SITGES '09: Film Fest of the Dead

Like swallows to Capistrano, the zombies return to the Catalonian seaside resort of Sitges every October—at least they have since 1967—and their number keeps growing. The 42nd edition of the Festival Internacional de Cinema Fantàstic was a breeding pool for all things undead or otherwise beyond mortal kin or consciousness. Yet, Hollywood entertainments like Zombieland or increasingly blah cult auteur franchises, like George A. Romero's Survival of the Dead, were merely early Halloween window-dressing for this kaleidoscopic Cannes of cinematic extremism.

The festival, which ran from Oct. 1-12 this year, celebrated the 30th anniversary of Alien and gave a career achievement award to Malcolm McDowell, likewise honoring Walter Hill, Ivan Reitman and the alarmingly vital octogenarian splatter king Herschell Gordon Lewis. (These may not always be so coveted. Last year, Abel Ferrara handed his trophy, a scale model of the Time Machine, to a hotel bartender to settle a tab). Everyone from Park Chan-wook to Viggo Mortensen to that spooky little girl from Orphan made appearances. [editor's viewing tip: click for Steve Dollar's reaction to an Orphan mask.] And if you turned around in the theater to see who was kicking the back of your seat, it was that Argentine provocateur Gaspar Noé, likely getting payback for sneaking ahead of him in line for breakfast buffet French fries.

Duncan Jones's lovely, sad, charming Moon won a bunch of prizes. Too bad its star, Sam Rockwell, was unable to dispatch a clone for the fest's afterhours "karaoke apocalypse." Instead, it was "one of those kids from the new Twilight thing," as New Moon heartthrob Jamie Campbell Bower was generally known to the non-screaming-teen-female crowd of international industry types, bloggers, critics, and juror/troublemakers like Tim League, who apparently teleported directly to Sitges from his own Fantastic Fest.

It's reflective of the festival's range that some of its most startling entries transcended genre slots, even as they jostled familiar concepts into uncanny new forms. Amer, from French-born, Belgium-based filmmakers Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, grabs you from the dynamic opening credits, set to an intriguing acoustic guitar melody and a menacing gurgle of weird ‘60s electronica that turns out to be from a vintage Bruno Nicolai soundtrack. Soon, we're inside a young girl's head, inside a creaky old house, where eyeballs peep through keyholes and the bodies of dead grandparents lay in state, ready to reanimate in a hallucinatory blink.

Constructed out of more than 900 separate shots, about one every six seconds, the film is nearly as keyed to optical reflex as a 1960s structural experiment. Its three half-hour segments trace the experience of the girl, Ana, from childhood to adolescence and into adulthood, advancing from a magical innocence (ripe with gothic tingles and primal scenery) to budding sensuality to, well... the film is a valentine to the giallo creep-outs of Argento, Bava, and Fulci. So a sexy, gap-toothed Euro Teen sashay for the benefit of a cliffside biker gang gives way to nocturnal stalking, black leather gloves brandishing a straight razor, and a dramatic return to forbidding corridors.

With maybe 15 lines of dialogue, though, Amer is more iconic poetry than explicit narrative, not a giallo but an evocation of its tropes, conjured in a disorienting rush of susurrations and extreme close-ups of bellybuttons and parted lips. "Giallo is the perfect genre in which to talk about desire, about sexuality, about fear and desire," Cattet told me, sharing a post-screening interview with Forzani, who is both her creative partner and boyfriend. It's the first feature for the young couple, who have previously made experimental shorts. "When you are with someone you love, in a couple," Forzani added, "you see them always up close."

Going this engaging pair one or two better as an eye-popping freakout is Enter the Void, the irascible Noé's first film since 2002's Irreversible (fondly remembered by one of this year's jurors as "an unending assault on the audience.") The film's stylistic gambits include, among other things, a protagonist shot exclusively from behind the back of his head, endless overhead "eye of God" tracking shots that swoop low into swirling dissolves, mushroom-trip strobe effects and a sex scene that resolves with an ejaculation shot from inside a vagina. Now that's an extreme close-up.

The effort most likely to be denounced by critics in attendance as "a piece of crap"—besides Paranormal Activity, that is—Void was screened in a 160-minute cut that was even longer than those prints shown at Cannes and Toronto. Those inclined to enjoy the void probably did so because of Noé’s extensive post-production work with a digital effects studio to create a psychedelic meditation on the meaning of life (and afterlife). The film is better appreciated as metaphysics, more akin to Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain, as the sudden death of a young American drug dealer in Tokyo cuts his soul free to witness the aftershocks of his killing. The dialogue is largely flat and functional, and the camera's wandering amid the scuzzball depths of Tokyo's sex-and-drug dens offers nothing new for fans of the director's most transgressive impulses (well, okay, actress/model and former Jack Nicholson consort Paz de la Huerta doing naked pole tricks).

"It's supposed to reproduce a DMT trip," Noé said. "When I went to see parts of the movie today, it was weird because by moments the strobing effects, as you try to refocus [your eyes] produces a double image. And I know there's no double image."

Noé expressed his admiration for work by avant-garde filmmakers like Jordan Bellson and Tony Conrad. "I have them all," he said. "People say, 'Oh, you was pretending to do a movie like Kubrick. But at the end, it ended up looking more like a copy of Buñuel or Kenneth Anger.' I say, yeah, when you see Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, it's a lot closer to that than 2001. Another reference for the movie was Tron. I told [the effects supervisor] that I wanted Tokyo to look like Tron."

And as for the, um, climactic money shot near the end of the film? What sort of technology allowed him to frame that? "Very special technology." He laughed. "It was fun to have that cum shot on a big screen in Cannes."

Arriving with no pedigree for outrage, Dogtooth proved to be as seriously disturbing in its way as, say, Eraserhead. Greek director Giorgos Lanthimos's film is, superficially, a domestic comedy about a middle-aged, middle-class couple with three grown kids living at home. Only, their son and two daughters are afflicted with a strange case of arrested development. They've never even left the family compound, where their parents have home-schooled them in détourned vocabulary and treat them like 7-year-olds. Shot in a flat, static manner that allows the weirdness to slowly warp the viewer's mind, the film suggests the inner world of a religious cult where incest is encouraged, role play is used as mind control, and the father is a God improvising an alternative universe. The perils of this hermetic order are evident soon enough, but Lanthimos strikes a nimble balance between the grotesque and the beatific.

Fears that Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans would be a joke were happily unfounded. Werner Herzog's gun-for-hire un-remake of the classic Ferrara title is, indeed, Nicolas Cage's best whacked-out performance in years. Finally, the beast awakes! Post-Katrina New Orleans makes a suitably hellish landscape, feeding Herzog's love of the catastrophic, and Cage's riffing as a drug-addicted renegade cop flares into many a deliriously purple moment. Other than that, I offer only two words: Iguana Cam.

As for the good, old-fashioned horror flicks, Sitges was the land of a thousand jump scares. Sequels like [REC] 2 and The Descent 2 delivered the shocks without the element of dramatic surprise that drove the originals. The British lads-gone-bad comedy Doghouse offered a new twist, though, when a boy's weekend in the country goes terribly wrong: On the outs with their wives and girlfriends, the blokes find themselves in a village where all the women are man-eating zombies. Unlike The Hangover, which happily endorses misogyny and wasn't even funny, Jake West's male-bonding fest actually promotes emotional growth and critical self-examination! This, even as his boisterous crew of punters is gradually picked off and dismembered by a mutant army of female stereotypes.

Equally lethal is Australian actress Robin McLeavy in The Loved Ones. She's the high school good girl in Sean Byrne's mash-up of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Carrie and The Breakfast Club. Or is she? Accompanied by Kasey Chambers's lilting “Am I Not Pretty Enough?,” McLeavy's Lola takes revenge when she gets rejected by pretty-boy Brent (Xavier Samuel) for the prom, aiming to add her crush to a collection of basement-dwelling would-be boyfriends she’s lobotomized. The blend of grindhouse horror, pop spoofery, and sincere teenage drama jells surprisingly well, even mustering a convincing argument for why being a "cutter" (the emotionally rattled Brent likes to slash up his arms) can come in handy when someone's about to drill a hole in your skull.

Such lessons are one of the gifts of Sitges, where the otherworldly really is a walk on the beach.

Posted by ahillis at October 15, 2009 1:41 PM