Film buffs flock to the 48th Thessaloniki International Film Festival looking for beautiful images – and mostly find them, but they have to look sharp because not all the images are onscreen, nor have they all been forged by human hand. Many of the most stunning, most painterly – indeed, most cinematic – compositions appeared as we walked from film to film along the waterfront (the Festival is built on the site of the old Port) or exited the John Cassavetes Theatre, a pebble’s throw from the sea as we blinked into hazy daylight. Our canvas – our screen – was the Bay itself, the Thermaikos, showing off the light trapped by autumn clouds and its ring of mountains. Sometimes, on a grey forgotten morning, sky and sea merged into the same ethereal whiteness, melting away the horizon, as if Thessaloniki were a flying castle-city peering down on a sea of clouds. Sometimes, close to sunset, a red bruise of sunlight left its streak across the distant waters; other times the clouds suddenly parted, warming the day and lacing the wavelets with midsummer blue, or a ship at anchor caught the light in a certain way. Always, the water rippled slightly as it made its gentle way towards the shore. Thessaloniki may not be the biggest film festival, but it’s probably the most scenic.
Then again, it’s bigger than most people realise – and getting bigger all the time, with audiences up another 7 per cent this year and talk of (even) more screens having to be commandeered for next year’s instalment. It’s not just the audiences; the number of films is also increasing, complicated by the Festival’s policy of showing the entirety of Greek film production – not a big deal when the Greek industry lay dormant, and making films was the expensive preserve of a few known ‘names’, but considerably more challenging now that any kid with a digital camera can make a movie. This year there was even a section called “Greek Digital Wave”, studded with titles like @Athens Blogs, its Audience Award won by a feature called Yagonan: The Dark Days of Doom. This is a film about “a fantastic world ruled by a Dark Wizard named Olkar and the quest of a fellowship, led by Yagonan, for a mythical sword, the only weapon that can kill Olkar”. Look out Greece, there’s a new generation in town – and they’ve spent waaaay too much time watching Lord of the Rings.
It’s not just Greece, it’s the way of the world – a fact fully acknowledged by Thessaloniki, which is always receptive to new trends (its audiences mostly youthful and packed with students) and this year included a section on “Young Americans” with Joe Swanberg’s Hannah Takes the Stairs among the films on offer. Swanberg is among the chief proponents of “mumblecore”, a low-tech genre whose practitioners apparently dislike the name (coined, so it’s said, by a sound technician who couldn’t believe all the mumbled dialogue on the film he was shooting). In his lecture – called a “Masterclass” – Swanberg told the Festival audience that he doesn’t like scripts or actors, which is why his films are mostly improvised and his actors mostly friends and fellow filmmakers; Hannah’s cast includes Andrew Bujalski who made Funny Ha Ha (shown at Thessaloniki two years ago) and Ry Russo-Young who made Orphans, shown in this year’s Official Program. Mumblecore may or may not survive – it’s already being disparaged in the US – but there’s no doubt it stands for something, a DIY aesthetic that’s the opposite of Hollywood slickness. At one point in his lecture, Swanberg showed the audience the cheap DV camera he used to shoot Hannah, plus a boom-mike he uses for sound. That’s all you need, he preached to the assembled acolytes. Now go out and make stuff.
Alas, I wasn’t there – but I did see Hannah, which is like all the other mumblecores I’ve seen in being fascinating more or less despite itself. Its characters are young, white, insecure, annoyingly clingy and totally self-conscious, politicised in a basic way – two of them are working on an anti-Bush blog – but totally lost in their bubble of break-ups and relationships; “It’s hip right now to think the world is grim,” says our heroine, “but the biggest tragedy is that people don’t listen to each other”. That Hannah and her ilk are spoiled middle-class parasites goes without saying (you can almost hear them whine “You never listen!” at Mummy and Daddy), but it’s still rare to find them caught so exactly and in such painful detail. The only question is whether Swanberg – and all the future Swanbergs making Hannah-style movies – really understands what he’s caught.
Mumblecore was one end of a very broad spectrum. At the other end were the various big-name films shown as Special Screenings – like the gloriously lyrical Assassination of Jesse James, starring Brad Pitt as the infamous outlaw and Casey Affleck as “the coward Robert Ford”, or The Darjeeling Limited starring Owen Wilson. That was shown as the Closing Film, which is why I didn’t get to see it (I also missed the equally starry opener, My Blueberry Nights, starring Jude Law and easy-listening diva Norah Jones) – but I caught around 20 movies over my four days in mid-Festival, guiltily avoiding the Greek titles (it’s easy to get burned, since there’s no selection process), trying to get a mix of old and new.
The spectrum is particularly broad in Thessaloniki because the Festival does Retrospectives as well as new films, this year’s main honorees being John Sayles and Mikio Naruse. Sayles is a strange case, a left-leaning American who should perhaps have turned to novels rather than cinema – his films are stronger on talk than visuals, and often didactic – but raised his game on two unexpectedly great occasions, The Return of the Secaucus Seven (1980) and Matewan (1986). I re-watched the former, having not seen it in about 15 years, and was left in tears by its empathy, subtlety and total understanding of its characters. It’s one thing to watch an old film on DVD, quite another to watch a good print in the cinema with a sharp, attentive audience. Most screenings were packed, most viewers firmly in the Festival spirit; one of the Naruses, Nightly Dreams (1933), was shown completely silent – i.e. without even the piano music that usually accompanies Silent movies – yet the audience was respectful, beyond the usual coughing and throat-clearing.
Film-buff heaven? Well, not exactly. Greeks aren’t embarrassed to walk out, for one thing – comically so in the case of Honor de Cavalleria (part of a New Spanish Cinema sidebar), where at least 40 per cent of the audience got up and left. Some of them legged it in the first 10 minutes – no surprise, given that most of the first 10 minutes is a single shot where the camera doesn’t even move. The ostensible subject is Don Quixote, the film a kind of meta-commentary reducing the knight and his squire to hapless figures in a landscape; they do very little except walk around and bathe in a stream, Quixote constantly haranguing Sancho – which is initially boring, then exasperating, then hilarious. It’s also very beautiful, in a fuzzy way (this was also shot digitally), with the duo silhouetted against dark-blue twilight skies and the like. Those who fled missed out – but then people don’t always have the patience to work their way through a movie.
What can I say about the middle-aged man who pushed his way out as if hacking through jungle – “I’m sorry, but this thing is unbearable,” he muttered crossly – during Secret Sunshine, a fine psychological portrait that won Best Actress at Cannes? What can I say about the various walkouts during The Secret of the Grain, a stunning human comedy set in the North African ghettos of Marseilles?
This was easily the best new film I saw at Thessaloniki – and it’s coming out commercially in Greece, so hopefully we’ll get to see it someday at the Friends of the Cinema. There we
re other contenders: the very funny Juno, with Ellen Page as a preternaturally poised (and pregnant) teenager; The Trap, a gloomy Serbian fable that prompted the woman behind me to declare “Now that was a good movie!” as the credits rolled; I could even mention Irina Palm (starring Marianne Faithfull) which I thoroughly hated but everyone else seemed to love. In the end, though, nothing hit so hard as Secret of the Grain, a simple plot – actually the plot of Big Night, about a grand restaurant opening with underdog owners trying to impress investors – filtered through family values, working-class rage and the juddery aesthetic of a DIY documentary or Dogme 95 movie.
Maybe that accounts for the walkouts: director Abdel Kechiche (who made L’Esquive, shown in Nicosia by the Friends of the Cinema in 2006) keeps his camera close, almost too close for comfort. When his people eat, you can see the stray crumbs of couscous stuck to their lips; when they fight, you note every quiver of emotion as it ebbs and flows. The realist style isn’t original, nor is the expansive milieu – it’s in the Marseillais tradition of Marcel Pagnol – but Kechiche burrows so deep and keeps looking for so long, as if trying to ferret out the truth by sheer force of will, that the film becomes epic, operatic. It’s immersive, building to a cross-cutting climax that deliberately (?) does things ‘wrong’, as if inventing a new cinematic language. It leaves you breathless.
One scene in The Secret of the Grain has a teenage daughter trying to talk her mum into going to the party – something she’s reluctant to do, so as not to meet her man’s other family. First the girl tries flattery, then wheedling, then self-pity – and the camera watches patiently, letting the scene develop, as if taking note of all the tricks human beings pull when they’re trying to get their way. Grain was the best kind of film at Thessaloniki, a magic mirror reflecting the audience back at itself. Was it as dazzling as the light-show Mother Nature was putting on across the placid waters of Thermaikos Bay every day? Maybe not; but still pretty dazzling.
