-and-forth, close range trajectories energetically alive w/ minute, expressive games of human pinball breaking out within tightly-knit microtopographies. The family is like a busy organism attending to its appetites and protecting its vital organs, as its members bathe together, roughhouse, inspect one another’s skin for the tell-tale spots, engage one another w/ unrestrained physicality. Home borrows from the western, the horror film, and even SF, focusing on the encroachment of civilization and the bio-sensorial threat it imposes. There home is like the town in so many westerns into which the introduction of the railways presents a new threat of assimilation and homogenization. When the highway crew arrives to tar the pavement and set up crash barriers they come decked out in orange suits and masks as though from out of The Andromeda Strain. When the cars come they descend on the newly exposed homestead like Hitchcock’s apocalyptic birds (The Birds (’63) being the only film that Meier mentioned as an influence during the Q&A following the screening, though it is clearly also an anti-Wim Wenders movie). Neuroses within the family are awakened w/ the new influx of civilization’s automotive detritus, auditory overload, and bad (perhaps deadly) air. A massive traffic jam provides plenty of gawkers, causing mother and the two youngest children to decamp for a brief picnic. When they return the eldest, who has stubbornly refused to forego her habit of sunbathing in the yard in a bikini whilst listening to death metal, has disappeared with a party or parties unknown. Everybody is losing their shit. So far so good. The first two-thirds of the film work quite marvelously. Home, being Swiss, could even be said at this point to be a witty little national allegory about an isolated conscientiously-objecting island-unto-itself through which much of the world’s capital (think Swiss banks) is just passing through. When father finally explodes, however, and mother stubbornly refuses to leave, clearly being as afraid of the outside world as was the mother in Dogtooth, no doubt having been previously burned by civilization and its discontents in some never-specified manner, a violent scene leads the claustrophobic man, realizing that they are at an impasse and that the situation as it stands has come dangerously close to turning him into a monster, to take the uncharacteristic action of bricking-up the windows and doors, effectively encasing his wife and two remaining children in a deathtrap. A family that was once happy, open, garrulous and free is now reduced to a totally debased, closed-off group of individuals, who leave rotting food everywhere, mope like they’re pacing a psych ward, and who no longer occupy the same frame (or do so only when lying lifelessly in bed). When the eldest daughter returns, not even able to enter the home, she is forced to leave again perhaps for good. Finally, starving for air, again making a decision that is less psychologically pre-determined than based on physical need, mother takes a sledgehammer to the bricked-up door and our family emerges into the light. The final shot is point-of-view from inside an unseen vehichle that briefly sees our family walking together next to the highway then, leaving them behind as quickly as it captures them, briefly passes over the house itself and then up into the light, as though leaving the earth itself behind for good. The last act of the film is rushed (as though the director has become a truck driver making time), somewhat dull, perfunctory, and not entirely convincing. But the poetic resolution is, embodied by this single gravity-defying tracking shot movement-image, genuinely sublime.

B+

Ddongpari / Breathless

Though the wetness behind the ears, heaviness of hand, not-particularly-original dissection of violence’s cyclical nature, and slight problems of plotting betray Ddongpari as a directorial debut (please note that I refuse to call it Breathless, a title which should be retired like a star player’s jersey, as the Korean title apparently translates as “Shit-Fly”), its emotional power is so utterly astounding – even honest-to-goodness goosebump-inducing – that I cannot help but consider it an almost complete success on its own terms. The opening scene embodies the film entire in microcosm. Sang-Hoon (an amazing performance from writer-producer-director Yang Ik-Joon), as the central pugilistic deputy-enforcer to an easy-going loan shark and freelance breaker-up of demonstrations, comes across some fellas beatin’ up on a helpless dame. After beating up the ruffians, he starts repeatedly slapping the girl himself, demanding of her an explanation as to why she doesn’t fight back. This goes on until, out of frame and unseen by the viewer, somebody smashes Sang-Hoon over the head w/ something. Cut to the film’s title. That is Ddongpari in a nutshell: self-perpetuating cycles of physical, emotional, and lexicographical violence, directed inwards and outwards, forming intertwining ellipses like the Olympic rings around the lives of its characters. The film is structured around scenes of violence like a porn is structured around fucking. It is an exhausting experience, and the moments of lyricism it occasionally pans from the sediment (especially two dialogue free montage sequences of its characters peacefully hanging out in the city set to a score of peaced-out shoegazery) certainly doesn’t get mined from prettiness. This is an ugly world. The film doesn’t look like any other Korean films about lowlifes (a genre which is a fucking industry unto itself over there). Its gritty shot-on-the fly (the shit-fly?) documentary look makes it resemble more so-called sixth generation Chinese films like Fruit Chan’s Public Toilet (’02), which are shot quickly, totally independently, and on the cheap, documentary-style, to escape the unwanted attention of the authorities. Though its tone is uneven, especially whenever we see Sang-Hoon shooting the shit-talk w/ his way-too-friendly employer (this is a film where a dude who pays guys to seriously fuck people up is the nicest male we meet by a long shot), the film seldom feels phony or forced, even when taking a turn for the potentially-too-precious when our hero meets-cute a potential love interest in the form of an equally profanity-spewing high school girl. He spits where she happens to be walking. She curses him out and slaps him. He curses her out and then punches her out cold. Then he waits for her to come to and buys her a beer. What looks like the stuff of coy movie fluff actually turns into an unbelievably powerful story about fear of intimacy and platonic connection. When her brother becomes involved, unbeknownst to her, kicking ass under the supervision of Sang-Hoon (who is likewise not aware of any connection) we can immediately she the circular machinery spinning into a lock, and we know that this is not going to end well. And end well it does not. Let’s just say that a genre movie cliché involving bad shit happening on a main character’s last day working a dirty job and the missing of a nephew’s school play gets pulled out to bring around the story to its logical point of termination – a stark decisive-moment freeze-frame of profoundly disheartening realization on the part of our young schoolgirl as she stares the reality of violence’s perpetual motion machinery in the face – but that nothing this debut feature trips up on or clumsily falters w/ in any way managed to stop it from wringing my guts like a wet dishtowel.

A-