Karlovy Vary Dispatch. 1.

There are always some discoveries at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, although you don't expect them to come from China.

The Good Cats by Ling Yiang is a satire that takes aim at one example of Chinese economic growth, a real estate deal that seizes land from local peasants, thanks to bribed politicians. As businessmen and politicians present their project at a photo op, one of the developers says, "This is about your benefit. My profit is only secondary." Ling is savvy enough to see the humor in the very idea of a businessman sounding pious. (If only Americans were so skeptical.) And these businessmen don't sound pious for long.

The story focuses on a young man with a promising future who throws his lot in with the opportunists who are planning to sell out the locals. He delivers bribes to elected officials in bricks of cash (often the politicians turn around and demand more - it's a growth economy, after all), he drives through angry crowds of peasants intent on beating the businessmen to death, and he ditches his beautiful sensible wife for evenings with a young prostitute whom he promises to marry.

Between acts of shameless corruption that you find every day in Chinese business, a band whose singer has a voice like a howler monkey reflects in the style of a Greek chorus on the pageant of wrongdoing, appearing in the most unusual of places. As you can imagine, the juxtaposition of craven self-enrichment and moral condemnation makes for laughs. Ling Yiang doesn't hold back. The Good Cats, which takes its title from the cynical results-driven notion that a cat's color doesn't matter as long as it catches mice, is a film that even presents suicide as a joke. Believe me, you'll laugh. There's not much of an aesthetic to the film (despite the kitschy interior decoration of the nouveaux riches), which Ling Yiang seems to have shot with the cheapest camera he could find, unlike the refined muted composure of a film like Peng Tao's Little Moth. It doesn't matter. This is a comic fable about the cheapening of human relationships and everything else.

The absurdity seems less contrived against the context of US-Czech relations unfolding at this very moment. Condoleezza "Mistakes Were Made" Rice was in Prague yesterday, urging the Czech government to become part of an anti-missile (i.e., anti-Russian) radar initiative. The deal was signed. Does anybody really expect the Russians to attack Eastern Europe - the "new" Europe, as Donald Rumsfeld liked to call it? As things look now, the Czechs seemed willing to join up. Even the Poles balked at it. What's the payoff? Word is that if the Czechs didn't sign, Dick Cheney threatened to organize a hunting trip to the Czech Republic next year. And radar won't work if Cheney has a loaded shotgun in his hands after a few Pilsners. Now there's a story that calls for a satirist.

In this year's international competition at the 2008 KVIFF, Distant Tremors, directed by Manuel Poutte of Belgium, gets my vote for most unoriginal. In Senegal, a young man, Bandiougou, would like to leave for France, if he ever obtains a visa, but the whole process is delayed when what seems to be a bad spell is cast upon him, and his luck goes south. In his town is a middle-aged European physician who is overworked and misanthropic (we're asked to believe, presumably from too much time spent saving lives). His wife has just died (did he kill her?) and his gorgeous pouting daughter who, improbably, has spent all her life in Africa is also confronting a deep darkness. You wonder why she just doesn't sign a modeling contract and get on with her life. Enter an antique dealer intent on returning to Brussels with an "authentic" African fetish, and all four set out en bateau for the interior territory that is inhabited by spirits. Throw in a little Heart of Darkness, Apocalypse Now and Aguirre: Wrath of God, and you get the picture. First the Europeans are arrogant unbelievers, then they get scared and sick in the labyrinthine mangroves, and then they go crazy. We could have told you so.

Equally predictable is Dr Aleman [site], directed by Tom Schreiber, also in this year's main competition at KVIFF, a German film about a well-menacing surgical resident in Cali, Colombia. Handsome Marc, played by Viggo Mortensen look-alike August Diehl, is boarded with an evangelized family (with a libidinous daughter) and he heads right for the rough barrio of Siloe. The young man who cuts up bodies of gunshot victims alongside life-hardened doctors in the hospital is besieged by local girls, and there's almost as much cocaine-fueled sex as there is violence in this "How I Spent My Internship" tale of Marc's loss of innocence in a place where life is cheap and gangs don't need much of a reason to murder an entire family. Marc gets caught up in a gang war and the bodies pile up, until he finally exacts revenge. Make no mistake - revenge is valued highly in Colombia. President Uribe now has around a 90 percent approval rating after soldiers took back hostages from the FARC rebels in a brazen maneuver last week [and, of course, the movie's on the way - ed]. Despite blood and body parts strewn all over the streets and hospital floors, Dr Aleman will struggle to find approval, even among Germans. The film has little chance of a release in the US.

For sheer tactility at KVIFF, it's hard to beat the in-your-face impact of The Hollow, from Russia, which seems determined to bolster the argument that rural life, as some famous Russian writer (Turgenev?) put it, is throbbingly dull, and much worse. The problem is that Marina Razbezhkina's film begins and ends there, with peasants tearing each other apart and saving their fiercest abuses for fair-eyed Karev (Mikhail Evlanov), who has had some education - maybe it was that same Russian writer who said that a little knowledge is a bad thing. Let's just add that a little of this film adapted from a story of the same name by Sergey Yesenin, goes a long way, unless beating people with dull objects in the Russian mud is your thing.

That view of Russia is one frequently found among Poles, who have found themselves at the wrong end of the Russian stick more frequently in their history than they would like to recall. The subject of Andzej Wajda's epic Katyn [site], which has included KVIFF on its marathon festival run, is the Katyn massacre of 1940, in which Soviet troops on Kremlin orders slaughtered some 22,000 Polish officers taken prisoner in the Soviet invasion of 1939 that divided Poland as part of the Hitler-Stalin Pact. When the Nazis found the shallow graves in 1943 and brought it to the attention of the world press, the Soviets claimed to have had nothing to do with the killings. In the 1970s, a Soviet film based on a book by a Byelorussian writer made the argument that the Katyn massacre was really the Nazi destruction of a Byelorussian village.

Although I'm one of the critics who believes that Katyn is distinguished only by the blandness of its script, given the subject, and the wooden solemnity of its storytelling, I congratulate the KVIFF for taking the fillm to the belly of the beast, as it were, since Karlovy Vary can give you the feeling that it is sovereign Russian territory.

Russians here ignored it, I'm told, much as they would in Moscow if it were to ever open there. Although many in the press corps here believe that Katyn was banned in Russia, basing that conclusion on their need for backstory drama and on the fact that a screening of the film on March 5, (the anniversary of Stalin's 1940 execution order and of his death in 1953), was cancelled, the film simply has no Russian distribution. It was not officially prohibited from opening theatrically, as was the case in Russia with Borat. I credit my friend and colleague Nick Holdsworth from Variety for that clarification. Further clarification came when I was told that the real risk of showing Katyn in Russia would be the economic risk of seeing cinemas go empty after a distributor paid dearly for the rights to show the high-priced epic, not any political risk of reopening interest in a mass murder that the Soviet government would not acknowledge. To date, Katyn has not been sold to any foreign territory. For a more positive view of the film than mine (which ran here during the Berlinale), see the recent promotional article on "a film that matters" in the New York Review of Books. (In the interest of full disclosure, the NYRB should have told its readers that the author of that piece, Anne Applebaum of the Washington Post, is married to the current Foreign Minister of Poland.)

Posted by dwhudson at July 9, 2008 6:55 AM