PERSECUTION (Patrice Chereau, 2009)

The latest from director Chereau, a little known filmmaker with a passionate cult following, is essentially a character study of Daniel, a carpenter working on small jobs in Paris. Chereau is best described as a messy filmmaker. There is a raggedness to his style and to his approach to character and narrative, a lived-in quality, an aliveness to his characters and their world. We never get a firm grasp of any of these people, including Daniel. We only have glimpses into their internal and external lives. PERSECUTION ends up being rather frustrating, but this is perhaps a result of it not providing the kind of form we want or expect. Even within the world of festival cinema, Chereau is a difficult case, and for that very reason worth exploring.

THE MIRACLE WORKER (Arthur Penn, 1962)

An early work by director Penn (best known for BONNIE AND CLYDE) is an adaptation of William Gibson’s play about Helen Keller and her teacher Annie Sullivan. It has all the weaknesses one would expect from a Hollywood inspirational story, but there is a great deal to admire here as well. The best sequences involve Sullivan (wonderfully portrayed by Anne Bancroft) and Keller (Patty Duke) interacting with one another. For the scenes of teaching, Penn uses a long take, deep focus style that allows the actors to play out the drama. But the tour-de-force sequence is an extended battle of wills (and bodies) in the kitchen, a scene of physical ferocity brilliantly edited by Penn. With this scene we can see an indication of the New Hollywood cinema Penn would help form from the old classical style. At the conclusion, we are as exhausted as the characters themselves. It easily tops 99 percent of Hollywood blockbusters in terms of an action sequence. THE MIRACLE WORKER is playing on October 14th (Wednesday), 16:30 at the Lotte Cinema.

DOGTOOTH (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2009)

You do not often find one of the funniest films of the year at a film festival, but that is the case with DOGTOOTH. Even more surprising is this black humour plays out through an extraordinarily rigorous visual style of long takes and angular compositions, seemingly inspired by the work of Michael Haneke. The story is an absurd take on the patriarchal family: a father sets up a private home for his children in which they fear any contact with the outside world. As a result, they develop their own strange parallel family life that is familiar enough to our own to be quite uncanny. It is as if Haneke’s THE SEVENTH CONTINENT was remade by Samuel Beckett. Along with Jacques Tati’s PLAYTIME, it is one of the few modernist comedies I can think of. Other than that, these two films have nothing in common. And although primarily comedic in tone, there are sequences of intense and sudden violence to keep the audience off guard. My favorite of the new films of the festival so far. Unfortunately, it is not playing again, but it should eventually make its way on DVD.

OF LOVE AND OTHER DEMONS (Hilda Hidalgo, 2009)

Costa Rican director Hilda Hidalgo’s first feature based on a novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez about an adolescent girl from a noble family, Sierva Maria, who is bitten  by a rabid dog and thought to be possessed by demons. She is abandoned by her family and given over to the church who assign a young priest to oversee her exorcism. The lush design and understated performances bring the story to life with a subtle dreamy charm. Eliza Triana’s (Maria), smolders on the screen throughout the film as the young priest is drawn helplessly into the vortex of her innocent beauty. “Of Love” is mercifully brief (97min) for a foreign language historical adaptation and is a blessing in the middle of an nine day long festival .
“Of Love” is playing again on Oct. 13th at 8:00pm

THE FAMOUS AND THE DEAD (Esmir Filo, 2009)

Takes us to a middle class town in rural Brazil where we follow the life of 16 year-old blogger known as “Mr. Tambourine Man” as his angst-filled days are spent online expressing his unrequited love for a mysterious girl. There are more questions than answers in Esmir Filo’s film about a side of Brazilian life rarely seen on film. Although the setting might be new, the theme of modern day teens in the Information Age struggling with issues of identity, alienation and depression are not. The film wears new shoes while walking down a well-trodden path as it demonstrates how the new globalized world can spread the generational ennui of the West to the farthest corners of the earth.

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