SFIFF 2010 Roundup, Part 2

It's plausibly said of blaxploitation that, beyond its style and salaciousness, the genre in fact empowers blacks. Such a case for Aussie exploitation can't be made on the basis of this movie, in which every outback dweller is sleazy, vile, and dirty (and aggressively friendly), and the hero, a schoolteacher named John who at least initially rises above this animalistic morass, is an Englishman.

This Michael York soundalike, indentured to a one-room schoolhouse in Tiboonda, a whistlestop outpost, takes his Summer leave and heads to the nearby fictional city Bundanyabba to catch a plane for Sydney where awaits his girlfriend, who in her red swimsuit mantled with crashing waves provides, in brief cut-in shots, a thankful contrast to the sweaty, grimy visual texture of the outback. 'Yabba men are sociable types who don't take kindly to strangers declining a beer when it's offered. John encounters several strangers, and with each downed beer relaxes his disdain for their provincial boorishness.

Fun with Dick and Joe

Everyone wants to be his friend, and with friends like these.... John succumbs to their macho-masochism and soon finds himself destitute and stuck in "the 'Yabba" with nothing better to do than to partake in their rites of hypermasculinity, culminating in a gruesome scene of kangaroos being run down, shot at, wrestled, and castrated, as if these men needed a booster shot of marsupial testosterone. The outback, it seems, has a way of bringing out the worst in people.

As noted previously, this was a digital restoration, and it showed. The analog gods, however, had exacted their bitter revenge: for every digitally buffed-out blemish, sloppy projectionists had added several more. It was the worst of both worlds. My screening suffered what I presume was a brainwrap (a platter feed issue) in the third reel, causing an unplanned intermission.

Jane Birkin and Sergio Castellito in 36 vues du Pic St-Loup

Wednesday night found me at the PFA. First, 36 vues du Pic St-Loup aka Around a Small Mountain. This is one of Jacques Rivette's slighter efforts--at 84 minutes it's roughly 1/9 the length of his most sprawling work, and simply hasn't the time to languorously develop into something monumental. But any Rivette is welcome, and this time his recurrent themes of performance and improvisation take us to the circus. We see several iterations of a mildly amusing opening act involving clowns and much smashed dinnerware. But even when the act is over, the characters are still performing--they know they're in a movie, and with stylized gestures and a hint of stilt to their interactions they dance about each other, and about the narrative's backstory, which involves forbidden love and a dangerous act gone wrong, but that's just a sideshow.

But to what does the title refer? A modest mountain can be seen as a backdrop in several shots, and indeed is the locus of the tone-setting opening scene. Since a movie must have a title, why not this?

I stuck around for Susa, the first feature by Georgian Rusudan Pirveli. She shot digitally and even I will allow that the result is quite lovely looking, with rich tones. Yes, the highlights are blown and there seem to be some time-based artifacts, but that's video being video, and honesty, in art as in life, is a virtue.

Susa (Avtandil Tetradze)

Susa is a boy who looks like a far-flung member of the Culkin clan and delivers bottles of bootleg vodka from the illegal bathtub distillery where his mother works. Harrassed by the authorities on one hand and two young thugs on the other, he perseveres, heartened by the imminent return of his father, hopefully with cash in pocket and a ticket to greener pastures.

Bottles are a constant visual motif. Bottles of vodka, empty bottles, bottles smashed and stuffed into a cardboard roll to form a makeshift kaleidoscope through which some illusory beauty may be glimpsed in a cruel world.

Back to the Kabuki Thursday for a late show of Claire Denis's White Material. This is, I think, her third film set in Africa, whose emigrants have however featured prominently in others of her works. Here the situation is reversed, with Isabelle Huppert, her son, her ex-husband, and his father the only whites in an unnamed country (presumably Cameroon) beset by violent unrest.

Isabelle Huppert in White Material

Huppert fancies herself a brave person and by staying on her coffee plantation even as all her workers head for safety she can be brave. But her stubborn determination to remain in harm's way is ignorant foolishness of the sort we might all be guilty of in such circumstances. Others are more pragmatic, still others are plain nuts, and their fates don't necessarily correlate with the sensibility of their actions in these turbulent environs.

Denis has a wise, unromantic perspective on the world. She knows not everything is accessible to human understanding, and her films embrace this opacity. She doesn't go in for establishing shots. Instead, we see fragments of a jumbled timeline buttted one against another, getting acquainted, exchanging phone numbers.

I was less than thrilled with the standard release quality of the print, several harried generations from the camera negative, that sacred nexus of a film's formative forces. This remove was partly due to the choice to shoot a scope picture non-anamorphically, necessitating an extra optical step in the manufacturing of a release print. Perhaps also the scope lens in the Kabuki's large house is not the best--I noticed some chromatic aberrations.