Palm Springs International Film Festival: Final Four Days

Appropriately enough on the final day of the Palm Springs International Film Festival, the Monday where they show all of the award winner and audience favorites, the torrential rain started coming down hard and it hasn’t stopped since. I spent the final days of the festival in too far-gone a stupor of cinematized neural overload to make appropriate time to commit my musings to communicable e-friendly blog form. I then spent another full day or two napping and reading a mendaciously addictive true-crime book, Most Evil: Avenger, Zodiac, and the Further Serial Murders of Dr. George Hill Hodel, ex L.A. homicide detective Steve Hodel’s follow-up to his Black Dahlia Avenger, in which he quite convincingly made the case that his father was responsible for the famous Black Dahlia murder as well as a series of related homicides in Los Angeles during the 40s and 50s. The new book finds Hodel expanding his investigation to include likewise convincing allegations against his father, accusing the old man of a spate of murders including the famous Zodiac murders in and around San Francisco in the late 60s and early 70s. I couldn’t put the fucking thing down. But with the book now finished it is high time I got my lazy ass around to having done with 2010 Palm Springs International Film Festival.

It was a wonderful festival, all in all, even if it did take place in what a friend of mine calls the Necropolis of Palm Springs, with an audience principally composed of bitter old WASPS and mainstream Republican homosexual males. Most of the films I saw did not cater to the narcotic, aesthetics-as-anesthetic needs of these dour, pain-in-the-ass Necropolitans. There was a particular trio of cackling old Christians that, every time they saw me at a screening, became visibly crestfallen, immediately aware that the following screening was going to fuck with their nervous systems in ways for which they were ill-prepared. I was like the angel of cinematic death for these poor creatures, unsuited as they were for anything that exercised even the most perfunctory interest in defying convention. This was a festival that will always exist in my mind as the festival of walkouts and vociferously voiced distaste. Nothing could stop these fucking corpses from lining up an hour in advance for films they had no business seeing, one after the other in an endless succession of misplaced cultural yearnings, a bare mimesis of participation in global culture that was not unlike witnessing the zombies, dressed mimetically in the costumes that defined their singular sociocultural positions and affiliations before the shit went down, returning in a mnemonic, automatist reiteration of consumerist habituation to the mall in George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. Only this was the cinema instead, and by and large they no longer had any of their original teeth left with which to bite. Instead they bitched and moaned, tugging at the loose-fitting clothing of overwhelmed staff and volunteers, murmuring guttural disapproval like gay and/or gray Frankenstein monsters. As if to issue one final fuck you the festival gave the FIPRESCI prize for best foreign language film to … arguably the best foreign language film, the monumentally crowd-displeasing De ofrivilliga / Involantary, meaning that Ruben Östlund’s absolutely brilliant film was given one more opportunity to piss off fans between audience choice award winners on Best of the Festival Monday. My friend tells me he could hardly make his way to his car afterwards through the mob of incensed moviegoers wondering “what the fuck was that?”

A bevy of wonderful, fair to middling, and pretty wretched films kept me happily engaged between bouts of fastened-to-the-pavement zombie watching. The best performances by actresses were all by Korean women (one of them, Bae Doo-na, in a Japanese film), which is hardly a surprise anymore. I am thinking particularly of Kim Hye-Ja in Mother, Bae Doo-na as the wry and adorable Dostoevskian idiot of an Air Doll, and Kim Kot-bi as the shit-talking put-upon schoolgirl giving as good as she gets from Yang Ik-Joon in his own roughshod Ddongpari. The best actor award for me is an absolute no-brainer: Olivier Gourmet, know to even the most cursory of world cinema aficionados for his incredible performances for the Dardenne brothers, appeared in a total of three films that I saw at the festival and was brilliant in each. I especially liked him in Frédéric Dumont’s Un ange à la mer, which is also my vote for best debut feature (even though Dumont has been directing short films on a regular basis since 1986). Best cinematography I have to give to cinematographer Francisco Gózon for Altiplano, and this in a festival where two of the five greatest contemporary cinematographers, Agnès Godard and Mark Lee Ping-bin, were accounted for with new work. As for best film and best director, I have to give it a two-way tie for both: Marco Bellocchio for Vincere and Ruben Östlund for De ofrivilliga. Both of these films were sphere-splitting brain-dissectors.

I’ll put my top ten list at the bottom, following my roundup of the last seven films I saw this year in Palm Springs.

Looking for Eric

A new Ken Loach film is always a safe bet, and such is the case with the fine but decidedly underwhelming Looking for Eric. Nothing particularly special here but nothing to excite the gag reflexes of Palm Springs audiences either, Looking for Eric is a nice film that goes down easy. In a festival full of films that seemed too often like modern urban fairy tales, Loach and his regular writer Paul Laverty produced one of the most metaphysically kooky but uncharacteristically (for them) easy-going of the bunch. The film tells the story of at-least-twice-divorced Manchester postman Eric Bishop (played with sweetness and flustered enervation by the very winning Steve Evets), who at the start of the film is seen in full nervous breakdown driving his car repeatedly the wrong way around a roundabout until the inevitable accident finds him recovering in hospital. Back home we see the stressful working class circumstances that precipitated his collapse. Living with two stepsons, one black and one white, Eric’s home life is a chaotic madhouse run (and being run into the ground), in spite of his baffled and occasionally brusque attempts at fathering, by his two teenage children who have littered the place with numerous plasma screen televisions and all sorts of other dubiously procured bric-a-brac. It turns out that the final straw that precipitated his breakdown came in the form of an unwanted reminder of the past, established in flashbacks, when the grown daughter from his first marriage asked him to babysit his granddaughter, first picking the kid up from grandma, his first wife, with whom he bungled things terribly and the sight of whom drives him over the edge. Having been unable to approach her he sped off only to drive himself into the hospital in the scene in which we first met up with him. Eric still loves his first wife and knows that she probably hasn’t forgiven him, as he sure as shit hasn’t forgiven himself, for running out on her many years ago, unable to face up to the pressures of fatherhood. At an impasse, not knowing how to face up to his past or to cope with the hectic and dissatisfying present, Eric raids his son’s hidden-beneath-a-loose-floorboard marijuana stash, and smoking a joint of what is apparently really good shit, discovers that his French Manchester United football star hero Eric Cantona (playing himself), a near-life-sized poster of whom bedecks his bedroom wall, has suddenly materialized before him to offer sage wisdom in the form of bizarre-if-workable philosophical epigraphs and to goad the man into facing the demons of his past and moving forward like a champion. At first we might be liable to think that Cantona is the psychological projection of a troubled mind, a fact not made any less probable by the fact that he seems to appear at first only when the lesser Eric is smoking grass (the smoking of which Mr. Cantona obligingly assists in). As the film progresses, however, it becomes increasingly clear that the predominating explanatory methodology of these appearances is not psychological but rather metaphysical. What we are witnessing is not the hallucinations of a man whose psyche has been cracked by broken bonds and tough living, but rather a sort of mystical opening up of the laws of matter. We are first made aware of this by the fact that Cantona keeps doing and saying things (occasionally in perfect French) that it is not credible to believe Eric Bishop would be capable of projecting. Our suspicions are confirmed late in the movie when Eric Cantona, participating in a group dispensation of justice by videotaped humiliation and intimidation-though-vandalism of a psychotic thug who has turned the world of Eric Bishop and his sons upside down by forcing his son Ryan, through intimidation and extortion, to hide a gun under the same loose board where he keeps his weed, momentarily interacts with Meatballs, Bishop’s best friend from work and the pub, whilst wearing, along with everybody else in the mob, an Eric Cantona mask. This image of Eric Cantona, somehow metaphysically transported into the life of a fan who needs him, wearing an Eric Cantona mask says a lot about what the film is telling us. Perhaps our tendency to forget that those who inspire us are not just images on posters. Perhaps they are not merely masks of themselves. Perhaps they are real flesh and blood people who can teach us real things about strength, determination, teamwork, and faith. Perhaps the false distance we place between our heroes and ourselves, by putting them up on a pedestal, too often excuses us from carrying the flame ourselves, causing us to fail to see that we, by surviving, by retaining some semblance of sanity no matter what the world throws at us, by managing to raise children who have even a semblance of respect for us no matter what kind of front they put up, are equally heroic, or at the very least have it in us. Looking for Eric, then, is a sweet and compassionate film about degrees of heroism and the efficacy of faith in real-world magic. Kitchen-sink magic realism. It’s a perfectly nice film. I’m glad I saw it. Once.

B

Daniel & Ana

Michel Franco’s Daniel & Ana has the distinction of being the second worst film of the festival, and not by much at that. It starts out immediately on the wrong foot with a title card that makes an absurdly obnoxious truth-claim, stating that not only is the film based on a true story, but that it is in actual fact an exact detailing of the real events as they actually went down. Maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise that a film that begins by making such an overblown claim of verisimilitude immediately starts depicting shit that would never go down in real life the way it goes down in the film’s fucked-up counterintuitive universe. It’s hard not to understand why I wanted to see this film about a brother and sister forced to fuck on camera and the brother’s subsequent development of sexual feelings for his older sibling. It’s dirty, salacious stuff, and in the right hands could make for one hell of an uncomfortable exploitation film. And it is an exploitation film after all. The genre developed when crafty and unscrupulous, amoral producers realized that the best way to attract audiences to low budget movies that couldn’t provide stars or studio production values was to cram them full of shit that studios couldn’t get away with and market the films exclusively around this, promising more than they could actually deliver. This is exactly what Daniel & Ana is essentially doing for all its faux earnestness concerning its prospective status as important expose of Latin America’s gunpoint incest porn market. This whole things boggles the mind. With this material one would think a filmmaker would find something a little more shocking to dish-out than a wretched Mexican soap opera full of pouting rich people gazing at their various respective navels. When the central spoiled rich Mexican teenagers (not the world’s most sympathetic demographic to begin with) are kidnapped by three sort-of-mean lowlifes, escorted blindfolded to a not-very-secluded urban domicile, and made to stand next to one another in a stark white room with lights and a video camera, at no point up until this one have they even seemed mildly inconvenienced. When the head baddy starts giving them ineffectual orders and threatening to rape and kill them if they don’t do as they are told, the kids do start to look uncomfortable, admittedly. About as uncomfortable as the kids in those kiddie-porn-chic wood-paneled Calvin Kline adds years ago, only with significantly less art direction to buffer them. You almost feel like you are watching a documentary about the making of the actual film you are watching, focusing on how difficult a time the director (the head baddy) is having making these kids emote even a little. When they actually do fuck, with the assistance of a little blue pill plied upon the boy while his sister is in the other room essentially renegotiating her contract through forced sobs, there is a very polite placement of hands and bodies so that genitals are politely blocked, she avoiding eye contact and he, looking like a skinny Mexican Dustin Diamond, allowing his bangs to hide his face. This could be any couple loosing their virginity awkwardly to each other. A scene that should easily disgust and arouse uncomfortably at the same time does neither. They are later dropped off at home and told to keep mum. Which they do. Considering that the baddies know who their victims are before they kidnap them, demonstrating this fact as part of their process of intimidation, you would think that they would also realize that these kids’ parents would rank among the world’s most likely to be willing and able to pay a hefty ransom for their safe return. Apparently this never crosses the criminals’ minds, despite the fact that ransom kidnappings are a fucking industry in Latin America. Upon being returned home, Ana starts putting the trauma behind her as best she can by postponing her engagement and seeing a psychologist (who upon being told of the girl’s unpleasant sexual ordeal sits next to her on a couch and places a consoling hand on her thigh which seems pretty fucking unprofessional), whereas Daniel skips school and goes to the movies, acting only slightly more sullen than usual. When his girlfriend calls his mom hands him the phone and he just hangs up on her. She doesn’t call back – apparently ever. Ana tries to talk him into seeing her therapist too. He goes there but doesn’t have the stomach to go through with the session. Instead he enters her bedroom the next night, having failed to find the footage of he and his sister in flagrante delicto online to jerk off to, and rather effortlessly rapes her. He’s pretty quick about it. After being raped by her brother in her own bed, and not wanting to tell anybody except her conspicuously incompetent therapist what has happened, she quite understandably decides she is suddenly very eager to get married to her fiancé after all and would just love it if he would take that job in Spain she was previously so skittish about. Problem solved. At the wedding Daniel gets in one last lick by jerking off into his new brother-in-law’s drink before bringing it to him which, if this is indeed really a true story told as it really went down, was a pretty strange thing to cop to after having spent such a long time hiding even the basic facts of this story from everyone in his life. The final indignity is being told, again with those title cards, that this film was made so that the apparently huge underground market in gunpoint incest porn would be exposed. Really? It struck me that if Daniel & Ana is in reality a message movie that message is about really bad movies that want you to think they will be titillating but that just really, really suck. Look out for those. I should have known better. It’s my Achilles heel. If the basic plotline of a movie suggests taboo-smashery I will probably be there with bells on. Serves me right.

D-

Darbareye Elly / About Elly

About Elly is a pretty good pressure cooker from Iran that plays like an American or Western European play, notable for the presence of a number of supremely classically beautiful Persian women I would very much like to marry and have large broods of lovely mixed-race children with, that has a plot which very much plays like a long riff on Lea Massari’s disappearance about a third of the way through Antonioni’s L'avventura (’60), likewise suggesting that the dematerialization of one of its principal female characters involves some kind of unwitnessed death by acute ennui. Starting like a rather promising Iranian Eric Rohmer film (appropriate considering that the 89-year-old French master died during the festival) involving a group of Iranian friends retreating to a beach for the weekend to dance around love, desire, foreboding, humility, sex, communication or the energy of exclusion that often defines it, and the general age-old discreet battle of the sexes, the film takes a sharp left turn into theatrical where-did-she-go-and-why? chamber piece revolving around the disappearance of Elly, a shy, sullen-though-enigmatic (and bone-marrow chillingly comely) schoolteacher who has been brought along by one of her students’ mothers, Sepideh (Golshifteh Farahani, with eyes that pierce your soul and hang you to the wall), in the hope that she may get over the fiancé that she cannot stand and maybe make a good match with recently-returned-from-Germany and recently single Ahmad. When they first have a few moments alone Ahmad at one point shares a German saying with Elly: “better a bitter end than an endless bitterness.” Elly takes a moment to think it over, sighs, and comes to the premonitory realization that she entirely agrees. When one of the kids of one of the couples at the beach nearly drowns in the ocean while the bulk of the adults are playing volleyball, the exited retrieval and revival of the child leads to the sudden realization that Elly has disappeared. Has she drowned as the first prospective rescuer on the scene? Did she just fuck off as she previously has threatened to, uncomfortable with the whole situation and anxious to return home, despite the fact that Sepideh has hidden her handbag and cell phone to prevent just that? Nobody is sure and everybody is panicking. It makes for edgy cinema, everyone perusing every angle, the ever-suspicious authorities brought in, possible courses of action hatched, worked over, and argued into submission. Lies are told and exposed with escalating consequences as the confused and stressed-out group of adults uses the missing woman’s cell phone to contact her mother (who Elly has told to act like her daughter hasn’t even left town if anyone asks) and the last person she called, her fiancé who, for the sake of appearances, pretends to be her brother (though Elly has no brother). As the characters try to feel their way around the proper course of action, trying to keep the escalating web of lies, half-truths, and momentarily useful bluffs in orbit, wondering how much they can afford to disclose without exposing any breaches of decorum, outright transgressions of Islamic law, or without the late-on-the-scene fiancé killing Ahmad or Sepideh. This nearly comic juggling of truth and lies is clearly endemic to the repressive culture in which these characters navigate, and all the headaches and stockpiled deceits that come as its baggage, going a long way towards suggesting why Elly was fucking sick of it all to begin with and why, when her drowned body finally is recovered, it probably didn’t get that way trying to save no goddamned kid. A bitter end indeed.

B

Altiplano

Altiplano is a predictably gorgeous film from the same directing duo of Peter Brosens and Jessica Hope Woodworth whose first fiction feature after years of making documentaries together, the equally-visually-resplendent Khadak (’06), bowled me over at the Calgary International Film Festival a couple years ago. Altiplano – as I have said: the best photographed film of the festival – is just as tranced-out and Edenically calm-lake-surface-pristine pretty as Khadak, but is significantly more narratologically and humanly engaged, its directors putting pictorial splendor to even more satisfying use this time around. The film begins with two bravo sequences: in the first we witness a breathtakingly captured religious ceremony in the remote Peruvian Andes, wherein pagan native traditions are merged with Christian iconography in the form of a statue of the virgin Mary being hoisted and carried out into the sun, where it falls to the earth and shatters as the attention of some of the ceremony’s participants is distracted by shimmering pools of mercury foreshadowing the community’s imminent and catastrophic contamination by cavalier Western mining practices (the film was inspired by the real mercury spill in the Peruvian village of Choropampa in 2000); this is followed by the first of the film’s many mind-blowing 360-degree sequence shots showing a female photojournalist named Grace (the stoic Jasmin Tabatabai, exuding a rare screen intelligence), in the middle of war torn Iraq, as she is forced to photograph the brutal matter-of-fact point-blank murder of her Iraqi translator/guide. The rest of the film, a stark and powerful film about death, mourning, and the power of images (full of appropriately powerful images), details the way that these two worlds become spiritually and narrativistically intertwined. Grace is married to Max (the de rigeur Olivier Gourmet), a Belgian doctor who runs a remote clinic in the Andes. When we first meet them back in Europe, she has given up on images, forsaking photography because of its inability to change a reality which is harsh and unforgiving, he chiding her, insisting that events will never be real to people unless they can witness them vicariously through images like those Grace has made her reputation capturing. She remains unswayed, locked in despair and disconsolation after the tragedy she witnessed in Iraq. Back in the Andes we follow a beautiful young woman named Saturnina from the village of Turbamba whose young fiancé Orlando is the first villager to die of mercury poisoning. It is at the precise moment that Orlando’s body is returned to the village and the grief of Saturnina and the other members of the community is in full bloom that a group of doctors, of whom Max is the most unfortunate member, happen upon the scene, having just become aware that some sort of contamination is present in Turbamba, and because they are seen as members of the civilization responsible for this fresh trauma are met with a volley of rocks one of which strikes and kills Max, a fact which only becomes known to us when, in the next scene, the most remarkable in the film, another sequence shot, this one, in the style of Greek master Theo Angelopoulos, encompasses in its roving pan a mind-boggling temporal elasticity, passing over Max and Grace’s son hiding despondently behind a tall pillar, then over a group of people including Grace mourning his death, then back around the pillar emerging once again around the other side now showing empty space once occupied by the mourners, the shot finally terminating with Grace leaning solemnly up against the other side of the pillar from where her son was at the beginning of the shot. Now that both of the central women in Altiplano have lost the men that they love, Grace decides to visit the scene of her husband’s death in the Andes just as Saturnina decides to kill herself, filming her own death on the camera recovered from Max at the scene of his death by her brother, a camera Max once used to record video letters to his wife back home, by consuming a vial of mercury after stating directly to the camera that this is her last act of resistance against the West, the only one she has left at her disposal, and that it will not go unnoticed because of the camera, so that it will live forever. Grace, upon discovering Turbamba, joined en route by masked figures of local folklore who stalk the landscape and line her path, awakens in a hut to discover that her husband’s camera has been placed there for her to discover, turning it on she witnesses the suicide of Saturnina and her insistence that her death-as-act-of-resistance will live forever, captured as it is on video. At this moment, Grace, graphically and spiritually conjoined with Saturnina, comes face to face with a powerful personal revelation concerning the epistemological, metaphysical, and social power of images. There is a powerful circularity to Altiplano, analogically paralleled as it is by the circular pans of DOP Francisco Gózon’s unusually versatile camera. Beautiful and extremely powerful.

A

J'ai tué ma mere

Written, directed, co-produced, and starring twenty-year-old Xavier Dolan, J'ai tué ma mere is a ridiculously accomplished debut about a volatile love-hate relationship between mother and son, taking its title from a scene, echoing a not dissimilar scene is the ultimate French language debut film of all, Les quatre cents coups ('59), in which the son claims at school that his very-much-alive mother is dead. An occasionally very funny film, it actually runs on a kind of deeply entrenched sadness, getting most of its emotional gas from the pain of having to grow up, lose ones illusions, stuck in the place between total symbiotic dependence on ones mother and an adult place of accepting her as human and imperfect but still necessary. The film is about the landscape of late adolescence and how its fidgety, capricious, going-four-directions-at-once inconstancy creates tremors within the mother-son bond and threatens to destroy the bond that the son’s conception of self still depends upon to exist in the first place. The film fastidiously captures a feeling that is universal: a relationship with a parent defined by love and hate mixed into a confused cocktail of emotion wherein the two components cannot be cleanly uncoupled. Though Dolan’s Hubert is queer, it would be wrong to suggest that this type of relationship with a mother is somehow quintessential of the gay experience, rather his sexuality simply adds another layer of distance and dissonance between mother and son, creating another zone of uncomfortable exposure for a young man already in the late part of a supremely awkward stage of development. The film begins with a close-up of the mother Chantale (played by the note-perfect Anne Dorval) as she eats an orange and then a bagel smothered in cream cheese. Dolan cuts to a two-shot of the woman and her son, she involved in eating, he staring at her with self-evident disgust. Immediately the film captures the deep-seated pent-up disgust we often feel at the most simple everyday actions of people with whom we are forced to spend a great deal of time in confined spaces. The simplest thing, like cream cheese carelessly smeared on someone’s face as they are eating, can begin to drive us around the bend. Hubert finds a lot of his mother’s mannerisms, absurdly girlish-feminine outfits, and habits nauseating to an extent that drives him to endless distraction. She in turn grows alternatively defensive and aggressive with him, irritated by his dependency and simultaneous rejection, often losing her temper just as easily as he does. Though his mother drives him nuts, it is the relationship most central to Hubert’s life, even more so than that with his boyfriend Antonin or the teacher, Julie, who understands and respects him. Certainly more than his father who is an absent figure and only comes into the picture later as a ruse to bring him back into contact with his mother after he runs away, and then to ultimately send him to boarding school. From the beginning of the film we see Hubert directly addressing the camera in b&w asides, in which he talks about the distance he feels from his mother, about how he doesn’t or cannot really love her, about how much he wants to escape her clutches. During these asides it becomes clear that the opposite of each proclamation holds equally true: that he needs his mother, that he cannot help but love her despite himself, that no matter how much he wants to despise her he admires her strength and independence from patriarchal expectations. We find out that these b&w direct addresses are not interior monologues stylized to betray their Freudian “other scene” quality, but rather videos that Hubert has shot of himself talking to his camera. We discover this at the same time Chantale does when she stumbles upon the tapes in Hubert’s room and watches them. These strident monologues suddenly attain the status of messages left for Chantale to discover, the product of a yearning to communicate with a loved one that one no longer knows how to communicate with. In addition to this, Dolan’s film takes strides to undercut his protagonist’s combustive contempt for his mother by giving her space in which to come into her own as a subject within the film. There are two key scenes that reveal Chantale’s strength and determination in standing up to the imposition of male authority or control. First when she confidently takes charge of the situation when she and Hubert are reconnected at his father’s, and later, after Hubert has run away from boarding school having been beaten up by virtue of his sexuality, in the most pleasurable scene in the whole film she goes over-the-phone ape-shit when the school principal suggests that maybe the boy needs more of a male presence in his life. Her tirade is both funny, empowering, and made to remind us of how cruel Hubert was in an earlier scene when he tells her it is no small wonder she cannot find another man. The conclusion of the film finds mother and son reunited at the rural home in which the boy was raised, which he calls his “Kingdom,” intercut with Super-8 footage of happier times we are seeing for the first time, suggesting that it is not our mothers that we are angry with but rather that things cannot be as simple and wonderful as they were when we were young, before life got messy and complicated, our families broken up, and the joy and connection so much more fleeting.

A-

Un ange à la mer

Un ange à la mer, advertised online and in the catalogue with a cute still of a young boy in angel wings, was another big festival surprise and the last of many films here in Palm Springs to instigate monumental walkouts, going to show once again that you can do whatever you want to people in your movies but if you start killings cats, even pretend killing them, you can expect serious reprisals. The film begins with a Belgian family setting up house in picturesque Morocco, immediately planting us in the subjective point-of-view of the younger of two sons, Louis, as he becomes a tragic victim of his father’s bipolar disorder and its monstrous manifestations. In the opening sequence they are driving through the North African desert, young Louis hanging out the window of the car playing a game wherein father and son emphatically pronounce whether the occupants of oncoming vehicles are happy or unhappy, the father manically declaiming that pretty much everybody is unhappy, the son being more likely to give them the benefit of the doubt. As the son continues to play the game his father suddenly becomes remote and morose, suggesting that this car too is occupied by at least one very unhappy camper indeed. We don’t know the half of it. Early in the film the father (Olivier Gourmet of course), working (or not really working) for a farmer’s rights activist group and almost permanently camped out depressed in his underwear in the upstairs bedroom of their home, calls his son upstairs to confide a secret that the boy cannot share with anybody, especially not his mother: that dad intends to kill himself that very night. Obviously the unthinkably cruel secret shatters the traumatized boy. Though dad doesn’t go through with the suicide, Louis is henceforth held captive by the secret. He spends most of his time playing guardian angel, high up in a tree adjacent to the house, keeping an eye on the bedroom window behind which his depressed father sits alone, perhaps biding his time. The mother (the always amazing if strangely cold Anne Consigny), meanwhile, is carrying on an affair with another man, one with whom she swims competitively, and is unable to connect with her unraveling son or her distanced, too-far-gone husband. In one heartbreaking scene she brings the son and father together upstairs to confront them on their strange behavior, demanding that Louis tell her why he is spending all of his time up in the tree peering in on his father. Looking uncomfortably between his father and his mother, knowing he cannot betray his father’s trust, the boy replies that he is building a tree house, plainly not the case and simply one of the saddest things I have ever heard in my life. The father’s depression is only occasionally usurped by outbursts of rage and extreme hypomanic cruelty, he and Louis only bonding over acts of animal cruelty, such as when the old man, crazed and lumbering about like Mr. Hyde, races downstairs and gleefully tries to drown a cat with a garden hose - whilst repeatedly chanting "el pueblo unido jamás será vencido," in parody of the Chilean cry of solidarity - after talking his son (from the upstairs window) through the process of catching it with a simple trap baited with food taken from the fridge, or when, after Louis sneaks into the trunk of the car and narrowly escapes suffocating in there because he is afraid to let his father out of his sight, the old man drives him home and has Louis keep score of the number of stray cats the old man manages to run down en route. The film is mostly shot in excruciatingly sad close-ups, particularly of young Louis as his too-young-to-cope-with-this-shit psyche bleeds out through his imperious eyes. When at the end of the film the mother finally gathers her two sons into the car and decamps without father, we may be forgiven for being momentarily relieved that they have escaped the clutches of this unfeeling madman, but this relief is cut short when Louis suddenly throws himself out of the moving vehicle and into the arms of the desert night as on the soundtrack the voices of father and son play a game of word association, one of the pathetically insufficient ways in which they have traditionally bonded. The title of the film comes from a poem that the boy is made to memorize for a school recital, also repeatedly spoken like a non-diegetic refrain on the soundtrack, in which an angel is asked if it can understand the full scope of human suffering. Un ange à la mer is an amazingly disconsolate and grim film about an all-together-unpleasant species. And it will fuck you up. It is the opposite of J'ai tué ma mere in that the deeper you dig the more it is finally just about the catastrophe of being born into the world of adults who deform and corrupt us to the point where everything is irredeemably stained. I loved it.

A

Sergio

A first rate exemplar of the HBO-produced talking head documentary, Frontline veteran Greg Barker’s Sergio, about the life and tragic death of United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Sergio Vieira de Mello, was the only film the screened on Best of the Festival Monday that I figured I ought to see, having heard good things from a friend. I am glad I did. It’s a ridiculously powerful story told with a graceful elliptical structure meant to involve the viewer in the escalating tension of the man’s final hours during the ridiculously under-equipped rescue effort to remove him from the rubble after a truck bomb exploded beneath his office at the UN headquarters in Baghdad in August of 2003 whilst at the same time allowing for periodic digressions that fill in more of the man’s amazing backstory as the film progresses. Sergio de Mello went from being a young philosophy student at the Sorbonne where he was a post-Marxist radical who joined in the student riots of May ’68, throwing stones at police and being hit in the head by a police baton, causing a permanent disfigurement above his right eye. From there he moved to Geneva, crashing on a friend’s couch, and decided that thought on its own was nothing without action, a realization that saw him seek employment with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. He participated in fieldwork in Bangladesh during its war of independence in 1971 and Cyprus after the Turkish invasion in 1974. He later became the first and only UN Representative to hold talks with the Khmer Rouge, ultimately allowing for the return of incredible numbers of Cambodian refugees to their homes. He was also the main figure in the process that led East Timor to independence from Indonesia between 1999 and 2002. Though he did not support the invasions of Iraq and at first claimed he would never accept the position of Special Representative of the UN Secretary General to Iraq, he ultimately did accept it at the direct behest of his friend Kofi Annan as well as George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice. Sergio was an incredibly charming man with movie star good looks and womanizing tendencies, but at the end of his life was anxious to marry the love of his life and move back to his native Brazil. In Sergio, the backstory is dealt with tactfully and is used to provide a basic sense of the man, his contradictions, his extraordinary interpersonal skills, extreme pride, and his habitual selflessness, all of which factor into the story of his death in the rubble of Baghdad’s Canal hotel (where the UN was stationed). It turns out that part of the reason there was no security around the perimeter of the building was that Sergio himself had not wanted any coalition forces there to suggest the UN’s complicity in the American-led occupation. While he was still alive in the wreckage, upside-down and being crushed by debris, his only spoken concerns remained for others, especially those in his employ. When one of the rescuers, a black New York fireman and paramedic, suggested that they pray together, Sergio responded by saying, essentially, “fuck that.” He remained a steadfast and determined secular humanist even in death. The ultimate tragedy is that the rescue effort to remove him and another man buried next to him from the rubble was so ill-prepared that they were literally using a woman’s handbag and string to haul rocks from out of the hole in what was left in the building, a perfect metaphor for how ill-prepared the occupying forces were in every facet of the Iraq theater of operations. The film is well put together, incredibly rousing at time – with subject matter like this it is hardly any surprise.

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Top Ten Films of the 2010 Palm Springs International Film Festival

1. Vincere
2. De ofrivilliga / Involuntary
3. Madeo / Mother
4. Politist, adj. / Police, Adjective
5. Les Regrets
6. Das weisse Band - Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte / The White Ribbon
7. Un ange à la mer
8. Altiplano
9. Kynodontas / Dogtooth
10. Ddongpari / Breathless




Cheers!