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Film Festival - Part 2 |
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By John Demetry
Wilmington took the opportunity to stress the influence of Godard's French New Wave classic on Quentin Tarantino (remember him?). Tarantino, whose every film is a crime, is actually closer - a Neanderthal cousin - to one of the pop-crazed robbers in Band of Outsiders than to Godard. With Band of Outsiders, Godard created a precise expression and examination of modern consciousness - defined, in part, by the way movies (especially Hollywood) altered a generation's perception of the world. Godard's understanding is so rich that it's easily misunderstood - as Tarantino and Wilmington evidence. Hopefully, audiences will see the difference. In the marathon exhaustion of seeing 35 films at a film festival, Band of Outsiders is the Mother of Pearl (both metaphorically and in terms of the artistic standard set by Roxy Music's mammoth track). Filmmakers and audiences reach for Godard's Holy Grail, the gold Buddha. There were two new masterpieces at the festival: Patrice Chereau's Intimacy and Shohei Imamura's Warm Water Under a Red Bridge. Both use the "shock" of sex to resonate, though in different ways, through modern anxiety. The 75-year-old Imamura, like Chereau and Godard, has perfected an idiosyncratic, radical vision of the world. With glistening deep focus and long shots, Imamura allows the audience of Warm Water Under a Red Bridge an unusual imaginative freedom. He shares the freedom that Koji Yakusho discovers as a laid-off businessman when he ventures to a small village and becomes a fisherman and the lover of a woman who releases buckets - and buckets - of water when she orgasms. At the end, that spray of water transforms the sunlight into a rainbow. Imamura's nutty, personal morality and communal vision has a melancholy shimmering, an essential vitality.
Cuaron attempts to criss-cross repression in the personal realm of sexuality and oppression in the social realm of politics. He goes for the Godardian dream of turning pop into poetry, a silly story into literature . That silly story is about two 17-year-old male friends who try to seduce one of their aunts on a road trip. Cuaron cops out to hetero audiences. Y tu mama tambien is unshakeable and disappointing and sexy - featuring the movie kiss of the year. It aches like a simple tune - always my weakness - trying to be something more. I have a bigger crush on Y tu mama tambien than on the highly touted Amelie. Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Amelie is a new kind of crowd-pleaser. The exaggerated visuals and ostentatious editing excite the sophistication of the post-Band of Outsiders pomo audience. Looking for love in a looking glass world, the title character, played by Audrey Tautou, is an endearing representative of that audience. Unfortunately, Jeunet replaces the challenging mythic mystery of his previous City of Lost Children and Alien: Resurrection with typical movie romance. It's the same old story stretched into an elaborately elongated meet-cute. That's a step back from Band of Outsiders.
The French New Wave influence extends to Taiwan as exemplified by Hung Hung's The Human Comedy and Hou Hsiao-hsien's Millennium Mambo. The play with film technique and one character's obsession with pop idol Tony Leung in The Human Comedy seems very New Wave. Hung's latest, vast in its scope of crisscrossing characters, although moving, is pretty weightless. The most striking character is a theatre director, dying of AIDS, whose artistic vision is undermined by an actor who refuses to strip naked for the play. When the actor finally strips, Hung doesn't show the actor from the front. Strangely haunting is Hou's seemingly weightless Millennium Mambo. Narrated from 2011 about the dissolving relationship of a young couple in 2001, it perfectly captures the pantomime of new youth - the international set of ravers and party kids. The perspective-from-the-future allows for Hou's obsessive formal practices and cinematographer Mark Lee Ping-bing's vibrant yet meditative colors. They limit audience perspective yet deepen the act of perception.
The film begins with a woman's suicide and then continues backwards through her husband's court defense of Algerian rebels, her husband's affair with a liberated woman, the revelation of her conception from father-daughter incest, and, finally, to a chilling, enigmatic ending/beginning. Weird, yet - being beautifully filmed and intensely acted - fascinating. Back in the U.S., two films two of the best films are a band apart from most independent films: Abel Ferrara's 'R Xmas and John Gianvito's The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein. With 'R Xmas, fierce auteur Ferrara exposes the world where middle-class consumerism, the drug trade, and police corruption meet in New York City of eight years ago. Scary banality crosses with the moral challenge of faith. It's a great Christmas movie. Also set in recent American past, The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein explores the ramifications of the Gulf War on American society - though it's also global by extension. Passionate, challenging (at nearly 3 hours), and very powerful, it's a rare type of political filmmaking. Totally rousing, it's also dramatically potent and creative. It feels like a journey - and a deeply necessary one. Gianvito's film - and its showing at the festival - reminds that movies are where lonely dreamers, a band of outsiders, can meet and dream together. The above are the most wonderful dreams I shared at the 37th Chicago International Film Festival. |
Band of Outsiders 
Y tu mama tambien 
With All My Love
© 1997-2002 BEI