SIFF Dispatch. 2.

For your average SIFF-goer, it's day 13 or so of the 24-day festival. For the press, it's the 6th week of day screenings and DVD screeners, only recently complicated by the addition of the bustling festival screenings on evenings and weekends and the arrival of scores of guests: directors, producers, actors and industry folk, here to promote their films or appear on a panel.

The pedigree of the Romanian satire Offset [German site], which saw its North American premiere at SIFF, is more impressive than the interesting but modest film itself. Director Didi Danquart's co-writers, Cristi Puiu and Razvan Radulescu, collaborated on award-winning The Death of Mr Lazarescu, and co-producer Cristian Mungiu just won the Palme d'Or for 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. This is no grueling endurance test but a wedding comedy as metaphor for Romania in the EU. As a German engineer in Romania prepares to marry a Romanian secretary, minor comic disasters come out of the cultural and social disconnection between Romania and the Europeans there for business or for the wedding. The Germans are patronizing, the French are haughty, and the Romanians (still struggling to embrace the capitalist model after decades of Soviet Communism) are defensive and, perhaps, a little provincial by modern European standards. Danquart's point isn't completely clear and more than a few characters slip into convenient stereotypes, but his observation of the lumps in the EU melting pot has its moments.

"Emerging Master" Olivier Dahan accompanied La Vie en Rose [site] the Édith Piaf bio that opened the Berlinale this year and won (deserved) accolades for leading lady Marion Cotillard, whose performance is more impressive than the (mostly) convincing make-up. She takes Piaf from teenage street urchin singing for coins on the corner to frail, stooped woman old before her time, hands shaking with palsy thanks to alcohol and drugs and a high life. Dahan skips major events in her career to follow her emotional life, jumping all over her timeline for reasons that he may know but neglects to share with us. Cotillard is the show here, and she is magnificent, never once letting us forget that behind the cultural icon is the spirit and sass of a street kid who muscled her way into polite company and burned out at 47. But no, she has no regrets, or so goes the song. Cotillard convinces you that she lived her life that way.

Andrew Currie's Fido [site], a Canadian zom-com dropped into a warped mirror of 50s suburban conformity and surface values with a rotting core, almost snuck under the radar of the festival and threatens to do the same when it gets a release later this summer. This is in a completely different social dimension from that of Shaun of the Dead a world where the "Zombie Wars" have left a no man's land of undead outside the gated communities, a passive underclass of manual laborers and service industry drones, and a legacy of trauma ("families having to kill their own") that all the psychotherapy on Earth is not going to heal. Yet at heart it's a boy and dog adventure, with a zombie in place of the family pet (Scottish comedian Billy Connolly, unrecognizable behind the ash gray complexion and rot-black lips and dialogue consisting of grunts and growls and, in one priceless scene, whimpers). It's a sly, cleverly underplayed mix of cold war sci-fi thriller, Douglas Sirk melodrama, and Lassie movie, with a great cast (Carrie-Anne Moss, Dylan Baker, Tim Blake Nelson and Henry Czerny) having fun with it all.

We local critics had hopes for John Jeffcoat's homegrown indie comedy Outsourced [site], which turned out to be a veritable Xerox of the same old culture clash comedy, albeit in color with henna doodles in the margins. Josh Hamilton is amiably generic as the Seattle call center manager sent overseas to "Americanize" his replacement in India, where he ends up overcoming all his hang-ups through a little cultural bonding and curry romance. Even the mercenary little street urchin shows his love for this foreigner when he learns to stop looking down on all the people who live there.

E J-yong's Dasepo Naughty Girls (South Korea), based on a popular manga, is a busy, brightly-colored comic-book farce brought to the screen as a series of absurdist skits unconnected by anything other than recurring characters, the high school setting, and an energetically amateurish silliness. The high energy of the opening scene and bouncy musical credits sequence is never recaptured as the film becomes a family menu-styled entertainment, with plenty of dishes piled on the plate without any concern of making a consistent meal of them.

The archival highlight of the festival to date is The Sentimental Bloke (1919, Australia), adapted from a popular World War I era book written in verse. The images are largely illustrative of the text, which is written in 20s-era Australian street slang in the form of first person narration and reads as gruffly honest and poetic. Many of the verses have apparently been dropped right in to the intertitles and they would threaten to overwhelm the visual drama were it not for the efforts of director Raymond Longford and actor Arthur Tauchert, who bring the story of this street thug on the road to redemption and love to buoyant life. It's unexpectedly sweet and touching and sentimental in the best ways.

David Jeffers has more on the The Sentimental Bloke at the Siffblog; and the Stranger's "SIFF Notes" are multiplying fast.

Posted by dwhudson at June 7, 2007 1:43 AM