Karlovy Vary Dispatch. 2.

Now that the prizes at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival have been awarded - most of the them to the Polish film, My Nikifor, it's time to draw some conclusions. For the most part, the news is good. In its fortieth year, the festival continues to improve, building on its existing strengths and developing new ones.

Karlovy Vary's signature strength is in its location and its commitment to presenting the region's cinema, a point which I've already made. Just a sentence or two about the festival's competition of 16 features. The winner, My Nikifor, by Krzysztof Krauze, is the story of a self-taught artist who settles into the world of the legitimate painter who "discovers" him. It's The Man Who Came to Dinner, only this man is a quirky, irksome dwarf of an artist, and, as I'm sure you've already guessed, there's an irresistible charm to the elfine nuisance (who happens to look like a grotesque shape out of the imagination of the Polish writer and artist Bruno Schultz. By the way, the elf is played by the actress Krystina Feldman. She seems on her way to becoming Poland's Linda Hunt.

The feature competition is not one of Karlovy Vary's greatest strengths. It's hard to get the best world premieres when Cannes is in front of you and Venice is looking over your shoulder, although Chinaman, by Henrik Ruben Genz of Denmark, offered a genuinely sensitive twist on the now-perennial European story of the green card marriage between a sagging Danish plumber and the frail pretty sister of the proprietor of the local Chinese restaurant. (It didn't win any awards.)

Let's expand a bit on Karlovy Vary's efforts to show the films of its region - bear in mind that this an international film festival, not a regional one. Obviously, Karlovy Vary can't be responsible for the ups and downs of regional filmmaking in any given year, and there certainly are ups and downs in this part of the world - especially the surprisingly disappointing Slovak comedy of unemployment in de-industrialized Ostrava, The City of the Sun, by the talented director Martin Sulik. Given that inevitability, the festival doesn't make the mistake of stressing sheer novelty.

Let's start with some films that haven't yet had to stand the test of time. Wrong Side Up by Petr Zelenka, was the most highly praised of the Czech films of the past year. Its hero, also called Petr, is a klutz who has been demoted from his job as a navigator at the Prague Airport to forklift duty. If that isn't demeaning enough, his dark-haired, blue-eyed girlfriend has moved in with another guy. This kind of character is a staple of Czech comedy, the every-nerd who brings calamity upon himself, but somehow triumphs in the end. (I won't give away the film's ending anti-triumph, which seems to be Zelenka's twist on the formula.) But on the way to the ending, Petr takes us from encounter to encounter, all of which seem gently absurd, all of which gel into a Kundera-esque magic realism. There's the father who deserts his humorless wife for a nutty artist, and the couple next door who like to be watched having sex, and the boss who keeps a plaster mannequin of a bimbo around for companionship. It's nothing if not flaky. Yet flaky and funny are two different things. Wrong Side Up left me cold. I'm willing to blame myself, since the whole audience was laughing. If nothing else, my Czech wasn't good enough. Funny or not, Wrong Side Up is undeniably slight. Is this a reflection of Czech cinema's ambitions these days? I sure hope not, but I saw no evidence to the contrary.

Slovenian films were more encouraging. A number were at the festival. The results were uneven, as always. But the one film I liked was The Ruins, by Janez Burger. It's a backstage drama (I'd call it comedy, although a very dark one) about a stage adaptation of what we think is an Icelandic text. Soon we find out that the author of the Icelandic saga is Herman, the director, but not before he learns that his wife is sleeping with the lead actor, his best friend. He reacts by sleeping with his best friend's wife and pain is shared by all. No one is left unbetrayed. Somehow the absurdity of doing it all in the name of faking an Icelandic drama keeps you laughing. (I can't say as much for the another Slovenian comedy, Suburbs, by Vinko Moderndorfer, about four losers somewhere on the outskirts of Ljubljana whose idea of fun involves killing a dog and mounting a video camera in a birdhouse to observe a young couple's sex life. Again, I may just be culturally-impaired when it comes to appreciating this comic sensibility, although I doubt it. I can't imagine why Variety included the plodding film in its "Critic's Choices." Maybe that's another joke I didn't get.)

I liked District, an animated feature billed as "Hungary's answer to South Park." The mix of computer animation and crude hand drawing is set among the aimless youth of a rough neighborhood in Budapest. The language is raunchy; so are the ethnic and sexual stereotypes in this Romeo and Juliet story. Although the film degenerates into a video game that you might see on Saturday morning television, director Aron Gauder is someone to watch. He seems to love provocation and to bring some freshness to it.

So did Theo van Gogh, although his talents went far beyond the stigma of the aging enfant terrible that's been the official story of so many press accounts. Two of van Gogh's films were in Karlovy Vary - Cool!, about gangs struggling to go straight, and 06/05 (The Sixth of May), a thriller about the killing of Pym Fortuyn in May of 2002. Van Gogh crossed the boundaries of political correctness when he championed Fortuyn's campaigns to limit immigration. He also shared Fortuyn's skepticism about Dutch "tolerance" of the doctrines and customs of Islam. He was finishing 06/05 when he was stabbed to death in Amsterdam in November 2004 by a Dutch Moroccan. (Full disclosure - Theo can Gogh was a friend of mine.)

The thriller follows a journalist at the scene of the crime because he's photographing a bimbo star nearby. The investigation finds a connection to the Dutch government, and offers a theory - Fortuyn was killed because he seemed likely to control a future right-wing government and threatened to block an arms deal which would have enriched Dutch businessmen. As van Gogh saw it, Fortuyn's genuine nationalism was a threat to the crony capitalists in Holland and elsewhere who exploited nationalism out of greed. It's plausible enough to make the story work; perhaps there's even some truth to it, although we may never know. What we do know - and what I hope the Karlovy Vary audience recognized - is that van Gogh had an irreplaceable voice that we'll miss.

Karlovy Vary is to be commended for showing both of van Gogh's films, as it is for searching the archives and showing Czech films (and other films) that audiences rarely get a chance to see. This year the festival screened A Higher Principal by Jiri Krejcik, who also received a lifetime achievement award. (Krejcik's acceptance speech about the power of cinema and the opportunity to seize that power was so eloquent that the audience, normally hungry for the next star or party, listened in silent admiration.) The 1960 film looks at the Heydrich Affair, the 1942 assassination of a top Nazi official by Czech partisans and finds lots of cracks in the sanctimonious official story of Czech heroism in the face of Nazi terror. (Why should the Czechs have been any different than the French?) The good news was that the public (or the happy few among them) saw one of Czech cinema's triumphs from the era before the Czech New Wave. The bad news was that the aggrieved majority who missed the screening (myself included) will have to wait a long time before they see the neglected film again. A Higher Principal is not available on tape, according to my informed sources on Czech cinema - even the festival lacked one. Let's hope that changes, but it probably won't unless potential distributors become aware of it. For that to happen, they have to see it.

Another archival section devoted to films about World War II offered more familiar films - like The Bridge, the 1959 German film by the Swiss actor and director Bernhard Wicki. Young boys filled with passion taste the emptiness of heroism and sacrifice as they defend a bridge destined to be dynamited by the same soldiers who told them to protect it. The closeness to the war itself gives the film a realism that you won't find in today's computer-driven war epics. There was far more realism in René Clément's 1946 The Battle of the Rails, about resistance among railroad workmen (although it did give the impression that France was one big brave resistance family - a myth forged in the swoons of liberation that no one believes these days). War romance aside, the films gave audiences something to think about, or at least a break from the inanity of contemporary Czech comedy. It was reassuring to see that so many in those audiences were young. Programs like Karlovy Vary's World War II series are important contributions to film culture. Let's hope for more next year.

Posted by dwhudson at July 9, 2005 11:52 PM