San Sebastian Dispatch. 6.

Alongside A Cock and Bull Story from Britain and El Aura from Argentina, Stestí (Something Like Happiness) from the Czech Republic must be the strongest entry to date in Official Section. Director Bohdan Slama presents a human patchwork that's real enough to believe - emotions breathe, skin cries and every word rings true. This radiography of a group of locals from the working-class district of a small Czech city follows solitary lives with sensibility, those of a young girl whose boyfriend has emigrated to America, the boy who loves her secretly, an abandoned mother and her children and all the people surrounding them. There are no half-truths, nor absolute blacks and whites nor conclusions. There is truth in painful quantities, especially in an ending that refuses to tie all the knots together just to give the characters some relief. Powerful social cinema.

We used to describe the cinema of French Laurent Cantet in the same terms. He was able to address social issues with a special talent - both Ressources Humaines (Human Resources) and L'Emploi Du Temps (Time Out) were tasteful, subtle insights into problems of our society, made with both a deep understanding of the source material and a penchant for visuals that reflected inner spaces, especially in the latter film. The same can't be said of his latest effort, the Zabaltegi-selected Vers Le Sud, the story of a group of middle-aged women who come to early 80s Haiti in search of tenderness and sex and end up entangled in the fight for attention of a young black man. The treatment of the characters and their stories is rather superficial here - and the use of direct speeches to the camera are both unnecessary and too literal. It becomes difficult to feel anything for or get interested in these characters, and this has also to do with a painfully flat direction without a single shade of the brilliance or the significance that could be seen in L'Emploi Du Temps.

The second disappointment of the day appeared on Official Section. After the disaster of The Brothers Grimm, Terry Gilliam has come up with something not much better. Adapted from a novel by Mitch Cullin, Tideland is the story of a young girl (the incredible Jodelle Ferland) who escapes from the terrible reality of her childhood (a dirty rural farmhouse, a dying father, strange noises) by means of her imagination. A rather pointless exercise in excess, a catalogue of naive provocations that bore rather than shock, more a visual attack than a visual feast, this is a film made for almost no one - too harsh for children, too boring for adults and too ugly and irregular to soothe the eyes of well-trained cinephiles. The painful experience is only redeemed by a couple of suggestive scenes, like the one in which the farmhouse goes under and becomes an hallucinatory pool. The question is: Has Gilliam lost it? My intense admiration for his previous work just wants me to believe his current lack of inspiration will end soon.

Posted by dwhudson at September 21, 2005 5:06 AM