We live in a difficult world. If you were not aware of how
difficult it is, the Portland International Film Festival is here to
remind you. Even by global cinema’s glum temperament, the 2012 PIFF
lineup seems especially forlorn, particularly focused on intractable
problems. For example, many people of different ethnicities hate each
other with deadly passion. Also, sometimes people of the same ethnicity
hate each other with deadly passion. People—and here we are not
specifically thinking of the audience at the Portland International Film
Festival, but it did expand to Lake Oswego this year—get old and die.
We cannot solve these
problems. And we won’t be so presumptuous as to advise PIFF how to
improve as a whole: It’s doing pretty good in simply adjusting to the
closure of the Broadway Metroplex, the longtime bedrock of its venues,
by filling every spare screen in the city. But we can suggest how each
film might be a little better. So we will.
What the world needs now is constructive criticism.
Salmon Fishing in the Yemen Critic's Score: 37 [GREAT BRITAIN] A puzzlingly
insubstantial opening-night selection (and not the first in recent
years), this Lasse Hallström rom-com does manage fierce sparring between
Emily Blunt and Ewan McGregor as caustic, contemptuous partners on a
photo-op project to bring the Middle East man’s favorite sport. Maybe it
only seems ridiculous by dint of environs? But then again, no: This is a
movie where McGregor saves a sheik from an assassination attempt by
using his fishing rod like a bullwhip to knock a gun from a terrorist’s
hand. Accordingly, McGregor’s character is named “Dr. Jones.” A dead
soldier is brought back to life so Blunt can face a
not-all-that-agonizing decision of the heart, and the love triangle is
just like Casablanca, but the exact opposite.
It’d be better if: It weren’t made by the Chocolat dude. AARON MESH. NT, 7:30 pm Thursday, Feb. 9.
Trailer:
Almanya—Welcome to Germany Critic's Score: 60 [GERMANY] Ah, what’s a festival
without a comedic-melodramatic ethnic family film devoted to the notion
that white people will find brown people endlessly cute? Almanya
is the politically and morally charged story of Turkish guest workers in
Germany, purged of all charge or edge or seriousness: a
Purell-sanitized, treacly multigenerational identity fable with a
bouncing-ball soundtrack. Which is not to say it isn’t breezily likable;
likability is, in fact, its only reason for being. So we can laugh when
the newly emigrated children think that wiener dogs are giant rats, and
feel mild nostalgic loss when their former homeland no longer feels
like home. And then we can all eat Turkish street food with a newfound
sense of fellow feeling.
It’d be better if: It weren’t one giant middle-class whitewash. MATTHEW KORFHAGE. WH, 6 pm Friday, Feb. 10. LM, 3:15 and 8:30 pm Saturday, Feb. 11. LT, 8 pm Sunday, Feb. 12.
Trailer:
The Salt of Life Critic's Score: 74 [ITALY] An enjoyably droll little
satire about a retired Charlie Brown surrounded by football-pulling
Lucys, when all he wants is his fair share of Berlusconi’s Age of Bunga
Bunga. Director and lead actor Gianni Di Gregorio—who also did the
besieged Roman everyman routine in Mid-August Lunch—plays the
abashed old goat, whose efforts to score a little strange on the piazza
are undermined by his hesitancy, his mother (Valeria De Franciscis, same
as in Mid-August Lunch) and his fondness for white wine. It is essentially a sophisticated Italian version of The 40-Year-Old Virgin.
It’d be better if: It had a
riotous musical montage at the end. Oh, wait, it does? Then it’s
probably about as good as this sort of thing can be. AARON MESH. LT, 6 pm Friday, Feb. 10. CM, 5:45 pm Sunday, Feb. 12.
Trailer:
Breathing Critic's Score: 84 [AUSTRIA] It sounds like a middlebrow
wet dream: A juvenile in prison learns about life and mortality while on
work release, tasked with transporting corpses from the scenes of their
demise to the morgue. Yet Karl Markovics’ Breathing is a
anything but standard tear-duct exploitation, thanks largely to a
wonderfully nuanced turn by Thomas Schubert, who layers his role with
grief, anger and vulnerability, especially when an encounter with a
woman’s corpse triggers his longing to reconnect with his estranged
mother. Like PIFF darling Ramin Bahrani (Goodbye Solo), Markovics
knows how to find tremendous power in small moments. His freshman film
is emotionally charged dynamite that, like life, offers no simple
answers.
It’d be better if: Schubert’s troubled relationship with the other kids on the cellblock received a minute or two more screen time. AP KRYZA. LM, 6:15 pm Friday, Feb. 10. CM, 8 pm Sunday, Feb. 12. LT, 6 pm Tuesday, Feb. 14.
Trailer:
A Cat in Paris Critic's Score: 82 [FRANCE] This year’s token hand-drawn nominee for the Best Animated Feature Oscar, A Cat in Paris
is an eye-popping beauty, with a unique style employing elements of
cubism. It helps that the story of a cat burglar and his feline buddy
protecting a girl from mobsters is breezy fun, coming off as a
kaleidoscopic combination of To Catch a Thief, Spider-Man, and Cassavetes’ Gloria,
with our heroes bounding across Parisian rooftops while eluding
bumbling goons and the fuzz. It may be too arty to grab the gold, but
it’s certainly evidence that hand-drawn animation is an art form in dire
need of preserving.
It’d be better if: An animated Cary Grant popped in for a rooftop cameo, striped shirt and all. AP KRYZA. CM, 6:15 Friday and 3:30 pm Saturday, Feb. 10-11.
Trailer:
Target Critic's Score: 51 [RUSSIA] In a not-too-distant Russian
future of the Aldous Huxley variety, the youth-obsessed superrich
descend on the countryside to connect with their roots and get a little
wrinkle-release radiation in fallout zones. In between bouts of
ultra-rapey sex, one man invents glasses that can visually identify good
and evil. Naturally, as Target’s small ensemble becomes more and
more enraptured with their obsessions and lusts, its characters teeter
on the rotten side of the naughty list with more frequency. It’s a novel
idea. Too bad director Alexander Zeldovich couldn’t come up with a cool
gadget to make any of it make any goddamned sense.
It’d be better if:The person in charge of subtitles had realized white text is difficult to read during a film bathed in glowing white. AP KRYZA. LM, 6:30 pm Friday, Feb. 10.
Amador Critic's Score: 36 [SPAIN] A character study without a character, Amador
ends up being just as lumpen as the infuriatingly passive, continually
morose face of its protagonist, Marcela, a young Bolivian immigrant who
wants everything in her life to effortlessly be different. Ennui is here
registered as a potatoey, unsympathetic pout, and each scene is left
equally uncooked. In order to earn her caretaker’s wage, Marcela must
preserve the illusion that the old man she’s looking after isn’t already
dead, while also hiding her pregnancy from the one person in the
picture with any life (who is nonetheless treated with disdain): her
flower thief of a boyfriend.
It’d be better if: The killjoy didn’t stay in the picture. MATTHEW KORFHAGE. LT, 8:30 pm Friday, Feb. 10. LM, 5 pm Sunday and 8:45 pm Tuesday, Feb. 12 & 14.
Declaration of War Critic's Score: 60 [FRANCE] A light-footed, almost fanciful film framed around a child’s battle with cancer, Declaration of War
sounds like a Lifetime movie via Jacques Demy. It’s a bit better than
that, though. Actress-director Valerie Donzelli, who wrote the
semi-autobiographical screenplay with co-star and real-life baby daddy
Jérémie Elkaim, keeps the movie from devolving into a weepy disease
drama. Like Mike Mills’ Beginners, War is about adults
reacting to life’s tectonic shifts. Also like Mills, Donzelli doesn’t
trust her story. She gussies it up with New Wave-y quirks—three
different narrators, an ill-fitting musical number—and relies on the
performers (herself included) to salvage its heart. And they do, barely.
It’d be better if: It maintained
the energy of the lead couple’s punk club meet-cute, though I suppose
the post-kid slowdown is the point. MATTHEW SINGER. 8:30 pm Friday, Feb. 10.
Trailer:
Forgiveness of Blood Critic's Score: 77 [ALBANIA] Nothing cramps a teenager’s
style more than a familial blood feud. Nik (non-pro Tristan Halilaj) is a
scrawny Albanian kid growing up in a rural village. Just as he’s
finally starting to charm the girl of his dreams, his dad kills one of
the neighbors and goes into hiding, prompting the victim’s family to
invoke centuries-old Balkan law and call for Nik’s head in retribution.
Bummer. Quietly compelling, director Joshua Marston’s first film since
2004’s Maria Full of Grace presents coming of age under the
threat of sudden, swift death as not much different than any other
adolescent trauma. It’s unclear what inconveniences Nik more: the
snipers waiting for him to step outside his house, or the fact that he
can’t go to parties anymore.
It’d be better if: There was just a tad more drama. MATTHEW SINGER. CM, 8:30 Friday, Feb. 10. LM, 5 pm Sunday, Feb. 12.
Trailer:
The Extraordinary Voyage Critic's Score: 93 [FRANCE]
A dream from the 1890s is alive in color. We’re lucky to be living in a
15 minutes of fame for Georges Méliès’ 15 minutes of wonder: The
Parisian cinema pioneer gets a Ben Kingsley cameo in Hugo, and we get a color nitrate print of his 1902 phantasm A Trip to the Moon. Oui, color: The Méliès studio movies (other titles include The Inventor Crazybrains and His Wonderful Airship)
were handpainted. The dazzling frames, with their Neptunes and dragons
and dirigibles floating through, look like ambulatory gemstones, or
those airbrushed T-shirts you buy at the beach. The attendant
documentary is serviceable (trailblazing genius, lost works, found work,
Tom Hanks). The restored short, with an eerie score by Air, is a candy
shop of the sublime.
IT’D BE BETTER IF: Only it lasted forever. AARON MESH. WTC, 8:45 pm Friday, Feb. 10. WH, 3 pm Sunday, Feb. 12.
ROUND AND ROUND: Bullhead, Attenberg and Turn Me On, Dammit! (left to right). - Images courtesy of PIFF
The Fairy Critic's Score: 55 [FRANCE] Whimsical and lighthearted in the grand French tradition of other shit your grandma loves, The Fairy
contains some excellently goofy moments of physical comedy in telling
the story of a lonely hotel clerk’s romance with an kleptomaniacal
fairy. Co-directors/stars Dominique Abel and Fiona Gordon’s absurdist
comedy sees the pair dancing underwater, encountering flying Frenchmen
and traipsing through a world where people burst into song unprovoked.
If this is your bag, you’ll be enchanted. If its sounds wholly
irritating, well, you’ve been granted a wish to avoid it.
It’d be better if: Cirque du Soleil showed up halfway through and had a whimsical throwdown to see who is more magically French. AP KRYZA. LM, 8:45 pm Friday and 3:30 pm Saturday, Feb. 10-11. LT, 8:30 pm Tuesday, Feb. 14.
Trailer:
Bullhead
Critic's Score: 81 [BELGIUM] Set in the Flemish “hormone mafia
underground,” freshman director Michael Roskam’s bleak (but not
humorless) Oscar-nominated thriller centers on one slab of chemically
enhanced beef in particular. His name is Jacky. His interests include
cattle farming, naked shadowboxing, and sticking needles in his ass. As a
child, Jacky suffered an, um, crushing blow to his manhood, causing him
to overcompensate later in life by ’roiding up to Ivan Drago levels.
Appropriately, actor Matthias Schoenaerts plays Jacky as a sort of
bipedal cow, physically imposing but psychically neutered. Knotted with
localisms, Bullhead’s crime story is too dense to really navigate; as a study of masculinity interrupted, it’s brutal and impossible to ignore.
It’d be better if: There was less, as one character puts it, “balls-ache.” As a man, that’s one of my general rules for art. MATTHEW SINGER. WH, 12:30 pm Saturday and 8:45 pm Tuesday, Feb. 11 & 14.
Trailer:
Monsieur Lazhar Critic's Score: 70 [CANADA] It might be the most
startling image yet of this young PIFF: A boy peeks into his
middle-school classroom, and through a sliver of doorway sees his
teacher’s lifeless body hanging from the ceiling. Not a conventional way
of starting a “magical schoolteacher” movie, but don’t worry: It gets
conventional pretty quick. The titular Mr. Lazhar (Mohamed Fellag) is
hired as the dead woman’s replacement, and soon he’s not just teaching
these kids...they’re teaching him. Still, writer-director
Philippe Falardeau keeps things simple enough, allowing the sincere
performances from Fellag and the young Sophie Nélisse and Émilien
Néron—both from the “so mature it’s unnatural” class of child actors—to
bolster the film beyond its clichés.
It’d be better if:Monsieur Lazhar was Mr. Laser, a former American Gladiator exiled in Canada and trying to make a difference. MATTHEW SINGER. LT, 3 pm Saturday, Feb. 11. LM, 6:15 pm Monday, Feb. 13.
Trailer:
Cafe de Flore Critic's Score: 17 [CANADA] Pro tip: The best time to
walk out on this faux-poignant jumblefuck of nonsense is during the
opening credits, when hunky club DJ Antoine (Kevin Parent) fades into
the background of an airport terminal as a slow-motion parade of Down
syndrome patients marches into the foreground. It’ll save you from
having to endure the cloying special-needs love story, the
meta-spiritual “twist” that intertwines the concurrent narratives, and
more than three minutes of director Jean-Marc Vallée’s hyper-pretentious
editing, which garbles his cosmic statement about love, music and
happiness into vomitous arthouse slush. The only message that emerges
from the muck is that Evelyne Brochu looks good naked. She is naked a lot, so that’s a plus.
It’d be better if: Antoine got
stabbed in a swordfight by the Beefeater Gin mascot he continually
hallucinates as a symbol of his alcohol addiction (seriously). MATTHEW
SINGER. LT, 5:30 pm Saturday, Feb. 11. LM, 6 pm Monday, Feb. 13.
Trailer:
Found Memories Critic's Score: 73 [BRAZIL] I’m naturally resistant to
magical realism, but the first 20 minutes of Julia Murat’s hymn to aging
had an impressive effect: They had me moaning for something, anything
mystical to occur. Repeated scenes of routine in the imaginary mountain
hamlet of Jotuomba are like a rural Brazilian ad for Dunkin’ Donuts:
Madalena (Sonia Guedes) rises in the wee hours, and it’s time to make
the biscuits! Eventually, a photographer (Lisa Favero) arrives, and the
ancient rituals are revealed in close-up as a kind of beneficence. The
movie is very much an undergraduate shutterbug’s gothic fantasy—I’m
surprised there aren’t more pictures of shoes—but it is entrancing.
It’d be better if: Things started not happening a little quicker. AARON MESH. LM, 6 pm Saturday, Feb. 11. PP, 8:45 pm Monday, Feb. 13.
Snows of Kilimanjaro Critic's Score: 75 [FRANCE] Old filmic hand Robert
Guédigan’s subtle, soft-toned piece of working man’s sentimentality is
way more pink-positive than the fest’s film about breast cancer
funding—or more pinko-positive, anyway. The implausibly roseate
situation it depicts—a sainted, laid-off union leader developing deep
sympathies for his own violent houserobber out of cosmic solidarity—is
made nonetheless workable by actor Jean-Pierre Darroussin’s gruffly
sympathetic performance and Guédigan’s patient craftsmanship in building
the story’s characters and central dilemma. Which is to say, the
open-palmed earnestness of the film leads not merely to warm fuzzies but
also a rewarding, intelligent moral complexity.
It’d be better if: It didn’t
nonetheless congratulate itself and its characters so heartily for being
all such wonderful people. MATTHEW KORFHAGE. CM, 6 pm Saturday, Feb. 11. LM, 8:45 pm Monday, Feb. 13.
Where Do We Go Now? Critic's Score: 43 [LEBANON] Director and star Nadine
Labaki’s second feature proves notoriously dour Lebanese cinema can be
downright whimsical. Until a kid gets shot, anyway. Before that happens,
Where Do We Go Now?, about the women of a remote village
attempting to quell a sectarian prank war from escalating into full-on
Christian-on-Muslim violence, resembles one of those lighthearted
English community comedies. Then a boy is killed, and the weeping
starts. A delicate hand is needed to guide such tonal zigzags; jolting
from a mother cursing the Virgin Mary to ladies singing about baking
hash cookies, Labaki’s hands must be made of lead.
It’d be better if:Instead
of telling the neighbors he’s just sick, maybe the mother of the dead
boy tried to convince the village he’s still alive à la Weekend at Bernie’s? MATTHEW SINGER. WH, 8:30 pm Saturday, Feb. 11. LT, 6 and 8:30 pm Monday, Feb. 13.
Trailer:
Mr. Tree Critic's Score: 58 [CHINA] In many ways a successor to
the attentive, character-based neorealism of director Jia Zhangke (who
produced it), debut director Han Jie’s Mr. Tree seems to
nonetheless want to be expressionistic allegory. It succeeds wholly as
neither, meandering waywardly through the half-fantasized life of
equally wayward, drunken fool Shu (Chinese for “Tree”), who eventually
becomes mere metaphorical placeholder for the fate of traditional
Chinese values in the wake of citified industrialization. The viewer’s
sympathy lies, unfortunately, nowhere: When you make half your
characters inarticulately metaphorical and the rest merely props, the
humanity whose loss you’re lamenting is sadly lost from the start.
It’d be better if:It were a
sweeping historical epic showing the bloodstained majesty of the
inevitable Chinese Empire. Sad to say. MATTHEW KORFHAGE. CM, 12:45 pm Sunday, Feb. 12. LM, 6:15 pm Tuesday, Feb. 14.
Trailer:
Goodbye First Love Critic's Score: 82 [FRANCE] Another gorgeously assured reflection from Mia Hansen-Løve (The Father of My Children), but this time with enough teen-girl pouting and drama that it could be a French version of Twilight. (No werewolves, better music, everybody gets shirtless.) Lola Créton, the sprite from Bluebeard,
plays a heroine not easily dissuaded from a boy (Sebastian Urzendowsky)
more interested in world travel. The film, which has the pacific
maturity occasionally brushed by Truffaut, recognizes that erotic
obsession is like a recurring illness, and sometimes the best you can
hope for is to have it go into remission.
It’d be better if: Well, maybe if there was one werewolf. Especially in the middle acts. AARON MESH. LM, 2 pm Sunday, Feb. 12.
Trailer:
Tales of the Night Critic's Score: 55 [FRANCE] Tales of the Night
looks like precisely what it is: a French public television show adapted
for the screen, depicting folk tales from all over the world—sometimes
faithfully, sometimes with “sassy” updates to the endings and morals.
The framing device used to bind these tales is awkward at best, the
stories pedantically overexplained and the pacing painfully slow, but
animator Michel Ocelot’s African-inflected, 3-D-dioramic, shadow-play
animations are at least lovely enough to be distracting, should one want
to bring a school group down for educational purposes.
It’d be better if: I were 6 years old. Even at 7, I would feel bored and itchy and patronized to. MATTHEW KORFHAGE. WH, 5:30 pm Sunday, Feb. 12.
Trailer:
Turn Me On, Dammit! Critic's Score: 84 [NORWAY] I would love this to become the Say Anything or Pump Up the Volume
for a generation of young Norwegian teens raised on Internet
pornography—never mind that all the film’s porn happens
anachronistically on paper or over the phone. Even with its opening
nubile masturbatory scene and a main plot point involving a teen boy
surprising a (not unwilling) girl by poking her thigh with his
turtlenecked penis, this is essentially a warm, goofily outsider
coming-of-age story—albeit for a very horny 15-year-old girl (Alma,
played with heartbreakingly tender naiveté by non-pro actress Helene
Bergsholm). The bawd and awkwardness all read largely true until a
too-pat ending more at home in the smooth-polished John Hughes ’80s than
amid kids who spent the whole film cruelly appending a penis to the
main character’s name.
It’d be better if: It maintained
adolescence’s nervous, cruel ambiguities even to the end, rather than
falsely resolve them all. Or maybe if it ended like Heathers. MATTHEW KORFHAGE. WH, 8 pm Sunday, Feb. 12.
Trailer (WARNING: Not safe for work):
Attenberg Critic's Score: 79 [GREECE] Between this and 2009’s Dogtooth (which involved some of the same people), Greek film is looking pretty interesting of late. Attenberg—a
film about a near-autistic, sexually inexperienced woman with a randy
best friend and a dying father—shares with that film its languid pacing,
expressionistic form and yen for the sexual grotesque. But although the
film is shot almost as a clinical documentary about impossible human
interaction (somewhere at the intersection of David Attenborough nature
films and old Françoise Hardy Scopitones), it also shares some of that
same no-shots-barred, delightful anarchy of early Godard, though without
his egomaniacal self-assurance.
It’d be better if: It actually found some of that assurance, and thereby also a lighter step. MATTHEW KORFHAGE. CM,6 and 8:45 pm Monday, Feb. 13.
Trailer:
Cirkus Columbia Critic's Score: 40 [BOSNIA] On the eve of the Yugoslav
Wars, a rich asshole named Divko Buntic (Miki Manojlovic, looking like a
puppet from Genesis’ “Land of Confusion” video) returns to Herzegovina
after decades in exile. He kicks his ex-wife out of her house, buys out
the salon where she works and bequeaths it to his hot new girlfriend,
and shows more affection for his cat than his son. Amid his tyrannical
homecoming, an Oepidal soap opera breaks out between his fiancée and
son, his beloved cat goes missing, then the bombs start to drop, and
perhaps it’s all a metaphor for the ethnic tensions dividing Bosnia, but
I really couldn’t bring myself to care much about any of it.
It’d be better if: It involved an actual circus. One lone swing ride doesn’t cut it. MATTHEW SINGER. PP, 6 pm Monday, Feb. 13.
WW critics were unable to screen 22 of the films, but here's a little bit about each:
Jiro Dreams of Sushi [UNITED STATES] A documentary about a sushi chef in the Tokyo subway. WTC, 6:15 Friday, Feb. 10.
Jose y Pilar [PORTUGAL] A documentary about Nobel Prize-winning author Jose Saramago and his wife Pilar. WTC, 12:30 pm Saturday, Feb. 11.
Jean Gentil [DOMINICAN REPUBLIC] A Haitian man seeks work abroad. LM, 1 pm Saturday, Feb. 11.
The Life of Fish [CHILE] A man goes to a party, avoids discussing the past. LM, 1 pm Saturday, Feb. 11.
To Be Heard [THE BRONX] Teens perform beat poetry. WTC, 3:30 pm Saturday, Feb. 11.
Unfinished Spaces [UNITED STATES] A documentary about abandoned architecture. WH, 3:30 pm Saturday, Feb. 11.
A Bitter Taste of Freedom [UNITED STATES] A documentary about an assassinated Russian journalist. WTC, 6 pm Saturday, Feb. 11.
Hello! How Are You? [ROMANIA] Retirees try online dating. WH, 6 pm Saturday, Feb. 11. CM, 8:45 pm Tuesday, Feb. 14.
Restoration [ISRAEL] A furniture salesman shines a piano. LM, 6 pm Saturday, Feb. 11.
Beyond the Road [BRAZIL] A love story on a road trip. LM, 8:30 pm Saturday, Feb. 11. PP, 6:15 pm Tuesday, Feb. 14.
King of Devil's Island [NORWAY] Students at an abusive boy's school rebel. WTC, 8:30 pm Saturday, Feb. 11. WH, 6 pm Monday, Feb. 13.
Las Acacias [ARGENTINA] A truck driver hits the highway with a single mom. CM, 8:30 pm Saturday, Feb. 11. LM, 8:45 pm Monday, Feb. 14.
