Seattle Dispatch. 3.

I saw Danis Tanovic's L'Enfer (Hell) a couple of days ago and I'm still mulling over it. The second film from Tanovic (whose No Man's Land won him an Oscar on his first time out) is based on a scenario by Krzysztof Kieslowski and a script by Kieslowski collaborator Krzysztof Piesiewicz, intended as the second film in a trilogy that was never begun due to Kieslowski's death [Heaven was realized by Tom Tykwer]. L'Enfer has gotten mixed reviews and I'm not surprised. Tanovic doesn't seem to be the "right" director for the project. Where Kieslowski sought out grace and ephemeral moments with a hushed elegance, Tanovic has a more visceral and earthy sensibility, and he tends to hammer the themes with beautiful but blunt scenes rather than let them arise from the drama. The treatise on Medea spoken by youngest sister Anne (Marie Gillain) over images of the newly separated eldest, Sophie (Emmanuelle Béart), playing with her children is the kind of overkill you'd never see from Kieslowski. Karin Viard rounds out the trio as the rabbity, withdrawn middle sister, the only one of them who visits their crippled mother (Carole Bouquet, playing the part like a gray cloud come to Earth to glower), for whom the Medea reference is truly meant.

Tanovic doesn't have a light touch - the music is memorable but oppressive, weighing down the film with it's dramatic doom and gloom - but he has both passion and compassion. Tanovic turns the drama of three damaged sisters, completely disconnected from one another and torn by emotional traumas in their isolated lives, into a full-blooded opera with performances to match. There's a harrowing, still unresolved familial horror from their childhood to reveal and clever but not always resonant twists to wind through. The script works at tragedy too hard, and Kieslowski surely would have toned it down, but Tanovic accentuates it with expressive and unforgettable images. The startling sight of Emmanuelle Béart snaking her head along the sleeping body of her husband's mistress, as if sniffing out his telltale scent on her flesh, justifies the entire film.

The language and the landscape of 13 (Tzameti) is French, but the sensibility and style of Gela Babluani's shaggy slacker comedy turned bleak nightmare is unmistakably Eastern European. Sébastien, a laidback immigrant roofer (amiably played by the director's brother, George Babluani), is stiffed on his payment when his employer dies. The guy was a former criminal plotting one last score (or so we gather from Sébastien's habitual eavesdropping through a convenient hole in the ceiling), which should have set off alarm bells of some kind when he nonchalantly pockets an enigmatic envelope addressed to the dead man and makes use of the contents, a train ticket to Paris and hotel room reservation (he's forgiven for missing the small army of cops shadowing his every move). The lighthearted direction frames it all as a meandering comedy with a nothing-to-lose idiot throwing himself into a North by Northwest bender of anonymous phone calls and directions found in train station lockers. When the reality of his odyssey is revealed - in an excruciatingly restrained scene that allows your mind to run away to your worst fears as the situation is doled out in tiny pieces - it's like the trap door drops beneath him and us and we wait for the rope to snap taut.

I like to think of it as Eastern Europe's answer to Hostel, in the sense of an innocent wandering into an urban legend come true. It's not a horror film in the traditional sense but the ordeal is grueling - not for gore but in the cold, matter-of-fact resignation of a man locked in an unimaginable situation. Gela Babluani (making a memorable film debut) creates tension with a stripped-down style and an unflinching camera and drives the film with a crisp pace that feels both out-of-control and achingly protracted. It's a nightmare more dire and deadly than anything Cary Grant ever faced and the film emerges from it all with a sobering gravity. Sébastien's broken-voice quaver and living-dead walk show just what a toll it has taken on the soul of the once happy-go-lucky kid.

What is it about Charles Bukowski that fascinates foreign directors? Barfly, Love is a Dog from Hell and Tales of Ordinary Madness all came from Europeans (two of whom who came stateside to make the films), and now Factotum follows suit, with Norwegian Bent Hamer (Kitchen Stories) directing the film in Minneapolis/St Paul (!), which stands in as the anonymous American City. It's the second SIFF "Weekend Gala" to be shot in St Paul, Minnesota and it's as different from the first - Robert Altman's A Prairie Home Companion - as could be. Matt Dillon shuffles through the film as a quasi-autobiographical Bukowski stand-in Henry Chinaski, an itinerate day laborer who would rather be writing, drinking or fucking, not necessarily in that order. He goes with the flow as long as it's flowing. The minute he starts to feel dammed up or, worse, stagnated, he splits with no hard feelings or emotional scenes... at least on his part.

The episodic structure simply drifts with Chinaski from one brain-dead job and/or convenient bed to another. Dillon has that disaffected attitude down cold and narrates with a bemused matter-of-factness that matches Hamer's deadpan direction. That blunt directness has its charms and its shortcomings. Bukowski's work doesn't necessarily lend itself to the feature-length form and Hamer has a tendency to puncture the deadpan tone when he pushes for a laugh from the wry humor with a distracting self-awareness. It's better when it doesn't try so hard and simply drifts with Chinaski: neither hero nor villain, neither above things nor apathetic to the world, simply focused on his own place in it (a place that inevitably involves someone pouring drinks). Hamer's sensibility is distinctively not American, and maybe that's what makes this askew look at rumpled dignity in a most undignified existence come through with a subdued, modest grace.

Posted by dwhudson at June 4, 2006 4:59 AM