Basque-ing

The San Sebastian Film Festival

by Peter Keough

Murder, pedophilia, drug addiction, Cameron Diaz -- the San Sebastian Film Festival offers current cinema in a nutshell (or perhaps a seashell, in keeping with its first prize, the Concha del Oro). Here, though, the cinematically commonplace seems refreshing and revelatory. Perhaps it's the resort town's pristine horseshoe beach and the cozy tavernas in the narrow 17th-century streets offering succulent Basque cuisine. Or maybe it's seeing familiar Hollywood titles through Spanish eyes: somehow the press kit for Algo pasa con Mary, with its free sample of hair gel, makes the movie more meaningful. And El Mascara del Zorro takes on genuine epic proportions when a squad of the masked avengers patrol the Old Town on horseback, or thousands of Spanish teenagers outside the majestic Vittoria Eugenia theater scream as Antonio Banderas, 40 feet tall on a giant video screen, presents the festival's lifetime achievement award to co-star Anthony Hopkins.

More intriguing, though, than the familiar made strange is the strange made familiar. When you see 25 movies in nine days from more than a dozen different countries, as I did as a member of the International Film Critics (FIPRESCI) Jury, you can't help imagining patterns. Death, for example, is high concept not only in Hollywood but in Japan, France, Greece, and Mexico.

Joining the ranks of such studio-peddled tunnel-of-light delights as What Dreams May Come and the upcoming Meet Joe Black and Jack Frost is Hirokazu Kore-eda's After Life (winner, after much compromise, of our jury's prize). The title state is a dreary dormitory where the newly deceased souls are asked to choose one memory to take with them to eternity. A provocative concept and intelligently thought out, it still felt a little too much like limbo.

In the terminal-illness/post-mortem-tears department with such films as One True Thing is Olivier Assayas's Early August, Late September (the film I was holding out for in the FIPRESCI voting). Reminiscent of such chatty French filmmakers as Eric Rohmer, this records with trenchant detail and breezy authenticity the lives and relationships surrounding the slow dying of one man, a middle-age author of some repute and little sales. Nothing is changed but everything is somehow renewed in this superbly acted ensemble piece (Jeanne Balibar deservedly won the Festival's Best Actor Award).

Thoughts of mortality naturally beg the question of how we act while alive, and so many films fell into the mini-genre of Very Bad Behavior. In addition to the previously released There's Something About Mary, Happiness, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, San Sebastian offered Peter Berg's upcoming Very Bad Things. Christian Slater, Vincent Favreau, and Daniel Stern are among a group of suburbanite family men in Las Vegas for a bachelor party (the ubiquitous Cameron Diaz once again plays the lucky bride). Indiscretion leads to murder and then some in a very black comedy that exceeds the more sophomoric visions of Todd Solondz and Neil LaBute in iconoclastic nastiness and moral condemnation.

From Great Britain comes the reprobate behavior of The Acid House and Divorcing Jack. The latter, from David Caffrey, features David Thewlis as an Irish journalist whose drunkenness and infidelity involves him in murder and conspiracy and places him in a key role in the election of a reformed IRA terrorist as prime minister of a fictitious, united Ireland in the year 2000. It relies too much on the blarney. The former is an adaptation by Paul McGuigan of three tales from Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh's story collection. It starts out puerile and proceeds to infantile in an apocalyptic conclusion that fuses addiction, boorishness, insanity, birth, and death in a stunning phantasmagoria that says just say no in a big way.

The theme of Bad Behavior blurs into that of Troubled Youth with Venezuelan director Francisco J. Lombardi's No se lo digas a nadie, an above-average portrait of a well-to-do teen trying to adjust to his homosexuality in a macho society through drug abuse. Fernando León de Aranoa's Barrio, one of the best Spanish entries screened, is a genial portrait of three teens in an impoverished Madrid suburb; gritty, intelligent and funny, it's marred by a melodramatic ending (Aranoa won the Silver Shell for best director). And Iranian director Abolfazl Jalili's Don, a somewhat tedious, somewhat incoherent neo-realistic account of an urchin without identity papers, is perhaps most remarkable for its critique of his homeland's social policy (it won the Jury Prize).

All three of the above are vastly superior to Robert Guédiguian's grotesquely mawkish and crowd-pleasing A la place du coeur, the story of a teenage interracial relationship in Marseilles. Co-winner of the Special Jury Prize with Bill Condon's Gods and Monsters, it was bumped for the Golden Shell, to the fury of many, by Argentine director Alejandro Agresti's Wind with the Gone. A postmodernist romp with shades of Borges and Buñuel, this one tells of a movie theater in Patagonia so low on the distribution chain that the films it receives are utterly fragmented and without continuity, bringing cultural isolation, dyslexia, and ignorance of cause and effect to the community. After nine days, 25 movies, and all those Zorros, it's the film I most identified with.