Two of the highlights of this year’s SFIFF were the LGBTQ coming-of-ager Bad Hair and Kelly Reichardt’s environmental terrorism thriller, Night Moves.
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Film Festivals
SFIFF Film Review: Yossi Aviram’s La Dune is a story of two broken men
Yossi Aviram’s directorial debut, which he also penned, is a quiet story of two broken men — a father and his estranged son — who are always shot as lonely figures against a vast, beautiful landscape. Aviram began his career as a cinematographer and here, working with Antoine Héberié, who shot the equally gorgeous Jellyfish, he creates a world full of stunning panoramas, from the Bordeaux countryside to the Isreali desert, that his central characters are too detached from to truly appreciate.
When La Dune begins, Hanoch (Lior Ashkenazi) is driving his bike to the stunning dune of the title, in Israel, where he stands in deep contemplation. It’s there that he makes an important life decision, which only proves to his girlfriend that he’s even more screwed up than she had thought. The end of their relationship sends Hanoch to France, where he silently follows around an old man, Reuven (Niel Arestrup), a Paris Police officer in the Missing Person unit who it seems is his biological dad: they both share a passion for chess and bicycles.
Hanoch’s silence and Reuven’s inability to recognize him, even as Hanoch forces himself to cross paths with him, suggests Reuven abandoned Hanoch early on. Aviram subtly hints at what might have happened by showing us Reuven’s life now. He lives with his lover, another man (Guy Marchand), and we can surmise that being gay at the time Hanoch was a child, and from North Africa no less, would not have been an easy situation. Could that be what made him leave? He’s also a reserved man who has never forged any real personal ties to anyone other than his partner and his dog. And Aviram subtly suggests that Reuven’s choice of profession may be far from coincidental.
It is, however, useful as a plot device. When Hanoch constructs an elaborate plot to make himself the subject of a Missing Person case, laying the breadcrumbs out for his father to pique his interest, it’s only a matter of time before they’re forced to confront each other. The biggest surprise may be how sympathetic Reuven proves to be, thanks to a sensitive performance from Arestrup, given that he couldn’t even recognize his own son.
Unfortunately, just as the film seems to be getting going, where the possibility for the men to change is imminent, it ends. Aviram excels at suggesting what might have caused both men to become so damaged, but he shies away from exploring it in any detail or depth. The two leads barely exchange more than a few words, which is a shame, because the brief time we do see Hanoch and Reuven together – each played by icons of French and Israeli cinema – is electric. We’re left with a film that has so much potential that it never quite reaches.
Review: Of Horses and Men and Club Sandwich
Two of my SFIFF favourites, Of Horses and Men and Club Sandwich, have not been picked up for US distribution, but will screen once more at the festival. Catch them on the big screen while you can.
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SFIFF Day 2: From Romania to Argentina on the big screen
When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism
The best argument for shooting on celluloid in the digital age gets made in the Romanian film When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism, which screened Friday at SFIFF. In the first scene, Paul (Bogdan Dumitrache), a young director, explains that he prefers film because it has the built in constraint that a film roll can only capture eleven minutes, meaning any uncut section of it can’t surpass this limit. As Bucharest is also shot on film, there’s a comfort in knowing that a slow or awkward scene can’t go on forever, as it might if it were shot digitally. Writer-director Corneliu Porumbolu favours long takes with a still camera and abrupt aesthetic changes between scenes – from the black of night to a white room in bright daylight – to keep us acutely aware that we’re watching a film and a scene change.
We may be watching minutiae – Paul smoking a cigarette, or having a tame conversation with the actress in his film with whom he’s having an affair, Alina (Diana Avramut) – but Porumbolu keeps us acutely aware that it is highly curated. This is a very meta film, with each scene instructing you how to watch the next, or forcing you to revise how you interpreted the previous one. And Porumbolu finds compelling ways to pass the time. Whether it’s the in-depth discussion between Paul and Alina about her character’s motivation while rehearsing a silent scene, which seems like an excuse for gratuitous nudity, or an exasperating argument about whether the utensils used to eat food in a given country influence its cuisine.
Fed Up
Next, I saw Fed Up, the engrossing American documentary about the obesity epidemic, which premiered at Sundance in January. Director Stephanie Soechtig and the film’s scientific advisor stuck around for a Q&A after the screening. The film will appeal to the same audience that enjoys the self-righteous indignation that accompanies any Michael Moore film. The film’s prime focus is in sparking outrage about how obesity is affecting our youth and how big processed food companies are largely to blame, along with the US government’s inability to stand up to the food lobby.
Ironically, the nationwide school lunch program, a relic of post-World War II legislation, created to circumvent the malnutrition that led to so many men being rejected from the army, is a major culprit: schools feed children junk food, because it’s highly subsidized by the companies that provide it. This sparks a life-long addiction to sugar, which is even more addictive than cocaine. But the film doesn’t dig deep enough to look at the underlying structures of American society that enable all of this to happen: would universal public health care change the government’s willingness to legislate to prevent high medical costs going forward?
The Reconstruction
Much like When Evening Falls On Bucharest, I don’t think I would have been able to make it through Argentinian drama The Reconstruction on a television: they both take their time so the big screen and the intense focus you get from being in a cinema with an audience are necessary. What a treat it was to see them both in beautiful digital projection at the New People Cinema in San Francisco. Given its title and central character —Eduardo (Diego Peretti) is a notorious curmudgeon, who finds himself in Patagonia helping out a friend and his family who are going through a difficult time — where The Reconstruction is headed is obvious: by interacting with his friend’s wife and daughters, the gruff and taciturn Eduardo will soften.
But director Juan Taraturo finds something deeper and touching along the way: Eduardo has much pain, which has led him to keep his emotions bottled up. When he finally unleashes them and deals with them, it’s surprising and rewarding how vulnerable he becomes. Set in the winter in a scenic tourist town in the Patagonia region in southern Argentina, this cold but beautiful place proves the perfect destination to warm some hearts, including ours. The Reconstruction was not without its flaws, like some cliched plot devices: Eduardo is about to leave the family in the middle of a crisis, driving back home, only to change his mind and make a literal U-Turn. It may take its time, but The Reconstruction will ultimately win you over, even if it’s a fairly minor work
Hossein Amini’s The Two Faces of January kicks off SFIFF with style
The Two Faces of January kicked off the 2014 San Francisco International Film Festival with style, including a Q&A with writer-director Hossein Amini.
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SFIFF capsules: It’s a hard knock life for the rich – Last Weekend and Palo Alto
Two of the San Francisco International Film Festival’s most anticipated films — The Centerpiece Film Palo Alto and the World Premiere of Last Weekend — both deal with the woes of the rich. They’re also made by Hollywood royalty: writer-director Gia Coppola, who directed Palo Alto” is the grand-daughter of director Frances Ford Coppola and Tom Dolby, who co-directed The Last Weekend, is the son of Ray Dolby. Both films feature some great performances, which soften these otherwise frustratingly privileged characters: more money, more problems. Here’s a first look at both films.
Last Weekend
So much great acting is wasted on this pointless film about the woes of the very rich. When an aging matriarch (Patricia Clarkson, radiant) decides to sell her summer house in Tahoe for no good reason – they don’t need the money but somehow the sale will make them better people – she invites her adult sons and their partners home for a last Labor Day weekend. There’s insight here about how the children manage their respective issues. The eldest son, Theo (Zachary Booth), brings home a working-class boyfriend, Luke (Devon Graye), perhaps as a buffer or to make a statement, and finds himself almost having to deal with the fact that he also brought a person who might not be impressed by Theo’s unchecked privilege. The younger son is reeling from a recent business mistake and finds himself taking it out on his family by acting with inflated self-righteousness. I was reminded throughout of Olivier Assayas’s significantly better film, Summer Hours, which also concerns the sale of a summer house so tied to childhood memories, but where the characters in Assayas’s film acted with poise and maturity, those in Last Weekend come off petty and often annoying.
Screens May 2 @ 6:30PM at the Sundance Kabuki and May 5 @ 1PM at New People Cinema. Directors Tom Dolby and Tom Williams, as well as several cast-members will attend the May 2 screening.
Palo Alto
For a film that takes its title from the California suburb, Palo Alto, it couldn’t be less geographically specific. It doesn’t even look like Palo Alto as it was shot outside Los Angeles. Based on the book of short stories by James Franco, writer-director Gia Coppola has crafted a film about the moments – and mistakes – that define adolescence. What Coppola gets right is how the teenagers find themselves in situations without necessarily purposefully getting themselves there, whether it’s engaging in sexual relations or falling in with the wrong friends, because they were too insecure to go for what they really wanted. Yet the idea that the children of the rich are under-parented and oversexed is hardly a new one: the television series Gossip Girl handled it with intelligence and nuance, always contextualizing the behaviour. Coppola’s film is mostly concerned with romanticizing the stupidity of adolescence: smoking with friends, dancing at parties, inappropriate sex. Just because the kids can’t make sense of their acting out doesn’t mean the film shouldn’t try to.
Screens May 3 at 7:30PM at the Sundance Kabuki. All advance tickets are sold out, but you can join the rush line to gain last-minute entry. Writer-Director Gia Coppola will be in attendance.