Seattle Dispatch. 7.

Michel Gondry's The Science of Sleep closed the festival on a note of imaginative spirit and emotional pain. I love the way he uses whimsy and fantasy to get at prickly emotions, uncomfortable feelings and the sometimes painful divide between our dreams and our lives. There's a childlike sweetness and honesty in Gael García Bernal's aspiring illustrator, who reimagines his world through the TV show of the mind. It's both prologue to his freewheeling dreams and madcap escape from reality, which he hosts and directs from a cardboard and cellophane set that lies just behind his eyes. The flip side to his creative imagination and flights of fancy is an emotional immaturity that cripples any adult connection to his neighbor (Charlotte Gainsbourg), a seeming soul mate. In the face of a mind-killing job and an unrequited love, his fantasy becomes pure escape that soaks through to both his dreams and his waking world.

As Gainsbourg remarks in the film, it's hard to create randomness as we tend to create patterns. Gondry directs from his first original screenplay (he collaborated with Charlie Kaufman on the story for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) and it lacks the architectural beauty of Kaufman's intricate scripts - purposefully, I would say. In place of the complex patterns and surreal order, Gondry captures the sloppiness of life with a scruffy chaos with no grand design, a life that is not necessarily random, but certainly doesn't feel narratively determined. The connections he makes arise from the images and themes and the feelings expressed in his fantasies.

My last SIFF screening, chronologically speaking (I saw Science earlier in the week) made for a satisfactory bookend to the festival. With A Comedy of Power, Claude Chabrol takes another break from his thrillers (which have been getting a little stale as of late) for a drama in halls of justice with a political backdrop. The SIFF audience didn't seem quite ready for the sober remove and lingering pace of his direction, a dryly sardonic look at a powerful and dogged French magistrate (Isabelle Huppert) on the trail of institutional corruption in a public company. While she uses her quite extensive power to pressure corporate officers - she earns her nickname, "The Piranha," and seems to thrive on blood in the water - even greater power is wielded from above to shield the politicians and power brokers who sacrifice the board members and their petty corruptions like pawns to protect their skims and scams. Chabrol presents the investigation, the power games, the interrogations and the intimidations aimed at her with a matter-of-fact directness, inflected with nothing more than a shrugging recognition and a subtle, ironic wit and concluded with a sour punchline. It was nice to see Chabrol in such smart (if not quite cinematically compelling) form.

The awards have been announced and posted on the Daily. As usual, I missed most of the Golden Space Needle Award winners, the audience awards of the festival. Not that I've ever embraced the winners with the same passion as the audiences. The winning film, OSS 117: Nest of Spies, was a hoot, but hardly the best the festival had to offer. It was, however, an audience pleaser that manages to both spoof classic spy movies and satirize European and Western arrogance in the Middle East with a light touch, and the director and co-star were on hand for the screenings, which always enhances the excitement.

It's always interesting to compare the general audience results with the Fool Serious ballots, a non-affiliated group who poll an exclusive group of voters (full series passholders only). "Most Liked" film is Elsa & Fred (Spain), an octogenarian romantic comedy (it was second runner-up in audience awards), followed by Mother of Mine (Sweden/Finland), Dorota Kedzierzawska's I Am (Poland), Carlos Saura's dance and music tribute film, Iberia (Spain), and Yoji Yamada's The Hidden Blade (Japan), the second film in a trilogy that began with The Twilight Samurai. Their top documentary pick is Adam Curtis's acclaimed The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear (UK).

Of the 65 films I saw, many of them chosen by random luck of the draw while covering the festival for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, my biggest joy was Kelly Reichardt's Old Joy, which I fear has little hope a theatrical release. Other highlights include Christoffer Boe's Allegro (Denmark), Gela Baluani's 13 (Tzameti) (France/Georgia) and Danis Tanovic's Hell (France). I missed more films than I'd like to remember, and saw a few I'd just as soon forget. But it's over. The longest film festival in the country tossed its closing night party (where I wound up hanging with Brian O'Halloran and Jeff Anderson, aka Dante and Randal from the Clerks films - they weren't part of the festival, they just happened to be in town) and waved goodbye for another year. I'd like to use the time to hibernate.

Posted by dwhudson at June 20, 2006 2:29 AM