Films in competition
By
Sonali Pahwa, Sherif El-Azma, Youssef Rakha and Sherif Iskander
Le cožt de la vie (Philippe Le Guay, 2003; French, no subtitles)
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This polished comedy is recommended as an antidote to the exquisite torments of Parisians that have occupied so many French filmmakers and given the industry its brooding image internationally. Not only is Philippe Le Guay's The Cost of Living set in the provincial city of Lyons, but it treats the frankly bourgeois subject of money. The ways in which their relationship with money shapes the lives of the film's characters provide a range of comic pleasures. Coway (Vincent Lindon) is an endearing profligate whose lavishness eventually throws his happy-go-lucky life off balance. Brett (Fabrice Luchini) is a committed miser, abandoning relationships when they get too expensive. A chic prostitute makes it her mission to reform him and shows him that love and money are unavoidably entangled. There is also a pair of young lovers who work as waiters, and whose chaotic everyday lives are played for burlesque comedy rather than bohemian rhapsody. At the other generational pole a wealthy old businessman slowly and hilariously discovers delights other than money. The sure timing of the ensemble cast keeps the humour from getting too broad. Only gradually does one realise that there are many stock dramatic characters here -- the good-hearted hooker, Molièrean miser, and so on -- played affectionately and credibly updated. Their neuroses are all too familiar. Nor are they magnified as epic insights into the human condition. In all, a film worth seeing even if you have minimal French. SP
The Fifth Reaction (Tahmineh Milani, 2003; Farsi with English subtitles)
Milani continues to forge her path as the pre- eminent Iranian director making films about women. In this follow-up to The Hidden Half (2001) she explores the discontents of middle- class Tehran illuminated before by Dariush Mehrjui in Leila (1998). The film opens in a plush restaurant where a group of women friends speak of the webs of material and emotional dependency that keep them in unsatisfying marriages. Each story offers rich possibilities for exploring the subtle forms of discipline that make women surrender their interests. However, Milani chooses to focus on the most dramatic of the women's stories. Fereshteh (Niki Karimi) is recently widowed and her wealthy father-in-law, Hadji Safdar, declares that he will take her two sons and raise them in his household since she cannot provide for them on her teacher's salary. The line between benign patriarchy and crushing authoritarianism is quickly crossed. The Hadji's intimidating size and style make the point that brutish power can and does thrive among the urban bourgeois. His wealth allows him to act as a law unto himself. Fereshteh decides to escape with her children. She drives off with a friend, à la Thelma and Louise, and the Hadji pursues them in an adrenalising cross-country chase. Curiously, however, the film acknowledges that the women are no match for the Hadji's resources. Fereshteh's equivocal victory comes instead when the Hadji is gradually shamed into accepting her claims. Have we come a full circle, then, to traditions of honour and shame? A thought-provoking deliberation on reform from within versus full-scale revolution. SP
Falling up (Alexander Strizhenov and Sergei Guinzburg; Russian with English subtitles)
The wife of a Moscow businessman has an affair with her decorator. The ensuing conflicts are played out in a series of scenes with a voice-over driven justification of the central character's search for infidelity -- for which read emancipation -- in strip bars and night-clubs. The plot eventually, and predictably, twists into a love triangle that involves her best friend.
The story unfolds in the well-heeled haunts of the Moscow business district and the city's expensive, leafy suburbs, an environment that can at times look depressingly similar to an episode of Dynasty, the ultimate power-dressing eighties soap. And when it's not Dynasty, it's a Duran Duran video, courtesy of the 80s-obsessed art direction.
Character development is the real flaw here, allowing little space for anything, while the attempt to create a portrait of the existential dilemmas of a woman trapped within macho capitalism eventually becomes little more than the diary of an over-indulgent rich girl out to get it all in the big city. SA
A Breach in the Wall (Jimmy Karlsson, 2002; Swedish with English subtitles)
This story of an under-achieving maths genius and his mentor will inevitably evoke Good Will Hunting. But this is a Swedish film and the gloom of the working-class hero's life does not disperse quickly. The film is set in a grim little town with no university or bright lights. Lars (Magnus Krepper) is a depressive schoolteacher who has given up his doctoral studies and returned to his hometown, but he still feels adrift. He finds a new sense of purpose in devoting himself to his gifted student Jonny (Sverrir Gudnason) and preparing him to go away to university against his father's wishes. But it gradually becomes clear that Jonny has a similar angst about leaving his hometown, oppressive as it is. Ties of duty and simple familiarity keep him there. The present cannot be cast off lightly for the sake of an uncertain future. If Jonny's hometown seems bleak the university is coldly gracious and not particularly welcoming. It is ironic that Lars directs his protégé here and urges him to undertake the very course of study that he abandoned.
The film is subtly cynical of the idea of mentorship, which seems like a vain attempt to regain youth and have another stab at early ambition. Lars' unconscious nostalgia for youth emerges also in his attraction to Jonny's fresh- faced girlfriend. There is an intriguing encounter between the rekindled ardour of middle life and the nihilism of disenchanted youth. The encounter is inconclusive, however. This film chooses sturdy realism over a redeeming happy ending. SP
The Father (Liang Shan; Chinese with English subtitles)
The youngest son of a retired Chinese worker plans to get married but the marriage falls through because of the old man's lack of funds. The days go by and finally the youngest son lands a job as a window cleaner in Beijing while the daughter sells evening newspapers on the streets.
There's something earnest about the struggle and toil that form the backbone of The Father, and something touching, perhaps, about the absence of rage in the face of this struggle. But this is a father who has bought up his children on a diet of honour and patience.
Honour makes it difficult for the youngest son to accept his job at first, but a month's pay, some of which is spent on a meal of boiled dumplings -- a meal that's close to home -- makes any dents in his pride easier to swallow.
As the film progresses the generation gap between father and children narrows. Here the father emerges as hero, the driving force by which the family unit functions. And if worker as hero, constantly pushed forward in the script, becomes at times cloying the picture is made palatable by the directing style. Its pace foregrounds the stoicism and patience of the mythical worker as well as providing a motif for the effects of age on the old man. In the end, though, this is a film the real strength of which is an unmitigated realism. There are no fancy camera angles or cuts, the scenes are filmed on original locations, the performances underplayed rather than melodramatic. SA
God Forbid Greater Evil (Snjezana Tribuson; Croatia)
Delightfully naturalistic acting and a lively Balkan score underpin this humorous Bildungsroman set in provincial Croatia. Following the story of Frula (Ivo Gregurevic) from pre- to post- adolescence, God Forbid Greater Evil documents a painfully slow coming of age, offering a sidelong glance at life under Tito: the legal perils of smoking Marlboro, the shifting loyalties of a Christian constituency controlled by the Party, the glamour of rock-n-roll, the toil and joy of getting your first television set to work. Frula's house is located near the cemetery where the boy has taken to brooding. When his father loses his job he finds employment cutting and polishing tombstones and Frula manages to prove himself useful when he takes to helping the old man. Family troubles, school life, a fascination with motion pictures (Frula creates a flip-book movie on the pages of his father's Das Kapital) and a lasting love affair with the daughter of the local cinema projectionist form the backbone of an intimately engaging personal history. Frula is divided between the need for his father's affection and the temptations offered by his maternal uncle, a gambler and black-marketeer who brings a gun and condoms into the house and spends several years in jail. Yet a happy ending is close at hand as Frula graduates, gains the affection of his beloved -- and boards the coach to Zaghreb to attend university.
YR
Listeners' Requests (Abdel-Latif Abdel-Hamid; Syria)
In rural Syria a group of villagers meet in a weekly ritual, gathering around the radio to hear their favourite programme, "Listeners' Requests". Songs are requested and names broadcast. The village is a world in which Jamil wants to marry Jamila and Saleh wants to marry his boss's daughter and have their favourite song broadcast on the programme as an affirmation of the strength of their love. The radio -- a physical presence and conduit of news -- becomes a palpable symbol, of love, desire, and of events far beyond the village borders.
The film makes a stab at satiric comedy though the array of often stagey gags, including occasional close-ups of the unfunny gestures of the village idiot, or Saleh's obsession with his lover's breast, become tedious by the second half of the plot by which time the film's central focus has in any case become the villager's moral salvation from the enemy's -- Israel's -- attacks.
The world of this village is far too symbolically loaded and the power struggles and tribalism too obvious by far. The immense tracking shots through sunny fields -- an attempt at pastoral relief, perhaps -- serve only to underline the crudeness of it all. And still Listeners' Requests aims to give hope to the viewer through the songs -- Abdel-Wahab, Umm Kulthoum and Fairuz -- everyone loves: it is an assertion of Arab national pride hardly disguised beneath the occasional chuckle, though the attempt at disguise perhaps saves the picture from drowning completely in its clichés of romance, nostalgia and innocent love. SA
The Stringless Violin (Sekar Ayu Asmara; Indonesia )
The most remarkable aspect of this largely sentimental drama is the photography -- exquisitely lit and meticulously composed in slightly muted tones. Renjani is a former ballet dancer whose traumatic experience of rape and abortion bring her from Jakarta to Jogyakarta where she founds a home for "unwanted children", helped by a Tarot-reading pediatrician with similarly tormented memories, and her growing attachment to an autistic child, Dewa.
Renjani periodically suffers from terrible stomach pains, which tend to occur following a recurrent nightmare -- a psychosomatic problem, the viewer is led to believe. It is only when she discovers that Dewa responds to her dancing and begins taking him to concerts, meeting a significantly younger composer-violinist who falls in love with her, that the extent of Renjani's tragedy becomes apparent: just as she prepares for a new life it becomes apparent that her abortion has induced fatal complications. The film ends with Dewa responding to the violinist's music by Renjani's grave. The film has some excellent theatrical acting, beautiful music and a series of evocative statements about life and death made by the pediatrician. Even so, the tortuously slow pace, combined with so few convincingly dramatic elements results in what is intended as a tragedy along classical lines becoming a viewing experience that borders on tedium. YR
Down by Love (Tamas Sas, Hungary)
Simplicity of narrative structure does not make automatically for a simple film: the result, as in Down by Love (Szerelemtol Sujtva), can be a psychological tour de force. Patricia Kovacs's performance in the tragic role of Eva is astonishing, as she leads us through an exploration of love and hate that begins with isolation and ends with a disastrous obsession. As Eva waits endlessly in her cramped apartment for her married lover Tibor to arrive the strain seems to push her further and further from reality.
The story unravels in Eva's conversations with herself, her reenacted mental flashbacks and her one-sided dialogues on the telephone. There are hints of Beckett, of David Lynch and of Kubrick, though Down with Love remains resolutely original. Lulled into believing Eva's situation is the projection of a dangerously unstable personality, the audience is suddenly shocked into the realisation that this is not the case. As reality slowly dawns a whole new dimension is added to the film that rapidly shifts genre gears from psychological thriller to depressing dramatic piece. A one-woman show that brings something new to the table.
YR
