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Korea
If you have read any of our previous film festival reviews, you’ll know that Korean movies often rock our world, cinematically speaking. And Helpless is another thriller that grabs you from the opening sequence and simply won’t let go. Director Byun Youngjoo is better known for documentaries, but she’s here chosen to adapt a modern Japanese novel and transport it to Korea. The twisty-turny narrative starts with a city vet, Munho, and his fiancée, Seonyeong, on their way to tell his parents they’re about to get married. Then she suddenly disappears. Totally. But he’s soon not only asking where she’s gone, but who she really was. Was it really just a simple scam? Nothing is what it seemed, Munho feels like he’s part of a much bigger deception, and the viewers are also constantly forced to review their own attitude to Seonyeong and her motivation.
More typical Korean fare comes from the huge box-office smash, Nameless Gangster: Rules of the Time, writer/director Yoon Jongbin’s eighties-set, all-action story of corruption. With Old Boy’s Choi Minsik in the ‘title’ role, and with inept but connected individuals and chaotic racketeering accompanying every bit of business, it’s inevitable that it’s all going to end badly – and it’s all done in broad comic strokes.
Perhaps the only slightly disappointing Korean movie this time is In Another Country, in that expectations are always high for Hong Sangsoo’s comedies of manners (like last year’s The Day He Arrives), and his star this time is current festival favourite, Isabelle Huppert. Though entirely in Hong’s style, it’s reminiscent of something rather French and arty, but without real purpose. Huppert is the innocent abroad – in a Korean resort – and she plays three characters invented by a young screenwriter with a vivid imagination, to tell three different stories, as she interacts with the same characters in the same location, but with different outcomes. There is a kind of intellectual delight in the symmetry and repetition, but there’s also the nagging feeling that Hong can stretch himself more.
Thailand
Another really promising debut, this one from Tongpong Chantarangkul, with the poignant I Carried You Home. Two estranged daughters are forced back together when their mother dies suddenly while singing karaoke. They must accompany the body back from Bangkok to their mother’s remote birthplace, and as they travel back to their past – driven there by a comical but well-meaning chauffeur – they become variously wistful, emotional and pragmatic. Ancient and modern rub shoulders on their journey and in their rituals, and the acting and directing is suitably delicate.
Japan
You need to suspend your belief and, more importantly, your moral compass when watching Miwa Nishikawa’s comedy drama, Dreams For Sale. For if the roles were reversed this might seem a tad distasteful (even though the director is female). A young married couple see their restaurant business go up in smoke and need another plan to claw their way back from destitution. The languorous pace somehow works, reflecting their frustration; he is defeatist, while she is endlessly resourceful. And when one night he gets drunk, is picked up by a rich woman and given a generous payment, the wife decides that he will make money by becoming a serial gigolo, while she is his pimp. Heck, she even writes his lines for him as they construct a gigantic scam. But you’ll laugh even as you’re questioning the premise…
Taiwan
Gosh, 10 + 10 is a really mixed bag. Comprising twenty short films, all five-minutes in length, made by some of the best Taiwanese directors around, you’ll find yourself absorbed by some, but shrugging your shoulders at others. Worth seeing though, if only for the short, sharp shock of Chung Mong-Hong’s film about bullying, Reverberation, plus Shen Ko-Shang’s Bus Odyssey, set on a superficially simple journey.
Brazil
Another one to watch is Kleber Mendonca Filho, the writer and debut director of Neighbouring Sounds. Divided into equally paranoid sections, this drama boasts a big cast with intertwining characters, spread over a middle-class suburb in the city of Recife, yet it feels claustrophobic throughout. Dogs bark in the night, the people in the neighbourhood pay for protection from private security guards, an elderly gent seems in control, the buildings feel structured and safe, the outside dark and possibly dangerous, but nothing is quite as straightforward as it seems. The Rear Window-type atmosphere builds as Filho’s seductively powerful debut reflects all these tensions. Oh, and I guarantee you’ll never be able to look at your washing machine’s spin cycle in the same way again after part one!
Uruguay
3 is a kind of coming-of-age(s) drama from Pablo Stoll Ward, the co-director of previous festival favourite, Whisky. It’s set in the centre of a triangle of an estranged OCD dentist father, a mother who spends all her spare time caring for her sick aunt, and their neglected, rebellious teenage daughter, Ana. Dad wants them back together and sneaks into the apartment to carry out DIY and chores for them. Mum wants romance from somebody else. Ana wants a dangerous boyfriend and to play the odd handball match. All three actors excel across the film, and have a ball in the nostalgic final sequence.
Argentina
I’ve loved Viggo Mortensen in pretty much everything he’s done. But that has now ended rather abruptly with Everybody Has A Plan. Overwrought, torturously slow, with no clear direction, it stars Mortensen as two identical brothers with very different lives, and when one needs a way out of his current plight, it’s very tempting to swap identities. I apologise if I’ve inadvertently made it sound interesting, because it isn’t. And I have to confess that I didn’t make it to the final conclusion of the film. And that’s rare for me. Sorry in every way.
Chile
From writer-director Dominga Sotomayor comes another commendable debut, Thursday Till Sunday, which is her way of retelling those old, half-remembered, epic family trips captured on fading photos. The entire road trip comes from the point of view of the ten-year-old daughter, Lucia (Santi Ahumada acting her socks off), as she witnesses her parents’ marriage crumbling en route. She grows up as they grow apart, meeting strangers and having adventures as they go. Great stuff.
Russia
New Russian cinema is possibly in the rudest health of all, if this year’s crop is anything to go by. In The Fog is based on the novel from Vassil Bykov, and is the latest film from Sergei Loznitsa, who previously wowed everyone with My Joy. And helping Loznitsa make another classic is Romanian cinematographer Oleg Mutu of Beyond The Hills and 4 Months fame. At first the plot seems to be about simple betrayal and revenge, after the Nazis execute a group of Belarus resistance fighters. But with its generous use of flashbacks, muted colours and action, and minimal dialogue, it evolves into something more morally and psychologically complex.
The quite brilliant Short Stories (above-right), from director Mikhail Segal, consists of four very different films. The premise is that a publisher has rejected a book of short stories, and every single person who picks up this collection is drawn into a particular narrative, finding something relevant and gripping. At times surreal, often very funny, and always original, one story focuses on a psychic librarian recruited by the police to find a missing child, and another tracks the trail of bribery and corruption, deal by deal, to the very top. A slightly cheesy affair between two mismatched, but lusting individuals closes the film, but it’s the opening story that really excels: a young couple’s pre-marital meeting with a wedding organiser who not only plans their big day, but also their future offspring’s education, and even the couple’s own extra-marital affairs in the years to come, letting them pick their partners-in-sin from pre-selected line-ups. Each story is cutely connected and Segal’s satire on modern life is richly rewarding.
KEY DOCUMENTARIES
Finally, a quick round-up of some of the best documentary features from this year’s festival – with quite a diverse bunch involved, from complete novices to the tried and trusted.
Village at the End of the World(right), from director Sarah (Brick Lane) Gavron, with cinematography by her Danish husband David Katznelson, shows us the reality of living in one of the most remote villages in Northern Greenland, Niaqornat, which has a population of just 59 – most of whom seem to be related to each other. Filmed over a year in this beautiful location, it shows how despite seeing icebergs through the windows of their homes and having plenty of fish and the odd reindeer to eat, life here can be lonely, harsh and isolated, particularly for teenagers. The reality is that the village is slowly dying, and unless the people take action and address their own fate, their idyllic existence there will be over and they’ll be relocated to an urban environment. A lovely, loving film.
The Central Park Fiveis the always reliable Ken Burns’ take on the media-fuelled criminal injustice meted out to five innocent young African American teenage boys after a woman was beaten, raped and left for dead in New York’s iconic Central Park in 1989. Justice needed to be seen to be done, the park needed to be seen as safe again, and though the NYPD had no evidence, they forced coerced confessions, and the youths talked themselves into court and then prison. Through forensic film-making, revealing that nothing added up – including DNA evidence and the basic timeline – the Burns unit has also located all the protagonists and re-interviewed them, including Mayor Ed Koch. And even 13 years after the original crime, when another inmate confesses to the crime, and his DNA is found to match, the police and the media are still in denial about the innocence of the five. Chilling.
Canned Dreams from Finland is Katja Gauriloff’s measured, matter-of-fact look at the journey of foodstuffs from all over the world into the final cans of ravioli itself. Some of the processes are automated and mesmeric, as huge Cold War type computers take control, and yet there is a profundity and deep sadness in the mundanity. Reminiscent of Our Daily Bread in tone, this is unfiltered by narration, has ambient noise and very little music, but adds straightforward first person testimonies from those involved. So we hear of modest hopes and dreams from Portuguese tomato gatherers, while a Polish cattle butcher talks of betrayal and revenge while spattered with blood. And some sections might make you consider vegetarianism.
The Road: A Story of Life and Death from Marc Isaacs is the story of the A5, the route from Holyhead in Wales which takes you down to north-west and finally central London, told through the narratives of the people who live and work alongside the road. On The Road’s surface it’s about a specific diaspora, but Isaacs carefully unearths a multitude of immigrants’ stories, interviewing them to discover they’re all different, yet all similarly bound by their desire to come to the UK. Some pushed, some pulled; Muslim, Jewish, Catholic, Buddhist, all these faiths have faith in their destination. This gentle meditation on modern immigration, love and loneliness, bars and bingo halls is recommended.
Solar Eclipse, from Martin Marecek, shows how a couple of experts, Tomas and Milan, travel down from the Czech Republic to Zambia to help with the local solar power and electricity supply. There are inevitable culture clashes when the charitable chaps find that all their hard work from their previous visit has been trashed and misused. Good will starts to plummet and they wonder if their trust has been misplaced. Yes, they have a common goal, but perhaps there are different ways of getting there.
The Ethnographer is Ulises Rosell’s film about an English anthropologist, John Hillary Palmer, immersed in the Wichi community in northern Argentina. Palmer gets involved, even as he documents them, now with a local Wichi wife and kids there, having crossed the line and gone native. Crucially, though, he’s fighting for their rights, and Rosell’s documentary is an authentic, eye-opening window on another world.
Beware of Mr Baker is Jay Bulger’s study of Ginger Baker, the unstable, 73-year-old ex-Cream drumming genius, as everyone lines up to confirm, from John Lydon to Stewart Copeland. Propelled and punctuated by his drumming, it’s also the story of the director’s ability to persuade the “red-headed mad man” to let him come and stay with him in his South African home, surrounded by dogs. Fun, especially for fans.
Bayou Blue covers the story of a serial rapist and killer, Ronald Dominique, who murdered 23 men in Louisiana. Shockingly, his decade of crime was ignored by the national and international media, because Hurricane Katrina meant everyone was preoccupied by this, and more incredibly, because it was viewed as a local story. Filmmakers Alix Lambert and David McMahon not only revisit the scenes of the crimes and interview the cops and the families of the victims, but also feature the audio of Dominique’s confessions. Candid and compelling.
Coming next: part three of the festival review, including the DVDfever Awards…