Seattle Dispatch. 6.

It's the homestretch at SIFF, the final weekend of the 24-day fest (double that if you've been attending press screenings from the beginning). It's enough to make the local critic (most, like me, frantically trying to keep up with the pounding schedule of press screenings and picking their way through the evening and weekend schedule of films that did not screen for the press) smile like a Sisyphus who has just been told that his replacement has arrived.

Don't get me wrong. SIFF is a great festival for what it is. If the numbers are any indication, it is (to use the lingo created by Seattle's silicon forest) the most user-friendly festival for an audience any city festival ostensibly serves: the local population. It's just a challenge to cover while keeping up with your day job (and really, who wouldn't pass up a chance to see Hou Hsiao-hsien's Three Times when the an advance screening of The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift beckons?). It's not that the films run together. It's simply that the sprawl diffuses the intensity of the experience. I've seen some fine cinema and had some memorable experiences, but it simply doesn't feel like it's all of one festival.

SIFF is a festival designed for sampling, for picking and choosing your way through like hors d'oeuvres, not for a steady diet. Full series passholders will argue differently, but what good is binge viewing on a schedule that lasts for so many weeks that you have no time to let films set and simmer and bounce around your head?

Thus endeth the rant and begineth a few short notes.

Andrucha Waddington's sensuous House of Sand could be called Sea of Sand. Set in the isolated Maranhao region of Brazil, a coastal desert of shifting sands on rocky plains, Waddington gives it the look and feel of a terra firma ocean with tides charted in years. The story of the three generations of women who are at first trapped in the barren landscape of roaring winds and whipping dust, and then settle in to their place in the social ecosystem, swims in long moments where time never seems to move and then jumps years, decades ahead without so much as a nudge to the audience. Disconnected from the flow of social history and adrift in a world where time is stranded, it's up to the audience to keep up with the leaps ahead. Fernanda Montenegro plays all three women at the end of their lives - the daughters literally become their mothers.

Americanese, from director Eric Byler (Charlotte Sometimes), is not your traditional romance - it opens on a break-up and tracks the relationship of the split pair improving after the separation - and it's not particularly romantic. The supporting actors have more life to them than Chris Tashima (as the older college professor who pays 'stalker visits' to his former lover's apartment just to feel centered again) and Allison Sie (the younger photographer and daughter of a Chinese mom and a Caucasian dad, who is tired of her intellectual boyfriend's tirade on race). Based on the novel American Knees by Seattle author and University of Washington professor Shawn Wong, it's a long-winded story that puts an interesting and complex frame around questions of race, racism and racial awareness in America, and offers an ambiguous answer. Which is a nice way of saying that the film sacrifices its story for its themes, creating an object for discussion at the expense of a drama.

You can feel echoes of Abbas Kiarostami in Reza Mir-Karimi's So Close, So Far, the story of a callous neurologist whose self-involved world is turned inside out when he discovers that his son is dying of an inoperable tumor (the specifics are vague) and rushed headlong into the desert to connect with the son he's neglected almost his whole life. The execution is far from Kiarostami, however, even as the urban neurologist is helped by a wandering holy man and a selfless village doctor who reveres his reputation. The obstacles that hinder his journey build to an almost mythic (biblical?) scale, while his only connection is a series of faltering cell phone conversations. The disembodied voice only accentuates the distance between father and son, and the father's helplessness in the face of the medical assault he, of all people, should be able to address. He has wandered so far out of the world, made so insensitive, that he can't find his way back. In the best tradition of Iranian cinema, the final image is a literal hand held out to lead him back, a simple, powerful, healing moment that pays off every hardship.

I was charmed by the homegrown Seattle comedy Expiration Date, from local director Rick Stevenson (who began his career producing the early films of Michael Hoffman), an odd mix of gallows humor, whimsy and romantic comedy built around a curse that involves a 25th birthday and a fatal collision with a milk truck. Robert A Guthrie (making his film debut) is the doomed young man working through a to-do list before his date with destiny who crosses paths with a screwball dream girl (Sascha Knopf), a high maintenance goofball and a whirlwind of energy and impulse who gives him reason to live.

Am I overrating the film? Possibly. It's a little awkward and clunky, but the tonal balance is dead on, the offbeat humor is perfectly deadpan and the portrait of Seattle is more than simply charming, it's irresistibly romantic.

Posted by dwhudson at June 17, 2006 2:50 AM