Vancouver Dispatch. 2.

May I take a moment to celebrate David Bordwell's coverage of VIFF. My apologies for dropping out for the past week - I had to cut my VIFF stay short and return to Seattle for my regularly scheduled assignment - but Bordwell has been filling the gap with terrific reports from his stay as a festival he has adopted as one of his favorites ever since serving on the Dragons and Tigers jury a few years ago. Invariably, I run into him at least one screening a day and comparing screening notes became a highlight of stay.

My biggest discovery of the festival was Slingshot (Tirador) from the Philippines. Directed in a state of anxious activity on location in the slums of Manila by Brillante Mendoza, the filmmaking sweeps you into its momentum, the rush of the characters and the camera that follows like an accessory to their criminal activity. It's a portrait of chaos in perpetual motion, people hustling, thieving, gambling, getting high, getting away, getting caught, getting into fights, jostling one another in their desperate flight of survival. It's an exhausting experience, and all the more thrilling for it. I've never seen a film with such breathless movement before. Mendoza's most audacious inspiration is shooting the film on location during the election season, where the politicians have done his set dressing for him. There isn't an open surface untouched by a campaign poster or banner (even the police van that collects the random suspects of the opening police raid advertises its law and order candidate on the side, announcing the whole crackdown as a piece of political theater; that same politician personally springs the victims the next morning). Within such a system run on corruption, the world we see can only be the natural consequences. Mendoza explained to the audience that the title Slingshot was a literal translation of the term "Tirador," which is street slang for thief, but the American title is oddly appropriate for a film that moves with such whiplash momentum and characters who rush and ricochet through their world.

More low-key but just as culturally rich is Yasmin Ahmad's Gubra from Malaysia. The catalogue write-up, with its half-hearted defense of pop filmmaking and almost apologetic tone, almost made me pass on the film. I'm glad I didn't. Centered on an extended middle-class family pulled together when the father is taken to the hospital for a diabetes-related illness, the main thread follows the daughter, Orked, who is married to a handsome young professional she discovers is engaged in an affair. That's the family melodrama portion of the film, but a whole community is sketched around them, including a young Muezzin and his playful wife, religious leaders who not only don't judge the prostitutes in their poor part of town but actually look after them however much they can. The celebration of Malaysia's multicultural society is given voice in a conversation between Orked (played by Sharifah Amani with spunky energy and engaging personality) and Alan, the handsome brother of her fiancé who died before their nuptials. The easy acceptance that the devoted Muslims and Christians alike offer everyone in the film creates a sense of community ("The lamps are different, but the lights are the same," reads the quote that ends the film), but Ahmad also shows a harder side of the world: when the sins of one thief come back to take their due, our Muezzin lets this sinner face them alone.

The two biggest disappointments came from a pair of filmmakers whose previous work might have suggested better. Thailand's Pen-ek Ratanaruang had been showing great growth as he developed from the genre cleverness of 6ixtynin9 to the visual beauty and quiet intensity of Last Life in the Universe. Perhaps Christopher Doyle's vivid and dreamy cinematography in the latter brought out values and tones beyond Ratanurang's inherent ability, but whatever the reason, his new film, Ploy (made without Doyle), with its dreary palette and a droning soundtrack, plays like a Tsai Ming-Liang knock-off without the pulse of humanity or the poetry of alienation. Set largely at a Bangkok Airport hotel, an anonymous, largely empty place where people come and go and contact is fleeting and impermanent, it tries to play with the tensions of relationships and suppressed feelings with a narrative that blurs the lines between a reality fraught with unspoken strains and dreams and fantasies where angers and fears play out. It reads far better than it plays. Ratanurang never lets his characters breath, let alone develop even rudimentary personalities, and it all comes off as an empty exercise.

Takeshi Kitano's Glory to the Filmmaker isn't a movie, it's a feature-length doodle. The title is in jest, but even so, there is no glory in this confused farce, a parody of genre filmmaking starring a usually silent Takeshi and, at times, a hollow Takeshi stand-on of wire and paper-mâché that he hauls around like baggage. The film seems to be building on Takeshis', in which Kitano played himself and a schlub of a lookalike, but the deadpan parody of celebrity and expectations of that film becomes a harried collection of cartoony gags connected by a random plot and executed with the finesse of amateur night at the Improv.

Posted by dwhudson at October 7, 2007 1:01 PM