Овсянки (Silent Souls) is a culturally-inflected meditation on death that seems almost as lost as its wandering protagonists until the very end lends it a belated cohesion. There are pleasures on the way: flashback sequences have a Tarkovskian flavor with their strategy of in-shot montage, particularly as their relation to the rest of the story is at first unclear. The source material is literary, and much exposition necessarily (as it turns out) but unfortunately happens via voiceover, whose Russian sonorities I found hard to swallow. The film is spherically shot in the scope ratio (either via Techniscope or Super-35), the postproduction, by the look of things, being digital.
Jean Gentil concerns a shy, down-and-out Haitian named Jean Remy Genty (sic, per the subtitles) in the Dominican Republic who can't land an accounting job. Despairing of life, he heads into the wilderness and putters about. Exceedingly but not excessively laconic, the film seems to exude little meaning (befitting Genty's attitude), but what there is is conveyed simply and sincerely. Ultimately, I couldn't decide if the photography was digital or, perhaps, 16mm, any distinguishing characteristics having been smoothed over by digital intermediate.
La Vida Útil (A Useful Life): I got bit here. Presumably print traffic issues prevented the film's timely arrival and this PFA screening was rather low-quality digital, full of dreadful edge-enhancement. I was trapped, mid-row! The humdrum story of the waning days of a cinematheque and its schlubby director, in this rendering, struck me as more mannered than melancholic, full of muddled shop talk and false triumphs. Interestingly, the aspect ratio appeared to be 1.2:1, virtually unheard-of since the very early days of sound-on-film. This is most likely a case of too much of the photographed image making it into the digital transfer. As I recall, my cinephilic nerve endings were tickled considerably more several years back by After Midnight, a film-archive-set movie frustratingly shot on video but shown on film. I'm told the April 30 Kabuki screening of La Vida will feature a real live 35mm print.
Hahaha, like most of Hong Sang-soo's films, features a bipartite structure, and the viewer's task is to figure out how it all hangs together. As such (though not as much as others of his films), Hahaha might benefit from a second, more informed, viewing. It would also benefit from looking better, as Hong has joined the ranks of the digital-shooters. He delights here in using a motorized zoom (always -in, never -out). The print had been around the block a few times and couldn't hold focus consistently.
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Apflickorna (She-monkeys) had me craning my neck off to the side in the second row, the result of the previous screening running severely late. Another scope-ratio, spherically photographed film, its visual texture seemed rather bland at close quarters, possibly due to an anamorphic projection lens of less-than-stellar quality. Being Swedish, Apflickorna could freely explore the erotic and thanatic passions of children without getting all bent out of shape about it. That doesn't mean that the film ultimately had anything too interesting to do with the material.
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Sound of Noise is a feature length expansion of Ola Simonsson and Johannes Stjärne Nilsson's earlier short, Music for One Apartment and Six Drummers (which I've not seen), in which six audio-terrorists declare war on crappy music and inflict their own percussive soundtrack on the city (supposedly Malmö, though the skyline looks nothing like). At first suggesting late-period Roy Andersson, with its deadpan humor and brilliant set-pieces, the film is front-loaded with its best material and runs out of steam ultimately, though much fun is had along the way. Visually middling, it's another non-anamorphically-shot scope picture that doesn't much justify its chosen format.