Karlovy Vary Dispatch. 2.

As of this writing, it looks as if the competition at this year's Karlovy Vary International Film Festival has a likely winner - Jar City, a thriller about genetic codes and DNA determinism by the Icelandic director Baltasar Kormakur. I hazard this prediction with no inside information, and with the admission of fallibility.

As a father pores through medical information to find the origins of a brain disease affecting his daughter, a detective (Ingvar Sigurasson) probes the death of an old man who lived in a basement filled with porn videos and kept the slimiest of company. This is not the Iceland of any tourist brochures. Kormakur, who adapted the script from a recent novel by Arnaldur Indridason, sets the detective story against a realistic background, in which the purity of Iceland's genetic information has been sought by bioengineering speculators, and the country's medical records have been sold. Alongside this picture of the seduction of genetic perfectibility is Iceland's underside of undersides - violent criminals, pathological porn freaks, junkies, and the people they prey upon.

Updated through 7/5.

Jar City (referring to the jars of medical specimens and the jars of DNA codes that promise health and happiness) twists its stories enough times to confound any but the most attentive viewers. There's plenty of humanity here - the humanity that seeks truth and justice after a crime has been committed, and the gross violent "humanity" that oozes upward from the swamps of pathology to assure that crimes won't be encrypted away by the technological optimists. The original title in Icelandic means swamps - no surprise.

Kormakur's competitors don't come too close. One is Conversation with My Gardener, by Jean Becker, in which a frustrated painter (Daniel Auteuil) flees stressful Paris for the countryside and bonds with a retired railroad worker who tends the urbanite's garden. It's a story of a sophisticated man learning simple truths from a person whom, except for chance, he would never have met. The concept is common enough, but the banality of this film is its only extraordinary quality. Auteuil learns how to plant vegetables and catch a fish, to his constant surprise at all things ordinary. It sort of reminds you of George Bush, Sr's surprise, at a photo-op at suburban Washington supermarket, that prices were read by electronic scanners. What planet had he been living on?

Becker's glimpse of "intimacy" among two friends is the kind of French factory product that only comes to the US in French film series that attempt to sell the unsellable. Or perhaps I'm wrong. At KVIFF, the standing ovation for the film's international premiere went on for almost ten minutes. Am I missing something, or am I just underestimating the market for platitudes with a French accent?

Saturno contro [site], by Italian/Turkish director Ferzan Ozpetek, is another would-be bearer of truths, which are supposed to emerge from conversations around the epicurean dinner table of gay friends and the women who seek their company - lots of camp and wit. This is the kind of film that was made more than 20 years ago in the US. Amid all the banter comes the death of one of the group, and the march of mourners from the table to the hospital, like zombies in a George Romero film, as Nick Roddick said to me. It seemed to me like warmed-over Denis Arcand (The Barbarian Invasions), which wasn't much to start with. Someone needs to tell Ozpetek that he's no Dorothy Parker. Bear in mind that critical unanimity against the film didn't keep it from becoming a hit in Italy.

In the East of the West section at Karlovy Vary, one film that caught my eye was Hope, a feature debut. Stanislaw Mucha is the director of two previous documentaries - one on the Carpato-Russian region where the family of Andy Warhol comes from (Absolut Warhola), one on the retracing of a vicious Nazi's steps during and after World War II (Back Home to the Reich, with Bubi). He makes the transition to the dramatic feature with the help of the DP Krzysztof Ptak, who shoots the film with elegance.

Mucha also gets the trajectory of an art crime with as much plausibility as I've seen on the screen, although we can all agree that the bar is not too high. There's a picture of an angel above the altar of an old wooden church, where young Francis's father, a former orchestra conductor, now plays the organ. We're not told who painted it, although it is from the Renaissance. The angel figure is too chubby to be Italian, which it seems to be for the purposes of the story. It has the proportions of a Bohemian Gothic figure - this is Karlovy Vary, after all. And young Francis - angelic with curly red hair - has set up cameras in the church to catch a thief. It takes the criminals a minute or two to remove the painting. Overseeing it all is a local contemporary art dealer, who looks right into the camera when a pigeon somehow flies through the church. The dealer, who is also a politician, makes a mournful appearance at a press conference deploring the theft, and when Francis confronts him, he can't believe that the young man isn't just interested in money.

As we get deeper into the story, the food chain of the art crime is revealed, with an organized crime boss poised to send the picture overseas, and enforcers there at every turn to make sure all goes as planned. This is the process that is emptying churches all over Europe of their treasures. And the consumers of this religious art, like the man who commissions the theft, are "respectable" people. And you can understand why they would want these paintings. In one scene, Francis makes a visit to the gallery of the man who hires thieves to steal the painting. On view is a pink array of photographs, paintings and other objects that looks straight out of Art Basel Miami Beach. You can bet that, even with organized crime's overhead, the Old Master painting is cheaper than just about anything contemporary.

Hope spins another story, about the death of Francis's mother who is hit by a truck as she tries to keep Francis and his brother out of traffic years before. It all happens during his father's farewell concert, and we're led to believe that her death has sent Francis's brother into his own life of crime, which has put him into prison by the time, years later, that the art theft occurs. Francis has a penchant for risk-taking, also presumably as a result. Besides monitoring the courts and spying on criminals, he sky-dives.

If you ever see this film, and it's unlikely that it will have much exposure in the US, you can make your own evaluation of the story about an amateur detective and the death of his mother. But the film should not be missd for its tale of an Old Master painting stolen from a vulnerable place. It makes you wonder what else Stanislaw Mucha might know about these sorts of crimes. I'm looking forward to his documentary about that.

Trends being trends, the mob figures prominently in The Trap [site], Srdan Golubovic's new film from Serbia about a family that gets caught up in a gambit to earn cash to pay for a son's urgent heart operation. It's what the film critics like to call a "Faustian bargain." The setting is Belgrade, where post-war prosperity is enjoyed mostly by veterans of the black market and other shady operations, and people who respect the law are forced to struggle if anything goes wrong - and something always does, or we wouldn't have movies. When Mladen (Nebosja Glogovac as the intense ordinary man trapped in a hopeless gamble) and his wife learn that their son is gravely ill, they scramble to pay for an operation that they can't afford, and place an ad for charity in the newspaper (which seems to be what many families are forced to do). Mladen is approached by a man who offers to pay him 30,000 euros to rub out someone who is "in the way," and the film that begins with Mladen's confession gradually fills in the blanks.

The Trap has been compared to Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, and the parallel rests on the way in which Mladen's guilt for his murder corrodes through his resistance to any moral qualms. Life has a price - either when it's taken or when it's saved. Yet moral peace of mind is harder to buy - for some. At least there's something that's still not entirely monetized.

At european-films.net, Boyd van Hoeij also reviews Jar City and Saturno contro.

"Czech auds gave Hal Ashby's 1971 cult romancer Harold and Maude five minutes of sustained applause at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival on Monday, bringing a tear to the eye of thesp Bud Cort," reports Will Tizard for Variety.

Updates, 7/5: Dan Fainaru for Screen Daily on Jar City: "Deeply ingrained in Icelandic soil, which comes up as a constant reminder all through the picture, richly textured with everything from a crime story to heart-breaking personal tragedies and past sins that refuse to stay buried, this is possibly Kormakur's best effort to date, strongly confirming his position as one of Iceland's leading filmmakers."

Also, Conversation with My Gardener: "Inoffensive and unconfrontational, and never trying to scratch under the neat lacquered surface of cheerful double entendres and sunny repartees, this is a natural platform for the talents of Daniel Auteuil and Jean-Pierre Darroussin."

And at european-films.net: Boyd on The Art of Negative Thinking.

Posted by dwhudson at July 4, 2007 5:32 AM