(3 out of 5, that is.)
Oh good holy sweet goddamn, the 37th annual Seattle International Film Festival has finally drawn to a close. After 25 days and a bajillion films, the fest winners were announced yesterday at brunch. Audiences loved Paper Birds and To Be Heard the most of all and juries dug Gandu, Hot Coffee, and On The Ice. Didn’t catch these or get enough film fest during the past month? No worries, the Best of SIFF 2011 will play at SIFF Cinema all weekend long, so you can see the individual films you missed or buy yet another series pass. With that in mind, let’s take a look the films Team SunBreak watched over Closing Weekend, as well as our thoughts on all of SIFF 2011.
WHAT WE SAW:
MvB: Poupoupidou is sort of a French attempt to get in on all this Nordic detective/mystery action, to the point of filming in Mouthe, “the coldest town in France.” Jean-Paul Rouve is a hangdog, less-wealthy Richard Castle, a mystery author who finds himself investigating the death of a cheese model/weather girl whose discovery and stardom tracks Marilyn Monroe’s history, but in a minor key. It’s wonderfully droll, though its insistence on paralleling Monroe’s story almost exactly bogs it down occasionally.
Josh: I also enjoyed it, particularly because up until seeing it, my SIFF experience had been missing out on a fun entry in the quirky crimesolving genre. Poupoupidou embraced its Frenchness through a sleepy mystery that felt very film festivally given its share of red herrings, unexplained recurrent symbolism, kitten dream sequences, oddball small town characters, and a hint of gay intrigue thrown in for good measure.
Josh: My closing weekend included two “year in the life” explorations of failed relationships. The first, a rewarding slice of life proceeding through monthly vignettes centering around a single mother in Amsterdam, her son, and an on-again off-again love interest. A laconic character study, I appreciated how it began and ended in typical Dutch fashion–with accidentally interlocked bicycles. The second was longer running and even more deliberatively paced, but due to the high stakes of young adult romance, felt more tumultuous: Tran Anh Hung’s adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood. Enlivened by a lot of fast walking through beautiful natural scenes, frank talking, sometimes comically dramatic seasonal changes, and a score by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood, the two-plus hours spent with a bookish Japanese kid navigating the aftermath of a friend’s suicide and affairs with two differently crazy girls felt well spent.
MvB: My side-thought about Norwegian Wood was that I liked how director Tran Anh Hung moved beyond the book in creating a visual language that’s almost entirely absent in Murakami. Romantic landscapes mirroring the soul’s turmoil parallel the use of landscape in Japanese woodcuts–you probably wouldn’t make out in a marsh, but it certainly looks great on film, along with dramatically backlit twenty-year-olds and a bounce light creating subtly luminescent skin.
Audrey also enjoyed Norwegian Wood. Though it’s a little long, the coming-of-age tale of young romance(s) and death is quirky, lovely to look at, and very Murakami. As an added bonus, the sex scenes manage to be both uncomfortably intimate and undeniably arousing. One quibble: the film (and the book) should really be called Bitches Crazy.
Josh ticked a few other film festival staples during closing weekend. For the glossy, nonsensical, science fiction entry that you’d be unlikely to bring yourself to watch under non-festival settings there was LOVE, a glossy story of space station isolation scored by Angels & Airwaves that might have been better off leaving the plotpoints vague. Third Star felt like a good candidate for a hypothetical Lifetime spinoff network for blokes. In it, a dying Benedict Cumberbatch (Sherlock in the awesome new BBC series) gets his mates to wheel him across the stunning Welsh coastline to a special bay on a walk to remember, complete with laughs, tears, and a few zany antics along the way.
MvB: liked Revenge of the Electric Car (the sequel to Who Killed the Electric Car?), though this movie seemed far less interested in the cars than in the people who make them. With access to GM, Nissan, and Tesla, the documentary spends more time peeking into tense management meetings than peering under the hood. That’s all right, because the four men who end up being profiled are such a mixed bag of nuts: Elon Musk, Bob Lutz,Carlos Ghosn, and Reverend Gadget. All make their bets on electric cars for different reasons, but the movie reminds you that not so long ago, no one was placing bets at all.
Josh: I feel like a good documentary can be made either by lucking into an amazing story or by helping the audience through the heavy lifting of complicated facts. My weekend had one of each. Hot Coffee expanded beyond the story that reached mass consciousness as a frequent late night punchline (elderly woman sues McDonald’s after being terribly scalded) to explore the depressing ways that the legal system has been increasingly tilted in favor of large corporations. Susan Saladoff justifiably picked up SIFF’s grand jury prize for connecting the dry and technical world of liability lawsuits, caps on damages, binding arbitration, and judicial elections to four powerful human stories. On the other hand, Bryan Storkel found a great story with the Christian card counters of Holy Rollers and ran with it, making a lively documentary about the Seattle-centered blackjack team. While it was fun to follow their exploits across the country taking money from casinos and earning a lot of cash for investors, I sometimes wished that the director had pushed the players a bit harder about reconciling the gambling life with their faith and dug a little bit deeper into the allegations of theft to explain some of the the team’s financial shortfalls.
I closed the festival with the hybrid Life in a Day, the YouTube-powered collage documenting life all around the planet on July 24, 2010. Though I was a bit skeptical of the crowdsourced approach to filmmaking, the result was one of my favorite closing night films, shuffling mundane and sublime moments into an evocative whole. I don’t know if the filmmakers intentionally requested footage from a weekend day that turned out to included a full moon, spiritual celebrations, fireworks, and a music festival turned tragic or if you’d get such a cinematic result from 4,500 hours of film from any random day, but it certainly worked to their advantage.
Tony: Korean crime/action flicks have become a subgenre all their own, and The Yellow Sea makes for a potent introduction. It spikes a classic film noir set-up (debt-wracked compulsive gambler agrees to perform a hit to erase his debts) with gritty Asian flavor and some stunning action setpieces. If you’ve seen Oldboy, you know what to expect, violence-wise: Korean mobsters, it seems, favor kitchen knives and hatchets over guns as weapons of choice.
A team of six sonic terrorists runs rampant through the city with a tone-deaf investigator in hot pursuit in The Sound of Noise, a wildly-inventive Swedish comedy that mixes the modern phenomenon of the Flash Mob with Looney Tunes anarchy. The less said about the buildings, people, and things hijacked as percussion and musical instruments, the better; but suffice it to say, the directors of the 2001 short Music for One Apartment and Six Drummers have expanded that original concept, brilliantly. Hands-down, the funniest thing I’ve seen all fest.
Screenwriter Yao B. Nunoo also delivers a glowering, charismatic star turn in The Destiny of Lesser Animals, a subtle, slow-burning riff on Kurosawa’s Stray Dog. Nunoo plays a police inspector whose counterfeit passport promptly gets lifted, and chaos ensues when he fakes the theft of his police pistol to force an investigation into the passport theft. Director Deron Albright shoots Ghana with verite authority, and amazingly, he’s from Pittsburgh.
El Bulli: Cooking in Progress is a minimalist food-porn documentary, shot and edited with simplicity to match its fascinating subject, the titular Spanish restaurant whose dishes push the boundaries of experimental culinary construction. Director Gereon Wetzel essentially lets the camera roll, eschewing narrative and editing flash in favor of just letting the story tell itself, and it works.
Village of Shadows, SIFF’s final midnighter, starts like gangbusters with a jarringly scary opening scene and some mysterious disappearances. To its credit it sustains atmosphere nicely, but a horror movie like this hinges on keeping the audience disoriented, and Village of Shadows plays its hand a bit too early and obviously.
Finally, Gorbaciof–The Cashier Who Liked Gambling is an Italian romance/crime drama in which prison cashier Pacileo (Toni Servillo) falls for a pretty Chinese waitress as his compulsive gambling drags him into a downward spiral of corruption. Servillo’s the big draw here, a mesmerizing presence whose Walter Matthau basset-hound features offset and humanize his gruff machismo.
SO HOW WAS SIFF THIS YEAR, OVERALL?
MvB: I’m trying to think of any final thoughts. SIFF didn’t really piss me off this year, except for the breakdown in communications to press, but that’s not something I think the general audience cares about. A minor annoyance was the inconsistency of admission times–it seemed like it got strange halfway through the fest. Otherwise, they had fixed Neptune up nicely by the time I got there. As with the past few years, I saw a lot of pretty good films I wouldn’t have otherwise seen but most of which were not all that remarkable. Of the 35 films I saw, if I subtract the ones that are coming to Seattle anyway, there were about 5 that were truly memorable. My fest faves were Mysteries of Lisbon, The Trip, Submarine, Honey, Page One, Bibliothèque Pascal, The White Meadows, Project Nim, Hot Coffee, and Norwegian Wood.
Tony: Maybe I’m just getting soft in my old age, or maybe I just picked lucky. But of the 42 movies I saw at SIFF this year, I really liked or loved over half of them. That said, I don’t know if I saw a lot of new trails blazed onscreen. Most of my faves were essentially genre flicks that didn’t so much reinvent the wheel as throw a pretty exciting new spin on it. Finisterrae, from this corner, subverted that pattern the most: The more I think about it, the more this experimental and weird Spanish feature just keeps growing on me. Gut-impulse favorites list: Viva Riva! Magic Trip, We are the Night, The Last Circus, The Sound of Noise, Finisterrae, Por El Camino. And there are plenty of runners-up….
Josh: Like MvB, I also saw 35 (that very special number) movies this time around. Of those, I’d count only two as compete duds and a few others as things that I could have happily lived without seeing. I guess this means that I agree with Tony about not being able to tell if SIFF’s programming is improving, if I’m feeling less critical, or if I’ve just gained skills in avoiding landmines.
Overall, the staff seemed to keep the trains running on time and maintained good spirits throughout, which is no easy task given the length of the festival and the sheer number of screenings. That said, I do wish that they would have anticipated the Neptune Debacle instead of just making a quick recovery from a bad situation. Another minor quibble is that SIFF’s slate of parties seemed more sedate this year, with most ending promptly at very civilized hours. While this year’s events were plenty of fun, the contrast between the heyday of open bars and indie bands versus drink tickets and cover bands was notable. Finally, I’d say that as much as the reluctant spring was not welcomed by sunbathers, it had to be pretty good for festival goers, making hours indoors during June feel less guilty.
On the narrative side, Miranda July’s funny and then strange and then crushing cat-narrated the Future was my far and away my festival favorite, followed closely by Mike Mills’ father-son love-grief story Beginners, and Richard Ayoade’s quirky but knowing coming-of-age tale Submarine. Choosing favorites from the reliably strong documentary programming was tougher, but Errol Morris’ jaw-droppingly crazy Tabloid, the previously-mentioned mashup Life in a Day, and the heartbreaking and inspirational How to Die in Oregon are strong contenders for the top of my list. Sure, most of these will (or already have) hit Seattle, but I think that SIFF chose well with its “See Interesting Films First” tagline.