Little battlers, a good line-up
Dan SlevinDESPITE the shocking and inexplicable decision to omit Patrick Keiller’s Robinson in Ruins from this year’s Film Festival (a disaster applicable only to me I think) the actual line-up is as good as everyone says. At least I think it is after surveying about 20 out of the 160 plus titles in the programme.
As usual, I asked the Festival to point me towards the less likely, the unheralded, the little battlers, the kind of film that is easily missed when skimming the 80 page programme. Any fool can tell you that The Tree of Life is going to be interesting. Capital Times readers want more than that.
Firstly music: two documentaries impressed me and they worked so well together I wish they were a double-feature. Merle Haggard: Learning to Live With Myself is a biography of the outlaw country star as he settles in to an uncomfortable old age. Actually old age to Haggard is no less comfortable than every other age - I can’t think of a great star less at ease in his own skin.
Compare that with Sing Your Song, the life story of the pop star, actor and activist Harry Belafonte. From a similar generation to Haggard, born with an equal lack of opportunity, Belafonte turned his talent and fame into a relentless drive to improve the lives of the people around him while Haggard seems to think that he is unworthy of his.
Aaron Schock’s Circo is a poignant look at the dwindling fortunes of a once proud Mexican circus, barely held together by ringmaster “Tino” as the rest of his family slowly drifts away. A beautiful soundtrack by Calexico completes the picture. Another, more succesful, side of the showbiz dream can be found in Being Elmo: a Baltimore teenager falls in love with puppetry watching early morning kids TV and discovers a talent that takes him all the way to Sesame Street. Joyous.
This festival seems to be full of confused teenage girls: in Tomboy a ten-year-old girl would rather be a boy so ... chooses to be one. A delicate subject deftly handled by director Céline Sciamma, it could have gone very wrong. She Monkeys, from Sweden, isn’t nearly as successful. A seemingly self-contained fourteen-year-old (this time) tries out for the local equestrian vaulting team (like synchronised swimming on horseback) and falls under the spell of beautiful Cassandra. Or does she? It’s described on its own website as a modern Western. No, it isn’t.
Another teenager, struggling to come to terms with adulthood and, more specifically, sexuality is stunning newcomer Clara Augarde in Love Like Poison. Like all of the last three films, parenting (lack of) is the core of the problem but this film states its manifesto right there in the title. Augarde reminds me of a young Isabelle Huppert and that’s quite a career to aspire to.
There are a plenty of examples of international hits to choose from: Point Blank is a French thriller about a hospital nurses’ aid who is dragged into a police conspiracy and has to join forces with a brutal (and tactiturn) safe cracker in order to rescue his kidnapped wife. It’s a rare thing - a film with action sequences you can actually follow - so expect a less coherent Hollywood remake soon.
Brazil’s biggest hit in years was Elite Squad: The Enemy Within, the sequel to it’s previous biggest hit Elite Squad. Featuring even more police corruption, this time plucked from the Rio headlines, Elite Squad has plenty of action but not much subtlety - director José Padilha has definitely seen the final third of Scarface, you can be certain of that.
Two years ago in these pages, I recommended a Korean film called Daytime Drinking only to be scolded for it by my own mother. So, I wouldn’t dream of recommending the deadpan Mongolian “comedy” Winter Vacation which will drive many audiences mad with frustration but intrigued and delighted me.
A longer version of this festival preview is available on www.captimes.co.nz or www.funeralsandsnakes.cet.









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