| |
|
|
New European films at the HFA
|
"Family Bonds: New Films from Europe"
At the Harvard Film Archive December 5 through 17
|
|
|
|
|
The Harvard Film Archive’s fourth annual festival of new films from Europe is actually the second one in 2003, since the festival #3 took place in January. But even European films that haven’t found an American distributor are often more thought-provoking than their American counterparts, and reason enough to take a break from holiday shopping. Here’s a complete rundown. SON FRÈRE/HIS BROTHER Two years ago at the Berlin Film Festival, Patrice Chéreau won the Golden Bear for his intense Intimacy. This year Chéreau, who’s also a stage director (he’s responsible for the Pierre Boulez Ring at Bayreuth) brought Son frère to the Berlinale and collected the Silver Bear for Best Director. This one is even grittier than Intimacy: older brother Thomas (Bruno Todeschini) wastes away from hemophilia while younger brother Luc (Eric Caravaca) watches helplessly. Son frère has been described as "a film about the body: about the disintegration of a body. . . . It examines the skin and its furrows, its fine hairs and beads of perspiration; it is also an exploration of bruises, reddened scars, suppuration and stains on the bedclothes." In other words, a "nature morte." And Chéreau delivers; the hospital scenes are especially harrowing. Thomas and Luc, however, are whiny, self-pitying, and pretentious, so the human touch is missing. In French with English subtitles. (95 minutes) December 5 at 7 p.m. — Jeffrey Gantz JESUS, DU WEIßT/JESUS, YOU KNOW Ulrich Seidl’s austere Austrian documentary captures on camera the prayers of an apparently random group of Catholics at various churches throughout the country. Unrelentingly sober, the camera returns to the same individuals as they ask Jesus for guidance in matters both trivial (parents who don’t understand) and profound (a crisis of faith). Seidl rarely follows his subjects outside their churches, intruding on their home lives only to show their isolation; any interaction between characters is strictly limited. Speech in the film is directed toward Jesus as prayer; there is no sense of these people as individuals with lives beyond the Church. Eventually, stories emerge, including one about a couple whose different faiths cause a rift and another whose shared religion becomes a hindrance when one joins a monastery. These stories are bleak at best, fractured glimpses of one-sided tales. Deeply religious but never joyful, this is the Church as confessional, but not necessarily merciful. In German with English subtitles. (87 minutes) December 5 at 9 p.m. — Brooke Holgerson OLTRE IL CONFINE/BEYOND THE BORDER Set during the war in Bosnia, Swiss director Rolando Colla’s film teeters uneasily between finger wagging and tear jerking. World War II veteran Carlo (Giuliano Persico) is dying in a veterans’ home near Torino. His daughter, Agnese (Anna Galiena), is taking a bath and doesn’t answer the phone when they call to tell her. Reuf (Senad Basic), a Bosnian refugee, wants to help the doctor who helped him, so he sits up with the old man and, in the morning, takes him for a wheelbarrow spin, but their jaunt is interrupted when Reuf is arrested for having no papers. Carlo dies; Agnese helps Reuf escape and takes him in, but he’s determined to get to Switzerland. A visa has been obtained for his younger daughter, Ada (Bojana Sljivic), who’s in a Bosnian hospital, but there’s no one to go for her, so Agnese makes the trip; when she finally arrives at the hospital, however, Ada doesn’t want to leave. Oltre il confine is all about the borders that humans put up between one another. It enjoys tough, gritty performances, particularly from Galiena, but there’s also lots of preachy newsreel footage indicting Italy, Switzerland, and the rest of us for not stopping the war, and many subtitles on my video copy were illegible. Colla keeps the suspense going till the very end; then, when you expect an emotional payoff one way or the other, he switches into documentary-report mode and you’re distanced from the outcome. In Italian with English subtitles. (104 minutes) December 6 at 7 p.m. and December 12 at 9:15 p.m. — Jeffrey Gantz EN CONSTRUCCIÓN/WORK IN PROGRESS José Luis Guerín shot this excellent film over the 18 months of the construction of a modern apartment complex in an old barrio of Barcelona. Revealing the project from numerous angles and points of view, Guerín’s camera enters the lives of several inhabitants of the neighborhood, among them a young prostitute and her boyfriend, and assists at the conversations and labors of several workers. Early on, a Roman cemetery is found at the construction site. This discovery allows Guerín to relate the building project — which already illuminates so much about class, culture, economic development, and the 20th-century history of Spain — to a vaster time scale and to make it a focus for the human encounter with death, as neighbors watch and discuss the excavation of ancient bones. This encounter and the connection to the ancient past are also the themes of a superb sequence in which various barrio apartments become screening rooms for a TV broadcast of Land of the Pharaohs, Howard Hawks’s great film about the building of the pyramids. Guerín’s is an art of slight reframings, of changes in angle on the same scene, as a way to explore people’s lives without dramatizing them and without implying a progress toward some final certainty or all-encompassing vision. Unlike many documentary filmmakers, he refuses to place himself (or the viewers of the film) in the position of moral truth. This restraint makes En construcción all the more fascinating and revealing. In Spanish and Catalan with English subtitles. (125 minutes) December 6 at 9 p.m. and December 15 at 9 p.m. — Chris Fujiwara VAI E VEM/COME AND GO The late João César Monteiro wrote, directed and stars in this film, the one entry in the series we weren’t able to preview. He’s a solitary widower who wanders around Lisbon in desultory fashion until he hires a young woman to straighten up his book collection and his son is released from prison. Portuguese critics mostly loved it; one disappointed viewer, however, described it as "66 shots in three hours and nothing new" and "nothing but an old man’s fantasizing with young servants." In Portuguese with English subtitles. (179 minutes) December 7 at 7 p.m. — Jeffrey Gantz ONDSKAN/EVIL Sixteen-year-old Erik Ponti (Andreas Wilson) has a tendency to punch the crap out of his schoolmates, and no wonder: at home he’s subjected to beatings by his nasty stepfather. Sent away to a boarding school, Erik is intent on making good, but the school itself condones brutality: discipline is left to aristocratic upperclassmen who systematically beat and humiliate their charges. This particular take on prep-school sadism by Mikael Håfström would seem improbable if it weren’t drawn from a best-selling autobiography by Jan Guillou. Would the teachers and the administration really ignore the bloody confrontations that are happening right under their noses? Set in the ’50s, the story even features a Nazi-like history teacher who instructs students on the physical manifestations of racial superiority. The violence is graphic and Erik’s struggle familiar, but Wilson’s restrained performance — and that of Henrik Lundström as his bookish roommate — makes this particular revenge of the nerds resonate. In Swedish with English subtitles. (114 minutes) December 12 at 7 p.m. and December 13 at 9 p.m. — Jon Garelick THIS LITTLE LIFE It’s not often, outside of Disney and DreamWorks flicks, that a character who could fit in the palm of your hand steals the show, but that’s what happens in the Sarah Gavron’s understated British drama This Little Life. The film opens with newlywed Sadie (Kate Ashfield) grimacing and straining, struggling to hold onto the baby inside her until it becomes viable. This stubborn refusal to let go of life is transferred to her son, Luke, who is born so premature that doctors all but shrug when they say they don’t expect him to live. But Luke does live, and the rest of the film chronicles Sadie’s vigil at his side — she paces and lingers, frets and winces — while her husband (David Morrissey) dithers in the background. Somehow, Sadie manages to establish a dialogue of sorts with her tiny son, and there are moments you think she might be veering off into madness. It’s grim stuff at times, but there’s also a subtle, life-affirming sensibility permeating the sorrow. And it’s impossible to avoid falling in love with little Luke; played by newcomer Anthony Borrows, he’s so tough, so brave, he makes Bruce Willis look like a milksop. (video/80 minutes) December 13 at 7 p.m. and December 14 at 9:15 p.m. — Chris Wright HARD GOODBYES: MY FATHER Penny Panayotopolou’s sweet film about a young boy who’s unable to cope with the death of his father in a car accident is occasionally touching, but it’s bogged down by its sentimental, cliché’d story. Taking place in Greece against the backdrop of the first moon landing, Hard Goodbyes sets up the strained relations among a working-class family, then rips them apart when the father, who’s adored by his 10-year old son, Elias (Yorgos Karayannis, in an excellent performance), is killed. Elias refuses to believe his father is dead, and there are some good scenes where his older brother (Hristos Bpiuptas) grows frustrated with Elias’s childish fantasies, but the rest of the family, apparently in an extended state of shock, refuses to deal with his denial. The film hits a few false notes in its portrayal of their grief, and a subplot with a senile grandmother plays out unconvincingly, but solid performances, especially by the two brothers, keep things interesting. In Greek with English subtitles. (113 minutes) December 14 at 7 p.m. — Brooke Holgerson L’ISOLA/THE ISLAND Costanza Quatriglio’s beautiful film, windswept and dappled with sea salt and sun, is an object lesson in lyrical, unadorned evocation of place. Turi, a rangy teen whose job fishing for tuna with his father has made him mature beyond his years, and Teresa, his plucky kid sister, live a life of indolent, slow-motion simplicity on a small Sicilian island. Her love for him borders on worshipful, and she wants nothing more than to go out to sea with him. As she invokes her grandfather, who died saving her from drowning, we skirt the azure depths while a trumpet exhales melancholy filigrees. "Grampa, Grampa, deep down under the sea," she whispers in a rapid-fire mantra, "let Turi take me with him." Not much else happens here, but Quatriglio’s skill at limning interactions among between the island’s small community makes that the film’s strength. Veronica Guarrasio’s turn as Teresa, her first role, is astonishing: a dynamo of expression and gesture, she shifts between flirty insouciance and fervent yearning, the mercurial, endlessly watchable center of this impressionistic waking dream. In Italian with English subtitles. (103 minutes) December 16 at 7 p.m. — Mike Miliard THE FOREST The opening sequence of this Hungarian film is also the ending sequence: various people emerging in succession through glass doors into a crowded public space, perhaps a shopping mall. The anonymity of the people is the point of the film: between the two crowd scenes comes a series of dialogues in which some of the people singled out by director Benedek Fliegauf’s arrogant DV camera are shown talking about death, obsession, and disturbing events from their pasts. Fliegauf shoots dialogue in extreme-close-up long takes, with whip pans linking the participants’ faces and occasionally taking in some other detail, like their hands. Since the actors’ hands are as inexpressive as their faces, and since Fliegauf has no interest in using mise-en-scène or editing to convey narrative information or an artistic point of view, the result is unwatchable. In Hungarian with English subtitles. (90 minutes) December 16 at 9 p.m. — Chris Fujiwara LicHTER/DISTANT LIGHTS Set on the border between Frankfurt-an-der-Oder in Germany and Słubice in Poland, Hans-Christian Schmid’s film weaves a half-dozen stories. Kolja (Ivan Shvedoff), Anna (Anna Janowskaja), and Dimitri (Sergej Frolov) are Ukrainians trying to emigrate from Kyiv to Berlin. Sonja (Maria Simon) is a German translator for Russian refugees who decides to help one, but he doesn’t repay her in the way you might expect. Andreas (Sebastian Urzendowsky) is a young cigarette smuggler whose unrequited love for Katharina (Alice Dwyer) gets him in dutch with the big boys. Ingo (Devid Striesow) comes unglued trying to make a go of a cheap-mattress outlet, and he’s blind to his sympathetic and attractive assistant, Simone (Claudia Geisler). Polish cab driver Antoni (Zbigniew Zamachowski) is trying to raise enough money to buy his daughter a first-communion dress. And West German architect Philip (August Diehl) renews his acquaintance with Beata (Julia Krynke) only to discover that her role in the project he’s been engaged for is to be nice to the men with the money. The intertwining doesn’t go very deep, and neither do the characters or the stories; like Andreas Dresen’s 1999 Nachtgestalten/Night Shapes, Lichter, whose title lights are always just out of reach, settles for jaded insights and easy cynicism. All the same, it was named Best Film by the FIPRESCI (that’s the international film critics’ association) jury at this year’s Berlin Film Festival. In German, Polish, and Russian with English subtitles. (105 minutes) December 17 at 7 p.m. — Jeffrey Gantz
|
