ITALIAN FILM FESTIVAL 2017

Another Italian Film Festival. This one had the usual down side of these National Events - ticket prices the size of the Hawaiian national debt and getting an indigestible year’s supply of one country’s film force fed in one brief period. The Spaniards set the bar high this year and thirty offerings from their Mediterranean neighbours could have been an anti climax - an oversize order of movie pasta or a child's portion of the Euro feast we don't get invited to?

However I’d been out of the country while the last couple were running and I started finding unexpected advantages. Repeat appearances meant recognising their stars and featured players. I even began to resurrect my near to forgotten Italian.

Regional differences register more striking than those in work from other countries. Naples got a really good work out. The picturesque  streets young Gennaro Guazzi shows the girl class mate he hankers for in Troppo Napolitano are  barely recognisable as those where two and three wheel traffic jostles elderly Renato Capentier in Tenderezza. Elio Germano observes that you have to be born there to appreciate the city. The event threw up a portrait of  Italy itself, the contemporary subjects, showing the country struggling with recession, echoed stories from earlier periods.  Norman Lewis’ autobiography turned into the compilation documentary Napoli ‘44  ends with the population of the devastated WW2 city rewarded with a democracy which permits them to chose leaders among the powerful men they know to be corrupt. Also WW2 set In guerra per amore shows Sicily where a mafioso mayor proudly declaims that they have outlasted conquerors and governments. It matches alarmingly  with the present day set L’ora legale.  L’estate addosso spells it out. Their American hosts express admiration for the country and the Italians say that yes but they do have corruption, environmental outrages and Mafia - curiously the problems current Chinese films describe.

Of course there is no guarantee that a country’s cinema represent it accurately and a thirty film event may not even represent it’s movies. We didn’t score any gentlemen in frock coats promoting Garibaldi to the strains of Giuseppe Verdi or slashers in party masks preying on the runway girls.  Promising new titles didn’t make the cut - Marco Tullio Giordana’s Two Soldiers, Paolo Virzi’s La pazza gioia, Davide Barletti and Lorenzo Conte’s La guerra dei cafoni, Giuseppe Tornatore’s La corrispondenza, Alessandro Aronadio’s Orecchie and Marco Bellocchio’s Fai bei sogni. Pupi Avati has been out of contention making television and Gabriele Salvatores' The Invisible Boy is still finalising.

Heading up the charge as predicted, Gianni Amelio’s impressive Tenerezza: Holding Hands / Tenderness must be rated among the best films of the moment.

With a  body of work that includes Porte Aperte and Lamerica, two of the most imposing European films of the last decades, Amelio was going to be the front runner. This one is not a big statement like those. It’s a careful account of the life of retired Neapolitan lawyer Amelio regular support player Renato Carpentieri, first found faking unconsciousness in hospital with daughter Giovanna Mezzogiorno in attendance. Once she leaves, he pulls out his drips and goes off.

Renato Capentier & Elo Germano Tenerezza

He makes his way back to his third floor courtyard apartment only to find neighbour Micaela Ramazzotti (Anni Felici) locked out on the stairs. Letting her into her area, which was once part of his flat, starts off the business of him being drawn into the life of her family, husband Elio Germano (La nostra vita) and the two children who use the shared courtyard to investigate his home.

With a  body of work that includes Porte Aperte and Lamerica, two of the most imposing
European films of the last decades, Amelio was going to be the front runner. This one is not a big statement like those. It’s a careful account of the life of retired Neapolitan lawyer Amelio regular support player Renato Carpentieri, first found faking unconsciousness in hospital with daughter Giovanna Mezzogiorno in attendance. Once she leaves, he pulls out his drips and goes off.

He makes his way back to his third floor courtyard apartment only to find neighbour the appealing Micaela Ramazzotti locked out on the stairs. Letting her into her area, which was once part of his flat, starts off the business of him being drawn into the life of her family, husband Elio Germano and the two children who use the shared courtyard to investigate his home.

The film has been running an hour before it really takes shape but this holds attention  as much as the shock turn of events that fills up the courtyard with spinning blue light Polizia vans and ambulances. Devastated Carpentieri attempts to intervene. Greta Scacchi’s brief appearance kicks off with a total shock and shows the actress totally on top of her material, making a key contribution.

This one works on the opposite proposition to most screen writing. They don’t work up your sympathy for the characters by having people say how much they admire them. The Carabiniere and the hospital orderly knew Carpentieri in his ambulance chasing days and are contemptuous. Mezzogiorno asks whether he was honest and his law clerk tells her “It’s hard to be a good lawyer and honest too.” His former mistress holds a grudge against him and his son is more interested in helping himself to the currency notes the old man hides around the flat in books than in his problems. Mezzogiorno’s own child doesn’t much like her and the first time we see her at work she’s ratting out the Arab prisoner in the glassed in court room dock she’s translating for.

 Tenerezza : Carpenteri, Amelio & Ramagozzi 

By the time we get to the end of the film we know a lot more about her because we understand - and like - him. That’s an impressive achievement.

The film making is exemplary. The camerawork is Luca Bigazzi in top form and accordingly exceptional. Editor Simona Paggi is a front runner too with the film’s ellipses
striking - the outcome of Germani’s meeting with the peddler whose scene has been filmed disturbingly too close in a film where the placement of camera has been exemplary or the discovery of the toy fire engine. Sound recording, normally a given, achieves distinction establishing the atmosphere of the roofed open space galleria or the busy streets in a way which cements conviction.

It’s rare to find a film with such a complex argument that holds attention for two hours and avoids all the pitfalls of sentiment - and cynicism. I would class this one as must see.

Interestingly what is basically a relationships piece is one of the few films in the event to treat the problem of immigrants, though Sole, cuore, amore does have a nice exchange with Isabella Ragonese who is surprised that her ethnic offsider enjoys male pin ups and is told “There are a billion Arabs don’t expect them all to be idiots.”

Recycled comedy formulas dominated the comedy entries. Having Massimo Gaudioso’s Un paese quasi perfetto / Almost Perfect Town shift Jean-François Pouliot’s 2003 Canadian La grande séduction / Seducing Dr. Lewis  to Pietramezzana, a poor village in the Lucan Dolomites, emphasises their resemblance to Benvenuti Al Sud  (2010) and Reality (2012) both written by Gaudioso and pivoting on an orchestrated fantasy that gets out of hand.

I found the basic deception off-putting at first but the skilled comic performances and affectionately handled characters win out. Silvio Orlandi (The Young Pope) is punching below his weight here but he shows his skill in making endearing the desperation he brings to the mad scheme to attract a company to the town where the out of work mining community now exists on unemployment pay-outs and his roof leaks, despite his collecting a second dole for a dead associate.

The plan to recruit city plastic surgeon Fabio Volo (hijacked to avoid a dope conviction for his lady friend pulled over by one of the town’s former citizens now a traffic cop) consists of a succession of  frauds of varying ingenuity and comic appeal - faking a local cricket team though he can’t account for both teams cheering at the end of the season (“They’re very sporting”) and  they switch the TV to the soccer the moment the leaves the bar, dropping bank notes in the streets near  bicycle, having the town’s one restaurant serve sushi and inventing a lost offspring for Orlandi that the orphan doctor can relate to.
His conversations are monitored on the old mine switchboard with the listeners wondering about all the train innuendo.

There is even a quite touching scene where the aged patient sleeps clutching Volo’s hand.

The way the situation is turned round for the finale is more inventive and more winning than the earlier film and this one does work in making the community the focus for our sympathy. They make an interesting contrast to the conniving Sicilians in L’Ora Legale  It’s The Law. Both films deploy A feature talent on a low comedy subject though their aims are opposite.

l'ora legale : Ficarra & Picone

L'ora legale / It’s the Law comes from the comedian team Ficarra & Picone and also relates to the other comic films in the event. It shows Pietrammare, a fictitious coastal town in Sicily, actually filmed in Palermo’s Termini Imerese where Cinema Paradiso was shot.

We kick off with local priest  Leo Gullotta muttering when he stands in doggy do on the
picturesque stone steps. The streets are full of uncontrolled traffic and the town’s rough
neck is collecting a fee for watching the vehicles parking illegally in the square where the church dwarfs the town hall. Corrupt mayor, the imposing Tony Sperandeo is pork barrelling his way to re-election. The mourners in a funeral procession each carry one of his white plastic bags of gift groceries.

His only opposition is school teacher Vincenzo Amato (also in Boarwalk Empire and  Sicilian Ghost Story) running on a clean government platform. One of the comic leads runs a speaker van supporting him while the other one drives one supporting Sperandeo. They are both members of the same extended family which provides would-be comic family meals. There is however an upset and the Polizia financiale take away Sperandeo handing the election to Amato. Nice scene of him saying good bye to his pupils.

This is initially a cause of rejoicing but Amato’s office fills with a line of petitioners who find that the network of perks that sustains them has unravelled. The Padre’s Bed and Breakfast has to pay tax, the police have to write up fines on their neighbours for the first time in thirty years and the civil servants have to actually spend time at their desks ruining the cafes where they used to pass their day. Even the forest rangers have to go out into the woods.

There are some dire routines with the leads incriminating one another by putting recyclables in the wrong bins at night and making animal noises to account for the noise they make. The outraged citizens call a town meeting in the church, where the woman who made a point of keeping one of  Amato’s election leaflets to reproach him for unkept promises, produces it to list the reforms he has actually enacted. Only one man speaks out saying how much more agreeable the ordered streets have become and they turn on him.

Amato’s sister finds the shops will no longer serve her and her job at the factory whose poisonous effluent has pushed up the town’s death rate is closed for not meeting environmental standards. Her co workers won’t speak to her. The citizens determine to act against the reformer.

The job of intimidating Amato falls to the dire duo who we find in a Dexter style plastic covered room with a chain saw to cut the head off a horse to leave in his bed. They can’t bring themselves to do that or behead a goat or a bunny and the wives complain about the zoo accumulating in their front gardens, so the boys use the head of a sword fish  (an expensive buy) and Amato turns it into pasta sauce. They build an unauthorised extension with the materials from the fake Greek Gazebo they couldn’t get a permit for and a bit of probing finally exposes Amato’s weakness.

The mob forms in the square demanding his resignation with a choreographed Mexican wave. However the boys riding double on the horse have retrieved his daughter who makes a stirring speech on the steps of the Municipo with Amato coming out and adding his own convincing appeal.

The mob turn on them savagely. Sperandeo is restored to the delight of all.

This is not the outcome we expected for this piece of knockabout and the point is made in a coda with the one supporter bound in a chair facing Alessandro Roja who is clearly meant to be a Mafia enforcer though they call him a Roman politician. He explains he’s not a bad person.

As for Ficarra & Picone, they clearly consider themselves as an extension of the tradition of Sicilian low comics Franco and Ciccio and of Aldo, Giacomo and Giovanni who they supported in the 2000 Chiedimi se sono felice. The duo appears to stand out from that line however, avoiding nudity and bad language and in this film it’s possible to see the childish quality which throws into relief the bitter after taste material which is the dominant feature. They appear to go down a treat in their home market, as shown by the large returns on this film. I just wish they were funnier.


I did look forward to a second helping with Smetto quando voglio: Masterclass/I can Quit Whenever I Want to : Masterclass. The sequel is again scripted and directed by Sydney Sibilia and turned out to be more of the same, here keeping on promising better than it delivers.

We pick up Edoardo Leo’s Chemistry Prof. Zinni in the clink where we left him at the end of part one. (His advocate was a specialist in Canonical Law). Leo's league of redundant university lecturers had been caught after they went Walter White and started supplying the drug market. It's the same gag of mixing the academics in with cops and pushers, done in the same Fluoro palette

Leo's menaced by an inmate with a safety razor blade that he doesn’t think was sterilised. However ambitious cop Greta Scarano, hard to recognise as a short haired brunette after her turn as the imperilled blonde in Suburra. She registers in all the confusion. She followed their case (cuttings on a wall and a few superimposed images), offers to let Leo out as required, so he can be with wife Valeria Solarino when their child is born. Scarano wants Leo to track down more of the drugs that have yet to be criminalised pouring into the market.

Smetto quando voglio ; Scarano and Leo

With an “eighteen months before” title we get the story of their fat analyst, hooked on their in-house product and turning over his truck on a ramp, when he was high on his half kilo stock of still legal pills. He was startled to see his department’s chromatograph being
trucked away. As before, his is the film's most rewarding character, detoxing in therapy with the priest who he tells has the composition of modelling clay wrong. Our man is
desperate to get away from the room full the plaster Madonnas he has to sculpt.

The other members are under-written, throwing the effort back on the performers to register. They get a bit of action out of the antiquarian, the only one still a functioning academic. This is picked up again in the chase where their van, with their physicist's after burner, destroys the Hadrian’s Market ruins.

There’s an excursion to the East where the Theoretical Anatomist is going Deer Hunter (he gets decked before he starts) and Lagos where another team member is trying to sell suitcase bombs useful for blowing up schools. That doesn’t go too well either.

Identifying ingredients like puffer fish venom means they manage to close a range of drug labs. However, their detoxed analyst finally succumbs to the allure of the red tablets which the cops are particularly keen to eliminate - Richard Linklater type rotoscope animated sequence.

Scarano, with a girl investigative reporter and her boss both on her ass, has to renege on their deal unless they can crack the red tablet guys and the clue of the chromatograph has them following a shipping container full of the birth control pills that the peddlers are using as an ingredient.

The piece finally comes into its own with another one of those moving train climaxes like the one in the Jacky Chan Railway Tigers. Here Leo's team have to keep up with the container, in which one of their number has been locked, while they ride museum Third Reich vehicles and wear authentic Nazi helmets.

This manages to mix gags and action a treat “We’ve just killed the foremost Latinist in Europe” sets up one of the film’s best moments.

When it looks like we’re heading for a happy end there’s the double down turn in their fortunes complete with Luigi Lo Cascio appearing to anticipate his number in the promised part three. This seems to be pushing their luck. They've had trouble making a second outing go the distance.

There is also Non c'è più religione/Messy Christmas where director Luca Miniero and stars Claudio Bisio & Angela Finocchiaro had done pretty well out of Benvenuti al sud/Welcome to the South running to a sequel and  a French version with Danny Boon, so they decided to give the handle another turn. This time it's Bisio as the mayor of the remote Mediterranean Island of Portobuillo to which he has returned after some kind of a failure in the big time in Brussels.

They have a problem. The declining population means that the youngest inhabitant in the declining community is a chubby kid grown to the point where he crushes the nativity pageant crib at the rehearsal. Without the pageant the needed tourists won’t be interested and the place will decline even further and nobody fancies the idea of the standard issue plastic baby Jesus. So Bisio determines that he will recruit a baby from the adjacent community of “crab eater” Muslims, over the objections of the church congregation he keeps on interrupting.

 Non c'è più religione Bisio, Grazia Daddario, Gassman

Things get more complicated when he and resident nun Finocchiaro have to deal with barely recognisable Alessandro Gassman, with whom they used to be á trois (before Angela took her vows of course). Alessandro is now a Muslim convert in a scratchy false beard, leading to a swathe of cultural divergency jokes. “Don’t admire anything in their home or they’ll feel obligated to give it to you.” the baby deal requires the islanders to observe Ramadan.

 This is all backed by attractive Mediterranean scenery and a great comic cast. It sounds like lively and edgy fun and for a while it is but they can’t keep up the momentum. The routines become strained - simultaneous services in the shared church or the bishop, an aged Roberto Herlitzka no less, desperately making excuses for the irregularities in the Nativity scene finally defeated when they ring in a Llama because they can’t find an Ox. The Muslim kids, seeing his robes decide he’s Santa Claus, foreshadowing the films nicest gag where they break out in “Santa Claus is coming to Town” with belly dancer choreography.

The personal material is better with Bisio, Finocchiaro and Gassman recalling their time together and Bisio’s teen age daughter Laura Adriani leaving Muslim boy Mehdi Meskar who holds up a farewell placard as her ferry pulls out. This all gets buried in the farcical complications.

By the time we get to a Ganesh statue in the dinghy, and the baby’s delivery, attention is wandering.

In fact the recession appears to be reviving Sicilian organised crime to the despair of  reformers and there is more serious comment in this film than seemed to be the case. The point is curiously underlined when we remember Sicilian actor Sperandeo’s turn as the Mafia Don making the highlight actual “Hundred Steps” speech in Giordano’s exceptional Cento Passi of 2000.

Pif was an assistant on that one. He’s in charge of  another Sicilian subject In guerra per amore/At War for Love in this season. 

In Italian studio New York, stuttering, plate dropping waiter Pif and boss’ niece Miriam Leone (also in Un paese quasi perfetto) in the full forties Technicolor lips and banked hair, are an item. He takes a fuzzy proto selfie under the Brooklyn (?) Bridge. This doesn’t go down well with her mobbed up family who have arranged a marriage with made man Lorenzo Patané. Meanwhile the authorities have made a deal with Lucky Luciano to have their arrival in Sicile opposition free - as in Francesco Rosi’s 1973 Luciano film.

In guerra per amore ; Pif & Leone

The only way to override Family authority it to get the permission of her dad in Sicily but the US is in WW2,  so our hero in one of the film’s stretches of logic signs up with the invasion force and gets put in charge of the ship board donkeys.

In occupied coastal Cristofullo the locals have an early warning system which consists of
the grubby duo positioning it’s blind member so that he hears the planes coming. The old
man who prays to a wax model Mussolini and the granny who prays to a plaster virgin
compete to get to the bomb shelter cellar where the locals gather. The blind man detects a sound coming from all sides. It’s the allied landing. 

This is staged with a half hearted attempt at scale and when the troops advance they are met by the local comic Don who persuades the Italian soldiers to surrender their weapons. Rejoicing in the streets.

Pif is helicoptered (!) in on a donkey and landed in the unmarried girl’s (what happens to her) bedroom with the animal,  with instructions to rescue captured Lt. Andrea Di Stefano and ends up chained up with him at shotgun point, forging a bond. He also gets sent with the message from the stateside Don which asks the local mob to off Pif,  himself then downing the house liqueur though he doesn’t drink.

Scenes of  the Americans administering the place which consists of  releasing the mob nominated list of “prominent anti fascists” from jail including triple murderers - “pardoned by the allied government.”  It looks as if the comic duo who were caught trying to steal a hanged American’s boots will be done for looting but Pif mistranslates their incompetent protests and earns their gratitude by getting them out.

None of this is as funny as it might be.

The comics locate Leone‘s father whose relatives are gathered for his passing and Pif in Di Stefano’s jacket (impersonating an officer!) puts his case to him despite the old man being committed to Patané, finally winning him over with the fuzzy photo. However Di Stefano disturbed by the alliance with the Mafia has prepared a report to be sent to FDR. He is offed by mistake by the mob hit man sent to get Pif.

Implausibly our hero is freighted back to the US to get married with Di Stefano’s report which he refuses to surrender to the sentry at the White House. Leone, who has been stalling, escapes the engagement party and joins him on the bench outside the white house - a great image.

The Sicilian setting and structure of  placing the knockabout material against the sinister historical events recalls Pif’s 2013 La mafia uccide solo d'estate/ The Mafia Only Kills in Summer and has been compared to Forrest Gump. The film’s romantic and comic material is ham fisted but notes of reality kick the piece into life - surrendering Italian soldiers emerge with their hands behind their heads to see with distaste the locals embracing the yanks in return for cans and chocolate bars, the truck emptying of returned prisoners leaves the little boy finding his father is not among them, the mistake mob murder. The declaration of love by the comic tramp is dismissed by the object of his affections who wouldn’t want the community to think they were “fruits.” As in L’ore legale/I It’s the Law there is no priest - only the bombed religious granny.

It makes an interesting comparison with Norman Lewis’ diary-become-book of his war time with the US forces in Italy Naples ‘44 . This one is much admired and it’s not hard to see why. The thing which gives its impact is Benedict Cumberbach’s reading of narration drawn from it. Whether Francesco Patierno’s film does the original justice is speculative. It follows the form of his  2012 La guerra dei vulcani tracing the Magnani - Rossellini - Ingrid Bergman affair mixing actuality and fiction material.

The lab work is disappointingly uneven, some of it approaching original negative quality and some looking like it was lifted off a VHS tape found on someone’s mantle shelf. Catch 22 scores best (Alan Arkin gets a thanku in the end roller) with them curiously using only material from the segments derived from Paisa and not in the original book. Paisa itself shows up along with  Duilio Coletti’s Il re di Poggioreale /Black City with Ernie Borgnine and Keenan Wynn, Nani Loy’s 4 Days of Naples of course and  Toto in Sergio Corbucci’s 1963 Gli onorevoli and a killer clip from Liliana Cavani’s 1981 La Pelle with Marcello Mastroianni re-arranging the bones in the unspecified restaurant meat meal into a human hand.

Whether trying to identify these distracts or enhances the narrated material is speculative. Lewis’ take on events is both funny and appalling - selected because the military police considered blue eyed people trustworthy, he is sent off to join the American forces with a Wembley pistol and five rounds to face enemy tanks on a front where the US officers have deserted their men. He gets to be stationed in a palace in a Naples without water or power, where the Germans set one enormous mine blast and are rumoured to have laid another which will explode when the power is restored - actuality of the city being evacuated. Lewis is confronted by a succession of genteel law school graduates who have
never pleaded a case their business cards reading avocado, dottore or volunteering professore to be selected as police informers. Cans of food are distributed and in a nearby room women with small piles of the tins, offer to provide sex for another one. The estimate is that one in four of the city’s eligible females are whoring. The increase in vice matches the decline in edible cats. The locals strip tanks for saleable elements. The blood of Saint Genaro looks like it will not liquefy indicating the loss of the Saint’s protection. Vesuvius erupts.

Lewis considers that the citizens of Naples must long for the days of Mussolini. Despite the movie referencing, this is all material we are not used to seeing in films. It is disturbingly funny and sobering at the same time.




Part two of this report follows.

Three for WINGS.

I WANTED WINGS.

I’ve thought of William Wellman’s 1927 Wings as one of the all time best films since I first saw it fifty years back so I came at the showings of the 2012 restoration nervously. I needn’t have worried. I was damp eyed by the time they got to the fourth of the Paramount mountains in the prologue.

With this film, director Wellman imposed himself on a project which dwarfed the production line movies he had done before. Though he didn’t originate Wings, once selected for his WW1 aviator background, he dominated the end result. This was a film that he was still proud of at the end of his career, after he had put together  four decades of masterpieces spaced with engaging programmers - Beggars of Life, So Big, The Public Enemy, Wild Boys of the Road, College Coach, Central Airport, The Hatchet Man, Heroes for Sale, A Star Is Born, Beau Geste, Nothing Sacred,  The Oxbow Incident, The Story of G.I. Joe, Yellow Sky, Across the Wide Missouri and Island In the Sky (you decide which are which) - along with his share of  clunkers. This is well on the way to being the most impressive output of any film maker.

Wellman orchestrated the script’s dramatic rise and fall - small town America, training, first combat flights (interval) the frantic Paris break, the drama of “the Big Push” and a return to home. 

Wings - Shooting Star

 We open with kids next door Charles Buddy Rogers (who they don’t show in the new trailer!) modifying his factory car for speed to the admiration of Clara Bow, at twenty five already showing traces of her hard life but still managing irresistibly bubbly. Her kicking her heels on the lawn is the business they steal for Anne Baxter’s 1949 silent movie simulation in You’re My Everything. However Charles Buddy only has eyes for Jobyna Ralston (with Harold Lloyd in his best features) who in turn is an item with well to do Richard Arlen, busily  pushing her swing with  the camera mounted on it as it reveals Buddy arriving to take Jobyna for a spin.

Comes the nation’s call and the boys sign up along with El Brendel for pilot training of which we get some effective documentation - throwing up after being in the rotating gimbals, physical jerks, boxing  and the rest. The boys are shipped out for flight training which darkens the tone of the piece effectively.

When we get to Europe and the first dawn patrol, the dog fight, the piece of course comes into it’s own with the Gotha bomber attacking Mervale - great shot from above of it and it’s two escort planes taking off in the dust. All the high tech. effects work which would be used on this material later can’t match the excitement of real planes actually in the air together. That first genuine bi-plane crash is still breath catching

We hear about Kellerman / the Von Richthofen character’s chivalry in not bringing down a flyer whose machine gun had jammed but that doesn’t extend to not shooting up (not all that convincingly) downed pilots.

The interval is part of the structure with the film resuming with a change of tone which would have been disturbing butted straight on. My rough timing corresponded to the 141 minutes the restoration is supposed to clock in at and it is running marginally fast - the aerial footage was deliberately undercranked. I don’t recall the scene of snatching the white parasol in front of the Arc de Triomphe in earlier versions. This looked like a complete copy and we were so lucky to get it. A repeating feature of screenings is people saying they had no idea how long the film had taken to watch.

Wings - Marchal, Rogers and bubbles

The Paris material kicks off with that tracking shot through the cafe couples - one of which is lesbian - that makes it into all the compilations and gets A.E.F. girl Clara back into the action, momentarily topless. The different reactions of the military police duo come for Buddy are a treat. Back under canvas, there’s the misunderstanding over Jobyna’s inscribed photo and more aviation action, with the hokey dramatic climax. By this time they could have had Dick and Buddy as space men trying to go home and I would have still accepted it.

The film craft is kicking in. The Shooting Star on Buddy’s car and plane give impact to the Iron Cross symbol on the German fighter. The officer kissing the cheeks of the heroes he’s giving medals sets up what is incorrectly called the first male on male kiss in movies, with peasant woman Margery Chapin’s reaction cut in to take the curse off it. Add in the propeller coming to a stop.

Find another bromance that is so explicit and so effective in movies. Wellman enjoyed pushing this to the edge of the homoerotic line without falling over. It’s much more compelling than covert gay relationships in the films of Tay Garnet (Slightly Honourable, The Big Haircut / Wild Harvest) or Sam Fuller (I Shot Jesse James, House of Bamboo) and they all seem to have coasted past the censors they were designed to provoke.

The final return to a brass band welcome (compare John Cromwell’s unjustly neglected The Mighty of  two years later) still retains attention and mixes irony, triumph and regret in exactly the measures to make the film resonant. I like Dunkirk but this one leaves it standing. Christopher Nolan must have been familiar with the precedent of Wings and his film has the same stance - only showing the combatants with no one higher than a field officer appearing and no consideration of the motives or justification for their wars. Combat may be an extraordinary experience but there is nothing heroic about it, with death coming without reason.

 

Wings is of a piece. Its preposterous sentimentality and melodrama are the engines that drive it. Beyond it’s qualities as entertainment and spectacle is it’s ability to draw the viewer back into the mind set of  the people who first watched it more than a decade before I was born. Even more so than brilliant, then contemporary, work like Lonesome, Asphalt or The Wind, this one registers because it is a pipe line into the attitudes of it’s day and even people who don’t understand that can still be mesmerised by it.

Julian Johnson’s (Docks of New York, The Way of All Flesh) intertitles never attract comment but he was the master of this short lived craft, even more so than Thomas Ince’s celebrated C. Gardner Sulivan. “These young warriors of the sky whose wings are folded about them forever.” The flying scenes would be incomprehensible without his work which never comes as an interruption. “Zooming upward to pour a stream of fire into the belly of the monster.” As superimposed captions these later worked nicely in sound documentary but his career still ground to a halt.

Veteran Harry Perry’s principal photography is mainly unostentatious with only the odd flourish (the swing, the cafe track) but he was surrounded by a small army of  portable Akely camera wielding photographers, Russell Harlan, William Clothier, Ernest Lazlo and George Stevens among them. The cutting is spot on.

Roy Pomeroy’s early downwards model shot crash is pretty feeble and when they later pile the real plane into a full size church, Wellman’s lot make a point of having an actor run into the shot before the edit, to establish that there’s no faking.

Wings - William A. Wellman

 The support cast is intriguing.  The dreadful El Brendel is quite acceptable here though he is largely replaced by character comic Roscoe Karns in the second half. Bit parts include Hedda Hopper as Rogers’ mum, director Charles Barton chatting up Bow, Wellman himself calling out that the planes may be of use after all from the battle field, Henry B. Walthall (Birth  of a Nation’s Little Colonel) asserting himself in a wheel chair and the Paris floozy is elegant Arlette Marchal (Michael Curtiz’ Princess Urseti in Moon of Israel - good luck trying to see her other work). Which one is Thomas Carr and is that George Chandler exiting the recruiting office? Of course the stand out is Gary Cooper whose one minute turn launched him on the greatest star career in movies.

Wings - Arlen and Cooper.

The new sound track uses an original first run score by J.S. Zamecnik who produced a lot of the sheet music played with silent films. It mixes pop songs of the day, most of which are now forgotten and come across as original music, along with his Mendelssohn selections. Forty years before Stanley Kubric, Mr. Zamencnik put classical music on flight footage. We  spot “None But the Lonely Heart”, “Dark Town Strutters’ Ball” and particularly in the Paris scene’s “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles.”  All this has been impeccably orchestrated and re-recorded.

I was worried by the news that Skywalker had added in an effects track but this has been confined to motor noise and blasts and works remarkably well. The people who did this obviously knew what they were about.

The image is slightly grainy but the irregularities in the texture caused by second generation negative, notably in the Bubbles sequence, have been largely ironed out and the piece simulates the original tinting. The only way to improve on this result would be to have a first run 35 mil. ortho copy playing with a live orchestra. We have the moon. Let’s not ask for the stars.

Well what happened? I don’t know about Melbourne where it played half a dozen venues but at the Chauvel it drew single figure audiences. The night I went there were three people, one who came on the recommendation of his ninety year old mum. What did the proprietors expect? No question of core audience. There hasn’t been a half way serious Cinematheque in Sydney since 1978. It’s doubtful that even people here who turned out in escalating numbers as word of mouth spread for the Gaumont retrospective are still about. Palace put up a poster in the foyer and listed it in their press advts. (at least they still do press advts.) Where was the feature on the ABC, the two page article in the Herald, the ticket give-aways on radio, the guru extolling it on morning TV? Who have they got could do justice to this one anyway?

We know that this neglect of  serious film has drained Australian production but what
must it’s effect be on the understanding of wider, less obviously connected areas?

Before Bergman

Before Bergman.

For a wide eyed film freak from the colonies, London in the sixties was like visiting 

Mars.  Battleship Potemkin got West End

Louis Brooks : Canary Murder Case - not Swedish

Theatrical seasons, though they did pull Ivan the Terrible  from a Sunday double feature with Three Faces of Eve (embarrassment in the booking office I suspect) and the suburban Repertory Cinemas occasionally filled their double features with items like Fedor Ozep’s 1934 Amok or Welles’ Othello.

I however discovered that the advantages weren’t all one way. The first thing I faced when I went to the London Times Sixty Years of Cinema exhibition at the Round House was a display of “lost” movies, featuring Louise Brooks in Malcom St. Clair’s (awful) The Canary Murder Case which I’d seen on Australian TV a few months before.

The late arrival of down under TV kept battered old theatrical prints running in the suburbs and the new medium was eventually deluged with the Hollywood back catalogues, meaning that the determined viewer had a better grip on the American sound film than Europeans - not that I noticed anyone here taking advantage of this bounty.

The night I landed in London, the then legendary Hampstead Everyman was in the second week of a thirteen (!) week season of the work of Ingmar Bergman. I piled into the Northern line for the last showing of Törst -  and for the succeeding offerings. It took about four for me to realise how awful the early Bergman was.

That however left their first offering, which had finished while I was still on the water, 1947's  Skepp till India land /A Ship Bound for India / Frustration. During the subsequent fifty years I was vaguely aware that this one still eluded me - until last week when a sale priced copy of Madman’s DVD came my way.

Actually Bergman’s third film as director, it is already characteristically steeped in gloom. Heavy father Captain Holger Löwenadler (in the Sjöberg Barabas) has approaching blindness. He’s convinced son Birger Malmsten that the boy’s deformed by a humped back. The crew of the salvage ship they work dread the wreck they are resurrecting, full of mud & sea shells, will turn over. “She will pull us down.” Mum Anna Lindahl just waits for the day when her husband’s incapacity will mean they have to move to a cottage on shore and fallen woman Gertrud Fridh faces a return to her life of degradation.

Skepp till India land: Gertrud Fridh, Birger Malmsten

The film opens wordlessly with sailor Malmsten coming ashore (dock cranes against the sky) after seven years and mistaking a girl we never see again for Fridh, who it turns out has become an ailing, depressed recluse in the waterfront apartment of  the two ominous women listening at the key hole to the pair’s meeting.

Flashback takes us to Captain Löwenadler interfering with his son’s dream to become a real sailor traveling the world, by insisting he work on their salvage job on the day he should go for his passport.   

The most filmic passage has Löwenadler pass through the busy carnival (where Bergman does a walk on) to the seedy music hall with caricatures on the wall. He becomes involved in a brawl and shelters in singer Fridh’s dressing room before the police arrive. He then takes the girl to the secret flat that his wife has never seen, with souvenirs of his travels, and brings her back to the salvage boat, shifting Malmsten out of the mate’s cabin. (“You and your hump can go sleep with the crew”) Passive mum Lindahl has been through this before.

However after some antagonism (of course) the young people become an item and go off in the row boat to inspect an abandoned windmill. Capt. Löwenadler predictably takes a dim view of this and secludes himself, so the crew elect Malmsten to take over, with his dad coming out and slapping both his cheeks (the duellist’s challenge - get it!) only to be hit back for the first time. With the younger man now in charge, he has to substitute for their regular diver and Löwenadler is stroking his straight razor. He starts working the pump seen as shadow.

Manager Ake Fridell forbids the young suitor backstage access in the theatre Fridh has gone back to and maliciously describes her idea of a secure relationship with a rich man, which we have already heard - effective short scene very characteristic of Bergman. Malmsten sets out to sea.

Back in the present we have a confrontation which doesn’t fit with the grim build up.

Malmsten gives the only plausible performance, maturing in his time at sea which has reduced his (slight) hump to round shoulders. No one else makes any impact, with Fridh an unlikely vamp. The staging is filmic, with well chosen angles and the camera passing through the walls of elaborately built settings.  Photography by the exceptional Goran Strinberg (distantly related to the dramatist) is impressive but, like the Bergman regulars in support, was seen to better advantage in the contemporary films of Alf Sjöberg.

This is a genuinely bad film. The handling is assured but the dialogue still seems written and played for stage performance - Malmsten’s eager description of  a ship arriving at Africa or Löwenadler doing the monologue about listening to the sea in the shell for hours. The seafaring setting never really rings true. They don’t run to underwater footage. None of it has any real conviction.

We know that it is available because Ingmar Bergman became the pin up boy of the festival circuit and his name still has clout. This raises the interesting question of what sort of a film industry sustained such an unlikely talent through fifteen dodgy movies till he hit form with Sommarnattens leende / Smiles of a Summer Night in 1955. Most English language viewers know zip about the Swedish films between the silent work of Sjöstrom/Seastrom and Stiller (if they know those) and Ingmar Bergman. Even Gustav Molander, who appears to be the heavy hitter of this period, is rarely shown.

Curious I watched a couple of  these unknown titles, a ridiculously small but still revealing sample.

Schamyl Bauman’s Swing it magistern / Swing It Teacher lifts the corner of the curtain on Swedish film making in 1940 during a peak for their industry where they did forty films a year.

In this one, at Viran Rydkvist’s Comprehensive (co-ed) private school, young  Åke Johansson is handing round sticks of chalk to chew, so the kids voices won’t impress in the auditions that day. However the new music teacher proves to be cool Adolf Jahr, with a silly thin moustache, qualified Cathedral organist who can’t find a Cathedral. He fields the chalk thrown at him and runs auditions which sort out the vocal talents of the class. Of course, sixteen year old Alice “Babs” Nilson’s rendition of the title song, which he joins on piano, steals the show.

Swing it magistern  Adolf Jahr,“Babs” Nilson

However severe school owner Rydkvist doesn’t approve and, after a rendition for the board, Jahr has to promise not to do any more of that.

Meanwhile Johansson is organising the School’s Jatterostfest concert, where Babs will of course be the star turn, which is not surprising when she’s up against lady gym teacher Solveig Hedengran making those girls in baggy shorts do ill coordinated routines and head teacher Quar Hagman’s magic tricks.

Turns out that Babs is supplementing mum’s contributions to her school fees by singing at the local Shanghai Palais (one tracking shot around the small dance floor) where Jahr is also moonlighting. The so talented teenage girl, that he encourages, forms a crush on him despite his interest in Hedengran.

One of the pupils rats them out and Rydkvist visits the Palais and puts a stop to all that, forbidding the girl’s appearance at the school show. Enterprising Johansson gets her trapped in the boiler room for the performance but she escapes and is, of course, a hit.

Despite her wholesome (among the film's strengths is that the leads are so ordinary) image Miss Nilson's immense popularity outraged sections of her community, one cleric calling her "the foot and mouth disease of our culture."

The piece has some naive energy, despite going on too long and being short on imagination. The handling is better than competent but it disappoints in showing virtually nothing of WW2 Sweden. Outside the studio is represented a bit of playground and some ordinary back projection of streets and cars.

It’s comparable to the later US Donald O’Connor-Jane Powell teenager musicals but also not all that far away from the grim school in Hets/Frenzy, despite all the jollity. A sequel Magistrarna på sommarlov (1942) reunited Babs and Rydkvist.

It’s up for consideration because  Sandrews made an excellent quality DVD with good English titles.

Munkbrogreven / The Count of the Old Town, directed by Edvin Adolphson with some uncredited help from Sigurd Wallén, dates from 1935. This one survives because it’s Ingrid Bergman’s first speaking part. It turns out to be an unsophisticated piece where she gets attention mainly as a good looking girl (with poor posture) supporting  the movie’s top billed character grotesques.

The opening is the most filmic passage with bell chimes over wide shots of Stockholm’s old town introducing cloth cap robbers knocking over a jewellery store and fleeing the beat copper. The plot then develops to include the comic newspaper seller, suitor to the fish shop lady, and his lay-about friends whose day starts with contraband beer. Shadows falling on the cobbles introduce a bumbling detective duo.  

 

The newcomer, played by director Adolphson, shelters from the pair in the modest City Hotel, where he claims to be a resident in the room occupied by young Ingrid in her slip.

Romance develops between the two, running to him helping her to beat carpets on the line in the street while he hides the beer the comics don’t want portly policeman Weyler Hildebrand to find. The community like the guy, not least because he has a license to buy Swedish vodka which he shares round. They worry that he may be the jewel robber.

The fish shop lady’s personal advert brings a hand kissing aristocrat who offers to help her with her investments now that the robberies have extended to the bank, while the false bearded blind man prowls the streets at night from his room where the light still burns.

Throw in a band which sets up in the street for the number which Ingrid reprises.

People turn out to not be what they seem and there is a quite lavish horse carriage multiple wedding where all the nice characters’ fortunes turn out for the best.

Passable entertainment, this is a curiosity. Removed from it’s original time and place the film is simple minded and routine with some resemblance to the courtyard movies being made in then contemporary France, like  Pabst’s Du haut en bas or Renoir’s Crime de M. Lange.  It would seem that it represents the more ambitious pre-Alf Sjöberg Swedish production. The film making is competent but ordinary with those involved sometimes having three figure filmographies running from  Sjöstrom silents to Ingmar Bergman. The designer did Scott of the Antarctic.

There is some kind of comment in the scene of one of the colorful oldies selling used clothing in what appears to be a doss house and on the place of liquor in a country which retained prohibition until the 1970s. Incidentally after that was lifted, all the winos I saw sleeping it off in doorways were in their twenties, which is revealing.

A French series of  Swedish Bergman (Ingrid this time fortunately) disks fielded this one in a sharp slightly contrasty, slightly cropped version as Le Conte du point au moine.

The one thing the earlier films have in common is that there is nothing notably Swedish about them. No one dies in childbirth. No one is crushed by loss of their faith.  I'll wait till I've seen three figures more to offer a conclusion.

 

Barrie Pattison 2020

SYDNEY FILM FESTIVAL 2017  part two.

Despite it’s apparently conventional film form, Philippe Van Leeuw’s Belgian- French- Lebanese Insyriated / In Syria accommodates a profoundly disorienting idea. Think Desperate Hours in a war zone.

In the apartment of a well-off Damascus family, three generations are now sheltering in what was recently a comfortable bourgeois home, with a lodger family and an Indian maid. Though traces of their normal life surround them, cell ‘phone reception is out, bomb blasts rock the building and snipers take down pedestrians in the parking lot.

Insyriated / Juliette Navis, Hiam Abass

The home represents the achievements of a lifetime to mother strong faced Hiam Abbass (Satin Rouge, The Visitor) which she refuses to abandon though her family are the building's only remaining residents. Looters on the other hand see nothing of value in her carefully tended consumer goods. Abass clings to the routine of normalcy, making tea for her father in law and berating her young daughter for washing her hair when water must be brought up from the cellar by hand. However new mother tenant Diamand Bou Abboud and her husband have stitched up a deal to leave the country with their baby.

That’s not going to fly. From the window maid Juliette Navis sees the husband shot down and Abass orders her not to speak, knowing that any rescuers are likely to be killed. Then there’s a knocking ...

Repeatedly the hardest thing to do is nothing - for people both sides of the barricaded doors. Self contempt and reproach build among the shut-ins. Comes the desperate after dark finale and there’s the disturbing spectacle in the marksman’s red dot playing over the faces of the characters we know.

The film develops a rare intensity in it’s scenes of crisis and moral complexities. Casting, performance and film craft are impeccable and any audience are soon confronted with the question of what they would do in the on-screen situations.

Agnieszka Holland is back on the festival circuit, though she has long since moved away from the Holocaust subjects for which they know her, doing series TV and versions of “The Secret Garden” and “Washington Square” - more familiar when it was adapted as “The Heiress”.

On the new film Spoor she shares director credit with her daughter Kasia Adamik. This sets it’s tone immediately with striking shots of deer antlers moving among the long grass at dawn already suggesting nature as a mystic experience, which is the way grey haired lead Agnieszka Mandat-Grabka’s character sees it. Like her neighbors she lives, with her adored dogs as companions, in in an isolated home in the woods. She chats to the wild boor that wanders into her yard and abuses a neighbor whose wire snares are a cruel death for the forest deer caught looking round at the audience. When Mandat-Grabka  takes a lover it is naturally entomologist Miroslav Krobot whose preoccupation is with the insects in the undergrowth here - nice shot of blue beetles mating.

Spoor /Agnieszka Mandat-Grabka, Miroslav Krobot.

Her uneasy appointment as local school English teacher is put at risk when she takes her charges on an expedition into the dark trees looking for her missing pets. The local priest, who is a cultural supporter of hunting, and the Polilja station cop, who joins the pack, are reduced to close-ups of lips framing platitudes about animals having no importance, no souls.

The only people who are exempt from the lead and the film’s assessment as crude intruders into this bucolic environment are the scrubbed up juveniles, an expelled city I.T. technician and the girl sex slave of the local bogus playboy club, and when bodies start turning up in the woods they are the ones who become the suspects.

The first half of the film is evocative and gripping. with the intriguing wild life straying through the foliage and seen as targets by the hunt-and-drink lot who seem to be violating  the natural order, with the dead animal heads strewn about their houses, paralleling the grotesque costumes of their seasonal celebration.

When the conventions of the who-dun-it assert themselves the film becomes less than it looked like it was going to be. It’s still a well crafted and played entertainment but it’s also a disappointment. The cast and technicians are regulars in Slavonic production.

The film’s comic spooky mood gets and holds attention and suggests new ground.

From Cédric Klapisch we expect something lively original and maybe even charming. His l'Auberge espangol trilogy provided that. No such luck here. The new Ce qui nous lie / Back to Burgundy is overlong and repetitive. It is great to look at, full of ‘scope vistas of seasons transforming the Burgundy vineyards - along with beautiful people - but they get to be boring company.

Pio Marmaï  comes back to the family vineyards after five years in Australia (!) - cut from him waiting on the bus stop with the circus poster, after a run in with dad, to the same stop showing a new circus poster and him with a rucksack & beard. His siblings Ana Girardot and François Civil are running the business. Hospitalised father Éric Caravaca (the only familiar face in a sea of fresh talent) dies and the trio face the question of how to deal with dividing the estate menaced by tax debt. Oliver Assayas’ 2008 L'heure d'été / Summer Hours kicked this idea about rather better.

There’s more wine making detail than anyone could ever want (“only wimps spit at a tasting”) and at great length the action gets to pivot on whether the most talented wine maker among them will carry on the family tradition. There were films like this about tobacco growing. I can’t help wondering whether we’ll think about this one the way we do about those in twenty years time.

Giradot comes across like gang busters and the rest are equal to the task but even the best passages, like the brothers lip-synching the dialogue between her and the stroppy picker who they see romancing Giradot in the distance, have a current of meanness out of character with the director’s best work.

Put this one down as the major disappointment in my highly selective viewing.

With Ucitelka / The Teacher  Festival Favourite Jan Hrebejk and his regular writer Petr Jarchovský are back on familiar ground documenting the abuses of Communist control in 1980s Czechoslovakia which we saw in their Kawasaki’s Rose.

This one starts confusingly with widow teacher and party secretary Zuzana Mauréry calling the new roll in her 1983 Bratislava suburban school class room, cross cut with what turns out to be a parents meeting called to discuss an allegation of her misconduct.  

Ucitelka / The Teacher - Zuzana Mauréry

We hear she’s into manipulating the families of the children in her class to provide services she wants - smuggling food to Russia, house keeping, running errands or fixing her appliances. Some of the parents are hearty supporters of her methods which include providing test answers to their children to boost their grades.

This comes to a halt when young ribbon twirling gymnast Tamara Fischer, who has been told in front of her class mates that she’s the dumbest kid there, puts her head in the gas oven. Her dad Martin Havelka places a complaint and when the school calls a meeting to determine action, he’s told that he’s an unreliable participant because punching out a stroppy foreigner got him a jail spell. Similarly disgraced window cleaner Peter Bebjak (himself a director of similarly themed efforts like Cistic) was a scientist before his wife broke with the restrictions of the socialist community and fled abroad. Mauréry sees him as replacement husband material and gets him the spot as school janitor, which comes with a flat. She encourages his artistic son who innocently gets involved in a foreign exchange voucher scam.

The meeting becomes tense and attention goes to Bebjak when he stands up - but he just wants to use the loo. The kind of moment we expect from Hrebejk.

Even an account of her dismal pupil success rate fails to swing the meeting against Mauréry and it looks like the head teacher will have to give her a promotion and a rise to defuse the matter.

The final montage of the subsequent lives of the kids is quite touching and following the coda in the class room with the Václav Havel photo on the wall, takes some of the bitterness of what we have been watching.

Performances are superior but craft aspects are mixed as with the irritating panning in the opening meeting. This one is uneasy viewing with it’s comedy elements and the sadistic treatment of children not only by their elders but also by their peers.

Then there was Song Chuan's unexpected Ciao Ciao a Chinese-French co production which paints a vicious picture of rural China?

Bookended by shots of the line of green and red train carriages running distant through the verdant countryside, this one covers the return of local girl Zuquin Liang/Ciao Ciao to her Yunnan province village. The kids call out “whore” when they see her city clothes and her family is made up of retrenched dad who is first seen catching a green river snake to use in his home made remedy and mum  getting by putting out for the local bootlegger. She complains that back breaking work in the tobacco fields for a year earns less than a city job in six months. She tells Ciao Ciao that at least she’s pretty and will have to use that to escape drudgery.

Marriage to the bootlegger’s tearaway son (the kids shout “drunk”) looks like an out but that disintegrates when his dad’s business is busted by the local cops on about people dying from home made liquor and she starts pairing with the urbanised town hair dresser who promises to take her back to Canton.

This one bears little resemblance to the Asian films in the mutiplexes, with its bilious colours,  raunchy make out and it’s depiction of petty corruption with gift cigarettes or the mayor sending out the emigrating workers with red rosettes that match uniforms of the kids’ band that plays them off as they are instructed to remember the one child rule despite the enticements of the big city. It’s not in the class of  say Jackie Chan’s Railroad Tigers or Ann Hui’s Huang jin shi dai /The Golden Era and it would be interesting to understand the mechanism which put Ciao Ciao in a festival and those into restricted distribution.

Newton proved to be an endearing if unpolished Indian drama from Hindi screen writer Amit Masurkar whose only other major project as director was the 2014 comedy Sulemani Keeda, about Hindi screen writers.

The new film is something different to the Bollywood movies that occasionally surface here. To start with, it has another look. The ‘scope image is soft and the colour less brilliant suggesting a cut price offering but the obvious budget limitations (small cast, a few real locations) don’t inhibit the story-telling in a film which relies on the strength of it’s subject and the appeal of its leads.

Rajkummar Rao is young and idealistic or is it egotistic when we see him refuse the arranged marriage with a girl who is uneducated and under aged. As a reserve poll organiser, he is briefed on the scale and importance of the up coming national election and he queries the procedures for dealing with the murderous Maoist insurgents bent on disturbing the vote. Sure enough, when the regular poling officer is told he hasn’t been given a metropolitan spot, he begs off (heart condition) and the unbending Rao is the one sent into the remote jungle where the Marxists Nayals are rampant. We’ve already seen a
candidate gunned down, fresh from promising every child a lap top and a cell phone.

Rao heads a less than stellar team arriving at an outpost commanded by officer Pankaj Tripathi who urges them to just fill in the paper work and forget about the idea. He has to be threatened with a written complaint to make him head up the security team taking the pollsters to their designated station, which proves to be a ruin in a burned out village - one the army has pacified. Promising new star Anjali Patil joins them as and goes about the task wearing her bright Sari while Rao’s lot have been got up in camouflage flack jackets and steel helmets.

Despite obstacles that include the fact that the hand full of locals they have come to record have no idea what the election - or any election - is about, Rao pursues his task, working up to a confrontation with the military guides. A weak coda damages conviction.

The film weaves between significance, comedy and tension with the odd flourish like a montage of shots of the real candidates who are represented only by symbols on the voting chart. It’s not all that compelling but it does raise a serious issue in a manner we haven’t seen before and has novelty value to paste over it’s short comings.

If you’re thinking too much Akira Kurosawa is never enough, there are a couple of feature length documentaries on his work but you had to settle for director Steven Okazaki’s Mifune the Last Samuri to go with the retrospective. A film that covers the life of the most famous Japanese actor since Sessue Hayakawa and reminds us just how good the films that represent his collaboration with the “perfectionist” Kurosawa are, can’t be a bad thing.

This one reproduces the mainly black and white footage beautifully and it’s interesting to hear from Mifune’s collaborators. The women have aged remarkably well. Dealing with survivors has brought some unfamiliar names into the foreground.

Filming Mifune ; the Last Samurai

That said, this one is for the choir. There is little on the actor’s pre-Rashomon career about which we know so little. The only other director who gets any attention is the remarkable Hiroshi Inagaki and that for his Myamoto Musashi films. His 1958 Muhomatsu no issho / The Rickshaw Man is well on the way to being Mifune’s best performance and it gets one still photo here.

Then there’s the discovery of the fact that while the juvenile did Seven Samurai in a bald cap but Takashi Shimura actually shaved his head for his part.

Keanu Reeves’ narration is unobtrusive, mainly adding a selling point to the production. Director Steven Okazaki’s documentaries and features extend back to the nineteen eighties.

Picking my way through this event is cheating of course. It means that I don’t run the risk of seeing the truly awful or the unexpectedly excellent which is what the festival experience is all about. Maybe I’m past that.

Sydney Film Festival 2017.

I had a pretty good festival. With a couple hundred films on offer I’d be surprised if the organizers themselves had seen everything. It’s possible to make completely different selections. This worked out so that I didn’t watch any of the audience poll winners, which leaned towards local product suggesting a heavy friends and relatives input. A lot of people missed any of  my choices and the only ones sharing a common experience bought the pre- selected seasons. I heard a few groans from that lot.  As predicted, I found the quality of the festival films falling away as the event wore on.

Some things did register throughout. What used to be CinemaScope/Panavision/anamorphic format seems to be pretty much universal. How they go about that in the digital age I’m not sure. Insyriated stood out for being in the old wide screen format and Ghost Story went one better and used the one time Academy Frame right down to the rounded corners. The East Europeans still seem to be stuck with the washed out colours of the processing from the days of the Soviet block. Those grey oranges in Bacalaureat were really off putting and I suspect Andrej Wadja would have liked something more vivid to colour code Powidoki / Afterimage’s scarlet light that fills the studio when they drape a giant Stalin banner over Boguslav Linda’s windows, the blue dye he uses on the flowers he places on his dead wife’s grave or the red coat that his daughter is ridiculed for wearing to her funeral.

The one thing which re-occurred alarmingly through the bulk of the material I watched was the rejection of their characters’ society. Father Adrien Titieni telling his teen age daughter to get away from corrupted Romania in Bacalaureat is a perfect fit with Wind River’s Jeremy Renner reproaching Native American boy Martin Sensmeier for not leaving the snow country when he had the chance or Ciao Ciao eyeing the escape from her stifling village represented by Canton. This is a pendulum swing from the work that aired in the first more propagandist films Sydney Film Festivals.

I’m kind of disappointed that the film which most impressed me in the festival was the one that came with the most fanfare. Fatih Akin’s new  Aus dem  Nichts / In the Fade carried off prestigious awards before it hit our shore.

Star Diane Kruger has been around for twenty years and she’s a great looking woman who can make her characters impress, though she’s only had a few films that were worthy of  her - Joyeux Noel (2005) Les brigades du Tigre (2006) and Pour elle (2008) and she wasn’t really the focal point in those. This time she’s front and center and the impact is in playing alarming events across her now mature features. She carries that load without a mis-step.

The film opens with her jail marriage to released Turkish drug dealer Numan Acar, which leads to a happy life with him running a city migrant information centre - and then she can’t get to his office because the police have the area cordoned off. A cautious inspector won’t buy her theory of a Nazi outrage and toys with the idea of Turkish Mafia or Kurdish Mafia or drug wars but then the call comes and she’s identifying suspects through the one way mirror and Denis Moschitto her lawyer has her in the court room as co-plaintiff.

The actual trial with it’s graphic description and legal niceties is the stand-out section. An appearance by Ulrich Tukur (The Lives of Others / Das Leben der Anderen 2006) adds to the impact. The subsequent lurch into vigelante-ism is more suspect but by that time nothing could derail this one.

Aus dem Nichts / In the Fade / Kruger

The depiction of the Turkish Diaspora seen in German movies has had an interesting evolution from Doris Dörrie’s playful 1992 Happy Birthday Türke to the savage current film mainly via Akin’s work. This is probably his best yet, master crafted and in the Volker Schlöndorff tradition. You have to ask why are the first overseas notices so luke warm or what was the nature of the contribution of Hark Bohm (films like the excellent 1987 Der kleine Staatsanwalt) who gets solo writing credit on the print though some sources credit Akin with the script.

There’s a lot more to be said about this one but my guess is that it will be back for more serious discussion later.

We pick up Taylor Sheridan’s Wind River at night with the Indian girl running in the snow as a woman’s voice reads poetry on the track (not a good sign). The ranchers’ animals have been taken and wild life tracker Renner in his white camouflage is out shooting wolves moving on the flock of sheep (actually one wolf repeated flopped over) and finds her bare foot body. This gets in the way of the time he’s supposed to spend with his young son.

Wind River /Jeremy Renner & Gill Birmingham in death face.

The film is a superior action movie drawing on it’s Native American setting, recalling Courtney Hunt’s 2008 Frozen River.  Reservation cop Greene (“six officers covering a territory the size of Rhode Island”) on the case is joined by FBI agent Elizabeth Olsen, who Renner cautions that she’d freeze to death on the back of  his snow- mobile going to the crime scene without winter gear “in the snow at eleven thousand frickin feet”. The sour Indian woman who outfits her warns “That’s not a gift” and the dead girl’s father Gill Birmingham asks “Why is it that when you people want to help you always start with insults?”

Olsen asks for Renner to be attached to her investigation and examines the body. “Her lungs burst here” he prompts. “I know you’re lookin’ for clues but you’re missing the signs.”  There’s the grim autopsy.

Olsen learns about the group of tearaways living in isolation. Greene commented, “Those boys could stand some serious lookin’ into” and this triggers the first action set piece  leading to the film’s most imposing scene between Renner and the girl’s brother Martin Sensmeier who discovers her death in the aftermath of the shoot-out. Renner joins him in the truck waiting to be taken away (“Jail’s a right of passage for these kids”) and reproaches him for his life style which offered him a chance to leave “It’s this place Chip - army, college - look at what you chose.”

Following tracks in the snow leads to a contractor’s camp. There Olsen, Greene and the deputies have gone to investigate the frozen victim’s trailer and things rapidly get out of hand. “You’re flanking us!” The announcement that an FBI agent is standing in front of the trailer door gets a shot gun blast through it which Olsen only just avoids on Greene’s warning. Soon there are bodies everywhere.

The final dialogue with Birmingham, who has applied his “death face” though he couldn’t get the right pigments, has ringing dialogue “Wolves don’t kill the unlucky deer. They kill the weak ones.”

Great setting, strong performances, intense suspense.  The cathartic shoot out is on he way to being a let down after this build up.

An advance on his Sicaro and Comancharia / Hell and High Water scripts, this one cements Sheridan in place as a significant talent. The stars have gained traction too.

The Nile Hilton Incident looked like a match for the Egyptian crime movies they used to show in the multiplexes in Western Sydney. We should have had some more of that. I was becoming a Mohamed Henedy fan.

In fact this convincing account of incidents in Cairo, shifted a couple of years to the 2011 Tahir Square riots, was actually filmed in Morocco by a Sweden- Germany-Denmark unit directed by ex graffiti artist Tarik Saleh, who did the intriguing animated Metropia. The current film’s rising star Fares Fares does actually come from Cairo making him the film’s most authentic element. Fares2 also did one of the voices in Metropia.

The Nile Hilton Incident is being called film noir, which probably sells tickets, but in fact it's a pastiche of elements of a whole range of crime movies Laura, The Big Heat, Heavy Metal, Gorky Park  and The Night Manager among them. This is blended in with it’s bleak depiction of the Murabak era.

The lead is a Cairo police force major whose main duties seem to be making the pick ups for the week’s kick backs in his beat up red hard top. Any case they investigate ends when the bribes have been collected. “We’ve got the money.” Fares’ life is arid. His wife has left him. Leisure is smoking a joint in a seedy brothel, watching his TV which will only pick up an Italian speaking channel or eating frozen meals on his own. He keeps on switching his pistol from one convenient spot to another but the only time he fires it is not when a motor scooter hit man takes out his cousin with a burst of machine gun fire but to smash a full length mirror - not a piece of ham handed symbolism like Le Jour se leve or The Brave Bulls either.
A glamorous Tunisian pop star is found dead in a suite at the Nile Hilton and our man is sent in to wind up the case. They don’t even call out the lab boys. What no one knows at that stage is that Sudanese hotel maid Mari Malek saw the killer leave the apartment. Complications ensue when Hania Amar one of the dead girl’s also glamorous fellow entertainers comes to the station to demand progress on the case. Other officers gawp and Fares tells her “This is no place for you” but he is edged into an awareness that he is still a police officer involved in an investigation. Think John Ireland in Farewell My Lovely. Pretty much without wanting it, Fares begins to solve the case - incriminating photos, making it with the club singer, paying off officers from another district to arrest her pimp and following leads that connect with a member of the Egyptian parliament living in a gated community with its own golf course and featured on press ads for his housing development which will usher in a new Cairo.

The Nile Hilton Incident / Fares Fares & Hania Amar.

Fares’ uncle protector department head, through whom he got the job, is distraught but instead of  getting them all fired, our hero is promoted to Colonel and told to wear his new uniform on a visit to the State Security office.

After the nice uncle breaks out the jumper leads and pours water on the cement floor, Colonel Fares gets fighting mad, despite being told “We’ve already got the money”. The MP tells his lawyer to move his wife and children out of the country but the Tahir Square demonstrations break out with the final scene being the night time streets filling with protesters who stop beating up Fares (“We are not like them”) while workers cover the face of Mubarak painted on the side of a high rise. The audience at the State seemed to relate to that image. I though it was pretty good too when it was George Raft in Shanghai at the end of Intrigue seventy years back.

It would be interesting to know if  this mash up of  such diverse elements is conscious or not. It is so seamless and so involving. I’ll watch what Saleh and his cosmopolitan chums do next.

Curiously We Don't Need a Map didn’t share the warm approbation poured over Australian product. Comparing the Eureka flag to the Swastika has already brought director Warwick Thornton grief. You’ve got to like him talking about sitting there thinking “please not me” when they announced Australian of the year 2009, punching holes in a sheet of cardboard with a pencil to make a Southern Cross background for the titles rather than commissioning high end lab work and figuring that a black feller (his choice of words) and producer Brendan Fletcher with a string of superior commercials would be a shoe-in for NITV’s referendum anniversary funding.

Though the pair represent their film as a chaotic endeavor (“let’s go out and do a shit load of interviews”) it is actually remarkably well organised, pivoting around the inescapable new significance the Southern Cross has taken on since John Howard, Pauline Hanson and the Cronulla Riots. The rock singer interviewee comments “Someone who got a Southern Cross tattoo the week before Cronulla, must be spewing now”.  It’s now like saying a swastika indicates a connection to Hindu philosophy or (and no one observes this) the Confederate flag.

Thornton visits a playground version of the Eureka Stockade, watches a traditional, celestial aligned cross laid out on the yellow soil and erased, recalls the Southern Cross Company windmills which drained the aquifers the indigenous people relied on for water (a sculptor now recovers the steel for art works) and listens to the significance of rock art explained.

The director and the articulate observers he has sat in front of his camera establish a remarkable context for all this - pre-European arrival Australia a model of multi- culturalism with six hundred different languages, the time when the oral tradition was not dismissed as Chinese Whispers, because then the ones who didn’t know the song cycles would not be able to find the food and water described in them and die, or the First Fleet, the aborigines and the boat people all using The Southern Cross to find their way.

This is not however your usual polemic. Scenes of beach spear fishing, night time fire lit activities and accelerated shots of the stars filmed by Thornton’s son  Dylan River punctuate more conventional footage. The action is commented by shots of hands manipulating the Bush Toy Mob’s salvaged-wire figures - Captain Cook’s boat greeted by locals with a sign saying “Fuck off - We’re full”, Thornton in dialogue with the Bush Toy Captain Phillip telling him if he wants to stay he’ll have to behave or a shot-down black man’s grave marked with a toy Southern Cross windmill.

You can see the sensibility of Thornton’s remarkable Samson and Delilah at play finding jokey material in appalling happenings.

The film goes to air in July and plan is to have this one shown in schools. Sounds like a really good idea to me.

Incidentally Thornton advises that the copper who defended with his Billy Club the people the mob attacked in the toilet block during the Cronulla riots, becoming an Australian icon, has been fired for excessive violence.

Andrej Wadja was the greatest film maker of the Communist world and beyond. He left behind a string of brilliant works - Popiól i diament /Ashes & Diamonds, Popioli/ Ashes, Ziemia obiecana / Land of Promise, Czlowiek z zelaza / Man of Iron, Katyn. His final film (he died aged 90)  Powidoki /After image is the work of a major artist. Every composition and edit shows this. The question of whether it is a work of art - or revenge or a cautionary tale or an act of contrition tends to over ride this.

 Powidoki /After image

Long time associate Boguslaw Linda (Saint-Just in Wadja’s Danton) plays one armed one
legged celebrity artist former associate of  Kazimir Malevich and  Mark Chagall, Wladyslaw Strzeminski, first seen in 1949 greeting new student Wichlacz (also in Spoor) by rolling down the hill to join her. What happens to the lively red-head whose panties show when she does the same thing?

He’s revered by his students at Lódz School of Plastic Arts and Design and has his admired gallery abstract exhibit “The Neo Plastic Room” in a museum. The Communist authorities reproach him with his thirties quote saying that art should serve the state and deal with him with increasing severity when he fails to conform. Cutting that hole in the Stalin Banner (compare Burned by the Sun or the Tsui Hark Maoist era film ) accelerates the process.

When he’s dismissed, the students rally round him stealing a typewriter for Wichlacz to work on his book  "The theory of vision" but their exhibition at the WMCA (the only venue that will have them) is broken up by a truck full of thugs and The Neo Plastic Room is dismantled.

We never see his estranged sculptor wife and his teen aged daughter (“She’ll have a hard life”) is rebuked for turning out to her mother’s funeral in a red coat, though it is the only one she has and her joy is in marching in a borrowed uniform carrying a portrait placard in the political parade. She decides she’d rather live in the children’s home than in the apartment to which Wichlacz has the key. Her last appearance is in a pair of borrowed shoes to convince Linda that she will be all right in the winter.

The pressure increases as a friend gets him a spot at the P.S.S. co-op, painting Stalin portraits and he’s so good at it that the Rail Workers Union want to poach him but even that is taken away from him. His membership of the artist’s union, of which he was one of the founders, is cancelled meaning he can no longer buy paints (“Those who don’t work, don’t eat”) so he tries to put a spin on it by taking the daughter to the movies (the Kino Tatry is showing Les Murs de Malapaga) with the money, only to be faced by a documentary on Socialist Realist art cf. the incriminating footage the Germans show in Katyn or even Oliver Stone running Vlad Putin Dr. Strangelove.

Wadja

His old associate party official offers him money, work and recognition - existence! - if he will conform and Linda is dismissive. He, of course, coughs blood. The final image of the disconnected hand swinging in the window the passers by don’t notice is extraordinarily evocative - if a further downer.

Performance, setting and film form are impeccable. This is recognisably the view that the artist community held of the Communists in the fifties and with Wadja’s stamp on it that
perception gains weight.

Comic strip artist-director Dash Shaw’s My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea has kind of one of those my years in (American) high school plots about the nerdy kids who write these autobiographies, after being at the bottom of the pyramid where the Jocks lord it at the summit, but that’s got conflagrated with The Poseidon Adventure and laid out in ‘Scope animation that is simultaneously naive and sophisticated - bold colours, 3D free textures that seem independent of outline, abstract sequences, of which one showing drowning is particularly challenging.

Probably the most rewarding thing about is that it never lets you work out how to relate to it - touching, grotesque, funny or dreadful. Is it sending itself up or does it want you to reconsider your own relationship history?

Shaw can be equated to the character voiced by Jason Schwartzman, who has just moved up to sophomore and cured his eczema only to find he’s still a bottom feeder. He expresses his concerns by trashing his friend (voiced by James Corden’s band leader) in the Tides High School give away paper that they edit with the girl (Maya Rudolph) who has become an item with his friend. Schwartzman is called in by the Principal and given a damning comment on his permanent record which Jason’s character attempts to retrieve from the school archive, finding calisthenics team star (Lena Dunham) in there looking for her confiscated cell ‘phone. They turn up a document saying that the school is built on a fault line and sure enough the ocean invades it, meaning the new alliance kids have to clamber up though it’s levels to the roof which also represents graduation, despite killer sharks, tribal seniors, fire and explosion. Only Lunch Lady Loraine (Susan Sarandon) supports their race for life.

My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea.

Dunham finds she is violating the caste rules of her cool friends as the social order changes. Schwartzman is limited by his lack of  fitness. You could add in his immature writing style (“I like turgid prose”) constructing a novel out of their near death experiences as they go. One Cool Girl facing death pleads “I’ll invite you to my next party!” The junkie students covet the contents of the infirmary and the water level rises in the library. There's a lift well full of  dead kids.

After watching this, multiplex movies come across as unchallenging. Speaking of Multiplex Movies I got to see two movie leads straighten up on the coroner’s slab in the one day, Tom Cruise in The Mummy and Casey Affleck in Texas fringe film maker David Lowery’s Ghost Story. I couldn’t avoid noticing that we have  a clear evolution of film monsters - Germany in the teens, Universal classics, Hollywood B movies and the European rip- offs of Hammer Studios, Paul Naschy and the rest, going up market with Coppola and Corman.

On the other hand ghosts seem to start from scratch every time. There’s no indication that Patrick Swayze’s lot had ever seen The Uninvited or either one was familiar with silent The Headless Horseman.

Lowery’s film seems determined to be conspicuous and begin the cycle over again. As well as standard screen it minimises reliance on editing, most scenes being one take. Texas cameraman Andrew Droz Palermo also filmed Hannah Fidell’s indie A Teacher which played here late night TV recently.

Mara in Ghost Story

The plot is non linear though it isn’t a strain to follow. Rooney Mara and Casey Affleck move into a timber tract house where there are mysterious light patterns on the wall. We cut from their make out to her standing over the car accident and then we get all the manifestations - he turns up as a Halloween ghost in a sheet and goes the poltergeist route, disturbing her and subsequent owners till the wrecking ball intrudes - a plunge off a high rise, frontier life with an Indian raid and what is a recapitulation of what we already know.

It manages atmosphere without atmospherics and is curiously touching - even haunting!

However we have been here before. Robert Downey the elder’s Greaser's Palace of 1972 was an acid western Christ story fielding a Father, Son and Holy Ghost  and the Holy Spirit turned up in a sheet complaining “It’s always the other two. When do I get to do my stuff?” The pair of films have a community. I wonder whether the makers are aware of that.


Continues in #2