After a certain point—we’re going to say it’s this
Saturday, Feb. 18—the trickiest part of navigating the Portland
International Film Festival is summoning the will to get out of bed.
Don’t
take this the wrong way: The second week of PIFF offers some very good
movies, and even a couple of great ones. (It also promises the first
weekend of the PIFF After Dark genre-film showcase, a recent fest high
point, but neither Headhunters nor Let the Bullets Fly were screened by WW press deadlines.)
It’s just hard to read the program clearly when you’re helplessly weeping.
No way around it:
PIFF 2012 is hellbent on selecting movies so gloomy they’ll make you
long for the sweet release of Mayan apocalypse. But we continue,
undaunted, on our quixotic and pissy quest to identify how each of these
pictures might be slightly improved. Chin up. We have a lot of stages
of grief to get through.
WEDNESDAY, FEB. 15
Habemus Papem Critic’s Score: 66 [ITALY] Filling a void left since 1991’s The Pope Must Diet, papal satire Habemus Papam is a rare film shot at the Vatican. It finally answers the burning question: What would a Top Gun-style
volleyball tournament between the College of Cardinals look like?
They’ve got leisure time because the newly elected Pope has gotten cold
feet and fled. We follow His Holiness as he cruises around Rome for self
discovery, and kick it with the Cardinals as they screw around and wait
for him to return. It’s lighthearted fun, but tonal shifts toward the
serious derail the film’s spirit.
It’d be better if: Father Guido Sarducci was among the reporters covering the story from outside the Vatican. AP KRYZA. LT, 6 pm Wednesday, Feb. 15. C21, 6 pm Friday, Feb. 17.
Bonsai Critic’s Score: 56 [CHILE] A sad young literary man rogers his college
girlfriend after reading her bedtime selections from Proust. Eight years
later, he rogers another girlfriend while writing a Proustian novel
surreptitiously about rogering the first girlfriend. Sorry to be so
coarse, but the movie could use some puncturing. Its opening scenes have
an affectionate irony that recalls early Noah Baumbach comedies, but
director Cristián Jiménez believes this material is profoundly sad, or
sadly profound, or something. Also, the hero (Diego Noguera) grows a
bonsai tree in honor of his lost relationship instead of calling his ex,
which: seriously, dude.
It’d be better if: The women had fully developed personalities—though if they did, they would not be sleeping with this guy. AARON MESH. LM, 6:15 pm Wednesday and 8 pm Saturday, Feb. 15 & 18.
Trailer:
The Orator Critic’s Score: 70 [NEW ZEALAND] Don’t let that “Made in New Zealand” stamp
fool you: This is the first feature film ever made in Samoan, by
Samoans, about Samoans. It is a languid film, steeped in loss, in which
the main character, Saili—as a little person in a country of quite large
people—has been denied his familial chiefly title and therefore also
the ability to protect his land and family. The film doesn’t insult with
easy redemption, and painstakingly maintains its integrity throughout.
Also, there are rock and machete fights, and passive-aggressive yam
mutilation.
It’d be better if: We maybe
got to smile once in a while, just a little. But if it’s all a bit
weighty, what’s the director gonna do? He’s Samoan. MATTHEW KORFHAGE. LM, 8:45 pm Wednesday and 2:30 pm Saturday, Feb. 15 & 18. PP, 2:30 pm Monday, Feb. 20.
Trailer:
Surviving Life Critic’s Score: 79 [CZECH REPUBLIC] Stop-motion sicko Jan Svankmajer claims a
budget shortfall forced him to resort to a new medium—paper cutout
animation, in the style of Terry Gilliam’s Monty Python cartoons and the
dancing Saddams of South Park—but his id
remains unchecked. In this lark about a man hitting the psychoanalyst’s
couch to summon more dreams about his mum, the director also indulges
his longtime oral fixation: There’s plenty of thick, clotted food
churning in and out of mouths; tongues entwined like snakes; and a woman
blowing up a watermelon like a balloon. Its repetitions are soon a bit
much to stomach (did I mention the teddy bears with erect, plush
penises?), but Surviving Life builds to a bathtub swim as disturbing as anything Svankmajer’s ever done. And this is the guy who made a film called Greedy Guts.
It’d be better if: Oedipus were less complex. AARON MESH. WH, 8:45 pm Wednesday, Feb. 15.
Trailer:
THURSDAY, FEB. 16
Patagonia Critic’s Score: 82 [GREAT BRITAIN] Something about Spanish-speaking
countries, especially in film, always makes the northern and pale go
wild with deeply self-involved notions of the romantic. Patagonia
brings a wonderful symmetry to this, however. Taking as its subject the
utopian Welsh communities formed in 19th-century Argentina, the film
sends Welsh-ethnic Patagonians back to their chilly roots and a pair of
contemporary Welsh out to document a faraway past in Argentina. That
love is found and lost and found again in these countrysides shouldn’t
surprise anyone, nor that it’s all stirringly pretty. But the film is
also believable and unforced and patient in its romance—much in the
manner of an early Atom Egoyan film, but without ever seeming schematic.
It’d be better if: The viewer didn’t nonetheless see it all coming. MATTHEW KORFHAGE. CM, 6 pm Thursday, Feb. 16.
Trailer:
Postcard Critic’s Score: 66 [JAPAN] “The war has not ended!” screams a former soldier
in Kaneto Shindo’s post-World War II melodrama, to no one in particular.
At age 99, the director can’t be blamed for articulating his message so bluntly. Postcard
is not his first antiwar film—he’s spent much of his six-decade career
contemplating the fallout from Hiroshima and Nagasaki—but it’s allegedly
his most personal. Best known stateside for his ’60s excursions into
supernatural horror, Shindo looks at war as a kind of evil spirit,
taking up residence in the home of a widow whose husband died in combat.
The movie doesn’t have the masterful atmosphere of Onibaba or Kuroneko,
but it does feature an oddly slapstick-y fight scene in which one
combatant busts out an old-school airplane spin, so, y’know, that’s
pretty cool.
It’d be better if: It contained more of the elemental flair Shindo brings to his best films. MATTHEW SINGER. LT, 6 pm Thursday, Feb. 16. C21, 5:30 pm Saturday, Feb. 18.
Rose Critic’s Score: 62 [POLAND] A familiar story of love blossoming amid horrific
circumstances. In the days following World War II, the Masuria region
becomes akin to an apocalyptic wasteland, complete with marauding
bandits, deranged Russian soldiers who conduct daily public gang rapes,
and conspiratorial former German officers exploiting the land. Amid this
horrific violence, a soldier with a secret cares for the widow of a
fallen comrade. It’s a compelling story, but director Wojciech
Smarzowski’s decision to employ rapid editing and confusing
chronological shifts frequently derail comprehension.
It’d be better if: Having
shattered the record for most graphic rapes in a motion picture, the
director had decided 40 was enough. Overachiever. AP KRYZA. WH, 6:15 pm Thursday and 7:45 pm Sunday, Feb. 16 & 19.
Trailer:
Images courtesy of PIFF
Clown: The Movie Critic’s Score: 85 [DENMARK] This is a movie in which a man poses with a
little boy’s micropenis as leverage for blackmail, and also ejaculates
in the eye of his sleeping girlfriend’s mother as an attempted gesture
of love. (She wears a patch now, and her eye’s healing fine, thanks.)
Which is to say, this is a grotesquely comedic
gross-out-with-a-heart-of-gold to shame the Brothers Farrelly and team Hangover
into submission-dominance games—although this one’s filmed in grainy
verité style and unflattering light suitable more for a ’90s Dogme film,
which means every punch lands hard in the uncomfortable gut rather than
sliding off the polish. If you have no shame whatsoever, you will
nonetheless discover it while watching this film.
It’d be better if: …Oh, who cares? Quality is an almost unethical consideration here. MATTHEW KORFHAGE. WH, 8:45 pm Thursday, Feb. 16. LM, 5:30 pm Saturday, Feb. 18. PP, 8 pm Monday, Feb. 20.
FRIDAY, FEB. 17
The Kid With a Bike Critic’s Score: 74 [BELGIUM] Another slice of lower-class life from the Dardenne brothers, The Kid with a Bike
focuses on Cyril (Thomas Doret), an 11-year-old whose future
abandonment issues we witness being seared into him. Disregarded by
every male figure in his life—his father, his foster mother’s boyfriend,
the slick-haired street tough who recruits him for a robbery—he is left
to survive alone in a boy’s school until literally falling into the
arms of a local hairdresser. International cineastes already know of the
Dardennes’ warm, realist touch, but the revelation here is Doret. He
plays Cyril as a bomb not waiting to explode but silently begging to be
defused. I’ve already seen a few powerful performances from child actors
at this year’s PIFF; his might be the best.
It’d be better if: It were a bit longer. These are characters you want to spend more than 80-something minutes with. MATTHEW SINGER. WH, 6:15 pm Friday, Feb. 17. LM, 7:45 pm Sunday, Feb. 19.
Trailer:
Woman in the Septic Tank Critic’s Score: 26 [PHILIPPINES] It aims to provide a derisive antidote to
fest-filler miserabilism, but this jape at callow filmmakers revising
their slum-degradation epic never gets itself past the storyboarding
stage. So the film inside the film opens in the style of a Sally
Struthers infomercial, then warps (like the vulgarized death-row film Habeas Corpus inside Altman’s The Player)
into a musical and a soap opera, each version featuring a mother
selling her tiny son into prostitution. But the only shock is that a
comedy this amateurishly lit, framed and acted is making the
international rounds. Even the most outre gag—a singing pedophile—is a
ripoff of that neighborhood perv in Family Guy, which isn’t funny either.
The Silver Cliff Critic’s Score: 41 [BRAZIL] Those whose hearts have been broken will
recognize the anguish on the face of Violeta (Alessandra Negrini) when
her husband leaves her: a mix of confusion, hurt, anger, introspection
and hopelessness. If you don’t know it, well, spend 83 minutes with The Silver Cliff,
which follows Violeta as she searches for her man in Porto Alegre. We
spend no less than 14 minutes of the film’s short running time watching
her sob in cars and cabs. She also cries at airports, in the shower, in
her hotel and on the beach. Then she meets a down-on-his-luck man and
his daughter. They brood together, then take a long, silent taxi ride.
It’s the cinematic equivalent of being stuck next to a quiet,
grief-stricken stranger on a bus.
It’d be better if: One of Violeta’s sob sessions became the most dour episode of Cash Cab ever. AP KRYZA. CM, 8:45 pm Friday, Feb. 17. C21, 2:30 pm Sunday, Feb. 19.
Trailer:
SATURDAY, FEB. 18
Gerhard Richter Critic’s Score: 76 [GERMANY] Corinna Belz’s documentary of iconoclastic
painter Richter doesn’t dwell much on the backstory and the “Capitalist
realism” that made him famous—he’s famous enough, we suppose—but rather
submerges us into the day-to-day of Richter’s studio life and into the
creation of the massive expressionist paintings he’s devoted much of his
late career to. As such, it’s somewhat formless and opportunistic in
its subject matter but also an important document of Richter’s working
process, baroquely well-appointed studio, self-doubt, charm and barely
concealed prickliness.
It’d be better if: It
were at all possible to capture the textural qualities of Richter’s
painting—especially the side-to-side trompe l’oeil of his
black-and-white portraits—in film. MATTHEW KORFHAGE. WH, 3 pm Saturday, Feb. 18.
How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr. Foster? Critic’s Score: 83 [GREAT BRITAIN] Filmed not only in the sonorously reverent
tones but also the angelic color-clarity and oft-heavenly camera
vantage of true hagiography, this documentary about legendary architect
Norman Foster succeeds largely because its subject remains resolutely
equal to the treatment he’s given. Aside from being the goddamned baron
of Thames Bank, flying daredevil planes and skiing alpine marathons well
into his 70s, the man came from working-class birth to help pioneer
eco-friendly, monumental architecture and also to build London’s
massively comic and beautiful Gherkin, the new German Reichstag dome and
the world’s largest manmade structure (the airport in Beijing). Props
where props are due, people.
It’d be better if: We got
to see some chinks in the shiningly heroic armor. What is public here
was already public, no matter how beautifully captured. MATTHEW
KORFHAGE. WTC, 6 pm Saturday, Feb. 18. C21, 3 pm Monday, Feb. 20.
Trailer:
The Turin Horse Critic’s Score: 75 [HUNGARY] Bela Tarr concludes his
notoriously snail-like career with a 146-minute meditation on the
eventual fate of the whipped horse that Friedrich Nietzsche hugged in
the street just before going mad from syphilis. This death rattle is a
black-and-white beauty, beyond Bergman parody, with a wind that pounds
sand into the grimacing faces of the two doomed peasants who own the
dirt-caked plow animal. There is a recognition that all life will be
snuffed by darkness. There are several minutes of a woman just looking
at potatoes. There are two positions you can take on this. “In the
history of art, late works are the catastrophes,” said Theodor Adorno.
“Why would anybody want to watch a movie where a horse is just dying?”
asked one of my passing co-workers. Why would anyone do anything?
It’d be better if: You wanted to watch a movie where everything is just dying. AARON MESH. C21, 8:15 pm Saturday and 7 pm Tuesday, Feb. 18 & 21.
Trailer:
Footnote Critic’s Score: 80 [ISRAEL] The academic-jealousy comedy is such a rare and delightful sighting (the last good one I can remember is Wonder Boys)
that it magnifies the minor pleasures of this filial scuffle between
Talmud scholars. (The dueling Shkolniks are basically the Archie and
Peyton Manning of Jewish Studies, if Archie kept running back on the
field during Colts games.) Joseph Cedar’s direction has the fluid
ridicule of a Payne or Coen: The brothers would especially relish a
scene of rabbinical sages packed into a filing room like it’s a clown
car. The study in tiptoeing past obvious facts builds to two
confrontations with a heavy named Grossman, a department chair with a
forehead like a basket of pugs.
It’d be better if: Cedar had remembered to write a third act. The anticlimax here rivals that of the Torah. AARON MESH. WH, 8:30 pm Saturday, Feb. 18. C21, 5 pm Sunday, Feb. 19.
Trailer:
SUNDAY, FEB. 19
Pelotero Critic’s Score: 72 [UNITED STATES] In the Dominican Republic, baseball
players are a cash crop. Following two teenage prospects on their way to
harvest—that is, the day they become eligible to sign with an American
club—this doc isn’t exactly Field of Hoop Dreams.
For decades, Major League Baseball treated the island like its own
personal estate sale, picking up all-star talent at bargain prices. Now
that young peloteros (Spanish for
“ballplayers”) are finally wising up to their actual worth, teams are
devising more creative ways to take advantage of their economic
desperation. Devoid of much “for the love of the game” sentimentality, Pelotero
is less inspiring sports doc than geopolitical allegory, presenting pro
ball as not much different from America’s other favorite pastime:
exploiting impoverished nations for their natural resources.
It’d be better if: It delved more into the subjects’ daily lives. Poverty is the backdrop, but it should be in the foreground. MATTHEW SINGER. WH, 2:30 pm Sunday, Feb. 19.
Qarantina Critic’s Score: 47 [IRAQ] There are two narratives running through the post-war Iraqi drama Qarantina.
One revolves around a family enduring constant abuse at the fists of
its patriarch. The other involves a hit man whose crisis of self leads
him back to the university and friends he left behind (some of whom he
also wants to murder). Conveniently, these lives are connected, since
the hit man is lodging with the family. What we get, then, is two
clichéd, half-baked movies in one, both so enamored with depicting
sorrow that nothing else—characters and motivations included—seems to
matter.
It’d be better if: The hit
man and his college buddies decided to lay down their guns and finally
take that spring-break trip to Cancun. AP KRYZA. LM, 2:30 pm Sunday, Feb. 19.
Once Upon a Time in Anatolia Critic’s Score: 95 [TURKEY] If there’s any justice, this is the festival
picture that will leave Portland awed and arguing. As the title hints,
it’s a kind of western: A small-town posse (police chief, prosecutor,
stenographer and coroner) drive by night through the Turkish steppe,
trying to illuminate the shallow grave where a confessed murderer
dropped his victim. Cannes darling Nuri Bilge Ceylan zooms toward his
actors’ weathered, warped faces for Leone-iconic close-ups, but the
showdowns are all internal. There’s a holy moment at the film’s center,
with a candle revealing buried souls, but at dawn comes a grappling with
how much truth any man should be forced to see before it stains him
permanently. A monumental achievement.
It’d be better if: The subtitles offered more nuanced summary of the night’s stream of conversation. AARON MESH. C21, 7:30 pm Sunday, Feb. 19.
Trailer:
MONDAY, FEB. 20
El Sicaro, Room 164 Critic’s Score: 76 [UNITED STATES] The most terrifying type of documentary:
Director Gianfranco Rosi can simply point a microphone and a camera at
his subject and make your blood curdle. Said subject is a black-veiled
Mexican cartel hit man claiming responsibility for some 200 murders in
two decades. He is filmed sitting in a hotel room, sketching his history
coldly in a book as he describes scenes of mass murder like a high
school football coach outlining a new play. Just a killer talking about
his job like any other working stiff. The stoicism is jarring, the
claustrophobic setting a vise. When the killer’s voice breaks while
describing the sensation of strangling innocent women, it’s utterly
suffocating.
It’d be better if: It weren’t real. AP KRYZA. C21, 12:45 pm Monday, Feb. 20.
Trailer:
Elena Critic’s Score: 72 [RUSSIA] Class division is omnipresent in Russian cinema, but Andrei Zvyagintsev’s Elena
excels in finding a unique intersection between the rich and working
class. The film focuses on its titular character (the powerful Nadezhda
Markina), a former nurse whose marriage to wealthy Vladimir (Andrey
Smirnov) is more indentured servitude than marital bliss. Love is there,
but understanding is not. When Vladimir suffers a heart attack and
decides to re-tool his will to prevent Elena from financially aiding her
troubled grandson, she is faced with a daunting moral conundrum. This
is a drama of quiet grief that succeeds due to its sympathetic
performances and overarching sense of uncertainty.
It’d be better if: Philip Glass’ stabbing, Bernard Herrmann-inspired score was more present. AP KRYZA. CM, 5:15 pm Monday, Feb. 20.
Trailer:
Aurora Critic’s Score: 24 [ROMANIA] Director and star Cristi Puiu (The Death of Mr. Lazarescu)
deserves credit: Only a filmmaker wholly committed to his storytelling
style could mold the tale of a mentally unstable man balancing his dull
life with multiple murders into such an overlong, pretentious and dull
effort. We watch Puiu walk around, take a shower, clean his apartment,
go shopping, sit at his desk, kill a guy, walk around, talk to his kid,
visit his mom, walk around, kill a couple, wander, visit a friend and
talk to some cops. For three hours. This is part two of a planned
six-part series that will become essential viewing for insomnia
patients.
It’d be better if: It were 140 minutes shorter. AP KRYZA. LM, 6 pm Monday, Feb. 20.
Trailer:
TUESDAY, FEB. 21
Life Without Principle Critic’s Score: 71 [HONG KONG] Who’d like the global
economic meltdown to feel more like an ’80s erotic thriller? Yeah, me
too. So would bullet-symphony conductor Johnnie To (Triad Election, Vengeance),
who has made a financial message movie that bemoans bank speculation
and investor greed—until it gets distracted by the slaying of a loan
shark with a greasy comb-over. It’s brassily lurid and
characteristically overblown (the title pun could be Unnatural Interest or Toxic Assets),
but that’s also its virtue: Instead of pious speeches about how “this
country used to make things,” we get a broker screaming at the stock
market to keep dropping, while he clutches the bejeweled fire poker
stabbed through his heart.
It’d be better if: The soundtrack was all synth and Mario dying sounds. AARON MESH. LM, 6:15 pm Tuesday, Feb. 21.
