Sitges Dispatch. 4.

The festival is in full swing. One morning, 10 am, the same hour some are trying to come to terms with Lucile Hadzihalilovic's one-of-a-kind Innocence, Guillermo Del Toro gives a charming master class in which he yearns for a more juvenile and active film criticism, one with a greater respect for popcorn films.

While this dialogue between the Mexican director and a thousand fanboys carries on, Brad Anderson's psychological thriller The Machinist is shown to a Spanish audience for the first time. The director and the vast majority of cast is from US, and the film's spoken in perfect English, but this is essentially a Spanish production, backed by the Castelao and Filmax production houses and staffed with a crew of Spanish professionals. And what a production, I must say. The Machinist features beautiful cinematography by Xavi Giménez, precise editing by Luis de la Madrid and great score by Roque Baños. They all contribute to make the film a memorable aesthetic experience.

Indeed, along with Oldboy, The Machinist (despite its painfully unsuccessful US release prior to its screening at Sitges) is one of the favorites for the awards. It seems this is not the case for two British films which also premiered yesterday in competition - John Simpson's Freeze Frame, which didn't win many over with its chaotic mixture of textures serving as an obvious visual metaphor for its main character's feelings of paranoia, and Michael Winterbottom's Code 46, whose existential flair some critics and viewers interpreted as mere pedantry.

I reserved the night to see two very different films from parallel sections. In the Noves Visions zone, Takashi Shimizu's Marebito, which ruined what could have been a nice night with its unbearable philosophical rumblings on fear. But in the Seven Chances zone, critics' week, Kim Ki-duk's Samaritan Girl - a crude but beautiful tale of troubled souls in search of an inner stability, only marred by those cheap shocks that the Korean filmmaker should learn to avoid. They make him look like Takashi Miike, whose Izô bored everyone to death who was exposed to it yesterday.

Posted by dwhudson at December 7, 2004 6:15 AM