As the film fest draws to a close, a few works stand out. In fact, none of the films we saw lacked merit. But to the curious reader who says, "I don't have much time. Recommend just one," I would reply, "That's not how it works. But how about one of these?"
The Snow Leopard takes place in a Tibetan-speaking region of Qinghai province in northwest China, high desert country, where Jinpa's sheep pen has been raided by a snow leopard. Jinpa won't let the leopard go until he receives compensation for his nine dead sheep. The local DNR officers tell him that he's required by law to do so. A TV crew of high-spirited young men from the city has been dispatched to document the event, one of whom, by coincidence, went to school with Jinpa's younger brother, Nyina, who's since become a Buddhist monk. Before long the Chinese police have arrived to help sort things out, though they don't speak Tibetan. It's a first-class mess, full of shouting but also fun, and the tone is enhanced by dreamy mystical interludes suggesting how Nyina got so interested in leopard welfare. The CGI leopards, mother and cub, are also fascinating to watch.
Mountain Boy is based on a series of children's books, which is important to keep in mind as we follow the improbable adventures of Suhail, a young boy who's been cast out by his father and spends much of his time alone, up in the rugged mountains of the United Arab Emirates. The film details the boy's quest to find his mother, guided by nothing but a rare pearl that she gave him before vanishing from his life. The landscapes are lovely, the people he meets invariably helpful, and the atmosphere might have been drawn from the Arabian Nights.
Songs of the Earth focuses on the other end of the life cycle, as we take in a stunning Norwegian fjord from the point of view of an octogenarian who's lived in the valley his entire life. He happens to be director Margareth Olin’s father, and there's an element of corn-ball in the presentation, as he and his wife sing Norwegian folk songs and reminisce briefly about the hardships of living and farming in such a remote location. The better part of the film is devoted to stunning drone and close-up photography of waterfalls, glaciers, small plants and berries, rocky cliffs, exotic raptors, and other such things. The subtle orchestral soundtrack adds to the mood of wonder. The film has been described as "a magnificent existential journey,” but that's overstating the case. It's a simple film, and in some places it teeters toward monotony, but the overall effect is quietly glorious.
About Dry Grasses was perhaps the strongest film I saw at the fest. The director, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, is an old hand at developing mundane scenes filled with long and seemingly aimless conversations into films of excruciating but weighty import, for example, in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia and The Wild Pear Tree. Here he follows a few months in the life of Samet, an art teacher from Isanbul who's spent the last four years at a school in rural Anatolia fulfilling his mandatory service. He considers himself above the pettiness and mediocrity of his colleagues and his situation, and he may be right. But he gets himself into trouble by becoming too friendly with one of his young female students, and the plot is given added dimension when Nuray, a teacher from a neighboring village, enters the scene. She's been disabled by a terrorist bomb, and she challenges Samet's elitism, which strikes her as detached and narcissistic.
One critic has insightfully compared Samet to the "superfluous man" of nineteenth-century Russian novels. He writes: "Confusing his “civilised” city roots with moral and intellectual superiority over his village students and contemporaries, Samet at once seeks to find answers to his existential condition while barely containing his inner toxicity."
In Our Day, the latest "flash" cinema from South Korean director Hong Sang-soo, offers more benign forms of hierarchical interaction. It consists of two mini-dramas that have little to do with each other. One focuses on an aging poet who's recently become fashionable with younger readers, the other on a retired actress giving a few words of advice to a novice who's decided to pursue acting as a career. Much of the later tale, however, is devoted to idle chatter about cats. In the former tale, the elder poet's responses to questions from a young film-maker and a fan take a back seat to games of "scissors, paper, rock" and the elder poet's desire to start drinking and smoking again, against doctor's orders. It may be true that the actress and the poet were once involved in a relationship—they both like to put hot pepper sauce in their ramen. If so, then the fact hardly seems significant. But Hong has learned, like Jerry Seinfeld, that a film "about nothing" can still hold our attention ... at least for a while.
The Gullspång Miracle is a bizarre documentary about two pious Norwegian sisters who buy an apartment in Gullspång, Sweden, from Olaug, a woman who looks exactly like a third sister who killed herself years ago. A bit of research reveals that Olaug is, indeed, a twin who was given up for adoption during WWII. There are tearful reunions with other family members back on the farm in Norway, but Olaug, who was raised in a cultured Swedish family, doesn't really fit in, and the situation grows even more strained when she becomes convinced that her twin sister didn't kill herself, but was murdered. It's a mystery without a detective. Among other things.
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