MSP Film Fest 2

The truncated stay-at-home film fest is due to come to an end on Saturday. Will they have a "best of the fest" extension? Not likely. Is there any point in describing a few more of the entries? Well, why not?

Especially good was Kuessipan, a depiction of life on the Innu Reserve in the wilds of Atlantic coast Quebec. The story focuses on the lives of two Innu girls who grow up together, party together, but do not seem to be headed in the same direction. Mikuan, who was raised in a relatively stable family environment, has a talent for poetry and even hitchhikes into town to take creative writing classes with the white kids. Shaniss has a more troubled past, a hot-headed boyfriend, and soon enough, a baby on the way. The situation becomes further complicated when Mikuan starts dating Francis, one of the Quebecers in her class. 

I'm making it all sound schematic, but these are the pillars of attachment upon which a succession of casual episodes are draped, including a tribal council meeting, drunken evenings at the local bar, hockey games, family hunting trips, a brief visit to a shelter for battered women, court-room appearances, and lots of laughing and heartfelt talk. If you've never seen a deer butchered on the living room floor, this is your chance.

The film exposes plenty of problems associated with life on the reservation, but it also highlights the affection, camaraderie, and pride that keep the tribe together. The portrait struck me as authentic, less depended on jokey humor than such classic reservation films as Powwow Highway and Smoke Signals. The poetry that Mikuan writes, and sometimes recites, adds another dimension to the film, underscoring how difficult it is to move beyond the patterns and traditions of the reserve without risking the loss of one's own deep connections to it.

Those Who Remain

Postwar Hungary. Lots of people never came back from the battlefield, the camps. This quiet film focuses on the relationship that develops between Aldó, a mild-mannered gynecologist, and Klára, an impetuous young patient who still writes letters to her parents and imagines they'll be back from Norway soon. Aldó also lost his family in the war—he now lives alone—and he becomes a sort of foster-father to Klára, who is otherwise being raised by her great aunt. 

It's a chaste relationship, but a peculiar one, full of inquisitive conversation on Klára's part and thoughtful, sober responses from Aldó. The situation would be easy to misinterpret, and some of the locals do, but that doesn't seem to be the main issue. For the most part, the film charts Klára's growth into adulthood, her discovery of boyfriends, and her entry into the adult world as she emerges from the security of this father-daughter bond.

In the role of Klára, Abigél Szőke is simply brilliant. Károly Hajduk, who plays Aldó, looks like Adrien Brody's sensible younger brother. To add a further element to the plot, Communist persecution gathers steam as the film unfolds. 

Lunana: a Yak in the Classroom

This simple but arresting film, set in Bhutan, features Ugyen, a young man completing his training as a teacher with an obvious lack of enthusiasm. He has no interest in pursuing a career in teaching, and plans to go to Australia to become a singer. In the final year of his compulsory training, Ugyen gets sent to the most remote schoolhouse in Bhutan, and maybe the world—an eight-day climb on foot from the end of the bus-line.

He's welcomed into the village, but one look at the schoolroom and Ugyen knows it will be impossible for him to teach there. The elders are crest-fallen, but they "understand." As it happens, in the three days it takes the mules to recuperate from bringing him up to the village, things change. He meets the kids, who are full of charm and enthusiasm. He takes a look around. He's in the Himalayas, after all. He begins to meet the townsfolk, learns how to start a fire with yak dung, and makes the acquaintance of a young woman named Saldon who often sits on top of the hill delivering her gift of song to the world. The village has a population of 56, so it isn't a very big "world," but little matter.

Ugyen is also somewhat charmed by the respect he receives from both the students and the adults. They consider him someone who "touches the future." He decides to stay and serve out his term. It's a gratifying transformation to watch, and a beautiful part of the world in which to spend an hour or two. 

Veins of the World

A tribe of Mongolian nomads are discomfited by the approach of industrial gold mines that will ruin the water table and destroy their pastures. Every family has been offered compensation and moving expenses, and many have already taken it, seeing the arrival of the mines as inevitable. A few want to hold out and fight.

It's a common theme in "international" films. But this plot soon veers off into several subplots involving a young boy, a car accident, a singing contest, and a "wild-cat" mine operated by some of the nomads themselves. Touching moments are scattered throughout, and the final scenes somehow bring things together. Somewhat.  

MSP Filmfest 2020

It's going to be a different film fest this year. No crowds, no volunteering, no running into friends, no trips to Punch Pizza for those after-film coupon specials.

But there are still going to be films. It's just that you have to watch them at home.

There are advantages to such an approach, too, of course. First off, and most important, you greatly reduce the risk of contracting a life-threatening virus. Also, parking is easier, and the films are cheaper. If you happen to be a member (we are) a movie costs $5 for two. And it's far easier to submit a film rating after the show. Not that tearing a paper ballot beside 3 stars or 4 stars was hard. But it's much easier to add comments at a keyboard online than with a stubby pencil standing in the lobby of the theater after a show.

Anyone can take a look at the festival offerings on line at this link:

https://mspfilm.org/festivals/mspiff/

Here are comments on a few of the works we've seen so far.

The Father (Bulgaria)

It's a familiar story—the larger-than-life, domineering father and the quirky, modern-day urban son—as photographer Pavel returns to his native village to attend the burial of his mother, Valentina. Pavel's father, Vassil, is an eminent painter who's deep into occult imagery. He believes that Valentina is already trying to contact him from beyond the grave, and he coerces Pavel into driving him to the remote "office" of a shaman who might be able to help. Pavel is an obliging son, but he finds himself in a tough spot, trying to satisfy the cravings of his pregnant wife and finish an advertising project at his studio remotely  while humoring his belligerent and egotistical father, whose fondest desire is the spend the night in the woods, naked, next to a meteor crash site. In the end, everything in this humane and subtle work revolves around a jar of home-made quince jam. With geraniums.

The County (Iceland)

Director Grimur Hakonarson scored a hit a few years ago with 'Rams.' His new feature, ‘The County’ offers a portrait of a much more industrial farm and an agricultural infrastructure that relies heavily on corruption and coercion. The culprit in this case in the county co-op, which demands that its members buy fertilizer and other farm materials at inflated prices from them, but offers very meager prices for the crops, milk, and meat it buys in return. Inga finds out how deeply the family farm is indebted to the co-op only after her husband dies. She also learns from one of her hands that her husband had been required to spy on purchases by his friends and neighbors as a condition for remaining solvent. Grieving, and at the end of her rope, Ingra decides the time has come to challenge the co-op's mafia-like practices. The film is a slow burn of righteous indignation, barren countryside, Icelandic sweaters, spattering milk, and grass-roots community support. Highly entertaining.

And the Birds Rained Down (Canada)

Three men have decided to spend their declining years at a remote cabin in the woods north of Quebec City. Their reasons for living "off the grid" differ but their desire to remain out of sight is equally strong. They take long swims in the morning, sometimes drink whisky at night, and support themselves by growing marijuana and exchanging it for supplies brought in on a four-wheeler by the youthful manager of a nearby resort. Their daily habits are upended by the arrival of a noisy journalist looking to interview people old enough to remember details of a fire that devastated the region decades earlier. 

Things get more complicated still when the resort manager arrives with an elderly woman—his aunt—who's spent most of her adult life in a psychiatric hospital against her will, and would like to try something else. She needs a place to hide out. 

The result is a beguiling late-life pastoral—a few owls hooting, a few loons calling in the distance, early morning wood-splitting, eating "grub" off a tin plate by the light of a kerosene lamp—to which an element of drama is added by the approach of another forest fire. A few of the folk songs around the bonfire could easily have been cut, and the strands of the plot kept in better balance, but this woodsy narrative holds our interest most of the time. 

 Gloria Mundi (France)

The film—a great film, I would almost say—opens with the birth of a child, Gloria, filmed with aesthetic brio to the sounds of a liturgical choir, fully evoking the miracle and majesty of coming into the world. But life isn't easy for a working-class family in modern Marseilles. The infant's mother, Mathilda, works at a retail dress shop; her father, Nicholas, drives for Uber. The grandparents help out a lot, but grandpa Richard drives a bus by day, while grandma Sylvie cleans rooms in the cruise ships that dock in the harbor overnight. They both need their sleep, albeit at different times. It seems that the only people in the family that are "getting ahead" are Mathilda's half-sister, Aurore, and her dashing but arrogant husband, Bruno, who together run a successful pawnshop and are about to open another one.  As if things weren't complicated enough, the ever-descent Richard asks his wife to send a letter to her ex-husband, Daniel, now serving a long prison term, to inform him that he's become a grandfather. A short time later, he arrives at their door! He's served his time, and now he wants to see the child.

Director Robert Guédiguian follows the intertwined lives of these individuals, some of whom are far more descent than others, with an eye to character, nuance, expression. A casual remark opens avenues into the past that no one has time to explore. Frustrations build. The otherwise natural response to a difficult situation, charged with desperation, suddenly looks like a crime. But who's to blame?  Sic Transit Gloria Mundi. "So goes the glory of the world." 

Arab Blues (Tunisia)

Selma, who has been living  in Paris since the age of ten, decides to return to her childhood home in Tunisia to hang out her shingle as a psychoanalyst, convinced that the need is great. (In Paris, there are three shrinks practicing on every block!) Selma’s niece is gravely disappointed. She was hoping to escape the oppression of Islam by moving to Paris to live with her aunt. And most residents of Tunis don't know what a psychiatrist does. But many in her old neighborhood are eager to discuss their personal problems. She sets up a practice in the roof of her parent's building, and the lines start to form. First-time director Manele Labidi keeps the pot boiling with a string of eccentric patients and a sub-plot about Selma's attempts to appease the local cop—a very reasonable guy—while struggling to secure a permit to practice from a ditzy bureaucrat who would rather sell her the latest black-market lingerie from Turkey than help her establish a legal footing for her practice. In short, the film is a farce.

You may recognize the actress playing Selma, Golshifteh Farahani, from her role in Jim Jarmusch's recent film Patterson. (I didn't.) She holds the screen well and sustains a mood of exasperated frustration while never descending into that supercilious post-colonial distain that a few of her patients accuse her of.

But the film also has several glaring weaknesses. Her father's exile to Paris is never explained. Several family members refer to Selma's mother, as if the explanation for her odd return home lies in that direction, but no elaboration is forthcoming. Finally, there is no need for Selma actually to practice psychoanalysis in her home town. It's a long drawn out process. Few of her "patients" will have the time or the resources to stick with it.  She might as well keep it simple and describe herself as a psychotherapist.

These caveats do nothing to diminish the fun in the film, however, of which there is plenty.  

*   *   *   

Prior to the start of the fest we caught a few offerings from the film society and elsewhere:

The Woman Who Loves Giraffes

This pre-festival selection tells the story of  Dr. Anne Innis Dagg, who went to South Africa as a young woman in the early 1950s to study giraffes, at a time when young single women rarely went to that country, much less spent years doing research in the outback. The first third of the film tells Anne's story with the help of 16mm film she shot during her research. The middle section focuses on the difficulties she faced securing a tenured university position once she'd completed her PhD. The book she wrote became the "bible" of giraffe research, but no one would hire her because, well, you know... she was a woman. I don't want to give the ending away but I will say that Dr. Dagg was rediscovered by a new generation of ethologists who not only admire her pioneering work but continue to utilize it in their own research.

The Etruscan Smile

Another pre-festival selection, in which Brian Cox stars as Rory MacNeil, a crotchety Scotsman whose main goal in life is to outlive a similarly hard-drinking neighbor of the opposing clan. The local doctor refuses to continue prescribing horse pills to keep Rory alive, and he makes the journey to San Francisco, where his son, Ian, lives, to seek medical treatment. While the father is blunt and oblivious to the concerns of others, the son is diffident, refined, unsure of his path. Trained as a chemist, he has become a chef, and is in the process of opening a restaurant with the help of his super-rich father-in-law. He imagines that his father is visiting to see the new grandson. Not so.

The film is riddled with generational and old-world/new-world clichés, but it's fun to watch all the same, as Rory familiarizes himself with big-city life, begins to bond with his grandson, and nurtures an improbable relationship with Rosanne Arquette.

Love Them First

This documentary about a grade school in North Minneapolis is a real tear-jerker. It reminded me of how hard teachers work, how cute kids can be, how tough some pockets of the surrounding neighborhood are, and how emotionally draining—and rewarding—the entire educational process soon becomes. The film had the look of a TV news documentary, which is what it is, but the editing and cinematography were both top-notch.

The Booksellers

This documentary, which the Riverview Theater is streaming from their website, focuses on the high-end used book business, the disappearance of small shops in New York City and beyond, the quirky personalities of dealers and collectors, and the allure of the books themselves. It seems to me a little too much of the film is devoted to very wealthy collectors, though the section on the importance of hip-hop magazine archives redressed the balance somewhat. We were well into the film before mention was made of the effect of internet sales on the trade: beneficial for collectors looking for a specific item, detrimental to shop owners who want to get a good price for their books, or enjoy getting to know the customers who come to browse and chat. But it's beneficial to booksellers, too, because it connects them to buyers across the country and round the world that wopuld never have stepped into their shop.

It seems to me that every town needs a used bookstore. Maybe three. My favorite for years was B & H, which changed to Biermeier's at some point. The Bookhouse in Dinkytown moved down the street and around the corner, but it's still very well stocked. New shops have opened up in recent years in Northeast Minneapolis (Eat My Words) and near Macalester in St. Paul (Against the Grain) while others have closed (Sixth Chamber).

One slice of the trade that the film somewhat neglects is that of the casual browser looking for nothing in particular or nursing a narrow vein of interest desultorily. People like me. I was in New York in 1980, made it a point to stop into the Argosy Bookstore, and found a first edition in half-leather of Francis Hueffer's pioneering study The Troubadours (1878). It cost $25, which was quite a lot for a book in those days. The woman at the register (one of the three pictured above, I'm sure) asked me if I wanted her to erase the price penciled in at the corner, as if that were part of the regular routine. I must have said no, because I can still see it on the marbling of the endpaper.

As they interviewed the three sisters who run the shop, I pulled that book off the shelf. The leather is getting a little flaky at the top of the spine. And (yikes!) the first signature has become unglued. But it's still generally sound.

Maybe I'll read it someday.

Mid-May Spectacular

Look out the window. Spectacular. Go out there and stare at the plants, the birds, the sunlight.

We must experience and acknowledge the presence of such beauty, energy, perfection, given the chance. Yes, I know, many are suffering, dying, at their wit's end. I'm holed up in my office, looking out the window at the sunlight glowing through the leaves on the maple tree in the front yard.

Hilary and I have been going out to the regional parks on the periphery of the city these last few months. Traffic has been so light that most of them are ten minutes closer than they used to be.

I even made a chart in descending distances figured in minutes to help us make our daily pick: Lake Beyellsbey (54), Sherburne NWR (53), O'Brien State Park (51), Afton State Park (48), Sharr's Bluff (41), Carver Park (34), Tamarack Nature Center (30), Elm Creek (26), Old Cedar Avenue Bridge (24), Hyland Park Reserve (20), Wood Lake (18).

Since the beginning of March I've filed 47 reports on eBird, the website where you can keep track of your bird sightings while also contributing to the Cornell University ornithology database. Maybe this wasn't what governor Walz had in mind with his "stay-at-home" injunction, but we met very few people during these forays, and it helped make the orthodox parts of our confinement more tolerable.

I'm not going to bore you with details of the black-crowned night heron, the Caspian terns, the Harris's sparrow or any of the other species we spotted during these trips because yesterday, out on the deck in the cool clear light of afternoon, I had the pleasure of listening to a Baltimore oriole sing, chirp, and twardle for several hours.

I only saw him once or twice, fleetingly. He spent most of his time in a buckeye tree two houses down. But his lovely voice came through loud and clear, and it occurred to me that no other bird song sounds more like human speech. The variety of rhythms, pitches, and phrases seems endless. One minute he's pleading, the next inquiring, and then, after a silence of several minutes, he might deliver a joyous and extended burst of genuine song. And the voice! It has an unparalleled depth and sweetness.

During my afternoon on the deck I also had the pleasure of watching a Nashville warbler for a good half hour. Warbler sightings tend to be fleeting, but this beauty was in no hurry to move on. The Nashville has a pleasing balance to its coloring and the pronounced eye-ring adds the finishing touch.

From time to time a robin, blue jay, or cardinal would descend to the birdbath, take a sip or two, look around warily, and then hop in. I don't know why this is so much fun to watch. Perhaps because it's so easy to imagine what's going through the bird's mind as it splashes around ruffling its feathers with a pleased but also slightly irritated look on its face.

But that's probably just my imagination.

I had a copy of Aristotle's Ethics with me on the deck, don't ask me why. The author's lines of reasoning are not always sound, but trying to determine precisely what's going awry can be an education in itself. And every now and again a line or two hits the mark. One of Aristotle's main points is that the "highest good" is an activity rather than a possession. He emphasizes the "do" in "doing well."

And I couldn't help jotting down this line in the midst of the avian activity going on all around me:

"The productions of nature have an innate tendency in the direction of the best condition of which they are capable."       

Greetings from Provence

During this extended stay-at-home I have been drawn  to earthy, vivid prose, as if the blossoming of the natural world and poetic descriptions of rural life offer a more effective counterweight to daily death tolls than do anguished domestic plot lines or homicidal psychological puzzles.

Top on the list is Blue Boy by Jean Giono  (It's been sitting around the house for years.) The author was a child of Provence, and his novels are set in villages where life is hard and the neighbors can be brutal, but the environment sings with a Homeric majesty, which Giono has a knack for describing in images that push audaciously beyond clichés into the realm of hallucination. I read two of his novels years ago—Harvest and Hill of Destiny—but Blue Boy is better. Or maybe I'm looking for something different in fiction than I once did.

Originally published in 1932, Blue Boy relates a series of incidents in the life in a Provencal village from the point of view of a boy living with his parents and attending school at the local convent. We might call it a "coming of age" story, although the narrator is more interested in describing the things going on all around him than in the emotional vicissitudes of his own adolescence. For example, here is how he describes a nun as seen by the narrator as they both hide under a bush.

Sister Dorothée would stretch out on the grass. She became a black world humped with mountains and hills, hollowed with dry and silent valleys, waterless, treeless, quite de­serted, and as if despised. All that was alive was the happy region of her face where her mouth was eating choco­late, where her lips finally made a moist sound, where be­neath a slanting ray of sunshine her cheek grew velvety with a blond down that seemed, in my intoxication from the fragrance, to undulate and wave like a vast sea of rip­ened grass.

And here is a description of the village as evening descends:

... the dirt from the hills was drying in great clods. A heap of gorse fagots was shriveling against the wall. It already smelled of fungus. At a stable door the chopped-up trunk of a fig tree had been dumped. A donkey brayed. A dog watched us go by. The sound of his collar could be heard as he raised his head. Strings of garlic rustled beneath the little projecting roofs over the doors. There was a light at only one window on the ground floor. I looked in as we passed. A woman was standing beside a bed, stirring a bowl of herb tea with a spoon.

The narrator reveres his father, a humble shoemaker who is also known throughout the region as a peacemaker and a saintly soul, albeit with revolutionary tendencies. From time to time people show up furtively at the door, in need of advice or refuge. The narrator watches it all unfold.

Among the quotidian experiences of which the story is built, the narrator describes the people living in the flats across the courtyard from his family's apartment, the fist-fights at the local bistro, the neighbors with whom he takes music lessons, the reactions of the villagers when one of the local women runs off with a itinerant shepherd, and the farm hand who commits suicide after being jilted at a dance. There are plenty of sheep, snakes,  and dramatic weather. The rendering takes on the larger-than-life imagery and the dramatic coloring of a painting by Henri Rousseau.   

On Sunday, at about ten o’clock, the sun was blazing so fiercely that the road, the walls, trees, and the sky began to quiver like white grease.

The narrator's discovery of women, far from being a matter of teen infatuation, beings very early, with three women from his mother's laundry business, all of whom are asked to walk him to the convent school at one time or another. Each has a different gait, a different smell, a different attitude toward the young lad, and he makes note of it all. He is also keenly aware of the young woman who lives across the courtyard, who takes a shower every afternoon behind a towel. 

But from early on in the book, he  reserves the bulk of his affection for the woman whose beautiful face he discovers peering out at him from amid the random patterns of fungus that have developed on the damp walls of the attic in the building where he lives. 

Her face was oval and slightly rounded. She was green, but the greenest part was in her eyes and all the color of her skin could be only a reflection, the luminous glow, or her gaze. At the place where her mouth was, the disease of the wall had eaten to the bricks, and it was blood-red like real flesh...the motion of her glance passed from me through my mind in spurts that I alone controlled, speeding toward the wind or toward the mystery of the thick walls, but, as I stood contemplating her, it was she who cast the stone into the still pool of my being.

The narrator admits to being aware of his intense attachment to visceral experience from an early age. He was chosen to recite an homage to the Virgin at a school ceremony, and advised to tell no one of the role he had been given.

There was no need to tell me to keep it a secret at home or to tell me not to speak of it to my father. It was enough for me to be near a mystery to become at once the personification of infant silence. Everything that touched the other world I felt I loved intimately like one’s native land, like a country where I once had lived and loved dearly and from which I was exiled, but which was still living within me with its weaving roads, its great rivers lying flat over the land like trees with long branches, and the swelling undulations of the shaggy hills whose every’ track I knew. I felt that I knew all this much better than grown persons ...

He credits his father with recognizing and nurturing this peculiar gift.

If I have such love for the memory of my father, if I can never separate myself from his image, if time cannot cut the thread, it is because in the experiences of every single day I realize all that he has done for me... He was the first to see, with his gray eyes, that sensuousness that made me touch a wall and imagine the roughness like porous skin ...  that sensuousness that made me like a drop of water pierced by the sun, pierced by the shapes and colors in the world, bearing in truth, like a drop of water, the form, the color, the sound, the sensa­tion, physically in my flesh... If one has the humility to call upon one’s instinct, upon the elemental, there is in sensuousness a kind of cosmic joy.

Writing in the 1950s, the American critic R. W. B. Lewis noted the striking contrast between Giono and his more famous French contemporaries:

[Giono] has always gone his private way, and it has been a way opposite to that of the representative literary figures of his time—opposite, for example, to that of Albert Camus. . . . [Giono’s] theme has been a sort of chaste paganism, a pastoral joy in nature, the good fellowship of honest folk, and in the sheer sensation of life. . . . And all this as deliberately remote as can be from the political belligerence and the metaphysical anguish of most of his distinguished contem­poraries.

True enough. But Giono is a country lad and a product of the First World War, and it would make more sense, perhaps, to compare him to writers in his own vein, such as the Norwegian Knut Hamsun, or even Hemingway, who has a similarly direct mode of expression though less interest in his surroundings and more meager poetic gifts. 

Such comparisons are illuminating as far as they go, but they fail to suggest how startling, and appealing, Giono's imagery can be. This is not the Provence of English expats like Peter Mayle, Lawrence Durrell, or Ford Madox Ford. Nor, I suspect, does it much resemble that of most Provençal peasants during the years between the two world wars. Henry Miller, who was a fan, described Giono's world as a "private terrestrial domain far closer to reality than books of history or geography."

The next day a storm swept up from the sea. At dawn it was already there, having passed over the plateau. From the east and the south it blew dark and damp like a cave; only a tiny blue window lighted the earth from the north, and toward it fled a whole family of falcons. The storm advanced. It rose higher, grew blacker, making no sound; on the contrary, it stifled all sounds, it laid a hush over the world.