Cinema and sausages

A report from the second week of the
Karlovy Vary International Film Festival

by MARK SLUTSKY

A week into the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival and I feel my body chemistry changing: cabbage, sausage, potato krokety and doughy, gnocchi-like spätzle are now my main sources of sustenance, along with infusions of Becherovka, the aromatic digestif made with the resort town’s mineral water.

I’m getting a bit tired of the unvarying diet, but at least I’m not alone: at the public screening of Yippee: A Journey to Jewish Joy, director Paul Mazursky complains vocally about the eats. Mazursky (Down and Out in Beverly Hills, Moscow on the Hudson) is affable and wise-cracking in person, quick as a gunslinger to unleash Jewish joke after Jewish joke.

Yippee is his first documentary, and it follows him on a trip to the town of Uman, in the Ukraine, where every year, thousands of Hasidic Jewish men gather to celebrate Rosh Hashanah.

URBAN URCHIN: Chop Shop

Mazursky isn’t religious; he’s proudly secular, and in this funny little movie, he appears rather bemused as he contemplates the devouts’ ecstatic rituals, which include some pretty wild dancing to Jewish-themed techno tracks with lyrics that refer to specific rabbis and their teachings. Who knew?

Matteo Garrone’s Gomorrah is a mob movie that deliberately bucks the conventions of the genre in favour of a branching narrative that resembles Traffic and its ilk more than anything else. Set in and around a squalid but strangely modernist housing estate in the north of Naples, the film shows in unglamorous detail the effect of the Camorra (the Neapolitan mob) on the citizens’ lives and livelihoods. It’s grim, fascinating stuff.

There are no cops in sight in Gomorrah, but the police force itself is the subject of The Elite Squad, directed by Brazil’s Jose Padilha and set in the favelas of Rio in the late ’90s. The movie’s clearly inspired by City of God, but it tells the story from the other side, and what seems to be a cops vs. gangsters movie turns into an exploration of the force’s systemic corruption and its particulars.

Despite some strange and unsteady plotting, it’s pretty fascinating, and was a huge hit in its native land. As it was produced under the auspices of the Weinstein Company, it should show up here eventually, in video stores if not theatres.

Yes, if you’re detecting a theme of grim urbanity, you might not be off the mark. Sundance hit Chop Shop, directed by Ramin Bahrani, is an American indie about a resourceful homeless kid who sustains himself and his sister by working and living in an auto shop. If that makes the film sound precocious or heartwarming, it’s not, but nor is it completely bleak.

Leonera is an Argentinean women-in-prison movie, but don’t get too excited: like Gomorrah, this melodrama (directed by Pablo Trapero) is entirely stripped of glamour and sexiness. Set in the mothers’ ward of a Buenos Aires jail, which is one of the most miserable places you could imagine, Leonera is a harrowing watch, if perhaps not entirely without hope. Not a bad way to end this strange but weirdly charming festival.

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