NZ International Film Festival 2010

I wish the NZ Film Festival happened during the winter holidays, because it's hard to fit it in the working schedule. It's the winter cultural highlight here in Wellington, and it makes the city look as beautiful as the International Festival of the Arts does on alternate summers. Luckily, my work is flexible enough to let me rush to the theatres and catch up with films I'd be unlikely to see otherwise.

The sunny days and the beauty of the venues filled with like-minded film lovers make it all the more special: there's nothing more satisfying than looking at the sunset over Courtney Place from the lobby of the Art-Deco Embassy Theatre while having a drink and listening to the buzz and excitment of the crowd before an especially awaited screening.

This year I've seen 10 films, carefully selected. I've talked about HOWL at length in my previous post; now I want to mention briefly the other ones. I don't predict any of them will become a popular hit, not even I Love You Philip Morris, which is the closest to Hollywood mainstream I've attended this time.



It's about conman Steve Russell (Jim Carey at his best, especially in the more dramatic, non-slapstick moments), who happens to be also gay and fall in love with a sweet, blond-haired, 100% gay Ewan McGregor while in prison for one of his scams. The film is too off-beat to appeal to a mass audience, always on the verge of melodrama but also trying hard for physical comedy: too romantic for slapstick, too surreal for romance, just too genre-defying and dark. I found it utterly charming in its strangeness and perhaps one of the most homo-political American films I've seen in a while. I wish it well, but I doubt it will be a commercial success.

In fact, I don't think any of the films I've chosen to see will have big audiences, but perhaps a few will appeal to dedicated viewers. Three of them were about art/artists: Basquiat, Banksy and Truffaut/Godard (the slash is intentional). The documentary about Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child (by Tamra Davis) was both interesting and a little disappointing. I was lucky enough to see a full Basquiat retrospective a few years ago in Milan (with my father: we saw a Tamara de Lempicka exhibition on the same day and it was one of those father/daughter-through-art moments that are almost impossible to achieve through a simple conversation, at least in my family), so I knew more about his art than this film assumes his viewers to know.

I didn't learn much more, but I still recommend the film to those who're not too familiar Basquiat and want to find out about his work, and, more importantly, for the stunning footage of New York in the late 1970s and early 1980s, especially the art scene. The distance of time made me almost nostalgic of those years when, very young, it was so easy to despise the times we lived in (Reagan, Tatcher, Craxi, etc.)

The film includes also some Warhol/Basquiat footage, and I wish the relationship had been explored further, especially the works they produced together. Only now critics are giving those painting its due, but they're among the ones that I remember most from Milan.



And thirty years later another street artist, Banksy, becomes mainstream, only without the angst and self-destructiveness of Basquiat. Exit Through the Gift Shop is labelled "A Banksy Film", although it is unclear who actually directed it (Banksy himself, from his hiding place and behind a computer screen, claims that his editors have more right to a directing title than himself). It was certainly the most successful of the screenings I've attended, with an Embassy Theatre filled to capacity and a very responsive audience.

It deserves its cult status: it's funny, entertaining, intelligent and very "actual". It presents itself as a documentary, not so much about Banksy, as about the film-maker Thierry Guetta, who obsessively filmed street artists at work without ever "making a film", until he turned into a maverick street artist himself and became an overnight art "legend" in the process. An idiot savant of the indiosincrasies of the contemporary art world (especially its commercialism).

Banksy apparently turns the camera on his documentarist and creates a commentary on the state of art today. Or does he? It's never clear whether we see a documenary or a very elaborate fiction or a combination of both. Still, one hell of a clever film.



Talking of intelligent people, I was expecting a lot from Two in The Wave, about the friendship and artistic relationship between two of my favourite film-makers, Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard. Unfortunately, as soon as I saw that the film opened with the iconic final scene of The 400 Blows", I realised that I'd be watching a rather well-rehearsed take on the Nouvelle Vague. However, being a sentimental girl,just watching the footage of these two geniuses as young protesters against the establishment and their tug-of-war over their love child Jean-Pierre Leaud was enough to bring tears to my eyes.



Although the deeper reasons for the end of their friendship and their ideological break-up are never fully explored, the film is worth seeing, if nothing else for the footage of boy Jean-Pierre arriving at Cannes with his little suitcase and Fracois walking the Croisette with him, and for the wonderful reel of Leaud's first audition for The 400 Blows that runs at the end of the film.

What else? Claire Denis' White Material is a very tough film about current North African civil wars and the deadly legacy of the French colonisation; it's also a very poetic love letter to Africa and a tour de force performance by Isabelle Huppert as the white coffee plantation owner who will not leave "her" land, even as the unspecified country she resides in is falling apart, with dire consequences for all. This is not a film for those who seek moral platitudes or want blame and responsibilities to be clearly attributed along racial lines: we're all guilty, we're all victims, and the horror of war is relentless.



One of the two Italian films I've seen is I Am Love, by Luca Guadagnini, clearly based on the rise and fall of the Agnelli (FIAT) family.



It' visually stunnig, reminiscent of many other stylish Italian films that are critical of the family structure and capitalist ideology in Italy, such as those by Visconti, or Pasolini's Teorema. At times, I felt the sense of style (the gorgeous framing of Milan, the perfectly lit and artistically designed interior shots, the artwork, the elegance of food presentations, the beauty of the actors and their clothes) was too overwhelming, leaving little space for substance.

On the other hand, it's the story of a family, a woman (Tilda Swinton: the film is built around her ethereal presence), who live according to the rules of style that determine/follow their social status,and little else; when their world falls apart, the emptiness beneath the facade is revealed: when the mother/wife finally loses her carfully constructed elegance, beauty, and "identity" at the end, it's all the more striking precisely because of the visual perfection she'd strived to embody until then.

It's also a film full of homoerotic (and Oedipal) suggestions, as is the other Italian-directed film I've seen (or rather, saw on the big screen for the first time) at the festival: the restored version of Sergio Leone's epic Once Upon A Time in The West (1968). I could write an essay about this film, about the way it's - although not quite deliberately - perhaps the only true feminist western movie; how it makes the western mythology look very much like Greek and Roman epics (the final duel, below, reminds us of Hector and Achilles' final battle); how Morricone's music is timed to perfection and makes each movement looks like ballet coreography; how Henry Fonda gives the performance of his life; how Claudia Cardinle burns the screen with her beauty; how it's as much about Italy in the 1960s as it is about the western myth. But I'll let the film speak for itself, in the scene of the final showdown. If you watch this clip, try to imagine it on a really big screen, in cinemascope and a restored print:



Finally, two more films that I've seen and truly recommend if you're looking for something quite different from mainstream fare. One is the winner of the 2010 Cannes Film Festival, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives:



I know that Tim Burton has been criticised for awarding the Palm d'Or to such an arty film. I, for one, think he did the right thing, because commercial movies don't need the little extra attention an award such as this might bring; I probably would have never have had the chance to see such an unusual, challenging film otherwise. It'a about reincarnation and the transition from life to death; ghost monkeys and princesses who mate with carps (the fish); beautiful jungle landscapes and caves visited at night and filmed in the natural light of gloworms; Buddhist monks who wear jeans and dream of hot showers; regrets and karaoke bars.

And lastly, again in the same vein of thank god for film festivals or we would never know these movies existed, perhaps the most beautiful of all: Al-Momia (The Mummy), aka The Night of Counting the Years, the only feature length film ever made by Egyptian director Shadi Abdel Salam (1969). I can only wish you to be lucky enough to come across this freshly restored version. It was filmed at dawn and sunset rigorously in the natural light of the Valley of Kings, including inside the caves where the treasures of thousands-of-years old pharaoh dynatsies were found. Transcendental.