WHEN DID YOU LAST SEE YOUR FATHER

When Did You Last See Your Father?

 

Elisabeth Stevens

 

            In the Film Festival Catalog,  the father of this family (effectively acted by Jim Broadbent) is described as a “charming” parent who overshadows his son ( played as an adult Colin Firth).

            Don’t believe it.  A better adjective to describe this father is  “horrid.”

The man is a blow hard, a liar, a cheater, and above all, a sadistic parent and husband.  He enjoys playing cruel practical jokes on his defenseless young son.  He flaunts his  long-term romance with another woman before his long-suffering wife at family gatherings.

Granted, the film provides a wrenchingly painful but believable  picture of the father’s effect on his son, and eventually, his son’s marriage, but it all goes on too long. No one, unfortunately, ever has the guts to stand up to the monster.  Instead, when the father is finally dying of cancer, his wife cares for him patiently, and his son leaves his own wife alone in order to help.

When the father dies at last, the film simply becomes maudlin. We have to  see the wife sleeping one last  night beside the corpse.  We have to drag through the funeral,  We have to witness the family deliriously throwing ashes that look like grey talcum powder into the air.

  Some may call this closure.  What it really is is failure; the failure to confront–and deal with–the truth.  Perhaps this film is the son’s revenge, but it comes much too late.

 

FACE TO FACE

Face to Face

 

Elisabeth Stevens

 

         Sometimes, going home can be a recipe for disaster. This is what happens  when Jenny Isaksson, a  beautiful psychiatrist  powerfully portrayed by Liv Ullmann, returns to the home of her grandparents for the summer.       

The doctor’s 14-year-old daughter is at camp, and her husband is out of the country on business.  With misplaced kindness, the Grandmother has brought down from the attic the childhood  furniture the doctor used when she was nine years old after her parents had been killed in a bus accident.

            This rare and grainy 1976 Ingmar Bergman film is one of the director’s most effective evocations of  the power of buried feelings, half-forgotten memories.  Seemingly happy and successful, Jenny nevertheless turns to another man (familiar Bergman actor Erland Josephson), and, after being attacked and almost raped by a stranger,  becomes disturbed, attempts suicide.

The scenes of  her breakdown, and then, her slow recovery in the  hospital earned Ullmann a well-deserved Academy Award nomination for best actress.  One can question, perhaps, whether Jenny’s cloudy recollections of her parents–which seem to lie at the root of her trauma–quite correspond with her painful present reactions. Was she perhaps molested by her father, who is described as a drunk?

The question is hinted at, but it remains unanswered.  Today, with more light on such subjects, this would be a different movie.  Nevertheless, the late Ingmar Bergman remains the master

 

THE PASSION OF ANNA

theThe Passion of Anna

Review by Elisabeth Stevens

            There was a time when one waited eagerly every year, and sometimes more often, for the new film by the Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman.  Masterpieces such as “The Seventh Seal,” “Wild Strawberries” and “Smiles of a Summer Night” were etched on the memories of many admirers.

            Now, a number of the lesser-known films of Bergman, who died last year at age 89, are being shown at the Sarasota Film Festival.  “The Passion of Anna” of 1969 is one of the darker, philosophically-oriented films of Bergman, the son of a Lutheran minister.           

            Instead of “dark”, one is tempted to say muddy, for this well-acted but dreary offering is not easy to understand.  Suffice it to say that it involves an affair between the beautiful Liv Ullman, cast as  Anna, a widow whose husband and child were killed in an auto accident, and  Max von Sydow, playing  Andreas, a divorced man who has been convicted for a minor offense and briefly imprisoned.

            The setting is rural, chilly, snow-clogged .  The more intimate scenes take place in the half-light of lamps during the seemingly endless winter.  In this sparsely populated area, someone has been torturing and killing helpless animals–first a dog, then sheep.  Eventually, a poor horse is set on fire in his barn.

            Who is to blame?  Is it the architect and photographer whose  lonely, insomniac  wife has had an affair with Andreas?   It is not the poor old woodcutter whom neighbors drive to suicide because they suspect him of the crimes.  Is it then perhaps Andreas–or even Anna herself?

            These troubling questions are never answered.  The guilt multiplies; the blame cannot be assigned.  We know that Anna, who staunchly says she believes in truth, has lied in describing her marriage as a perfectly happy one. 

But deception and misrepresentation are not Anna’s sins alone.  The mood, the shadows, the dark questions in this film suggest that human frailty and, in the end, original sin, are the problems.  Animals–and humans too–are tortured by violence, contradictions and the need for love.

 

CALIFORNIA DREAMIN

CALIFORNIA DREAMIN’

ELISABETH STEVENS

            If  you don’t mind sitting for two and  a half hours (155 minutes to be exact) you’re going to like “California Dreamin’.”  Due to the death of  the film’s 27-year-old Romanian director Christian Nemescu in a car crash, this work was never edited into its final form, but it nevertheless won the  2007 Camera D’Or award.

            An ironic story of Balkan misadventure, the film involves a group of American soldiers sent on a NATO mission to Kosovo by train across Romania.  When the train is stopped in a mid-country village by a bureaucratic stationmaster, the action begins.

            The stationmaster wants the proper papers–and time to plunder the train’s valuable contents for the black market.  The American officer in charge wants to get going.  The villagers want–whatever they can get from the visitors.

            In a pumped up show of hospitality, the town plans an elaborate party–supposedly to celebrate its one hundredth anniversary (which has already passed).  The Americans are welcomed with food, drink, music. 

There are unbelievably elaborate costumes, fireworks and performances–a Romanian Elvis impersonator, a Dracula.          

 The teenage girls smile invitingly, Even though they can’t speak English, they are more than willing to dance.  Of course, the inevitable happens. The stationmaster’s daughter ends up in the arms of a GI; the stationmaster and the American officer become friends.

Beneath it all, however, there is a dark undercurrent of sadness and remembrance.  In black and white flash backs, the stationmaster recalls the bombing of the village during World War II when he was a child.  The villagers back then, had dreamed that Americans would come to rescue them.  Instead, the soldiers who came were Germans, then Russians.

The Americans have come at last, but ironically, it is all too late.

There are warring elements in the village itself.  The visitors depart amidst conflict, tragedy and misadventure.

            Truly, this is a moving story despite inordinate length, jarringly jerky camera movements and sub titles flashed on and off too quickly.  In World War II movies, snafus and cross-cultural confrontations could be humorous–but of course the Americans always won in the end.

 This sort of comedy currently lacks credence.  There are no jokes to be made about the Killing Fields of Cambodia or about what is happening today in Iraq.

 

Glass: A PORTRAIT OF PHILIP IN TWELVE PARTS

GLASS: A PORTRAIT OF PHILIP IN TWELVE PARTS

Elisabeth Stevens

            If there is such a thing as a model for a film about an important but difficult creative artist,  “Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts” fills the bill.   The avant garde American composer Philip Glass has been both idolized and reviled by music lovers here and abroad for his “odd sounding” symphonies and for operas such as “Einstein on the Beach” and “Waiting for the Barbarians.”

            What makes this first rate summary of the life and music of the 70-year-old- composer work is the decision, presumably by director Scott Hicks and producer Susane Preissler, to divide the film into twelve parts–or chapters– rather than attempting to meld diverse elements into one continuous, and chronological, narrative.

            The innovative nature of Glass’s music, music that can be loud and repetitive and is often performed on unfamiliar, non-Western instruments, is conveyed sometimes by fragmentary performances and conversations with the composer and sometimes by indirection via talks with close associates.

            Viewers are treated to tantalizing bits of Glass operas: the clip from the final act of “Waiting for the Barbarians” is particularly effective. Glass himself is also shown at his piano, playing and frenetically correcting scores.

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Meanwhile, the composer is interviewed with friends such as filmmaker Woody Allen, poet Allen Ginsberg and painter Chuck Close.  The Close interview is particularly revealing because this artist, who creates huge portraits out of ben day dot like squares seems to parallel the composer’s interest in creating “mosaics” of sound.

            Meanwhile, Glass’s personal life if not neglected.  There are close ups of his first wife, his sister, his present wife with her two young children.  The compelling, overall picture is a triumphant one–at least for Glass himself.  Admitting, at one point that there is “a very strong, solid, hate faction” for his music, Glass has nevertheless clearly succeeded in fulfilling his high ambitions and innovative inspirations.

            “If you don’t need a new technique,” he remarks at one point, “then you’re saying something that isn’t new.”

 

 

 

 

Autumn Sonata

AUTUMN SONATA
Review by ELISABETH STEVENS
Can the pain of the past be mitigated by confronting what happened years afterwards? In Ingmar Bergman’s “Autumn Sonata” a mother, a concert pianist, returns to visit one of her grown-up daughters after years of separation.
The mother is Ingrid Bergman, faultless, in her final big screen role, and the daughter is Bergman’s favorite female star Liv Ullmann, who is memorably convincing. In the seven years since the two have seen each other, daughter Eva has quietly settled down as the wife of a minister, but her only child, a four-year-old boy has drowned. Perhaps in compensation, Eva has removed her profoundly handicapped sister from an institution and is caring for her at home.
The night of the mother’s return is one of tears and recrimination. Both sisters craved–and failed to receive–the love of the mother, who, because she was performing, was seldom at home. Eva, who is only superficially sweet and subservient, becomes her mother’s relentless judge and accuser.
“Is my grief,” she demands, “your secret pleasure?”
Driven to tell the truth, the mother admits: “You loved me, and I was afraid of your demands….I didn’t want to be your mother.”
In depth explorations of hidden feelings and failed love were wrenchingly and memorably depicted in this and a number of other Bergman films. “Autumn Sonata” won the 1979 Golden Globe Award for the Best Foreign Language Film. Would it win a prize today?
Maybe, but in the thirty years that have elapsed, much has changed. Action, rather than probing analysis, is more often “the answer.” If a mother-daughter conflict film were made today were made today would it end in physical–rather than psychological– violence?
Maybe so. In any case, “Autumn Sonata” is a masterpiece of its genre. The a,b,a sonata form is ideal for this intimate drama. The ending echoes the beginning–with variations. The mother arrives, and, in the end, as before, she leaves.

 

MISTER LONELY

MISTER LONELY 

Elisabeth Stevens

 

             Had there been a competition for the worst film at the Sarasota Film Festival, I would have voted for “Mr. Lonely.”

            The experimental, young film director Harmony Korine had some provocative ideas when he made this Surrealist-influenced film that focuses on a  group of impersonators who get together in  France at an isolated, never-never land  mansion on an island.  The participants include a Michael Jackson, a Marilyn Monroe, a  Charlie Chaplin, a Pope, etc.

            The not-very-exciting and predictable activities of these forever-costumed  souls are interspersed, from time to time with the unrelated  charitable efforts of a few nuns.   These sisters  believe that,  if they jump out of a food-distribution plane, their faith will enable them to fly, rather than die.

            O.K. then, the unifying theme is belief.  You can be what you want to be, etc.  The fragility of this sort of “faith” is best illustrated by the impersonators, but it all goes on too long.  The illness of the black sheep on their island commune prefigures the death of their dreams.

            I’ve always admired theatrical melanges such as August Strindberg’s  “Dream Play.”   I’ve sat through a number of Surrealist films and quite a lot of footage by the late Ed Emswiller, but “Mister Lonely” (112  minutes) was too much. 

 The makings of  a provocative film  with Catholic overtones are all in place, but it appears that Korine (allegedly due to addiction problems) was simply unable to do  the editing required  to make it work.  Even with the famous German film director Werner Herzog presiding as the Pope, this film is a failure.

 

The Deal

THE DEAL

Review by Elisabeth stevens

 

            The idea of a play about producing a play or a movie about the making of a movie is not new.  Nevertheless, “The Deal,” which was the opening night film at the 2008 Sarasota Film Festival, provides amusing, fast-paced entertainment.

            The stars are William H. Macy, as the down and out, many times married producer Charlie Berns, and feisty, attractive Meg Ryan as the studio big wig who has been engaged–but not married–for seven years, presumably to the wrong man.  When the two meet they bicker, have sex, battle again–and eventually fall in love.

            What’s at risk, beyond their own, somewhat jaded feelings, is the film they are struggling to make. Charlie Bern’s nephew has provided a serious script based on the life of Benjamin Disraeli, a British prime minister during the reign of Queen Victoria.  The question is: is this film going to be an authentic historical drama or is it going to be transformed into a pro Israeli  picture featuring the current dim witted muscular action star, played with considerable élan by LL Cool J?

            The answer, predictably, is that everything turns out all right.  Macy and Ryan are attractive and appealing.  There’s plenty of sex and it’s sometimes pretty funny.  If you didn’t know who Disraeli was, you’ll learn.

“The Deal” is a slick, successful, ephemeral Hollywood comedy.  What more do you want?

 

Sarasota Film Festival 2008 (10 days to remember)

Each year the Sarasota Film Festival adds a little more.
From the stars and the events, to the films and the audience, new independent film makers and the festival movers and shakers had much to choose from.This year the selection of films hand picked by the programmers was well thought out, there was something for everyone. Great job, Tom Hall and Holly Herrick.
With so many film festivals around the country, let alone the world, a local non profit company like the Sarasota Film Festival, relys on the support of the community, as well as the press.
It is always a pleasure working on a project near and dear to our heart.
This year RadioSRQ.com, has decided to expand it’s coverage to include other Film Festivals. Tribeca; April 23rd-May 4th, Boston Independent Film Festival opens April 23rd. The oldest Film Festival in the world, The Venice Film Festival Aug 27th-Sept 6th, and Cancun in November 2008.

Media Attendance Rank Festival Name Pro. Att

1 Cannes Film Festival 4,376
2 Berlin Int’l Film Festival 4,200
3 Generation 3,600
4 Comic Con Int’l San Diego 3,500
4 Venice Film Festival 3,500
6 Clermont Ferrand Short Film Festival 2,000
6 Moscow Int’l Film Festival 2,000
8 Pusan International Film Festival 1,695
9 Bangkok Int’l Film Festival 1,630
10 Mar del Plata Film Festival 1,500
10 Netherlands Film Festival 1,500
12 Tribeca Film Festival 1,300
13 San Sebastian Int’l Film Festival 1,138
14 Shanghai International Film Festival 1,109
15 Locarno Int’l Film Festival 1,048
16 Tokyo International Film Festival 1,000
16 Toronto International Film Festival 1,000
18 Sundance 900
19 Sitges Int’l Film Festival Catalonia 859
20 New York Film Festival 700
21 London Film Festival 670
22 Dubai Int’l Film Festival 650
23 FESPACO Panafrican Film Television 633
24 Filmfest Munchen (Munich) 600
24 Torino Film Festival 600
26 Karlovy Vary Int’l Film Festival 581
27 Gen Art 560
28 Rotterdam International Film Festival 541
29 Prix Ars Electronica 533
30 Sofia Int’l Film Festival 500
30 Stockholm Int’l Film Festival 500
30 Viennale Vienna Int’l Film Festival 500
30 WorldFest Houston Int’l Film Festival 500

The largest  clearly reflect the amount of press, that’s usually what gets films scene and talked about. RadioSRQ wants to do it’s part, so reports on a variety of film festivals will be filed.

 

The Pleasure of Being Robbed

sff08-thepleasureofbeingrobbed