SFIFF 2014 - links and comments thread

[Chris Knipp]

Yossi Aviram: The Dune/La dune (2013

Those Israelis continue to impress. Aviram, a former cinematographer, has produced a delicate, subtle, and exceptionally well acted directorial debut, set mostly in France and in French with an initial segment in Israel and Hebrew and an Israeli tie-in. A tale of paths that cross and connections long lost, this is a study of memory and mood and a bit of a mystery story about an officer of the French bureau of missing persons and a mysterious man found in the country, mute, unsought, with no identification. Distinguished performances by the always superb Niels Arestrup, as the police investigator, with Guy Marchand as his longtime lover, and a strong Lior Ashkenazi as the lost man; it's a pleasure just to see Arestrup and Matthieu Amalric, in a key cameo, in the same room, two of the best French film actors of recent times.

[Chris Knipp]

Fabio Mollo: South Is Nothing/Il Sud è niente (2013)

A moody debut feature for Mollo set in the thirty-something Fabio Mollo's native Reggio Calabria, where the Mafia reigns. The story depicts its crushing effect on a small family, with focus on a misfit tomboy called Grazia (Miriam Karlkvist, who got a Euro shooting star award for her committed performance). Her brother has disappeared a few years earlier. Now a local mob boss tells her father he has to sell his fish shop and move north with Grazia. Much tight-lipped brooding follows. Director, cinemagrapher, and much of the crew and some cast members have links with the Centrol Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome, and it shows in an air of youth and experimentalism.

[Chris Knipp]

Claudia Sainte-Luce: The Amazing Catfish/Los insólitos pesces gato (2013)

Mexican first film about a very lonely and isolated young woman who's adopted into the fatherless family of a dying woman with three daughters and a young son. It won the Youth Prize at Locarno and was included in the Discovery section at Toronto and the cinematography is by Agnès Godard.

[Chris Knipp]

Juan Taratuto: The Reconstruction/La reconstrucción (2013)

A craggy, tight-lipped oddball working as a no-nonsense oil field boss in Argentina is called to Ushuaia, the nethermost town in the south of Patagonia, to help a friend with a wife and two daughters, and events slowly take him out of his shell. From the films of Carlos Sorin we've come to know Patagonia as unlikely soil where cinema can bloom. This is also one of those Latin American outback movies where tough macho men come to take a deep look into themselves. Interestingly, Taratuto and his fellow Buenos Aires collaborator and terrific star here Diego Peretti have done a 180° turnaround for this movie, going from the bouncy, talky romantic comedies they formerly did together to serous drama that deals with tragedy and its aftermath, and they do a very fine job of it.

Another example of macho life and emotional trauma in Patagonia would be Pablo Trapero's BORN AND BRED (2006), in the 2007 SFIFF.

[Chris Knipp]

Marina Mondon: Bad Hair/Pelo malo (2013)

From Venezuela comes this complex and well-acted, if draggy, portrait of the fraught relationship between a nine-year-old boy with putative burgeoning homosexual tendencies and his tough young jobless mother in a working-class housing project. It's Caracas in the twilight of Hugo Chavez's presidency, and the teeming city and the bothersome relationships are depicted with documentary realism making use of improvisation rather than a learned script. PELO MALO/BAD HAIR, which debuted at Toronto and has shown at a dozen other festivals and had theatrical releases in France and the UK, doesn't quite work as a film, but it has a lot of good stuff in it, a vivid texture and good scenes. Suggesting it's gay self-discovery is misleading: it's more subtle than that and the sexuality and the hair issues are just several of the various threads.

[Chris Knipp]

Tom Dolby, Tom Williams: Last Weekend (2014)

This is just a sketchy opening to my full review due to "hold review" restrictions for this movie about a rich family whose matriarch (played by Patricia Clarkson) has decided to sell their glamorous prewar Lake Tahoe resort house, though she's not saying so so the adult children assembled with her and her husband for Labor Day Weekend, with boyfriends and girlfriends, will have a "summer weekend like all the others." Tom Dolby, son of the late sound/noise reduction system inventor, may have grown up in wealthy circumstances like this. There's gayness -- the youngest son and his new boyfriend get the nicest cuddles, status anxiety -- the older son has just lost his job through a major stock trading fuckup, and there's a lot about real estate, money and status. It's all a little too bland and easily resolved (no Tracy Letts or Eugene O'Neill action here), but I give it credit for at least making one think of Virginia Woolf and Henry James.

The 2 May screening is the movie's world premiere.

[Chris Knipp]

Noaz Deshe: White Shadow (2013)

The overlong yet remarkable saga of an endangered albino boy in Tanzania, one of three countries in Africa where "muti" parts are delivered to witch doctors who sell them for a lot of money for their supposed energizing properties. The film wildly swerves between intense documentary realism and swoony surreal sequences and features several young albino newcomers to the screen who are amazing. A harrowing watch that the Variety critic Guy Lodge writing from Venice, where Berlin- and L.A.-based Israeli first-time director Deshe won the most promising award called this a "staggering debut." Deshe co-scripted, co-lensed, co-composed the score, co-produced and directed. Ryan Gosling was a producer. Also at Sundance.