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NEW DIRECTORS/NEW FILMS 2002 Send This Review to a Friend
As always, the annual New Directors/New Films series includes noteworthy films that reveal important new talent and offset those that are less than exciting. This year's event (March 22-April 7, 2002), presented as usual by The Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art, ran true to form. It scored an unusual coup by showing THE FAST RUNNER (ATANARJUAT), a monumental job of filmmaking set in the Arctic, spoken in the Inuktitut language and, save for a lead actor, casting non-professionals in the drama that is based on an Inuit legend. The visually splendid work recalls the classic 1922 documentary "Nanook of the North," only this is a drama, yet one with a feeling of utter reality.
"The Fast Runner," due for commercial release by Lot 47 Films, has been directed by Zacharias Kunuk from a screenplay by the late Paul Apak Angilirq, and the extraordinary cinematography that so vividly captures the look of this frigid part of the world is by Norman Cohn. The film was shot in the community of Igloolik, where about 1200 people live on a small island in the Canadian Arctic. The landscape, with all of the sea ice and the forbidding rocky terrain, virtually becomes a character in the film, and the need to build winter refuges to survive and the daily struggle for minimal existence add to the film's portrait of life under these demanding circumstances.
Against this background the tale unfolds about groups of nomads locked in struggles for power and rivalry over women. While we are made privy to the everyday lives of the characters, probably the most fascinating aspect of the film, we also follow the actions of loyalty and betrayal, including murder. When director Kunuk was present at the series to help promote the film, he said that there was only one professional actor, Natar Ungalaaq, who has the title role of Atanarjuat. The rest, the director said, were not experienced, and it is astonishing how well Kunuk succeeded in making them all so convincing. The film is nearly three hours long, but that should not deter anyone, as the experience of watching this movie is so compelling that the time passes more quickly than it does for many a film half its length.
A worthy film of a less spectacular nature is writer-director Achero Manas's EL BOLA, a gem made in Spain. From the moment it starts with adolescents playing chicken by seeing who can retrieve a bottle from railroad tracks seconds before an oncoming train passes, the film becomes riveting. At the center is a situation of child abuse, but there's much more.
El Bola is the name of the boy who's the protagonist (Juan Jose Ballesta), who gets the nickname Pellet from his habit of toying with a ball bearing. At school he meets a new friend, Alfredo (Pablo Galan), and the film nicely depicts the comradeship that develops between them. Bolo is closed-mouthed about his home life, where his abusive father beats him out of unrelieved anger and perhaps frustration and guilt at the previous loss of a son, who may also have been beaten.
Bolo finds comfort in Pablo's home, but things become very complicated, as their efforts at intervention lead to problems as Pablo's life heads further and further into crisis. Manas directs with admirable assurance in his first feature, which packs power at every turn even when it is being understated, and the performances are uniformly effective.
Another accomplished film is DOG DAYS (HUNTSTAGE), director Ulrich Seidl's unsettling film from Austria. It is summertime and a merciless look at assorted lives reveals how messed up so many people are in Seidl's vision (co--scripted with Veronika Franz) of people in his home country. Outwardly folks seem to be leading conventional lives in conventional housing complexes. But behind the scenes--oh brother!
A young one-time beauty queen is subjected to repeat brutality by her boyfriends. A couple are divorced but still live together and separately visit the place where their child was killed. A teacher gets involved with two men in an episode that sparks violence. A paunchy, aging widower gets his plain-looking housekeeper to put on his late wife's clothes, dance teasingly for him and have sex. A crazy, compulsive woman hitchhikes and drives whomever she meets batty with her incessant recitation of assorted top ten lists about life. And so on. A nasty mood permeates the very cynical film, which for that very reason manages to be entertaining in its observations and attitudes.
The area around the Afghanistan-Iran border is the scene for Abolfazl Jalili's DELBARAN, which gets under the skin in focusing on the life of a 14-year-old boy named Kaim, an illegal Afghan immigrant in Iran, who tries to live as best he can by working at an inn and running errands. There are ever-present threats from the authorities and from robbers who prey on whomever they find vulnerable.
Life is hard and precarious, and "Delbaran" succeeds in painting an uncompromising picture of the youngster's arduous existence. One is made to admire Kaim's stamina and much sympathy for him is generated. Jalili takes a low key approach and the quiet style makes the dramatic details all the more potent.
TRULY HUMAN, another of the Dogma films from Denmark, works partially as an entertaining fantasy, although it is too precious by far. But its premise is interesting and often worked out amusingly. Written and directed by Ake Sandgren, the film concerns seven-year-old Lisa, who, neglected by her busy parents, has conjured up an imaginary friend who lives in the walls of her house. When Lisa dies as a result of an auto accident and the building is torn down, the friend known as P (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) escapes from the wall. There's humor and some pathos as he struggles to become a real person.
For example, he naturally is attracted to children--after all, he was Lisa's imaginary pal--but in the world that really exists his innocent actions can easily be taken as child molestation. The final rosy resolution for Lisa's family and the eventual fate of P are a bit much, but there is a jaunty quality to 'Truly Human" that makes it audience-friendly.
LATE MARRIAGE, a French-Israeli co-production written and directed by Dover Kosashvili and Israel's submission for the 2002 Oscar competition, provides an intimate view of rigid immigrant family attitudes that impinge on the life of a mama's boy when he becomes involved with a divorcee who has a child and is not the virgin from a substantial family that his parents want him to wed.
Zaza, the son (Lior Louis Ashkenazi), is 31, and he is in love and having sex with Judith (Ronit Elkabetz), but he has to keep it a secret, which is beginning to anger her. Meanwhile, he goes along with the endless number of meetings his family arranges for him to meet eligible young girls. The situation is basically funny as the mother, steeped in the tradition of her background in Georgia, indulges in superstition to help the quest along. The film is stacked against the parents, as the mother is fat and unappealing, as is the other relative who joins in the battle against Judith when they learn the score. One roots for Zaza, who needs plenty of rooting for because he is such a wimp. But the family bonds are strong and for a son to go against his parents is a tall order.
How the situation is worked out is enlightening and the result is surely one that can't please everybody in an audience. But "Late Marriage" is one of the better works to come out of the New Directors/New Films--and of Israel.
THE SLAUGHTER RULE, an American film written and directed by Andrew and Alex Smith, is a very accomplished work in terms of filmmaking talent and acting. But its main characters are wracked with pain; they're hurting so much that one needs stamina to watch their lives unfold. Set in Montana, "The Slaughter Rule" gains from an exquisite job of cinematography of Eric Edwards, who integrates the Montana landscapes and rural settings with the story in ways that help give the dramatic portrayals extra credibility.
David Morse is terrific actor, and he acts his guts out as Gideon Ferguson, a football coach who lives by a macho code of physicality, but is deeply hurting for reasons that must eventually be revealed. His protege is young Roy Chutney, played with equal talent by Ryan Gosling, who is cut from his high school team and joins coach Ferguson's contingent, a six-man regional team. There are homosexual underpinnings to Ferguson's attention to Roy, whom he takes under his wing in fatherly fashion.
Ferguson is a complicated man, and Morse makes the most of the character, and Gosling is a complicated youth, who has his own problems to solve. Clea Duvall has a key role as Skyla, the woman who works in a bar and with whom Roy is initiated into the ways of love and sex. But there is so much pain in "The Slaughter Rule" that the film becomes tough to endure at times, especially when violence kicks in.
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