San Francisco International Film Festival 2012

[Chris Knipp]

San Francisco International Film Festival 2012 April 19-May 3


LINKS TO REVIEWS:
(Including films seen at NYFF 2011, R-V [Rendez-Vous with French Cinema 2012], ND/NF [New Directors/New Films 2012]; FCS [Film Comment Selects]; and in Paris 2011.)

17 Girls (Delphine Coulin, Muriel Coulin 2011)--R-V
Alps (Yorgos Lanthimos 2011)
Back to Stay (Milagros Mumenthaler 2011)
Bernie (Richard Linklater 2012)
Bonsái (Cristian Jiménez 2011)
Chicken with Plums (Parannaud, Satrapi 2011)--PARIS
Choked (Kim Joong-hyun 2012)
Crulic -- The Path to Beyond (Anca Damian 2011)--ND/NF
Day He Arrives, The (Hong Sang-soo 2011)
Don't Stop Believin': Everyman's Journey (Ramona S. Diaz 2012)
Dreileben (Petzold, Graf, Hochhäuser 2011)--NYFF
Farewell, My Queen (Benoît Jacquot 2011)--R-V
Found Memories (Júlia Murat 2011)--ND/NF
Giants, The (Bouli Lanners 2011)
Gimme the Loot (Adam Leon 2012)--ND/NF
Goodbye (Mohammad Rassoulof 2011)--ND/NF
Guilty (Vincent Garenq 2011)--R-V
How to Survive a Plague (David France 2011)--ND/NF
Hysteria (Tanya Wexler 2011)
I Wish (Hirakasu Koreeda 2011)--FCS
Informant (Jamie Melzer 2012)
Intouchables, The (Eric Toledano, Olivier Nakache 2011)
Land of Oblivion (Michale Boganim 2011)
Last Screening (Laurant Achard 2011)--R-V
Last Winter (John Shank 2011)
Law in These Parts, The (Ra'anan Alexandrowicz 2011)
Life Without Principle (Johnnie To 2011)
Lonieliest Planet (Julia Loktev 2011)--NYFF
Neighboring Sounds (Kleber Mendonça Filho 2012)--ND/NF
Okay, Enough, Goodbye (Rania Attieh, Daniel Garcia 2011)
Oslo, August 31 (Joachim Trier 2011)--ND/NF
Oversimplification of Her Beauty, An (Terence Nance 2012)--ND/NF
Policeman (Nadav Lapid 2011)--NYFF
Polisse (Maïwenn 2011)--PARIS
Rebellion (Mathieu Kassovitz 2011)--FCS
Secret World, A (Gabriel Mariño 2012)
Sleeping Sickness (Ulrich Köhler 2011)--NYFF
Smugglers' Songs (Rabah Ameur-Amèche 2011)--R-V
Snows of Kilimanjaro (Robert Guédiguidigian 2011)--R-V
Step Up to the Plate (Paul Lacoste 2011)
Summer Games (Rolando Colla 2011)
Terraferma (Emanuele Crialese 2011)
Twixt (Francis Ford Coppola 2011)--PARIS
Waiting Room, The (Peter Nicks 2012)
Where Do We Go Now? (Nadine Labaki 2011)--ND/NF



Filmleaf forums thread


INTOUCHABLES POSTER


Descriptions of all the films listed alphabetically including an additional 19 out of competition can be found on the San Francisco Film Society website here.

[Chris Knipp]

COMPETITION FILMS:

Official Selections 2012 New Directors Prize (Narrative Feature) Competition


Official Selections 2012 New Directors Prize (Narrative Feature) Competition

Back to Stay, Milagros Mumenthaler, Argentina 2011, U.S. Premiere
Buenos Aires at the end of summer. Marina, Sofia and Violeta are alone in the family home after their grandmother, who had brought them up, has died. This strange situation will affect their interactions with one another and with the world.

Choked, Jong-hyn Kim, South Korea 2011
In a recession-battered Seoul, a young man in the dodgy relocation business must deal with loan sharks and aggrieved parties owed large sums by his vanished entrepreneur mother. Director Kim Joong-hyun gradually turns up the heat and watches his characters boil in this intelligent and nuanced feature debut.

Found Memories, Júlia Murat, Brazil 2011
A young photographer drifts into the tiny Brazilian village of Jotuomba, charming the elders with her camera and learning the fine art of baking bread in this disarming meditation on memory, aging and letting go of the past.

Land of Oblivion, Michale Boganim, France/Ukraine 2011
This compelling debut feature tallies up the fragile human cost of one of the first truly global disasters, the cataclysm at the nuclear power facility at Chernobyl. Ukrainian Bond girl Olga Kurylenko plays emotionally damaged Anya, one of many unanchored survivors whose memories and ambitions are impacted by the strangely magnetic pull of a desolate hometown.

Last Winter, John Shank, Belgium 2011
A young farmer in central France tries to sustain his spiritual connection to the land amid the crushing pressures of modern agriculture in this elegiac drama. Vincent Rottiers is the taciturn Johann, who goes it alone in the landscape he loves, a terrain captured in shimmering cinematography.

Mosquita y Mari, Aurora Guerrero, USA 2011
Set in Huntington Park, near downtown Los Angeles, this earnest and beguiling coming-of-age tale follows two Chicana teens in the midst of the delicate dance of self-discovery and sexual awakening as they explore a new friendship and young love.

Neighboring Sounds, Kleber Mendonça Filho, Brazil 2012
This magnificently sculpted story about life on an upscale street in the bustling city of Recife encompasses an entire city block’s worth of characters, incidents and encounters. The totality becomes symphonic in its structure and power.

OK, Enough, Goodbye., Rania Attieh, Daniel Garcia, Lebanon 2010
A forty-something Lebanese pastry shop owner who looks like an escapee from a film by Judd Apatow and still lives with his mother is the unlikely protagonist of this marvelously crafted deadpan comedy. After his mother skips town, he searches cluelessly for various maternal substitutes.

Policeman, Nadav Lapid, Israel 2011
This fascinating journey into Israel’s changing political landscapes doubles as a formally puzzle-like narrative. Story lines involving a counter-terrorism police unit and class-war guerillas merge into a telling picture of a long-embattled region.

17 Girls, Delphine Coulin, Muriel Coulin, France 2011
A young girl’s decision not to terminate an accidental pregnancy sets off something like an airborne outbreak of teen reproduction, transmitted via loneliness and peer pressure, in this startling debut feature based on real-life events.

Valley of Saints, Musa Syeed, India 2012
Using Kashmir’s picturesque Dal Lake as its backdrop and underpinned by the political unrest in the region, this heartfelt drama explores the relationship between two best friends and the female researcher, studying environmental degradation, who threatens to distract them from their dreams of escape.

In addition to these 11 first features in competition, the New Directors section of SFIFF55 includes 19 out-of-competition films, which will be announced at the Festival’s press conference Tuesday, March 27.


EOM TAE-GU IN CHOKED

Official Selections 2012 Golden Gate Awards Documentary Feature Competition

Golden Slumbers, Davy Chou, Cambodia 2011
This exceptional documentary summons the spirits of Cambodian cinema’s golden age, which ended during the Khmer Rouge’s reign of terror between 1975 and 1979. Blending interviews with surviving filmmakers, classic songs and poetic examinations of former movie palaces, Golden Slumbers is a testament to the captivating power of art in the face of tragedy.

In My Mother’s Arms, Atia Jabarah al-Daradji, Mohamed Jabarah al-Daradji, Iraq 2011
In violence-ridden Baghdad, one determined man tries to create a safe haven: an independent orphanage with no government support, where 32 Iraqi boys live, eat, play, sleep and go to school together. It is a fragile ecosystem shielding them from a life of suffering and extreme danger.

Informant, Jamie Meltzer, USA 2012, World Premiere
Brandon Darby, liberal activist turned FBI informant turned FOX news commentator and Tea Party darling, tells his side of the story.

It’s the Earth Not the Moon, Gonçalo Tocha, Portugal 2011
Filming on the remote Azores island of Corvo, director Gonçalo Tocha aims “to be everywhere at the same time and not miss a thing.” The result is a wonderfully poetic take on the anthropological documentary, the travel essay and the armchair adventure, made with almost naïve sincerity.

The Law in These Parts, Ra’anan Alexandrowicz, Israel 2011
This film, winner of the Sundance 2012 World Documentary prize, offers a rare insider’s view of the logic, structure and moral cost of Israel’s parallel military legal system that governs Palestinians under occupation. Interviews with the men who created and uphold these laws, artfully juxtaposed with archival footage, call into question concepts of justice and rule-of-law.

Meanwhile in Mamelodi, Benjamin Kahlmeyer, Germany 2011, U.S. Premiere
Set against the raucous backdrop of the 2010 World Cup, this beautifully crafted portrait of a place and a family features stunning cinematography and a lively score, as the Mtswenis’ day-to-day struggles and victories echo the promise of a new South Africa.

Off Label, Donal Mosher, Michael Palmieri, USA 2011
An alternatively tragic and bleakly comic road trip through the methods and madness of pharmaceuticals in our culture. Setting personal storytelling against archival and industrial footage, it examines the medicated margins of American life, from the testing, marketing and consumption of pharmaceuticals to the alienation, perseverance and spiritual striving of individuals living in a society that pathologizes our desires for health, happiness and even our sense of identity for profit.

Patience (After Sebald), Grant Gee, England 2012
This moving tour through the landscape of W.G. Sebald’s genre-bending novel, The Rings of Saturn, presents a multilayered, many-voiced homage to his discursive, elegiac and perfectly illusion-free style by poets, mapmakers, novelists and acquaintances—admirers haunted and inspired by the voice of the German writer, who died in 2001.

The Source, Maria Demopolous, Jodi Wille, USA 2012
An exploration of the controversial Source Family, a ’70s Southern California experiment in communal living whose eccentric leader, Father Yod, championed Eastern mysticism, healthy living and sexual liberation. Using archival footage and interviews with former members, the documentary chronicles the Family from inception through implosion, examining its lasting impressions on pop culture.

Step Up to the Plate, Paul Lacoste, France 2011
Hawkeyed master chef Michel Bras is ready to hand the keys to his Michelin-recognized restaurant in rural southwestern France to his talented son. A sublime, contemplative study of artistry, family and tradition calibrated to the turning of the seasons, this lovely documentary is about much more than food.

The Waiting Room, Peter Nicks, USA 2012
Dire situations are often illuminated by extraordinary acts of compassion in this intimate and intense day-in-the-life documentary portrait of the patients, doctors, nurses and social workers at Oakland’s Highland Hospital—Alameda County’s busiest medical center for trauma cases, the uninsured and indigent.

Winter Nomads, Manuel von Stürler, Switzerland 2012, North American Premiere
800 sheep, three donkeys, and several dogs are led by two shepherds through Swiss fields and suburbs in a film that combines its beautifully photographed images with a keen ear for sound to situate this vanishing profession and lifestyle within a changing environment.


JOHN KANE EDITED INFORMANT FOR JAMIE MELTZER

[Chris Knipp]

PAUL LACOSTE: STEP UP TO THE PLATE (2011)


SEBASTIEN AND MICHEL BRAS IN STEP UP TO THE PLATE

Preview

Tradition and creativity in French cuisine

This translation of its title is a nice pun that you couldn't make in French. The original title of this austere, impressive documentary about tradition and creativity in a French regional restaurant, which opened in Paris March 14, 2012, is Entre Les Bras - La cuisine en héritage, but it's a pun too, because "entre les bras" is like "within reach" or "pass off," but the family of great chefs, father Michel and son Sébastien, is Bras, so the action here is all "among the Bras." The film begins in 2009, when Michel Bras decides to pass on the reins to Sébastien. Michel is a famous French chef. His restaurant in Laguiole, deep in the semi-mountainous Aubrac region of the Hautes-Pyranées in southwest France, has won many awards including Michelin three stars, one of 106 in the world, and 26 in France, to have this honor. The film doesn't tell us any of this; there is no narration or fuss about fame. In the second scene we see Michel create Le Gargouillou, his most famous dish, which is like a painting, revealing his mixture of freshness and complexity, and his incredible knowledge of the local flora and herbs. Later Sébastien will create his own dish, and his father will critique it, multiple times. At the end, Sébastien will cast it aside, and break it down, and we see him, having officially more or less taken over the mantle from his father, presenting three dishes in sequence at the Palais Royal in Paris. They run from savory to sweet. It's like a final exam, that he passes summa cum laude.

The film, which is organized by a run through the four seasons from spring to winter and back to spring, is austere, handheld, mostly without music, fly-on-the-wall, or often fly-in-the-face, because it closeups on the two men. They are both fit, runners. No smoking or pot belly for them. They are rather alike, both in their lean, craggy faces and in their agelessness. Michel has all his hair, and it's only partly gray. Sébastien is no longer young, but of indeterminate age. Later we meet their father and mother, who ran a restaurant too; Michel began following around in the kitchen, as did Sébastien. Their grandfather was a farmer in the region. The farm is still active. Alban, Sébastien's young son, already works in the kitchen as he father and grandfather did. So we begin to realize why some of the world's greatest restaurants are in far-off parts of France: because their proprietors are deeply rooted in the regions and their cuisine is a flower of the land. Step Up to the Plate could be called Handing Off the Baton. Michel is still running, literally. He is not leaving. He continues to work, closely involved in selecting food at the market each week. "If I stop doing that," he says, "I will be dead." "Their carelessness in making selections," he begins, referring vaguely to his successors, and then he stops and seems to begin to cry.


http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.p...-Festival-2012
Kabuki
Fri April 27, 6:00 pm
Sat April 28, 3:45 pm
PFA
Sun, April 29, 1:00 pm

This is a preview. My full review will be available here after the film's US release.

.

[Chris Knipp]

KIM JOONG-HYUN: CHOKED (2012)


EON TAE-GU IN CHOKED

Money money money

Somehow young Korean director Kim Joong-hyun's promising first feature Choked (Kashi) reminds me of early Visconti, though his Asian Alain Delon, Gwon Yun-ho (Eom Tae-gu), with his far-away look and cheekbones for days, isn't a dirt-poor immigrant in Milan but someone trapped at the bottom of his country's economic boom, stuck with his mother's bad debts, an evil job, and a condescending, status-conscious fiancee. Yun-ho (Eom) lives with his ditsy mother Park Hui-su (Gil Hae-yeon), whose diet supplement pyramid scheme involves something she claims made Nancy Reagon start menstruating again. After the delivery of many cartons of this stuff, mom mysteriously disappears in the night, and Youn-hoo is stuck with her debts. The chief investor is another foolish woman, Lee Seo-hui (Park Se-jin), to whom she owes 30 million won ($25,000), and we spend a lot of time following her around, while Yun-ho works for Dobang Construction, his job to help persuade the occupants of a housing block to move out.

Yun-ho's fiancee Se-gyeong (Yun Chae-yeong) keeps bugging Yun-ho to introduce her to his mother. Needless to say, he can't explain why he can't do this. She also wants them to take a nice apartment. The one he lives in, owned by his aunt's husband, is a dump. Seo-hui is bugging him to pay her what his mom owes. He's also pursued by a loan shark who wants him to sign his life or his body away. Seo-hui is struggling and illegal herself, selling designer knockoffs out of her minivan. She threatens to sue, and presses charges against Hui-su, who gets put in jail for a while when she's found. Yun-ho tries to get a big loan through a bank officer friend. Eventually his efforts to pressure housing block residents for the construction company lead to violent retaliation, just after his mother is released and returns home.

Wherever you turn in this story, it's all about money. Money brings status (which Yun-ho's aunt is obsessed with like his fiancee) and his supervisor brags that now people can be removed from their housing by payoffs rather than physical force. Seo-hui is divorced, and has to appeal to her ex-husband to put up money to bail her out when she gets picked up by the cops for a violation. He has remarried and her little daughter has switched allegiance to her step-mom, but Seo-hui tries to buy her affection by offering her an expensive video game. Yun-ho tries to hold onto the materialistic Se-gyeong by dressing nicely and showing her nice Seoul apartments. When he shows her, more realistically, a small one, she dumps him.

The film has limited tech credits but, shot by dp Lee Jin-Keun with a red camera, the images are clear and sharp, and the action is mobile, constantly shifting from Yun-ho to Seo-hui and from one of their scenes to another. As Yun-ho, Eom Tae-gu is both neutral and complex. At first his opacity seems a sign of strength, and he can lash out on occasion, and stands up to the loan shark, but the three demanding, crazy women wear him down, and when his mother returns and he's sitting at the kitchen table with her, he momentarily seems her little boy again. But the film is as much about Seo-hui, as emerges clearly when we begin to feel Yun-ho's passivity. A particularly strong and well placed moment comes late in the film when Seo-hui and Yun-ho encounter each other on some steps and he sits smoking and staring into space after she has been cruelly rejected by her ex-husband and sits munching on some of the pastries from his bakery. Choked (whose Korean title actually means "Thorns") is a character-driven drama, and all the main actors are good. The important thing is that Park Se-jin and Gil Hae-jeon as the impoverished divorcee and the mother, never seem pathetic, though the rejected, compromised, and bilked divorcee Seo-hui is certainly struggling. Director Kim avoids that by conceiving them as kooky and trying to reshape the world to fit their own fantasies. Hui-su, once out of confinement, plans to become a truck driver and even gets Seo-hui to give her a lesson on the way home. But she doesn't even know how to shift gears.

Kim doesn't quite know how to end either, but that works because there's not meant to be any escape from Yun-ho's personal trap of the bullying, snobbism, and materialism of modern Korea that Kim delineates here. One can argue, as Derek Elley does in his Film Business Asia Pusan review, that Yun-ho is too passive and the three women show too little development, making the second half repetitious, but Kim still seems to have an original point of view and his script plays out with determination and restraint, if not with the warmth of the Italians.

Choked debuted at Pusan in January 2012 and was shown in March at Miami. It was reviewed here as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival, where it will be shown as follows:

KABUKI
Sat Apr. 21, 1:30 pm
Sat. Apr. 28, 6:00 pm
Tue. May 1, 9:00 pm.

[Chris Knipp]

RICHARD LINKLATER: BERNIE (2011)


JACK BLACK IN BERNIE

The nicest murderer in East Texas

In the town of Carthage in East Texas, not too long ago, there was an assistant funeral director called Bernie Tiede, pronounced "Teedy" -- like "tedium" without the "um." He sang, played the organ in church, directed local theatricals, including The Music Man. He taught classes to aspiring morticians. He was wonderful with widows. He was nice to everybody and all the town of Carthage liked him, though he had little use for ladies of his own age. In fact, as some acknowledged, he was a little "light in the loafers," in short, closeted gay. Among the widows whom he befriended was Marjorie Nugent, wife of a recently deceased and very mean and rich oil man, who turned out to be even meaner than her husband. Marjorie alienated all her relatives and some of them sued her. She was nasty to everyone who worked for her. But Bernie was so nice to her she began going around with him, taking him on trips, and eventually making him reduce his work load at the funeral home and become her full-time companion, house manager, jack of all trades. Her pampered slave, and sole beneficiary.

And then she became so bossy and controlling and mean that Bernie, nice though he was, couldn't stand it any more and without intending to, quite, he killed her, shot her four times in the back, and popped her body in the freezer, to await a proper burial. And then he began spending more and more of her money, but always to do kindnesses around the town -- until, after nine months in the freezer, Marjorie's disappearance became too suspicious, and Bernie got caught. This is the true story Texas native Richard Linklater, collaborating with Skip Hollandsworth, the author of an article about Bernie Tiede in the Texas Montly, has endeavorred to present on film, making use of the excellent services of Jack Black as Bernie, in an unusual semi-serious role, Shirley MacLaine as the widow, and Matthew McCaughnhey as the DA who brings Bernie to justice, against the wishes of the Carthagenians, who hated the widow and loved Bernie and declared that they wanted him to go free.

Linklater tells his story partly as a lighthearted true-crime story, somewhat like a tamer, more claustrophobic verson of what Glenn Ficarra and John Requa did in I Love You Philip Morris, and partly as a choral Christopher Guest-style mocumentary, because there is much focus on the townspeople (played by twangy Texas TV actors) extolling the virtues of Bernie and telling his story. It's been commented with some justice that the mocumentary bits get in the way of Bernie's own tale. If you can forget that this is Jack Black, his scenes tell the story well enough. Though he plays it a bit too fey at times (particularly in the swishy walk) he delivers a nicely modulated performance, half droll, half real. The only thing he cannot capture, because he is too good a comic actor, is the banality of goodness. But Linklater evidently was wedded to the townsfolks' flavorful testimony, and let it flow more than necessary. It is what gets most of the film's laughs, and it's funny, and loaded with telling jokes about Texas Linklater must have been storing up all his life. One speaker in particular gets crude but irresistible laughs by deriding every part of the state but East Texas, and then describing the nearby district the trial's moved to (so the prosecution will have a chance) as nothing but trailer trash retards.

All this is done with polish. MacLaine is far more restrained than she has been in the past. The character she is playing is extreme enough not to need puffing up. Similarly, Bernie warns his mortuary pupils not to think they make a corpse look more alive by using too much makeup. Matthew McConaughey is as different from his usual roles as Black is in his, as Danny Buck Davidson, the zealous DA, who wants justice done but more than anything wants to get reelected.

But what are we to make of this movie? It presents us with a moral dilemma. Bernie gets a severe sentence. Should he not have? Is this kind of tongue in cheek treatment a fair way to deal with a real crime story? Jack Black visited the real Bernie in prison and has said, “There’s precedent for films in the past that have helped people get out, but you worry at the time you’re making the film: ‘Wait, if we don’t present the film properly, will it actually hurt his chances of getting out?’” Indeed. That's what I was wondering. And I was also wondering if a "good" murderer is even interesting. We like evil. We don't mind if it's droll, like, say, the wondferful string of murders executed by the Victorian villain Louis Mazzini (Dennis Price) in Kind Hearts and Coronet, who knocks off eight relatives, all played by Alec Guinness, in order to gain the title of first Duke of D'Ascoyne. Mazzini's certainly wicked, but his crimes are great fun, because he's self-serving in such a dashing, Macchiavellian way. One wishes Bernie had taken pleasure in doing away with the insufferable Marjorie Nugent -- or at least, as various townspeople opine, he had done the job right, with care and premeditation, so he'd gotten away with it.

Linklater and his coauthor tell their true story in their own homely, humorous Texas style. It's very effective in its way. And it's more or less true, and doubtless some will love it. But it's curiously unsatisfying and too uncritical and lacking in nuance in its treatment of Bernie and his relationship with Marjorie.

Bernie was shown in June 2011 at the LA Film Festival, and also at Rio and London. It had a Texas premiere at SXSW in Austin March 14, 2012, and debuted in NYC as part of Tribeca April 23. Screened for this review in San Francisco, it was included in the San Francisco International Film Festival, where it was shown April 21. It goes into limited US release April 27, and expands May 4.

[Chris Knipp]

CRISTIÁN JIMÉNEZ: BONSÁI (20110


DIEGO NOGUERA AND NATHALIA GALGANI IN BONSÁI

Lies, literature, loves

We must consider adding to Alicia Scherson (of the lovely Play, SFIFF 2006) and Pablo Larrain (of the superbly creepy Tony Manero and Post Morten, NYFF 2008 and 2010) the name of another younger Chilean filmmaker, Cristián Jiménez. He has chosen for this, his second film, Alejandro Zambra's much-admired eponymous novella (and debut). It begins this way: "In the end she dies and he remains alone, although in truth he was alone some years before her death, Emilia's death. Let's say that she is called or was called Emilia and that he is called, was called, and continues to be called Julio. Julio and Emilia. In the end Emilia dies and Julio does not die. The rest is literature:" Bold opening for a movie to begin with a total "spoiler." In fact this film, too, is literature. It concerns a young man who writes a novel about himself and Emilia pretending to his girlfriend at the time -- it's eight years later -- that it's the (handwritten) manuscript of a well known writer that's he's transcribing Julio (Diego Noguera) has pretended to Emilia that he's read Proust, whom she says she's read. Perhaps she's lying too. Note that and love-making and live punk rock music and symbolic plants, and you've about got the basics about a somewhat vague young man learning to love and to write.

The film oscillates in neatly organized sections between Julio's college days studying literature in Valdivia, southern Chile, when he was in love with Emilia (Nathalia Galgani), and that eight years later in Santiago, when he's involved, less romantically, with Blanca (Trinidad González). This is when he pretends to be working for the writer, Gazmuri (Hugo Medina), but is really filling up the four blue notebooks himself.


Diego Noguera plays Julio with confident confusion and poetical blankness. He's a little bit insufferable but he's at the age when being stupid is forgivable. Emilia doesn't necessarily take him very seriously, but after their meeting in the library it's not long before they're in bed every night and, after sex, they read aloud to each other a few pages of a book. If that appeals to you, this lighthearted, bittersweet tale is a movie for you to watch. It's distinctly a young man's film, but it may appeal to young women seeking to understand what makes young men tick.

Julio raises his hand in class to show he's read Proust, which he hasn't, then gets it from the library and goes to the beach, where he falls asleep with the book on his stomach. He wakes up sunburned with a white rectangle where Swan's Way in Spanish was sitting. This defines him and the novella's humorous, slightly sardonic picture of him. The earlier Julio is a student and a reader; the later one is bespectacled, bearded and longer-haired, living marginally, hoping to become a writer, which leads him to take the typing job for Gazmuri, who quickly fires him when he finds someone in his publisher's office who'll do it more cheaply. His sex buddy eight years later is Blanca, who lives in the little apartment across the hall from him. As he has lied to Emilia that he'd read Proust, he lies to Blanca about the fact that Gazmuri has fired him and the writing in the notebooks is his own. Does she suspect? Her comments suggest that she may, and this perhaps is the sweet, indirect way that Blanca and Julio communicate. But she can't be honest with him either and doesn't tell him she's off to Madrid to get a master's degree till the day she's out the door. ("The boxes were suspicious," Julio remarks. "Yes, a suspicious kind of cardboard," she quips.)

What do we suspect? That the flashback sections may be lies too, that they're passages from Julio's fake Gazmuri MS that pretend to be his love affair with Emilia, but are a variation.

There is a Nouvelle Vague playfulness about this tale that makes one wish Jiménez had added more quirky touches like the arrow over Julio's head when he's off in a street scene, so we can spot him on a bike. Witty and sardonic though the story is, one wishes Jiméniz had dared to be a bit more fresh and witty in the cinematic retelling of it; but he may have been deterred by the source novella's near-classic status.

Jiménez's film (and it's shot on film) has a nice, slightly grungy look (especially shots on the roof trimming and arranging his bonsai tree -- part of the somewhat cutesy plant-bonsai theme). I'm afraid I was a little bit underwhelmed. The film's offbeat hipness and New Wave-ishness may have helped get its inclusion in Cannes' Un Certain Regard last year. It was also at Toronto, and other festivals, and Strand has picked it up for US release. In the meantime it was included in the San Francisco International Film Festival April 20, 22 and 24, 2012. It opened theatrically in Miami (at whose festival it won the popular jury prize) May 18, 2012.