SFIFF 2010 Roundup, Part 1

Imogen Poots and Juno Temple in Cracks

The first full day of festival programming yielded me only one screening, the pseudo-Iranian Frontier Blues. Director Babak Jalili was born there, but moved to England as a child. This film, a product of his residency at Cannes, overpowers its indigenous Iranian tendencies with internationalist exoticism. Jalili acknowledges his outsiderhood and even pokes fun at it in the character of a Tehran photographer coaxing Turkmen Steppe-dwellers to re-enact long-dead ethnographic archetypes.

Frontier Blues: Frontal Bias

Following a certain flippant trend exemplified by last year's festival entry Lake Tahoe, Jalili delights in (handsomely photographed!) static frontal shots. The non-professional cast, directed to underplay, doesn't provide that vital spark of life lived, nor does the film's tone elevate us out of its banal realist quagmire. With every shot, we sit and wait for the predictably quirky turn of character, the punchline, and (evident from the audience's guffawing) for many this may suffice. It occured to me that, with a pinch more absurdism we might venture into latter-day Roy Andersson territory, and indeed the post-film Q&A revealed Andersson and Aki Kaurismaki to be two of Jalili's inspirations.

While titles and credits (both in English!) were done digitally, as was the soundtrack, I'm happy to report that no analog images were harmed in the making of this movie.

And on to Saturday...

Ounie Lecomte's A Brand New Life is the story of Jin-hee (remember this name), a 9-year-old Korean girl with a face only a jealous stepmother could hate.

The face of Kim Sae-ron (Jin-hee in A Brand New Life)

This face, beaming into the kid's-eye-view camera as her father prepares her for a "trip", is almost too much to bear. But she's orphanage-bound, and it'll be some time before she smiles again.

The videography is decent as videography goes--a bit bleary with blown-out highlights and shimmery shadows.

Like Frontier Blues, ABNL features a character, mischievous aspiring adoptee Sook-hee, practicing broken English--Anglophone audiences eat that stuff up. Sook-hee becomes Jin-hee's bosom buddy, and is also a delight to watch.

Perhaps I'm jaded to the point of cine-Asbergers, but it took the sobbing of the lady at my left for me to succumb to the prevailing emotions at film's end.

Pen-ek Ratanaruang (Last Life in the Universe) is back with Nymph, a mystical tale of infidelity set largely in an enchanted forest that seems close kin to those of Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Tropical Malady and Lars von Trier's Antichrist. In this fertile ground stands a stout and gnarled gothic cathedral of a tree, an object of fascination, by which men are consumed and passions consummated.

"Have you seen my husband?"

We're presented with such a mishmash of the real and the imaginary, if that distinction even obtains in this film-world, that it's not clear exactly what the tree nymph-succubus does (and doesn't do) to photographer Nop, but it certainly changes his relationship with his wife.

The sylvan photography (via digital intermediate) is very low-contrast, and the print shown had been through the wringer. Most interesting of the blemishes was the inscription "E10" hand-scratched onto several frames a couple minutes into each reel. Per Wikipedia:

E10, sometimes called gasohol, is a fuel mixture of 10% anhydrous ethanol and 90% gasoline that can be used in the internal combustion engines of most modern automobiles and light-duty vehicles without need for any modification on the engine or fuel system.

Somehow, I think this is the key to the whole film.

To conclude my second festival day, another Korean picture, Whang Cheol-Mean's Moscow. Jin-hee (remember that name? Just a coincidence; the timeframes don't work out),

Ye-won and Jin-hee (II) in Moscow

a frustrated labor organizer, insinuates herself back into the life of her old junior-high friend Ye-won, a frustrated actress. Hospitality is abused, emotions burst forth, and Chekhov is repeatedly invoked. But the girls' spirited interactions ring true, and that goes a long way.

This was another digitally-shot effort, but a bright and colorful one, and the limited color depth frequently gave rise to a contour-map effect where one might expect to see gentle gradations, which I found not wholly unappealing. One shot, of an upset Ye-won's face swimming in a glowing sea of whiteness, was downright fetching.

But I do need to vet my selections a little better.