PIFF Dispatch. 10.

As the Portland International Film Festival came to an end last weekend, Where's Molly?, one of the few Oregon-bred films in the lineup, proved to be an honest tearjerker, its waterworks facilitated by being based on a true story. It's a simple enough premise. Jeff Daly, raised in Astoria, Oregon, had a sister, but she vanished at the age of three. His parents, following his mother's lead, refused to discuss it, and his sister became the elephant in the living room. Years later, married, after a successful career as an international TV cameraman, Daly learns that his sister has been alive the whole time. Born in 1954, she was confined to an institution for the mentally disabled, in Salem, Oregon, one of 350,000 kids thus confined from the 1950s through the 1970s. Daly tracks her down to a home outside Portland, and reunites with her joyously.

The story doesn't end there. Daly manages to get a law passed that makes it easier for people to track down relatives confined to sanitariums. In fact, in a surprising twist, Daly's own brother-in-law also had a sister confined to the same institution. Viewers at all prone to weeping in movies will have collapsed well before this revelation.

Where's Molly?, as it happens, is also beautifully photographed, and for being an Oregon product, surprisingly non-amateurish. It must be noted, however, that as a self-interview subject, Jeff Daly shrugs his shoulders a lot and frequently appears to be on the verge of tears. There is also something of a hidden agenda. Despite Mr Daly's evident gregariousness, there is a disturbing thread of score settling, particularly through his mother, who made the decision to confine Molly to the institution and then proceeded to exclude her from mind, and to Daly's brother, who thus far has refused to participate in the discovery of Molly. More information about the film (whose official title is Where's? Molly [sic]) and the news its case has generated can be found at its official website.

Speaking of the festival, now that it is over, the numbers have come rolling in: 16 days, 82 features, 34 shorts from 35 countries, with 31,000 attendees (the festival managers are a bit vague about attendance numbers - is that ticket sales or individual viewers?). An informal and easily ballot-stuffed poll of the attendees resulted in Portland filmmaker Irene Taylor Brodsky winning an audience award for her documentary, Hear and Now, while the short film favorite was Christopher Leone's K-7. The audience's favorite feature film was fest opener The Lives of Others.

After the glorious artiness of The Lives of Others, the slightly similarly-themed Red Road, born from a Scottish chapter of the Dogme movement, can only be a disappointment. For one thing, Red Road is virtually unintelligible, thanks to the thick accents, and in its adherence to the distant sobriety of Dogme unengaging for its first 40 minutes. This may be a narrative strategy born of providing unexpected plot turns, but once the viewer knows what Jackie (Kate Dickie), a security officer who monitors numerous police TV cameras in a particularly dangerous (i.e., poor) part of town, is up to, the strain for "tragedy" is palpable. Alternative views can be read at Planet Sick-Boy and at the Oregonian's incomprehensible, unnavigable website.

One of my favorite Hal Hartley films - in fact, now that I think about it, the only Hartley film I like - is Henry Fool, and I was cautiously delighted to learn that he had come up with a sequel to it. But Fay Grim [site] is more like his recent works than the robust, realistic yet arch films of that phase of his career. Hartley wrote, shot, edited and scored this film, so it is clearly a personal work, but it feels impersonal for most of its running time - until Henry Fool finally reenters the picture. Its intentionally complicated series of spy movie reversals and revelations, across New York, Paris and Istanbul, evoke Wim Wenders's make-it-up-as-you-go Until the End of the World rather than the intricacies of Henry Fool, and its terrific cast, including Saffron Burrows, cinema's skinniest woman who doesn't look anorexic, seems called upon to look good in leather skirts rather than advance a coherent plot. Still, the very last scene manages to evoke the same feeling of poised change that Henry Fool's did.

It's probably unnecessary for me to add to Andrew Grant's detailed review of Alain Resnais's Private Fears in Public Places. But since one sour-faced viewer at the screening I attended came out complaining to her husband that "I think I need an interpretation," perhaps the film needs a modicum more of defense. There's a lot going against it: a French director adapting a peculiarly British subject, playwright, story, in a thoroughly artificially devised setting. But Resnais appears to like the discipline of adapting another's work, and if Rohmer uses decor to underscore his attitude to his characters, Resnais uses architecture. There is a marvelous shot that evokes Last Year at Marienbad early in the film, the camera tilting up at an indifferent ceiling, hinting that the same mysteries of motivation, of past, present and future, obtain here. A depleting first experience, the film may very well be more rewarding the second time around, when the viewer can match character arc to environment, and I look forward to giving it a second try on DVD.

Posted by dwhudson at March 4, 2007 7:41 AM