Peering at the SFIFF53 films from non-French speaking Europe, I'm especially glad to see a pair of German entries. Maren Ade's Everyone Else won a Silver Bear at last year's Berlin Film Festival and follows the dissolution of a young couple on holiday in Sardinia. The film would have been a natural for our now-defunct Berlin & Beyond festival, and I'm assuming it didn't make the recent German Gems program because SFIFF already snagged it. If you've read the reviews and also caught Ade's debut The Forest for the Trees at SFIFF five years ago, you know this is going to be special. The other film is Turkish/German director Fatih Akin's Soul Kitchen, which is said to be quite different from his previous works like Head On and The Edge of Heaven. This one's a comic look at the efforts to save a failing family restaurant and stars my two favorite German actors, Moritz Bleibtreu and Birol Ünel.
I caught Portuguese director João Pedro Rodrigues hyper-stylized transsexual melodrama To Die Like a Man at the Palm Springs International Film Festival and loved it. Many loathed it. If you dug his previous works (O Fantasma, Two Drifters aka Odete) you sure don't want to miss this. In his review for the New York Film Festival, critic J. Hoberman called it "the kind of film Pedro Almodóvar should be making." Also Portuguese, at least in title and setting is Eugène Green's The Portuguese Nun. I'm totally unfamiliar with the work of this U.S.-born French director who seems to be known for his formalist approach to filmmaking. Ostensibly, the film is about a French actress making a film about a 17th century nun in Lisbon, with Green portraying the director. Variety gave it a scathing review, but I'm planning to give it a chance.
The big Italian film this year is Luca Guadagnino's I Am Love, starring Tilda Swinton as the unhappy wife of a Milanese industrialist. It's been compared to the works of Luchino Visconti. Uncoincidentally, the lone SFIFF screening of I Am Love takes place immediately after a restored print revival of Visconti's Senso at the Castro Theater on Sunday, May 2. If you're unable to make the showing, I Am Love opens at a Landmark Theater on July 2. The other Italian film I'm anticipating is Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel's La Pivellina, in which a group of circus performers find and keep an abandoned child. Also of interest from Italy is Giorgio Diritti's WWII massacre movie The Man Who Will Come, which won both Grand Jury and Audience Prizes at last year's Rome Film Festival
From elsewhere in Europe we have Serbian director Vladimir Perisic's Ordinary People, a multi-fest prizewinner and (Bruno) Dumont-ian parable of ethnic cleansing and the human potential for brutality. At an opposite extreme lies Nina Hedenius' Way of Nature, a near-silent meditation on life at a remote Swedish farm. According to some reports I've read, the ex-Soviet republic of Georgia might be the next international hotbed of inspired filmmaking. SFIFF53 has programmed one title that keeps popping up, Rusudan Pirveli's Susa, a neo-realist tale of a 12-year-old bootleg-vodka delivery boy. Also from Georgia is the documentary Russian Lessons, which examines the 2008 Georgia-Russia armed conflict.
2009 was a quiet year on the Latin American filmmaking front, with virtually none of the region's major directors releasing new films. I'd hoped to find the Mexican omnibus film Revolución in the line-up, but perhaps it's too soon after the film's January premiere at Berlin. That reasoning wouldn't apply, however, to the absence of Claudia Llosa's sublime The Milk of Sorrow, which won Berlin's top prize in 2009 and was one of the five Oscar nominees for Best Foreign Language Film. One wonders, did the programming team really deem this film unworthy of our fest or were other factors involved? Oh well, I'm darn glad I saw it at Palm Springs.
Headlining what Latin American cinema we do have at SFIFF53 is surely Brazilian director Walter Salles' receiving the Founders Directing Award, along with screenings of his 2008 Linha de Passe and also a new work-in-progress. Also from Brazil come the narrative feature The Famous and the Dead and the musical documentary Simonal: No One Knows How Tough It Was, about the "spectacular rise and infamous fall of the undisputed king of Brazilian popular music." From Colombia there's Ciro Guerra's The Wind Journeys, in which a man and teenage boy set off on a roadless road-trip to return a cursed accordion. I've watched this on screener and it's visually stunning. Usually we get a bunch of titles from Argentina in the festival, but this year there's only one. The Peddler documents the work of Daniel Burmeister, a traveling septuagenarian filmmaker who uses local amateur talent to create genre movies. Rounding out the South American roster is You Think You're the Prettiest, But You Are the Sluttiest, a Chilean comedy about the pitfalls of being young, horny and male.
While we may not have gotten Revolución, there are three other Mexican films in the SFIFF53 line-up, two of which I've previewed and heartily recommend. Roberto Hernandez and Geoffrey Smith's documentary Presumed Guilty is an exposé of the Mexican criminal justice systems that follows one young man's efforts to reverse a homicide conviction. In Rigoberto Perezcano's meditative feature Northless, a young man's determination to cross into El Norte gets waylaid by the female proprietor of a Tijuana grocery store. The film I haven't seen is Pedro González-Rubio's docu-fiction hybrid Alamar, in which a half-Mayan boy spends a final summer with his father and grandfather along the Caribbean coast. The film has won a slew of festival awards, most recently a Tiger at Rotterdam, and I'm saving it for a big-screen festival experience (the underwater cinematography is by Alexis Zabé, who also shot Carlos Reygadas' Silent Light and Fernando Eimbcke's Lake Tahoe).
OMFG! was the reaction I had to seeing two particular Asian titles in the line-up—and I'm using "Asian" here in its broadest geographical sense. In 2006 I was blown away by The Forsaken Land, a film by Sri Lankan director Vimukthi Jayasundara for which he won Cannes' Camera d'or for best first feature. I've had fingers and toes crossed that his new film Between Two Worlds would show up at our 3rd i South Asian Film Festival next fall, but I'm just as ecstatic to see it at the SF International. The other title that got a rise out of me is Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof's The White Meadows. Rasoulof directed the phenomenal Iron Island, which the fest screened in 2006. I won't even attempt to synopsize what these two allegorical films are "about". Just read the program capsules and prepare yourself for an other-worldly cinematic experience. A million thanks to the programmers for securing these. (Mohammad Rasoulof, by the way, was arrested and imprisoned in Tehran along with director Jafar Panahi on March 1 and released 17 days later).
There are a handful of other Asian films I'm looking forward to. In 2006, Thai director Pen-Ek Ratanaruang made a big splash with Last Life in the Universe. His two follow-up films took a critical beating and never made it to our neck of the woods. Now he's made Nymph, which garnered mixed to favorable reviews, and I'm really pleased to have the chance to see it. One of the highlights of the 2005 SFIFF was a sidebar devoted to New Malaysian Cinema. One of the directors feted that year was Woo Ming-jin, and his new film called Woman on Fire Looks for Water has come our way. It's described as an "utterly gorgeous meditation on yearning and regret set amid a small fishing village." I caught Hirokazu Kore-eda's Air Doll, a wistful social comedy about a blow-up sex doll come to life, at Palm Springs. It's an inevitable disappointment coming on the heels of the director's undisputed masterpiece Still Walking, but is well worth seeing for the lead performance by bug-eyed South Korean star Bae Doo-Na (The Host, Linda Linda Linda). There are two more Iranian films I might catch if time allows. Nader Takmil Homayoun's Tehroun is a crime thriller set in Tehran's slums, while Babak Jalali's Frontier Blues is an absurdist portrait of life along Iran's northern frontier. Anyone with a penchant for star-studded Chinese historical epics probably won't want to miss Bodygyards and Assassins and Empire of Silver.
Finally, we have some films that don't fit in any of these geographic categories. The top prize winner at last year's Venice Film Festival was Samuel Maoz' Lebanon, a film set entirely inside an Israeli tank during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. SFIFF53 also has this year's Grand Jury Prize winner from Sundance, Debra Granik's Winter's Bone. Set in a poor rural Ozark community, a 17-year-old girl must find her meth-cooking father to keep from losing the family home. Ted Kotcheff's 1971 once-considered-lost Australian exploitation shocker Wake in Fright (Outback) has been restored and revived with the hope of appalling a new generation of moviegoers. 2008's Baghead finally sold me on the talents of the directing Duplass Brothers and the festival will be screening their latest Cyrus, starring Marisa Tomei and John C. Reilly. Another (truly) American indie film that's sounds promising is Tanya Hamilton's Night Catches Us, the story of an ex-Black Panther returning home to Philadelphia in the year of the bicentennial. Finally, it you're as freaked out about Colony Collapse Disorder as I am, you won't want to miss Ross McDonnell and Carter Gunn's documentary Colony.
Cross-published on film-415 and Twitch.
The full line-up for the 53rd San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF) was announced at an unusually subdued press conference last week. With Executive Director Graham Leggat taking an uncustomary silent role in the proceedings, it was left for new Director of Programming Rachel Rosen and her staff to guide attendant journalists and Bay Area film community members through this year's impressive roster of 177 films from 46 countries. Rosen admitted that while the festival doesn't program according to "themes", certain ones inevitably emerge. 2010's program is characterized by "a return to basics and beauty in filmmaking," films that could be deemed "unclassifiable," films with an "intense interest in the creative process" and the beginnings of an "era of co-auteur theory" (15 of this year's selections have two or more directors). Rosen also joked that she has indulged her taste for "nuns, old men and farm animals."
In a previous entry I covered the films and events announced prior to the press conference. I won't be revisiting them here, except for these few addendums. Joining the list of on-stage "friends" at the Roger Ebert tribute will be writer/director Philip Kaufman and documentarian Errol Morris. At the world premiere of All About Evil, director Joshua Grannell (aka Peaches Christ) is expected to duet with actress Mink Stole on the theme song from John Waters' Female Trouble. Animator Don Hertzfeldt will be the youngest person to ever receive the fest's Persistance of Vision Award. The documentary Presumed Guilty so wowed the programming staff that they've already declared it winner of the Golden Gate Awards competition for Best Bay Area Doc, leaving one less decision for the jury.
Each year when the SFIFF line-up is revealed—and I've attended every single fest since 1976—I experience a mixture of elation and disappointment. This 53rd edition is no exception. Only six of the 20 films I most hoped for are in evidence, and several dozen more are MIA. That said, there are fully 25 films I'm very excited about seeing, with another dozen of possible interest. So here's my very subjective wander through what's in store from April 22 to May 6.
I'll begin, as I'm wont to do, with the French language selections. And right off, here's a big Evening Class kiss to whoever programmed Joann Sfar's Gainsbourg (Je t'aime…moi non plus). I'm a monster fan of musical iconoclast Serge Gainsbourg, but know very little about his life apart from the scandals (which include making the only pop record ever condemned by a Pope). This biopic only opened in French theaters three months ago, so once again, bravo. Somewhat relatedly, SFIFF has also programmed visionary Hong Kong director Johnnie To's Vengeance, which stars grizzled veteran rock 'n' roller Johnny Hallyday, aka the French Elvis Presley, as a chef avenging the Hong Kong slaughter of his daughter's family.
SFIFF has always done a fine job of keeping tabs on the work of France's l-o-n-g established auteurs. This year brings us Alain Resnais' Wild Grass, which won a special jury prize last year at Cannes, and Jacques Rivette's circus-set Around a Small Mountain. I sheepishly confess to not being a particular fan of the latter director's work, but I adored 2007's The Duchess of Langeais and this new one stars favorites Sergio Castellitto and Jane Birkin (ex-wife of Serge and mother of Charlotte Gainsbourg).
A number of mid-career French auteurs also pop up this year, starting with the Opening Night screening of Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Micmacs, his first film since 2004's A Very Long Engagement. Bruno Dumont returns to SFIFF with his latest provocation, a tale of religious extremism called Hadejwich. Although it's received tepid reviews, everyone I know is dying to see White Material because a) it stars Isabelle Huppert and b) it's directed by Claire Denis. This is Huppert's second film in as many years playing a white colonialist, the other being Rithy Panh's mysteriously as-yet-unseen in the Bay Area The Sea Wall. Director Jan Kounen, whom Variety once called "the Carlos Castañeda of hipster helmers," gets a crack at the Coco Chanel legend in Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky. The story takes place at a time when reviled and penniless Igor (due to "The Rite of Spring" and the Russian Revolution respectively) moves his wife and four kids into Coco's sprawling estate. The film stars Anna Mouglalis (who also plays chanteuse Juliette Gréco in Gainsbourg) and Danish dreamboat Mads Mikkelsen. Then in Christophe Honoré's Making Plans for Lena, put-upon wife and mother Chiara Mastroianni gets to spend a disastrous weekend at her parent's home in Bretagne. And yes, there's a part in it for Louis Garrel. SFIFF53 will also be showing a special sneak preview of a new-ish film by François Ozon.
Four other French language films I'm anticipating are by directors at or near the beginning of their careers. I was thrilled to find Patric Chiha's debut film Domain in the line-up because it stars the world's scariest actress and a personal favorite of mine, Béatrice Dalle. Who can believe it's been almost 25 years since Betty Blue? Here she plays an increasingly unhinged, alcoholic mathematician who has a special relationship with her gay, teenage nephew. The lead actress is also my reason for wanting to see Dutch director Dorothée van den Berghe's My Queen Karo. Déborah François (The Child, The Page Turner) stars in this story of a squatting family in 1970s Amsterdam, as seen through the eyes of a young girl, Karo. Making her second appearance at SFIFF is director Mia Hansen-Løve with Father of My Children. I wasn't as taken by 2008's All is Forgiven as many were, but I've heard nothing but great things about this true story of a French film producer's suicide and its effect on those he leaves behind. In her third feature, Lourdes, Austrian director Jessica Hausner enlists the help of yet another incomparable French actress. Sylvie Testud plays a wheelchair-bound, quasi non-believer who nonetheless makes a pilgrimage to Lourdes.
Finally, there are three French documentaries I've got my eye on. Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea's Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno attempts to reconstruct a lost masterpiece by the director of Diabolique and The Wages of Fear, while recounting the story of its troubled production. Documentarian Nicolas Philibert had a 2003 arthouse hit with To Be and To Have, about a contemporary one-room schoolhouse in rural France. His latest film Nénette looks at a 40-year-old orangutan who lives the caged life in Paris' Jardin des Plantes. Jean-François Delassus's 14-18: The Noise and the Fury is a WWI doc that programmer Rosen especially singled out as being "unclassifiable." Using a mix of newsreel footage, movie clips and the voice of an unseen soldier narrator, the film attempts to fathom a reason for the "war to end all wars" 10 million dead.
While the above titles represent a formidable effort at bringing the latest French cinema to the Bay Area, there are a number of curious omissions. Will the latest works by such notable directors as Robert Guédiguian (The Army of Crime), Lucas Belvaux (Rapt), Gaspar Noé (Enter the Void), Tony Gatlif (Korkoro), Costa Gavras (Eden is West), Patrice Chereau (Persecution) and Sebastien Lifshitz (Going South), as well as Isabelle Adjani's Cesar-winning performance in Skirt Day pop up at the SF Film Society's autumn French Cinema Now festival? Or will they already be considered old hat and forgotten by then?
Cross-published on film-415 and Twitch.
Like ships passing in the night, Brecht Andersch and I literally met on the BART train on our way home from a PFA screening, introduced by our mutual friend Brian Darr. His essay "Venus In and Out of Furs: Joseph Losey's Eve and Accident" for SFMOMA's Open Space convinced me to catch those two films in PFA's retrospective Joseph Losey: Pictures of Provocation, currently running through April 16.
Though a Bay Area native, Andersch—a filmmaker and on-call AV Technician at SFMOMA—co-founded the Austin Film Society in 1986 with Richard Linklater, Lee Daniel, and George Morris, gaining a great deal of his film education from Morris, who had spent 10-or-so years as an Auteurist film critic in New York (roughly covering the 70's), before returning to Texas. Already an Auteurist before meeting Morris, Andersch's understanding of film history, aesthetics, and ethics advanced under Morris's guidance. Morris died of AIDS in 1989, but his presence continues to inform both Andersch's film sensibility, and his writing style when—as he puts it—"I write well."
Currently serving as Board Chair of the Bay Area-based Film on Film Foundation—whose mission is to encourage the appreciation of projected celluloid motion picture film as central to the cinematic experience—Andersch has curated the on-going FOFF series "Radical Strategies" since May 2007, including rare screenings of Jean-Isidore Isou's Traité de Bave et d'Èternité (Venom and Eternity, 1951), Yoshishige Yoshida's Eros Plus Massacre (1969), and Joseph Losey's Accident (1967). He also spent much of 2009 writing the weekly column "Highly Recommended!", focusing on the Bay Area repertory film scene, for the Film on Film website.
Further credits include his role as the "Dostoyevsky wannabee" in Richard Linklater's Slacker (1991). His interview with Stan Brakhage will appear in A History of the Avant Garde Moving Image in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945-2005, to be published by University of California Press later this year. Andersch is currently editing two films: a low-budget feature, and a lyrical experimental work in the Brakhage/Baillie mode, both photographed in 16mm black & white. I'm grateful for the time Brecht has taken to generously respond to my inquiries.
* * *
Michael Guillén: How did you come to appreciate the work of Joseph Losey?
Brecht Andersch: I saw my first Losey film, The Servant (1963), as a 15-year-old. I'd recently purchased my first issue of Film Comment (Nov/Dec '81), which had an article by Raymond Durgnat entitled "Skin Games", dealing with The Servant briefly, along with other films. Although I found it mystifying, I was very taken with it, and Losey's been on my radar ever since. Over the years, I've been able to see almost all his films, whether in the form of fantastic 35mm prints or poor, bootlegged videos. The ones I especially like, I've been diligent in watching repeatedly.
I'm deeply interested in many filmmakers, but I certainly consider Losey in the top echelon. Until the mid 80's, when he died, he was generally considered one of the world's major directors. Since then, there's been a reversal of fortune in critical opinion, and his Hollywood films have been getting much more attention than his later European Art-House output. I love films from throughout his body of work, don't value one period over another (although his late period definitely wasn't the best), and find the arc of his career highly exciting—there have been European filmmakers widely seen as artists who've gone to Hollywood and had successful careers; but, as far as I know, Losey's the only Hollywood filmmaker to reach the heights of European Art Film culture, where he was widely seen as a major figure.
Guillén: In my earlier conversation with Peter Conheim on the PFA Losey retrospective, though recognizing "recurrent themes" that run throughout Losey's work, Conheim appeared reluctant to categorize him as an "auteur". Do you see Losey as an auteur?
Andersch: Peter's definition of the term is very American, coming from an underground, experimental film, and Punk DIY sensibility. But "auteur" is a French word and concept, and I think you have to understand it from its original Cahiers du Cinéma context. The idea was cognizant of, and held up as an ideal, the total mastery and control of a Hitchcock (who to a large extent embodied the practice of Alexandre Astruc's "camera-stylo"—camera pen—conceptualization), but really was applied to all directors who were able to impress their personalities on a film (or—to think of this process as more gentle and humane—to imbue their films with their sensibilities).
One of, perhaps the defining auteur was Nicholas Ray, of whom Godard famously said "Nicholas Ray is cinema". Ray, to some extent, chose his projects, had a hand in writing their scripts (certainly influencing them, or having them re-written by others if he couldn't get what he needed from the original scriptwriter, or re-writing them himself, all this often amidst production), and did the usual work of a director: all the aesthetical production decisions, creating shots, guiding actors in their performances, planning how cuts would work in the editing, and influencing how they actually came out. He never had complete control over his work or career, however, and lasted as a creative artist in full control of his abilities for only roughly a dozen years. By the standard of Ray, Losey was very much the auteur. His films are every bit as impressed with his personality as Ray's, and he was able to get much more control over both individual films (or at least many of them), and his career. Roughly the same age (and of course coming from the same town, LaCrosse, Wisconsin, where they knew each other, having gone to the same high school, and then were later friends and associates in the New York leftist theater scene), they started filmmaking pretty much at the same time. Losey's career lasted much longer, however—over 30 years. He had his best decade, the 60's (winning big prizes at Cannes, etc.), at a point when Ray was dropping out (he stayed out for a decade before resurrecting as a semi-underground icon). So in my opinion, Losey was about as "auteur" as you can get.
To the culture which developed the auteur concept, that is, French cinephilia, Losey was definitely the auteur, or at least he was to a major segment from at least the early 60's. He was a key figure to the MacMahonites, who were also rabid fans of Robert Aldrich, among others. A lot of why he has become ignored in English-speaking cinema culture is wrapped up in his becoming the key figure for 10 or more years in English cinema. The English have a unique talent for lopping off the heads of those who let their brilliance shine all-too-clearly. Look at Michael Powell.
There's also a distrust in Anglo-Saxon culture (obviously including us) to emotionalism, especially by men. The French, on the other hand, love this kind of stuff. Think about New Wave films like Pierrot le Fou, Shoot the Piano Player, or all of Jacques Demy, for example. If these had been made by Americans or Britons, they would have been skewered by the English-language press (not that they were too popular as it was, but I think you get what I'm saying).
This relates to, as Losey might have put it himself, the whole hetero/homo/bi-sexual issue. There's a whole lot to say about this, but let me cut to the chase and say that Losey, who presented himself as a heterosexual who acknowledged homosexual feelings, has never been a figure who's made broad swathes of Anglo-American cinephiles and critics comfortable. You can imagine all the eye-rolling greeting Stanley Baker's exit from the bar in the opening scene in Eve, for example.
At any rate, Losey saw himself as very much the auteur. He was both biting and generous with credit towards his collaborators, but he never saw himself as a hired hand or cog, and constantly sought to exert himself as an artist, and someone who was seen as an artist (another factor which made him few friends in the non-French world).
Guillén: Your comment about cultural attitudes towards masculine self-laceration is fascinating. Since you seem to know a lot about Losey, is there some reason why this theme (which you insinuate as auteurial) is so important to him? I've heard some indication that he had mother issues? Is this vision of women as toxic six degrees away from being misogynistic?
Andersch: I discussed the issues re. his mother and father in the last section of my article, and think this dynamic, as explored in David Caute's biography Joseph Losey: A Revenge On Life (which, by the way, I have very mixed feelings about), pretty much provided the template for his relations with, and feelings towards women. He deals frequently—and especially in both Eve and Accident—with an area not often explored in narrative art: masochistic feelings by heterosexual men towards women. Some great filmmakers and writers have dealt with this, but not often. Josef von Sternberg is the most obvious major figure to delve into this extensively, and maybe his The Devil Is A Woman (1935) is the great masterpiece along these lines. Von Sternberg's film is adapted from a terrific Pierre Louÿs 1898 novel, La Femme et le pantin (The Woman and The Puppet), later adapted as Luis Buñuel's last film, That Obscure Object of Desire (1977).
Both films treat the man's feelings satirically, ritualistically. There is clear masochistic pleasure taken in the ironies of his situation. Both, however, hint at a feeling plunged into by Losey in Eve and Accident: resentment at women for the power they have within the man's internal psychology. I don't know of any culture which has any love to spare for the straight male who abdicates, or can't inhabit sexual self-assurance, or is prone to open emotionalism (although maybe the French go the furthest). This just really isn't in the normal paradigm of what's considered sexy, so unless you're an out-and-out masochist, as a heterosexual male artist you aren't going to deal with this stuff openly. Of course, large numbers of straight men (no doubt probably the vast majority) want a heterosexual version of what some gay men get to have: much sex with many partners. Few get this opportunity, and usually only by those of great fame and wealth. This is a natural source of resentment.
I don't think Losey saw women as toxic, so much as tantalizing. Being tantalized without satisfaction for those not so masochistic is torturous. The issue of misogyny is often brought up in connection to these kinds of feelings when they're revealed. Personally, I've never understood this label. Is having an emotional issue of some kind with women equivalent to hatred? There are very few men and women who don't have issues with the opposite sex, and perhaps just as few who don't have related issues to their own. I think the world Losey portrays—in my opinion quite accurately—is a sexual battleground in which men and women are in natural conflict with each other for what they desire, and are at the same time in conflict with members of their own sex in achieving their ends.
Towards the beginning of his oeuvre, Losey blames hierarchical, Capitalist society for this situation, and indicates false consciousness as the root of the problem, the factor which keeps us enslaved. This take is best exemplified by The Prowler. As he goes along, Losey observes class dynamics at play, but is less fixed on the idea that they can be addressed via individual or collective enlightenment. By Eve and Accident, he seems to arrive at the sex war situation being archetypal, ingrained into the structures of our psyches. Eve begins and ends with references to Adam and Eve's expulsion from paradise (there are numerous citations of this throughout the film, actually)—since eating from the tree of knowledge, man and woman are condemned to pain, struggle, disharmony. By Accident, Losey seems to no longer be protesting this situation, but merely observing it, as indicated by Sassard's departure with the Kali figurine. She's played her innocent role, leaving the lives of all involved in disarray (or in York's case, brought to an end). Bogarde rejoins his family in their home as the sound of the accident plays on the soundtrack. It will be a lingering reminder of a irrevocably disordered world for a long time to come.
I believe you've an interest in Jungian psychology? I don't know of Losey ever mentioning Jung, but I'm sure he would have read him. He kept up with the intellectual developments of his time. Whether he liked him, I can't say, but, as a Jungian myself, I apply ideas from Jung in thinking about Losey. The male artist with obvious resentment towards women has an overpowering anima which seeks expression via his work. Losey tried to present himself as highly rationalistic, but he seeped (mostly understandable) bitterness and resentment from his pores. He tried for many years to ascribe his emotional issues to problems in the set-up of society, but I think the reality is he had a highly feminine aspect to his nature which he tried to suppress but couldn't, leading to the leakage. The heterosexual male artist must deal with this issue—must come to terms with his feminine, feeling aspect—or he'll come apart at the seams. The anima will lead you to where you need to go, you just have to follow, pursue. Losey did follow, and by his fifties or so reached a certain emotional equilibrium after The Servant and its success, but it was a rough ride. As shown by Eve, he had a giant-sized anima; an anima to rule the world.
In Losey's actual relations with woman (as well as non-sexual ones with men), he always tried to dominate. If he could, he would, so I'm not saying anything simplistic regarding his psychology, like he was a simple sexual masochist; although maybe he was, I don't know.
Losey made it very clear in his interview book with Michel Ciment (Conversations With Losey, 1985) that he found Eve's feminine wiles (and those of his other female characters) an adaptive way of gaining power, and he thought them right to employ these. As his work proceeded, however, there was less and less internal evidence that he thought there was a way out of this paradigm. He's relatively harsh in his judgment of Tyvian (as opposed to Eve), but this strikes me as a little reflexively PC, less connected to his direct feelings as a man than his utopian yearnings. He tried to incorporate a Feminist critical sensibility into his work, but was often criticized as being a chauvinist himself.
Guillén: Associated with the Hollywood Left and forced into exile in Britain to flee the HUAC inquisition, how valid do you think the HUAC's concerns of Losey's leftist leanings were? It might seem like a moot point today, but how much do you think his politics influenced his art? Was there any tell-tale evidence? Especially with regard to his examination of the power structures inifluencing gender and class?
Andersch: I think HUAC could have had reasons to be concerned, because—if some of the info in Caute's biography is correct—Losey could have served as a courier for the CPUSA; a role which could even be described as a low-level spy. (I want to make it clear, however, I'm—retroactively—totally against HUAC, nor would I condemn any of Losey's political actions, or blame him for his unfortunate delusions regarding Stalin, the Soviet Union, etc. Perhaps I can add more to this topic later.) I think his American film, and to a certain extent all of his films are informed by his Marxism, especially by a Marxian analysis of class and false consciousness. I don't think HUAC had any reason to be concerned regarding the content of Losey's films. Losey was too much of an artist to be in any way a propagandist, and—while he tried to enlighten people, or at least to raise their consciousnesses regarding their social conditions (or, as in The Lawless, that of minorities)—his films weren't going to drive anybody out into the streets to search out Molotov cocktails.
Losey is a fascinating case study of an American Stalinist who lived in a state of self-willed delusion. Through the Ciment book, he left a pretty detailed record of his intellectual development and the evolution of his world-view. By this book you can see how he really believed, and was able to force from consciousness all doubts regarding Stalin, and the mass-murder Stalin was perpetrating in the Soviet Union. Losey was a man of deep perception in any environment he actually was immersed in, but he could invest faith in the Soviet Union because of its distance. This is an interesting inversion to the paradigm we, as Americans, encounter more frequently: those who are able to ignore, or force from consciouness, or excuse injustices right under their noses (or which are caused in other countries directly by the actions of our own) because they've heard that it's much worse elsewhere. However Losey deluded himself about the "elsewhere", he was pretty clear about the insanity of the society right in front of him.
Losey, as an outsider in Britain, was very psychically impacted by the British class system, and this registered very deeply within his work, which dealt with this theme very incisively and much more frankly on a regular basis than just about any British filmmaker has ever done. I think this contributed to the resentment against him, much of which was unconscious. His brazen foregrounding of style was another. It was very un-English, especially at that time. Even many of the best English critics didn't get him. Unless I'm much mistaken, he wasn't very popular amongst the MOVIE critics, for example (certainly the greatest collective of film critics in the English language of that generational cohort). V.F. Perkins for example, in his largely brilliant book Film As Film extols the virtues of Richard Brooks, while using examples from Losey as how one shouldn't make a film! Losey's manner was just too jaunty, too overt, too aesthetically oriented towards the exquisite and, simultaneously, too Brechtian.
Cross-published on Twitch.
As any gamer or blockbuster fanboy will tell you, adapting a video game for a film is often not the best decision for either medium. Yet the guns at the big studios remain convinced they can offer gaming's immersive and interactive experience within the frame of cinematic narratives on the big screen. Hopes run high for Disney's Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, whose WonderCon panel was moderated by L.A. Times writer Geoff Boucher and introduced by producer Jerry Bruckheimer (at his first-ever comics convention), with director Mike Newell, game creator / story consultant Jordan Mechner, and the Prince himself Jake Gyllenhaal on hand to field questions.
As synopsized at IMDb: Set in medieval Persia, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time is the story of an adventurous prince who teams up with a rival princess to stop an angry ruler from unleashing a sandstorm that could destroy the world. Which is why after the prince is tricked by a dying Vizier to unleash the Sands of Time that turns out to destroy a kingdom and transforms its populace into ferocious demons, he makes efforts to save his own kingdom and redeem his fatal mistake. It's up to the prince and the princess to return the sands to the hourglass by using the Dagger of Time, which also gives him a limited control over the flow of time.
Starting off their WonderCon presentation with an action-packed sizzler reel of the siege of a 6th Century walled city, director Mike Newell complained that the scene was a huge undertaking that took forever to shoot. Shot on three separate tracks—one for character interaction; a second unit for Gyllenhaal's stunts (Newell felt it important to point out that this was made much easier by Jake doing a tremendous number of his own stunts); and the third for the computer graphics—each track was equally complicated within the particular scene. To create shots of the city—because, of course, the city didn't exist—they sent people to India to photograph Indian cities so that they could get the detail absolutely right. Although the wide shots were created with CGI, the big castle in this sequence actually existed, situated on one of the most colossal stages of the world: the Bond stage at England's Pinewood Studios.
As to how they determined the tone of the film, Newell relayed that he and Bruckheimer felt it was very important that they both feel good about their vision of the project, and they agreed that the film should not have a postmodern tone, by which Newell meant that the characters would not do something heroic and then turn to the camera to wink. They didn't want that at all. They wanted the story to be absolutely for real from the ground up and that the audience would sense the peril, the emotions, the love, and find themselves right in the middle of the action throughout the whole movie, without being constantly yanked out by the movie commenting on itself.
Bruckheimer's priority of tone was to realistically capture the period, to express the film's humor, and its romance. In effect, he felt the key was to tell a great story. Crediting Jordan Bechner with having created great characters while adding a Shakespearean element to the character drama, and then bringing a fantastic director like Mike Newell on board to guide the actors along the way, created something special; but, ultimately, it was always about the story. No matter how good Mechner's original game was, Bruckheimer knew that if he gave audiences a bad story, they would be bored. They shot in Morocco where—though it doesn't show on screen—it was nearly 120° every day. It was brutal on location for Mike Newell and his cast. Again, it shows in their performances, you can feel the heat, feel the tension and yet Mike is wonderful with the humor. It's a shame, Newell inserted, that they didn't have a clip that offered a sampling of the comic genius of Alfred Molina who plays the wonderfully untrustworthy Sheik Amar.
Gyllenhaal was impressed with the "ocean of people" packing WonderCon's Esplanade Ballroom and the thunderous applause, catcalls and whistles let him know how much he was adored by his fans. Boucher asked him if—with a character like Prince Dastan—he prepared for the role by starting with the inside or the outside? Gyllenhaal responded: "I started from the outside first. I'm a physical person and I'm athletic so I started training early, knowing that—if I wanted to make a movie like this—I wanted to pull off the stunts and do the functional action. If I was going to run on walls, I really wanted to run on walls. I tried to figure out how to do that and not get hurt." How could it not be fun to get paid to get in shape and work on a tan?
Every character requires different things and Prince Dastan required working out. With all of the stunts that he had to perform, Jake trained in free running. "We worked very closely with a guy named David Belle who invented parkour. It took a long time to find him because he has no email address or phone number. So we went over the streets of France in a helicopter looking for someone jumping off of buildings and snagged him and brought him over to Morocco. [Gyllenhaal laughs.] No. But at first I worked with a lot of gymnasts. Free running is based a lot on acrobatics and I started working in a gym jumping off of things that were padded and learning how to do the running up to stuff. Then slowly we started working on harder and harder surfaces, very carefully. Then David just started saying eventually at certain points, 'We're going to go from here to here' and then I'd say, 'Okay, I'm going to try it' and then he'd go, 'Oh God, don't please!' and then I would and then I'd get a little bit farther and earn a little respect and David would let me go a little longer, a little farther, a little higher, and we just kept going like that."
Boucher asked if this action hero role was a new sector Gyllenhaal was moving into as an actor. "Yes," Gyllenhaal quipped, "the Jerry Bruckheimer sector. It's a little louder, a little bigger, and a little more fun."
Boucher turned to Jordan Mechner and asked—having created the game and watched it evolve over the years—how this moment of the game becoming a blockbuster film felt? "Considering that it started with a character on the Apple 2 computer that was three pixels high, moving from that to Jake is pretty incredible," Mechner answered. The video game of Prince of Persia became something of a phenomenon on its own. Mechner was fresh out of college, home for the summer, and inspired by such swashbuckling Hollywood films of the 1940s as Thief of Bagdad. He had his brother put on a pair of baggy pajamas and they went to the high school parking lot where Mechner had his brother run and jump and do all sorts of actions, which he videotaped. He put the videotape through the computer and the game was born. Gyllenhaal inserted: "That's how I trained for the movie too! It was just me and a baggy pair of pajamas."
Newell attested to being familiar with the video game because of his 14-year-old son who—though he has played the game—finds it a little too early historically to be of interest. Currently his son prefers fighting the Reichstag in the second world war. Privvy to the new version of Prince of Persia that's about to come out, Newell played the game as much as he was able, though he was "absolutely hopeless" and fell into revolving knives every game.
Bruckheimer is not an avid gamer, admittedly busy developing TV shows and movies all over the world; but, thanks to Jordan Mechner he became familiar with the game, loved its devices and characters, and the Shakespearean touches Newell brought to the drama throughout.
Gyllenhaal stated he played the original sidescrolling videogame that Mechner invented. "Who knew how our fates would meet so many years later?" He admitted there was definite pressure in adapting the game to film because he knows how important the game is to so many people and how much fun people have had playing the game for decades. There have been so many incarnations of the game. "It's been reborn and reborn and reborn again, which is a testament to Mechner's brother's pajamas, y'know? So definitely there's pressure there. But it's exciting too to try and reinvent the character in a new way for a different genre of entertainment. It's great fun, y'know? And my boots, by the way, speaking literally, took 20 minutes every day to put on so they were hard boots to get on and to fill."
They next showed a sizzler reel wherein Jake's character discovers the power of the dagger: it can turn back time. Newell wanted to give the impression that—by doing that—the body of whoever is handling the dagger is dissolved to its constitutent atoms, and then built back up again a little earlier in time.
Newell described some of the other characters in the film. British actress Gemma Arterton plays Tamina, the princess of the great cult that guards the Sands of Time, which are a natural force of destruction. Should the Sands of Time get out of their imprisoning glass container, they could potentially destroy the world. It's her business to make sure that doesn't happen. The only thing that can ward off the destructive onslaught of the Sands of Time is the dagger itself. Of course, Tamina falls in love with Prince Dastan, which Newell admitted is what he would have done if he'd been in the same place.
Reluctant to say too much about Nizam, Ben Kingsley's character, for fear that it would spoil too much, Newell characterized him cautiously as "a serpentine character." Newell always said to Kingsley, "Ben, we have to make two movies with you. We have to make a movie they think they're seeing and we have to make a movie that you know you're making"; but, Newell advised his audience that they wouldn't be able to really disentangle that until they see the film.
"One of the great comic turns of our times is Alfred Molina who plays Sheik Amar," Newell went on. "He's on the side of the angels at the end, but if he can see his way to a little profit as he goes, he will. So he's a rogue with a good heart." Then, of course, there is a "whole range of wonderful characters" including princes, and a marvelous villain, an Icelandic actor named Gísli Örn Garðarsson who plays the Vizier, the chief Hassansin.
Describing his character Prince Dastan, Gyllenhaal stated Dystan had "the difficult challenge of being able to take the situation at hand as seriously as it is possible to be taken when you have a dagger that turns back time, you have magic snakes that come out of your arms chasing you, and at the same time have fun while he's doing it. He has a wry sense of humor, which I appreciate about him. In the first draft of the script I read, he was a strong fighter who would face each challenge in front of him with a sense of fun. He also likes to jump off of things. He likes to fight with his fists and his swords. And he also likes princesses."
Having played a few roles related to time travel, Gyllenhaal was asked if time travel was of personal interest to him? He responded affirmatively: "Whether it's conscious or unconscious, I have a real issue with time. I might not be alone in that. And I'm fascinated with how it works in telling stories. There are so many opportunities when you can move forward and backward and when characters are unaware that they're moving forward or backward. That's fascinating. And anyone who knows anything about time continuums knows that we probably don't necessarily only move forward." As to where he would travel back in time if he could, Gyllenhaal said he would be interested in traveling back to his birth. "I'd love to see what that was like." Boucher remarked, "That's weird, Jake. I'd like to travel back in time before you said that."
Asked what convinced him to shift from his more usual dramatic roles to choose an action role, Gyllenhaal answered, "Well, all of my peers seem to be getting into it so I thought maybe it's time. I love big action adventure movies, I really do, Indiana Jones is one of my favorite movies. Jordan was influenced by movies like that, and it felt somehow great to mix all of these interests and all of these movies that I love so much."
Mechner was the first to admit that not every video game should become a movie; but, Prince of Persia leant itself well to the enterprise for many reasons. First, it's set in a fantastical world of the One Thousand and One Nights that hasn't been brought to the screen in a long time and certainly not on the scale undertaken by Bruckheimer and Newell. Second, to have a dagger that turns back time, who wouldn't want to turn back time? And that's the heart of the story.
Newell related that he came to adore Mechner while filming Prince of Persia. Mechner would wander around the set with a notebook. He didn't write a diary, he drew a diary of what was happening each day, which Newell thought was wonderful. But what he loved most about him was that he was an absolute research freak. Everything in the game and everything in the film script—for which he wrote the first draft—was researched on the basis of what it was actually like in 6th century Persia, what was around, what the technologies were, what the belief systems were, all that wonderful research.
Despite its rich visuals, Bruckheimer did not film Prince of Persia in 3D and—when asked why—admitted it was because James Cameron's Avatar hadn't yet come out. Until then, most 3D films were animated films. They considered re-editing it in 3D but it was too costly. Further, the cameras that were available at the time were not as advanced as those of today to take out into the desert. Had they decided to shoot the film in 3D, they would probably still be shooting today.
Cross-published on Twitch.
Peering at the SFIFF53 films from non-French speaking Europe, I'm especially glad to see a pair of German entries. Maren Ade's Everyone Else won a Silver Bear at last year's Berlin Film Festival and follows the dissolution of a young couple on holiday in Sardinia. The film would have been a natural for our now-defunct Berlin & Beyond festival, and I'm assuming it didn't make the recent German Gems program because SFIFF already snagged it. If you've read the reviews and also caught Ade's debut The Forest for the Trees at SFIFF five years ago, you know this is going to be special. The other film is Turkish/German director Fatih Akin's Soul Kitchen, which is said to be quite different from his previous works like Head On and The Edge of Heaven. This one's a comic look at the efforts to save a failing family restaurant and stars my two favorite German actors, Moritz Bleibtreu and Birol Ünel.
I caught Portuguese director João Pedro Rodrigues hyper-stylized transsexual melodrama To Die Like a Man at the Palm Springs International Film Festival and loved it. Many loathed it. If you dug his previous works (O Fantasma, Two Drifters aka Odete) you sure don't want to miss this. In his review for the New York Film Festival, critic J. Hoberman called it "the kind of film Pedro Almodóvar should be making." Also Portuguese, at least in title and setting is Eugène Green's The Portuguese Nun. I'm totally unfamiliar with the work of this U.S.-born French director who seems to be known for his formalist approach to filmmaking. Ostensibly, the film is about a French actress making a film about a 17th century nun in Lisbon, with Green portraying the director. Variety gave it a scathing review, but I'm planning to give it a chance.
The big Italian film this year is Luca Guadagnino's I Am Love, starring Tilda Swinton as the unhappy wife of a Milanese industrialist. It's been compared to the works of Luchino Visconti. Uncoincidentally, the lone SFIFF screening of I Am Love takes place immediately after a restored print revival of Visconti's Senso at the Castro Theater on Sunday, May 2. If you're unable to make the showing, I Am Love opens at a Landmark Theater on July 2. The other Italian film I'm anticipating is Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel's La Pivellina, in which a group of circus performers find and keep an abandoned child. Also of interest from Italy is Giorgio Diritti's WWII massacre movie The Man Who Will Come, which won both Grand Jury and Audience Prizes at last year's Rome Film Festival
From elsewhere in Europe we have Serbian director Vladimir Perisic's Ordinary People, a multi-fest prizewinner and (Bruno) Dumont-ian parable of ethnic cleansing and the human potential for brutality. At an opposite extreme lies Nina Hedenius' Way of Nature, a near-silent meditation on life at a remote Swedish farm. According to some reports I've read, the ex-Soviet republic of Georgia might be the next international hotbed of inspired filmmaking. SFIFF53 has programmed one title that keeps popping up, Rusudan Pirveli's Susa, a neo-realist tale of a 12-year-old bootleg-vodka delivery boy. Also from Georgia is the documentary Russian Lessons, which examines the 2008 Georgia-Russia armed conflict.
Headlining what Latin American cinema we do have at SFIFF53 is surely Brazilian director Walter Salles' receiving the Founders Directing Award, along with screenings of his 2008 Linha de Passe and also a new work-in-progress. Also from Brazil come the narrative feature The Famous and the Dead and the musical documentary Simonal: No One Knows How Tough It Was, about the "spectacular rise and infamous fall of the undisputed king of Brazilian popular music." From Colombia there's Ciro Guerra's The Wind Journeys, in which a man and teenage boy set off on a roadless road-trip to return a cursed accordion. I've watched this on screener and it's visually stunning. Usually we get a bunch of titles from Argentina in the festival, but this year there's only one. The Peddler documents the work of Daniel Burmeister, a traveling septuagenarian filmmaker who uses local amateur talent to create genre movies. Rounding out the South American roster is You Think You're the Prettiest, But You Are the Sluttiest, a Chilean comedy about the pitfalls of being young, horny and male.
While we may not have gotten Revolución, there are three other Mexican films in the SFIFF53 line-up, two of which I've previewed and heartily recommend. Roberto Hernandez and Geoffrey Smith's documentary Presumed Guilty is an exposé of the Mexican criminal justice systems that follows one young man's efforts to reverse a homicide conviction. In Rigoberto Perezcano's meditative feature Northless, a young man's determination to cross into El Norte gets waylaid by the female proprietor of a Tijuana grocery store. The film I haven't seen is Pedro González-Rubio's docu-fiction hybrid Alamar, in which a half-Mayan boy spends a final summer with his father and grandfather along the Caribbean coast. The film has won a slew of festival awards, most recently a Tiger at Rotterdam, and I'm saving it for a big-screen festival experience (the underwater cinematography is by Alexis Zabé, who also shot Carlos Reygadas' Silent Light and Fernando Eimbcke's Lake Tahoe).
OMFG! was the reaction I had to seeing two particular Asian titles in the line-up—and I'm using "Asian" here in its broadest geographical sense. In 2006 I was blown away by The Forsaken Land, a film by Sri Lankan director Vimukthi Jayasundara for which he won Cannes' Camera d'or for best first feature. I've had fingers and toes crossed that his new film Between Two Worlds would show up at our 3rd i South Asian Film Festival next fall, but I'm just as ecstatic to see it at the SF International. The other title that got a rise out of me is Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof's The White Meadows. Rasoulof directed the phenomenal Iron Island, which the fest screened in 2006. I won't even attempt to synopsize what these two allegorical films are "about". Just read the program capsules and prepare yourself for an other-worldly cinematic experience. A million thanks to the programmers for securing these. (Mohammad Rasoulof, by the way, was arrested and imprisoned in Tehran along with director Jafar Panahi on March 1 and released 17 days later).
There are a handful of other Asian films I'm looking forward to. In 2006, Thai director Pen-Ek Ratanaruang made a big splash with Last Life in the Universe. His two follow-up films took a critical beating and never made it to our neck of the woods. Now he's made Nymph, which garnered mixed to favorable reviews, and I'm really pleased to have the chance to see it. One of the highlights of the 2005 SFIFF was a sidebar devoted to New Malaysian Cinema. One of the directors feted that year was Woo Ming-jin, and his new film called Woman on Fire Looks for Water has come our way. It's described as an "utterly gorgeous meditation on yearning and regret set amid a small fishing village." I caught Hirokazu Kore-eda's Air Doll, a wistful social comedy about a blow-up sex doll come to life, at Palm Springs. It's an inevitable disappointment coming on the heels of the director's undisputed masterpiece Still Walking, but is well worth seeing for the lead performance by bug-eyed South Korean star Bae Doo-Na (The Host, Linda Linda Linda). There are two more Iranian films I might catch if time allows. Nader Takmil Homayoun's Tehroun is a crime thriller set in Tehran's slums, while Babak Jalali's Frontier Blues is an absurdist portrait of life along Iran's northern frontier. Anyone with a penchant for star-studded Chinese historical epics probably won't want to miss Bodygyards and Assassins and Empire of Silver.
Finally, we have some films that don't fit in any of these geographic categories. The top prize winner at last year's Venice Film Festival was Samuel Maoz' Lebanon, a film set entirely inside an Israeli tank during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. SFIFF53 also has this year's Grand Jury Prize winner from Sundance, Debra Granik's Winter's Bone. Set in a poor rural Ozark community, a 17-year-old girl must find her meth-cooking father to keep from losing the family home. Ted Kotcheff's 1971 once-considered-lost Australian exploitation shocker Wake in Fright (Outback) has been restored and revived with the hope of appalling a new generation of moviegoers. 2008's Baghead finally sold me on the talents of the directing Duplass Brothers and the festival will be screening their latest Cyrus, starring Marisa Tomei and John C. Reilly. Another (truly) American indie film that's sounds promising is Tanya Hamilton's Night Catches Us, the story of an ex-Black Panther returning home to Philadelphia in the year of the bicentennial. Finally, it you're as freaked out about Colony Collapse Disorder as I am, you won't want to miss Ross McDonnell and Carter Gunn's documentary Colony.
