Seattle Dispatch. SIFF Wrap-up.

After 23 days and almost 250 features, the Seattle International Film Festival is over. Finally. For the working press, it's an exhausting haul - with press screenings running for the four weeks before opening night and the tape library rotating throughout, it can be overwhelming and, frankly, hard to finally put into any perspective. SIFF's lack of focus and definition doesn't make that any easier, though what may be its biggest weakness is also its greatest strength: it is everything to everyone in the community, a festival for the people of the city, not the critics or industry movers and shakers. Where attendance is down in theaters nationwide, the festival had a five percent upturn in attendance - this, in the shadow of Star Wars (which robbed the festival of its traditional screenings in the Cinerama).

The Golden Space Needle Award (an audience-voted trophy) for Best Picture went to Luis Mandoki's Mexico-produced Innocent Voices, a well-meaning, heartfelt and utterly conventional social statement about the citizens caught in the crossfire of El Salvador's civil war, notably the children turned into soldiers or snatched off the streets for sexual assault. First Runner Up was Hayao Miyazaki's Howl's Moving Castle, which played SIFF in its original Japanese-language version on the day the English-dubbed version opened nationwide.

Best Actress went to Joan Allen for her performance in Sally Potter's Yes (Emmanuelle Devos was robbed - she wasn't even a runner up for her fearless performance in Kings and Queen) with a well-deserving Maggie Cheung First Runner Up for Clean. Joseph Gordon-Levitt won Best Actor for Gregg Araki's Mysterious Skin (Peter Sarsgaard was First Runner Up for The Dying Gaul and Mathieu Amalric Second Runner Up for Kings and Queen).

Gregg Araki took Best Director for Mysterious Skin and Sally Potter was First Runner Up for Yes. Best Documentary went to Murderball. For a complete list of the awards, click here.

Just for contrast, the privately tallied "Fools Serious" awards, voted on in a complicated system by the Full Series passholders, provided their own take on the festival. The highest number rating went to Howl's Moving Castle, with surprising a second place finish for the adrenaline-charged French B-movie thriller Banlieue 13 (see below for my review). Their least liked, surprisingly, was Miike Takashi's Izo.

Gus Van Sant's Last Days saw its North American premiere at the closing night ceremony. It was another film that divided audiences. Continuing his experiments in narrative deconstruction and reconstruction, it drifts through the final days in the life of Blake, an alienated, drugged-out-of-coherence rock star "inspired by" Kurt Cobain and played by Michael Pitt in a shambling, mumbling, suggestive performance under shaggy blonde locks that leaves no doubt as to who he's emulating. The story is pure speculation, Van Sant's fantasy on what might have happened during those final days of self-isolation, but he loads the film with distinctive imagery - from Pitt's wardrobe to the architecture of the damp, murky forest that envelopes it all like some primeval landscape - that makes a definitive connection to the real events and complicates any kind of reading of the film. What he's really interested in, however, is the experience: the decay of the mansion, the isolation and depression that continually fuels itself, the sense of abandonment, the queasy disorientation of the narrative timeline as it slips back to replay events with details just a little off. There's no explanation to be found here and Van Sant is defiantly vague about pretty much everything (except the rather heavy-handed religious imagery), but the disturbing indifference of the self-absorbed housemates and the texture of Blake's haunting deterioration creates an experience that is hard to shake off. I still haven't really come to terms with it.

I missed many of the 55 documentary features spotlighted at SIFF in this record year, but my pick of what I saw is without a doubt Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man, a portrait of a real life Fitzcarraldo named Timothy Treadwell. This new-age Grizzly Adams with a video camera and a quest to save the Alaskan habitat from humanity spent thirteen summers living amidst the grizzly bears of the Alaskan wilds until he was killed and eaten by his beloved cause. Herzog's fascination with and respect for the man and his fanciful (and somewhat false) self-created mythology as "the lone guardian of the grizzly" is genuine, and his perspective is honest. Treadwell's quest was sincere and passionately undertaken, but his sense of privilege gives him justification to break laws that he would hold everyone else to and his passion blinded him to the contradictions inherent in his stated goals. Those contradictions and controversies, as well as fundamentally opposite philosophies on the essence and reality of nature and wild animals, are where Herzog's film lives.

Argentina got the spotlight in this year's festival with a sidebar of twelve films. I saw very few of them, though what I did see suggested a subject for further study - The Holy Girl, Lucrecia Martel's follow-up to La Cienaga, is just as queasy a cinematic meditation as her debut, and Pablo Trapero's lively and loose The Rolling Family observes the antagonisms of an extended family trapped together on a sloppy road trip with a wry affection.

What did impress me was the French line-up. There wasn't a richer film on display than Arnaud Desplechin's dense, daring and emotionally churning Kings and Queen, a character study that leaves audiences sharply divided about the truth of its heroine, played with an exceptional balance of poise and raw intensity by Emmanuelle Devos. Her twice-married (sort-of) single mother lives her life with a certain arrogant selfishness and Desplechin contrasts her personality and her melodrama-charged crisis (her father is dying of cancer with only days left to live) with her former "husband" (Mathieu Amalric), an equally arrogant and far more irresponsible musician who is committed for a two-week observation period in a mental facility. While audiences seem eager to embrace the most critical judgments passed on Devos by herself and other characters (in particular, a vicious hate letter from a bitter loved one - which ultimately reveals more about the writer than the subject), they are ready to forgive Amalric because of his eccentric antics and shaggy charm - which is part of the fascination of the experience. The film is a minefield of uncomfortable emotions and moral cowardice, yet there are undercurrents of selflessness and sacrifice throughout, complicating any simple assessment of what these characters are all about. It's at once devastating and uplifting, and I found it hopeful and generous.

Jacques Audiard's The Beat That My Heart Skipped, a contemporized remake of James Toback's Fingers set in a shady real estate underworld of Paris, has its own churning drama. Romain Duris has all the emotional stability of a lit fuse as a scrappy streetwise hustler coercing tenants and squatters out of valuable property with strong-arm tactics, when a sudden drive to return to abandoned piano studies overtakes him like a mad love. Duris makes you feel the tension between his adopted life and the driving need to succeed in conquering the keyboard and making the music come alive under his fingers. Audiard gives it all an edgy volatility as the world of small-time hustles and under-the-table scams comes back with a vicious sting.

The back-to-front narrative structure of 5 x 2, François Ozon's scenes from the dissolution of a marriage, opens on the divorce of married couple Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi and Stéphane Freiss and ends with their first hints of romance (tellingly during his vacation with his longtime girlfriend). Ozon plays each of the five moments of the birth and death of their lives together with startling dramatic austerity and clarity. It's both a remembrance of things past and a post-mortem in fragments: pieces of character, telling decisions indicative of their life, moments when weakness or pettiness overcome calm and affection. His greatest special effect is holding the camera in tight on faces which radiate helplessness, insecurity, hardness, anger, disgust, ennui and, at times, simple unguarded love and rapture.

High concept blast Banlieue 13 is further proof that Luc Besson has found his calling as a writer and producer of the leanest, cleanest, most adrenaline-charged B-movie action thrillers in the world. A pair of opposites - ghetto hero David Belle and kick-ass undercover cop hero Cyril Raffaelli - become a volatile team of urban guerrillas to break into the maximum security ghetto (police keep the poor penned in like convicts) and defuse a stolen "clean bomb." It's less Escape From New York than a hysterically overheated socio-political commentary on the ghetto-ization of neighborhoods into impoverished prisons abandoned by civil authority and ruled by the drug lords. That straight-faced outrageousness is part of the film's charm, while the stripped down aesthetic, driving pace and efficient and impressive action sequences are the film’s charge. Curiously, the emphasis is on acrobatic chase scenes through the city, which spotlight a new, uniquely French urban sport known as Parkour that star David Belle helped create. Which doesn't mean that first-time director Pierre Morel stints on fights; he just cuts them down to their essentials with a well-honed sense of how to make images move. They do.

Posted by dwhudson at June 14, 2005 6:49 AM