May heralds the 31st edition of the Seattle International Film Festival (really the 30th, but the 13th was superstitiously skipped), and that three-decade anniversary makes me realize that - tempus fugit! - half my life has been spent under SIFF's annual influence one way or another. From holing up for a month with movies from all over the world, to reviewing fest films, to participating in panels and juries, to serving on the selection committee, mounting tributes and even editing the doorstop program, my on-again, off-again relationship with Seattle's premier cinematic extravaganza has been multifaceted. Even during the 10 years-plus I adventured in Manhattan, where I helped choose films for the highly selective New York Film Festival, I regularly headed back to Rain City for a taste of SIFF's omnivorous slate.
One of my warmest SIFF memories is from 1996, when festival co-founder Dan Ireland's "The Whole Wide World" was Opening Night film. Directorial debuts by old friends can be tricky for film critics, so being unequivocally knocked out by "World" and its stars Vincent D'Onofrio and Renée Zellweger was sheer delight. Back in New York, Richard Jameson (then editor of Film Comment magazine) and I talked up the film and loaned our tape to doyen-of-film-critics Andrew Sarris, who promptly made it number two on his annual 10 Best list.
But festivals, like people, age. In recent years SIFF hasn't always aroused that anticipatory zing! we hope to feel at the beginning of another monthlong cinematic orgy. Maybe every longtime relationship breeds familiarity, that sense of not-so-bright, not-so-shiny, but the fest sendoff in last Friday's Seattle P-I barely skirted "ho-hum, here we go again," and the Times launched the season with a juicy remembrance of things past rather than concentrate on things immediately ahead. (A smart young film reviewer once told me that even amicable criticism is rarely leveled at SIFF because Seattle's mantra is "It's our film festival, so it's A-OK.")
Most major festivals - Toronto, New York, Sundance, Cannes - have an idiosyncratic shape, mission, identity, something they stand for and do better than any of their peers. SIFF sports many sexy parts: samples from international New Waves, Emerging Masters, tributes, Fly Filmmaking, the absurdly named Spawned in Seattle program (the title was my own joking suggestion a few years back, so I'm allowed to diss it!), forums and panels, a huge shorts program and more. But is it possible that with fewer parts and a more selectively shaped whole, SIFF 2005 might look like a gourmet restaurant instead of an all-you-can-eat joint?
Speaking of sexy but puzzling parts, how did actor Peter Sarsgaard come to be chosen as recipient of a career tribute when he's barely had a career? Word is he's meant to appeal to "a younger demographic," but that rationale nullifies the whole concept of tribute. First noticed a scant six years ago in "Boys Don't Cry," Sarsgaard is clearly a comer, delivering increasingly impressive performances in "Shattered Glass" (2003), "Kinsey" (2004) and now the SIFF-featured "The Dying Gaul." But candidate for tribute?
Tribute might more reasonably be paid to Joan Allen, a veteran actress who's on board in Sally Potter's "Yes" as well as one of SIFF's Afternoon Conversations. In a two-decade career Allen has brought remarkable class and intelligence to her every film, no matter how minor or flawed. Or what about the Northwest's own Gus Van Sant, whose "Last Days" - a Kurt Cobain-inspired meditation variously described as "vacuous exercise" and "secular Gen-X Passion Play" - closes SIFF? His outstanding oeuvre spans a couple of decades, as well as mainstream and indie success. Is Seattle's "younger demographic" so cinematically ill-informed that they wouldn't queue up to pay homage to international faves (and SIFF-featured) François Ozon ("5X2") or Michael Winterbottom ("9 Songs"), both of whom have rich and extensive filmographies? And what about venerable Werner Herzog, whose doc "Grizzly Man" reportedly shows him back at the top of his game? Might it not be an opportune moment to reintroduce some of his mad, beautiful movies about obsessives and visionaries?
But the nod has gone to Sarsgaard, undeniably superb in "The Dying Gaul," adapted from a play by Craig Lucas, who debuts as director. A vulnerable young screenwriter whose longtime lover has just died, Robert (Sarsgaard) sells his script to a glib studio exec (Campbell Scott) for a cool million, agreeing to change - for the sake of box office - his AIDS-afflicted protagonist from Maurice to Maggie. Soon bisexual Jeffrey has fallen hard for Robert, while his wife Elaine (Patricia Clarkson), a frustrated writer herself, dotes on the boy's unspoiled talent.
To the eye and ear, this La-La Land power couple is as smooth and shiny as the glass house and pool that constitute their nearly sci-fi habitat. For Elaine, true intimacy comes in playing chatroom avatar, an all-knowing angel who generates both good and terrible ill in conversations with an unknowing Robert. Emotions shift like light over Clarkson's face as she deeply touches and is touched through their virtual exchange. This is acting so achingly genuine you almost have to look away for relief. (Come to think of it, why not a tribute to Clarkson's glorious and prolific career?) But chatroom intercourse can shatter glass, and Robert - only apparently innocent - surprises us with awful survival skills as he turns a cold eye on orchestrated destruction.
Ultimately, watching "The Dying Gaul" is like gazing into a sunlit terrarium to spy on an exotic species: a little too much artifice and containment, but never less than fascinating.
Acclaimed performance artist Miranda July wrote, directed and stars in "Me and You and Everybody We Know," SIFF's spot-on choice for Opening Night (May 19). July's first feature is a feel-good, funny movie that celebrates eccentric humankind without selling out to sappiness.
In emulation of "Short Cuts" and "Magnolia," "Me" is comprised of a series of intersecting suburban stories that feature folks trying like the devil to make some kind of electric connection: a shoe salesman ("Deadwood"'s hardware storekeeper John Hawkes) who sets his hand on fire when his wife leaves him; his two wonderfully deadpan sons, an adolescent and an adorable 7-year-old, each of whom dips into the world of sex in sad, silly ways; a ditsy video artist (July) with a crush on the shoe salesman; two superficially worldly teens exchanging escalating sexual fantasies with a middle-aged loner, et al.
"Me" gives off such sweet vibes, it seems like carping to suggest that at times the whimsy goes a tad too twee. And even though July adds some obligatory bitter bits to her cinematic angel food, the sharp edges of reality seem a little more blurred than is safe.
Some other first week recommendations:
* "The Holy Girl": Back in 2001, Lucretia Martel's "La Cienaga" ("The Swamp") served noticed that Argentine cinema was alive and well. In it, Martel skewered a self-absorbed bourgeoisie by dramatizing the primitivism of a well-to-do family stewing through the summer in their country home. Now, in "The Holy Girl," her universally praised sophomore effort, Martel anatomizes religious and sexual erotics through the ambiguous relationship between a teen and the middle-aged doctor who molests her.
* "3-Iron": How is it that Asian directors like Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Ki-duk Kim have become such masters of the menace and magic that can be mined from ordinary spaces? Kim's shivery, nearly silent "3-Iron" follows a beautiful boy on a motor bike who delivers restaurant ads to doorsteps. When a house is obviously unoccupied, he jiggers the lock, entering other people's space to make himself at home for a day or a night, ritually washing his clothes, snapping photos of himself and tampering with a clock or bathroom scales. He's a ghostly Peter Pan, living on the margins of the adult world, leaving small signals that not everything can be measured or controlled.
The boy finds himself partnered with a lovely woman fleeing an abusive husband, and the duo drift through the oddly empty, increasingly dread-filled city, falling slowly into love. It's as though their bond makes this Peter and Wendy visible, and they're soon brutally parted by punitive grown-ups. Heading into madness or the supernatural - which, is irrelevant - "3-Iron" shows that the dreamlife of angels can transform mundane, inimical spaces into heaven.
* "The Aristocrats": Exiting the press screening of this egregiously offensive doc about a classic dirty joke told in comedian circles since vaudeville days, I overheard a tender young woman exclaim, "I feel violated!" Whether she was kidding or waxing ironic, "The Aristocrats" is sure to be too much for anyone righteously armored up in P.C. The joke consists of intro and punchline - "The Aristocrats" - and the film invites a coven of comics to offer their versions of what comes in between.
A matter of individual taste and style, like riffs on a jazz theme, these bluest of blue rants dive deep into sexual perversity, the scatological, whatever's most toxic to any sacred cow you can conceive of. The thing escalates into liberating hilarity - if you can let yourself go. Participating comics include Bill Maher, Bob Saget, Robin Williams, Whoopi Goldberg, Jason Alexander, Sarah Silverman, Jon Stewart, Howie Mandel, Lewis Black, George Carlin and many, many others. But it's screaming Gilbert Gottfried who scores highest, with the exorcising version he rendered at a New York roast just days after 9/11.
Don't miss "2046," Wong Kar-wai's latest excursion into erotic style, reuniting Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung from his "In the Mood for Love," along with gorgeous Gong Li. And Gillo Pontecorvo's beautifully photographed "Quemada" ("Burn!"), spiritual 1970 sequel to his "Battle of Algiers," is a timely, if flawed, take on nation building and breaking. Marlon Brando plays a British mercenary hired to radicalize a black slave into heading up a phony revolution, designed to kick one colonial power off the island of Quemada so that another can take over. One of those fallen idealists who's more voyeur than man of action, Brando is eventually charged with destroying his own creation, who has come to believe that "Freedom is something only you must take. If the Man gives you freedom, it is not freedom." Hope no Iraqis are watching.
Sally ("Orlando") Potter brings "Yes" to the fest, occasioning the estimable Joan Allen's visit. In this critically panned marriage of politics and sex, an Irish-American molecular biologist (Allen), out of love with her husband (Sam Neill), notices a Lebanese waiter at a dinner and beds him. To add symbolic weight to the affair (empathic Western imperialist hooking up with emotionally repressed, politically oppressed Middle Easterner), the two are known only as "He" and "She" and address each other in rhyming couplets. If "The Tango Lesson" was an exercise in Sally solipsism, "Yes" may be yet another production locked inside the theater of Potter's mind.
In coming weeks, look for Ingmar Bergman's "Saraband," the three-decades-later sequel to "Scenes From a Marriage"; "After the Day Before" (2004) and "The Long Twilight" (1997), two haunting films by Emerging Master Attila Janisch; Olivier Assayas' "Clean" (with fabulous Maggie Cheung); Hiyao Miyazaki's latest visionary animation, "Howl's Moving Castle"; Arnaud ("My Sex Life...") Desplechin's "Kings and Queen"; Xu Jinglei's China variation on Max Ophuls' 1948 masterpiece "Letter from an Unknown Woman"; Irish director Paddy Breathnach's "Man About Dog"; and Apichatpong Weerasethakul's much-admired "Tropical Malady" (2004). Detailed comments to come.
[[In-content Ad]]
