Palm Springs International Film Festival: Day 7

A much more restrained day. Made my early meeting. Second such brush with celebrity in as many days as there was a famous rock and roll singer there today. This celebrity, however, seemed like more than a bit of an ass. Both of my screenings today were at The Camelot. One in each of its two theaters. The Camelot theaters are not nearly as good as the ones at the Regal 9 (where most of the films I have previously seen have been shown, excluding the back to back screenings of Fish Tank and Das weisse Band), but they are still pretty great. So no big deal.

A real disparity in quality today. The first film I saw was easily one of the worst that I have ever seen at any film festival anywhere. Which would go a long way towards making it the worst film I have ever seen on the big screen. It was supremely awful in ways that simply beggar belief. The second film was, for me, one of the highlights of the festival. As with most of this festival’s highlights, it was not a crowd pleaser in the least. Folks hated it. Such, my friends, its Palm Springs, that intractable little cunt that she is.

Pokrajina St.2 / Landscape No. 2

Landscape No. 2 is something else, man. This is some seriously awful filmmaking from the word go. Everything about it stinks to high heaven. I have never seen a Slovenian film before and was curious, being a huge fan of Slovenian philosopher-celebrity Slavoj Žižek and generally interested in the nation’s fascinating history. My curiosity was rejoined with Landscape No. 2, an utterly bizarre and in every way incompetent apologia for dormant fascist sympathies suffused within the national character presented in league with an aesthetic and worldview so skuzzy and deranged that the mind can merely boggle at its garrulous, insipid wretchedness. It is apparent that aside from the many other things that capitalism and democracy have brought to bear in Slovenian culture, the nation can also thank the West for exporting a particularly execrable form of the fanatical rightwing made-for-cable thrillers of the 1980s. The film is about two extortionist thieves, the older, wiser Polde, and his young, idiotic pussyhound lackey Sergej, who make money by stealing and holding for ransom illegally-obtained artworks from wealthy and powerful benefactors of the nation’s onetime communist elite. At the beginning of the film Polde and Sergej break into an ex-general’s opulent home, without much effort at all, to steal the titular landscape painting, which the general appropriated from Nazi-sympathizers who were summarily executed shortly after the end of the second world war. Instead of being happy with fulfilling this basic criminal task, Sergej also breaks into the general’s safe, without telling Polde, pocketing some cash and a set of documents the significance of which will only come to be known to the young man well after it is far too late to stop the wave of atypically sloppy murders precipitated by the efforts made to recover them. These documents, as it turns out, betray the general’s central involvement in those post-war executions that have heretofore gone unpunished. The general brings in a ridiculous heavy played by the glowering and seriously fucking humorless Slobodan Custic as one-quarter Terminator, one-quarter Boris Karloff, one-quarter Michael Ironside in Scanners, and one-quarter No Country for Old Men’s sociopath-for-hire Chigurh, to go retrieve the documents whatever the cost in human lives. Effortlessly tracking the painting through one of the two unreliable people in the whole world who knew of its existence (the general’s cleaning lady who is also friends with Polde’s family), the assassin doesn’t take long in disposing of Polde, who doesn’t know a damn thing about any documents and whose made-to-look-like-a-suicide death is witnessed by his Down syndrome-suffering son Igor (seriously), who somehow escapes unscathed despite the tendency of Custic’s ridiculous villain to really messily murder everybody in his path whether it is necessary or not, especially if they are women or fags. Finally tracking Sergej to a cabin in the woods owned by the family of one of the two women the young criminal has irresponsibly impregnated – which happens to be directly adjacent to a surrounded-by-candles-of-mourning hole in the ground from which the remains of the dead Nazi-sympathizers that the general is responsible for having executed just happen to be in the process of being excavated – the assassin chases Sergej to the precipice of the mass grave and then, because during all his killing and following of leads the general who has dispatched him to do the dirty work has died of old age, himself jumps out of nowhere to his death, leaving Sergej standing there looking dumbfounded, just as the cops show up ready to pin the trail of dead on the poor young thief, the documents that explain everything having just been incinerated by the candles aligning the really big, and apparently deep, hole in the ground. The acting is abysmal, with everyone genuflecting and mugging like they’re in a silent movie. To show how happy Sergej is about the money he just stole from the safe he takes the money out off his pockets in the middle of the street and starts exuberantly sniffing it. When his fiancé finds out that she is about to be murdered, impossibly slowly so that the choreography works just right, she goes about methodically running directly into every piece of furniture in the room. This is almost one of those movies that fits into the SOBIG (so-bad-its-good) sub-genre, pace Ed Wood or Menahem Golan’s The Apple (’78). There are indeed moments here of unintentional hilarity that are as funny as anything in your average decent comedy. It is almost a triumph viewed from the standpoint of parody. Besides that the film had two moments that really struck me as awesome in the same way early Paul Verhoeven is awesome: in the first such scene we see Sergej, as he waits for his hot redheaded pregnant-girlfriend-on-the-side Jasna to return to bed from another room, manually keeping himself hard whilst watching the remains of bodies being recovered from a mass grave on television (something I can see myself putting in a film); the second awesome scene, shortly after the first, finds Sergej giving nude-under-her-coat Jasna Larry Clarke-realistic head in the middle of a well stocked grocery store, up against a grocery cart, in what must be the most tantalizing and spirited celebration of the joys of consumer-capitalist consumption I have ever seen.

D-

De ofrivilliga / Involuntary

Involuntary, Swedish director Ruben Östlund’s second feature proper, is easily the most pleasant surprise of the festival so far. It was a film I knew nothing about until I did some cursory reading-up after the festival announced its lineup, and was made sufficiently curious about what I found to purchase a ticket and check it out. Am I ever happy I did. It is an exceptionally deft portrait of contemporary Sweden telling five interconnected-but-narratologically-unrelated stories in a style that superficially resembles Michael Haneke’s 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (’94), but is even more experimental and profound. Instead of an exploration of violence, causation, and contingency, which define the Haneke and have served as the core thematic concerns of a myriad of other films before and since, Östlund’s masterpiece is about something I have never seen encapsulated by the cinema so directly: the element of human nature, running parallel to our ethics and informed by drives bound up in our apperception of mortality, which manifests itself in the things we do that we know we shouldn’t do but that we do anyway as if we cannot help ourselves; as if we are doing these things involuntarily. Östlund’s film does not only approach this theme from five different angles, it does so in such a way as to legitimately lay claim to something like the status of a quintessential national portrait: particularly in its depiction of Sweden’s drinking culture and the domination of forces of repression that define it as a famously polite society built atop unsaid things. Four of the stories are about unsaid things or actions not taken: in one story a man attending a party at his home in his honor gets drunk and sets off a firecracker in his face and nobody will force the issue of his getting medical attention, with disastrous results, knowing that he is intractably stubborn; in another story a semi-famous stage actress accidentally breaks a curtain rod in the bathroom of a bus and will not cop to responsibility when the driver, assuming that roughhousing kids are responsible, refuses to continue driving until somebody fesses up; in a third story a pair of rambunctious young girls get incredibly drunk and when one passes out in a park whilst they party with a group of young people, the other fails to do anything about it, putting her friend at serious risk; in a fourth story a group of young men retreat to a cottage for a weekend’s drunken getaway and unspoken sexual patterns, behaviors that normally get repressed, cause one of the young men confusion when he cannot decide whether he wants to leave or to stay after an uncomfortable sexual humiliation takes place. The fifth story looks at the other side of things: a young schoolteacher, who does speak up when she believes that a student has been reprimanded by the woodshop teacher in a manner that “crossed the line,” faces ostracization from the rest of the staff. In each of these fragmented, interlocked vignettes we see how uncomfortable situations cause people to do things that they know they should not, to keep mum when they know they should speak up, and to participate in the acknowledged perpetuation of unhealthy illusions so that they do not incur reprisal or risk complete alienation in a society built on false illusions that refuses to allow for its members to be human and imperfect. Early on the teacher who is later ostracized leads her class in an exercise in conditioning by having one girl wait in the hall and telling the rest of the class to contradict her every time she chooses the longer of two lines in a series of graphics until the girl finally picks the line which she empirically knows is the wrong one. This scene is Involuntary in microcosm. It is a brilliant film about falling into line against our better judgment, told in fragmented long takes that place the viewer in a position of ontoepistemological estrangement. The camera consistently remains in discomfiting counterintuitive relation to the actions of its characters, retaining, along with its dense and extraordinary soundtrack, a profoundly immanent character as our heightened senses are excited by the oddness and destratified concretion of what we are experiencing and how we are experiencing it. There is a demanding, hyper-involved quality to Involuntary that is remarkably unique and experientially rich. It is extremely minimal yet of an ever-growing moment-to-moment intensity. A fascinating and penetrating work of art almost alien in its alacrity and formal audacity. Momentous!

A+