October 27

[Earlier films: inadequate MANDERLAY stuff, Oct. 23]

Due to overwhelming public demand (cheers Dan), it's the Return of the Bloggy Asides! Bloggy Aside 1 concerns the pale middle-aged woman who sat next to me in the internet cafe yesterday, talking really fast in an Irish accent. First I knew of her was when she suddenly turned to me and said: "Excuse me. Could you please stop scratching yourself?". I complied (though I didn't think I was scratching myself), and something about my response obviously pleased her because 10 minutes later, completely out of the blue, she started telling me how she was a victim of identity theft, her former roommate had stolen her personal data, this had been going on for years and the cops refused to help because she (the roommate) was a compulsive liar and always made it look like she (the woman) was imagining things. Stupidly forgetting Big-City Rule #1 - Never Humour an Insane Person - I told her I was sorry for her troubles and her roommate sounded clearly psychotic, like those women who steal someone else's baby when they lose their own (I don't know why I said this; I suspect because I saw it on MARCH OF THE PENGUINS a few days ago). Her eyes lit up and she started bombarding me with questions: Who's lost a baby? Has this happened to someone I know? Why did I mention lost babies? Did I think her roommate might be a closet baby-snatcher? Putting on my smoothest voice and explaining that of course I only meant the same pattern of behaviour, etc, I quickly grabbed my coat and got the hell out of there. Sometimes I think I see her on the subway, trying to catch my eye...

Bloggy (yet somehow Film-Related) Aside 2: For fucksake, not another festival cold! This one isn't as bad as the one that laid me low in Toronto last year but still put a crimp in today's movie-watching, mostly because I keep sniffling and coughing and don't feel like sitting in a crowded theatre for two hours. I know why it happens, of course - at the risk of offering Too Much Information, I've got the whole hairy bearlike thing going and sweat really easily, plus I'm constantly running up and down escalators in the Underground, standing in sweltering trains then walking into the chilly air. Anyway, this is why I missed LEMMING today (I didn't miss much, right guys? right?) and may decide not to see BROKEN FLOWERS tonight. Autumn in England - and/or Canada - sucks in my opinion. This wouldn't happen at the Sao Paulo Festival...

TIME HAS COME (dir., Alain Guiraudie) (61)
OK, looks like Guiraudie's true metier are mad dreams like this and NO REST FOR THE BRAVE, not low-key realism as per THAT OLD DREAM THAT MOVES. Fine with me - I dig his sense of humour - and suffice to say this is a tale of gay French samurai in faux-medieval garb living in the mythical kingdom of Obitania, where the "Warriors" fight the "Bandits" and people talk about ounaye herdsmen, kevara (a drink) and krobans ("Spare me your two-kroban speeches!"). As in NO REST there's a gay couple with a partner in his sixties, a punk-music interlude, and gentle natural light making the most of the video visuals (admittedly I've seen both films on video); everyone has bizarre names and they talk about the possibility of Love in between offbeat action scenes (THAT OLD DREAM wasn't a fluke; Guiraudie's still a humanist, even in outlandish settings). The last two lines - "It's hard to feel comfortable in your own country"; "Look around. You'll see you are not alone" - might be the rallying-cry of a defiantly original filmmaker seeking his niche in a land of Bacris and Jaouis; this one isn't major work, nor does it add up to much, but don't be fooled. He's a huge talent.

THE PLANE (dir., Cedric Kahn)
Watched 55 minutes on DVD, didn't see much evidence of subversion. Boy-and-his-dog picture with a magical plane (possessed by the spirit of a dead father) as pooch, managing a few dark moments - the plane gets angry, and destroys the kitchen; there's a morbid little girl-friend who claims to hear the voices of the dead in the forest at night - but mostly content to work as superior kidpic (my rating was somewhere in the mid-50s). Kahn isn't slumming, though he obv. streamlines his oblique style; there's some striking images of walking to the lab across the fields at night, and a Sign of the Times conversation when the boy asks Mom if Dad's gone to Heaven. "Some people believe that, other people believe other things," she replies multi-denominationally; "I believe he's wherever we want him to be". We live in the Age of the Spiritual Cop-Out...

THE SKY TURNS (dir., Mercedes Alvarez) (67)
Didn't take notes, and missed the first 5 minutes, but the premise is simple enough: Spanish village awaiting its death (there hasn't been a baby born there in decades; the last one was the filmmaker, now grown up and returning to the world of her early childhood). The inhabitants take the long view - philosophical about the end, shrugging that "in 400 years no-one will remember what happened here" - and so does the film, placing the village on a locus of Time and History stretching back to the dinosaurs (almost the first thing we see is a site where dino-bones were uncovered). There's a sense that the people are mere witnesses to their own lives, their spirits already crossed over - like the village itself, looking unearthly in the morning mist, they seem lost to the world; it's a shock when George Bush is mentioned, or the gigantic blades of a wind-power plant appear on a nearby hill - making the film both touchingly elegiac and a little one-dimensional. Almost all the scenes harp on the same theme: memories, ghosts of the past. These people's lives have become truncated, reduced to taking their place between past and future; they're waiting out their time (albeit with dignity and good humour), and the film seldom tries to transcend their quotidian (cf. Terence Davies). Only Art is allowed a way in, preserving what it can; the rest is silence.