2007 INDIEFEST—The Evening Class Interview With Kumakiri Kazuyoshi, Director of Seishun kinzoku batto (Green Mind, Metal Bats)

Having now seen two Kumakiri Kazuyoshi films—Antena (2004) and Seishun kinzoku batto (Green Mind, Metal Bats, 2006)—I've bumped Kazuyoshi's breakout shocker Kichiku Dai Enkai (Kichiku: Banquet of the Beasts, 1997) to the top of my Greencine rental queue. In town for this year's IndieFEST, I arranged to hook up with Kumakiri-san, taking him out for Mayan pozole and cerveza at Mi Lindo Yucatan. I'm indebted to Taro Goto for his indispensible translations.


Kichiku was Kazuyoshi's graduation project at Osaka University of the Arts. It became a big hit in Japan and received the semi Grand Prix at the 20th PIA Film Festival in 1997 and the Grand Prix at Taormina. The film was invited to many international film festivals including Berlin. In 2001, Kazuyoshi followed up with Sora No Ana (Hole in the Sky, 2001) as a scholarship production of the PIA Film Festival. The film was screened at the film festivals of Berlin and Rotterdam, where it gained the Special Mention of the International Film Critics Prize (FIPRESCI). His third film, Antena, was officially invited in 2003 to the Venice (section Upstream) and Toronto film festivals. Other films include Kihatsusei no onna (The Volatile Woman, 2004) and Tadareta ie zoroku no kibyo yori (The Ravaged House: Zoroku's Disease, 2004).

As IndieFEST programmer Bruce Fletcher synopsizes Green Mind, Metal Bats for the festival program: "[Kazuyoshi's] latest film comes (literally) out of left field: It's a baseball movie. However, with one of the most provocative talents in new Japanese cinema behind the camera, it's not going to be a traditional sports film by any stretch of the imagination.

"From the incredible opening sequence's errant pitch to the head until the inevitable showdown between the former teammates, Green Mind, Metal Bats is more about the effect of the game on three psychologically wounded people, and how baseball can be a force for healing, than in the game itself.

"Nanba is a shunned outcast who doesn't have a girlfriend, any money, or prospects—a turnaround from his glory days in high school when he played on the baseball team. His former teammate Ishioka used to be their ace pitcher; now he's a policeman because of an elbow injury. Then there's baseball fanatic Eiko, a hopeless alcoholic who spends more of her time drunk than sober. The three share an intense love of baseball—and their destinies are forever intertwined."

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Michael Guillén: Green Mind, Metal Bats is having its U.S. premiere at this year's SF IndieFEST but had its world premiere last year at the 35th International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR). I'm assuming you went? How was it received by its Rotterdam audience?

Kumakiri Kazuyoshi: I couldn't go last year to the premiere because I was shooting my next film.

Guillén: Ah, too bad. Then I guess you don't know how the Rotterdam audience received it; but, I asked because I was wondering if its audience reception differed from its critical reception, which—to date—has been conflicted, though not necessarily negative. Critics don't quite know what to make of Green Mind, Metal Bats. They're somewhat confused by the genre mash-up. When Juan Manuel Freire reported on the film to Greencine from the Barcelona Asian Film Festival, he called it "an enjoyable rarity which shakes surrealist humor, thriller action and sport-film motivational spirit into an impossible mixture." I'm wondering how much of that is your responsibility or your vision? Or if you were more a hired gun to direct Takashi Ujita's adaptation of Tomohiro Koizumi's eponymous manga?

Kazuyoshi: In terms of the genres being mixed, I'm not interested in being pigeon-holed into any particular genre. I'm more interested in seeing something that people haven't seen before so I think Green Minds, Metal Bats is the product of my vision. But it may be true of all of my films that about half of the audience is probably confused by them.

Guillén: I certainly was by Antena, I can tell you that, but I went with it anyways.

Kazuyoshi: Antena's probably the film that does confuse people most.

Guillén: So not being familiar with the original manga of Green Mind, Metal Bats, can you talk about how your film adaptation differs, if at all? I'm aware that with your current feature, which is also based on a manga, there has been some controversy about how much the film adaptation differs from its original source.

Kazuyoshi: Freesia is the new film that just premiered at Rotterdam and in that one certainly the result of the film is very different from the original. With Green Mind, Metal Bats, I felt that I had used quite a bit of artistic license and took a lot of freedom in making the film that I wanted to but—after I saw the completed film—I realized that much of the original taste of the original manga was very much intact in the film. I could say, of course, that the original is a little bit more dry, whereas the film version tends to be more emotional; there's more impact.

Guillén: It's my understanding that you tend to write your own scripts but in the case of Green Mind, Metal Bats, the manga had already been adapted into a script by Takashi Ujita. What prompted you to work with someone else's treatment?

Kazuyoshi: Takashi Ujita is actually a screenwriter that I work with quite a bit on all my films and with Green Mind, Metal Bats, we started at a very early stage rewriting the treatment together.

Guillén: Juan Manuel Freire, who I quoted earlier, likewise found Green Mind, Metal Bats to be a confounding "dramedy" that plays with conceptions of what is heroic and what is criminal and that it's infused with your directorial obsession with exploitive violence. Your violence is disturbingly comic. Can you speak some about that?


Kazuyoshi: There is a good amount of depiction of violence in my films; but, with the film I made before this—Antena—I had the sense that there was something a little bit too serious and heavy-handed about the approach to violence. I wanted to take a lighter approach to filmmaking and that was the result you see in Green Mind, Metal Bats. In regards to the heroes and criminals in my films, I believe that a hero in my vision is somebody who does what is right regardless of what society believes. In regards to criminals, I'm often drawn more to the villains in films rather than the typical heroes. I tend to be more drawn towards the villain who might have been lonely. I tend to side with them. The extreme version of that is what you see in Green Mind, Metal Bats.

Guillén: In this week's Nichi Bei Times Ben Hamamoto praised your directorial balance. He said that even though Green Mind, Metal Bats is "a bleak portrait of aging urban degenerates", it is "also an outrageous comedy. Somehow, its zaniness never undercuts the 'realness' of the characters and the bleakness never undercuts the comedy." Elsewhere the film has been described as "gentle" even in the face of its exploitive violence. Hamamoto, again, says that the film causes you to root for these losers and to like them; a guilty pleasure. You offend and you fascinate. Can you speak some about how you achieve this balance or why you seek to balance these seemingly oppositional energies in your themes and your characters?

Kazuyoshi: I'm happy to hear those comments. What drew me to this material to begin with is that the characters are hopeless people and yet I wanted to treat them with a lot of love. That was the challenge that I took on.

Guillén: Some years back in your interview with Tom Mes for Midnight Eye, he noted that your earlier film Kichiku had drawn comparisons to the early work of Kôji Wakamatsu and Mes wondered if you felt a kinship to Wakamatsu. You replied that—though you weren't particularly fascinated with his films—you liked their underground feel. Kôji Wakamatsu has now ended up acting in Green Mind, Metal Bats as the alleged son of Babe Ruth; one might say the spirit of Babe Ruth. What was your thought behind casting him in your film? Were you striving for an underground aesthetic?


Kazuyoshi: It's a long story, but basically when I was a college student I had already been a fan of Wakamatsu's films. When there was a retrospective of his films at a nearby theater, I went to go see them. I went up to him afterward and told him how much I admired his films and he said, "Fine, let's go drinking together." So we went drinking. Towards the end of it, when we were saying good-bye, he basically shook my hand and said, "Good luck, kid." Several years later when I finished Hole in the Sky, my second feature, he took a look at the film and apparently enjoyed it. He invited me to be on the radio show he was doing at that time. He talked about the film quite a bit and he told me, "You look like a director now. Your face looks like a director's now." I really enjoyed hearing that so I wanted to bring a part of that into this film. When you see the scene where Nanba is practicing his swing, and the Babe Ruth character played by Wakamatsu comes along and says, "Your swing is looking good now"—that's our personal interaction coming into the film.

Guillén: Whenever Wakamatsu speaks as the Babe Ruth spirit in Green Mind, Metal Bats, the subtitles are rendered in an American drawl. I'm not a sophisticated enough linguist to know if this is also being rendered in Japanese in some way for Japanese audiences to pick up on. Is it?

Kazuyoshi: Wakamatsu is actually from the northeast region of Japan and they have a heavy thick dialect there. It wasn't until the day before we actually printed the screenplay to go into shooting that we locked in Wakamatsu as the Babe Ruth character. So I had to basically go in very quickly and rewrite all the lines to be more in Wakamatsu's dialect.

Guillén: But why was his speech translated into American slang? [At this juncture my translator Taro Goto admitted that he wrote the subtitles for Green Mind, Metal Bats so he responded directly to my query.]

Taro Goto: Wakamatsu is speaking with such a thick dialect that in the U.S. or in the English language, the closest thing I could find was a slightly Southern drawl. I tried not to make it too Southern but again just a touch of it so that there is the sense that he's from somewhere other than this city. There's an element that he's coming from somewhere else. It's a little more rural.

Guillén: Your choice intrigues me because, I guess, it does distinguish him as being more rural, which in effect is saying American. Which leads, I guess, to my true question for Kazuyoshi: what is the role of this American sport of baseball in Japanese sensibility? What's the weight of its fantasy for Japanese people? And what are you trying to say by showing how it has damaged the emotional lives of these three young Japanese individuals—Nanba, Ishioka, and Eiko?

Kazuyoshi: First of all, in the original comic, in the manga, the character is not Babe Ruth at all. He's actually a famous Japanese baseball player who was a well-known alcoholic. It felt too provincial for me to use that in a film that's supposed to go out to an international audience so I decided to use someone more universally recognizable and that was Babe Ruth.

I myself actually played baseball through middle school. In Japan it's not so much baseball itself that has a lot of weight, it's high school baseball. High school baseball in Japan is very big. Almost every kid aims for being a high school baseball player in national tournament. There are many people like the Ishioka character in the film who basically reached their life peak when they were shining in the high school baseball national tournament world. Then everything else is downhill. I felt a lot of sympathy for that type of character.

Guillén: So that high school baseball becomes a symbol of lost youth or the golden days of youth?

Kazuyoshi: In today's Japan it may be soccer that's gaining more popularity, but in my generation it was baseball.

Guillén: Ben Hamamoto relayed an interesting claim of Wakamatsu's that he "sent his teenage daughter to live with guerillas in Beirut after she came back from study abroad in America with 'absurdly self-centered notions of individuality'." I found that hilariously intriguing about Wakamatsu. What was it like to work with him?

Kazuyoshi: [Chuckling.] I haven't heard that story. Filmmakers understand what has to occur on the set because they're the ones who have to direct actors. Wakamatsu understood what I had to accomplish on the set. He allowed me to be self-centered and I had no problems getting him to do what I wanted him to do. For example, in the scene towards the end of the film where you see the Babe Ruth character in his briefs watching the city on fire, that's a tough thing to ask someone like Wakamatsu to do but he had no problems with that.

Wakamatsu is known for being a great low-budget guerrilla-style filmmaker. He has a reputation for being able to get more than 20 shots in a single hour. I tend to work slower. I take my time with my shots. There were a few moments during the shooting where the sun would be going down, we would be losing light, and Wakamatsu would be the one panicking more than me.

Guillén: What does the "green mind" portion of the film's title refer to?

Kazuyoshi: The initial translation was supposed to be just simply Youth and Metal Bats. That's the direct literal translation from the Japanese title. But "Green Mind" is supposed to refer to something about the bittersweet pangs of youth. I happen to be a big fan of a Japanese group called Dinosaur Junior. They had an album called "Green Mind." The original comic book author was also a big fan of Dinosaur Junior and he had suggested "Green Mind." There's something about green youthfulness in the mind that seemed to work together and we decided to use it.

Guillén: Passivity and aggression play into your films a lot and you've gained a reputation for keenly chronicling relational obsessions. Eiko's alcoholic aggression is distasteful but fascinating. Are you trying to say something about Japanese women? Because it's not a role I would associate with Japanese women. What's Eiko about?

Kazuyoshi: Rather than saying something about Japanese women generally, it's simply my personal taste. I love women that are violent and cute.

Guillén: I loved the scene where Nanba told her he didn't have any more money and she said, "No problem" and went outside and beat up the girl on the bicycle and stole her money. It was terrible but funny.

Kazuyoshi: That's my ideal woman.


Guillén: So let's shift briefly to Freesia, if we may, which just had its world premiere at Rotterdam. Although my Twitch teammate Ardvark was not so enamored with Freesia, Mark Schilling's review in yesterday's Japan Times was fairly enthusiastic. So, again, we'll have to rely on Bruce Fletcher to bring the film to us so San Franciscans can decide for themselves. This is another film based on manga, this time Jiro Matsumoto's Furîjia. Initial reports are that fans of the manga are upset with your treatment because you've strayed so far from the story. Some have wondered why you even bothered to get the license. Any thoughts?

Kazuyoshi: Basically, the producer asked me to do this. I hadn't heard about this project before. When I took a look at it, I found that the Furîjia series wasn't complete yet. It's still an ongoing manga series. There were many episodes that fascinated me but there wasn't a complete plot so I felt it was an opportunity to improvise.

Guillén: Your films are dystopian and dispassionate. Do you think it's important as a filmmaker to disappoint anticipations? Or to subvert an audience's attachment to expected outcomes? It can be frustrating but is also mesmerizing.

Kazuyoshi: Thank you. You're pretty much right on. Many people have noted similar things about my films. There is this conventional expectation that a character has to somehow grow in the course of a film and I never really fully bought into that. I often see many people who gain quite a bit of experience and yet never really amount to anything or never learn something from it. Those are the people I respond to. In Green Mind, Metal Bats specifically, the two characters at the very end, after the film is over they'll probably get arrested, that's what I think. But though the film doesn't necessarily have a happy ending, I didn't want to show that part of it. I wanted to show them at their brightest moment.

Cross-published at Twitch.

2007 SFIAAFF—Michael Hawley's Wish List

This evening, while interviewing Kumakiri Kazuyoshi for his IndieFEST entry Green Mind, Metal Bats, I was delighted that Taro Goto served as interpreter. Taro wrote the subtitles for Green Mind, Metal Bats, helped produce White Light/Black Rain (which just screened at Sundance), and is one of the main facilitators of the upcoming San Francisco International Asian-American Film Festival. The press conference announcing the line-up is scheduled for next Tuesday and will go up online shortly thereafter.

Taro and I joked about my fishing for scoops. He asked if journalists really do talk to each other about what they uncover, trying to piece together the program? My eyebrow went way up. "Oh no, Taro!" I lied. But truth is that hunger is the best spice and nothing serves a festival like anticipation. I joked that some folks—such as Evening Class contributing writer Michael Hawley—even derive a unique pleasure out of comparing what they hope will come with what actually arrives. Here, then, is Michael Hawley's wish list. Let's see how close he gets. At the very least, it's a wonderful and informative overview of Asian film in 2006. Thanks, Michael!

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As I'm writing this, it's only a matter of days before the 25th San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival announces its line-up for this year. I've looked over my wish list of films that have toured the festival circuit over the past year, and now it's time to speculate which ones I'll have the pleasure of seeing in the Bay Area from March 15 to 25.

A few things I know for certain: A major contemporary Korean auteur whose last two films were mysteriously overlooked by local programmers, will finally be getting some local respect. Also, the other Korean blockbuster of 2006 (the one not featuring a river monster) will be making an appearance. And as a big Kiyoshi Kurosawa fan, I'm very sorry to report that neither of his two most recent films, Loft and Retribution, will be on the schedule.

The ten films I've listed below are my most fervent wishes for 2007 SFIAAFF. These are all films that have been around the block, so to speak, and I fear that if they don't show up here, or at the San Francisco International Film Festival in April, it'll be Next Stop: Oblivion. Or at best an eventual Region 1 DVD release. Two of them, 4:30 and Invisible Waves, are films I optimistically skipped at Palm Springs. I might mention that the latest works by Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Syndromes and a Century) and Tsai Ming-liang (I Don't Want to Sleep Alone) would have topped this list, were they not scheduled for multiple screenings at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in April.

4:30—The SFAIFF introduced me to Royston Tan's incredible short 15 in 2003, and its feature length version in 2004, so I have every reason to hope the festival will continue supporting his work.

Big Bang Love: Juvenile A—Because I just gotta be able to say I saw the Takashi Miike gay prison movie!

Dong—Jia Zhengke's documentary companion piece to Still Life.

Hana—Hirokazu Kore-eda's follow up to Nobody Knows.

Invisible Waves—It seems like almost everyone is disappointed in this recent work by Pen-Ek Ratanaruang. Well, I'm demanding my right to be disappointed, too.

The Last Communist—Malaysian funny man Amir Muhammad's musical documentary road movie.

No Regrets—After reading Adam Hartzell's rave review from Pusan at Koreanfilm.org, I knew I had to see this gay Korean debut feature from director Leesong Hee-il.

Opera Jawa—Garin Nugroho's all singing, all dancing Indonesian updating of a tale from the Ramayana, and one of six features in the New Crowned Hope series celebrating Mozart's 250th birthday.

Rain Dogs—Praised at every major film festival of the past year, this is Malaysian director Ho Yu-hang's follow-up to 2004's Sanctuary.

Still Life—Jia Zheng-ke's Venice Golden Lion Winner. 'Nuff said!

Listed below are several other films I've made mental notes of during the past 12 months, and I would be happy to see any of them in this year's line-up. A number of them premiered only recently at Rotterdam or Berlin, so the chances of them showing up so soon in the Bay Area are slim. But one can always hope.

The Old Garden—Im Sang-soo's follow-up to A Good Lawyers Wife and The President's Last Bang had its U.S. premiere in Palm Springs last month.

Tachigui: The Amazing Lives of the Fast Food Grifters—Mamoru Oshii, best known for Ghost in the Shell delivers an "honest to God masterpiece of mad invention" according to Olaf Möller of Film Comment. The trailer is a trip.

Matsugane Pot Shot Affair—Yamashita Nobuhiro, director of last year's festival fave Linda, Linda, Linda has a new feature.

Khadak (aka The Color of Water)—Peter Brosens' and Jessica Hope Woodworth's Mongolian-set drama won The Lion of the Future prize at Venice last year, and recently drew many favorable notices at Sundance.

I'm a Cyborg but That's OK—Post-vengeance Park Chan-wook.

Time, Kim Ki-duk's tale of plastic surgery and identity.

Half Moon—The SFIAAFF will occasionally show films more often identified as Arab cinema. Two years ago they hosted the Bay Area premiere of Bahman Ghobadi's Turtles Can Fly, and perhaps they'll reward us again with his latest film. This is another feature in the New Crowned Hope series.

It's Winter—This Iranian film from Rafi Pitts won the New Voices/New Visions Grand Jury Prize at Palm Springs.

Finally, two years ago the San Francisco International Film Festival featured a spotlight on New Malaysian Cinema. As it turns out, four of the five directors from that series have new films being shown at Rotterdam and Berlin and—perhaps if we're lucky—the SFIAAFF. Those directors and their latest projects are Woo Ming-Jin (Monday Morning Glory) with The Elephant and the Sea, Deepak Kumaran Menon (The Gravel Road) with Dancing Bells, Yasmin Ahmad (Sepet, Gubra) with Mukhsin, and last but not least, Amir Muhammad with Village People Radio Show, a sequel to The Last Communist.

FELIZ CUMPLEAÑOS—The One-Year Anniversary of The Evening Class

Today marks the one-year anniversary of the launch of The Evening Class with my first post reporting from the 4th San Francisco Korean American Film Festival. What a long, strange trip it's been. Intended originally to help me manage my boredom and depression while recuperating from a series of hospitalizations, The Evening Class has become so much more for me and promises to evolve even further.

I want to thank each and every link on my blogroll for creating the unique sociality that characterizes film writing on line. Being mentioned and referenced elsewhere has bolstered confidence and granted credence. I also want to thank every publicist I have worked with this year—primarily Karen Larsen and her crew at Larsen Associates—for giving a nobody his first press pass and starting a chain of events that has been nothing but exciting and wonderful. I'm also grateful to Shelley Spicer, John Weaver and Dierdre Kennedy at Terry Hines & Associates for providing so many opportunities to participate in Bay Area press junkets. Gary Meyer at the Balboa Theatre, Joel Shepard at the Center for the Arts, Shelley Diekman at the Pacific Film Archives, and the many programmers of the Bay Area's numerous film festivals are likewise to blame for the movie monster I've become. Of special note is Hilary Hart and her staff at the San Francisco Film Society who really gave me a chance to test my chops at last year's International Film Festival and with whom I am looking forward to working with for this year's landmark 50th.

Writing means nothing if it isn't read and I am so grateful for the various venues that have allowed me to self-publish my work. Todd Brown at Twitch has armed me with powerful cachet, frequently writing me letters of assignment to festivals outside of the Bay Area. Attending the Toronto International was a revelation. Cecilia Tsai at Entertainment Today has provided a Los Angeles exposure and necessary lessons in compression and focus. Jonathan Marlow and David Hudson at Greencine have provided just enough financial compensation to inspire me to consider that I can supplement a meager disability income after all.

Most recently I have been gifted by editor Susan Gerhard with being asked to be part of the SF360 team and look forward to working with them in the near future.

I had no idea when I started out a year ago that I would enjoy interviewing talent as much as I do. Over 60 interviews in one year! I almost wonder who the heck is doing this? Is it really me? Do I really get to sit down and talk to this broad variety of creative and intelligent, impassioned talent just because I have a question or two? It still boggles my mind. I want so much to contribute to the online world of film reportage and am grateful I have found a niche that works for me, and seems to be of service to others.

As I begin my second year, I look forward to taking one more turn 'round the dance floor.

Thank you all for making The Evening Class such a fun and rewarding experience.

Photograph courtesy of Steve Rhodes.

GERMAN CINEMA: Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others) Redux

Since interviewing Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck a few weeks ago, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences elected not to be cruel and included von Donnersmarck among the hopeful quintet vying for the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Feature. There are rumblings afoot that he has a dark horse chance of winning and this continues to agitate a coterie of critics who make up a loud minority. No less than a week ago The Lives of Others took away the KPN Audience Award at the Rotterdam International Film Festival. The film's editor, Patricia Rommel, accepted the cash prize of 7,500 Euro on behalf of filmmaker von Donnersmarck, from Ivo Opstelten, Mayor of Rotterdam. And as ever, Dave Hudson at The Greencine Daily has made my research effortless by compiling the film's most recent reviews.

Greencine's most recent compendium of critical feedback is noteworthy for tossing in a new wrench, namely the Film Forum screening of Toussaint/Iannetta's documentary The Decomposition of the Soul. Exploring the same subject matter but by a different approach, I now feel as if I am watching Mattel's Rock'em Sock'em Robots knocking each others blocks off with critics wagering bets on the side, their fists clenched and their grimaces tense. I almost feel a documentary should be made about the critical tussle surrounding von Donnersmarck's fictional treatment of the Stasi era. Perhaps we could title it: The Reviews of Others? Then again, perhaps not. Perhaps we should just let sleeping dogs lie? It's hard to do that, though, when the polarization is so titillating and thought-provoking.

I'm reminded of that encounter between the songwriter and his producer in Stephen Sondheim's Merrily We Roll Along: "That's great," the producer sings, "That's swell. The other song as well. It isn't every day you get a score this strong; but, buddy, if I may there's only one thing wrong. There's not a song they can hum. There's not a song that goes bum-bum-bumbedum. Give me a song that goes bum-bum-bumbedum; give me a melody. Why won't you toss them a crumb? What's wrong with letting them tap their toes a bit? I'll let you know when Stravinsky has a hit. Give me a melody!"

If von Donnersmarck has tossed "a crumb" at moviegoing audiences that actually entertains them and gets them to "tap their toes a bit", let alone vote the film their favorite, audience after audience, festival after festival, country after country, I don't quite follow that this makes it any less eligible for praise nor award. I think it's great to have a movie that audiences enjoy even if its scriptural contrivances irritate some critics to no end. How could it be otherwise? Isn't it the role of a critic to be irritated when audiences enjoy something they shouldn't? I'm being facetious, of course, but sometimes it seems truth is stranger than fiction. Or should that be stranger than friction?

The film that has been "obscenely lauded" (as Slant's Ed Gonzalez puts it) now appears suspect for having pleased the masses. Should it win the statuette, it might end up being hated for having done so.

More directly, Robert Koehler commented on my interview with von Donnersmarck over at Twitch and granted permission to port his comment over here to The Evening Class. I place it here not so much to kick a sleeping dog as to express my fascination with the process by which any respective critics circle comes up with their choices. I appreciate Koehler providing a corrective glimpse into that process even if I don't completely agree with some of his deeply-held convictions. His point about the films that have been altogether overlooked, however, is well-taken and seems somewhat a fact of critical life that the entire system of nominations and awards is frustratingly arbitrary, relative, highly personal and, yes—even as von Donnersmarck insinuated—somewhat cruel. Koehler writes:

Michael—Von Donnersmarck's remarks regarding Scott Foundas were full of inaccuracies.

I am a film critic for Variety in Los Angeles (also for Cinema Scope and Cineaste film journals) and, like Scott, a member of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. Von Donnersmarck and his party were seated at the table adjacent to mine at the LAFCA awards dinner he referred to in your interview. So I was there, just as I was for the voting process which gave Lives of Others our award for best foreign film.

I haven't the faintest idea where Von Donnersmarck pulled out the "fact" that 19 out of 20 critics voted for Lives, and that Scott was the only one opposed. THIS IS BLATANTLY UNTRUE. First, the voting membership of LAFCA numbers close to 50, with well over 30 members voting in person. Second, there were several other foreign films considered for the prize; I and several other critics voted enthusiastically for the vastly superior The Death Of Mr. Lazarescu (The Lives Of Others wasn't even remotely on my own consideration list!), while other films such as Volver were other strongly considered. I can't tell you the exact details, but it's far from the case that Lives of Others was the overwhelming consensus choice of LAFCA; far from it—there was considerable and close competition.

Von Donnersmarck has never met Scott face-to-face, so his characterization of Scott going "blue in the face and almost popped" is pure fantasy. Nonsense. I spoke with Scott right afterwards (I also spoke to the film's star Sebastian Koch), and he was perfectly fine—no blue to be seen. Where and how he dreamed this up is something only he can explain, but I think it's extremely bad form for him to trash a critic with faulty logic, and then invent stuff from whole cloth about him. It's so outlandish that it makes me doubt everything else that Von Donnersmarck says. I find him now to be distinctly untrustworthy.

If anything, I was angrier than Scott; I strongly felt, and still do, that Lives of Others had absolutely no business winning best foreign film of the year—not, certainly, in a year when such masterpieces as Claire Denis' The Intruder, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu and Hou Hsiao Hsien's Three Times were up for consideration.

The Lives Of Others is precisely, though, the kind of foreign film that many film critics who see relatively few foreign films in any given year admire, because it's a safely consensus choice that the "busy" critic can get behind and support, without doing the hard work of spending more time watching a wider swathe of films to consider.

I firmly believe that the primary reason that Lives has received such strong support from Hollywood, and from critics like Kenny Turan who know Hollywood well, and even in some cases speak for them, is that it obediently adheres to every verity of the Robert McKee school of screenwriting—particularly his rock-ribbed conviction that characters must experience a stroke of redemption (this is a religious principle with McKee, whose class I once endured). It's this aspect that you allude to in your interview with Von Donnersmarck, and which he tries to defend. Under the McKee rules, Weisler MUST be redeemed, regardless of the intrinsic dramatic impossibilities involved with this. Now, Von Donnersmarck plays the game of citing supposedly documented examples and supposed precedents for Weisler's behavior, but facts do not in and of themselves make good cinema.

Count me among those who have never bought Weisler's transformation (for every soul softened by music, one can cite—most starkly in the German historical framework—an evil man who loves music), and that the mechanics that provided the excuses and/or "reasons" for his Saul-to-Paul change are never more than that: Pure dramaturgical machinery that's the first sign of bad writing. My severe objections to The Lives Of Others—and which a shocking minority of critics have raised—lie precisely in the film's dramaturgy, the awareness of which is heightened by the nature of the film's subject: A dramatic writer, and the deliberate erosion of his creative life by a man who comes to realize the sins of his ways. It's always a risky gambit for a screenwriter to place a playwright at the center of his drama, since this will only invite deeper scrutiny into the screenplay's dramatic truth. On this fundamental level, The Lives Of Others is a considerable failure, perhaps even a lie. It matters little to me that this is, at least for now, a minority view. In Von Donnersmarck's reductive thinking, a critical view that's in the minority is intrinsically wrong; from much painful experience, I can report this to be profoundly wrong-headed. And, in this case, obviously self-serving.

In the end, your interview only confirms suspicions I previously held that there's something lacking in Von Donnersmarck; I now have confirmation that he's not exactly honest, either. Best! Robert Koehler.

02/24/07 UPDATE: Greencine's Dave Hudson continues to rake in the reviews on The Lives of Others, including Elbert Ventura at Reverse Shot, Vince Keenan at his eponymous website, Rob Nelson for Citypages, Hannah Booth for The Guardian, and most recently Lars-Olav Beier for Der Speigel.

2007 IRISH FILM FESTIVAL—Lineup

Running March 1-4 at the Roxie Film Center, the 2007 San Francisco Irish Film Festival, the only event of its kind on the West Coast, has secured two high-profile comic Irish features: Studs, starring Brendan Gleeson (Breakfast on Pluto) and Man About Dog. Now in its fourth consecutive year, the festival will also present the "Magners 'n' Shorts" program, the "Irish Gay Cinema Program" and "Irish TV Night" showcasing the best of Irish television.

The theme of this year's festival is "Ireland in Transition." Ireland's economic boom has had a profound effect on the country. Ireland is now the second richest country in Europe after Luxemburg. One of the most notable by-products of the country's newfound affluence has been an influx of foreign nationals. Nearly half a million immigrants (10% of the population) have flocked to Ireland's shores in the last decade.


On a lighter note, the festival will screen Studs (2006) with internationally-renowned Irish actor Brendan Gleeson. The movie, written and directed by Paul Mercier, charts the unlikely rise of an inner-city soccer team. The festival will also screen the recently restored film Irish Destiny (1926), a feature-length docudrama detailing the history of the Irish rebellion against British rule.


The Irish Gay Cinema program reflects social changes in Ireland. Movies that feature in this program include: Goldfish Memory (2003), a modern-day love story set against a Dublin Bossa Nova backdrop, Here To Stay a documentary about a Filipino transgender performer and Christy, a film about a gay homeless man in Dublin.

Meanwhile, the Irish Television Program will feature the award-winning show Pure Mule, a sophisticated modern-day drama and Bachelors Walk, a modern day comedy set in Dublin.

The Magners 'n' Shorts program will include Nun More Deadly, a film noir about author Raymond Chandler's holidays in Ireland, Unaccompanied, a drama featuring Irvine Welsh about missing children in Dublin and Peace Cubed, an irreverent take on the Northern Ireland Peace Process by Ireland's bondage community starring a rubber doll.

EDDIE EDDIE BO-BEDDIE BANANA FANA FO-FEDDIE

Listen up, y'all know the drill: If the first two letters are ever the same, drop the first and then say the name, like Bob Bob, drop the "B", Bo-ob, or Mary Mary, drop the "M", Mo-ary, and that's the only rule that is contrary.

Okaaaaay, now that I got that out of my system, for all of those who didn't get enough of Wordslinger & Cultural Archeologist Eddie Muller at Noir City 5 (is that even possible?), here's two more hits to the jaw.


On Friday, March 16, Eddie stops by the British Noir Cinemalit Film Series at the Mechanics Institute Library ("MIL") to introduce Alberto Cavalcanti's They Made Me A Fugitive (1947), a "tough-minded tale, laced with caustic dialogue, of a double-crossed crook seeking revenge while eluding the cops." The Mechanics Institute is located at 57 Post Street (near Market), here in Noir City. The program begins at 6:30 p.m. with a "salon style discussion" following the film. Tickets are available at the door. MIL members get in free while a suggested donation of $10 is asked of the drop-in riffraff. For more information and reservations: Call (415) 393-0100 or email rsvp@milibrary.org. Since seating is limited, reservations are required.

More immediately, however, Eddie offers something sanguinary instead of saccharine for Valentine's Day. For the past two years he's been playwright-in-residence for Thrillpeddlers, a San Francisco-based theatre troupe that keeps alive the sensational spirit of the traditional Grand Guignol at an intimate 50-seat venue, the Hypnodrome.


This month Thrillpeddlers begin a run of what is inarguably the most provocative and compelling one act play they've yet staged, "Orgy in the Lighthouse." Eddie penned the adaptation from the original play by Alfred Marchand.

In a lonely lighthouse, on the holiest day of the year, a sailor on leave visits his naive young brother, one of the keepers of the lighthouse flame. He brings uninvited guests: a pair of playful prostitutes. A rising storm unleashes a torrent of treachery, budding love, religious fervor, and drunken debauchery—with an unexpected, horrifying climax.

The cast is fantastic and fearless, Eddie promises, and it's all the lust and mayhem you could ever hope for! It's advisable to bring someone you can squeeze.

The Hypnodrome is presenting four "previews," under the banner "A Night of Erotic Appetizers." The shows are at 8 p.m., February 14-17. The show's regular run begins March 1. Tickets can be purchased online at Brown Paper Tickets.

MALAYSIAN CINEMA—Rotterdam & Elsewhere

I gotta love the San Francisco Film Society. Not only did they turn me on to Malaysian cinema a couple of years back when they had their showcase during the International, but they continue to keep me abreast, via Dennis Lim at indieWIRE who—reporting Bayside from the International Film Festival Rotterdam—notes the "moment of heightened visibility" for Malaysian cinema, categorizes some of the "movement's" signature characteristics—"patient realism characterized by long takes, a fondness for ellipses, and a focus on stoic, alienated youth"—and alternate funding, and focuses on the latest ventures of the filmmakers introduced to San Franciscan audiences at the SFIFF Malaysian Showcase. Hopefully this new work will show up at SFIFF 50.

One of the best things that could have happened to help keep me in touch with Malaysian cinema has been the addition of Allan Koay ("The Visitor") to the Twitch team. Since he's been aboard he's posted an interview with Yasmin Ahmad, a trailer of her Berlinale-bound Mukhsin, an overview of what Malaysia offered in 2006 and what to expect in 2007, reviews of Ciplak, After This Our Exile, Possessed, Love Conquers All, and much more.

2007 PSIFF—The French Line-up

Michael Hawley reports on the French fare he caught at Palm Springs:

It shouldn't come as a surprise that after the U.S., France had the most films in this year's PSIFF, (and that's without factoring international co-productions.) Which is fine by me, because for my money, France still produces the most interesting cinema in the world. It also offers up plenty of pleasant, middle-brow fare such as Avenue Montaigne, the French film that was on everyone's lips in Palm Springs. I saw it last autumn at the Mill Valley Film Festival, and all these months later I hardly remember a thing about it.

Years from now, however, I'll very much remember the experience of watching Denis Dercourt's The Page Turner (La Tourneuse de pages, 2006), one of my five favorite films at this year's PSIFF. This muted, modern gothic revenge thriller starring Catherine Frot and Déborah François had me completely unnerved for nearly all of its lean 85 minutes. Never have I felt so alert at a 9 a.m. screening.


We're first introduced to Mélanie (François) as a young, aspiring pianiste. When she has the chance to try out for a prestigious music academy, one of the judges is renowned concert pianist Ariane Fouchécourt (Frot). During the audition she is distracted by an inconsiderate action of Ariane's, and consequently blows her big chance. She returns home devastated, puts her Beethoven bust back in its box, closes and locks the piano. Forever.

Flash forward a decade and young adult Mélanie secures a secretarial internship in a law firm headed by Jean Fouchécourt (Pascal Greggory). When she learns that the famille Fouchécourt needs someone to watch their young son while on vacation, she readily volunteers. And thus begins a tale of revenge being served ice cold. Mélanie moves into their secluded country mansion and proceeds to destroy the life of the woman who had so thoughtlessly destroyed her own years earlier.

Dercourt's direction is deliciously taut, and his screenplay contains a number of wonderful red, and not-so-red herrings. My favorite moment in the film is when Mélanie, now working as Ariane's page turner, plants a seductive slow-mo kiss upon a bewildered Ariane's cheek after a successful radio concert. Equally stunning is the film's singular moment of real physical violence, a moment so unexpected and so disturbingly absurd that the audience howled with shock and disbelief.

Frot, as always, gives an astonishing performance, but the revelation here is François, whose only previous screen role was in the Dardenne Brothers' L'enfant (2005). This role is so completely different from her debut, one can't help but wonder what the future holds for this amazing young actress. François and Frot have both been nominated for Cesar Awards for their performances in this film.


From the sublime to the ridiculous (and in this case that's not a bad thing), we move on to Michel Hazanavicius' OSS 117: Nest of Spies, a sort of James Bond meets Maxwell Smart spy comedy set in 1950s Cairo. French comedian Jean Dujardin stars as Hubert Bonisseur de La Bath, alias OSS 117, a cluelessly arrogant and fastidious French secret agent. This film was hugely popular in France (as was Dujardin's previous effort Brice de Nice) and has been nominated for five Cesars, including Best Actor, Screenplay, Production Design, Cinematography and Costumes.

It was great fun watching this film, and a welcome respite from the more serious fare that made up the rest of my festival schedule. The kitschy mid-century Orientalist production design sparkled and the action moved along briskly from one cleverly conceived set-piece to the next. I especially enjoyed a ridiculous nightclub scene that began with Hubert learning to mambo and ended with him enthralling the crowd with his masterful oud-playing skills. Another outlandish (and beautifully filmed) sequence had him escaping Houdini-style from a ball and chain, after he's been thrown into the Nile by Islamic extremists. Some of the recurring gags begin to produce diminishing returns by the film's final third, but by then you've had such a grand time it matters little.

I was intrigued by the film's comic use of Hubert's ignorance and blithe dismissal of all things Arab. There are many examples of this in the film, where the actions of this well-meaning buffoon comment tongue-in-cheek on France's colonialist past. In one scene for example, he's awakened at dawn by the muezzin's call to prayer. "Shut the fuck up!" he screams from his hotel window. When the prayer doesn't stop, he storms out of his hotel room and we hear him assaulting the muezzin over the mosque's loudspeaker. One wonders how scenes like this played for France's large Moslem population. At any rate, I'm sure they cheered a scene where Hubert, who fancies himself a ladies man, asks his beautiful Egyptian assistant if she'd like to make love. "I'd rather fuck a pig on holy Friday," is her terse reply.


Another commercial French feature I caught at the festival was Lionel Bailliu's Fair Play, a black comedy/thriller about the cutthroat nature of corporate culture. The film is an expansion of Bailliu's 2004 Oscar-nominated live-action short Squash, in which a boss and employee go to war on a racquetball court. Here, he takes the sports metaphor several steps further in a cleverly conceived two-act screenplay.

Act One of Fair Play consists of four lengthy scenes, each one involving a particular sports activity as played out by two competitive co-workers. Scene One finds Jérémie Renier and Benoît Magimel (barely recognizable with thick glasses, a paunch and flaming red hair,) who are both up for the same promotion, honing their river rowing skills. Scene Two is basically a re-filming of Squash, with Renier and Eric Savin, reprising the boss role from the original short. Scene Three is set on a jogging course, with Magimel harassing a female co-worker who's about to sue the corporation for sexual harassment at the hands of Savin. And a contentious golf game between Savin and the corporation's owner (who's also his father-in-law), played by vet Jean-Pierre Cassel, is the setting for Scene Four.

The entirety of Act Two takes place during a corporate "bonding" weekend during which Savin will guide his employees through a treacherous river canyon. There are waterfalls to jump from, cliffs to scale, and underwater ravines to swim through. Given the enmity, power plays and jealousies set up in Act One, we know that not everyone's going to survive. And sure enough, equipment fails, limbs are broken and a rainstorm threatens to submerge the canyon. It's all quite exciting, if one can ignore chunks of clunky dialogue and a few ludicrous plot points. But as the woman in front of me gushed as we exited the theater, "Now that was a movie!"

That it was, and a type of French film we usually don't see here in the U.S., even at festivals. I went to see it because of Renier, whose career I've followed with interest since his stunning debut as a 15-year-old in the Dardenne Brothers' La Promesse. Since then, he's had interesting roles in films like Brotherhood of the Wolf, François Ozon's Criminal Lovers, A Love to Hide (a made-for-TV film in which he's sent to Dachau for being gay in Vichy-era Paris) and finally reuniting with the Dardennes for L'enfant. His next film, Private Property, has him paired up with his older brother Yannick Renier and Isabelle Huppert.

Palm Springs had an impressive line-up of documentaries this year, including all of those on the MPAAA short list for Best Documentary Feature Oscar. There was also an 18-film "True Stories" sidebar, from which I saw two French documentaries, Beyond Hatred and Forever. I'd been hoping to see Olivier Meyrou's Beyond Hatred ever since it won the Teddy award for Best Documentary at Berlin last year. In French, the title is the mellifluous-sounding (at least to English-accustomed ears) Au dela de la Haine, which is very much at odds with the film's subject matter; the murder of a gay man.


In 2002, François Chenu went to the city of Rheims for the weekend. While walking through a park one evening, he was accosted by three skinheads who had come to the park with the intention of beating up an Arab. After admitting his homosexuality to them, they beat him unconscious, all the more furious because he kept calling them cowards. Thinking he was dead, they threw his body into a river, where subsequently he drowned. The film explores the emotional and legal aftermath of the murder as experienced by the families of both the victim and his attackers. No narrative voiceover is used to explain and expound upon the events in the film, only the interview footage of family members, law enforcement officials and the lawyers involved in the case. In one stunning, extended sequence, a stationary camera records the mundane tranquility of the spot where Chenu was attacked . . . people are strolling, jogging, bicycling. Concurrently, we listen as Chenu's older sister recounts in detail how she heard about the incident in a news report and slowly began to suspect it might be her brother. She then recalls the thoughts that raced through her mind as she drove to Rheims, and describes the horrifying task of identifying the body. It's a heartbreaking chronicle, and is matched in poignancy by the film's ending in which the entire Chenu family composes a letter of forgiveness to François' assailants, now in prison. Bay Area audiences will have three opportunities to see this remarkable documentary during the San Francisco Independent Film Festival, February 8th to 20th.

The other documentary I saw is officially Dutch, but its subject matter is decidedly French. Thanks to the San Francisco International Film Festival, Bay Area audiences are very familiar with the work of documentary filmmaker Heddy Honigmann, who has had at least six of her films shown there over the years. I've had the pleasure of seeing two, 1994's Metal and Melancholy, about the taxi drivers of Lima, Peru (where Honigmann was born and raised), and 2002's Dame la Mano which profiles the lives of Cuban immigrants living in Union City, N.J. This new film, Forever, is yet another one of her extraordinary portraits of ordinary people, namely, those who come to visit the graves of Paris' famed Père-Lachaise cemetery.

The visitors Honigmann chooses to profile in Forever fall into two categories: those who make the Père-Lachaise pilgrimage to honor a favorite writer, artist or poet, and those who actually have family members buried there. She interviews them in her customary matter-of-fact style at graveside, and in some cases follows them outside the cemetery to elaborate on their special relationship with the deceased. These interview scenes are cut with beautifully composed shots of the cemetery itself; its neglected mausoleums, the insects crawling upon the statuary, and graffiti pointing the way to Jim. (Morrison, that is, whose infamous grave she curiously chooses to ignore).

The profiles are all captivating, and I resist the temptation to describe them all. Here are a few I found especially moving:

Three elderly women are seen sitting together on a bench. One woman's husband, with whom she fled Spain during the Civil War, is buried in Père-Lachaise. She describes how she watched from her window as Francoist soldiers roughed-up a group of Nationalists, and how a priest came along and shot all the Nationalists in the head. "That's the day I stopped believing in God," she laments. "If a priest can kill, there is no God."

A young Korean man places a box of madeleine cookies on Proust's grave. Honigmann asks him to talk about his admiration of Proust, which he attempts in a halting, awkward English. Sensing his difficulty, she invites him to speak in his own language and he becomes joyfully animated as he speaks about his favorite writer. His passionate discourse in Korean needs no subtitles.

A 54-year-old woman visits her husband's grave, a man who was twenty years younger than herself. They were married for three blissful years, and then he died from a bee sting while they were on vacation.

A Père-Lachaise tour guide describes childhood walks though his village cemetery with his grandfather, and how he learned the alphabet from tombstone engravings.

If I have a single complaint about Forever, it's that some of the material filmed outside the cemetery feels extraneous. For example, the film's first subject is a young, Japanese woman studying piano in Paris, whom we first meet at Mozart's grave. Honigmann interviews her again in her apartment, where she gives a lovely accounting of how Mozart was her dead father's favorite composer and ultimately, her inspiration for studying music. The director comes back to this woman several more times in the film, and each time it's considerably less interesting. Frankly, I began to resent her, as I imagined the stories of other fascinating denizens of Père-Lachaise falling to the editing room floor.

In another example, we see the shared grave of Simone Signoret and Yves Montand. Next, two blind men are filmed walking down the street as they chat about nothing in particular. We soon see them in a friend's living room "watching" Les Diaboliques, discerning the story from dialogue, sound effects and Signoret's acting skills alone. It's fascinating to be sure, but because these men are never even seen in Père-Lachaise, it feels like this sequence belongs to another film entirely. These are minor beefs, however, and Forever is a worthy addition to Honigmann's estimable filmography. And how I would love to see Paris' Montmartre and Montparnasse cemeteries given the same privileged treatment.


Although the entirety of Tony Gatlif's latest film Transylvania is set in Romania, it's officially a French release, so I'm including it here. In recent years, Gatlif's films have received little or no theatrical distribution in the U.S. (his last film Exils received exactly one screening in the Bay Area, at the 2005 Arab Film Festival), so I was very excited to have the opportunity to see this at Palm Springs. Having seen it, I'm glad to report that this is probably my favorite Gatlif film since 1997's Gadjo Dilo, which coincidentally was also set in Romania.

Transylvania contains ingredients you'll find in almost every Gatlif film. First and foremost, you have a story set amidst some aspect of Roma (gypsy) culture. Second, there's a bounty of exuberant music and dancing. And third, there's a road trip in which a character is searching for something. In the case of Transylvania, that character is Zingarina (Asia Argento), who comes to Romania in search of the lover she believes was deported from France. When she finds him, however, he wants nothing to do with her. And so poor pregnant Zingarina proceeds to go bonkers.

Rescuing Zingarina from herself is Tchangalo (Birol Ünel from Fatih Akin's Head On), a scruffy trader who crosses the countryside buying jewelry and antiques from rural homesteads. His first order of business is getting Zingarina to an exorcist, in a wonderfully bizarre scene that would feel at home in any 1960's "mondo" movie. Spiritually cleansed and now sporting some serious gypsy drag, she and Tchangalo hit the highway for a series of misadventures on the back roads of Transylvania. The journey culminates with the birth of Zingarina's child, an event which reveals a slight continuity lapse in Gatlif's screenplay. Because we're never really made to notice Zingarina's pregnancy, it's disconcerting when the story line we've perceived in terms of a few weeks, inexplicably and unconvincingly turns out to be one of many months.

Asia Argento does a fine job with her portrayal of Zingarina, although I frequently wished she looked a bit less like Courtney Love in a black wig. I also enjoyed her low key performance as Madame du Barry in Marie Antoinette, and it appears as if she's set to become European cinema's go-to girl of the moment, starring in the upcoming films of Catherine Breillat, Abel Ferrara, Olivier Assayas, Amos Gitai, and even papa Dario.

I'd also like to make special mention of Transylvania's gorgeous cinematography by Céline Bozon. There's a wondrous scene where Tchangalo connects a chandelier to an overhead power line, then dangles it from a tree branch overlooking their nocturnal camping spot. If there was one indelible image I took with me from the Palm Spring Film Festival, this was certainly it.


Finally, in a case of not saving the best for last, we come to Pascal Arnold and Jean-Marc Barr's One to Another. I can't say I wasn't warned. Before the festival I read four reviews of the film, all of them loathsome. But the reviews did promise plenty of naked Euro-youth, so I added it to my festival schedule and hoped this poor film was being unfairly maligned. I was heartened when I picked up The Desert Sun newspaper and noted that a certain festival programmer (one I respect and who shall therefore remain nameless) listed it as one of his festival picks-of-the-day. Said programmer was also on hand at the screening to give a flowery introduction of director Barr, making it sound as if we were about to witness the second coming of André Téchiné. Alas, it was not to be.

One to Another tells the story of Lucie, her bi-sexual brother Pierre and three close friends. "Close" as in, Lucie has slept with two of them, and probably her brother Pierre as well, who is himself having sex with one of the friends. Shortly after the film begins we learn that Pierre has been murdered. That's when we also learn that the film's narrative will be lurching back and forth between our five-some's idyllic past, and the troublesome present where Pierre's murder needs to be solved.

Scenes of that idyllic past include swimming nude, sunbathing nude and just plain old lying around the house, nude. Also, the four guys are in a rock band together, and the big surprise is that they're actually not bad. After a drunken gig, one of them vomits and asks his friend if he has a mint to take the bad taste away. No, he replies in all seriousness, but he has a strawberry-flavored condom to suck on. Strawberries are of importance here because Lucie and Pierre each have one tattooed on their ass. As they lie on the ground together, butt cheek to butt cheek, Pierre demands to know, "How beautiful am I today? As beautiful as a new coin?" Lucy thinks to herself, "When I hold him I feel like I'm tasting eternity." I kid you not.

The search for Pierre's murderer provides some relief from these inanities. No one seems to really care except for Lucie, who confronts potential suspects such as the belligerent local skinhead and the older john who introduced Pierre to the world of sex orgies. She also busies herself accompanying friend Nicolas to the police when it's discovered that his sperm was on Pierre's t-shirt and he needs to give the cops a sample. Anyway, by the time it's revealed who killed Pierre, I had stopped caring, if indeed I had ever cared. In the post-screening Q&A, Barr revealed that the film is "partly" based on a true story, and that "the film is about the nihilistic violence of our times." That one almost made me choke on a Raisinette. In Barr's defense, I will say that he didn't write the screenplay (co-director Arnold bears that responsibility), and his work as co-director and cinematographer on this film are certainly nothing to be ashamed of. And had I known at the time about his acting career, I would have complemented all the fine performances he's given in a half-dozen Lars von Trier films. Lastly, at a time when hundreds of sublime foreign films go unreleased in the US each year, Barr announced that One to Another will receive a theatrical release this summer through Strand Releasing and become available through Netflix soon thereafter.

Next up: Films from Eastern Europe!

Cross-published on Twitch.

NOIR CITY 5—Eddie Muller and Foster Hirsch Remarks On Joan Crawford

On the closing night of Noir City 5, Eddie Muller welcomed his audience to Super Joan Sunday. "The Joan Bowl, as we call it. For those of you keeping score, within the Castro Theatre: Joan Crawford 532; big sweaty football guys zero."

To help him introduce the Joan Crawford double-bill, Muller invited on stage Foster Hirsch, esteemed author of more than 16 books, including Film Noir: The Dark Side of the Screen (Da Capo Press, 1983) and Detours and Lost Highways: A Map Of NeoNoir (Limelight Editions, 1999). Acknowledging that Hirsch was a man who has tread this film noir terrain for more years than he had, Muller likewise credited Hirsch with probably forgetting more about film noir than he would ever know.

Visiting from New York City, Hirsch qualified that New York does not have a theater like the Castro. "You San Franciscans are so lucky that you can see these rare films on a big screen in one of the greatest remaining movie palaces of America." His cheering audience agreed 100%. The two then engaged in a dialogue about Joan Crawford.

Muller: I have very distinct opinions about Joan's place in movie history and specifically in film noir; but, I wanted to get your opinion on Joan as an actress and then how did Joan make that weird transition from actress to icon?

Hirsch: I don't know … was she ever really an actress? She was a personality. And she was larger-than-life. You have to see Joan Crawford on a screen like this. …She's too big for your home t.v. She's over the top. She was always over the top. She just got more and more over the top as she got older. She was terrific. She was great. She transcends whether or not she's an actress. She was something they don't have much any more: an authentic movie star. I don't think she had any range. She didn't have to have range. She played Joan Crawford and she painted everything very big and very bold and very black. She had no sense of humor. None.

Muller: Isn't that ironic? Not a trace of it.

Hirsch: Not a trace of it. So she's perfect for noir. I have a few quotable lines. I didn't write any of them but they're all great stuff about Crawford and noir. Here's what I found out: "She's the best leading man in noir." "She's a man trapped in a woman's body." "She's more man then you'll ever be." "She's deadlier than the male." There was definitely a masculine component to her personality. It's what gave her the strength and—in these two films you're going to be seeing tonight—she really plays roles normally played by men. In Possessed she falls apart because she is in love with Van Heflin. He's the object of desire; she's not the femme fatale. It's normally the man who's derailed by obsessive love. In [Possessed], she's derailed by it. But can you buy Van Heflin as the object of desire? As the homme fatale? I'm not going to answer that; I'm just asking.

Muller: When you see them together on screen, …it does seem like Joan could pretty much snack on [Heflin] for lunch. They're not equally weighted.

Hirsch: One of the things that is fabulous about Joan Crawford—and you'll see it tonight—is she seizes the screen. She absolutely takes charge. She's totally in control of the screen. Your eye goes to her. You're mesmerized by her every minute. Van Heflin is just not at that level of performing. But in the second film, The Damned Don't Cry, very interestingly all the men in that film give good performances. David Brian—who is moreorless her equal—has the coldest eyes of any actor I've ever seen. He is very much a good pairing for Joan Crawford. Steve Cochran, who is terrifically underrated….

Muller: The Elvis of Noir!

Hirsch: There's a scene of Steve Cochran in a very short bathing suit. We want you to whoop it up. And Kent Smith is terrific as the mamby-pamby. Three great performances that match her's, which I think makes The Damned Don't Cry a balanced film.

Muller: Absolutely. I will say without hesitation that, for me, The Damned Don't Cry is my favorite Joan Crawford picture. It also follows the same trajectory of Joan Crawford's own life story, even though it's supposed to be about Virginia Hill, Bugsy Siegel's moll, it's really a thinly-veiled depiction of Joan Crawford's own life. Trust me, any movie that Joan Crawford is in, it's all about Joan Crawford!

Hirsch: We could call it All About Joan. She's Ethel Whitehead who becomes Lorna Hansen Forbes. Brian plays George Castleman who started out Joe Cavany. But the director Vincent Sherman started life as Abraham Orvitz. All of these people had a background that they wanted to hide. The thing about Joan Crawford, you can't look at her films without bringing a knowledge of what we know, or think we know, about her life. We know about Mommie Dearest. We can't forget that.

I interviewed Ruth Ward for a book I was working on. She worked with Joan Crawford and had some pertinent things to say about Joan's person. She said you could never tell what she was thinking—that there was this masked quality to her in the real world—and that she was very cordial and very professional. She never caused any trouble. She was a total pro. But you could sense that beneath the cordial surface, there was ferocity. She was really a forbidding woman and you stayed across the room. [Ward] said [Crawford] counted on propriety because she came herself from such desperately low circumstances. She always had things she wanted to cover up. The irony is that her life has been exposed after her death and we know probably more than we need to know.

Another little event that is significant about her personality: a friend of mine Steve Harvey a number of years ago wrote a [book] on Joan Crawford. He worked at the Museum of Modern Art. [One year] after the book was published, [he received a phone call], didn't know who it was from, went to the phone, and [the voice] said, 'Mr. Harvey, this is Joan Crawford. I want to congratulate you on your book. I'm so proud; I'm so pleased with myself; I'm so pleased for you.' He wrote her a thank you note for the call. And he got back a letter thanking him for his thank you note. She was wonderful if you were a fan or a stranger. Beware if you were her child.

Muller: So you're really in for a treat. I would say, really without hestitation, 99 River Street perhaps aside, if we'd seen Cry Danger in a really good 35mm print instead of that 16mm print we had to show, they would be contenders for the best in show at this festival…. [Someone shouted out Wicked Woman.] Wicked Woman, of course, and since you're a Wicked Woman fan, you'll get to see Richard Egan again in The Damned Don't Cry; but, I can say without hesitation that this is the best double bill of the series. These are two really great films and they are great films because of Joan Crawford. Not only because of what she brings to the screen, but the power that she wielded behind the scenes. Joan Crawford, to me, is one of the great auteurs of film noir. People don't think of it that way because she's the actress up on the screen, but she really is the driving force behind these movies. She is the person who got these movies made, absolutely controlled her image on the screen, and these films are as good as they are because Joan Crawford would settle for nothing less than absolute. We'll have a good time with these movies. We'll get some laughs out of them. But bear in mind that these are A-list pictures and Joan Crawford was—in addition to becoming somewhat of a camp icon—a real serious….

Hirsch: She wasn't quite yet self-parodying in these films. That came a little bit later. She's sort of on the edge in these films. She's not quite at that level. But, since we're here about film noir, in Possessed there are two of the greatest set pieces in noir: the opening when she's walking through a deserted downtown Los Angeles and she's not wearing any make-up, fabulous noir stuff, and that scene where she's waiting for her step daughter and it's raining and every object in the house seems menacing. Great noir expressionist photography by Curtis Bernhardt.

Muller: Curtis Bernhardt the director, one of the great underrated German Expressionist directors. He was very inspired by Joan Crawford; a piece of expressionism herself. I think they were a perfect match together. Any final words on Joan?

Hirsch: Isn't it great that we can be here enjoying Joan as fans and not having to call her Mommie Dearest? As fans we can see how generous she was to her audience. She wanted you to love her, even though she's playing wicked characters, you're rooting for her and you like her anyway. That's star power.

* * *

I cracked open Joan Crawford's autobiography A Portrait Of Joan, to see if she had anything to say about either film. Crawford reminisced: "I went on to an even more difficult part in Possessed, the part of a schizophrenic, a woman going insane from unrequited love." (1962:142) Elsewhere, Joan described her character Louise as a woman "so bruised by love she sinks into the psychotic." (1962:156)

"The role of Louise was violent and fearful and required medical accuracy," Crawford detailed. "I spent six weeks in hospitals watching schizophrenics, seeing how sodium pentothal and sodium amytal restores them to memory for a few brief moments—six weeks at L.A. General Hospital, and many sanitoriums. Even the critic who disliked me most called me 'Hollywood's great sufferer Academy style.' Mr. Mayer ran Mildred Pierce, Humoresque and Possessed and made his MGM producers look at them each three times.

" 'She's through, is she?' he said. 'Why couldn't we have done this here? Every one of them is Academy timber!' He was right, I was again nominated for an award [for Possessed].

"I didn't win the Oscar, but I got something more wonderful—my twins, Cynthia and Cathy, darling babies two months old, still in incubators." (1962:142-143) Knowing—as Hirsch insinuated—probably more about Crawford than we need to know, I couldn't help wondering if Joan wouldn't have preferred two Oscars in incubators?

With regard to Crawford's perceived "masculinity", I would argue that this was not a quality exclusive to Joan and is a somewhat unfair if simplistic ascription. Mollie Haskell delineates it more accurately in her introduction to Leading Ladies: The 50 Most Unforgettable Actresses of the Studio Era: "At a time when very few women worked at all, and it was taken for granted that they were subordinate to men in marriage, here were women who radiated power on screen, and as actresses and star 'commodities' were making salaries equal to men. Even when stories dictated that, under the rules of romantic contrivance, they capitulate in the end, we were left with a quite different sense of them as heroic free spirits, contravening any and every implication of submission. And in these stories, they struggled with many of the same anxieties that beset us today, juggling friendship and ambition and the need for love, making choices both wise and foolish, carving out individual paths.

"Today's young women, benefiting from wide professional opportunities and greater sexual freedom, and operating under the assumption that we've 'come a long way, baby' from the benighted eras of our mothers and grandmothers, are often staggered by the incredible presence of these earlier stars—their strength of mind, their confidence, their brio and female swagger. These icons of a bygone era seem, in many ways, more authoritative, more at ease in their skin, than stars today. We may find ourselves returning to them for inspiration and as an antidote to our present day anxieties, forming as they do an ongoing historical basis for a belief in women's potential." (2006:15)

Which is to say that—instead of perceiving an actress like Joan Crawford as someone who has wrested from the male something that is essentially "masculine"—perhaps it's more appropriate (and again, accurate) to recognize the strength of their individual potential, unlimited by gendered preconceptions, especially as configured by the fashions and the mores of the time.

Muller is astute to draw attention to Crawford's auteurship. Haskell again: "They had clout back then, as well as faces! Those were the days when women were essential to the filmmaking process, commanded salaries equal to their male counterparts, and appeared in equal numbers on annual lists of box office favorites, very different from the current lopsided situation in which for every lone 'bankable' woman like Julia Roberts, twenty male stars constitute a significant box office draw and can sell a picture." (2006:14)

Star power, indeed. "If you're going to be a star," Joan Crawford once said, "you have to look like a star, and I never go out unless I look like Joan Crawford the movie star. If you want to see the girl next door, go next door." (Quoted in TCM's Leading Ladies, 2006:41.)