PIFF Dispatch. 3.

As the Portland International Film Festival rolls on, each film seems to easily represent a "trend" evident in the film world at large. For example, Sarah Polley's Away From Her [site], the young actress-turned-director's account of a man dealing with certain peculiarities of his wife's Alzheimer's, marks the latest film in a new trend. For want of a better term, this trend might be called the New American Girl Cinema. Given that Miss Polley is Canadian, perhaps it should be modified to North American Girl. In any case, Polley is joined in her directorial debut by a whole host of young actresses, including Julia Stiles and Jennifer Aniston, who have each made a short film, Zoe Cassavetes, who has directed Men Make Women Crazy Theory and Broken English, the late Adrienne Shelly, whose Waitress was the toast of Sundance, Karen Moncrieff, whose The Dead Girl is attracting attention, and Joey Lauren Adams, whose Come Early Morning stars Ashley Judd, who is writing the screenplay for a forthcoming film, The Burning Time.

Sofia Coppola would be the Godmother of this "movement" if her acting career were more outside the orbit of her father's, but the sensibility remains the same: calm in effect while unflinching in gaze. Miss Polley's well-meaning if stripped down film is based on Alice Munro's short story, "The Bear Came Over the Mountain," and on the screen anyway, concerns a retired academic Grant (Gordon Pinsent) and his wife Fiona (Julie Christie), whose Alzheimer's has coarsened to the degree that she needs full care. Unfortunately, the rest home where he takes his wife demands several weeks of privacy, and when he is allowed to see Fiona again, not only does she not remember him at all but she has formed a seemingly romantic attachment with another patient, Aubrey (Altman favorite Michael Murphy, who has no dialogue). Complications ensue when Grant seeks out and meets Aubrey's wife, Marian (Olympia Dukakis), a woman who turns out to be the opposite of both himself and Fiona.

Once the narrative gets into third gear, it's fairly easy to predict where it is going, but the pleasures of the film are in supporting parts, including a nurse named Kristy (Kristen Thomson), who gives Grant off the record advice on his wife and the clinic. In fact, it is the minor players who generally excel. Alberta Watson as the head of the clinic isn't given a whole lot to do, and Mr Pinsent is rather more impassive than he might need to be. It's hard to glean motivation for later actions from his bearded, beaming face. Just when did he decide upon the film's final, radical action? It's hard to tell. Still, the film is funnier than one expects, as when, at an admissions interview, a doctor asks about their entertainment habits and Fiona mocks the noisy, corporate Hollywood movies, sure to elicit a knowing laugh from festival audiences.

Which brings me to one of my peeves (it can't be called a pet because it is too large). Screenings for reviewers commenting on PIFF commenced on Monday, January 29th, and for at least one attendee, it revived once-dying memories of fest press screenings of the past. As we old critical war horses stood in the crowded lobby outside the museum's Whitsell Auditorium before the first film of the day, we were surrounded by members of the Silver Screen Club, with whom, for the past several years or so, the reviewers have shared screening space. The Silver Screen Club consists of primarily wealthy patrons of the NWFC whose members can pay up to $1000 dollars to enjoy special privileges regarding access to movies and seating arrangements. To relieve the burden of SSC members at open screenings, when ordinary paying customers in the past could wait in long lines and even be refused entrance if an unexpected number of Silver Screeners showed up, the Film Center opened the day screenings to the SS as well. This has been a source of annoyance to the critics, and vice versa.

The critics are irritated and self-absorbed and in a hurry and expecting the worst. The SSC is clannish and cliquish and they obviously hate the critics. For example, as I was leaving the first screening, I went to grab the last of the festival's schedules from a counter on my way out but it was plucked up by a typically silver-haired Silver Screen member, who then laughed at me, an experience I generally haven't had since grade school. One advance screening (I am told) was started a half an hour before its stated time for the convenience of the SSers, causing some critics to miss it. Silver Screeners sneer at the reviewers, give them the "evil eye" if they get in their way in lines, and worse, can disrupt screenings with their typically ravenous Portland appetites (Portlanders deem all public events as opportunities to eat). Oregonian reviewer Shawn Levy refers amusingly to the symphonic overture of burping Tupperware before most SSC screenings, and even in defiance of museum policy, I saw SSers with plastic bowls of nuts in their laps and heard the endless crinkle of plastic being unwrapped from seemingly endless supplies of nutritionally enhanced fast food. But it's the knowing laugh that gets you. As Fiona derides Hollywood and its product, you hear the hollow forced knowing laugh that announces, not the appreciation of wit, but the vote of solidarity. These people are such cartoon characters they actually laugh in word balloon "Ho Ho Ho"s.

But back to the movies: Away From Her has received positive notices from Reel.com, Eye For Film and Variety.

The long reach of Michelangelo Antonioni's influence is found in Climates (Iklimler), a simple slice of life about the end of a marriage (or relationship). A cinematic Renaissance man on the order of Soderbergh, Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan wrote, directed, produced, photographed and now acts in Climates with his wife, the exotic Ebru Ceylan. His real parents are even cast his character's parents. The Ceylans play Isa, an academic, and Bahar, a movie art director. While on a vacation in sunny Kas, Bahar abruptly breaks up with the silent and surly Isa. Isa finds comfort temporarily with an ex, Serap (Nazan Kirilmis), and then, as the result of remorse hunts down Bahar on location in a snowy village, with a vague and inconclusive (from the audience's perspective, anyway) attempt to get back together.

Like fellow Antonioni disciple Theo Angelopoulos, Ceylan likes to let his camera linger on the beauty of Woman, and there are long, long takes of Mrs Ceylan simply looking. Hints of marital discord occur on the beach, when Isa says says, "I love you," and then dumps sand on her head in an attempt to bury her, a not particularly subtle metaphor for her sense of suffocation, otherwise unexpressed. Flies, bees and mosquitoes dwell ominously and with more energy than the cast, except in a sex scene that turns a bare floor into a choochoo track. Visually, the film, shot on digital, is stunning, and there is an interesting sequence, again with a hint of Antonioni, after the duo meet up in a café and, in the course of the wordless sequence, their faces slightly obscure each other's heads meaningfully. Or "meaningfully." The narrative arc from sun to snow is also meaningful, but ultimately the viewer isn't given much clue as to the meanings. Like the beginning of L'Eclisse, all the action's happened before the film started. Climates' official website gathers together some of the more positive comment.

Romanian writer-director Corneliu Porumboiu's 12:08 East of Bucharest (also known as A fost sau n-a fost?, which means, "Was there or wasn't there?," while the English title refers to the moment Ceausescu abandoned the presidential palace) is mostly build-up to an extended comedy sequence. The plot covers a day, December 22nd, in the life of a local TV personality Jderescu (Ion Sapdaru) who is trying to gather up to witnesses to the revolution that brought down communist rule 16 years earlier and coïncidentally investigate whether or not the revolution in turn made its way to his small village. His search turns up old Piscoci (Mircea Andreescu), easily distracted by minor things, and Manescu (Teo Corban), an alcoholic academic who may or may not have been in the Bucharest square where the revolution began - Manescu's claims are disputed by callers into the show, who suggest he was too drunk at the time to know where he was. Though the set up is long, and shot in typical plain Eastern European fashion with long takes from cameras squeezed into awkward corners, the resultant TV sequence is worth it, very funny and lively, a kind of Keatonish examination of mass failure. There is a beautiful moment at the very end though, as night falls on the snowy village and lights go on around the town, in a pictorial representation of Piscoci's on-air comment that the revolution did in fact come, like a light being switched on.

Reviewers at Bright Lights, Floatation Suite and Swimming to Casablanca also got a kick out of the film.

Earlier: "Sundance. Away From Her.," "Cannes. Iklimler." and "Cannes. A fost sau n-a fost?."

Posted by dwhudson at February 16, 2007 12:47 PM