Rotterdammerung.

For the regular "festival tourist," Rotterdam has remained, for years, something of a holy grail. Its proximity to Sundance on the calendar (and the Berlinale, for that matter) never made attendance a practical choice. I remember, while working on the 2000 Seattle International Film Festival, finding a copy of the IFFR catalogue in the office. I was immediately attracted to their off-beat selection of lesser-known features and a surprising selection of non-narrative/experimental works. It seemed like the perfect festival for my unruly tastes.

I was right. With outgoing festival director Simon Field (after eight years at the helm) promising that this 33rd fest would be something special, I committed myself to the irrational expedition east. Particularly important was Field's selection of Raul Ruiz as a "Filmmaker in Focus" (Ken Jacobs was similarly feted). I can count on one hand the individuals (alive, that is) that I admire and Ruiz ranks easily among them. Considering that the festival presented the opportunity to see more than a dozen of his films that I've merely read about in addition to new works by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Takashi Miike, Jacques Rivette, Kenji Fukasaku and Michael Winterbottom, how could it miss? It didn't.

But first, a primer on the Netherlands. There is plenty to like about the International Film Festival Rotterdam. All of the venues are within walking distance. The hub at De Doelen is conveniently located near the Centraal Train Station. All of the theatres are relatively comfortable - good seats, good sight-lines and good sound. The schedule is plotted with few overlaps so it is possible to see films at a variety of venues without difficulty, even with only a few minutes between screenings. With the number of concurrent events (as many as 24 screenings, counting those for the press screenings, going on at any moment), there is nearly always something worth seeing and the theaters are usually not too full. You can drink in the cinema (Heineken, brewed and bottled in nearby Amsterdam, and Grolsch being the options of choice, generally).

Now the bad. Nearly everyone smokes. Constantly. The lobby of nearly every venue is a virtual cloud of carcinogens. Evidently, no one believes in queues here, either. If you want in, if you want to buy something, if you're trying to escape, you'd best be prepared to politely push your way to the front. Also, it's winter. Prepare to be cold (even more so, surprisingly, than at Sundance). As with the rest of the EU, and with the value of the dollar being kept artificially low, everything is more expensive than it should be (particularly more so than five years ago when I lived in Berlin, for instance).

But back to the films. Typically, there was some inspired programming by the staff. Zero Day screened back-to-back with Gus Van Sant's Elephant (both inspired by the Columbine shootings). King Hu's Dragon Inn played with Goodbye, Dragon Inn, the latest from Tsai Ming-liang. Little-seen, The Exiles screened before Los Angeles Plays Itself (and a pairing that was featured earlier at the Vancouver International Film Festival, LAPI features several sequences from Bunker Hill-set Exiles). The Cremaster cycle was presented in it entirety, in sequence (quite a relentless, hard-to-imagine marathon).

Berenice

The crux of ambition, however, was the impressive aforementioned Ruiz retrospective: 17 features and three shorts, granted only a sliver of his work (he's made over one hundred films), but a fair selection of theatrical releases (from the well-known, Time Regained, to the little-known, such as The Blind Owl), theater pieces (Berenice), dance work (Mammame), documentary (Great Events and Ordinary People [Des grands événements et des gens ordinaires: Les Élections), pseudo-documentary (the fantastic The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting [L’Hypothese du tableau volé], new work (including the world premiere of a film completed specifically for the fest, Responso, and his latest of the fest circuit, That Day) and even his first completed film - Three Sad Tigers (Los Tres Tristes Tigres, from his days in Chile. From all of this work, what can we learn? Like his City of Pirates (La Ville des pirates), his films are equal parts genius and absurdist, compelling and frustrating. His oeuvre is uneven, intentionally so. Like no other filmmaker, he is not afraid to take chances. He is not afraid to fail. Every moment presents a cinematic opportunity and none should be wasted.

As prolific as Ruiz clearly is, there are new aspirers to the throne. Both Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Takashi Miike had two new films in the program (and, amazingly, Miike has yet another in the Berlinale). For Kurosawa, Bright Future (premiered at Cannes) and Doppelganger (the opening film at Pusan, the first Japanese film so honored) display clearly why he is the finest Japanese director working today. Both were shot on video (although only Bright Future noticeably so), allowing Kurosawa seemingly more liberties with effects under his limited budgets (used with exceptional affect in Doppelganger). In the latter, Yakusho Koji (appearing for the sixth time in a Kurosawa picture) stars as a brilliant scientist plagued by his mischievous double, punctuated by acts of unexpected violence in classic slapstick style. For Bright Future, due for release in the months ahead by Palm Pictures, the deceptively simple plot is difficult to describe. In essence, it concerns an unexplainable murder in the midst of a mysterious migration of jellyfish into Japanese waters. A similar migration (in this case, sea otters) occurs in Miike's Zebraman, one of several visual references to other films (Ringu and Kurosawa's Kaïro are similarly quoted). As a superhero film gone amok, Zebraman is entirely entertaining for much of its duration. Unfortunately, Miike insists on interfering, inserting his usual tricks into the proceedings. Worse still, his difficult Gozu (roughly translated as Cow Head, currently featured in the San Francisco Indie Fest) is a mess. A fine beginning (with a yakuza hit man that sees an enemy in every object) and a bizarre ending (featuring two perverse sex sequences in quick succession) with not much else in between except a tiresome effort to shock.

As such, the best Asian films at the fest arrived from earlier festival appearances. Doppelganger, of course, Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter... and Spring (and to think that Kim Ki-duk made the awful The Isle just a few years ago), Last Life in the Universe and (I am told) Memories of Murder remain the highlights. Disappointments include the Korean box office failure Resurrection of the Little Match Girl (a piss-poor wire-fu virtual video game); Battle Royale II: Requiem (credited to the legendary Kenji Fukasaku, who died before filming began, but basically written and directed by his son Kenta), an unremarkable retread with a bizarre pro-terrorism angle; The Missing (winner of the VPRO Tiger Award, oddly enough) by Tsai Ming-liang regular Lee Kang-sheng, best described as "Tsai lite"; Sogo Ishii's Dead End Run, essentially three twenty-minute shorts on a similar theme strung together, has its moments but isn't quite of the caliber of his earlier work.

The most troublesome aspect of this new crop of films from outside of America is the decidedly anti-American content that lingers in the background. It isn't as if these feelings are unjustified. In BRII, for instance, several dozen countries are written on a blackboard and the question is asked, "What do these have in common?" They were all countries that the US had bombed in the last half-century, thus pointing to the true side of our supposedly peaceful nature. At least a half-dozen otherwise unrelated films contained dialogue that was decidedly angry about the Bush administration and our roughshod foreign policy. This was the subtle effect. Less subtle was a program in the festival entitled "Homefront USA" (almost entirely culled from American filmmakers, no less), with numerous shorts and feature-length presentations such as The Unamerican Film Festival, This Ain't No Heartland and the J. Hoberman-curated "George W. Bush: Superstar?" Naturally, there is no surprise that these feelings are out there. It is merely enlightening to see such a great quantity of ill will finding a home in so many motion pictures.

Of course, there are films from other countries, too. The best of the rest, then? Jacques Rivette's L'histoire de Marie et Julien is an elegant ghost story and one of the few films in recent memory that gets better as it goes along. At two-and-a-half-hours, if only it "got along" a little quicker (although, for Rivette, this running time could almost be seen as sprightly). If only the casting was a little better (protagonist Jerzy Radziwilowicz doesn't always appear to even be in the same movie as the always lovely Emmanuelle Beart but perhaps that is the point) and the thread of a blackmailing plot is never filled in. Still, these are minor problems in an otherwise engaging film.

Michael Winterbottom's latest, the futuristic Code 46, bears an identical trait. Tim Robbins seems miscast as a corporate detective who inexplicably protects (and subsequently falls for) doe-eyed Samantha Morton. Perhaps it's the detail that Robbins is 6'5" and Morton is 5'3" (or perhaps it's the nearly twenty-year age difference) but the combination is mismatched from their first moment on screen together. Morton is terrific; Robbins (like his similarly miscast turn in Human Nature) appears to be sleepwalking. Still, in Winterbottom's sure hands, the film is never tiresome and the premise consistently fascinating (ending, in some sense, in its final frames back in the territory of his last film, In This World). Mother issues and genetic memory have rarely been combined so efficiently.

Let me be among the first to declare, contrary to Roger Ebert, that The Brown Bunny does not suck (except for one infamous scene in particular, literally). This re-edited version is evidently less dull. It's still dull, naturally, but the film seems now to read as a latter-day Two-Lane Blacktop, a misanthropic road movie. Only, Two-Lane Blacktop is a masterpiece. The Brown Bunny is merely a sophomore slump for Vincent Gallo after his excellent debut Buffalo 66 (which should serve to remind folks to credit co-screenwriter Allison Bagnall - her terrific directorial debut Piggie can currently be seen on the film festival circuit).

Finally, since the festival is in Europe, there are still a few titles ("Hollywood product," for lack of another phrase) that surfaced during the festival. Old hat for us, brand new for them. School of Rock, anyone (which I fortunately caught on the flight back to the US)? I finally took this opportunity to see 21 Grams. No one should mistake good performances (justifiably recognized with Oscar® nominations) for a good film. Running your chronology through a blender does not make your movie "deeper." Instead, it diffuses any emotional impact that the tale might have and acts as in ineffectual narrative crutch. Of course, you're invited to disagree.

-- Jonathan Marlow

Posted by dwhudson at February 8, 2004 1:43 PM