Seattle Dispatch. 1.

The quality of the opening night film for the Seattle International Film Festival has become something of a local joke (the punchline was last year's film: The Notebook), so it was a pleasant surprise to see something as interesting as Miranda July's Me and You and Everyone We Know open the 2005 incarnation of the most well-attended film festival in the country just days before it took home the Camera D'or at Cannes. A delightful tale of lonely, inarticulate people looking for their voice and for emotional connections, the modest little piece stars July as an aspiring multi-media artist with the social skills of a hyperactive child and John Hawkes (late of Deadwood) as a recently divorced father of two, both of whom use words to talk around their feelings (the off-center dialogue at times sings with yearning). As small and modest as they come, it's quirky and compassionate and even potentially discomforting sexual elements are oddly innocent and harmless. This is a world where people are not predators and trust is rewarded with affection.

Wong Kar-wai's luscious 2046 is technically a sequel to In The Mood For Love - Tony Leung Chiu Wai's Mr. Chow has since turned into a smiling, seductive womanizer, a charming cad who never makes himself emotionally vulnerable. Between his affairs (with Zhang Ziyi, Gong Li and Faye Wong) he recasts his life as a melancholy science-fiction tale where he's the tragic romantic hero. But Wong is less concerned with story than the texture of lives and the texture of image. The longing, the trampled emotions and Chow's glib manner of playing games with romance come through in the great 60s lounge tunes and Latin dance instrumentals, the hazy intensity of the color and Wong's way of tilting intimate scenes with his skewed visuals.

Documentaries are dominant at SIFF this year - there are over 50 in the line-up - but the form is as conventional as ever. One bright spot is Paul Provenza's documentary The Aristocrats, ostensibly about the filthiest joke in the world. As dozens of comedians and comics chime in with their take on the legendary after-hours joke, told off-stage for the amusement of fellow comedians and unfettered by notions of taste, it becomes a lesson in storytelling, an illustration of comic style and a study in taboo topics (the debate rages on: fecal matter versus incest?). Provenza seems to simply get out of the way of the comedians but his editing is a work of art, creating a structure out of the chaos while remaining sensitive to the timing of every individual comic. Pick your favorite telling of the joke. Mine is Bob Saget, who stops himself in moments of restraint, jumps in again as if inspired to top his previous heights of outlandish offensiveness, and walks out without delivering the punchline.

Also recommended (and, like The Aristocrats, a Sundance favorite) is Don Argott's Rock School, a portrait of Paul Green (founder of the Philadelphia-based Paul Green School of Music, which inspired the movie School of Rock) that has a good time with the contradictions of Green, a wannabe rock star whose passion to teach his kids (his self-proclaimed approach is that if he doesn't assume anything is too difficult for them, then they never set their own limits) chafes against his own spotlight-stealing ego and short temper - the film is full of his screaming rants in the midst of rehearsal. It's a big enough film to hold all the contradictions and still find time for a handful of pupils, from the class stars to the merely enthusiastic.

In contrast, the sweet and unadventurous Mad Hot Ballroom, about real life sixth-grade kids in New York City schools who have taken a ten-week dance course in the school system that culminates in a city-wide competition, plays like a companion piece to Spellbound. Too bad that director Marilyn Agrelo forgets that the kids and their lives should be the focus and not the dance contest that dominates the last act of the film; the little time we spend with them shows not merely a great cultural diversity, but a thoughtfulness and sensitivity that they are rarely credited with.

  Almost overlooked in the bounteous schedule is Abdellatif Kechiche's amazing Games of Love and Chance (aka L'Esquive), a riveting, beautifully played look at a multi-ethnic group of kids in a racially mixed school in the Paris projects disrupted when one Arab-French kid (the pitch-perfect Osman Elkharraz) becomes enchanted with a beautiful, spirited blonde classmate (a minority in the neighborhood). The title comes from the Marivaux play they are rehearsing, a comment on the codes of behavior we see all around the kids. The first-time teenage actors are unselfconscious and effortlessly convincing (especially the passive Elkharraz, whose slack-faced way of watching the world go by and getting dragged along silently with it speaks volumes) and the details of the day-to-day life, the incessant teenage arguments that wind round and round and round, and the social clashes that explode and settle within minutes feel genuine. It could use some pruning (a little narrative efficiency could really focus this film) but that rambling looseness is also its strength. Inch' Allah, man!

One final self-serving plug: The most complete coverage of SIFF (you decide if it's the best) can be found in my own paper, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which features reviews every weekday (the Friday coverage extends the whole weekend).

Posted by dwhudson at May 25, 2005 1:26 PM