Sod’s Law strikes again! Most of the time this column is an exercise in making much out of little, patiently chewing through familiar fodder – why the current fashion for horror films? how many cartoons about wisecracking animals can a person take? is a sequel better than a threequel? – like a half-starved ruminant. Again and again, I’ve wished for a week with films I can sink my teeth into, grown-up films with themes and real-world resonance. Now, finally, that week is here – yet it comes just as things start buzzing at the multiplex! Cyprus Film Days is the year’s most important film festival, yet nothing in this year’s selection is as worth seeing as The Prestige, currently showing at the K-Cineplex. I could even fill a column on Happy Feet, the dancing-penguin cartoon that’s much less sunny – and more self-negating – than its trailer might suggest.
Hopefully, we’ll do those next week. But there’s no avoiding Cyprus Film Days, both because the lineup is excellent – about on a par with last year’s inaugural edition, once again programmed by Cyprus-born critic Ninos Fenek Mikellides – and because each film plays only twice (once in Nicosia, once in Limassol) so it helps to know as much as possible rather than rely on word-of-mouth. The Festival started last night, so Limassol audiences have already missed Nicos Panayiotopoulos’ Dying in Athens while Nicosians have missed Baba’s Cars, Beauty in Trouble and a Greek film called Summer Province Dreams. The last-named won’t play Limassol at all, one of several slight variations between the two programmes. Nicosia gets a number of Greek films in the “Digital Waves Programme” – presumably low-budget films made on digital video – as well as Joseph Losey’s cryptic 1963 drama The Servant (***), tying in with a Harold Pinter exhibition; Limassol gets a German film called The Short Life of Jose Antonio Gutierrez, about which I know exactly nothing.
There’s a couple of obscurities among the 14 making up the spine of the Festival; it could hardly be otherwise, with so many films made each year and so much to choose from. Mostly, however, Mr. Mikellides has cherry-picked from the top tier of arthouse offerings, including a number of titles that rank among last year’s most important films – clearly including Grbavica (**), winner of the Golden Bear (the top prize) at the 2006 Berlin Festival.
The setting is Sarajevo, a city inching back towards normality. “It smells just like it used to be,” says the heroine approvingly, taking a whiff of the heady air. Still, reminders of the war are everywhere, from a jokey reference to Tito – symbol of the old Yugoslavia – to the heroine’s missing husband who’s been designated a shaheed, or martyr. She herself struggles to make ends meet, trying to make a life for her early-teenage daughter, working as a waitress in a sleazy bar where the girls are encouraged to show their tits. Her name is Esma and the film’s been released in the UK as Esma’s Secret though Esma’s secret is in fact pretty obvious, especially once you factor in that the war ended about 12 years ago. The film ends tamely, but its value is the picture of a city in transition – above all the terrible silence about the past, hanging like a pall over the characters. “There’s no healing without talking,” a social worker tells a group of women – but she can’t even get them to attend her meetings without offering money.
Grbavica is small-scale, obviously made on a shoestring; one admires its heart, but it’s still a bit one-dimensional – and the same may be said of director Park Chan-wook, except in that case one admires the lack of heart. Mr. Park is the Korean specialist in twisted ultra-violence who’s become a cult figure in Greece, and of course whatever’s trendy in Greece eventually trickles down to Cyprus. Oldboy played in last year’s Cyprus Film Days, and this year we get the two films he made on either side of that, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (**) from 2002 and the more recent Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (***). Admittedly it seems a shame to waste two slots on the same director but I suspect this is the Festival’s push for the young audience, hoping the draw of violent exotica will lure them in for the more thoughtful fare. (The same may be said of Yiannis Economides’ notoriously brutal Soul Kicking, another succ?s de scandale in Greece.)
The films themselves recall Oldboy, the three together making up a loose Revenge Trilogy. Mr. Vengeance, a grim tale of a kidnap gone wrong, is the one most popular with highbrow critics, doubtless because it’s made in the most austere style; there’s a certain fascination in watching a revenge thriller with unspeakable detail that yet unfolds so slowly and elliptically – but the film is empty, beyond a sketchy rich-versus-poor theme and echoes of Kurosawa’s High and Low (1962).
Lady Vengeance is a different kind of beast, much more flashy, clearly made after Park’s elevation to cultists’ darling (he won a big Cannes prize for Oldboy). Much of it actually seems callous to the point of being tasteless, its controlling metaphor being that taking revenge is like baking a cake (!); the gaudy style feels like a less inventive version of Tarantino’s Kill Bill, Vol. 1 – but then comes the final section, the revenge itself, and what seemed a consciously cool exercise (its heroine saying things like “I’m planning to kill another person. Do you think I’m sexy?”) becomes reconfigured into something blunt and sickeningly literal. It’s like the film takes a look at itself, disapproves of its weightless levity and decides to give its audience a real jolt of violence, gruelling and prosaically nasty. No wonder the ending has the heroine choking on her own cake…
The Vengeance films act as a reminder of something we often forget in Cyprus, namely that the separation between Art and Multiplex is an artificial one; ‘serious’ films aren’t always genteel, like fine wine and classical music – many of them are cruel, in-your-face and upsetting. Still, my three favourite films in Cyprus Film Days (of the nine I’ve seen) are all fables, set in engirdled worlds of the spirit, all to some extent humorous.
The humour isn’t readily apparent in The Island (***), a stark Russian landscape movie with a vague resemblance to The Return, but this moody spiritual fable also works as wry comedy in its lead character, an ornery mystic and “holy man” praying for forgiveness on a rocky island. People come to seek his blessing and he purposely gives them bad advice, making their lives as hard as possible (because only through pain comes salvation). His own redemption feels thin – the ending seems tacked-on – but much of the film takes a kind of Bunuelian pleasure in the contortions of moral masochism, and Pyotr Mamonov (apparently a rock star in Russia) is suitably eccentric as the flinty hero.
Then there’s 10 Canoes (***), whose actors have names like Jamie Gulpilil and Richard Birrinbirrin; they’re Australian Aborigines – and this delightful bit of cod-ethnography is made by a white director, Rolf de Heer, in collaboration with “the people of Ramingining”. A story is narrated, set in the old days before the arrival of the Europeans, broaching Western conventions (“Once upon a time”, etc) only to reject them. In other words, it bends over backwards to be non-condescending – but the film is too good-humoured to be politically-correct, and in fact reminds me of such non-PC fare as The Gods Must Be Crazy (1980). The Abos fart, talk about women and tell stories, the older men to the younger to “help them live the proper way”; everything’s a story, the point being that stories are a primitive culture’s way of creating the world. The result is self-conscious, but surprisingly enjoyable.
I don’t know what the point is in A Cock & Bull Story (***) – or maybe I do and the point is there is no p
oint, which is less self-defeating than it sounds since the film is based on Tristram Shandy, the surreal 18th-century novel that keeps doubling back on itself. The book is considered ‘unfilmable’, and in fact it is unfilmable; the film is a jape, making a stab at its self-referential nature – it’s ‘about’ the making of a film based on Tristram Shandy – but missing its audacity (only a totally experimental, wildly uncommercial movie might’ve captured that). Instead we get showbiz folk being predictably impossible, led by Steve Coogan in Alan Partridge mode.
What reason does the film-within-a-film have for existing? someone asks. “Because it’s funny,” comes the reply. “Isn’t that enough?” A Cock & Bull Story is also very funny. Coogan ends up suspended upside-down in a plastic womb (!), then he and Rob Brydon do Al Pacino impressions over the closing credits. Indeed, Cock & Bull is so funny one almost wonders if it has any place in a serious Festival. Some of us have been waiting months for sober films with real-world resonance, then we end up giggling at Steve Coogan arguing over the plural of “foetus”. It’s not fair, I tell you!
DVDs OF THE YEAR 2006
No space for a comprehensive look at such a great year for DVDs – but here’s a brief list of highlights, focusing mostly on older movies.
REGION 1 (US)
ESSENTIAL ART HOUSE: 50 YEARS OF JANUS FILMS: 50 classic films, plus a 200-page book; $650 for the lot. Unique.
ERIC ROHMER SIX MORAL TALES BOXSET: Including ‘My Night With Maud’ (1968), ‘Claire’s Knee’ (1970) and definitive extras.
THE MALTESE FALCON (1941): 3-disc edition, also including the two previous versions of the story.
THE BUSBY BERKELEY COLLECTION: Five delirious musicals from the 1930s.
SYMBIOPSYCHOTAXIPLASM: TAKE ONE (1968): Funny-smart semi-documentary.
HUNGER (1966): Danish drama makes its DVD debut.
THE DOUBLE LIFE OF VERONIQUE (1990): Criterion Collection.
Other great Criterions included ‘The Fallen Idol’ (1948), ‘Late Spring’ (1949), ‘Pandora’s Box’ (1928) and ‘The Complete Mr. Arkadin’ (1955).
THE CONFORMIST (1970): A steal at under $15 plus shipping.
REGION 2 (UK)
SATANTANGO (1994): Hypnotic 8-hour Hungarian drama.
BLISSFULLY YOURS (2002) and REGULAR LOVERS (2005): Two of the best foreign films of the past few years.
DAVID HOLZMAN’S DIARY (1968): Ahead of its time.
3 FILMS BY MIKIO NARUSE: Little-known Japanese master on DVD with ‘Repast’ (1951), ‘Sound of the Mountain’ (1954) and ‘Flowing’ (1956).
LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN (1948): One of four Max Ophuls classics released this year.
STAR WARS – ORIGINAL VERSION (1977): Enough with the ‘remastered’ Special Versions!
