DIFF ’01: Faat Kiné

October 18, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Senegal

***½/****
starring Venus Seye, Mame Ndumbe Diop, Ndiagne Dia
written and directed by Ousmane Sembene

by Walter Chaw Though John Dunne clarified that "no man is an island, entire of itself," for all cinematic intents and purposes, Ousmane Sembene is the whole of the Dark Continent. Now 73 years old, the African auteur presents Faat Kiné ("Aunt Kiné"), a wonderful film resplendent with Sembene's unaffected anti-style and even-handed approach to thorny issues of the ails–new (AIDS) and old (neo-colonialism, violent misogyny)–festering at the core of the modern African sensibility, stunting its growth as surely as the murderous European invasions of a century ago. Faat Kiné is Sembene's sunniest piece, defining a trend for 2001 when one considers the return of another legendary, septuagenarian filmmaker: Jacques Rivette's effervescent Va savoir. But although Va savoir and Faat Kiné share strong and opinionated female protagonists and sweet love story endings, Rivette (eternally) grapples with the absurdism of identity; Sembene's demons are rooted in the absurd notion of a people divided by damning traditions and crippling prejudice.

DIFF ’01: The Devil’s Backbone

October 17, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Horror, Mexico, Spain

***/****
starring Federico Luppi, Marisa Paredes, Fernando Tielve
screenplay by Guillermo del Toro and Antonio Trashorros & David Munoz
directed by Guillermo del Toro

Devilsbackboneby Walter Chaw More of a sepia-stained Spanish fairy tale about the dehumanizing effects of war than a horror film, Guillermo del Toro's melancholy labour of love The Devil's Backbone (it's dedicated to his parents) is redolent with atmosphere and lacking in conventional fright payoffs, which aren't the point of the exercise, anyway. The Devil's Backbone centres around a colony of lost boys led by a stately Pan, Dr. Cásares (Argentine legend Federico Luppi). The head of a refuge for war orphans (we never know who's winning, and neither do the characters), Dr. Cásares and the one-legged matron Carmen (Marisa Paredes) share chaperone duties with the swarthy Jacinto (Eduardo Noriega) and the comely Alma (Berta Ojea). Look to each of the adult character's infirmities, strengths, and vanities for clues as to what they represent in the Guernican tragedy of the Spanish Civil War, specifically of how the doomed republican rallying cry of "No pasaran!" ("You will not pass!") becomes the hollow promise of ghosts defending an abandoned orphanage.

The Business of Stettner: FFC Interviews Patrick Stettner

October 16, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Film Festivals, Interviews

BizstettnerOctober 17, 2001|Quick with a smile and a self-deprecating laugh, Patrick Stettner is not the dour cynic his films–the 14-minute Flux (starring Allison Janney) and his feature debut, the wicked The Business of Strangers–lead one to expect. I sat down to talk with the polite and effusive Mr. Stettner, who is utterly passionate about and eager to discuss independent cinema, among many other topics.

DIFF ’01: Hybrid

October 13, 2001Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, DIFF/SDFF, Documentary, Esoterica, Film Festivals

****/****
directed by Monteith McCollum

by Walter Chaw Hybrid is an elegy for the passing of a man who fell in love early in his life and remained faithful until the day he died, two years past turning one-hundred. Presented in gritty blacks and whites, Monteith McCollum's six-year labour of love memorializing his grandfather Milford Beeghly is a stunning documentary that itself plays as a hybrid of something dreamed-up by Errol Morris and the Brothers Quay. Ostensibly about Beeghly's obsession with finding the perfect hybrid breed of corn as an industrial crop, the film somehow becomes a grand metaphor–for the rough grace of the American way of life, for the lingering death of the agrarian lifestyle, for the difficulties of balancing family with a calling, and even for the true meaning of happiness.

DIFF ’01: Lantana

October 12, 2001Posted in2000s, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Germany, Mystery, Romance

***/****
starring Anthony LaPaglia, Geoffrey Rush, Barbara Hershey, Kerry Armstrong
screenplay by Andrew Bovell, based on his play
directed by Ray Lawrence

by Walter Chaw Leon Zat (Anthony LaPaglia) is a police officer suffering from low self-esteem and a dwindled passion in his marriage to Sonja (the incredible Kerry Armstrong). When we first meet Leon, in fact, we know him only as an adulterer, witness to the first of his two indiscretions with the newly-separated Jane (Rachael Blake). Suspecting that Leon may be straying, Sonja visits a therapist, Valerie (Barbara Hershey), confiding that, "It isn't that he's slept with another woman, it's that he's lied to me about it that's the betrayal." Lantana is obsessed with repression, of how one small secret kept for too long mutates and festers into insurmountable guilt and fear. Leon feels guilty about his adultery and is fearful of being discovered; later, Leon feels guilty for having been discovered, and is fearful that his wife no longer loves him. Sonja similarly worries that she doesn't love him anymore.

DIFF ’01: The Son’s Room (2001)

October 11, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Italy, Palme d'Or Winner

La stanza del figlio
**/****
starring Nanni Moretti, Laura Morante, Jasmine Trinca, Giuseppe Sanfelice
screenplay by Linda Ferri, Nanni Moretti, Heidrun Schleef
directed by Nanni Moretti

by Walter Chaw Teetering along the narrow line that separates “poignant” from “maudlin,” the curiously detached The Son’s Room (La Stanza del figlio) ultimately errs on the side of the latter through increasingly unsubtle and rote revelations about the process of grief. Written (with Linda Ferri and Heidrun Schleef), directed, and starring the “Italian Woody Allen,” Nanni Moretti, the film is too clearly the product of a veteran comedian’s mind: all seriocomic vignettes barely tied together by the loosest of narrative structures. It may be more appropriate to describe Moretti as the Italian version of America’s own teary velvet clown: Robin Williams. (Unflattering, yes.) The winner of the prestigious Palme d’or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival (beating out Mulholland Drive, In The Bedroom, and The Man Who Wasn’t There, each this film’s superior), La Stanza del figlio is well performed but unconvincing, aspiring to a sober emotional depth that is consistently undermined by high-decibel wailing, a tinkling, sappy soundtrack and score, and melodramatic trials and their telegraphed resolutions.

DIFF ’01: The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001)

October 11, 2001Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coen Brothers, Crime, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Scarlett Johansson, Thriller, UK

****/****
starring Billy Bob Thornton, Frances McDormand, Michael Badalucco, James Gandolfini
screenplay by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen
directed by Joel Coen

Manwhowasntthereby Walter Chaw The noir genre was born of discomfort with women in the workplace, the rise of cynicism, and a world polarized by international conflict (WWII). Its symbol, the hardboiled detective, became the projection of the collective paranoia about the ascent of globalism and the death of Pollyannaism. Women and foreigners are not to be trusted in the noir universe; information is slippery and expensive; and the solution of the puzzle more often than not points back to a rot at the heart of the detective. It is the Oedipus/identity trajectory, complete with a blasted plague land, a murder, its thinly veiled culprit (noir is typically invested in process, not mystery), the appearance of a femme fatale, and a solution involving mortal self-knowledge. The noir hero may save the day, but at the price of being betrayed by those he loves. He is impotent to avenge his fallen friends and lovers, and at the mercy of a larger corruption that is unalterable and serves only to further degrade individual confidence. Tellingly, a great many noir works in literature and film begin with the death of a best friend or a partner and end with the realization that any victory is a hollow one in light of society’s inexorable fall into chaos.

DIFF ’01: Life as a House

October 9, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals

*/****
starring Kevin Kline, Kristin Scott Thomas, Hayden Christensen, Jena Malone
screenplay by Mark Andrus
directed by Irwin Winkler

by Walter Chaw Adrift in a turbid morass of such Forrest Gump-isms as, “Hindsight is like foresight without a future,” and “I like how it feels not to feel,” Irwin Winkler’s rumpled hankie of a movie Life as a House is that tired breed of awkward, self-important entertainment wherein people are always tenderly asking one another for permission to steal a kiss. There is not a moment unaffected by syrupy manipulation and severe underestimation of the audience. Worse, every major plot point in Life as a House is stolen from American Beauty, the film it most wishes to emulate and, ironically, least resembles in terms of intelligence and observation. From the doomed father’s voice-over to the Lolita love-kitten sexpot; from the wayward soccer moms to the attempts to facilitate a familial reconciliation through the discarding of a conventional 9-to-5 American dream; from the troubled young man who finds salvation in the arms of a chubby young woman to the last-minute denial of a conventional happy ending…the only thing that’s really different about Life as a House (besides the fact that it stinks) is an epilogue that uncomfortably recalls the ethic of another Kevin Spacey film: Pay It Forward.

DIFF ’01: Wish You Were Here (Introduction)

October 8, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blog, DIFF/SDFF, Film Festivals

Difflogo2by Walter Chaw Going to the movies for a living is an incalculable blessing.

Watching films and writing about them is the equivalent of a lovelorn voyeur's tear-stained journal. A failed relationship with the moronic and abusive Pearl Harbor shares column inches with blazing liaisons like the clever Memento and the acerbic Ghost World. Watching is a consummation, for me: sometimes I go back to a film multiple times; other times I regret having stayed all the way through even once. Doing it as a job means that you go for free, but you have to do it with every movie and stay to the bitter end. (Or at least you should.) I thought I was a voracious moviegoer before I started getting paid to do it. The revelation that I had actually been exercising an extraordinary amount of discretion in my viewing choices was hammered home when I watched both Glitter and The Musketeer in the same week, chewing the insides of my cheeks raw and eyeing the exits like a castaway eyes the cruel taunt of a ship's smoke on the horizon.