New Directors/New Films and Film Comment Selects 2011

[Chris Knipp]

Denis Villeneuve: Incendies (2010)


LUBNA AZABAL IN INCENDIES

"Fire," "burnings," a strange family history and a parable of sectarian war

When you watch the French Canadian director Denis Villeneuve's Oscar-nominated film Incendies -- and it is worth watching – prepare for something long, literally dark, and shocking. The film, adapted from a play by the celebrated young Canadian-Lebanese playwright Wajdi Mouwawad but expanded into a film rich in Middle East location (and in Arabic as well as French dialogue) delves deeply into the hidden past of a family of Lebanese origin. A mother from Lebanon, Nawal Marwan (Lubna Azabal) dies at 60. Her twin son Simon (Maxim Gaudette) and daughter Jeanne (Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin ) go before a notary for whom their mother also worked, Jean Lebel (Rémy Girard) and they receive instructions in the form of two sealed letters, one for a brother and one for a father. This is incredible news for the twins. They thought their father died a heroic death and they knew nothing of a brother. Nawal also requests that she be buried naked in the ground, face down, without a coffin. Simon is angered by all this and rejects it. Jeanne wants to comply with their mother's wishes.

What follows intermixes flashbacks to the early life of Nawal with sequences about Jeanne's quest, which Simon eventually joins. For reasons not entirely clear to me, the name "Lebanon" is never mentioned, though it is clear that violent fighting between Christians and Muslims and a country where educated Arabic-speaking people also tend to speak French mark the setting as Lebanese. (Actual location shooting was mostly done in Jordan.) Here it is meant to be a fictional country called "Foad," though it could still have been universal, at least for countries of long war and savage factional conflict, without the fiction that it was not what it plainly is. Rape, torture, genocide and dislocation dominate this world, whose distance from the experience of Jeanne and Simon we can only guess at. Incendies is powerful and absorbing and while the images of war are familiar from many films, what holds them together is the detective-story trajectory that we cannot reveal and is a discovery even Nawal herself does not come to until shortly before her death.

In flashbacks to her decades-earlier life we see Nawal watch her lover shot in front of her; then give birth to a child who's immediately taken from her; later become the sole survivor of a bus shot up by Christian militiamen; still later be imprisoned for many years and repeatedly raped. It's all a bit much, but it's so stunningly staged and shot that you rarely question it. You only wish the two siblings investigating their mother's secret, violent past were more interesting or more involved.

One of the first flashback sequences reveals what the twins will only realize later: that the heroic father who died in a moment of strife, a Muslim refugee despised by Nawal's Christian siblings, was actually the father of their older brother, not them, and that older brother was taken away from Nawal because born out of wedlock, but tattooed with three dots on the heel so she might be able to recognize and find him again some day. Those dots are duly connected. It might be better if they weren't.

More flashbacks show Nawal going in search of her lost son, sent to a Christaian orphanage burnt in reprisal by Muslim militias,though the orphans were saved -- somewhere. Nawal volunteers with a Muslim militia in hopes of finding the boy, and is jailed, for 15 years, where she is known as "the woman who sings" and is so resilient no cruelty, including rape, causes her to crack. Informants' accounts of Jeanne alternate with images of Nawal herself. I couldn't help being reminded of Ana Ularu, in the Romanian film Outbound, just seen, who also is a spare, stony-faced young woman in search of a young boy who's been put in an orphanage. But Nawal must endure greater tests.

As Peter Debruge explains in his Variety review , Villeneuve "excises entire blocks of text" in the transfer from play to film. Instead there are many striking images, often in a soft semidarkness that underlines the mystery the twins are unraveling. Debruge further suggests that Villeneuve lets us draw our own conclusions and speak our own words where the playwright Mouwawad spelled everything out in long monologues. Whatever one may think of the thorny tragic and tendentious plot whose final revelation strains credulity, and however excessive the measured pace of the 130-minute film is at times, Villeneuve has realized the play on film in a bold and richly cinematic manner and his accomplishment has already gained festival kudos and the justified admiration of cinephiles.

Incendies could have been a better film if it allowed itself to breathe and curbed some of its drawn-out and less necessary sequences. Perhaps it could have taken a moment to smile, yea, even in the world of near-biblical suffering. Ultimately the source play shakes you up while lecturing you and the film does the same. One is fascinated by the plot twists and can see their poetic justice without consenting to believe them all. Some of the truths of war and sectarianism might ring truer if they were not all so neatly tied into the detective-story search for family origins. I think often in this kind of context of Claire Denis's 2004 The Intruder and Arnaud des Pallières 2003 Adieu, multi-level films about family and wrongdoing whose failures to connect all the dots make them richer and more memorable and perhaps even more truly cinematic. Perhaps only a disturbing and never-explained opening sequence in Incendies of boys having their head shaved to the tune of Radiohead's "You and Whose Army" has that quality of boldly evoking inexplicable but dangerously real worlds.

Director Villeneuve has thrice before been put forth as Canada’s pick in the Best Foreign Oscar category — for his first three films: Cosmos, August 32nd on Earth and Maelström — but has never won the award (this year it went to Danish director Susanne Bier's In a Better World). Incendies was also shown at Venice, Telluride, Toronto and Sundance. With it he may have moved up a notch as an international artist and even this time a more commercially viable one. Incendies goes into limited US release April 22, 2011. Incendies was reviewed in January in Filmleaf's Forums section by Howard Schumann at the time its Canadian release.

Seen and reviewed as part of New Directors/New Films, the series co-presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and MoMA, New York March 22-April 3, 2011.

ND/NF screenings:
Friday, March 25th 2011 | 6:00 PM | MoMA
Sunday, March 27th 2011 | 8:30 PM | FSL

[Chris Knipp]

Seren Yüce: Majority (2010)


ESME MADRA AND BARTU KÜÇÜKÇAGLAYAN IN MAJORITY

Indecision and ethnic issues in Istanbul

Seren Yüce is a young Turkish director who deserves credit for dealing with the situation of the most ordinary and unglamorous of characters. Mertkan (Bartu Küçükçağlayan) is a paunchy, unambitious, bored 21-year-old who lives with his mother Nazan (Nihal G. Koldas) and father Kemal (Settar Tanriogen). His father is the macho, aggressive owner of a construction company, for whom Mertkan is little more than an errand boy. His older brother is married and lives on his own and is therefore, in Mertkan's eyes, free. Mertkan is in thrall to his dad. His mother is disappointed in him and her husband, whom she calls "insensitive." We see in an opening sequence that Mertkan as a young boy was unthinkingly abusive to their housemaid, and even then he was psychologically bullied by his condescending father. The family's life isn't luxurious, but they don't suffer either, and when there's a problem, dad's money can fix it. Mertkan drives a late-model SUV. He hangs out with pals, all with gelled hair, whose idea of a good time is to drink tea in the mall, scarf hamburgers, or drive around quaffing beer.

Unfortunately the film seems as unmotivated and listless as its protagonist, and while it has realistic and occasionally humorous moments, it utterly lacks flair or the ability to make its scenes pop.

Into Mertkan's demeaning, dull and senseless existence as an homme moyen sensuel, spineless version, comes Gül (Esme Madra), a young, slim, darkly pretty Kurdish woman (though the word "Kurdish" is never spoken) who works in the fast-food joint where Mertkan bolts hamburgers to assuage his humiliations from his father. She begins to show interest in Mertkan and since he has nothing better to do, he goes along. If he's not a virgin at least he may not have had sex for free before, with kissing. This seems as much as is going to happen to stir things up, and writer-director Yüce's main point seems to be highlighting the ways in which bourgeois prejudices plug into the Turkish-Kurdish split. The prejudices are shared by Merkan's mall rat pal Ersan (Ilhan Hacifazlioglu), who refers to Gül as a "gypsy," which is either slang for "slut" or a Turkish code word for "Kurd." In fact these subtleties are hard to judge by an outsider, and a Turkish viewer of the film has questioned the casting of Gül, saying the actress speaks Turkish with too perfect an Istanbul accent to have come not so long ago from Van, as designated in the story. Given the fact that she's studying sociology at a good university, the viewer also questioned Gül's telling Mertkan her greatest dream (he can think of none himself) is to find a handsome man and marry him.

This seems not so surprising: Gül is away from her family, and short on money. The fast-food job is necessary to pay for school and her digs are humble and shared. Gül escaped from a suffocating, traditional home life and she needs some security. She's not unaware that Mertkan has money in his pocket. Marriage could indeed be high on her list of priorities, even though it means risking entrapment in a situation that will not allow her to use her education to full advantage.

After Martkan brings Gül home for dinner (which at least he has the courage to do), Kemal very quickly tells him to dump her. People from Van are communists, he says, and this woman represents the people who want to break up the country. This is Mertkan's chance to show some cojones. But will he? Unfortunately Yüce has no excitement up his sleeve, though from scene to scene he keeps it realistic, and sometimes slightly funny.

Yüce has been assistant director on films like Akin's Edge of Heaven, but Akin's brilliance and ambition have not worn off on him. However, the casting is good. Despite his schlubby appearance and lack of energy, as Mertkan Bartu Küçükçağlayan manages to be somebody you can identify with, and the other three principals are quite real. Yüce just needed to write a script that made something more telling happen. Majority doesn't make sufficient dramatic use of its issues and conflicts.

Yüce's first feature, Majority/Çoğunluk won a number of awards in Turkey and the Lion of the Future prize at Venice. It was also shown at Thessaloniki and Rotterdam. Seen and reviewed as part of New Directors/New Films, the series jointly presented by MoMA and the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York from March 22 through April 3, 2011.

ND/NF screenings:
Friday, March 25th 2011 | 9:15 PM | MoMA
Sunday, March 27th 2011 | 12:30 PM | FSLC

[Chris Knipp]

Anne Sewitsky: Happy, Happy (2010)


JOACHIM RAFAELSEN, AGNES KITTELSEN, MAIBRITT SAERENS, HENRIK RAFAELSEN IN HAPPY, HAPPY

Danish couples comedy with cringe-worthy giggles

Anne Sewitsky’s directorial debut Happy, Happy (Sykt lykkelig, which means "sickeningly happy") is a dark little satire of sex and manners with musical interludes and an ugly little subplot that seems tasteless and pointless. Two couples, each with a little boy, are thrown together in an isolated piece of the Norwegian countryside as into a Petri dish. Into the world of Kaja (Agnes Kittelsen) and Erik (Joachim Rafaelsen) and their young son Theodor (Oskar Hernæs Brandsø) come tall Liam Neeson-lookalike Sigve (Henrik Rafaelsen), his blond Danish wife Elisabeth (Maibritt Saerens), and their adopted African son Noa (Ram Shihab Ebedy). The writer, Ragnhild Tronvoll, wastes no time. The one couple is renting the house to the other and they've close together. A joint dinner is staged the first evening. Kaja's neediness is embarrassing. She seems to have no social outlets and Erik seems to have no social skills.

The second night the landlords dine chez the new tenants. This time a couples game causes Kaja to blurt out more. She and Erik haven't had sex for a year! Drunk, she rushes from the table crying, and in comforting her Sygve reveals the embarrassing reason for their coming to the country: Elisabeth has just had an affair. Sygve and Kaja embrace, and the loosened-up kaja gives Sygve a quick blow-job.

This only leads to more in the days to follow. Sex with Sygve is much better for Kaja than it ever was with Erik. Erik, it turns out, has told Kaja she isn't attractive anymore. He'd rather go moose hunting. Actually (this emerges more gradually) he may never have liked women that much, and his hunting trips are a probable excuse to indulge his sexuality "on the down low." This comes out when Erik and Sygve go on a run, and afterward in a rush of emotion and misunderstanding Erik tries to kiss Sygve. Kaja turns out to have long feared Erik is gay. He may have married her out of pity because when they dated she was so unhappy and unlovable.

Elisabeth is a cold, unpleasant woman, hardly the "perfect" creature Kaja sees. For a while, Sygve may believe he's in love with Kaja, who definitely thinks she's never been happier in her life than Sygve has made her. A (possibly reformed?) Erik attempts sex with both women, but his technique is comically crude and pleases neither.

Meanwhile Theodor and Noa enter into a sick master-slave relationship involving beatings and confinement brought about by Theodor's reading about African slavery. Erik finds out about his wife's infidelity and, having been a good wrestler in his youth, tries to beat up Sygve out in the snow -- where one day Theodor comes upon Kaja and Sygve cavorting in the nude. Maybe the boys' unhealthy role-playing is an expression of their emotional confusion about their parents' misbehavior.

The narrative arc leads up to a somewhat weak climax as Christmas comes and Sygve, Elisabeth and Kaja have joined the local glee club and Elisabeth, who knows about Sygve's affair with Kaja pushes Kaja to sing the soprano solo in "Amazing Grace," which looks like it's going to lead to huge embarrassment. In the end it turns out at least one of these marriages is over, but there's no follow-through.

A young male quartet in suits and ties sings American songs in interludes staged in a studio that both break up segments of the film and add to the comic distancing and neatly dovetail with the musical theme of the glee club and classics that underline sexual moments. Dennis Harvey of Variety calls the quartet "a Greek-chorus device that restores good humor at the darkest moments." And there are dark moments. Harvey acknowledges that the writing sometimes "risks pushing the envelope farther than the feature's lightly farcical emphasis can handle."

Happy, Happy is an accomplished comedy -- if you can call it a comedy. It is hard sometimes to see Kaja's unresolved personality -- she turns out to be an orphan raised in foster homes -- and Erik's sexual confusion as funny, and it is quite impossible to see the Norwegian boy's continual abuse of the African boy as in any way risible. A playing with the squirm-worthy slips into the tasteless there. Noa isn't developed as a character either. Is the slavery-play just good fun for him? He never interacts with his parents, and barely speaks.

There are gaps and implausible elements in the writing too. How come this young couple owns two houses in close proximity? Kaja is a schoolteacher and Elisabeth is a lawyer, but what do Erik and Sygve do? The direction is sure enough to keep the scenes moving energetically, but Sewitsky can't manage the various tonal shifts in the script. The actors, particularly Rafaelsen and Kittelsen, do good work, with Rafaelsen providing the subtlest moments.

Sykt lykkelig, not to be confused with Henrik Ruben Genz's droll Jutland Danish comedy Frygtelig lykkelig (Terribly Happy), won the World Cinema Jury award at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, which shows how well the setup works for audiences. There is some talk of a Hollywood remake. Seen and reviewed as part of New Directors/New Films, presented by MoMA and the Film Society of Lincoln Center March 23-April 3, 2011.

ND/NF screenings:
Friday, March 25th 2011 | 6:00 PM | FSLC
Sunday, March 27th 2011 | 4:30 PM | MoM

[Chris Knipp]

Pia Marais: At Ellen's Age (2010)


JEANNE BALIBAR (LEFT) AND STEFAN STERN (RIGHT) IN AT ELLEN'S AGE

A woman poised on the edge -- very poised

Pia Marais grew up in South Africa, Sweden, and Spain, studied in London and Germany. At Ellen’s Age (Im Alter Von Ellen) is an international film, a film aware of but at ease with dislocation. Jeanne Balibar is a famous French movie actress, who here acts in meticulous German. Arnaud Despleshin, Jacques Rivette, Olivier Assayas, Benoît Jacquot, and Christophe Honoré love Jeanne Baibar, and you can see why. Here, as Ellen, she is a woman at the end of her tether who never loses her implacable cool. That's Jeanne Balibar: a poise and neutrality, that is at the same time amused, present, intelligent. Here, as Ellen, she is an international person by occupation: an airline stewardess, who has a panic attack and walks off the job just as the plane is ready for takeoff because she sees a leopard on the runway.

That's one reason. But she is slightly unhinged already. Her longtime companion, Florian (Georg Friedrich) has left her. Or his relationship with another woman has made theirs too unstable. He is about to be a father -- of the other woman's baby. He seems to want a kind of ménage à trois. Without the placebo of the formerly stable "home" to return to, the instability of Ellen's job becomes simply aimlessness. She learns that her walk-off will force her superiors to fire her, and she wanders off. She walks in on a gay colleague at an airport hotel and spends the night, sleeps over and is taken up by a woman who stages a drunken sex party to amuse and distract her -- or perhaps just make us think of the drawings of Otto Dix.

Ellen's aimlessness is a kind of distracted chutzpah. She won't put out her cigarette in a taxi, and the driver evicts her -- and drives off with her suitcase in the trunk. She hitches a ride in a van to catch the taxi, but instead, still wearing her flight attendant uniform, the only clothes she has, becomes the somewhat out of place guest of a commune of young long-haired animal activists. They are a hippie and punk German version of the anti-poachers she saw after the leopard appeared on the African runway and delayed takeoff. A little African boy lighting a handmade cigarette said they were "professionals." "We are the only ones who shoot the poachers," he had said.

Marais' film, following Horst Markgraf 's screenplay, has an admirable dreamlike quality that creates a sense of captured reality. The young German activists are attractive. They argue about all their actions. They are vegans. They are a commune, so they find a temporary place for Ellen. Her maturity and sense of order might help them. But in one of their demos she won't strip naked as they do so she doesn't get full voting rights, and later she is not allowed to live in the guest room.

Florian, who has been desperately searching for her, finds Ellen in a furniture store, finally not in her stewardess uniform any more. "I live here," she says. He wants to take her back, but she won't go. She has him come and see her with Karl (Stefan Stern), a young man in the commune who finds her beautiful. She has Karl pretend he's her boyfriend to show Florian she no longer needs him. Later Karl proposes marriage to her, because it may exempt him from military service. She marries him but will not have sex with him -- till she does. There is a good scene in a bathtub. Karl makes one realize that Ellen has bravado. He has it too, but he admits he's not as confident as he seems. "I know," she says.

The German activists stop a truck and release a load of chickens, and later let loose a lot of white lab mice. Memorable moments: Ellen with a monkey on her shoulder; in the dark with a horde of white mice scurrying away. The message (to us) is clear: this is foolishness. The sexy young activists are not helping the animals. Suddenly, we're in Africa, and Ellen has found the anti-poacher group again and the African boy who rolls cigarettes. In the final scene, when she has been given a bed and made it up, the boy says, "I think you need a new set of clothes. . . or maybe you just need to come with me for a walk." And they go off into the African haze, her dawn. We don't know if this will be her life or is just a stepping stone, like Karl.

In this second film by Marais (her first won four prizes for a promising beginning) Ellen has come to a mid-life crisis that's a crisis of age but also a kind of rebirth into an age of reason. Viewers who find the script aimless or think the film establishes too little distance from its protagonist can enjoy Balibar's sublimely improvisational, self-possessed performance as a woman stripped of everything and therefore free. They may also enjoy the convincing and detailed scenes of the German animal rights commune, and the flavorful moments in Marais' home continent of Africa. The transfer from 16mm to 35 is handsome and the sound is atmospheric.

This picture debuted at Locarno just before a JetBlue employee walked off in very similar circumstances, life imitating art. At Ellen's Age was also shown at Toronto. Seen and reviewed as part of the New Directors/New Films series presented by MoMA and the Film Society of Lincoln Center from March 23 through April 3, 2011 in NYC.

2010. Germany. 95 minutes. In German.

Series showing times:
2011-03-24 | 6:00 PM | MoMA
2011-03-26 | 3:00 PM | FSLC

[Chris Knipp]

Mohamed Diab: Cairo 678 (2010)



A campaign against Cairo gropers

The title stands for a crowded Cairo bus where women are routinely harassed sexually by men. The story is one of self-empowerment. Thus it fits in well with the post-January 25 moment in which Egypt lives today. The film reads at first like an a lesson and consciousness-raiser for Middle Eastern women. But it's done with such vividness and humor it quickly becomes involving and thought-provoking for any audience. 678 follows three women who become connected because of shared anger at the way Egyptian men habitually feel up and assault women in public places. If it was noted that it didn't happen in Tahrir Square during the demonstrations, that reflected the new revolutionary spirit.

Each of the thee women suffers from different assaults -- gropers, grabbers, feelers, lone and group. A wealthy young woman is felt up by a dozen men who press upon her at a crowded football match. She isn't raped, but she feels violated. Another is a "muhaggiba," a veiled women who's constantly bothered on buses, which limited income forces her to ride to her job at a government registry office. The third is a free-thinking young lady -- she aspires to doing stand-up, like her fiance -- who is grabbed and pulled along by a man driving a pickup truck through a public square.

Fayza (Bushra), the "muhaggiba," gets groped daily. Her husband Adel (Bassem Samra) is a crude dude who works two jobs just to pay the rent. Their two kids are being forced out of a tuition school. He wants a little loving when he gets home, but Fayza is so turned off by men she pushes him away. A TV appearance by Seba (Nelly Karim) leads Fayza to attend her class in self-defense for women threatened with male groping. She keeps coming back to the class again and again, but is too ashamed to tell Seba what's been happening to her.

Seba is the one who was assaulted at the soccer game. What's worse, when it happened her husband Sherif (Ahmed El Fishawy) was more concerned about himself than her. He claimed to be so disturbed by Seba's "defilement" that he had to stay away from home for weeks. This meant he wasn't around when she had a miscarriage, for which she can't forgive him.

After Fayza keeps coming to Seba's class, Seba tells her she doesn't need to learn self-fefence. She points to a pin she's wearing and says that's all she needs. Fayza takes this advice and after she stabs several perpetrators with sharp objects, she tells Seba. They both know it's wrong but still feel pleased.

Nelly (Nahed El Sebai) is the would-be comedian engaged to marry a standup comic (Omar El Saeed). She wants to take the pickup truck driver to court in a sexual harassment case, but Omar's family says it she does that, he can't marry her. Another issue is he must give up standup and become a banker to be able to afford to marry -- the crippling cost of weddings and the low incomes of college grads being big issue in Egypt.

The stabbings lead to all three women being questioned by a wry and rotund cop, Essam (Maged El Kedwany), who eventually figures what's going on (and also stands in for various segments of the Egyptian male audience). El Kedwany is especially good as a classic Egyptian figure who yet is complex and unpredictable and has tragedies of his own to deal with. When the tension grows to a peak, the women temporarily turn on each other, Fayza accusing the more modern women of provoking assaults while they blame her traditional outlook for perpetuating male chauvinism. Nelly's case refers to the first actual presentation of a sexual assault case in an Egyptian court. After-titles point out that there are still very few such cases. But both Fayza's counter-attacks and Nelly's daring in court evidently reflect shifting attitudes.

His directorial debut, this is Diab's fifth screenplay, and the writing skill shows in the earthiness of some of the characters and the street, police station, standup audiences, domestic scenes of different social levels and bus scenes, all written and directed to deftly convey the texture of Egyptian daily life. Ahmed Gabr's handheld camera could have been toned down a bit. Cairo 678 is distributed by Fortissimo Films (Jean-Michel Basquiat: the Radiant Child; Winter's Bone).

2010. Egypt. 100 minutes. In Egyptian Arabic. (The title was mistakenly given as "6,7,8" in the ND/NF series program and has now been revised to Cairo 678. The original film title is 678.)

678 was shown at the Dunbai festival, where it won the Muhr Arab award and Bushra and Al Kedwany won best actress and best actor prizes. The film opened in Cairo to acclaim and notoriety in December 2010. Seen and reviewed as part of the New Directors/New Films series presented March 23-April 3 by MoMA and the Film Society of Lincoln Center, NYC.

Screening times and dates for ND/NF:
2011-03-26 | 3:30 PM | MoMA
2011-03-28 | 9:00 PM | FSLC

NOTE: This film, under the title Les Femmes du Bus 678, is being released in France May 30, 2012.

[Chris Knipp]

Göran Hugo Olsson: The Black Power Mixtape: 1967-1975 (2011)


VINTAGE COLOR FROM THE BLACK POWER MIXTAPE

A Swedish look at the Black Power era

What can Göran Hugo Olsson, a Swede born in 1965, add to our understanding of the Black Power movement in America? The answer is not a lot, really, other than a "clean and clear" point of view uncolored by American emotions or prejudices of the movement's radical rise and importance as a new generation's break from the passive resistance of Dr. King leading up the its decline under violent attack from US law and the FBI and the government-induced drug epidemic. But to tell the story, Olsson had access to some rich and beautiful newly unearthed footage shot by Swedish journalists. And by "mixtape" he means that he added new commentary by Black Americans who were around at the time and have lived to tell their tale -- or, more accurately, to reassess the significance of events in the light of today. In the discovered footage, in particular there is more than usual of Stokely Carmichael (including him interviewing his mother), an interview with Kathleen Cleaver when she was in jail, a full-dress interview with Lewis Farrakhan on the eve of his rise to power, and, perhaps best of all, much lovely and atmospheric old 16mm color footage of life on the streets off Harlem.

A peculiar interlude concerns how TV Guide, oddly described as "the most popular magazine in America," published a cover story by the editor that lambasted Sweden's depiction of American politics. Emile De Antonio is shown putting the magazine in its place as idiotic and read by idiots.

The Swedish descriptions of Harlem treat it as if it were some third world country. There is a Marxist slant that's not out of place in describing the demographics there and the radical aims of the Black Panther Party of Oakland, whose free breakfasts where children are led in empowerment chants are shown, and which were famously described by J. Edgar Hoover as the most dangerous activity in America. It doesn't always come together. Though Last Poets member Abiodun Oyewole is one of the contemporary "mixtape" voiceovers, the Swedes can't give a full sense of the American context, and the American present time speakers, like Erykah Badu, Harry Belafonte, Cleaver, Angela Davis, Talib Kweili, Bobby Seale, and Ahmir-Khalib Thompson, discuss 1968 as if it only happened in America. Oddly, a world-wide picture of the Sixties political upheavals is never drawn.

Göran Hugo Olsson has made commercials, shorts, documentaries, and music videos. This is his first documentary feature. It won the World Documentary Editing award at Sundance in January and was also shown at Berlin in February and will be shown at Miami, Istanbul, and San Francisco. Sundance Selects is distributing the film. Seen and described as part of New Directors/New Films, presented March 23-April 3, 2011 by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

ND/NF screenings:
2011-03-26 | 9:00 PM | MoMA
2011-03-28 | 6:00 PM | FSL

[Chris Knipp]

Denis Côté: Curling (2010)


EMMANUEL BILODEAU IN CURLING

Overprotective dad and a pileup of corpses

In Denis Côté's miserabilist mock-thriller a French Canadian bowling alley handyman develops increasing mental problems while keeping his 15-year-old daughter out of school and away from much contact with the outside world. An opening scene shows she hasn't even had her eyes examined before. With glasses, she wanders out one day and comes upon a pile of frozen corpses. Later her dad hides a corpse himself -- that of a neighbor boy he finds dying by the highway -- in an abandoned motel where he used to work. Emmanuel Bilodeau plays the borderline-autistic dad Jean-Francois, and his real life daughter Philomène plays Jean-François' daughter, Julyvonne. The names may be fun, but the action decidedly isn't in this feature, the director's fourth, which has little to recommend it other than a Beckettian alienation, without the eloquence.

Curling takes place, we're told, in a "rural Quebec town," but we see only desolate settlements. The bowling alley, where Jean-Francois Sauvageau, the man with the mustache and the the Aznavour stare, cleans up; a deserted motel called "Mistral" where he also cleans up, until its owners shut it down; his own house, where he keeps his 15-year-old daughter Julyvonne a virtual prisoner; and thin strips of wind-and-snow swept highway in between. The father-daughter acting collaboration isn't a very fruitful one: the two Bilodeaus have little chemistry or presence; both maintain sad-sack stares. A visit to wife and mother Rosie (Johanne Haberlin) in prison leads to an outburst. Rosie knows Jean-François is keeping the girl isolated and declares with fury that she's "borderline retarded" and that threatens that she'll get revenge for this wrongdoing when she gets out.

Left all day by herself, Julyvonne seems strangely content with sitting outside staring into space. When she finds the group of frozen corpses, she runs from them at first, but then goes back in the daytime to join them now and then. They might represent the evil outside world her father has tried in vain to shield her from, but for her in an odd way for her they represent life, the existence of other people. Côté doesn't really do anything but drop vague hints as to what anything may mean. When Jean-François hides the little boy's corpse, it's apparently because he doesn't want to deal with cops. Since the motel lady also says not to call the cops when he finds puddles of blood on the bed and floor of a room recently vacated by a trucker, Jean-François emerges as only marginally odder or more secretive than the other rural characters in Côté's oddball world.

"Fun" (the Canadian French word for, in fact, fun) is offered by the bowling alley boss, who brings in a bright-haired goth girl to mind the snack bar, and by Jean-François' former motel employers, who take him to a commercial location where people play the Canadian variation of the game of curling -- where big polished granite stones are slid over ice in a competition that combines aspects of bowls, boule and shuffleboard. Jean-François takes his daughter, eventually, to these activities. After he hides the boy's body, he has a mental meltdown, though, and goes off in his car leaving his daughter to her own devices. A brief encounter with a rural call girl seems to soften him up, however, and as the film ends he calls Julyvonne, declaring love and affection, and returns to her again.

In constructing his bleak tale, which is not enlivened by music (save a few CD's played for Julyvonne as rewards for being good) or by any humor, Côté has provided some of the trappings of a murder mystery, namely the group of adult corpses the girl finds -- and for all we know the boy might be victim of the same feud or gang fight. He has also created an emotional crisis in his protagonist. However both of these are red herrings. The emotional crisis is deflated, or turned around. The bodies -- well, the cops are coming, but it's a while till spring thaw time. Côté is intentionally careless in spinning his yarn.

Shown at Locarno in compettion, the film won the Best Director prize there. Seen and reviewed as part of New Directors/New Films presented March 23-April 4, 2011 by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and MoMA, New York. In French-Canadian dialect. 92min. In 35mm.

ND/NF screening times:
Sat Mar 26: 6:15 pm - MoMA
Sun Mar 27: 3:30 pm - FSLC |