Europe has always offered refuge, for filmmakers and filmgoers alike, from the homogenization of Hollywood. That bastion has been crumbling for some time. There’s not much left to withstand, for example, the assault of a Harry Potter. True, the book’s author is British, and the movie was shot in England with a British cast. But DreamWorks Studios produced it and reaps the profits, and at the film’s helm is a latter-day Chris Columbus, eager to exploit the riches of the prostrate Old World. American studios have robbed Europe of not only its stories and its audience but its filmmakers as well, and all the Europeans have to show for themselves, it seems, are pallid co-productions — "Euro-puddings" — and television.

Is there any hope? Not all European filmmakers defecting to Hollywood have found happiness there. Danny Boyle, for instance, made a big splash in Britain with Shallow Grave and Trainspotting, but in the US he crashed and burned with the (I thought) underrated A Life Less Ordinary and the unsalvageable The Beach, passed up an opportunity to direct the fourth Alien installment, had his Miramax project Alien Love Triangle put on hold, and then returned to British TV, for which he made his brilliant mini-series Mr. Wroe’s Virgins in 1993. Brisk, brief, and cheap, Boyle’s two made-for-TV features are perhaps the high-profile highlight of this year’s "New Films from Europe" series at the Harvard Film Archive, a collection that is mixed but encouraging.

Strumpet (2001; December 7 at 7 p.m.) and Vacuuming Completely Nude in Paradise (2001; December 8 at 9 p.m.) represent, in varying degrees, a return to the hyperkinetic trangressive originality of his Trainspotting days. The former in particular, with a screenplay by playwright Jim Cartwright (Little Voice), soars above cliché with a primal energy and a technical sophistication that belies its humble roots. Perennial down-and-outer Christopher Eccleston plays Stray Man, a feral poet ("fucking" is his favorite word, but not his favorite practice) who lives in a squalid flat with a pack of dogs in a hellish unnamed industrial city. His life of shoplifting, growling at strangers, writing poetry on the walls, and disrupting local karaoke nights with terrifying recitals ends when he picks up the equally feral waif of the title. Within minutes she grabs a guitar and, completely nude, renders the words scrawled on his walls into a yowling pop anthem that, after various raffish misadventures, goes to the top of the charts. Strumpet is like a cross between Mike Leigh’s Naked and A Star Is Born, and though the theme of individual inspiration versus corporate exploitation is an old one, Boyle’s pulsing rhythms and layered imagery are fresh.

Perhaps he should stick to singing instead of vacuuming in the nude, because the latter film, except for a few moments of giddy inspiration and a go-for-broke performance from Timothy Spall, takes a similar cliché’d idea — crushing corporate greed and conformity — and tarts it up like a failed Baz Luhrmann project. Spall plays Tommy Rag, a rabid salesman out to win the annual company prize for selling the most (and I’m sure there’s a metaphor here) vacuums. He’s burdened with naive loser Pete (Michael Begley), whom he gleefully corrupts. Together they zip through spectacularly sordid streets to foist their products on the hapless populace; it all ends in a Fellini-esque fiasco at a seaside resort.

After Boyle’s sweaty surrealism, the stern self-reflexiveness of Sébastien Lifshitz’s documentary The Crossing (La traversée; 2001; December 7 at 8:45 p.m. and December 14 at 9:30 p.m.) comes as a relief. Lifshitz, whose gay-teen initiation film Come Undone just opened at the Kendall Square, here follows his friend Stéphane Bouquet to the United States. Bouquet is in search of his American GI father, who left France and his mother in the 1960s, before he was born. The shots of strip malls and rundown towns and the long vistas of American vacancy have a humble beauty undiminished by Bouquet’s sometimes sophomoric voiceover narration, which can surge with whininess and florid angst. His need intensifies as he nears the object of his quest, and the film sheds its posturings as it evokes the universal longing for origins and rootedness.

Anomie and rootlessness serve as the starting point for Greek-American Athina Rachel Tsangari’s whimsical, experimental The Slow Business of Going (2000; December 14 at 7 p.m.). The title refers to Petra Going (Lizzie Curry Martinez), the film’s heroine; she translates her name as "Rolling Stone," and it’s just one sign of Tsangari’s flair for the precious. Petra is an agent for the mythical "Global Nomad Project," an agency that sends alienated young people like herself out to Tangier, Anchorage, Moscow and other places with a rocking chair strapped to their backs and a glib cynicism attached to their observations. Their mission is to gather impressions for some vast databank — or maybe they’re just lying in an office, Matrix-style, with impressions fed in by electrodes. It doesn’t seem to matter much as Tsangari uses the premise to showcase her talent for collage, imagery, and parody in a potpourri that is for the most part engaging and inventive.

Had Petra Going made it to Berlevåg, that Norwegian outpost on the edge of the world might have chilled her wanderlust. Knut Erik Jensen’s documentary Cool and Crazy (Heftig og begeistret; 2001; December 8 at 7 p.m.) takes full advantage of the frozen landscape, and of the surreal eloquence of a frostbitten but determined chorus belting out hymns and anthems against the wind and snow. The Berlevåg Male Choir consists of local fishermen and factory workers ranging from lapsed Marxists to recovering addicts — indelible eccentrics all, with the history of Europe written on their faces. And the film starkly traces their efforts to prepare for their concert in the big city — Murmansk.

Going from cold to hot, we get Joaquim Leitão’s Inferno (1999; December 13 at 7 p.m.), a steamy bouillabaise of a movie about a dozen special-forces veterans of the Portuguese war in Angola whose annual reunion collides with a raucous imitation of a Hollywood action thriller. It seems Blondie, the ne’er-do-well ex-con who in the American version would have been played by Nick Nolte, has gotten his hands on a mobster’s shipment of drugs. As he and the other revelers go through their rite of dissipation, sentimentality, accusation, and the requisite combat flashbacks, the drug dealers circle and close in, little knowing what they’re up against. Exhilarating even when incoherent, Inferno is a hoot.

Also borrowing its title from mediæval literature is Swiss director Riccardo Signorell’s Scheherazade (2001; December 13 at 9:30). That’s the name of the yacht on which Zurich financier Peter is taking his nubile daughter for a spin on her 19th birthday. Peter’s estranged son Michi crashes the party, however, along with Peter’s protégé, Frank, and his intended bride, Valeria, a snooty British gallery owner. That makes for a boat crowded with lots of jealousies, desires, and little secrets. Signorell handles it all with a crisp moodiness reminiscent of Polanski’s Knife in the Water, though unlike the tale spinner of the title, he chooses to end things abruptly.

Less privileged are the tormented parties of Esther Gronenborn’s impressive Alaska.de (2000; December 9 at 8 p.m.), a Rebel Without a Cause for a bleak new millennium. Shunted from her mom’s place to her dad’s apartment in a desolate suburb of the former East Berlin, 16-year-old Sabine (Jana Pallaske) struggles to fit into her new peer group of listless thugs, sluts, and losers. Leonardo DiCaprio look-alike Eddie (Frank Droese) befriends her, but he has ulterior motives, and guilt about a senseless murder leads to a convulsive resolution. At times lapsing into cheap effects (slow motion, glib symbolism), Gronenborn nonetheless lets the teens do their own talking, and she shoots the dehumanized landscape with an eye that would please Antonioni.

Landscape plays a transcendent role in Fred Kelemen’s Frost (1997-’98; December 15 at 7 p.m.), which feels like a play by Georg Büchner acted out on a set designed by Anselm Kiefer. At 203 minutes almost an hour longer than Harry Potter, it shimmers with a far subtler magic. A woman flees her abusive husband on Christmas Eve, taking her young son with her as she seeks refuge in the frozen fields and towns of the former East Germany. Unreeling in long takes, Frost jolts its meditations with astonishing images: a dress burning in an empty room, a steeple projecting from a plain of ice, a naked woman bathing a child. Made three years ago, it may not be especially new (Kelemen’s more recent Abendland was featured in last year’s "New Films" program), but it is quintessentially European. Catch it while you can.

Issue Date: December 6 - 13, 2001

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