San Sebastian Dispatch. 1.

The 53rd edition of the San Sebastian International Film Festival opened yesterday under the shadow of a painfully timed death [more]. The work of Robert Wise is to be the subject of a thorough retrospective and his wife was going to take part in the opening ceremonies. It's a sad note for the Donostian festival to open on, particularly because of its special relationship with Wise, who was president of the jury in 1994. This was the talk of the town yesterday - films took second place in conversations. Even so, the projectors rolled, of course.

The first film to unreel, Obaba, the latest from Montxo Armendáriz, was a rather disappointing attempt at adapting a famous collection of short stories by Bernardo Atxaga. As usual, Armendáriz demonstrates a certain visual flair, but this time around, his style is too cold - this is supposed to be a captivating narrative patchwork about love, loss and memory, but its hard cinematic grammar, painfully distant, freezes the emotions and makes them impossible to comprehend or share. Add problems with the script (many lines sound as if they were taken from, well, a good novel, but not from real life), not to mention the performances (some of the actors, including female lead, seem to be reading a teleprompter), and you have a frustrating work from the usually inspired director of Tasio or Secrets of the Heart.

Obaba couldn't make it into competition, as this nostalgic, quasi-magical tale was just screened at the Toronto Film Festival. The first film to screen in competition was none other than Michael Winterbottom's Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, a personal adaptation of a mighty classic work of English literature, more or less their Don Quijote. As we could expect from the British maverick, this is not a conventional adaptation, but an experiment in whimsical metacinema which moves and shakes with a nice urgency. Looking like a mix-up of 24 Hour Party People and his adaptation of Jude, or a James Ivory film shot through the lens of a speed freak, this strange version of Tristram Shandy is a light, wacky entertainment that doesn't change cinema a bit, though it at least gives it a kick in the butt. Nice try, yes.

Zabaltegi, a section reserved for pearls from other festivals, yesterday screened two films of rather different degrees of satisfaction. Abel Ferrara's latest, Mary, is a teological mish-mash which can leave a viewer confused and dry, but the new film by Rodrigo García, Nine Lives, is a beautiful addition to that genre baptized by Manohla Dargis as "We Are The World"; in other words, it's those films made up of intertwined stories of urbanite, lonely people, with an ending usually verging on a new-agey celebration of universal bonds. Unoriginal as it may be, Nine Lives is made with such taste that you have to leave prejudices behind and enjoy what is surely one of the best-written films in a long while. One story in particular, that of pregnant Diana (Robin Wright Penn) and her old ex, Damian (Jason Isaacs), discussing love long past in the cold corridors of a supermarket, resonates with an emotional depth that's not easy to find. Some simply marvelous minutes of cinema.

Posted by dwhudson at September 16, 2005 4:47 AM