New Directors/New Films and Film Comment Selects 2012

[Chris Knipp]

VINCENT GINZBURG: GENERATION P (2011)--ND/NF


MIKAIL EFREMOV AND VLADIMIR EPIFANTSEV IN GENERATION P

Publicity, politics, and drugs in Nineties Russia

A wealth of witty ideas, mostly from the much admired source novel by Victor Pelevin, enliven this fantasy about advertising, media, politics and business in Nineties Russia, This Brazil-like miasma is admirable for a degree of ceaseless invention in preposterous "what-if" and "wow factor" scenes that, despite deep immersion in matters locally Russian, may gain the film some western cult value. Rich period detail and elaborate production values are big pluses: some real time and substantial rubles went into this production. But this is a virtually plotless film -- except for sticking with its amiable but neutral protagonist (who narrates) and being pulled together by some far-fetched business about the worship of Ishtar. The consequent lack of clear direction tends to make P wearying, at least for non-Russian viewers.

As with many overly energetic films this one is probably most memorable at the outset, when we meet aspiring poet and recent university graduate Babylen Tatarsky (Vladimir Epifantsev) taking what advantage he can on his own from the fall of the Soviet Union. What he learned in college is useless so what this means is selling contraband cigarettes and condoms and other trinkets behind a keyhole window in a dark kiosk controlled by Chechen mafia. He learns to up his profit by short-changing customers selectively according to how he sizes them up. Into this bleak world his old pal Morkovin (Andrey Fomin) appears and introduces him to the grandiose prospects of building an advertising business reframing American product promotion and brand names for the Russian customer base. It emerges that for some reason the whole nascent free market Russian media world is controlled by followers of the cult of Ishtar.

The symbolic product inspiring the generation of nouveau-capitalists is a bottle of Russian-made Pepsi, because it was originally given to "Bab" and his generation as Soviet Young Pioneers as a symbol of the possibility of a better world coming, if the nightmare ever ended. Presumably that better world doesn't come, only a succession of governments and product knockoffs and absurd promotion campaigns for both. This is the story of Generation P (for Pepsi). In the ad world, Bab's and his colleagues' game is to get paid by their customers before they go bust, because gangsters are taking over everything and nothing lasts.

As one absurd and sometimes hilarious advertising campaign after another unfolds on screen, there is also stuff about the impeachment of Yeltsin and his attempt to take over the Russian Parliament, cleverly interwoven with alternative ad campaigns for Parliament cigarettes. An ad for a Christian church promotes it as “a first class Lord for first class people.” A funeral parlor Bab sells with the slogan, “Diamonds are not forever.” The recreation of a suitably gruesome medieval Russian beheading drives home a pitch for Head and Shoulders with the punch line, ”Keep them together.” The interweaving of ad ideas and political events is intriguing but hard to follow, and things aren't much helped by the fact that Bab consumes massive events of alcohol, mainly vodka (and a fake political candidate is marketed under the name of Smirnoff) with other mind and body altering substances including cocaine, super-strong Acid, and piles of magic mushrooms provided by another school friend, Gireev (Sergey Shnurov), which lead the hero with his oddball spiritual guide toward eastern mysticism. Acquisition of a Ouija board leads to communication with a mad Che Guevara. The cult of Ishtar being Babylonian, Babylen's odd name makes him feel a special connection -- aiding his rise in the Russian media world. Reaching the apparent peak of that world, Bab joins Azadovsky (Mikhail Efremov), head of The Beekeeping Institute (cover name for a mysterious publicity syndicate), who has the peculiar habit of appearing on the TV under different identities, and is so rich he's quite indifferent to the fact that he's wearing a $170,000 Patek Philippe watch.

The combo of tongue-in-cheek ad campaigns, politics, drugs and spirituality causes the film very quickly to lose all contact with the real world. Even rides in Mercedes Benz's and Labmorghinis can't bring it down to earth. This seems unfortunate in a story that aims to comment on recent history in some detail. Ginzburg, who partly grew up and was educated in the US, West, is tireless in recreating fantastic sequences from the novel, but the story line doesn't make enough cohesive sense, especially not to anyone non-Russian. It doesn't help that most of the cast isn't particularly memorable, including the appealing but bland Epifantsev: Ginzburg has put most of his eggs into the mise-en-scène basket, at the expense of plot, argument, and character. Given a novel source of this complexity and all the wonderfully absurd scenes to recreate, that was perhaps an inevitable compromise.

Ginzburg, who is a graduate of the School of Visual Arts in New York, has done music videos, documentaries and short films. This is his feature debut. Generation P has been shown at several festivals, including Moscow and Toronto, and it was watched for this review in a screening for the MoMA and Film Society of Lincoln Center joint series, New Directors/New Films, whose public showings for the film are:

Friday, March 30th | 6 PM | FSLC
Sunday, April 1st | 1:30 PM | MoMA

[Chris Knipp]

DJINN CARRÉNARD: DONOMA (2011)--ND/NF


VINCENTE PEREZ AND SALOMÉ BLECHMANS IN DONOMA

Banlieue ronde

Djinn Carrénard'S Donoma might invite comparisons with Eric Rohmer, Andy Warhol, or John Cassavetes. He claims to have made his film for pennies, using a digital video camera and a handful of young actors who improvise their lines. Much of the film takes place in St. Denis, the ghetto-esque main "banlieu" or suburb of Paris. The cast includes Salomé Blechmans, Emilia Dérou-Bernal, Sékouba Doucouré, Laura Kpegli, Matthieu Longuatte, Laetitia Lopez, Benjamin Mayet, Amélie Moy, Marina Pelle, and Vincente Perez.

To begin with in a small, claustrophobically photographed banlieue lycée Spanish class, one student, Dacio (Vincente Perez), is disruptive and disobedient and his teacher Analia (Emilia Dérou-Bernal) behaves after class in a totally inappropriate way, rapidly masturbating him through his pants to embarrass him, which she later gleefully recounts to her young female colleagues. But who is the winer on the battlefield of love here? Dacio turns out to be on the make for Salma (Salomé Blechmans), a bourgeois girl who is not a believer but has become obsessed with religion. Salma resists Dacio's advances, though not completely. Meanwhile a black virgin, Chris (Laura Kpegli), originally from Ghana but raised by rich diplomats, now a serious photographer, decides to take as a lover the first stranger she finds in the Metro, and to bring him in to live with her, requiring that they speak only in writing and sign language. The lucky man is Dama (Sékouba Doucouré), a handsome, slim young black man, who later turns out to have just broken up with a (white) photographer, Leelop (Laetitia Lopez). In her search for religious belief Salma eventually takes up with an apparently devout young man, Raîné (Matthieu Longuatte) spotted on an inter-urban train.

This is not all, because there is a social services employee, who interviews both Salma and Dama when he was with Leelop, and Salma gets into difficulties because she insists on caring for her sister, who has terminal cancer. She also thinks she has stigmata and levitates. At a later meeting, the social worker concludes Salma is deranged and needs to be institutionalized. She rejects this and finally meets up with Raîné, in a church. In an intense and challenging encounter he puts her in her place and reveals he is a born again skinhead, who used to be a criminal but now leads a good life.

These scenes and the elaborate choral plotting are often fascinating, the young actors are remarkably vivacious, and the focus on love as couples pair off or break up has a strong link with Rohmer, though the confrontational improvisation more closely resembles Cassavetes. The sexual explicitness at some points justifies the Warhol link. So does the fact that the whole film runs on too long, and could be better if relieved of a solid chunk of its 135 minutes. It is tonally all over the map, moving from the Bruno Dumont-esque religious questioning sequences to the cringe-worthy teacher-student hand-job to the sharp satire of the social worker's polite interview with the couple Dama and Leelop who insist on pretending they're not. Whether this shows the young Haitian-born Carrénard's multiple talent or simply a lack of discipline remains to be seen but he is certainly a talent to watch. Needless to say despite the various comparisons this film isn't quite like any other, and this is why is has been heralded with joy in France.

This film was released in Paris November 23, 2011 and received raves (Allociné 3.9) from the likes of Cahiers du Cinéma, Les Inrockuptibles and Libération, and many of the French critics heralded Carrénard as a breath of fresh air in the world of French cinema. The actors are almost uniformly as talented as they are attractive. Carrénard left Haiti at 11, then after living very briefly in Togo spent two years with his family on the coast of Normandy in France, followed by four years in French Guyana, and then she came to Paris to read Philosopy but says that when "Unlimited UGC cards" arrived (allowing low cost cinema attendance) he dropped out in 2004 to focus on the "moving image," much as Chris in Donoma reports quitting the lycée to focus on using her camera. English subtitles apparently were much improved from the "misspellings and grammatical errors" reported at Pusan, but seem awfully free at times. The tech features are rough and ready: the images work, though some dialogue is marred by uneven sound quality.

Thursday, March 29th | 8:30 PM | FSLC
Saturday, March 31st | 4:15 PM | MoMA

A virtuoso passage from the film on video from which the still above is taken. A girl (Salma) is turned on by seeing a boy (Dacio) picking pockets on the Metro. She takes her valuables out of her wallet and puts in her name and address, and leaves the wallet in her bag so the boy can steal it. It's all observed by Chris, who narrates the sequence.

[Chris Knipp]

ANGELINA NIKONOVA: TWILIGHT PORTRAIT (2011)--ND/NF


BORISOV AND DIHOVICHNAYA IN TWILIGHT PORTRAIT

A woman on the wild side

In Twilight Portrait/Portret v sumerkakh, a woman is left off in a bad neighborhood by her lover and breaks a heel, has her handbag stolen and is raped by policemen. This changes things. Her husband is weak, dependent on her rich father. She doesn't think much of her best friends, as she tells them at a surprise birthday party. She tells no one of the rape. By chance she runs into one of the rapists, the handsomer one, and lies in wait for him with a broken bottle outside his shabby apartment building. Instead, she kisses him in the elevator. Later they have sex in the same elevator. For a while she pretends to go to visit her mother. "You need a break," her husband Ilya (Roman Merinov) has been telling her. But instead, she moves in with the rapist, his humorous total stoner younger brother (Vsevolod Voronov), and their gaga and vaguely menacing grandpa (Alexei Belousov). The stoner brother's brief monologue is one of the only fun moments of the piece. One might also include scenes at a trashy roadside restaurant that has daytime karaoke. When the about to be brutalized woman tries to order a glass of water it recalls Nicholson at the diner in Five Easy Pieces.

I'm talking about Marina, a chic, good looking woman, played by Olga Dihovichnaya, who co-produced and co-scripted this film, and lightens its effect. Supposing the great French actress Yolande Moreau took the role. Moreau, with her inwardness and dogged intensity and lack of youthful looks, would draw our sympathy and arouse our curiosity more. But Dihovichnaya is easy on the eye, and we can understand why Andrei (Sergei Borisov), the brutal but coldly handsome cop, would take her in for a while, despite his smacking her angrily every time she says "I love you."

Marina's life is obviously at a crossroads and that's made ten times more intense by her brutal afternoon. Her motives are unclear. She is a social worker dealing with children's problems and scenes show she is losing her sympathy for her clients and her faith in her ability to help. With typical overkill, the script has her tell somebody this as well. Marina's motives with Andrei are unclear. In shacking up with him she might be planning a delayed, subtler revenge than the broken bottle would provide. Or she might be experimenting, experiencing a kind of sexual Stockholm syndrome, or have lost her self respect. Or she might be trying to atone for her loss of rapport with her clients at work, or seeking to reconnect with the less fortunate classes she used to want to help.

Given Marina's job -- which she points out she can practice because her husband has a more lucrative one -- pedophilia, incest, and child abuse are secondary themes. And boredom. That may be what is at the roots of Marina's story, and the moral decay of modern Russia, and an alienation and angst Antonioni would understand, as he would understand the desolate landscapes on the outskirts of town (Marina and her husband are blessed with an enviable downtown apartment). But in Antonioni's day, the camera might roam the edge of town, but a film didn't begin with two rapes (the cops do a roadside prostitute before they later come to the "stuck up" Marina).

Twilight Portrait refers to a setting on a used camera Marina buys in a gesture of compassion -- or stupidity: nothing is unambiguous here -- and also knowingly points to a prevailing grayness and darkness that give the film a visual style (rather successfully: two still cameras, Canon EOS II's, were used throughout, without artificial light, and Eben Bull's cinematography has won a festival prize). The film feels as if Krzysztof Kieślowski had set out to offend feminists and combined two or three of his Decalogue films into one, a longish one (135 minutes) -- and tossed out his usual profound sense of humanity. Leslie Felperin reports from a Russian festival that the audience had very mixed reactions: "some felt the film offered a daring, psychologically complex but still-credible portrait of a woman's unexpected reaction to sexual violence; others, especially Russian and older viewers, felt the pic violated core feminist tenets, or simply considered it too unpleasant or implausible."

But almost anything can be considered "too unpleasant or implausible" nowadays: that's no excuse for rejecting this strong and original first film. My main criticism is that Nikonova and Dihovichnaya have, as I've already suggested, crammed too much into their screenplay. Even when Marina goes to the airport, she encounters a set of abusive parents. The writers could have relaxed and let their story breathe a bit. They try too hard. But they keep it watchable, and the scenes at the karaoke restaurant and the cop's dump of a flat are memorable.

Twilight Portrait is set in Nikonova's native Rostov-on-Don, in the south of Russia, with some attention to the accents and flavor of that area. It debuted at the Kinotavr Sochi Open Russian Film Festival, and in Europe, at Venice. It was also shown at Toronto, Warsaw, London, and Stockholm. It was watched for this review as part of the MoMA and Film Society of Lincoln Center New York series, New Directors/New Films. Public showings of the film at the latter are scheduled for these days and times:

Friday, March 30th | 6 PM | MoMA
Saturday, March 31st | 1 PM | FSLC

[Chris Knipp]

MADS BRÜGGER: THE AMBASSADOR (2011)--ND/NF


MADS BRÜGGER IN THE AMBASSADOR

"The Ambassador" is a stretch. "The fake minor diplomat" wouldn't sound so good though.

This latest exploit of Mads Brügger, whom a festival blurb described as "between Michael Moore and Borat" in connection with his (more interesting) 2010 North Korean adventure, Red Chapel, is designed to show how easy it is to assume a fake identity and get diplomatic papers in order to deal blood diamonds in Africa. And he does this, sort of. He shaves his head, dons sharp suits (sort of) with handkerchiefs, ties, starched shirts, cuff links, big ring, aviator sunglasses and riding boots, puffs on cigars and purveys caviar and champagne, and, thus accoutered, poses as a "businessman diplomat." He pays bribes and deals with government agents and the owner of a diamond mine, pretending as cover to be setting up a match factory, and all these dealings he has filmed secretly. In pretending to start the match factory he claims to encourage local industry against the exploitation of the French and the newly encroaching Chinese and employing (token) pygmies as truly local help. The match factory being a scam, probably leaves a dozen or two non-pygmies also feeling badly scammed. But his excuse is, diplomats scam people all the time. He makes some racist remarks, supposedly to lure locals into his confidence, and that may offend film viewers. But it's all part of the game. And there is always the possibility that we're being scammed too, somewhat, at least.

The process begins in Europe, where Brügger talks to two people who actually specialize in brokering diplomatic papers for African countries, Brit Colin Evans and Dutchman Willem Tijssen. That this is not legal only makes it more expensive; but it can be done because so many African governments are so dicey. The deal he settles on is to get a diplomatic passport in Liberia, and set up to do business in the Central African Republic, a place that has diamonds and gold (as well as some oil), and not much stable government or rule of law. It's open season there, apparently. Brüggers pays out a lot of cash (presumably funded by Lars von Trier as was his last film) and is promised a Liberian passport, drivers license and honorary degree, as well as a post as the Liberian ambassador to the Central African Republic. He gets the drivers license, and what serves for a while as a passport; it may not be valid, he learns later. Nor do his ambassadorial duties ever really develop. But how would they? The CAR is a lawless state anyway. Tijssen, who seems to have been the major agent in providing Brüggers with Liberian credentials, has protested his unauthorized inclusion in the film and tried to block it from being shown, but he has not proven his innocence and Brüggers has said, "If Tijssen were my PR agent, then I’d say ‘Good work!'"

Nonetheless, in the process of almost setting himself up to be a dealer in blood diamonds, Brügger, who is called "Mr. Cortzen" because his real full name is Mads Brügger Cortzen and that's on his new diplomatic passport, meets with a government functionary who also owns a diamond mine, the head of CAR secret service, who is French and later disappears, to the Indian consul, and eventually several high government officials. He visits the diamond mine, a somewhat dangerous trip on a small plane, and he arranges to have two pygmy assistants whom he declares are the only people he can trust -- because he thinks his translator is in league with the diamond mine owner. Meanwhile it turns out his Liberian passport may not be valid, and the Liberians never grant him the necessary accompanying documents, nor can the European who brokered the passport for him help. He is warned by the Indian consul that if he buys a lot of diamonds his diplomatic status won't count once word goes out and he'll be lucky to get a big fine and have the diamonds seized at the airport -- lucky to get out alive.

So this is really the kind of operation that would require more experienced, tougher, more devious, richer men than Mads Brügger, and would take years to set up. But "Mr. Cortzen" goes through the motions, and all the dealings, all the uncertainties and worries, notably about getting the necessary diplomatic papers, are filmed secretly, and in The Ambassador we get to see them. One interpretation is that Brügger aims to appear to be a sucker, to show off the veniality of those he's dealing with. And that may be true. But most of the time it merely appears he is trying to succeed at the game, only the large sum he paid to the diplomatic passport broker wasn't enough, and he doesn't have the right connections all along the line. His contract with M. Gilbert, the functionary who is also the diamond mine owner, is not accepted by the government, and vice versa. Is he trying to fail or is he just doomed to fail? It's a tough call. But we must bear in mind that if he truly failed he might meet with the same fate as the French head of CAR security, whom he secretly interviewed, but who later was assassinated -- like his predecessor, it turns out. Why did he take the job? Brügger barely scratches the surface of the craziness here.

This is an elaborate put-on, and it illustrates that such things do happen. And Brüggers has entered the world in which they do. However, this is a less interesting film than Red Chapel for various reasons. In Red Chapel, Brüggers, with several others, posing as a cultural mission, bringing an experimental theater troupe, travels around North Korea, and films a place that western journalists rarely get a chance to see. The Ambassador, on the other hand, mainly just shows Brügger himself parading around in his semi-colonial outfits, making semi-racist remarks, telling a Hitler joke, and talking to various functionaries -- and pygmies. Actually the pygmies don't say much. The world of blood diamonds is corrupt, but we kind of knew that.

The Ambassador had its North American debut at Sundance, where Red Chapel was a hit. It has also been in some other festivals. It was watched for this review as part of the MoMA-Film Society of Lincoln Center series, New Directors/New Films, and its days and times of public screening for this series are as follows:

Friday, March 30th | 9 PM | MoMA
Saturday, March 31st | 3:45 PM | FSLC

[Chris Knipp]

ALEJANDRO LANDES: PORFIRIO (2011)--ND/NF


JARLINSSON RAMIREZ AND PORFIRIO RAMIREZ ALDANA IN PORFIRIO

Amazonian Bresson

Porfirio is a work made in the often powerful new Latin American "slow film" vein, and this time the authentic people and settings are wielded by Brazilian-born director Alejandro Landes in reference to a dramatic Colombian crime story he found in the newspaper. The details of the crime are withheld till near the end. In fact they are too much and too long withheld to integrate drawn-out quotidian prelude and final crime into a coherent whole. If Landes had achieved that integration, the result might have been something brilliant and impressive. Instead, the film is best at depicting the world of a handicapped person with vivid physicality, as a fresh mixture of sensuality and grinding monotony. The dramatic finale, the crime story, merely seems tacked on. Porfirio is a first feature that is not quite a success. It nonetheless marks Landes in the view of festival organizers as a new director to watch. The film creates a monotony that has been called "Bressonian," and it may be that fans of Bresson will be its best audience outside festivals. But this is a more tropical and steamy world than Bresson's. It's filled with the noise and clatter of a Colombian Amazonian town and dominated by its mustachioed protagonist, who despite his frustrations, sometimes wears a little smile.

If we began with the headline that attracted Landes to his story, "Paralyzed Man in Diapers Hijacks Plane to Bogotá," the experience of watching the film might be different. But nothing of that is hinted at. With a documentarian's dogged loyalty to his subject, Landes lived around his provincial cast for five months before shooting the first frame. Though he revealed his decision to do so only at the last minute, he chose the actual protagonist, Porfirio Ramirez Aldana, to play himself. In the film, Porfirio's dissatisfaction comes out gradually. He seems a strong and under the circumstances cheerful man. He is cared for by his unemployed son Lissin (Jarlinsson Ramirez, playing the role of his older brother, who was Porfiriio's actual accomplice) and a young woman, Jasbleidy (Yor Jasbleidy Santos), in a shabby, noisy quarter of the tropical provincial town. Unable to move about without a hand-driven wheelchair, Porfirio sells minutes on his cell phone to locals. We learn he was paralyzed by shots from a police weapon and he seeks redress from the state and consults a lawyer, who is never available when he calls or visits. Eventually he remedies an injustice with a crime -- which we do not actually see.

The editing, excellent at showing the physicality of Porforio's robust but limited bodily existence, doesn't try to depict time through repeated daily rituals but skips around randomly. Porfirio and Lissin are shown swimming, but mostly Porfirio does not leave the house. Porfirio plays himself without any modesty, relieving himself on camera for Lissin and having real sex with Jasbleidy.

The non-intervention of Landes is not to be taken too seriously. The entire film was story-boarded and the actors were given lines to deliver. The stylistically simple but often handsome camerawork by Thimiois Bakatakis is by no means unstudied. Head-on shots follow artfully symmetrical setups and sometimes shift position multiple times during a single scene. As noted, Landes withholds much information about his protagonist. If we knew not only hints of what's to come but more of the background, that Porfirio's injury was from police crossfire and that he was once a successful landowner and rancher in Playa Rica who was forced into these straightened circumstances in the city of Florencia in a different part of the country by civil strife, we might be more sympathetic, might understand Porfirio's growing rage better. But Landes prefers to imply that rage, bit by bit, in small daily occurrences, and only hint at Porfirio's hijacking scheme.

Porfirio has the myth-making habit of making up rhymes about himself and his life. He invents some for Jasbleidy after the sex scene. At the end, after arming himself with weapons hidden in his diapers and setting out for an air trip to Bogotá with Lissin, and then a strange, ominous scene, Porfirio recites his own rhymes poetically explaining what happened. Those and the press notes confirm that he was subsequently confined by the government to his house. This restriction must have been lifted so Landes could shoot Porfirio going into town in his wheel chair to visit a law office and a bingo hall, not to mention the airport.

Alejandro Landes has an cosmopolitan background. He was born in Brazil of a Colombian mother and Ecuadorian father, educated at Brown University and later employed as a writer for the Miami Herald. His Pofirio was included in the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes 2011 and also was shown at Toronto, Pusan, Stockholm, and Miami. It was watched for this review as part of New Directors/New Fims 2012 (jointly sponsored by MoMA and the Film Society of Lincoln Center), where it will be shown to the public as follows:

Saturday, March 31st | 7:30 PM | MoMA
Sunday, April 1st | 3:00 PM | FSLC