Barcelona Dispatch. 7.

The first re-runs are a sign that the festival's slowly coming to the end - on Saturday, the jury will give its verdict and Chen Kaige's The Promise will screen as the closing picture, while on Sunday, there'll be more repeats and a masterclass with Christopher Doyle. There are hints of melancholy but happily it still feels like Saturday, and not like a Morrissey-like Sunday.

Thursday saw, again, as did Wednesday, an almost overwhelming batch of titles on the screens of this year's BAFF, and possibly the best, too, though the films in the Official Section have not always lived up to expectations (but is there any film fest, except for maybe Cannes, where it doesn't happen with regularity?). There was the option of catching Kathapurushan, an sampling of cinema from of the guest country India, a dramatization of Kerala's story since the struggle for Independence. Or the competitive films - sadly, not very competitive: the overlong, muddled Gie or Grain in Ear. Or a documentary on pinku eiga, Pinku Ribbon or the delirium of Rampo Noir...

Too many attractions, too little time. And a final option to beat all of them - in the Asian Selection, the remarkable This Charming Girl. (So the previous Morrissey reference wasn't really so gratuitous.) Maybe this dispatch will wind up being more a flashback than a flash forward, but there's still a lot to celebrate in this fragile depiction of the impossibility of love, one of the best since Claude Sautet's Un coeur en hiver, that sad love triangle. Like It's Only Talk, it's a minor-key character study of a woman who lacks the complete emotional resources to live a happy life, enter a healthy relationship, relate to the others, give way to light. There's a main reason behind all of her behavior, one that oversimplifies the whole film instead of improving it in any kind of way, but that's a minor failure given all the emotional nuances the movie subtly offers. The heroine lives in a cloud and the images seem also to float, almost silent, depicting daily routine, daily sadness, daily drama, with clarity and crudity. If you feel like dancing, think twice.

Posted by dwhudson at May 5, 2006 8:39 AM