More of the Film Fest

Becoming Who I Was

This documentary, eight years in the making, follows the life of Padma Angdu, a young boy of the Ladahki tribe in northern India who often dreams of Tibet (where he's never been) and is therefore considered a rinpoche — a reincarnate or “Living Buddha.” But there's a problem. If he really were a rinpoche, the monks from the monastery where his predecessor lived would come and find him. Years pass and nobody comes. Eventually the monastery where he's studying decide he's a false rinpoche and kick him out. At which point he and his elderly teacher and guardian, Urgyan Rickzen by name, decide to make the long journey to Tibet to find out what's going on.

The mountain scenery is spectacular, the child is curious and playful, his guardian is gentle and wise, the journey is colorful, and the entire film is infused with sweetness and unhurried grace. A total winner.

The Blessing, a documentary set on the Navaho Reservation in the vast, open spaces of north east Arizona, takes a look at the Kayenta Coal Mine, which supplies fuel for the local power plant and jobs for many reservation residents. We see this world through the eyes of Leonard, a recovering alcoholic who works in the mine though he's well aware that it's desecrating a landscape sacred to his people. Leonard's wife skipped town years ago, and his thoughtful, articulate daughter has difficulty telling him that she plays on the high school football team, or anything else of importance to her. 

The film bounces back and forth awkwardly between Native spirituality, the economic life of the reservation, and a young woman's coming-of-age, like an unmaneuverable truck heading down into the pit, but if it comes up short on coherence and sociological detail, it still has lots of flavor, which is only enhanced by the Santana-esque guitar soundtrack. And perhaps that's all we need. (Specifics about the mine are available on line; for example, read The End of Coal Will Haunt the Navajo.)

        

Rainbow: a Private Affair

The Italians have a weird take on World War II. Allied with the Nazis, then overrun by Germans, then reconquered by the Americans, split in half, north and south, with or without Mussolini at the helm. Who's side are you on? Rainbow focuses on a few days of fighting near the end of the war, with partisans and Fascists occupying farms and villas on neighboring hilltops and skirmishing with one another when the mist coming in from the sea dissipates. Soldiers are captured and ransomed, local residents are reduced to slave labor or executed.

In the midst of the confusion, a partisan named Milton visits an abandoned villa where he used to lounge around with his best friend, Giorgio, and Fulvia, the beauty with whom he's still smitten. (Lots of flashbacks here.) The housekeeper, now the villa's only resident, inadvertently gives him the impression that Giorgio and Fulvia were much closer than Milton had imagined: a troubling thought. When Giorgio is captured by the Fascists, Milton must secure a "roach" and arrange for a prisoner exchange. But is he trying to merely save his old friend, or confront him?

The Taviani brothers have been making films since 1960, and there is something stagy about this production (one reviewer refers cruelly to the film’s "nostalgia-drenched affectedness")that bespeaks increasing old age. Then again, Night of the Shooting Stars (1982) was also a little stagy. In any case, the flashbacks make it pretty obvious that Giorgio, unlike Milton, is a charmer. Giorgio and Fulvia like to dance: Milton doesn't. Giorgio and Fulvia like to climb trees: Milton doesn't. Milton and Fulvia do share a love for Emily Brontë, but in times of war, perhaps that isn't enough.

Yet stagy though it may sometimes be, Rainbow offers some nice scenery and also some harrowing images of civil war, when your neighbors suddenly become your allies, or your enemies, and the tree where you once carved your girlfriend's name might now be the one where they string you up.

    

Trespassing Bergman

Here an odd assortment of film directors ranging from Iñárritu and Woody Allen to Wes Anderson and Lars Von Trier discuss Ingmar Bergman's work, personality, and influence. Some of them have descended on Bergman's home on a remote island in the Baltic Sea, others are interviewed wherever it's convenience. Along the way we also get an overview of Bergman's career from Summer with Monika and Smiles of a Summer Night to Cries and Whispers and Fanny and Alexander.

I would have liked to learn more about where the island is located, if there are villages on it, how the main house is situated with respect to the sea, and what all the various out-buildings we see in the footage are used for. But I did learn some things about Bergman's career, and also about his vast collection of VHS tapes. Evidently Bergman watched three movies every day, and he wasn't very discriminating about which three they were.

The next morning (a Sunday) I returned to the theater at 9 a.m. to see Bergman's early classic, 

Summer with Monika. I don't feel like describing it in detail--it came out in 1953--but I will say that it had some great scenes of Stockholm as seen from the water, quite a few good camping sequences on barren islands that look a lot like the BWCA, and two brilliant close-ups.

The Guardians might almost be considered a documentary of preindustrial agricultural life. Sound dull? It's not. The film could have taken place anywhere, though both the buildings and the lighting are probably more attractive in rural France, where the film is set, than ahywhere else, and that locale also provides an important element of the plot. The men are away fighting in the trenches of WWI. The women are trying to keep things going back home. 

The matriarch, Hortense, hires Francine, a young woman from the local orphanage, to help with the chores. She's a top-notch worker and everyone likes her—even Hortense's son, Georges, who returns on leave several times. That could be a problem. (She's lower class.) American soldiers arrive the buy vegetables and moonshine. They pay well, but they seem to like all the young women on the farm. Another problem. 

It's a rich ragout of passion and labor, family ties and moral quandaries. And a good ending.

Mpls. St. Paul Film Fest One

A scene from Bottomless Bag (see below)

While Minneapolis was being blanketed with seventeen inches of snow, Hilary and I made a well-timed escape...to India, Israel, Pakistan, Hungary, and the nation of Georgia. I'm referring, of course, to the opening weekend of the Mpls. St. Paul International Film Festival.

On Friday night we saw The Confession and Village Rock Stars (described below).  I had volunteered to be a greeter, and I stood in the hall in front of the information office all Saturday morning in my office pink volunteer T-shirt, watching people try to find the ticket booth, which has been set up around a corner and entirely out of sight of passing film-goers. I recommended to several members of the theater staff who passed by that a sign with an arrow saying

TICKETS →→→

would be very useful, posted on the pillar, and even volunteered to bring one from home, but two days later, nothing had been done to solve this problem.

My job, meanwhile, was to scrutinize the faces of the people who came around the corner from the front door. If they looked puzzled, I would say, "Are you looking for the ticket booth?" Usually, the answer was yes. "Right around this pillar," I would reply, gesturing nonchalantly with my thumb. 

Strange but true, there is a huge sign that says RUSH LINE in plain sight, but during the blizzard the audiences have been meager and it has served no useful purpose.

My four hours of volunteer work were occasionally enlivened by conversation with a film fan. One tall, red-haired woman with a passing resemblance to Julianne Moore had been to 45 films last year. "But that was down from 60 the year before," she told me.

So we discussed last year's films—the ones we could remember. And also The Confession. "Not as good as the director's previous film, Tangerines," she said, "but still pretty good." I agreed.

An hour later Hilary and I were watching Wajib, a slow-burn of a film set in Nazareth.

Here are some brief descriptions.

Confession (Georgia) A priest is assigned to a remote village in the Caucasus Mountains, along with his hair-brained assistant. They try to win over the local inhabitants to Sunday services by showing American films in an abandoned barn on Saturday night, and that's how they learn about the local piano teacher, who keeps mostly to herself but bears a striking resemblance to Marilyn Monroe. The priest makes the woman's acquaintance, she eventually agrees to come to confession, and problems ensue, though they're not the ones you might imagine. A solid tale, expansive scenery, rich choral singing, and beautiful  church interiors.

Wajib (Israel)Father and son, Abu Shadi and Shadi, spend the day delivering wedding invitations up and down the hilly streets of modern Nazareth. Shadi has returned home from Italy only because of his sister's wedding; he fled years ago to escape the incessant government persecution of Palestinians. 

The two men carry on a gently antagonistic conversation throughout the day: Abu Shadi, a respected local teacher, is doing Wajib, the honorable thing, in delivering invitations by hand, even to Jewish officials whom he takes to be friends or colleagues, though his son considers them spies and enemies. Beneath the generational discord common to many families lie two different visions of the Palestinian future. The acrimony is compounded by the fact that the father's wife ran off years ago with another man, who is now dying. Perhaps she'll make it back for the wedding, perhaps not.

Much of the film is devoted to the pleasantries, evasions, and half-truths exchanged between old friends and relatives as each invitation is delivered.  In the course of a single day a stirring portrait of a neighborhood, a fractured nation, and a single family springs to life before our eyes. This is art.

Village Rock Stars (India) Young  Dhunu wants a guitar. Her family has no money. They live in a mud compound and work a rice field that floods every year, obliterating the crop. Dhunu spends a good deal of time playing games in the fields and climbing trees with the neighborhood boys. The story is thin, but the landscapes and the incidental details of daily life in Assam are rich. Scenes seem to begin and end at random...yet the film won Best Picture at India's National Film Awards, and its quiet beauties have considerable appeal, with or without the Styrofoam guitars.

Armed with Faith (Pakistan) This straightforward documentary follows the activities of an underfunded bomb squad who defuses IEDs (improvised explosive devices) in the mountainous regions of northern Pakistan at the risk of life and limb. We get to know their motivations, fears, rewards, and frustrations while following them on their daily routine...which is never routine. Simple but moving.

Aurora Borealis (Hungary) In old age, Mom has moved from Austria back across the border to Hungary, though her high-powered daughter wonders why. When the old woman falls into a coma, her daughter pays her an extended visit, and begins to unearth a post-war family history that's a lot more complicated than she thought. Fitted with several extended flashbacks, the film is dramatic, complex, and convincing.  

Bottomless Bag (Russia) The director, Rustam Kamdamov, is also a jewelry designer, which may explain why this slightly surreal film has elaborate costumes and jewelry but very little coherent  action. It tells the same story that Akira Kurasawa drew upon for his classic Rashamon, and the black-and-white cinematography is, if anything, more compelling. But the narrative is largely submerged under the weight of medieval Russian robes and necklaces and the Wagnerian sensibilities. Where is Toshiro Mifune when you need him?

So Help Me God (Belgium) This documentary gives us a peek into the life of a Belgian examining magistrate named Anne Gruwez, who passes judgment on criminals and suspects daily in her cluttered office in Brussels. Unfortunately for the viewer, most of the cases are grisly, and involve prostitutes and small-time grifters. Gruwez seems to relish the sleeze, and she obviously takes pride in the fact that she's "seen it all." There are touches of humanity and even humor in the proceedings, but it's a slice of life most of us don't care to know that much about.  

On the Beach at Night Alone (South Korea) A fading actress named Young-hee retreats to Hamburg following an affair with the director of her last film. She and a friend discuss relationships and take long walks in the parks while she waits for the director to join her. He doesn't show, and soon enough she's back in Korea, meeting up with old friends, all of whom have heard of her affair. Various discussions take place in bars and coffee shops, and everyone's views about relationships and love get thoroughly exposed, and often trashed: Young-hee tends to get belligerent and insult her friends after a few drinks. 

Actress Kim Min-hee has been widely praised for her portrayal of Young-hee, though I found it difficult determining when she was being serious and when not. A New York Times critic wrote of the film:  " For all its intimacy, the drama has a vast scope, a fierce intensity, and an element of metaphysical whimsy (including one of the great recent dream sequences), which all come to life in the indelibly expressive spontaneity of Kim’s performance."

That seems like an exaggeration to me, though I like the phrase "metaphysical whimsy." I found the music of the language and the unhurried pace of conversations sort of mesmerizing. 

A young Korean-American woman was ushering. She'd already seen it. "I love this film, "she told me. "I hope you like it." I heard another woman say as she came out of the theater: "I slept through that one. I'd give it a 1."

You never know about these things going in. I guess that's half the fun.

Give It Five Stars

In the realm of customer satisfaction surveys, there are no wrong answers, which is nice. But have you noticed that the questions are invariably phrased in such a way that they are almost impossible to answer at all? "On a scale of one to ten, how likely would you be to recommend this [concert-motel-restaurant] to your friends?" Well, recommendations tend to be a yes-or-no thing. In any case, it depends on which friends.

Even giving out stars isn't as easy as it might seem.

Not long ago we rented a cabin in Park Rapids, Minnesota, with some friends, and I was later asked to evaluate our stay. There was a problem with the rental: the septic tank froze right after we got there, putting the bathrooms and the sink out of commission. Hard to give that place five stars. On the other hand, we can hardly fault the owner for a problem that arrives unexpectedly and is widespread in Minnesota at this time of year. He graciously allowed us the use of the bathroom in his place, a hundred yards away through the woods at the top of the hill. Most of us made use of a convenient snow bank nearby, but  by all accounts his house was—dare I use the word?—untidy.)

There were a few other problems. The cabin was listed as having accommodations for eight but was equipped with only five forks. It had only one wine glass—a serious deficiency—and there was a desiccated fox-fur coat hanging in the closet, which reminded me of Psycho for some reason; a Jim Dine bathroom poster sitting on a chair in the living room; and a wedding picture in the kitchen—man, woman, child—none of whom resembled the owner in the slightest.

On the other hand, the cabin had large windows looking out across a frozen lake and was costing each of us only $25 per night. I might have given it three stars, but I want the owner, a potato farmer by trade, to do well. He's obviously a beginner on the vacation rental scene. He was close to despondent over the plumbing freeze-up, but also a bit shocked at how much it was going to cost to fix it. Three-and-a-half stars? 

I sometimes receive satisfaction surveys from the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra following a concert, and the issues are always the same. The music is interesting but varied in quality, the introductory patter often a little too long, and the program-rustling in the audience invariably annoying. These outings, considered as a whole, remain enriching. Four stars?

Not long ago Hilary and I attended a performance of Haydn's Seven Last Words of Christ at the Ordway Concert Hall. The timing couldn't have been better. It was two days before Easter, and it also happened to be Haydn's birthday. We arrived early and caught an informative Fanfare lecture given by a professor from Macalester College. 

The performers, members of the SPCO, had chosen to do a stripped down version of the piece for string quartet, and they had also decided to play it on the gut strings in widespread use during Haydn's time. During his opening remarks violinist Kyu Young Kim told us that he and his colleagues almost had the impression, due to the slow-moving and often somber character of the piece, that they were merely playing for themselves, and cellist Jonathan Cohen remarked that he considered the performance as an act of personal meditation. However, the choice of gut strings worked against such an effect. They tend to groan where metal strings sing, and due to the fact that they go out of tune easily, there were long pauses between several of the movements while the musicians retuned.

I was a little bored.

But that's not the end of the story. After the concert, on the advice of a friend, we drove up the hill for lunch at Tori Ramen, a hole-in-the-wall place that was bubbling with activity. Tasty food, too.

And that night, as we were sitting down to a pre-Easter dinner (lamb shoulder chops with asparagus risotto) I put a recording of Haydn's Seven Last Words on the stereo. It fit the moment perfectly.

Perhaps this reaction reinforces the remarks of the musicians that the piece is more of the personal meditation than a concert crowd-pleaser. And maybe it's easier to appreciate a fine but quiet piece of music when you're eating a nice meal in your own home than within the stuffy confines of a concert hall.

I think another factor might also have been in play. Haydn wrote The Seven Last Words for orchestra, and later produced a stripped down version for string quartet. I believe that's the version the  SPCO musicians were using. But the one we were now listening to had been created from the score of the oratorio version, which Haydn wrote years later after having visited London and been impressed by Handel's work in that vein.   

Attacca Quartet cellist Andrew Yee, who did the new arrangement, remarks in the liner notes to this version that "in examining the arrangement for string quartet, one is struck that this version bears little of the careful crafting typical of the father of the string quartet. The string parts from the orchestral version remain mostly intact, [but] the crucial wind parts are left out almost entirely."

Yee goes on to suggest that the oratorio version, crafted ten years after the original, conveys "Haydn's reflections, and perhaps reconsiderations, during this hiatus of one of his most personal and intimate pieces." That's the version Yee used to create the quartet we were listening to that night. The changes include adding double stops here and there, adjusting unison passages to octaves, and adding melodies and counter­melodies extracted from the oratorio score that are not present in Haydn's earlier versions.

Whatever the reason, this new rendering, which I bought years ago on a whim in a little shop in Stanton, Virginia, during a road trip through the Shenandoah Mountains, and  listened to only once, was now approaching the sublime.

So, how are we to rate the event? The SPCO performance wasn't outstanding, but the programming was, if only because it brought renewed attention and appreciation to a forgotten musical masterpiece.

 

Four-and-a-half stars?   

Before the Fest

The last few days have been cold and amazing. The sun is fairly high—more than halfway to its zenith—and the ground will never give off more reflected light than it's doing now. In the summer the sun beats down more fiercely but the vegetation-covered landscape gives nothing back and there's far more humidity in the air. Last week's brightness will be hard to beat.

I was out for a few hours recently, in the midst of that splendor, delivering programs in Robbinsdale for the upcoming international film festival. My first stop was Video Universe, one of the few remaining high quality video stories in the Twin Cities. The young man behind the counter is the same one who was working there ten years ago, and even today he doesn't look to be over seventeen.

"Sure, you can put those fliers in the rack. The Camden Times doesn't own it."

We discussed last year's films as I scrutinized the new video releases displayed on the front shelf: Dunkirk; I, Tonya; Lady Bird.

"Three Billboards just arrived," he said.

"I don't know. I'm not keen on revenge movies," I said. " I hear it's sort of crass."

"Well, nearly everyone I've talked to has liked it."

From there I drove a few blocks over to West Broadway, parked, and walked into the darkened, cavernous hall of the Wicked Wort Brewery, where a young couple was sitting in a booth with a laptop, apparently going over the books.

"Sure, I'll take a few fliers," the man said.

At the sunny café across the street, I said, "What's that smell?"

"Food," the woman behind the counter replied with a smile. She let me put a stack of tabloid-sized programs on the broad sunny sill under the front windows.

At nearby Woellet's Bakery the young woman behind the counter let me put some flyers in the rack. "How can you work here amid such wonderful aromas?" I said.

"You get sick of it real quick," she replied.

At Beyerly's Big Bowl café in the Spring Brook shopping center I worked my way up to the assistant manager, a friendly fellow who was happy to take a few of the tabloid-size schedules. Then I was off to "downtown" Golden Valley, a glorified strip mall with a circular pedestrian arcade leading nowhere and a few benches overlooking a well-landscaped drainage ditch along Highway 55. But they also have a Starbucks and a D'Amico and Sons. Then off to Triple Espresso (right across the street), Mort's Deli (why is the chicken liver $17.99 a pound?) and finally the Golden Valley Public Library, where the librarian seemed eager but hesitant.

"Are there fees involved?" she asked.

"Well, you do have to pay to get into the movies."

"But I suppose it's cultural..."

"It's the greatest cultural event of the year!" I tried to keep my voice down.

Yes, the greatest cultural event of the year hereabouts. But on my way home I got to thinking of the big-time Hollywood film year just past, and how good and varied it was. Everyone is sick of hearing about the Oscar contenders, no doubt, but it's interesting to reflect on how solid, but also how different, are such films as Lady Bird, The Phantom Thread, and The Shape of Water.  

I can now add Three Billboards to the list. I saw it just the other day—a Nexflix DVD that was diverted to us from Hilary's parents on its way back to the post office. I was prepared to dislike it, based on reviews. As I mentioned, I tend to avoid revenge movies and "angry" movies, and I think Frances McDormand is at her best in supporting roles—for example, the mother in Almost Famous or the professor's wife in Wonder Boys.

The gratuitous swearing in Three Billboards took some getting used to; it isn't funny and nobody really talks like that. But as the story developed I found myself being drawn into this odd mixture of soap opera, psychodrama, and morality play, where no one is absolutely right or wrong and we begin to see beyond the logic (or not) of the plot into the crippled dynamic of individual lives. It's a film about grief and loss and guilt and bigotry and bad luck, and forgiveness, and it could have collapsed into absurdity at several turns of the path. Somehow, it kept getting better.

By way of contrast, The Phantom Thread is an exquisite film in which every scene is like a well-constructed and beautiful movement from a string quartet, leading—nowhere.

I was playing racquetball with a friend the other day and The Phantom Thread came up. "What did you think of it?" he asked, with a pained and anxious look on his face. I shrugged indifferently.

"I know," he said. "Why did he make that film?"

Yet The Phantom Thread lingers; it stays with you a little. I wouldn't mind seeing it again. It's less of a romance than a film about mothers (dead) and sons and craft and "the legacy of the past." It shows us a certain kind of life and attentiveness that has always been rare, but was nevertheless further undermined by the arrival of "chic." The New York Times called it the best "food movie" in ages.

Having mentioned how much I dislike angry movies, it strikes me as very odd that the most powerful film I saw last year was The Clash, an Egyptian work that's full of shouting from beginning to end. The entire film takes place inside the confines of a police paddy wagon in Cairo during the unraveling of the Arab Spring.   

We might compare The Phantom Thread to another recent but less well known film, Things to Come.

Both films are dominated by an actor of unimpeachable credentials playing a character of unorthodox interests. Daniel Day Lewis is a dressmaker; Isabelle Hubert is a high school philosophy teacher. Lewis lets nothing encroach on his craft; Hubert, having spent a good part of her career reading Spinoza and Pascal, seems to have developed such a dispassionate approach to life that her husband, early on in the film, announces that he's leaving her for a young Spanish woman. She's not too happy about this, though it seems she's mostly disappointed that she'll no longer be able to tend the lovely garden she created on her husband's estate in Brittany. 

Hubert has been described as "prickly" and "aloof," but she's adept at projecting a variety of emotions at once: distain, confusion, determination, disappointment. Frances McDormand (switching comparisons here) is numbed and jaded by grief and rage; Hubert seems to be adjusting to a new situation with the inscrutable aplomb of a Buddha, though she also has her weepy moments, and most of the time it's hard to tell how she's getting on. 

In the midst of this unsettling situation, her batty mother's health is deteriorating, and  further disappointments await at a meeting with her publisher where she's informed that her anthology of philosophical extracts is going to be redesigned in garish colors for a new generation of students, and her monograph on Theodor Adorno is in danger of being dropped.

Yet the most moving scene in Things to Come takes place near the end of the film in a hospital where Hubert's daughter has just given birth. Both parents are present. When Hubert's ex finally quits cooing at the infant and departs, Hubert says, "I thought he'd never leave," and her daughter bursts into tears.

In all the hoopla surrounding Huppert's performance in another film of 2016, Elle, for which she was nominated for an Oscar, Things to Come got swallowed up. Or maybe it was just that, like The Phantom Thread, it leaves the viewer feeling ... what?