Thursday, September 2, 2010

Limbo

by James McNally on September 2, 2010

in Film Festivals

Limbo

Limbo (Director: Maria Sødahl): I was ini­tially attracted to this film because of its set­ting: a com­munity of expat oil engin­eers in 1970s Trinidad. But quite apart from exquisite art dir­ec­tion, Limbo fea­tures one of the strongest per­form­ances I’ve seen in quite a while. Sonia (Line Verndal) has delayed joining her hus­band Jo in Trinidad to care for her mother, who’s just had a stroke. But after six months, she packs up her two young chil­dren and leaves Norway for the Caribbean. Upon her arrival, she exper­i­ences much more than cul­ture shock. She dis­covers that her hus­band has been car­rying on an affair with a local woman in her absence. Despite his declar­a­tion that it was just a “fling” and that it is over, she can’t seem to trust him, or to settle into her new life.

She’s also not accus­tomed to having ser­vants make her meals and clean her house, and she seems unable to slip into the life of leisure that the other expat wives take for granted. Despite the fact that her husband’s friend has a Swedish wife, she seems unenthused by the other woman’s over­tures of friendship.

Jo’s efforts to win her trust back also fail, and when she backs out of a trip to Houston with him, he becomes sus­pi­cious. When the chil­dren con­vince her to accom­pany their gardener on an overnight trip to catch crabs, she goes along and even flirts with the man, but it’s revenge and not lust that drives her.

Before long, her dis­com­fort grows into a full-blown nervous break­down, and she checks her­self into a mon­as­tery to “rest.” With this time to clear her mind, she makes a decision about her future that upsets the equi­lib­rium her hus­band has been so des­perate to establish.

Though it might sound a bit like a soap opera on paper, in reality, the per­form­ances lift this con­sid­er­ably, turning it into a char­acter study of a woman trapped in cir­cum­stances seem­ingly beyond her con­trol. When she finally develops the strength to choose her own future, it coin­cides with a moment of tragedy that gives the film an ambiguous but somehow sat­is­fying conclusion.

Here is the Q&A with dir­ector Maria Sødahl and stars Line Verndal and Bryan Brown from after the screening.

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Duration: 16:33

8/10(8/10)

Tagged as: #mwff10, 1970s, expatriates, norway, trinidad

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Bjarnfreðarson

by James McNally on September 2, 2010 · 2 comments

in Film Festivals,Television

Bjarnfreðarson)

Bjarnfreðarson (Director: Ragnar Bragason): Based on a pop­ular Icelandic tele­vi­sion show, Bjarnfreðarson topped the domestic box office for sev­eral weeks last Christmastime, besting even James Cameron’s Avatar. Although I sus­pect that famili­arity with some of the TV show’s plot­lines would enrich the exper­i­ence, the film works quite well as a stan­dalone story, and if any­thing, it’s made me eager to seek out the rest of the series.

We first meet Georg Bjarnfreðarson (Jón Gnarr, who co-wrote the script with Bragason) as he’s being granted parole from prison. Despite his protests that he never applied, he’s forced out and we soon under­stand why. Georg is a tyrant, imposing his own will on everyone and everything around him. Flashbacks show us the reasons. The son of a very unique single mother, Georg was raised as a veget­arian fem­inist com­munist and was expected to be a “great man.” Instead, his mis­ad­ven­tures landed him in the slammer. Upon his release, his mother refuses to see him, so he crashes with Daniel, with whom he spent time in prison.

The nerdy Daniel is not someone you’d expect to have a crim­inal record, but appar­ently he got caught up in one of Georg’s schemes and did some time. Now, he’s about to graduate from med­ical school. At least, that’s what his wife and par­ents think. Secretly, he’s been studying art instead. Also living with them is Olafur, another prison buddy. He’s a 40-year-old who thinks he’s still 20, and when he loses his job as a delivery driver, an amazing piece of luck leads him to his true calling as a radio DJ.

Watching these three char­ac­ters interact, it’s no wonder that they’ve fea­tured in an entire series. What the film does, though, is to probe the oddball Georg’s back­story, and in the pro­cess, make us care about him. As we see him being picked on throughout his child­hood, we realize that he’s never known a normal life or normal rela­tion­ships. His desire to bond with the goofy Oli leads to some hil­arity, but in the end, these mis­fits really do need each other.

Though this reminded me in parts of Canada’s own Trailer Park Boys, there was some­thing deeper at work here. Although guilty of a few instances of poor taste (including giving Daniel a mentally-challenged brother-in-law and a father reduced to mum­bling inco­her­ently after a stroke), the film does convey a real sense of out­siders trying to make a new begin­ning, of trying to escape the per­sonas that have been forced upon them. That the film is able to achieve this while also providing plen­tiful laughs is a credit to the filmmakers.

In any case, it has me pre­pared to spend large sums of money to watch the rest of the story. And ship­ping DVDs from Iceland isn’t cheap, you know.

8/10(8/10)

Tagged as: #mwff10, iceland

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Le Sentiment de la Chair (The Sentiment of the Flesh)

by James McNally on September 2, 2010

in Film Festivals

Le Sentiment de la Chair (The Sentiment of the Flesh)

Le Sentiment de la Chair (The Sentiment of the Flesh) (Director: Roberto Garzelli): When Helena, a young med­ical illus­trator, begins exper­i­en­cing lower back pain, she goes for x-rays, bringing her into con­tact with Benoit, a radi­olo­gist. A series of cir­cum­stances brings them together again and again and soon they are involved in a pas­sionate love affair. Each of them is drawn to obsess­ively doc­u­ment the human body, both inside and out, and in order to break down all bar­riers to intimacy, they go to extreme lengths to explore each other’s bodies. Robert Garzelli’s fea­ture debut has the germ of a fas­cin­ating idea at its heart, but in the end is as shallow, albeit beau­tiful, as its protagonists.

When Helena tells Benoit that it is a priv­ilege for him to be able to see inside people, she’s right. But in equating that with intimacy, both she and Benoit are ludicrously mis­guided. If the film seemed more aware of that irony, it could have been a fas­cin­ating explor­a­tion of a romantic rela­tion­ship. When she asks Benoit to scan her com­pletely in an MRI machine, saying “I don’t want to have any secrets from you,” I almost laughed out loud, for all that we’ve seen from this extremely attractive couple up to that point has been an intense sexual rela­tion­ship. Neither seems to know or care any­thing about the other’s family, circle of friends, dreams or aspirations.

The fact that Benoit can pos­sess a full set of images of his lover’s body gives him no insight into her char­acter. It’s simply x-ray porn. The lovers’ belief that they can know each other by knowing each other’s bodies is naive, at first charm­ingly, and then dis­turb­ingly so. If it was only that easy to see what was inside the other’s mind, heart, or soul.

In the end, the film goes for the psy­cho­lo­gical angle, and almost becomes a thriller, as we see these two obsess over, and then reject each other as they try to quell the growing intensity of their shared fetish. The final scene is meant to dis­turb, and it does, to a point. It prompted a few walkouts from the audi­ence at my screening, but failed to gen­erate any emo­tional reac­tion from me. The dir­ector seems to keep his dis­tance, giving the film a cold, hard, dare I say clin­ical edge. Unfortunately, if there was any beating heart in this film, the x-rays failed to find it.

7/10(7/10)

Tagged as: #mwff10, france

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Pete Smalls is Dead

by James McNally on September 2, 2010 · 18 comments

in Film Festivals

Pete Smalls is Dead

Pete Smalls is Dead (Director: Alexandre Rockwell): Peter Dinklage plays K.C., a former Hollywood screen­writer who now runs a laun­dromat. Having moved to New York after his wife died, he has little time for his former life, pre­fer­ring to spend time with his beloved dog Buddha. But after a loan shark kid­naps the dog and holds him as ransom for an unpaid debt, K.C. has to come up with $10,000 fast. At the same time, his former col­league Pete Smalls, a suc­cessful dir­ector, has just washed up dead on a beach, and his friend Jack is pes­tering him to go to the funeral. Only after Jack prom­ises to get him the money does K.C. agree to return to L.A.

This highly-contrived premise is the set up for a shaggy dog film that is over­stuffed with quirk and straining from the abund­ance of shop­worn cliches it employs to reach its pre­dict­ably happy ending. On one hand, it’s great to see Dinklage in a role that doesn’t con­stantly make ref­er­ence to his size. But he’s burdened with por­traying a char­acter who hasn’t cracked a smile in ten years, and who doesn’t get to change that in the film. Another annoy­ance is the use of voi­ceover throughout, as if this were a film noir.

The struc­ture and char­ac­ters are much too remin­is­cent of The Big Lebowski, a film with a much better script and fresher per­form­ances. Rockwell has assembled a great cast, most of whom have appeared in his earlier films, espe­cially In the Soup. Some of the sup­porting cast have fun, espe­cially Steve Buscemi (in a blonde afro wig) and Michael Lerner, playing a couple of greasy pro­du­cers. And Mark Boone Junior, in the dude role of Jack, reminded me at times of the late great Maury Chaykin.

In the end, the script just has too many twists for its own good. The quirky gang of pals that comes together to help K.C. out seems thrown together unbe­liev­ably. Stabs of pseudo-symbolism (but­ter­flies, snow globes) are embar­rassing, and the overuse of film tech­niques like the iris zoom are just annoying.

I hate to sound so down on a film that was clearly a labour of love for all involved. Rockwell seems like a genu­inely nice man, and I’m sure his cast all did the film as a favour to him. But the story didn’t hold my interest beyond the half-hour mark, and some char­ac­ters (esp. Seymour Cassel’s) seemed to be written into the script just so he could give one of his actor friends a role. It feels a bit like a reunion pro­ject with no real life as a film of its own.

Perhaps it was just K.C.‘s (or was it Peter Dinklage’s?) gloom that per­meated what was sup­posed to be a fun caper film. In any case, Pete Smalls is Dead. To quote one of the char­ac­ters in the film, “he’s dead as a doornail.”

Here is the Q&A with dir­ector Alexandre Rockwell and stars Mark Boone Junior and Seymour Cassel from after the screening. Of note is the fact that Rockwell’s 87-year-old mother Svetlana lives in Montréal and was at the screening, sit­ting in the row right behind me. She asks Seymour Cassel a ques­tion that he spends quite a bit of time, uh, answering. Also of note was that Rockwell’s wife and daughter were sit­ting in the row behind me as well. His wife is Karyn Parsons, who played older sister Hilary on The Fresh Prince of Bel Air.

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Duration: 22:01

5/10(5/10)

Tagged as: #mwff10

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