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World beat
>> Bits and bites from the World Film Festival
by JONATHAN GOLDSTEIN
The War Zone Tim Roth's directorial debut starts with a car crash gory enough to make David Cronenberg drool. It's an appropriate opening to a dark, moody and relentlessly bleak film about incest that doesn't entirely shy away from the erotic. What starts off as a suggestive atmosphere of familial insularity slowly develops into a graphic tale of sexual abuse. Set in the rainy English countryside and seen through the dead-pan gaze of Tom, the family's teenage son, The War Zone has hardly any musical soundtrack and offers little in the way of hope or redemption. Made up of silent, static, beautiful compositions, Roth presents us with a vision of the family as a microcosm of voyeurism, incest and lies. (JG)
Romance The story of Paul and Marie, a Euro-trashy couple who live in an apartment that looks like the set for a CKone ad. When the supremely indifferent Paul can't get it up anymore, Marie decides to get her kicks elsewhere, inaugurating a series of meaningless and perverse sexual affairs. One liaison is with porn star Rocco Siffredi and another involves meticulous bondage maneuvers with a paunchy middle-aged school principal. The long scenes of tying and untying are as erotic as watching someone do a Rubik's cube--so Marie soon learns that anonymous sex without love isn't all that great. I found myself dying for Paul to throw her a bang and end her whiny voice-overs on the nature of love and the differences between the sexes. (JG) The Pornographer This may be a first: a porn melodrama! Watch as our protagonist, Paul, gets rejected by various women. According to all that '80s psycho-babble (which filmmaker Doug Atchinson has apparently swallowed hook, line and sinker), this leads him inevitably to consume tons of porn. Then, Paul decides it would be cool to leave his career as a paralegal behind and become a creator of his very own artsy porn. This film's central revelations, that L.A. is kind of a sleazy place and that there are nasty people involved in the porn biz, may leave you a bit cold. But there's no denying it: Michael DeGood, in the central role, turns in an excellent performance, managing to bring dimension and intelligence to his character in the film. (MH) Beresina or The Last Days of Switzerland Part social satire, part screwball comedy, this is the story of a young Russian woman who comes to Switzerland wanting nothing more than to become a citizen. An innocent abroad, she hooks up with an avant-garde fashion designer/madame who pimps her out to sleazy public officials who are into everything from foot worship to cross-dressing. All throughout, she refers to her johns as "good friends" and hopes they will help her gain citizenship. While the film's surreal humour is hit and miss, there's a fun finale involving a bunch of geriatrics initiating a coup d'état, successfully taking over Switzerland. (JG) My Best Fiend (Mon Ennemi Intime) Join German director Werner Herzog as he indulges in memories of Klaus Kinski, the star of five of his films. Mainly composed of talking heads intercut with scenes from Herzog's movies, the film's reminiscences made me hungry for more Kinski footage. According to Herzog and most of the people interviewed, Kinski was the most violent, intense, hysterical, megalomaniacal human being who ever lived. But despite a couple of scenes of Kinski screaming at production people in the jungle, there's little insight into what truly made him tick. One thing is for certain: Kinski was funny. There's one scene of him pulling a contemplative Hamlet, with a monkey for a skull, that had me in stitches. (JG) Ça Commence Aujourd'hui Bertrand Tavernier's Ça Commence Aujourd'hui is the story of Daniel, a kindergarten teacher at a school for lower income families. Daniel brings to his job a Serpico-like sense of determination and integrity, bursting into the offices of bureaucrats to demand better funding for his school. But he's also a man who gets down on his knees to kiss and hug little kids with unselfconscious affection. Tavernier's film is an exploration of what it means to be saintly in a contemporary context, and also presents the problems that face the police, government, teachers and parents to ultimately reveal there to be no easy solutions for social ills. (JG)
The World Film Festival screens from August 27September 6 at the Loews, Imperial, Parisien, Paramount and Complexe Desjardins. Tickets are $7.50, $55 for a book of ten and $200 for a 9 to 5 day pass. Info: 848-3883. Web site: www.ffm-montreal.org |
Guinevere After being declared the It Girl at this year's Sundance, Sarah Polley continues her lucky roll with the indie Guinevere. She's great in this, acting opposite the daunting talent Stephen Rea (who will be in town this year for the World Fest as a member of the jury). He plays a considerably older artist who has the hots for various younger women, his latest conquest being the naïve and impressionable Polley. There are a few too many clichés in the screenplay (equal parts A Star Is Born/Pygmalion), but the two actors manage to create some honest and inspired moments. (MH)
Rats To say this film is bizarre would be an understatement of epic proportions. Toronto-based filmmaker Jacques Holender has made a nausea-inspiring film about a doc filmmaker who begins to lose his mind as his girlfriend dumps him, his mother dies, his film funding dries up and, as you might have guessed by the title, his apartment becomes infested with rats (this is not a first date movie, no sir). Are the rats for real or is it all just part of our hero's madness? Holender doesn't quite pull us into the horror he's hoping to create, in large part because we simply don't care enough about his central character. (MH)
Just a Wedding This is a sequel to the Oscar-winning 1978 NFB doc I'll Find a Way. Montreal filmmaker Beverly Shaffer decided, 20 years later, to revisit the life of Nadia DeFranco, the utterly endearing and charming nine-year-old girl who dealt so bravely with Spina-Bifoda in the first film. At 29, DeFranco grapples less with her disability than she does with some rather condescending family attitudes while endeavouring to tie the knot--to a man without a disability (or a job). While not quite matching the punch of the original, Just a Wedding does what a sequel is supposed to do, capturing the feeling of meeting up with an old friend you've lost touch with. She's doing just fine, thank you. (MH)