Karlovy Vary Dispatch. 3.

It's hard to have much faith in film festival juries. Based on the evidence that I have seen, festival jurors don't have a much better record than the jury in the OJ Simpson murder case. I say this as someone who has sat on many film festival juries.

At Karlovy Vary this year, at least two of the awards showed me to have been too much the skeptic. Perhaps it's because the competition was a great improvement over those of previous years. Sherrybaby, directed by Laurie Collyer, won the Crystal Globe, the festival's top prize. The Best Actress Prize went to Maggie Gyllenhaal, who played a heroin addict, just released from prison, who is trying to reconstruct her life with her daughter against all the odds that get most addicts locked up again. If the film weren't so affirmative about building one's life again, I'd call it a drop-dead performance.

It's also a nuanced performance. Gyllenhaal, who's blonde for this film, has the kind of hard ballsy exterior that we've come to expect from people who've done time (or from characters like this one) - with raw talk about sex, men and dope. But you can get that kind of talk from any rap track, from kids who've only done time at Versace. The vulnerability that Gyllenhaal brings to the role of a mother watching her children under the care of her sister-in-law, watching her family effectively take her child away, is what brings real emotions to Sherrybaby. Posturing can only go so far if a complicated family story is aiming at real and painful truths. (This one is based on the true story of someone whom the director knew. All the more reason to make it seem real.)  Here, acting took over, not just from Gyllenhaal but from the ensemble of actors in the cast - Danny Trejo as a goodhearted tattooed biker who tries to keep Sherry out of trouble, and Sam Bottoms as the father that she's trying and failing to please. We see in the briefest of pivotal scenes that he seems to have abused her as a child.

The production design of Sherrybaby is another triumph, because you're not aware of it. The New Jersey town to which Sherry returns is numbingly ordinary - not too rough, certainly not too elegant. You can say the same for her family's house. It's all woven into a story of the large and small battles of a person who could go either way - and you're never quite sure of that direction. Hence the drama.

The cinematography of Russell Lee Fine gives us a balance between character and circumstances. Gyllenhaal in close-ups can shift in an instant from one impulse to another, as a person does when she lives in the realm of fearful necessity. You get that same urgency in the love scenes, if that term can be used to describe those raw sequences. The camera helps us witness the maturing (and I don't mean aging) of a very fine actress.

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Another film defined by superb acting is Aku Louhimies's Frozen City, a Finnish film about a father fighting to be with his children, screening in the Karlovy Vary competition. Veli-Matti is a taxi driver whose wife turns every effort to see his three kids into a battle. Any battle in cold dark Finland is likely to be more painful than it might be in a place like Italy. Little things go wrong, eating away at him, either at his miserable job or in his spartan apartment, where a neighbor complains that his curtains aren't right. Generations raised on Scorsese know that a taxi driver is supposed to explode eventually, and Veli-Matti does, after he's the victim of an act of unspeakable and trivial cruelty, and we are reminded that emotional hell always has new depths. Janne Virtanen gives every bit as courageous a performance as Gyllenhaal does in Sherrybaby.

If you watch Finnish films, you inevitably think of Aki Kaurismäki. Yet emotions with Kaurismäki tend to be played with a surface deadpan. Characters walk robotically through circumstances that they often can't control. In Frozen City, you watch as a character thrashes against the cards that he's been dealt, and wonder whether determination has any chance against what seems to be destiny. Let's hope some distributors were watching this one.

The fight over children seemed to be a theme this year. It was part of the picaresque Goodbye Life, Ensieh Shah-Hosseini's odyssey set in the Iran-Iraq War, seen through the autobiographical eyes of a woman journalist covering that carnage in the marshlands of the river delta that those countries share in the South. Families reassembling after attacks and bombings, searching for lost children, are part of what she witnesses. At its best moments, that journey through the eyes of a survivor walking among corpses in the deserts and the marshes is hypnotic. There's a great look to the mute landscapes, but the script doesn't go much farther. (A number of Iranian films have been made on the subject, and I'm told that most are nationalistic melodramas, although I have never seen one. We could also use any kind of film examining the US role in that war, which took more than a million lives. The US supported Saddam back then, remember?)

Kids and custody were also at the core of This Girl Is Mine, by Virginie Wagon, in which an ex-addict mother living in the woods somewhere outside Marseilles suddenly finds herself under siege from a businesswoman who claims that she is the real mother of her 11-year old child, who was allegedly kidnapped at the age of six months.   The mother living with the child is Spanish and toils as a substitute teacher and part-time farm-worker. The would-be mother is rich, divorced, and drunk most of the time, no doubt the casualty of a ten-year struggle to find the child that was taken from her. She is easy to dislike. Amid debates over who is (or could be) the better mother, and sub-plots about the techno-search by private investigators for those complicit in the kidnapping, what this story really needs is a Solomon, and it gets one. The wisdom here, affirmed once again, is that you can't cut a child in half, often in spite of evidence that, abiding by the most literal reading of the law, could wrest a child from the only family that she has known. A small, gripping drama leads you toward that conclusion.

Transit, by Alexandr Rogozhkin, aims at a much bigger drama, an epic set at the extreme eastern end of Siberia in 1942 and 1943 - and presumably a budget to match its ambitions. Through this isolated base pass American men and women pilots from Alaska, young Russian soldiers, local communist party hacks, and the native people whose land gets trampled in the world war. The cinematographer who shot Transit must have watched Pearl Harbor a few too many times, and, to put it mildly, neither the script nor the acting fills up all that space. An epic deserves better. Go back to Rogozhkin's Living With an Idiot to see how good this director can be.

A better Russian choice at Karlovy Vary, from the documentary section,  was Blokada, a collection of footage of the 900-day World War II Nazi siege of Leningrad, seen from the Russian point of view. The documentary, shot back then in crystalline 35-mm and assembled into less than one hour by Sergei Loznitsa, has no dialogue, and no sound except sirens, children screaming, and the marching of boots. We see soldiers marching through the street with prisoners (some of whom are hanged at the end), buildings are bombed into splinters, and citizens desperate for water are scooping up melted snow to drink.

Things were far worse than these images of dignity might have you think, but the silent footage has a quiet power. My friends who grew up in the Soviet sphere say they were force-fed similar images in school every day, and don't need more. For the rest of the film audience, whose historical memory seems to be the length of a single frame, Blokada will be absolutely new, and should be seen.

Posted by dwhudson at July 9, 2006 2:23 PM