Maverick cinema

The Rotterdam Film Festival

The best film festivals can get by decently without an A-list of mighty premieres, shuttled-in celebs, or a balls-rubbing-balls bidding war. What counts is a mix of non-hype filmmakers and serious-minded critics who can hang out over beers, audiences keen for audacious types of movies, and programmers who favor the formally experimental and oppositional cinema. True independents.

Suck-up-and-ski Sundance won't do, and neither will our drab non-fest at the Copley Place mall.

I'm returned from the 1999 Rotterdam International Film Festival, which seems to me, after Toronto, the most invigorating in the world. What's not to like? Maverick Americans like Jon Jost, Mark Rappaport, James Benning are routinely fêted at Rotterdam, treated as very important filmmakers. The American pictures exhibited are critics' favorites like Buffalo '66, Rushmore, and The Last Days of Disco.

One morning, 600 young people turned up for the Russian-language Beshkempir from the former Soviet Republic of Kyrgyztan. Show time was 9:30 a.m. More than a hundred crowded into a late-night screening of the gay avant-gardist Gregory Markopoulis.

(Are European youth more daring in their filmic choices than young Americans? Does the grizzly poop in the poplars?)

I talked with Simon Field, the gentlemanly Brit who has served three years as Rotterdam's festival director. Why so few non-distributed fiction features from the USA? What about the hundreds of Sundance-style indies?

Field explained, "We look for a particular kind of film that is more individual, more original in approach. But many American independents seem headed toward the mainstream as fast as they can. On the whole, we saw lots of films we were not impressed by." An exception was the New York-made The Eden Myth, in its wet-from-the-lab world premiere. "We chose it on the strengths of its script. It has a distinctive plot that is quite strange."

Indeed. Mark Edlitz's truly weird, original tale centers on a family gathering of a stern patriarch and his four passive, bloodless, adult children. In the most matter-of-fact way, Edlitz unfolds a bone-cracking saga of inbreeding and genetic engineering. The Island of Dr. Moreau on Long Island, shot in a mansion that was a Fitzgerald setting for The Great Gatsby.

"Maybe you modeled your film on the Kennedys?" a Dutchman asked Edlitz at an Eden Myth Q&A. "Maybe they were screwing?"

Edlitz, a movie-freak graduate of NYU, loves Paul Schrader, Billy Wilder, and David Mamet for their "chewy dialogue"; and he has worked as an assistant for Mamet both in theater and in film. "Mr. Mamet is a perfect gentleman, gracious and kind on the set. " He rewarded Edlitz with a walk-on in The Spanish Prisoner. "I carried Campbell Scott's luggage. I was there! Like mountains!"

The Rotterdam fest has a close-to-home duty to showcase new Dutch cinema. Outsiders start wary, because Holland has a reputation for fluffy, middle-class erotica that doesn't translate or travel. (This year a sex comedy was explained to non-laughing me, "You need to know Amsterdam.") On the other hand, the Netherlands has produced two recent Academy Award winners, Antonio's Line and Character, and a 1999 Golden Globe nominee, The Polish Bride. Attention must be paid.

I saw three Dutch films this year to write home about.

Bucks and Goats is a droll, entertaining documentary about a village in Holland, Thorn, where since the 19th century the populace has been divided into which of two choirs you (and your family) back. "I'm neutral. I like both," says the politic Thorn burgomaster.

Little Tony, made by the well-regarded director Alex van Warmerdam (The Dress), is a clever three-handed absurdist comedy set in rural Netherlands about a much-overweight woman who hires a bouncy blonde to teach her 40-year-old husband to read and write, and to get impregnated. Warmerdam also stars as Little Tony's not-exactly-romantic farmer lead. He tends goats. He watches TV.

My favorite new film at Rotterdam was the Dutch Man with a Dog, which unspooled one morning with no buzz at all. (I might have been the screening's only foreign attendant.) Annette Apon's gentle comedy possesses that wonderful anecdotal quality we associate with Milos Forman and the Czech New Wave. A dreamer young boy impresses his office mates by showing them photos of his girlfriend and his Himalayan travels. In fact, the photos are collected during nocturnal break-ins of people's houses. The boy (affecting newcomer Ramsey Nasr) is more than a bit loony, but he's the character who, back in America, I'm still thinking about.

The most discussed film at Rotterdam? Easily French filmmaker Catherine Breillat's Romance, the story of a sexually charged young woman who, rejected by her boyfriend, seeks satisfaction elsewhere. Breillat includes jolting hardcore scenes in her narrative. When I saw Romance, unfortunately, I was jet-lagged. The heroine administered a blow job. I fell asleep. I woke up, and the heroine was having a baby. I missed something.