San Francisco International Film Festival 2010

[Chris Knipp]

Brian Byrne: The Loved Ones (2009)


XAVIER SAMUELS IN THE LOVED ONES

A painful end to high school

Heavy metal is an effective background for this gore-fest from Australia, about a young man tortured on prom night by a girl he refused to date. Late Night item at the San Francisco International Film Festival, it was similarly featured in the Toronto Festival's Midnight Madness series last year, where it won the Cadillac People's Choice Award for its brightly hued, well-shot nastiness. I don't particularly enjoy this sort of thing, but they're good at the down-and-dirty genre thing down under, and this first-time director shines in his use of sadistic evil, brave resistance, and the usual weapons of mayhem, razors, a power drill, a torture pit, and cars that run astray and kill or maim people. He also makes us care about and understand his characters. The Loved Ones focuses on teen angst and family dysfunction within a horror genre format. It's been called a fusion of Pretty in Pink and Misery, with a dash of Carrie.

In an introductory sequence, Brent (Xavier Samuel) is driving on a highway with his father beside him when he swerves to avoid a bleeding shirtless man (a harbinger of things to come) and hits a tree, killing his dad. His mother falls into a catatonic state from the shock of this. This is a prelude to Brent's senior year in high school. As graduation approaches, Brent's coping with his grief and survivor guilt through a blend of rock climbing and good weed, heavy metal, hanging out with his girlfriend Holly (Victoria Thaine), and taking long walks with his dog. When Lola (Robin McLeavy) comes up in the hall and invites him to the prom, he naturally tells her he's going with Holly.

Brent gets kidnapped on prom night by Lola, who holds him prisoner at her house and tortures him, aided by her equally creepy dad Eric (John Brumpton). She turns out to have kept a weird diary, and during Brent's torments, she and her dad take Polaroid photos to add to it showing dressup games involving the hapless and bravely silent Brent. As Rod Armstrong, the SFIFF planner of genre film showings, writes, "Brent is a remorseful, laconic hero who finds a visceral desire to live amid the most extreme circumstances. " Since the film has already spent enough quality time with him before his ordeal for us to get to know him, Brent's silence during the horror segments is an original device that works well.

Reviewers have differed on whether it makes sense for Byrne to keep shifting back and forth between Brent's prom night from hell and his best friend's evening with his date, which goes wrong in a more conventional way. It's true the film might have been neater if the two separate plot lines were joined toward the end, but the subplot functions to remind us this is prom night and to add suspense as well as relieve us from having to watch nonstop goriness. In the subplot, Byrne, who wrote as well as directed, shows his ability to combine a convincing kind of John Hughes-style teenage lifestyle study with his dive into nightmare cruelty. There's a nice irony in the fact that an ordinary bad date, who just misbehaves at the dance, can create a parallel sense of nastiness. And make no mistake about it, Lola becomes a fully developed character in her own right as, during her deranged behavior, she reveals the mentality of a warped nerdy girl filled with jealousy and rage. Byrne shows he is as good at writing as he is at action.

The acting is uniformly good, and Simon Chapman's cinematography deserves much credit for creating the bright hues on a limited budget. Byrne is a talented young man, and Hollywood reportedly is after him. Samuels has a part in the third Twilight film.

Seen at the San Francisco International Film Festival 2010.

[Chris Knipp]

Jessica Hausner: Lourdes (2009)


SYLVIE TESTUD IN LOURDES

Hallalulah (maybe)!

This film starring the pinched and fearless Sylvie Testud is about a miracle. And so it takes place at Lourdes, in France, the mountainous shrine where thousands seek a cure. Hausner's approach, documentary-like, Bressonian, a restrained social comedy that's also a study of faith, never mocks, but keeps its observant distance from this heavily religious environment where special things are supposed to happen (but mostly don't). Lourdes is a wonderfully dry film about scary things, and it's no surprise, therefore, to learn that the director, who is Austrian but here works in French, learned her trade with Michael Haneke.

Christine (Sylvie Testud) is a paralytic, unable to move arms or legs due to multiple sclerosis. She comes to Lourdes on a kind of religious tour, whose members include the disabled or ill, family members, or mere hangers-on like the two middle-aged women, Frau Huber and Frau Spor (Linde Prelog, Heidi Baratta), who gossip and comment throughout like a snippy Greek chorus. Presumably they are along for a spiritual cure rather than a physical one; the priests who minister to the pilgrims constantly suggest that is what they should all seek. The group is cared for and supervised by women volunteer nurses dressed like nuns, and by uniformed male members of the Knights of Malta, who include Kuno (Bruno Todeschini), a man both kind and handsome. As for Christine, she merely says such trips are the only times she gets out. She remarks to Kuno, who takes an interest in her, that she really prefers the cultural tours to the religious ones like this one.

Many of the scenes in Lourdes are collective, and are filmed amid actual crowds and ceremonies at the shrine, in its grottoes, its buildings, in front of its shops, often from a certain distance. This creates a sense of space that subtly conveys Christine's paralysis -- we're just specks on the wall observing helplessly -- and also gives a sense of a slow, relentless process that's going on all the time. And again there is a sense of helplessness, for the crowds move along hoping wanly for relief and finding only boredom and fatigue, though much of what we see is beautiful, the stately processions and ceremonies, the priests in full regalia, the thousands of candles shimmering in the darkness.

The way Christine is cared for is a slow ritual. She's formally dressed and undressed, her hair combed. She's laid into her bed and the covers pulled up, the mattress jacked up to raise her head. But at one point Maria (Léa Seydoux), the young volunteer taking care of her, simply walks off and leaves her and Madame Hartl (Gilette Barbier), an older woman in the tour who shares a bedroom with Christine, begins pushing her around. Later the volunteer in charge of the tour, Cécile (Elina Löwensohn), a woman in extremis herself, as it turns out, rebukes Christine for allowing herself to be brought to the head of a line. You won't get cured by cheating! Gradually dialogue reveals the many doubts and suspicions, as well as jealousies, that swarm around the scene. There have been miracles, but then they didn't last. Someone got up and walked, and later became crippled again. And then it wasn't a "miracle" and was discredited. It was personal, idiosyncratic, inauthentic.

When the miracle comes to Christine it's a surprise even if we might have suspected it. This is thanks to Hausner's skillful pacing and to Testud's deadpan performance, which reveals neither anger nor hope. During confession, she has told the priest she often asks "Why me?" but then when she's cured, or seems to be, others around are quick to ask, "Why her?" She is not a person of faith, though of course she must have hoped.

Hausner's film is off-putting and, though in theory rather droll at times, not very enjoyable. But it is a very detailed look at the ego and backbiting of some religious groups. They seem to bring together the kindest people with the meanest people, and sometimes it is hard to tell which are which. The film's coolness and avoidance of sentimentality (or chortling) makes its everyday examination of faith the more thought-provoking. And though the people at Lourdes are highly flawed, that doesn't mean something wonderful may never happen.

In a thoughtful review The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw has called Lourdes a "superbly subtle, mysterious and brilliantly composed film," and he is right. And it's also occasionally very droll; but that doesn't mean that it is a barrel of laughs.

Seen as part of the San Francisco Film Festival 2010.

[Chris Knipp]

Ivan Engler, Ralph Etter: Cargo (2009)--SFIFF


THE COSTUMES ARE A LITTLE BIT STARTREK

Asleep in space

Cargo is the first Swiss science fiction film. It takes place in space, on a great interplanatary transport ship, and its events call to mind Aliens, Sunshine, and Moon. It's a story of suspicions, unveiled conspiracy, revolt. The sets and the effects are grandiose. "Is this the great new Sci-Fi space epic?" publicity teasers ask. Well, no, it sure isn't. It's an overly-familiar, under-stimulating movie that winds up being very hard to care about or even follow, because the plot doesn't jell and the characters aren't fleshed out. The fancy accoutrements are just empty decor for a film that in toto is too underwritten.

The heroine of Cargo Laura (Anna-Katharina Schwabroh) is a doctor who has joined the ship's crew to earn money, presumably lots of it, for working on a journey to a remote location that will take light years to get to and from. The time is about 200 years from now, the Earth is largely uninhabitable, and the lucky humans inhabit a halcyon far-off planet called Rhea which has been given a makeover so that it somehow duplicates the earth at its healthiest and most fertile, as we see in scenes shown in messages from Laura's sister, who lives on Rhea. Only the rich can go there but Laura hopes to make it.

Things sound pretty familiar. Everything is controlled by large corporations. There is a threat of terrorism on these cargo flights. Consequently a man called Dekker (Martin Rapold) -- perhaps a homage to Blade Runner -- comes on board as a sky marshall counterterrorism officer. There's a tight-lipped mean lady called Arianne (Maria Boettner ) who takes over when the captain, Lacroix (Pierre Semmler) gets shot. I didn't catch the captain's name; he wasn't around long enough.

The ship runs automatically, and only one crew member need be on duty at a time. The rest put breathing masks on and are lowered into cryo-sleep in a kind of thick soup that freezes them off till their services are needed again. When Laura is on duty, she hears loud noises and realizes somebody else is out there in the storage area. She investigates, and soon learns -- and read no further if you don't want to know what happens -- that the ship doesn't contain normal cargo at all. It's full of cryo-sleeping people wired in a Matrix-like system and the ship is docked somewhere, broadcasting messages to people (somewhere, we don't really know very well where everybody is) because, doggone it, Rhea is just a simulation! The actual Rhea was an experiment that failed miserably, but the big corporation that runs things wants people to believe in it so they'll invest in going out to live in space stations. Eventually Laura finds out a few more things -- most importantly, that parts, at least, of Earth actually are inhabitable again, and the corporation is trying to keep humans from going back to live on their own home planet.

All this is very sketchy. Most of the film's time is spent with banging around in and out of the space ship. The latter part, where several people float around outside and dock with miraculous precision for no comprehensible reason, is embarrassingly badly executed. Cargo fails for several reasons. It is so derivative that it arouses comparisons that are never to its advantage. When one thinks of Duncan Jones' recent film Moon one realizes how a simple, low budget space travel film can have much more psychological depth than this. A moment's thought of Kubrick makes one realize that this grandiosity is in fact shallow and without real resonance. Remember the opening scenes of Aliens or the closing ones of Sunrise and you can see these characters and their interactions aren't made three-dimensional or interesting enough. You can't care about Cargo's characters and their conflicts because you have not learned who they are. It's unfortunate that they keep going off to cryo-sleep. Scenes were needed to show who they are, what they do, how they interact. Cargo puts the viewer into vicarious cryo-sleep after a while.

The film's best moments occur when we are floating around in the ship's vast hold with clanging containers moving inexplicably but menacingly around. Perhaps if the filmmakers had used a much simpler plot with mostly wordless action they might have made something suspenseful and beautiful. Cargo is of limited interest to any but hard core Sci-Fi fans, some of whom will enjoy the homages and, I guess, the clanging cargo containers. The Swiss can go back to making chocolate and watches.

Seen as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival 2010. One can see why it was included. It's a novelty, of sorts.

[Chris Knipp]

Joann Sfar: Gainsbourg (Je t'aime...moi non plus) (2009)


BARDOT (LAETITIA CASTA) AND GAINSBOURG (ELMOSINO): HAVE SEX, WRITE A SONG

A French icon of many songs and many loves

The French title of this biopic of the great French singer-songwriter, personality and womanizer, which opened in France January 10, 2010, is Gainsbourg (vie heröique). The subtitle "Je t'aime...moi non plus" is the title of Gainsbourg's most famous song, sung in a duet with Jane Birkin. This is the first non-animated feature of a major young French artist and writer. The 39-year-old Joann Sfar is himself a current cultural icon, having penned over 150 comic books and graphic novels for adults and children, including a graphic novel version of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's classic The Little Prince and his creation of a (1930's Algerian) rabbi's talking cat, Le chat du rabbin, a popular series soon to become an animated film. With this in mind it is not surprising that Sfar's biopic has, briefly, a talking cat; has a giant head from an anti-Semitic poster that comes to life; and gives its hero, Serge Gainsbourg, né Lucien Ginsburg, a tall, lean double, "La Guelle," the embodiment of his ugly mug, who follows him around throughout his life goading him to do naughty things and causing him trouble. It's a Dr. Jekyll-Mr. Hyde idea close to Gainsbourg's own later sense of himself.

As biopics go this one is richly evocative and appealingly frank and free. It's bluntly truthful about Gainsboug's womanizing and abuse of cigarettes and alcohol -- and his extraordinary exploits. He was the lover of a jaw-dropping stream of beautiful and amazing women, including Juliette Greco, herself one of France's most celebrated singers, Brigitte Bardot, and, most turbulently and lengthily, the famous English model and actress Jane Birkin. Birkin and Gainsbourg had a daughter, Charlotte Gainsbourg, now an internationally known actress and French icon in her own right. The film features a mouth-watering female cast. But it obviously isn't dutifully realistic or thorough. It doesn't even contain a great many of his songs, though singing is an important element in it. Best of all, Sfar doesn't feel obligated to follow his protagonist doggedly to the bitter end. He finishes off with beautiful abruptness somewhere in the early Eighties, when Serge was drunken but still very vigorous.

Gainsbourg is played by Eric Elmosnino, who has an ugly mug amazingly close to the real Gainsbourg's and who settles into the role with utter confidence, the more so in the later, more outrageous stages of the part. It seems lucky that Sfar's earlier ideas of using Charlotte Gainsbourg or Matthieu Amalric in the role had to be jettisoned in favor of a less-known actor who can more independently embody the man. One of the best elements of the film, however, is its early segment featuring the young, then, Lucien Ginsburg, played by the 10-year-old Kacey Mottet Klein as an irrepressible young sprite willing to try about anything. This shows the future songwriter in WWII boldly mocking authorities who make him wear a Star of David, trying to be an artist, puffing on cigarettes and persuading a curvaceous model to strip for him because he claims he can't draw a bra. His Russian Jewish father, who plays piano in a bar, forces Lucien to study piano, but is unsatisfied with the results till he hears him play a song at night. "You play better at night," he says.

Sfar was significantly helped by David Martí and Montse Ribé, 2007 Oscar winners for their work on Guillermo Del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth. They are responsible for the makeup and invented creatures that augment the biopic element so nicely.

Gainsbourg is a figure of such continuing significance, and wrote music in so many genres, that he touches all generations of the French today. Americans can hardly imagine such national appeal in a single artist, whose music 2010 French twenty-somethings will tell you you absolutely must listen to and of whom when he died in 1991 the then French President François Mitterand said, "He was our Baudelaire, our Apollinaire... He elevated the song to the level of art." With its big, fascinating cast and its wealth of unrolling incidents, this film begins to do justice to the man and his chaotic, intense life, but its best homage of all is its lightheartedness and flair.

The film has been warmly received in France with a 3.8/63 Allociné critical score. Serge Karganski in Les Inrockuptibles wrote: "An ultra-personal biopic, elegant and sparkling, playful and serious, heavy-light, as was Gainsbourg himself... A complete success." Gainsbourg is an entertaining film worthy not only of further festival exposure but of wide US distribution, and it has just been seen at Tribeca and the San Francisco International Film Festival. I saw it at the SFIFF.

[Chris Knipp]

Robert Cibis, Lilian Franck: Pianomania (2009)


STEFAN KNÜPFER AT WORK

A piano tuner's obsessiveness

This little documentary by a pair of Austrian filmmakers could be seen as a publicity film for German Steinway. It's about Stefan Knupfer, a Steinway concert technician, and reveals their (i.e. Steinway's) obsessively high standards and extreme precision. His name is Stefan Knüpfer and he is a Steinway concert technician. Knüpfer is a piano tuner, but on a more exalted level. He is prepared to go one-on-one with famous concert pianists, making sure before they give a performance or make a recording that they have the piano they want and it's tuned the way they like it.

There are several pianists who appear in this film, but as we shall see, all but one are hardly more than filler.

There is a classical comedy team, a violinist and pianist, Igudesman & Joo, who put on a show called "A Little Nightmare Music." Knüpfer fools around with them a bit. Lang Lang comes in before a concert and tries the piano. It's commented that it's hard to get him off the stage before a concert; and then he's seen at the recital doing one of his embarrassingly showy performances, making a complete hash of a Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody and receiving an ovation from his devoted fans afterward. The very gifted young Austrian pianist Till Fellner appears and makes a few interesting comments on types of piano sound. Fellner is a pianist who plays with great fluidity and grace, sometimes a little too great: his performances, though fine, can emphasize fluency over revelation. I was hoping for more of revelation from this film. It can be had in other films about classical piano, such as documentaries about Sviatoslav Richter, several on Glenn Gould; or the wide-ranging film, The Art of Piano. This is not on that level.

Alfred Brendel appears briefly -- a very great pianist in his late years, and an Austrian. He makes a simple comment that for a concert a grand piano should be tuned to have equal response along its whole keyboard, and that's that.

Pianists are, as the film notes, usually dissatisfied, very often liking only a part of a performance, and finding minute flaws in the pianos they play on. They have chosen the piano for concerts when they could. Since a piano is a large and heavy instrument that's hard to move around, that hasn't always been possible. Horowitz had his own specially designed piano that traveled with him, and in the Fifties before an early Columbia recording session a young Glenn Gould was filmed picking out a piano from a warehouse full of them at Steinway in New York. Gould seemed to favor "clarity" of sound for recording Bach. (Of course the terminology on these matters tends to be sui generis and moot.)

Pierre-Laurent Aimard, a French classical pianist fluent in German, is the man who provided Pianomania with its substance and its drama. Knüpfer and Aimard were made for each other. They are both to an equal degree obsessively precise about piano sound and piano tuning. One can frankly say they're both equally neurotic. Aimard is getting ready to record Bach's austere final keyboard work, The Art of the Fugue, on a modern piano. He seems to have some sort of idea, perhaps inspired by Knüpfer's willingness to please, of using several different pianos in the course of the recording, one to have an "organ" sound, another to have a "clavicord" sound, and several others tuned to other sounds. It's never quite fully spelled out. No doubt about the fact that Aimard has a precise and obsessive ear. Knüpfer exclaims that he can spot minute changes in tuning instantly without being told. And best of all for Knüpfer, Aimard is never happy. He has a way of saying "fine," and then after a pause, "Frage..." (Question...) And after that he'll express a doubt, a worry. And that may lead to the whole piano's being moved out in favor of another one that has to be hunted down in a warehouse -- as Knüpfer nervously does a heavy piano seat for Lang Lang, though it's not clear whether Lang Lang uses it or not.

For the "organ' sound, Knüpfer resorts to a system of three plastic baffles on the piano, meant to expand the sound. At the point when the two recording engineers come on the scene things become a more grounded in reality, however. They seem to view all this fuss over the precise details of the pianos as like the medieval question of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. The baffles turn out to be a disaster. They were an idea to project sound out in a certain way to the audience of a concert. Things work quite differently with a system of microphones being used to catch the sound. It's never fully clear what the different piano sounds that Aimard wanted were, and how he used them. What is clear that he and Knüpfer enjoy working together -- and that Knüpfer can do all sorts of things to alter piano sound. When he finds out that the hammers of a piano soon to be used in performance are seven tenths of a millimeter off, he freaks out. He winds up having new ones sent to him, and stays up all night to install them. He relates that once a Japanese engineer found a big lump of dust inside the works of one of "his" pianos. He said, "Put it back!" and points out that anything you move can change the sound and throw it off. He sometimes wiggles things around, or puts little dabs of cotton along the strings.

Ultimately this little documentary, for all its interesting obsessiveness, is a disappointment. It would have been better if it had been more instructive, more wide-ranging. There is not enough about music. Even Aimard's recording of Bach's Art of the Fugue -- the project that is the film's greatest drama and gets Knüpfer in such a state of nervous excitement -- isn't really followed through on. What did it sound like? Were the different piano sounds achieved? We don't find out. And Pianomania is not enough about pianists. All this fuss and precision mean little without great pianists to profit from them. Lang Lang's gyrations tell us nothing. Brendel and Fellner tell us something, but it would be better to hear from a real range of classical pianists about piano sound and to see them interact with Knüpfer. In between sequences the filmmakers insert a series of stills of the the city where Knüpfer is working. It's just postcard stuff, and a commonplace kind of filler for films on classical music.

Seen as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival 2010, where it won the award for Best Documentary Feature. The prize for Best Investigative Documentary Feature went to Lixin Fan's Last Train Home.

[Chris Knipp]

Pedro González-Rubio: Alamar (2009)


NATAN AND JORGE WITH BLANQUITA IN ALAMAR

Portrait of three generations bonding by a coral reef

Pedro González-Rubio, who is 34, was born in Belgium of Mexican parents and is a frequent visitor to India, where he spent a year in his teens. He studied media in Mexico City before attending the London Film School. He has been the cinematographer for several films, among them Born Without (2007) by Eva Norvind. Toro negro (2005) was his documentary debut. Alamar won a Tiger Award at Rotterdam. Working alone except for his sound man Manuel Carranza and another photographer to photograph the underwater diving, González-Rubio captures the intimacy of a father and his young son in an idyllic setting in this short film.

A cattle egret (Bubulcus ibis) they call Blanquita becomes a house pet when Natan's father takes him to spend the summer by the sea, ala mar. They live in a hut on stilts and spend most of their time fishing with the boy's grandfather Nestór. Banco Chincharro is the richest coral reef site in Mexico and part of the second largest coral reef barrrier in the planet," an after-title says. This is where Jorge Machado, his father, and his little boy Natan are, and dive to catch big crabs. Jorge, 30-something, is learning how to line fish at sea from his father, and they catch big fish easily. Natan comes along on all their outings and takes to it all like a fish to water.

Jorge and Natan's mother, Roberta Palombini, were in love but after Natan was born she found Jorge's world too remote, and they divorced and she took Natan to raise him in Rome. In a prelude we see her get him up, wash him and dress him to go and stay with his father, all the while talking to him in Italian. When he's in Mexico, he speaks Spanish with father and grandfather, learning new words all the time, remarkably fluent. The minute he is back with his mother he instantly begins speaking Italian again. This symbolizes the boy's seeming ease in adjusting to the two different worlds. This is a dream vacation, an idyll, for Natan and his father, who lets him share in everything and obviously adores him. After Blanquita goes off on her own again he takes Natan to look for her. He plays with Natan like a big brother but instructs and corrects him like a father. His own father is an easy-going, benevolent fisherman, still youthful, loving his life. Jorge is a lean and supple man of Mayan heritage with long flowing hair and an earring, a modest naturist who wears shorts but otherwise is naked and knows the names of species. Who is he? What is his usual life?

Alamar doesn't explain everything. It shows this is an interlude in Natan's life. When Jorge tells him it's over but he will be with him wherever he is he quietly cries. People have discussed whether this is a narrative feature or a documentary, concluding that it is both or neither, that it doesn't matter. It's not quite a feature, because it doesn't add enough of a made-up story. It's not quite a documentary, not the earnest social and political kind, investigating a subject or lecturing us on it. Gonzáles-Rubio has said in interviews that he gave Jorge and Natan "tasks" to do, each day, and then filmed them. So he was the organizer of their activities. The whole thing in Alamar is the experience of Nathan with his father and grandfather; the film was made to show the special rapport between Natan and Jorge that the director had spotted earlier. The film lets us revel in the naturalness, the simplicity, and the pleasure the three generations experience together. There's nothing but good humor and affection, never an unkind word spoken. When Jorge coaxes Blannquita to climb on his arm and then passes her onto Natan's arm, it's a magic moment, however momentary, of patience, gentleness, and sharing among generations and species that we can carry with us as Natan will carry his memories of the summer with his father with him.

The film is not about how the coral reef, a protected area where some 40 fishermen live, may be threatened by encroaching urbanism and pollution. It's not about the economic details of Jorge's or his father's life. It's not about the pull between Natan's urban life in Rome, where he says "they don't fish" because "the fish are already in the store," and his back-to-nature idyll or idylls (are there more?) with his father in Mexico. But if these are lacks of context, they aren't bothersome because González-Rubio has so memorably captured the intimacy and joy of Natan and his "papi" and their physical grace together.

Alamar has been bought by MK2 and will be released in France shortly. It produced by Jaime Romandia (Carlos Reygadas’ Silent Light, Battle in Heaven and Japón, and Amat Escalante’s Los Bastardos and Sangre). It was introduced at Venice and shown at Rotterdam and Toronto and won the Ibero-American Competition Grand Jury Prize at the 2010 Miami Film Festival and the Best Film Award at Buenos Airesl. It will open commercially July 14 at Film Forum in New York and in March was screened at the BAM Rose theaters. Film Movement is making Alamar available on DVD simultaneous with its commercial run in New York.

Seen as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival 2010, where it won the New Directors Award, which includes a prize of $15,000.

[Chris Knipp]

Walter Salles, Daniela Thomas: Linha de Passe (2008)



Brothers without fathers, in São Paolo

This collaboration between Walter Salles (Central Station, The Motorcycle Diaries) and previous co-director Daniela Thomas provides a look at the struggles of urban Brazilian youth without melodrama or ultra-violence. (Salles saw Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund's City of God as an impressive film but one that misled the public into thinking every Brazilian kid packs an AK-47.) The texture of the film is gritty, but attractive. Like the boys in Visconti's Rocco and His Brothers, the focus is on the sons in a family who have a natural glamor, but are presented in a neorealist style. Linha de passe is a term for passing a soccer ball from one player to another without its touching the ground. An English language title hasn't been found yet; the French used simply Une famille brésilienne/A Brazilian Family. The film is engaging, if a bit chaotic. The May-through-September time-lined structure helps add organization, but the effort to move constantly back and forth among five different characters and scenes becomes wearying toward the end, though the lack of any resolution certainly is an honest reflection of the protagonists' near-hopeless lives.

Living in the slums of São Paulo, the country's most populous city, Cleuza (Sandra Corveloni, who won the Cannes Best Actress award in 2008 for this performance) is a hard, spirited woman who smokes, works as a housekeeper, and keeps having sons by different men. Cleuza is an obsessive soccer supporter with four boys, none of whom knows who his father is. She's pregnant again, and when her mistress notices, she edges her out by hiring another woman to replace her. Cleuza's youngest, Reginaldo (Kaique de Jesus Santos), who is black, is intent on resolving the mystery in his own case. He believes his dad is a bus driver and so spends all his spare time riding buses, befriending drivers, and learning how to drive a bus. His final exploit of stealing a bus and driving it off on his own, designed to draw attention to himself and thus lead him to his father, is based on a true story.

Reginaldo is feisty, handsome, and precocious and his exploit is amazing, but the film excels at balancing its attention among each of the sons. Dario (Vinicius de Oliveira, who when very young starred in Salles' Central Station) is a talented soccer player who wants to make it on a commercial team. But having just reached 18 he is at the limit for hiring of newbies; when he finally finds a coach still interested in his impressive ball handling, shooting and (with prodding) teamwork, he finds out he has to come up with a big "tip" to get the team official to ease him in. Dinho (José Geraldo Rodrigues) works at a gas station, but his life revolves around evangelical Christianity. He's had some badness in his past, but is determinedly righteous now. Dênis (João Baldasserini), the oldest, has a small boy he very seldom sees and cannot provide support for as a motorcycle messenger. He is still paying for the bike. This need for money leads him to crime.

The settings are real and gritty and the main actors, save Vincius, had no previous experience. All this contributes to the vigor, spirit, and naturalism of a narrative that grounds its drama in sociology. It begins with the statistical fact that a large percentage of São Paulo's children are fatherless. There is little sense of social organization or services here.

Dênis' momentary turn to theft and carjacking leads the film as far as it ever goes into Hollywood actioner territory. Meanwhile Dinho is having his faith tested and seriously losing his cool, little Reginaldo is moving up to joy-riding a giant bus, and Dario, who earlier went on a dangerous drug and alcohol spree in frustration, is seemingly getting that big break on the soccer field, but his lack of money to bribe the manager may doom his chances. Everyone is moving boldly forward, hopeful in the face of despair. One ends the film feeling wrung out and uncertain. Salles has become seemingly more realistic but also more pessimistic by now than he was when he made the emotionally moving but somewhat saccharine Central Station, and he does not wreathe his ghetto youths in mist as he does the Che Guevara of The Motorcycle Diaries. This is a valiant effort, with many engaging elements, but the final effect is somewhat lukewarm.

The editing by Gustavo Giani and Lívia Serpa is unfailingly clear; it is not their fault if the focus on five plot lines at the end of the film becomes a little overwhelming, and ultimately numbing.

Premiered in May 2008 at Cannes, Linha de Passe is still unreeling in various countries. Seen at the San Francisco International Film Festival May 29, 2010. In the dual-theater projection, an unfortunate staple at the SFIFF, the print did not look very good; presumably a fault of the projection and not of highly experienced d.p. Mauro Pinheiro Jr.