Juntos

By ROBERT KOEHLER

I’m not going to devote any more moments than they deserve to Guadalajara’s Mexican competition. It was universally deemed bad (by everyone, critics, programmers, sales company reps alike), much worse than last year’s crop, which at least yielded Fernando Eimbcke’s Lake Tahoe and, in its modest way, Rodrigo Pla’s The Desert Within. Pla’s film, in this current group, would look like a high masterpiece. Only one competition film (we’re not including Gerardo Naranjo’s AFI-screened I’m Gonna Explode, since it’s quite old—from last fall—and immeasurably better than anything else) ranked, and that was Carlos Serrano’s El Arbol, which I won’t write about here since I’m reviewing it for Variety and was a premiere in Rotterdam’s Tiger competition. There was also Nicolas Pereda’s second film and the only strong world premiere, Juntos, but that inexplicably wasn’t in the competition (and slotted over in Lipkes’ and Cruz’s “Alternative Currents” section) and, again, a Variety review film. And, irony of ironies, both video copies of El Arbol and Juntos were shown on sub-standard video projectors.

The Mexican films were bogged down in lousy direction, banal mise-en-scene, undeveloped ideas, total lapses in sense, and worst of all, the Amores Perros Problem. That’s the one where you, the screenwriter, watch Amores Perros for, oh, the 30th time, and decide that you too will concoct a scenario with three interlacing storylines involving characters at various crisis points in a sweaty, nervous Mexico City. The lineup was lousy with such stuff, and will be quickly forgotten. Why they were shown in a festival is a mystery, and may only be possibly perceived through some obscure lens buried deep inside the Mexican film industry. What’s worse, perhaps, is that they were selected from a larger group of submissions—the largest in the festival’s history, due to the boost in production from recent tax incentive film production laws. It’s hard to imagine how poor the rejects must have been if these were the ones that survived the selection. I must stress: Everyone attending the press/industry screenings over several days would more or less echo what I write.

It may also be the case that, with Cannes having recently latched onto the Mexican scene in a big way with successes like El Violin, certain Mexican directors and producers are starting to hold back from Guadalajara—traditionally the place where major Mexican films get their start—and hold out for Cannes. Especially right now, where filmmakers around the world are waiting for a call from Thierry Fremaux or Olivier Pere to see if they’re in, somewhere, in Cannes. That’s the way the festival world is working these days, and Guadalajara may be getting hit by all sides: Pre-Cannes jitters on one end, and films that are simply not ready for prime time…….

By ROBERT KOEHLER

In the last post, I had promised some thoughts on Philippe Grandrieux, the director of Sombre, Un vie nouvelle and his newest, Un lac. Well, more precisely, I noted that I hoped to discover Grandrieux. On my third day in Guadalajara, I was able to see the first screening of Un lac, but not until my seventh full day did I see Un vie nouvelle—a mere seven years late, after its 2002 festival tour—and screenings of Sombre, his first film from 1999, wouldn’t happen until I left Guadalajara. So without a complete view of Grandrieux, I won’t trace a complete line of his work. But these two films are enough to reinforce the view of several critical voices (Jonathan Rosenbaum, Roger Koza, the circle around the exceptional French film journal, Trafic) that this is cinema of extreme majesty, strength and courage.

“I don’t think in terms of stories,” Grandrieux said to me in a taxi during a ride back to the festival hotel. “To me, these films are objects. They are plastic. They’re formed.” Film as sculptural object has a long tradition (consciously or unconsciously) in experimental film, predating Oskar Fishinger, but not nearly as long in cinema that tries to tell some kind of story. Grandrieux may not think of his films as starting or even ending with the demands of narrative, but a certain kind of story exists within them nevertheless, although they’re as furtive, as looming on the edges of the work as might seem permissible in something that belongs within what we think of as the category of features with representational states of reality, dramatized situations, with actors, locations and scenes. Grandrieux adopts all of those, but then molds them to his own ends in astonishingly radical ways.

I told Roger that watching Un lac, set in a cloud-shrouded, snow-covered region of the French Alps, involving characters of various accents and desires and needs, reminded me of Claire Denis’ L’intrus—at least those sections of Denis’ film set in a snowy patch of woods with Beatrice Dalle kicking ass with some of her dogs. I had also assumed before this, without seeing Grandrieux’s films, that no French filmmaker in the past decade had radicalized narrative structure within visual terms as Denis had with L’intrus. So, once again, as if we needed further reminding, our assumptions are only as good as the films we’ve seen. Grandrieux and Denis are both, yes, extremely plastic in their attitude towards the image: Denis collaborates with the world’s greatest cinematographer, Agnes Godard, who can do anything with the filming of reality; but more notably, Grandrieux (after working with Stephane Fontaine on La vie nouvelle) becomes his own lighting cameraman on Un lac. I use the old British term, instead of cinematographer, because it more accurately captures what he achieves. The images in Un lac shimmer, mutate, glow, float, transform at moments into Rothko-like orbs; light is almost not there in some scenes, and only the spectral outline of a character’s body can be made out on screen, in the most exact optical recreation of the effect we all have when we wake up in the middle of the night, the lights turned off, darkness enveloping everything, until tiny slips of perceptible “night light” hit our eyes so we can stumble toward the bathroom or the kitchen for a glass of water. Such precise simulations almost never happen in cinema, since reality is always mediated by the camera, and the trained audience eye can spot the manipulations by even those directors most committed to reality. In fact, before Un lac, the most ideal re-staging of such optical exactitude was John Alcott’s and Stanley Kubrick’s staging of card games purely by candlelight in Barry Lyndon. I’ve often puzzled over why directors and cinematographers didn’t adopt the Zeiss lens that Alcott and Kubrick used; Barry Lyndon remains, so far as I know, a unique experiment. But it’s pretty certain that almost nobody is going to go where Grandrieux goes with light in Un lac, since he literally makes the quality of light and its force as a form, as a plastic/optical medium, the engine of the film.

Well, and I have to add, right alongside this, sound—which can vary with Grandrieux from seeming like the music of the spheres to the sense of what Hell, if it were to exist, would sound like. I think that plastic nature he means is as much on the surface of the celluloid soundtrack as in the image itself, and if this all may seem abstract, the feeling of the combined aural-visual sensation in both films is about as far from abstract as it’s possible to manage. Sometimes, as in scenes in Un lac where the central character, a young man who chops trees in the dense forest to support his family, lapses into occasional fits or spasms or, worse, jealousy, the burning heat of the soundtrack (a mix of what hits the ear like altered natural and electronic elements) is a better expression of the boy’s inner turmoil than any dialogue could manage. Sound becomes soundscape, much like 19th century landscape painting developed (at its height through Turner and Pisarro) to the point where it could express states of mind and consciousness, even political consciousness. Sound sculptures, in Grandrieux’s hands, also largely supplant music, though music has its place (and becomes a pounding techno hammer of threat in La vie nouvelle). I couldn’t help but imagine what a Grandrieux attack on sound could do to transform the effect of how we listen to silent films, and how similar sound sculpture replacing the tired and antique use of standard keyboards and piano could utterly shift how we might watch, say, Gance, Griffith, von Sternberg, Vigo or, yep, even Keaton. Pretty great filmmaking is what gets you thinking this way while watching/listening to a film, and Un lac provides that kind of all-sensory experience.

There’s another silent film connection, as well: I leaned over to Roger during a scene where the woodcutter boy (maybe some kind of distant, half-Scandanavian relative of Saavedra in Alonso’s La libertad?) glimpses his sister, who it seems he loves at least secretly a little more than he should, kissing a new woodcutter who’s recently arrived to help out with the harvesting. The boy—too young to be a man yet, too old to be a child—stands at the cliff’s edge adjacent to a waterfall, looking down on the couple in a silhouette that shimmers in the wintry air. “Murnau” I said to Roger, and he knew what I meant. (Meaning, of course, Nosferatu.) But it wasn’t merely a film referential moment: It was a suggestion that the boy could be transforming into something awful, maybe not a vampire, but something fearsome at the same time, maybe a human monster. What raises Un lac to a work deeply observing a flawed humanity is many passages where the worst we fear might happen shifts into something unexpected: So the boy doesn’t transform into such a monster at all, but tries to run away, and later found vulnerable, in the snow, and tended back to health by his sister. The film’s grasp of emotions is really at the level of Artaud (with La vie nouvelle even more so), the expression of the most buried emotions allowed to explode out of characters’ bodies, arms hitting or stroking, mouths gaping wide and screaming. (Francis Bacon plays a pivotal role in Grandrieux’s sense of a plastic cinema, and La vie nouvelle seems impossible without Bacon’s visions of naked bodies trapped in spaces, humanity reduced to the level of meat, and, in about as terrifying a sequence as I’ve ever seen on screen, four-legged animals crawling in the dark seen through night-vision lenses.)

Michel Lipkes and Max Cruz, the former FICCO-ites, are organizing a Grandrieux video installation in Mexico City this summer, and are in the meantime bringing the three features to the capital’s Cineteca Nacional and the Filmoteca. Even more intriguing, Grandrieux is planning to shoot his next film in both Mexico and Los Angeles……

By ROBERT KOEHLER

With the happy sights today of one of my favorite comrades in cinephilia, critic-programmer Roger Koza (see his Spanish-language site, ojosabiertos.wordpress.com); the always convivial Screen International critic from Tel Aviv (via Paris) Dan Fainaru; veteran Latin American cinema programmer Denis De La Roca; Gerald Peary, Boston Phoenix critic (and maker of the new doc about American critics, For the Love of Movies, screening here fresh off its South by Southwest premiere); and Holland Film’s best ambassador, Claudia Landsberger, I knew Guadalajara had begun in earnest. After breakfast with the Hollywood Reporter’s man in Mexico City, John Hecht (with whom I had endured the first, brutal day of press screenings capped by the film-that-would-never-end, Hernandez’ Rabioso Sol, Rabioso Cielo), and taking in the latest wave of wrath directed at the inexcusable AIG money pit as related on CNN International in my hotel room, I walked a few blocks from my hotel through lovely residential streets to the Centro Magno shopping mall (dirty, open secret: all film festivals now play in malls) for the second day of press screenings.

The signs, to quote one of the annoying characters in Gerardo Tort’s beyond-annoying Viaje Redondo, weren’t good. That is, if any single day of viewing during a festival can be taken as a sign, then this year’s crop of Mexican narrative films looks like it may fall far from the mark. Tort, whose major credit is the okay De la calle, is just awful this time around, indifferently shooting his sloppy road movie with a matching-cut format during one talky scene after another in a way that might be fine for TV (well, TV during the daytime), but virtually unwatchable in a cinema. The things he and his screenwriters Marina Stavenhagen (who also co-wrote De la calle) and Beatriz Novaro have to do to make sure that their two characters, a middle-class college gal and a working-class beautician from the wrong side of the tracks in Acapulco, get stranded in the middle of nowhere are object lessons on how to make a bad film.

And we’ve seen films like Eva Lopez-Sanchez’ La ultima y nos vamos (which awkwardly translates into something like The End and Us) a thousand times before—the one where a group of rich Mexico City folks get lost in the big city at night and discover how the other half (or in Mexico, the other 95%) live. The story pattern is so basic and graphed that it hardly seems written at all, let alone lived, let alone filmed. Stupid rich white guys get drunk, get high, get robbed, get beaten up, almost get laid by a stripper, do get laid by a bus driver (on her bus, during her work shift), don’t get home on time, lose their wallet, their cell phone, almost lose their lives, and all manage to stay intact and return home to the safety of their rich white homes. And this is all to point to…what exactly? This kind of unexamined, robotic filmmaking isn’t what Mexican cinema needs, and it’s not needed in Mexico’s biggest annual showcase.

Nestor Sampieri’s Reforma 18: Trappings of Power might be a fairly good documentary on courageous journalists walking out of one paper—the big, gray Excelsior—and setting up the once-rebellious magazine, Proceso. I say “might” because his video was screened in the wrong format at today’s press screening, and ended up looking pixilated to a point where it was hard to watch. Still, there’s a heroic tale of journalism in action here, and a telling study in how politics in Mexico begins and ends with the office of the President, which has been filled for decades with hacks, cronies, thieves, crooks and worse.

Garapa

Saving the day was Jose Padilha’s Garapa, which partly redeems his last, despicable Berlin-winning exploitation machine, Elite Squad. From celebrating secret fascist cops to casting an unflinching eye on some of Brazil’s most desperately poor in the northeast state of Ceara—hard to get a handle on this Padilha fellow, whose worldview seems to gaze in all directions, and through the prisms of all ideologies. Whatever Padilha’s politics, this is one uncompromising filmmaker, co-existing and absorbing the everyday harshness of unrelieved poverty, without even the soothing effect of color. (Padilha shoots in a grainy black-and-white that looks deliberately like a tribute to Nelson Pereira dos Santos’ early Cinema Novo masterpiece, Vidas secas.) Will anyone stay through to the closing credits, as my Variety colleague Leslie Felperin doubted in Berlin, after having watched many scenes of fly-infested hovels with unclothed babies and overwhelmed, unemployed parents struggling just to get basic foodstuffs? Africa is the land of ultimate poverty: That’s the received media image and popular assumption, but Garapa (titled after the sugar-water that these moms must feed their babies in lieu of milk) argues that, no, extreme poverty is worldwide, on all continents, and possibly worse at the lowest levels than it’s ever been. Criticism is nearly suspended in light of such an act of cinematic witness.

* * * *

BRIEF ITEMS

• It looked like Theo Angelopoulos was coming to Guadalajara for the North American premiere of his latest, The Dust of Time. Angelopoulos, though, has had to cancel for undisclosed reasons.

• Don’t expect many Argentine films in Cannes, one year after Argentina dominated the festival in almost every section, particularly the Quinzaine with Lisandro Alonso’s Liverpool.

• The market at Guadalajara has expanded this year, with several more and larger booths, including a major presence from national film promotions in Brazil, Argentina and Colombia, receiving the festival’s traditional national survey. But where are Chile and Peru, two countries starting to make a major impact at world-class festivals?

• Gerald Peary reports that For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism went over “great” in South by Southwest, and is set to go from here to San Francisco, Nashville and beyond.

• If you think the recent musical chairs at festivals—Geoff Gilmore out of Sundance and in at Tribeca with John (Cooper) Cooper replacing him in Park City, Peter Scarlet out at Tribeca, Kent Jones out of Film Society at Lincoln Center, Rebecca Yeldham in as director of LAFF—is strictly an American phenomenon, think again. Fernando Pena, once artistic head of BAFICI after the Quintin era, has left the Mar del Plata festival after one year. Though it was set as a temporary gig, Pena was open to the idea that it might go on a bit longer. But now, he has what sounds like his dream job: Hosting a Monday-Friday program (airing, in pure Argentine fashion, at midnight) featuring works of classic cinema. Pena, a major archivist and private collector, and the man who discovered the complete version of Lang’s Metropolis in Buenos Aires, is now in his element, albeit not in a cinema. I didn’t get the channel, but I will once I get to BsAs, and pass it along. It all recalls KCET’s great cinema series, Film Odyssey, which aired in the early to mid-‘70s and was one of my earliest cinema schools. Los Angeles Times critic Charles Champlin hosted the weekly show, which generously dipped into the Janus Films catalogue, long before it became the Criterion Collection. Speaking of which, it’s time to pull Film Odyssey out of the video vaults—if the videotapes still exist.

Next: Day 3, in which I hope to discover Philippe Grandrieux…..

By ROBERT KOEHLER

Being told that you’re the first member of the press to check in at a film festival and get a badge produces strange feelings. Beyond the automatic response—“Where is everyone else?”—is the lurking sense that you’re the only one of your kind within earshot or cell phone signal. And in a city the size of Guadalajara, Mexico’s second largest, that sense is stranger, though only really an illusion. I merely showed up early to the party. Most arrive Wednesday (when I’m writing this, in the lobby of the Cine Foro, the University of Guadalajara’s downtown cinematheque, whose walls are festooned with original film one-sheets produced by ICAIC, Cuba’s national film institute receiving a retrospective tribute during the festival) and Thursday, opening night of the Guadalajara’s 24th edition.

Which raises a question: Why open with Otro pelicula de huevos y un pollo, a broad, basic animated feature (and sequel) geared mainly to kids? As I’m writing, the movie’s soundtrack of loud sound effects, audible-through-concrete voiceovers and Disneyesque music bleeding into the lobby is more than enough to suggest that this is fine for a Saturday morning screening during the festival, but not for opening night at the massive Telmex Auditorium. (Seating: 10,000.) Last year’s pick, the lovely and classical documentary on Argentine tango composers and musicians, Casa de los maestros, was pitch-perfect. Festival director Jorge Sanchez’ reported defense during the opening press conference (relayed to me by a few journalists who attended) was direct though curious: Cannes has opened with Shrek, so why can’t we open with an animated movie about a bunch of talking eggs and a chicken? (And as we get ready to post this, news arrives that Cannes is opening with Disney/Pixar’s Up, so Sanchez has some kind of point. Still, Otro pelicula con huevos will never be confused with John Lasseter’s brand of animation.)

Our Beloved Month of August

On paper, things do look better than this once the competition begins in earnest. It’s especially gratifying to see that a radical film of the nature of Miguel Gomes’ Our Beloved Month of August slotted in the Ibero-American contest. Gomes’ on-the-spot experiment in allowing fiction to bleed into non-fiction and back again would typically have had no place in Guadalajara editions of yore, and in recent years would have ended up in Mexico (if it came to Mexico at all…..suddenly the chicken and eggs movie is getting extremely loud, with a horrific rip-off of metal rock on the soundtrack…) at FICCO, the beloved cinephilic event in Mexico City. But FICCO’s owner, theatrical distributor Cinemex, forcing the exit of director Paola Estorga, soon followed by program directors Michel Lipkes and Maximiliano Cruz, has led to a somewhat different kind of FICCO this year that few I know attended, and most reported as fairly disappointing. A FICCO programmed by Lipkes and Cruz would have nabbed the Gomes in a heartbeat after its Quinzaine premiere last year. Now, a vacuum has been more or less created, and Guadalajara is trying to fill it. The Gomes in competition is one way; perhaps the inclusion in the Mexican documentary competition of Eugenio Polgovsky’s Los herederos (which I’ve reviewed for Variety) can be viewed as another. And certainly the creation of a new section, “Alternative Currents,” is another; it’s literally old FICCO in new Guadalajara, since who should be programming the section but Lipkes and Cruz. While interviewing Guadalajara’s programming director, Lucy Virgen, for a preview story for Variety, I told her that this move was smart. She rightly agreed.

As usual with Guadalajara, the tea leaves for the Ibero-American sections are a bit easier to read ahead of time than the Mexican sections, since the latter are dominated by world premieres and, in good measure, debuts. The one known Mexican quantity press screening today—Julian Hernandez’ characteristically sprawling, three-hours-plus Rabioso Sol, Rabioso Cielo (a lovely title in Spanish), while two from abroad and fresh off of prizes and festivals—Alicia Scherson’s Turistas, the second from this extremely promising young Chilean filmmaker, and Javier Fesser’s Goya-laden Camino.

Turistas

The Scherson is a superb delight, equally light and heavy, a dryly witty odyssey of an emotionally akimbo biochemist from Santiago whose spat with her husband leads to a momentary separation….which leads her to a walk in the woods, and quite possibly a personal rediscovery. Scherson’s first film was a piquant and free n’easy jaunt through Santiago titled Play, and it proved to be a popular pick on the festival circuit. Turistas is several steps forward for Scherson, formally and thematically, and she can certainly now be claimed as one of the most interesting, thoughtful and funniest young South American filmmakers.

Hernandez, alas, is twiddling his thumbs with his latest, which is unconscionably long and bloated with post-Jodorowsky quasi-mythical pretension. Centered around two male lovers, with a third crowding in, his film continues Hernandez’ now-rote mise en scene of tracking and panning cameras around and between young, muscled male bodies, fucking when not kissing, gazing when not fucking, all leading to a final hour that easily ranks among the looniest sequences in recent cinema, which includes among other items one of the bodies emerging out of the caked desert sands dressed in only a loincloth that appears torn off the costume for the actor who plodded through The Creature From the Black Lagoon, and searching for his lost lover in underground caverns, prodded on by a goddess-like presence known as “The Heart of the Sky.” I could only feel one thing through all of this, and that was feeling sorry for the actors, enduring what looks like searing and impossible desert conditions while naked. Hernandez needs to check himself: He’s become an image fetishist, the most dangerous role for a director to adopt.

Fesser’s film, the Slumdog Millionaire of the Goyas (meaning it won too many), is just as bad as Slumdog, maybe worse, a ridiculous exercise in faint anti-clerical drama. Young Nerea Camacho, who plays Camino, an 11-year-old who comes down with a fatal spinal condition while falling in love with a lad named Jesus (and, yes, when she says that she loves Jesus, her priest and everyone else assumes she means the carpenter from Nazareth), is asked to play scene after scene with her eyes so wide open, I thought that they would pop out of her head. More evidence of why Spanish cinema is in so much trouble. (Which reminds me: How can Guadalajara have a section devoted to Catalan cinema, and not include Albert Serra’s El cant dels ocells, likely the only Catalan film worth talking about in the past year or two?)

To Guadalajara’s credit, the program is also full of relevance, stuffed with films straight from Berlin, Rotterdam and Sundance, including Claudio Llosa’s Berlin Golden Bear-winning Milk of Sorrows, the Hernandez (from Berlin Panorama), Jose (Elite Squad) Padilha’s Garapa (also from Panorama), Carlos Serrano’s debut, El arbol (Rotterdam), Sebastian Silva’s La nana (Sundance), Lucia (XXY) Puenzo’s Nino Pez (Berlin), the Scherson (Rotterdam), Gustave de Kervern’s and Benoit Delepine’s latest crazed work, Louise-Michel (Sundance, Rotterdam), and such Berlin Forum entries as Mercedes (El inmortal) Moncada’s La sirena y el buzo, another example of a film that would have been a FICCO natural, but now finds safe harbor in Guadalajara.

Next: Day 2, when the festival really starts going…..