FILMS FROM ALL OVER THE WORLD – EVEN CYPRUS – AT THE THESSALONIKI FESTIVAL
This year’s Thessaloniki International Film Festival was the 49th (we can only guess at the planned festivities for next year’s Golden Anniversary). My own visit to the lovely city on the shimmering Thermaikos was my 9th, at least for Festival purposes; looks like I missed the first 40 years – but it’s no huge loss, because the Fest only became “international” in the early 90s. Before that it was merely a showcase for the perpetually underachieving Greek cinema – and it’s still committed to showing the entirety of Greek production, but also on the schedule are well-known festival films (well-known, at least, if you like to scan the line-ups for Cannes, Venice, New York and Toronto), an International Competition, spotlights, retrospectives and a truly global range of titles. Faced with such an array, viewers often lapsed into the shorthand of defining movies by country, film as a substitute for travel. “I’m doing the Malaysian film at 8, then the French,” they’d announce. Or this exchange: “How about that one?”; “Turkish? … No, I don’t feel like doing any Turkish films this year.”
You might conclude that Thessaloniki audiences are a mite superficial, but in fact the opposite is true. Not only are the numbers growing – the Festival attracted more than 160,000 punters this year, a new record – but they’re becoming more sophisticated. This year, for the first time in my 9 years of attendance, I was unable to get tickets for certain films because they were sold out days in advance. Whereas in the past it often seemed like one’s fellow viewers had turned up on a wing and a prayer – college students are the main audience but one also sees old men in flat caps, baby-faced high-schoolers and middle-aged matrons going out for the evening, their elegant outfits contrasting sharply with the scruffy students – it’s increasingly clear that cinephile Greeks are movie-savvy, targeting some films and avoiding others.
This year’s hottest ticket (at least in the non-Greek sections) was Terence Davies, a British director granted a full retrospective – not as extensive as it sounds because Mr. Davies has only made six films in his 30-year career, his poetic style seldom finding favour with hard-nosed producers and funding bodies. His best-known films, Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and The Long Day Closes (1992), draw on his own Liverpool childhood, limning a working-class England of terraced houses, pub singalongs and drabness leavened by transcendent beauty – music, light, and of course trips to the cinema. Davies is his own best subject, as he showed in a two-hour “Masterclass” where he kept a full house enthralled with his anecdotes and wry tales of woe, veering – like his films – from hilarious to depressive. He has no small talk, he lamented. He often feels sad and/or worthless. He looks like an accountant. But he got big laughs with his Liverpudlian wit, and seemed visibly moved when a woman in the audience said his films had “taught [her] how to live … Has filmmaking taught you how to live?”. “No,” he replied sadly.
Davies’ latest – his first film in eight years – is Of Time and the City, which has been widely acclaimed and invited to more than 80 festivals (it opened in the UK last month, to rave reviews). It’s a found-footage documentary, using old shots of Liverpool in the 50s and 60s paired with Davies’ own mordant voice-over – and it’s actually a commission, made to celebrate Liverpool’s designation as European City of Culture 2008. Alas, Davies’ creative juices don’t appear to be in full flow on this project. He does very little with the footage except sprinkle it with classical music, bits of poetry or the occasional pop song (‘He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother’ doesn’t really fit over news of the war in Korea) and add nostalgic apophthegms: “All are gone, the old familiar faces…”. Still, it’s worth seeing just for the acerbic edge in Davies’ voice when he reflects on the Queen’s 1947 wedding: “The start of the Betty Windsor Show!”.
The other main tribute – to Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembene – didn’t go so well; I watched two of his films with sparse audiences, a reminder that African cinema (with its rather laborious rhythm) doesn’t always gel with Western audiences, especially when they’re young and looking to be dazzled. Then there were the Dardenne Brothers from Belgium, another complete retrospective including the likes of Rosetta (1999) and The Child (2005), leading up to their latest, The Silence of Lorna. Alas, scheduling defeated my attempts to watch it – I was only there for 4 out of 10 days – but most people agree it’s one of the outstanding films of the year. Hopefully we’ll get to see it at Cyprus Film Days in March, or perhaps the Friends of the Cinema Society.
What we’re definitely seeing – I believe it opens at the K-Cineplex next week – is the Cypriot film, The Last Homecoming by Corinna Avraamidou, actually one of two films made by Cypriot filmmakers (the other was Small Crime by Christos Georgiou, who’s based in Greece). This was a good year for Cyprus; one Greek newspaper critic, Demetris Danikas in Ta Nea, even suggested that the motherland could take filmmaking lessons from ‘little Cyprus’, praising the local flicks’ coherence – their beginning-middle-and-end structures – as opposed to the self-indulgent Greek films. In the event, Cyprus was shut out of the “State Cinema Awards” which mostly went to two Greek titles (Without and Slaves in Their Bonds) – but Cypriot-born DP Haris Zambarloukos of Mamma Mia fame did give a Masterclass at the Festival, and a Cypriot short, Instructions by Constantinos Yiallourides, did win Second Prize in the short-film section.
As already mentioned, I’m no great fan of Greek movies; the only one I watched was Tale 52 by Alexis Alexiou – purely because it played at Toronto, suggesting it might be world-class. Indeed it is, the promising Mr. Alexiou (he’s only 32) crafting an effectively claustrophobic bit of science-fiction in the style of Memento or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind – the tale of a man who keeps going back in dreams to a failed relationship, desperately (and of course hopelessly) trying to make things right. The film isn’t always very lucid, but its style is impressive: Alexiou cuts fast and composes imaginatively, using shallow focus and strategically-placed props to make the frame more interesting. Above all, each scene is extensively covered, so we skim from wide-shot to close-up to insert – a fluid, intricate surface that’s exactly what’s missing from The Last Homecoming, a film that’s otherwise absorbing and even a little touching; at least if you happen to be Cypriot.
I suspect Ms. Avraamidou’s film will do well at the K-Cineplex. Not only does it star well-known faces from local TV shows – a few of them, notably Stavros Louras and Demetris Xystras, doing infinitely better than you’d expect from their TV work – but it deals with a talismanic moment in Cyprus history, the coup and invasion of 1974, and may even prove controversial in making a nationalist its main villain (though by the end he’s morphed into a flawed hero). The problem – which won’t be a problem for local audiences, accustomed as they are to TV – is that it’s all a little flat, and the main culprit is a lack of coverage. The build-up is fine, but the big scenes cry out for more. The post-coup scene between Louras and Popi Avraam, where he begs her to have faith in him even though it “might seem like we’ve done something foolish”, needs close-ups, alternations, some kind of rhythm – but it’s done in a single placid two-shot, as if onstage. The reasons (I assume) have to do with a low budget, but it’s still a shame – especially since the film is so heartfelt. Cypriots of a certain age may find themselves collapsing in tears.
Festival films don’t often milk tears. As a woman (not the same one) noted at the Terence Davies Masterclass, arthouse movies nowadays shy away from being “emotional”; instead they specialise in detachment and sly observation – qualities very much in evidence in two excellent films, both Latin American, both featuring youngsters. A Week Alone screened in International Competition, and won Best Director for its Argentinian helmer Celina Murga (top prize, the “Golden Alexander”, went to the Iranian drama Over There); it’s deceptively simple, a tale of some rich kids left alone by their parents in a gated suburban community – but the film is both lovely (in a poised, natural way) and seething with inner life. The kids are almost interchangeable, yet show subtle hints of the kinds of adults they’re likely to become. One girl says she believes in God “just like everybody else” and also likes to draw houses (something cosy and safe); one boy is aggressively macho and clearly insecure, uncomfortable around girls, unpleasant with the working-class kid who joins them in Act 3. By the end, enough tensions have come to the surface to make it clear the youngsters’ privileged lives won’t be as happy as they think.
Almost as good is Lake Tahoe, a deadpan Mexican comedy from director Fernando Eimbcke (who made the very similar Duck Season) which starts off droll – a boy crashes his car, and wanders around trying to find a mechanic – and ends up tender, its characters granted dreams, hidden depths and secret melancholy. This and the Murga were probably my favourites of the new films I watched at Thessaloniki – but there was so much more. Shocking, salacious Serbis from the Philippines, set in a rundown porn cinema. The gloriously-titled My Marlon and Brando, a sometimes-amazing Turkish film based on a true story. Hypnotically nasty Tony Manero, from Chile. Daytime Drinking, a Korean slacker comedy featuring copious drinking (much applauded by the student audience). Flower in the Pocket, the aforementioned (very bad) Malaysian film. Even W., Oliver Stone’s brand-new biography of the still-incumbent US President, starring Josh Brolin as George W. Bush. I didn’t bother (it’ll be out in cinemas before too long), though it’s said to be entertaining, counter-intuitively played as comedy – and Stone himself was there, not just giving interviews but enjoying the Festival ambience, especially when Emir Kusturica showed up with his rowdy Serbian band (known as the ‘No Smoking Orchestra’) and Stone climbed onstage, the two award-winning directors joining forces in an improvised duet. Only in Thessaloniki.
