New Directors/New Films and Film Comment Selects 2012

[Chris Knipp]

JOANN SFAR, ANTOINE DELESVAUX: THE RABBI'S CAT (2011)--ND/NF



A talking cat and a wandering story set in 1920's Algiers

This charming and benignly crazy tale about the adventures of an unorthodox rabbi, his cat, his daughter, and assorted other characters comes to us from a popular French comic strip. The creator, Joanne Sfar, bases people and events, set in the 1920's, on his own family background. He comes from Algeria and is a Jew of dual Sephardic and Ashkenazi heritage. This must first be seen as a lovingly executed work of visual art. The images are delightful and colorful. And there are many witty incidents. But the film suffers from the same weakness as Sfar's debut live action feature, the Serge Gainsbourg biopic, Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life. Wonderful, inventive episodes, but an inability to meld them into a coherent whole. It comes from forming his sense of structure while working in the comic strip format, perhaps.

The soon-to-be talking cat (voiced by François Morel), first of all, is an African breed with a long gray body and pointed snout and big pinted ears. He looks like a king-size comic strip mouse. The first scenes are the best, in which we meet rabbi Sfar (Maurice Benichou), a lusty roly-poly, quite unlearned chap with a white fringe beard and an ancien-régime look unlike the conventional image of a Jewish cleric. His daughter Zlabya (Hafsia Herzi, Kéchiche's discovery in The Secret of the Grain) is voluptuous, and adored by the rabbi's cat, which jealously devours a pet parrot, whereupon he begins to speak.

The cat's conversations with the rabbi are droll. He wants to become a Jew, so as to be sure of remaining with Zlabya, and if he can't be circumcised, he'd at least like a bar mitzvah. This doesn't sit well with the rabbi's rabbi (Daniel Cohen), who's as mean and severe as rabbi Sfar is easy-going. This is 1920's Algiers, and Algeria is under French colonial rule, so it turns out rabbi Sfar has to take a dictation test to prove his French is up to par. The cat is better at spelling, and wants to take it for the rabbi. The cat invokes the Almighty to get the rabbi a good grade, but in doing so loses the power of speech again himself. It all sounds silly, but it's congenial to watch.

Later when Sfar & Co. introduce other characters, a Russian lady, a blond guy escaped from a pogrom, and they all go off in a Citroën truck to find the Abyssinian jews, getting into a fight with a desert prince (Mathieu Amalric) along the way, the narrative starts seeming more and more pointless. I wanted to loe this -- I really did. I'd been looking forward to it for over a year since I heard about the project, and more so after June 2011 when it opened in France to rave reviews (Allociné 3.6). I couldn't really see (as Eric Loret wrote in Libération) that this "like its comic strip original" is a "didactic poem" that is "both ecumenical and anti-religous." This tendency appears in the early discussions between the cat and the rabbi and the rabbi's rabbi, and the rabbi's relationships with muslims show a benign and ecumenical mood, but the episodic meanderings across Africa keep this from cohering into "a didactic poem." After its great beginning this animation (shown in pointless 3D, which adds nothing since the images are flat) unfortunately goes nowhere. But don't forget: the images are rich and individual, which stood out after having just watched the musically fine Chico & Rita, whose animation drawing (despite some nice detail in its period backgrounds) is too generic. Here the images are a continual pleasure even when the narrative begins to lose its grip. And the voicings and music are fin.

Le chat du rabbin (100min.) was released in France June 1, 2011, after winning a Crystal award at the 2011 Annecy animation festival for best animated feature; it won the equivalent award at the 2012 Césars. It was screened for this review as part of the MoMA-Film Society of Lincoln Center series New Directors/New Films. It will be shown during that March 21-April 1, 2012 series at the following places and times:
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Sunday, March 25th | 11 AM | MoMA
Tuesday, March 27th | 6 PM | FSLC

[Chris Knipp]

KLEBER MENDOÇA FILHO: NEIGHBORING SOUNDS (2011)--ND/NF


IRMA BROWN, W.J.SOLHA AND GUSTAVO JAHN IN NEIGHBORING SOUNDS

Menace and isolation in a Brazilian city

This new film about class, disorder, and environment in Brazil reminded me of Celina Murga's very original study of children abandoned completely by their parents in a wealthy compound in Argentina, called A Week Alone/Una semana solos (Film Comment Selects 2009). Those children are in a gated community, and they are the ones who gradually take the law into their own hands. Kleber Mendonça Filho's film takes place mostly in contemporary Recife, the fifth largest city in Brazil, whose exploding economy has led to increasingly luxurious but soulless tower apartment buildings clumped in the built-up downtown. And they are in protected areas. Filho skillfully builds up a sense of menace and disorder, skipping around among various inhabitants of such a building, some of them from the same well-off family; their servants; and a newly arrived security firm whose real aims are clearly suspect, though the reason for their presence remains dark -- until the final frames. Kleber Mendonça Filho, has done a number of related short films, going back to a video in 1997. In this first feature, he succeeds in integrating many separate sequences because he knows his milieu so well.

Mendoça neatly pulls everything together, as the title warns, with "neighboring sounds." These can be an invasive stereo playing loud music, a dog's persistent howling which one of the main characters battles throughout (using drugs, a high-pitched electronic device, and firecrackers), or the scary drumbeats of the soundtrack warning of hostility or a strange interloper around the corner. Obviously Filho has used sound and music, as well as skillful editing and a narrative line that seems to ramble but knows very well what it's dong, to draw his portrait of city, society, and neighborhood that is rooted in the problems and dark history of a single family. Servants in some scenes seem intimate members of the families they work for, but the rooms the new apartment houses still provide for them are still hot and dark, and they can be dismissed or abused with ease. Plus there are layers of resentment because their parents were even worse used.

At least half the street belongs to the handsome, silver-haired Seo Francisco (W.J. Solha), who lives in a luxurious duplex. When a private security team arrives headed by Clodoaldo (Irandhir Santos), Francisco coldly gives him the brush-off, annoyed that they already know who he is, and saying that his main interest now is in his plantation in the country, which appears ruined but is evidently the source of the family wealth. Francisco warns Clodoaldo to steer clear of his grandson Dinho (Yuri Holanda), evidently a young, directionless bad boy who steals things for kicks. His other grandson, João (Gustavo Jahn), has spend the night with a new girlfriend, Sofia (Irma Brown), and Sofia's car CD player turns out to have been stolen during the night by Dinho.

A central figure of the film to whom it keeps returning is Beatriz (Maeve Jinkings), who is always in her apartment, not as nice as Seo Francisco's by a long sight but comfortable. Her family, a young son and daughter who have Chinese and English private lessons besides school and a hardworking husband, is firmly middle class. Mother has her little helpers. A water delivery service man brings her her regular supply of marijuana, and she uses a loudly spinning washing machine as a giant motorized dildo. We keep returning to Beatriz. She isn't going anywhere. Of the film's characters, as Jay Weissberg of Variety points out, only Seo Francisco gets far afield, going down to the nearby shark infested ocean waters for a night swim, and relaxing in the country plantation. João also goes to the country place with Sofia and they wanter aimlessly in an abandoned school and a now grass-filled cinema. This sequence shows the ruins of a time when the underclass was exploited, as is hinted in a series of old black-and-white stills shown as the film begins. The way João and Sofia wander aimlessly recalls the upper bourgeois uselessness of the couple in Antoinioni's L'Avventura. Sofia lived in an apartment nearby the Recife building that is now about to be demolished to build another highrise tower. She and João visit it and its empty swimming pool. It's no surprise that Sofia disappears from João's life: she seems obsolete (though Francisco urges them to marry when they visit him in the country).

While all this is going on, the little private security company brought in by Clodoaldo is setting up shop under a canopy down on the corner. With just a few men at the periphery and cell phones (which also are video cameras), they turn out to have the area very well covered indeed. But are they interested in protecting the well-off inhabitants, or do they have a more sinister aim in view?

Plainly Filho has built up a richly thought-out sense of this world, its class strictures, and its people from his earlier short films, elements of which, according to Weissberg, are seamlessly incorporated here. This is another socially astute, hauntingly assembled, highly original film from Latin America, and a thoroughly contemporary view of Brazil in which the word "favela" is used only to point out that this is not that. And while the director in a Statement for the film has spoken of an aspect of class relations being "a crippling fear of urban violence," no such generalizations are ever overtly or crudely made.

Neighboring Sounds/O som ao redor won the FIPRESCI International Critics Prize at Rotterdam, where it debuted. It has been picked up by Cinema Guild for US distribution, and will have its North American premiere at the MoMA and Film Society of Lincoln Center New Directors/New Films series March 21-April 1, 2012 (where it was screened for this review), with the following showings:

Saturday, March 24th | 9:15 PM | MoMA
Sunday, March 25th | 7:15 PM | FSLC

[Chris Knipp]

DAVID FRANCE: HOW TO SURVIVE A PLAGUE (2012)--ND/NF


ACT-UP ACTIVIST AND TAG FOUNDER PETER STALEY IN HOW TO SURVIVE A PLAGUE

An important film about the AIDS struggle in its early, key years

France's documentary, which is intense, passionate, but clearheaded, concerns the fight in the US to get research and treatment for AIDS and HIV. It focuses on two organizations, ACT-UP and TAG. The fight was in New York, when in 1987 a group of HIV-positive gay men, gay women, and others teamed up to do something about the lack of urgent action to provide medication to prevent people from dying of AIDS. This story has been told before, but France neatly organizes old footage to present a historical picture that is clearer than ever before and follows through to the point when medication and care were being provided to enable people to live with AIDS, a point first reached in the late Nineties. The key development was the move to protease inhibitors shifting from monotherapy to combination therapy, bringing a massive decline in AIDS-related deaths in the U.S. and transforming HIV into a manageable chronic illness.

A key activist element in this development was TAG. TAG, the Treatment Action Group, founded by young former bond trader Peter Staley, developed when there was a period of disenchantment and split in which some Act-Up members moved away from street demos and entered highly technical fields of medical and scientific research to force an end to the disorganized, slow, and limited progress among medical and governmental organizations responsible for dealing with AIDS.

France, a journalist who has been following the AIDS crisis since the beginning, uses ACT-UP footage to follow some of the leading activists, who include Peter Staley, Jim Eigo, Garance Franke-Riuta, Mark Harrington, Spencer Cox, Larry Kramer, Bill Bahlman, David Barr, Gregg Bordowitz, Gregg Gonsalves, Derek Link, and Iris Long. The film leaves to the end the answer to the question of which HIV-positive men involved in the fight survive to today, though in some cases their appearance as present-day, talking heads answers that question. Of course the film fills in the background of lousy initial NIH support, a President Reagan who did not even mention the name of the disease, a Bush Senior who claimed the government was doing just fine, a Jesse Hems who said it was God's punishment for evil behavior. But the living, strong part of this film is its depiction of how a group of activists fought successfully to change the whole way the plague was being fought. The notably included activists and patients' being on boards of organizations and consulting directly with drug companies.

How to Survive a Plague captures the revolutionary fervor of the early ACT-UP period with particular energy and vividness. It was a time when desperation and anger were turned into effective action. There was excitement in the air. People were dying left and right, life was tragic, but people had a palpable sense of the need to go for broke, and the leaders were heroes who were the best they could be. As the Hollywood Reporter review puts it, this serves as "a sequel of sorts to seminal AIDS works like Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart or Randy Shilts’ And the Band Played On." The film has been picked up by IFC Films sister division Sundance Selects for US distribution. It debuted at Sundance in January 2012 and is included as part of the New Directors/New Films series of MoMA and the Film Society of Lincoln Center. It was screened in connection with ND/NF for this review. Public ND/NF showings of this documentary at Lincoln Center and MoMa were held March 24 and 26, 2012.

How to Survive a Plague opens in the US Sept. 21, 2012 in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco.

[Chris Knipp]

JÚLIA MURAT: FOUND MEMORIES (2011)--ND/NF


THREE VILLAGERS POSE FOR RITA'S PINHOLE CAMERA IN FOUND MEMORIES

Memories that smell of old age and magic

In her Found Memories/Historias Que So Existem Quando Lembradas Brazilian Júlia Murat has woven a visual poem, delicate, meditative and beautifully tinted in sepia yellow. It's part enhanced documentary, part magic realism. A young woman comes briefly to invade the life of an old lady living in the country. It's a place that declined long ago in the last century due to a coffee crisis. The train doesn't come there any more. Everything is in a photogenic state of natural decay. Which is fine, because Rita (Lisa E. Fávero) is a photographer. She has brought two cameras, one modern with buttons and lights and the other a pinhole camera that is just a tin can. (She seems to favor the latter for the rough hewn effect it gives.)

Every morning the old lady, Madalena (Sonia Guedes) receives an old man, Antônio (Luiz Santos) and they engage in Beckettian ritual squabbling as he fixes coffee and she lays out the rolls she has baked the night before. Sitting on a bench out in front of Madalena's big old ramshackle former shop and house, they squabble like an old couple, talking of loss and rain. But they are not married. They're both widowed.

Rituals continue. Antônio and Madalena go to a service conducted by a grizzled Padre (Josias Ricardo Merkin) and attended by other old people, perhaps a dozen in all, who inhabit this lost, sealed-off village. Later they have a communal lunch, preceded by a long silent prayer. Madalena tends flowers at the entrance of the cemetary -- which is padlocked.

Though it's not spelled out, this was inspired by the director's once coming upon a town whose cemetary really had been sealed off, so that when people died they had to be taken on a long trip down river to be buried elsewhere. Murat toys with the notion that here, due to the cuttoff of names of deceased persons and the locked burial ground, the old people linger on, unable to die. Toward the end Madalena tells Antônio she's afraid of dying, and he snaps back, "Then don't die." But then Rita, who has won Madalena's confidence and affection, photographs the old lady naked from the waist up. Soon afterward, as if this naked photo was preparation for the hereafter, Madalena dies. It's not clear what this means or how it's handled. (Where will she be buried? Has a spell been broken?) Antônio just says, "Now there's nobody to bake bread."

The beauty of Found Memories is that, like the films of Lisandro Alonso (whom this picture's dp Lucio Bonelli has worked for) or Carlos Reygadas, Júlia Murat uses unusual authentic settings to weave a special magic. Plotwise, the film is a little thin. Any more morning squabbles between Madalena and Antônio over rolls and coffee and we might go bonkers. But it's amazing how introducing a new young character with a project changes everything. The everyday things, the dark corners, lamp lights, kitchen objects, that seemed merely accoutrements of decline now suddenly as subjects of Rita's camera are beautiful and picturesque. Or at least artsy: Rita's pinhole photos don't seem like masterpieces. But that may be just as well, because when drawings, paintings, or photographs done by a character in film are too professional, they just seem fake. Rita seems a little smug and annoying, but at least she is real. And Madalena greatly brightens, after an initial stonewalling period. with Rita around.

Being young, Rita has a nightlife, even here. She goes and drinks with an old but still feisty black man, Carlos (Antônio dos Santos), and she even dances out there with iPod music. When all the old people dance one evening to the music of an ancient gramophone, that is "magic", not real. When Rita announces she's leaving, Madalena insists she can't -- and perhaps it's by virtue of Rita's visit and departure that Madalena becomes ready to die.

Found Memories is a beautiful slow film, a genre increasingly rich in Latin America. Viewers with patience will find much to enjoy here. It is like a staged photograph, using existing elements judiciously to create a new reality. But its picture of old age as repeated rituals, though not far from the mark, is not quite the whole story. Nor in this first feature does Murat manage a story that is as as specific or as profound as it might have been. With its weathered buildings and locals and its chiaroscuros it's a pretty picture, but it doesn't make much of an impression. It risks not being remembered, and therefore not existing. Though not a direct translation, Found Memories is a good title for the film. But it reminds us of something: memories that are found somewhere and appropriated may not always feel as authentic as one's own.

[Chris Knipp]

EMAD BURNAT, GUY DAVIDI: 5 BROKEN CAMERAS (2012)


GIBREEL AND SETTLEMENTS IN 5 BROKEN CAMERAS

A boy grows up with village protests

This film -- by a Palestinian videographer whose images are collected and narrated by him here -- tells much the same story as Julia Bacha's awarded 2009 documentary Budrus, only in a more personal and rather sadder way. Both films are about Palestinian villagers protesting against Israeli settlements, walls, encroachment of their land, destroying their olive groves, ruining their lives in piecemeal fashion year after year. Emad gets a video camera when Gibreel is born, his youngest of four sons. Then he gets the habit and becomes a documentary filmmaker, covering marches and protests and endless encounters with the Israeli army in which friends and brothers are arrested, wounded, and finally killed -- and the shooting is so rough, five of the cameras he's using get destroyed in the space of five years.

Budrus, which focuses on another town and its actions and activists, provides more information about the community organization that went into the protests, the negotiations, the identity of the Israeli soldiers engaged in protecting settlements or walls, the effect of the involvement of Israeli and foreign activists in the demonstrations, and the dimensions of the non-violent struggles, which over a period of several years joined together from town to town.

The unique feature of 5 Broken Cameras is that it literally depicts events that Emad Burnat himself covered with his cameras, which generally lasted less than a year before they were wrecked in a demonstration. This is a sort of DIY documentary filmmaking manual: if you've got a camera and what's happening in your world is as significant as the Palestinian-Israeli struggle, and you haven't much else to do (Emad was robbed of any livlihood other than olive cultivation), you become a filmmaker. He covers the shooting, the wounding, the tear gas. He shows how spirited demonstrators Phil and Adib inspire others to maintain hope and keep returning to protest. But at the same time he is still using his cameras to record Gibreel, whom we see learn to walk, and talk and grow up. It seems his first words include "wall" and "army." Gibreel has enormous innocent dark eyes and an open spirit. He sees and experiences everything. He grows up in a world of encroachment and protest. It's all he knows..

Emad's narration is simple and direct. He doesn't provide an elaborate historical picture or fill us in on the politics of protest as Budrus does. But on the other hand he gives us a more direct sense of what it's like to be an average guy in a Palestinian village on the edge of the Israeli settlements, المستوطنات الإسرائيلية (a personal note: I followed the narration closely; it was unusually easy for a student of Arabic to follow, showing how simple, direct, and forthright it is). This film conveys a sense of Palestinian robustness. Their situation is demoralizing beyond words but in the eye of Emad's cameras they remain hardy and vigorous -- and they keep on coming. Emad speaks of anger, of how it deepens as the sorrow sinks in for example when one of the village's inspirations is killed, the man whom the children loved to gather around. But his spirit is determinedly non-violent -- and as Budrus shows, that's an approach that works.

Guy Davidi is an Israeli filmmaker who collaborated with Burnat in producing this film. They were much helped by the editor Memmo Borema, and the film is gently enhanced by the music of Trio Joubran, an oud group. French television gave its support, and the finishing touches on the final edit were done by Véronique Lagoarde-Segot. Thanks to this expert help Burnat's "amateur" camerawork becomes brilliantly effective. The simple narrative preserves the filmmakers' aim of avoiding "traps" and clichés. Needless to say, the chronology of the five cameras, plus the first five years of young Gibreel's life, with "Happy Birthday" and ritual cake-blowing included, provide not only a neat structure, but a sense both of how personal and of how dangerous the circumstances of this film's progress were.

5 Broken Cameras debuted at Sundance. It won the World Cinema Documentary Directing award there and was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize. It has recently been part of festivals in Mexico, Sweden, and Greece. It is also included in the MoMA-Film Society of Lincoln Center series, New Directors/New Films, in which it was screened for this review. Public showings at ND/NF will be:

Monday, March 26th | 6:00 PM | FSLC
Tuesday, March 27th | 8:30 PM | MoMA

[Chris Knipp]

JASON CORTLAND, JULIA HALPERIN: NOW, FORAGER (2012)--ND/NF


TIFFANY ESTEB AND JASON CORTLAND OF NOW, FORAGER

Man finds mushrooms, loses wife

This serious foodie feature is anchored by its focus on the problematic marriage of a thirty-something couple, both of whom are more than capable of playing a key role in the kitchen of a hip restaurant. The wife would like to do just that, take over a kitchen when she can. The husband, who is a mushroom specialist, is more of a counter-cultural persuasion. He would rather live by foraging alone, if he could, and selling the findable eatable wild American fungi he knows so well, giving up apartment and car if necessary to follow that pursuit. This clash over lifestyle and material goals ultimately causes the somewhat reluctant breakup of the couple, leaving them in the spring with the wife working in a restaurant in Manhattan and the husband housesitting a 35-minute drive from Brooklyn and -- planning to gather some portobellos that afternoon.

The subtitle is "A Film About Love and Fungi." It's really a slow-food and slow-film movie, an intelligent little American indie that's ironic and knowing and notable for the sharp specificity of its people, places, and specialities (casting and settings are tops, and so are details about food), shown off in a series of carefully located scenes.

That the filmmakers know whereof they speak shows all the way through, but there are two excellent sequences in particular that make this film worth watching. And they provide a nice contrast. The first occurs when wife Regina Echevarría (Tiffany Esteb) takes an opportunity found for her by Mas (Almex Lee), the hot chef whose octopus restaurant she's been working in, to become chef of a Basque restaurant "outside of Providence." "That's the whole state," says the often grumpy Lucien (Jason Cortland) when awakened in the middle of the night to hear this news. (Both are of Basque origin.) This sends Regina off to Rhode Island, where the restaurant turns out to be a real dump where hamburger balls with rice and thousand island dressing are key menu items and the "Basque" designation is meaningless. Her Rhode Island chef-ing gig is a disaster: the unsophisticated restaurant regulars can't accept her authentic Basque substitutes.

The second great sequence comes when, with Regina away, Lucien decides as it turns colder to drive down to gather wild mushrooms still growing south of New York State. Life is harsh for Lucien away from Regina. In a Maryland forest his afternoon's foraging is robbed from him by a couple of gangsterish Russian rivals (possibly courtesy of the Polish co-production on the film). But real fun happens when -- following another dicey reference from a restaurant friend -- he tries to cater a big party for a fabulously demanding and rich DC lady with a "think tank" husband. The pinioning of the spoiled and the overly well funded here is truly delicious, and as the insufferably bitchy hostess, April Garrison, Gabrielle Maisels is insanely annoying. Casting is spot-on throughout.

Except that in his review in Variety Jay Weissberg has a point when he claims "zero chemistry between the leads." The couple's splitting up doesn't so much carry a high emotional charge as seem an excuse for the separate sequences they act in thereafter. Consequently Weissberg's also right, good though the episodes are, in saying the film plays "like a compilation of episodes rather than a flowing narrative." Pleasure is to be derived more from the technical details, which are exceptional. Mas's hip restaurant and Mas himself, the unsophisticated Rhode Island restaurant folks and their setup, as well as all the details of kitchen prep work and mushroom-hunting (plus details of looks, taste, texture, and how to prepare each species) are done with a sense of accuracy and detail such as one rarely sees in a feature film -- not to mention one of those warm fuzzy Mostly Martha -type food sentiment-fests. But this is so much true that the details may have taken up space that should have gone to character and story. Cortland shows his passion for fungi with what The Hollywood Reporter calls "additional fungi cinematography, [himself, in addition to writing, starring, and editing] crafting the beautifully immaculate close-ups of choice mycological specimens that punctuate a season-hopping narrative." Clearly this is destined to be the ultimate mycophile movie.

This seems a slightly new kind of "precision" small indie American film that, despite the somewhat downbeat turn of this feature, has great possibilities for precise satire if Cortland and his co-director Julia Halperin want to continue in this vein but lighten it up a bit. And turn to other topics. There is probably room for only one cult feature on mushroom gathering.

This 93-minute American indie film, first feature for the directors, debuted at Rotterdam. It is also included in New Directors/New Films (a series from March 21-April 1, 2012 co-sponsored by MoMA and the Film Society of Lincoln Center), and in was in this connection that it was screened for this review. The ND/NF public screennigs of Now, Forager (the name humorously adapted from Walt Whitman) :

Friday, March 30th | 9 PM | FSLC
Sunday, April 1st | 4:30 PM | MoMA

[Chris Knipp]

SONG CHUAN: HUAN HUAN (2010)--ND/NF


DR WANG AND HIS WIFE CHUNFENG DINE IN HUAN HUAN

Having a child in rural China

The story told here is of a young woman, Huan Huan, who is having an adulterous affair with a boyish-looking married doctor called Wang. Huan Huan herself is married to a fat, brutish gambler, Yue Lin, a squirmy little man who sits around smoking cigarettes. Dr. Wang is married to Chunfeng, who can't seem to produce a child. Yue Lin winds up taking bribes from Wang for keeping mum about Wang's affair with his wife. Wang also gives Huan Huan pocket money and pays a large fine to the local family planning committee so Huan Huan's brother can return to the village.

When Yue Lin is humiliated by the police and Wang's clinic is shut down by the local government so he has no more money for payoffs, Yue Lin beats Wang to death. Now Huan Huan is pregnant, evidently by Dr. Wang. As the film draws to a close Chunfeng and Huan Huan are out by the local lake talking about Chenfeng raising Huan Huan's baby as her own. All along Huan Huan has wanted to leave her village to work in a big city, but it's looking as if she won't.

This first feature feels like student work of a rather stiff kind. The choppy editing and lousy acting reminded me of Ying Liang's Taking Father Home (SFIFF 2006). If the latter looked even cruder that's because video cameras keep getting better. While static camera setups are poetic in the hands of Asian artists like Tsai Ming-liang or Hou Hsiau-shen, they just seem like the easy way out here.

Song Chuan's version of rural China is a place of petty corruption, mutual blackmail, a life without beauty or grace. People ignore the "one child" law, and the local police exact bribes for having this overlooked, and for other things. Punctuating the film are excerpts from very curious song and dance videos (real, not made by the filmmaker) in which men and women apparently advertise prostitution, or maybe just sex. These are shown at public gatherings that include not only old folks, but kids. The characters of Huan Huan often use obscene and abusive language.

You wouldn't think any of this, which by the way has none of the style or penetration of the films of Jia Zhang-ke or his generation, was the sort of thing the Chinese government would want shown as part of contemporary reality, and yet this was shown at the UCCA (Ullen Center for Contemporary Arts) in Beijing, and was supplied to the Film Society of Lincoln Center by the Chinese Consulate General in New York. The 32-year-old Song's film was nominated for best feature at the second China (Hangzhou) Youth Digital Film Contest. And he is a graduate of the National Academy of Chinese Theater Arts, has worked in films and TV since 2006 and worked on his own films since 2002.

Huan Huan may have been chosen for festival showing as an artifact of the modern China and again, as with the (far more accomplished) filmmakers from Iran, some films are sought by international festivals to encourage underground work challenging the status quo in their repressive country of origin, regardless of artistic accomplishment.

Huan Huan was watched for this review among screenings for the MoMA-Film Society of Lincoln Center March 21-April 1, 2012 series New Directors/New Films, and will be shown to the public in ND/NF at these times and places:

Tuesday, March 27th | 9 PM | FSLC
Wednesday, March 28th | 6 PM | MoMA