One Final Note About the Film Fest

Shadow, the latest “period” drama by Chinese director Zhang Yimou, probably had the biggest budget of any film I saw at the festival, but I wouldn’t rank it among the best. For one thing, the entire film seems to take place in caves, during rainstorms, or amid the halls of giant palaces with the rain falling outside. It all seems a little dark and dreary, and the characters are often dwarfed by their elaborate yet shadowy surrounding. The film has little of the color or fantasy that distinguished such classics of the genre as House of the Flying Daggers and Heroes, and the central combat trope seemed a little lame to me: twirling umbrellas made of detachable, knife-sharp steel ribs.

During the battle scenes no one actually expired before being slashed and chopped and punctured at least fifteen times, and the sound of blood gurgling from wounds and mouths might easily have earned an Academy Award for some Chinese foley artist.    

That being said, I have to admit I liked the film, though my favorite scene involves a wild and lengthy duet performed on the Chinese zither by the emperor’s sister and the commander while the umbrella warriors are retaking the city.

Maybe the best word to describe Song of the Tree would be “singspiel,” a German word for a drama in which spoken dialogue is interspersed with folk songs. But it’s a strange term to apply to a film set in the harsh and largely treeless uplands of Kyrgyzstan. The action takes place in the late eighteenth century, when nomadic tribes lived in yurts and moved from place to place seasonally to find new pastures for their cattle, goats, and horses. Naturally there’s a chieftain with a beautiful daughter who’s fallen in love with the wrong young gent, a headstrong commoner who’s charming but also immature and generally inept. It’s a complex morality play about love, loyalty, sacrifice, and devotion to the clan, and songs erupt spontaneously here and there, challenging us in their simplicity to deny that the emotions they express aren’t the important things in life.

Two of the film's executive producers were in attendance, and during the Q & A they admitted to having cut out an hour of footage, including a lengthy subplot about the clash between Islam and the native religion. Too bad.  

 Harvest Season focuses on the role played by Latinos in the Napa Valley wine industry. Wildfires rage and seasonal immigrants sometimes wonder where they’re going to spend the night, but a good deal of the film—perhaps too much—focuses on Latino vineyard owners, who face the same problems as other vintners: what to plant, when to harvest, how to get the most from their grapes. Anglo, Latino, or Chinese, all vintners tell the same stories. I would like to have learned more about the workers.

   

I sometimes need to remind myself, when considering whether to go to the movies, that a film is almost invariably richer than the two-sentence description you read in the catalogue. Where Are You, João Gilberto? is that rare film that turns out to be much less interesting than its description. 

Gilberto is credited with inventing the Bossa Nova, a style of Brazilian music that took the world by storm in the late 50s and early 60s. He had a string of hits, including “The Girl from Ipanema” and “Desafinado,” then retreated into self-imposed isolation. Georges Gachot, our film-maker “hero,” heads to Brazil to find him, with the aid of a book written by a journalist who went on a similar quest before dying under mysterious circumstances. (A red herring, complete with remoulade.)

Gachot investigates nothing. There are lots of shots of him sitting in cafés and walking along the beach, hoping to spot João. He goes to a record store to talk to the merchant who sells João’s LPs. He visits the hotel bathroom where João was purported to have sat for eleven hours strumming his guitar. He talks to the guy who, even today, cuts João’s hair regularly; he talks to João’s agent in an attempt to set up a meeting; he talks to João’s ex-wife, who chats with João on the phone often. There is no mystery here. There is no story. And the Bossa Nova soundtrack soon grows tiresome.   

 

 Documentaries have been assembled about jazz artists of every stripe, from Bill Evans and Lee Morgan to Charles Lloyd, Anita O’Day, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, and Chet Baker. They tend to follow a similar pattern: success, innovation, drugs, domestic violence, decline, renewal, relapse. Often the artists’ wives and girlfriends figure prominently. Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock also tend to show up, like a couple of talented and impressionable kids who were THERE, and still happen to be alive. Lots of brief musical cuts—no one wants to hear the whole track!—and there are usually plenty of street scenes of Manhattan or LA at night.

I’ve never seen a jazz biopic I didn’t like.

The new Miles Davis documentary, Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool, follows the same format, though the stakes seem to be a little higher, due to the fact that Miles was glamorous, and angry, and cool, and for several decades he had a knack for assembling the best combos around, one after another. His first wife, the dancer Francis Taylor, still full of character and candor, adds a welcome dimension to the narrative.

I grew up on the Miles Davis Quintet. As I write these words I’m listening to Miles in the Sky, which was recorded in 1968. It’s the first of Miles’s albums to have a guitar on it, and its second track, “Paraphernalia,” figures prominently in the documentary’s soundtrack.

The film follows Miles’s career into the high-volume noise of Bitches Brew and well beyond. It’s all part of the story. If you haven’t listened to Miles, if you haven’t heard his story, this film would be a good place to start.

The Danish film Before the Frost, set in the mid-nineteenth century, focuses on a farm family that’s struggling to keep food on the table. In the opening scene, Jens, the old man, sells a cow he can ill afford to lose to support his lovely but malnourished daughter and the two nephews he’s raising now that his sister has died. Soon afterward a wealthy Swedish farmer who’s moved south to be with his mother in her old age offers to buy a patch of Jens’s land—land that Jens needs to grow fodder for his two remaining cows. These are desperate and dreary times, but Jens finally works out a deal, giving up his entire farm along with its livestock, in exchange for a pension. After all, the farm is insured, so if it burns down ... ? Also, the Swede will have to marry his daughter.

It’s a nightmare scenario—Jens and his daughter don’t fit in amid these sophisticated foreigners, not to mention the two nephews—but the situation unravels with stunning artistry, with new and ever more grim moral quandaries at every turn of the path.

 The last film we saw, and one of the best, was from Turkey: The Wild Pear Tree. It runs to more than three hours but the pacing is exquisite, and at no point did I find myself thinking, I wonder when this will be over. The film recounts the life of a young man names Sinan, fresh out of college, who returns from the city to the small town where he was raised. He plans to be a teacher though he hasn’t yet taken the exam. He’s also written a book and has high hopes of arranging to get it published. Trouble is, the book is a fictionalize memoir of his adolescence, and it paints an unflattering picture of his relatives, neighbors, and friends.

He chats at length with the mayor, who declines to help him, though if it had been a tourist guide he would have had no difficulty providing a subsidy. The mayor sends him to the man who runs the local gravel pit. Another lengthy and futile conversation ensues. Back in the city to take his exam, Sinan runs into a locally famous author in a bookstore and corners the poor man for quite a while to discuss a conference he attended once, his manuscript, the current state of literature, and so on.

Interspersed with these lengthy but discordant and futile exchanges are encounters involving Sinan's old high school flame, two imams stealing apples from a tree, and Sinan’s own parents. His home life has long since come unglued thanks to his good-natured father’s gambling addiction, and he often visits his grandparents on their rustic farm in the hills near town. 

In the course of these comings and goings, many of them carried out on foot, a picture emerges of an idealistic but tactless and increasingly bitter young man who sees few opportunities lying ahead for him other than military service or a dead-end job. Sinan isn’t all that likeable, but it’s fascinating to see him butt heads with former friends who've chosen to remain in town and more mature individuals who have no difficulty defending their seemingly dreary lives against his lofty criticisms. A few deftly introduced dream sequences complete this picture of a personality at odds with his social surroundings--and himself. 

Director Nuri Bilge Ceylan is one of the world's heavyweights. He won the Palme 'd Or at Cannes a few years ago, and his recent film Once Upon a Time in Anatolia was dark but stunning. Here he has given us a complete multi-generational package. Call it art. Call it life.

Volunteering for the fest as an usher, a floater, or a greeter, can be tedious or hectic, depending on the shift, but for the most part it’s simply great fun. You get free passes to the movies, and a certain collegiality develops as you get to know the other volunteers a little. The names don’t always stick, but among the individuals I’ve been working with this year are Zack, who holds down two jobs on the West Bank—at Palmer’s Bar and a hole-in-the-wall hotdog shop called the Wienery; Shelley, who also volunteers at the Fringe Fest and Theater Latte Da; Jesse, a young Korean-American woman who seems eager to get involved in the film world any way she can; Bruce, a retired psychology professor; Roger and Lesley, two transplants from Milwaukee; Colin from Cleveland; Peter, another retiree who spends half the year or more in Mayasia, where the weather is hot, people are friendly and often speak English, and the food is cheap.

Then there are the pass-holders, whom you begin to recognize because they’re there every day—the one with unnaturally red hair, the one who was featured in the newspapers a few years ago, the one with the long beard and the knapsack. You might easily strike up a conversation with one of them, or with Susan Smoluchowski, the film society’s executive director, who seems to drift at random in and out of the five theaters at St. Anthony Main, where the festival is held, or with Al Milgrom, who’s been involved in the festival since its inception forty-odd years ago, and seems to recognize you, though you’re quite sure he doesn’t know who you are.

You also run into your friends, some of whom have been going to a lot more films than you have. You stop in with them at Pracna or the Aster Café for a beer or a burger between films, or perhaps walk a few blocks together to Punch Pizza to take advantage of the $3 OFF coupon in the film fest brochure.

And then it’s over. And spring has arrived. And you jot down a few notes like these, to make sure you don’t forget about all these remarkable films from far-flung parts of the world.