San Francisco International Film Festival 2018

[Chris Knipp]

VIVIAN QU: ANGELS WEAR WHITE/JIA NIAN HUA (2017)


ZHOU MEIJUN IN ANGELS WEAR WHITE

Vulnerable women in China

The images in Angels Wear White are pretty and at the center of it is a quartet of delicate young Chinese girls. The scene is a motel, one that's modern and spacious and where the rooms aren't cheap, at a seaside location with large dunes like sculptures - and a giant sculpture of Marilyn Monroe that runs symbolically through the film. Two of the four are very young schoolgirls, twelve years old. Another, Mia (Vicky Chen), is a teenager and a working girl, doing menial chores at the motel. The last is a bit older and more sophisticated, Lili (Peng Jing), a clerk at the motel. Through a surveillance camera Mia sees foul play in a room one night and records the camera information on her cell phone, but she hides what she knows. Lili's wily ways infect her.

The central event is an ugly one, the sexual exploitation of a young girl, perhaps two, by a middle-aged man, who's never seen directly. Lili and Mia cover this up when an investigation takes place.

A desultory police investigation proceeds off and on, while the camera follows around the exploited young girl and the teenager. There surely is a good story here somewhere. But it doesn't seem the filmmaker, Vivian Qu, knows quite how to structure her tale. Though never anything but watchable, this film meanders and runs off on tangents, never quite gaining momentum. It is too diffuse.

Boyd van Hoeij commented in Hollywood Reporter at Angels' Venice debut that it's "Luminously filmed but restrained to a fault," and though its final shot packs "an impressive punch," Qu's drama wants to suggest something about the precarious position of women in China, but exactly what "is harder to pin down." That may also have been true of Qu's first film, Trap Street (reviewed on Filmleaf in 2014 ND/NF coverage). That was in Venice's Critic Week, while this feature made it into the main competition on the Lido and later to Toronto; she is making steady progress. The texture of her films is satisfying even if their thrust is vague.

In some ways Trap Street may have succeeded better with its more complicated, less focused material, which contained many similar elements - hotel rooms, pretty young girls, surveillance cameras, with the added attractions of youthful romance and richer mystery. Angels Wear White touches on today's awareness of sexual harassment and is beautiful to look at.

Angels Wear White 嘉年华 (Jiā Nián Huá), 107 mins., debuted in competition at Venice 2017 and has played or will play in a total of at least 34 international festivals, including the San Francisco International Film Festival in April 2018, where it was screened for this review.

[Chris Knipp]

DOMINIQUE CHOISY: MY LIFE WITH JAMES DEAN/MA VIE AVEC JAMES DEAN (2017)


MICKAËL PELISSIER, NATHALIE RICHARD, AND JOHNNY RASSE IN MY LIFE WITH JAMES DEAN

Cinema and romance on the Norman coast with a light gay touch

My LIfe with James Dean is a charming French gay film about love and cinema whose central figure is an attractive young director, Géraud Champreux (actor and birdsong immitaer Johnny Rasse). Géraud - not Gérard; people keep getting it wrong - goes to the Norman coast for a series of showings of his eponymous new film in Calais and several other coastal towns. Not many show up, as is not surprising given the provincial settings and the movie theme, which Variety describes as "a frank Jean Genet-ish LGBT tale of carnal passion" - and Géraud seems all at sea anyway. But he's ready to go with the flow, and things happen.

At the first showing, in a cinema attached to a casino, only one person shows up. But the cute, young, very tall projectionist, Balthazar (Mickaël Pelissier), falls for him and wants to make him his first gay experience.

Géraud has left his laptop at home and a kid has stolen his cellphone on the train. He borrows phones and calls the star of his film, Ludwig (Tancredi Volpert), leaving messages in which he promises he's looking for a salle de musculation (a workout room) "to maintain that body you like." Géraud (that is Johnny Rasse) is indeed attractively muscular in his thin, open-collared shirts; his expression is abstracted, a little sad, perhaps missing Ludwig, whose interest in him may have faded.

Ludwig, at least, is not there. But he does eventually show up, to the disappointment of Balthazar. The sponsor of the first screening, Sylvia van den Rood (Nathalie Richard), wholly misses the screening, because her lover, a married woman, has broken up with her and she is a mess. At the Hotel de Calais, where Géraud is put up by Silvia, the perpetual clerk is Gladys (Juliette Damiens). Is she in love with Géraud? No, there is someone else; but she has memorized Chekhov's Seagull - which seems not inappropriate - and wants to be cast in Géraud's next film.

Géraud gets a cahier in a bookstore, and, freed no doubt by the lack of computers or cellphones, and, while among people, starts jotting notes in it for his next film, whose title becomes The Maharajah and the Seagulls. It's a Bollywood-Normandy production of which we see the title song in the closing credits.

No scenes in Choisy's film seem more typical than those where all the main characters are following each other, one after the other, around the town streets, compelled by romantic confusion. They create intertwining intrigues and infatuations, led by Balthazar. Him, Géraud gently rebuffs, saying he is "a child." But when he takes off his clothes, he is not. We meet Géraud's mother, and Balthazar's father. Later some of the principals run off in a van, hiding a handsome, dark young fugitive.

The thing Choisy's good hearted, airy, film has and never loses is the essential quality Calvino defined, leggerezza in Italian - lightness. Something of that comes from being made away from the responsibility and pretension of Paris, France's cultural and cinematic capital whose weight of tradition and responsibility to be sophisticated and elegant could weigh on a cinéast whose material is as evanescent as this. Choisy

Born in 1959, Dominique Choisy has worked as an editor for French television, in addition to teaching at the Université d’Amiens in the north of France. After helming a number of short films, Choisy directed his first feature, Modern Comforts in 2000. Also starring Nathalie Richard, Modern Comforts won the FIPRESCI Prize at the Mar del Plata Film Festival. He returned to the director’s chair in 2011 with Les fraises des bois. My Life with James Dean is his third feature.

My LIfe with James Dean/Me vie avec James Dean, 108 mins., debuted in Paris at the Cheries-Cheris Film Festival (MK2 Beaubourg) and continued at Montreal, Brussels, Toulouse, Tours, and Lyon. It was screened for this review as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival. Theatrical releases in France and Germany are scheduled.

Showing at the same same time in Boston (Cambridge) at the Wicked Queen Festival Apr. 6, 7:30 pm at the Brattle Theater.
SFIFF showings:
Thurs. Apr. 5 8:30 Roxie Theater
Fri. apr. 6 3 pm Creativity Theater
Sun. Apr. 8 j8:30 pm Vitoria Theater


THE POSTER FOR THE FILM

[Chris Knipp]

SIMON LERENG WILMONT: THE DISTANT BARKING OF DOGS (2017)


OLEG AFANASYEV

Lions at home in danger by a brave photographer


Danish documentarian Simon Lereng Wilmont went to Hnltove, a mile from the front line of fighting between Ukraine forces and pro-Russian separatists four years ago and made this film focused on a boy of ten whose father chose not to flee the fighting. Like many a great documentary this one starts with extraordinary access. Wilmont's fly-on-the-wall technique means he is present at the most intimate moments but never noticed.

Not surprisingly, the film Loreng made won top honors in IDFA's "First Appearance" Competition. Just how dangerous this work was, if you wouldn't guess along the way, is shown at the very outset with footage from a car when there's a big explosion a couple vehicles forward of it, blowing everything away and driving the car the photographer is in off the road.

Oleg is a fifth-sixth grader, the age of openness, curiosity, good humor. He lives with his grandmother Alexandra, a big, tough-minded, warm woman. His father is gone, his mother died years earlier. His aunt Ayosha falls for a soldier who'll take her to a safer place along with her son Yarik, robbing Oleg of his companion for pillow fights and leaving Alexandra and Oleg alone - the more so because most of the village is also gone. There are a few classroom scenes were there were other children - classes on mines and how to be wary of them, what to do if disaster strikes. War is the ever-present thing, with memories of a neighbor who had his head blown off, leaving his wife wandering outside speechless. Alexandra quotes a saying, "Every dog is a lion in its own home." So they are lions who hear howitzers and the distant barking of dogs.

With the older teenager Kostya Oleg goes swimming in the dark, with firing roaring in the distance, and they make a fire. Wilmont must have pledged, "If they go, I go." He threw in his lot with them to make this film. It reminds me of the old Life Magazine. A great Life photographer focused on the most human of human interest stories, weeding out anything trivial, unless, in its triviality, it was tremendous. He took me as a boy to far other worlds I could escape into. But this world I only wish did not exist. Yarik comes back for some reason, and Oleg has his company again. But the situation is wearing everyone down, us too, the viewers, the mood grows darker, and when Kostya brings a pistol, it's dangerous. Oleg gets a gash in the ankle from a ricocheting bullet, then they cruelly shoot frogs in a pool, but Wilmont quietly forbears and observes.

It was quiet and lovely for a while, then the fighting started up again. It is not over.

The Distant Barking of Dogs, 90 mins., debuted at International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam (IDFA). Screened for this review as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival, April 2018. See the review at IDFA by Neil Young in Hollywood Reporter for further details.

SFIFF April 6.

[Chris Knipp]

MATTHEW HILL: CIVILIZATIONS: HOW DO WE LOOK? (EPISODE 2) (2018)



A glossy update, in a retro documentary style, minus the dominant voice

According to Vanessa Thorpe in the Guardian, the makers of the ambitious BBC arts series "Civilizations" faced "major hurdles" in filming, with tourists, bureaucrats, security staff and "cultural sensitivities" all "standing in their way." They believe they faced greater obstacles than the 1969 series they were commissioned to update. I looked at one episode shown as part of the SF film festival, number 2, which is about the representation of the human figure from its earliest days till now.

The question title, "How Do We Look?" is misleading in its suggestion of a personal, self-conscious sense of the culture of the visual. Actually, the representations of human form through history come from sources we mostly know very little about, other than what we see. Did ancient Egyptians really see themselves as stiff and upright, or were they just waiting for artists to come up with another way of drawing, like the fascinating, and engaging Roman funerary portraits on top of Egyptian-style coffins in the Fayum Mummy Portraits? This is a rapid survey, not a deep delving, but it could have delved deeper.

Just as we still owe a lot to the beautiful idealized forms devised by the Greeks and the Romans and their incorporation into modern sculpture promoted by the influential 18th-century archaeologist Johann Joachim Winckelmann, so this glossy, handsomely realized documentary hour owes an awful lot to the traditional ceremonial style of the docs it's updating. In fact it comes on initially very much like the "Encyclopedia Britannica films" shown in US schools in the Fifties, which droned on in a singsong fashion so we'd know we were being lectured about important things, and could zone out.

In the effort to keep us from doing that, a string of impressive and appropriate experts are shown, British whenever possible, with nicely lit, sharply focused sculptures. Toward the end, the film skips from classical style modern sculpture to an African American painter who does updates of people found on the street in a style adopted from "high art" he's viewed at the Met. Particularly noticeable, and amusing, is chief "presenter" (one of three in the series) Cambridge professor Mary Beard, resplendent in a big orange scarf (to unify multiple appearances over time, perhaps), whose toothy, over-emphatic style of delivery, striving for a sense of dramatic revelation, has been compared, not without reason, to Margaret Rutherford, as Vanessa Thorpe notes.

Starting with Mexican Olmec sculpture, none of the usual highlights are missed in a survey that privileges western classical art because, it shows, the world has done so. Something new to me is the information that even traditional Buddhist sculpture was influenced by the Greco-Roman (along with the Lincoln Memorial in Washington).

One thing that's missing here is a defining individual voice. What made the 1969 series so memorable was the aristocratic, establishment tones of its ever-present showpiece spokesman, Sir Kenneth Clark. That assurance Clark had, his regal authority, is lacking here. So is this really an update, or a dusting off, with something important, the unifying element of a strong sensibility, missing? The old one, note, dared to call itself "Civilization." Now it's safely pluralistic, not one but many "Civilizations." Timid and PC, but you can't get away with a white male presenting mostly western art as "civilization" anymore, you need females, people of color, and a bIt more exotic stuff. (Still slighted: Africa, which remains largely invisible.)

Of course there have been some new discoveries, which are incorporated, and these are always of immense value. One thing undoubtedly new is the more recently discovered Chinese Han dynasty tomb figures, with a representative of the beautiful new Asian Art Museum of San Francisco to talk about them, its Director Jay Xu. But they do not seriously alter our understanding. Is it surprising that sculptures were made by and to celebrate the rich and the powerful? One was hoping for some more pungent observations and keener insights. Perhaps a more overt critique of Sir Kenneth's version would have helped us see the value of an update.

Civilizations,"How Do We Look?", 64 mins., debuted 24 Apr. 2018, no. 2 of nine one-hour episodes, BBC Two, PBS, presented by Simon Schama, Mary Beard and David Olusoga, a series of documentary films on the history of art. Viewed as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival on a PBS Press Room video (of which the sound fell out in the last ten minutes).

[Chris Knipp]

AMY SCOTT: HAL (2018)



A director's biography

[Capsule review]

Hal Ashby is less of a household word among the iconic Seventies "New Hollywood" directors than Lucas, Spielberg, Scorsese or Coppola but also important. Amy Scott has made a documentary re-introduction. His key work of the period, often created in non-stop stoned editing sessions, includes The Landlord, In the Heat of the Night, Harold and Maude, Shampoo, The Last Detail, Being There and Coming Home, movies all made in the nine years from 1970 to 1979. He died at only 59, of pancreatic cancer. Some said the studios killed him by their opposition. L.A.-based Scott was trained in Oklahoma, became an editor, and was head digital archivist and assistant to Studs Terkel in Chicago. Owen Gleiberman has reviewed her documentary for Variety suggesting it has more clues to his work than his life. For an avaluation of his work read Pauline Kael's review of Coming Home in The New Yorker.

Hal, 90 mins., debuted Jan. 2018at Sundance, screened for this review as part of the April 2018 San Francisco International Film Festival.

[Chris Knipp]

HONG SANG-SOO: CLAIRE'S CAMERA/LA CAMÉRA DE CLAIRE (2017)


ISABELLE HUPPERT IN CLAIRE'S CAMERA

Quick camerawork

[Capsule review]

Whether you think Claire's Camera (not her knee, eh?) is a dashed-off sketch or a succinct masterpiece, it's another of Hong Sang-soo's characteristic sequences of two- or three-way dialogues - à la Rohmer, the similarity more obvious with a film shot at Cannes and including a major French star. And it's typically about a boozy, womanizing Korean movie director, a long-time gf, and a beautiful young fling who's Wong's own serious new flame, Kim Min-hee. Things go round, and aphorisms are uttered. There is more than this light-hearted, Rohmer-esque entertainment might reveal at first, though the run-time is too short for Hong's usual lengthy, boozy arguments and elaborate overlapping time-schemes.

Claire's Camera/La Caméra de Claire 클레어의 카메라, 69 mins., debuted at Cannes May 2017; 14 other festivals, and was screened for this review as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival. Metascore 80%.

SHOWTIMES SFIFF:
Saturday, April 7, 2018 at3:30 p.m. at YBCA Screening Room
Monday, April 9, 2018 at 4:00 p.m. at SFMOMA
Thursday, April 12, 2018 at 8:30 p.m. at YBCA Screening Room

[Chris Knipp]

MATTHEW TESTA: THE HUMAN ELEMENT (2018)



"I became a photographer to be an eye witness to the beauty of nature but I quickly realized there was a more complex story going on in the world about the collision between people and nature, and I felt a great sense of urgency to bear witness to that…Imbalance in one element leads to an imbalance in another. People are the only element that can choose to restore balance." – James Balog

For me the most convincing and important climate change documentary was Jeff Orlovski's Chasing Ice. It records National Geographic photographer James Balog's work recording the melting of glaciers using multiple time release cameras that provide the information over years of what is happening to the ice at the ends of the planet. This is where the sea rises.

This is the clearest, simplest, and most disturbing visual proof that the frozen parts of the planet are rapidly eroding, causing the sea levels to rise.

With Matthew Testa Balog simply has another guy recording his work as a photographer. This time he moves to the elements, water, air, fire, and earth, and he suggests that humans constitute a fifth element interacting with, changing and being changed by the four others. Needless to say, I do not agree with the citizen critic on "Letterboxd" who wrote: "In the last few months I've seen An Inconvenient Truth, An Inconvenient Sequel, Chasing Ice, & Chasing Coral... This added nothing new." Here's what it's got that's new: this man's voice and personal camera. James Balog's information is always very visceral, personal, and clear. It doesn't feel like a survey but like reports from the front, this time, from multiple fronts, governed by the four elements.

The first element is water, rising sea water. Balog concentrates on the Chesapeake Bay region, particularly Tangier Island, a kind of canary in the coalmine of invading water levels. This little island community of "watermen" will need $100 million to build a seawall to protect its way of life from extinction. Where is this going to come from? New York City can afford the $180 billion or whatever it is it needs for a seawall, but Tangier Island is poor.

Burning fossil fuel has changed the air. Balog begins with a project to photograph the thin layer of breathable air to show how fragile it is. It's a simple project, using a balloon and several cameras, but it works. He then goes to visit a school and some kids in Denver where they have asthma and the air quality is bad. They cannot afford to move to another region. About half the US population lives in substandard air, the film says.

Fire: this is the most newsy and scary of the elements stories, as fresh as the fires in California. The "new normal" for forest fires is now 1000% percent increased. Balog covers with his camera a region in the Carmel Valley that was saved by a very large team at the cost of over $200 million, the most expensive firefighting project in US and perhaps world history. "The fire next time" is no poetic menace but a likely statement of the way things are going. A 5,000 acre fire in summer used to be exceptional. Now it's hardly noticed at all. As the film went to completion the big California fires were still raging. And while now it is no longer the custom just to "let fires burn" around property, because they are too powerful not to destroy all in their wake, it is also true that now there are fires that cannot be stopped at all. The film explains the multiple factors behind this exponential increase in fire. If you life in the american West or on the West Coast, no matter where you are the danger of fire could be real.

Water, air, and fire. Next comes earth. Here Balog returns to his family's origins in the coal mining country of Pennsylvania where his Russian grandfather worked in the mines. He expresses a new respect for what these men did, which was right at the time. It is also true that now, nothing can restore the economic viability of coal. A young man is shown who has gone to barber school and loves cutting hair even more than he loved the mines. Some of the mine owners are shown to have moved toward developing solar energy over the vast land area they own that was used for coal mining. So this looks like one of the more positive pictures. But we are reminded that the US announced its intention to pull out of the Paris Climate Agreement in 2010, , the only country to have done so - one of the chief indications of the terrible in which we are going.

The film ends with the March for Science of April 22, where Balog speaks, and also with a catalog of major natural disasters that have recently happened and their human toll. "Three hurricanes cost the US economy $265 billion. 251 people died." "Carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, reached the highest levels in 800,000 years." We have an "inalienable right", Balog said at the March for Science, to stable elements on which we rely for life. We are the only ones who can achieve that.

The Human Element, 76 mins., was in post-production according to IMDb. It's a brand new film. It was screened for this review as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival. This was the film's premiere, with multiple showtimes as below. Film crew, subject, and spokesman present for the screenings.

Saturday, April 7, 2018 at 1:30 PM -- Dolby Theatre/PREMIERE SCREENING
Sunday, April 8, 2018 at 3:30 PM -- San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Wednesday, April 11, 2018 at 1:30 PM -- The Roxie Theatre
Thursday, March 29, 2018 at 12:00 PM -- The Roxie Theatre
In attendance wukk be Matthew Testa (Director/Writer), James Balog (Photographer/Film, Subject/Writer), Olivia Ahnemann (Producer), Daniel Wright (Co-Producer),Lyman Smith (Editor/Writer, Josh Salzman and Jim Hurst (Cinematographers), Chief Tony Howard (Film Subject, Cal Fire)