Cannes '96, Expert Witness #7: Amir Soltani

I'm guessing many people reading have had the experience at least once of meeting someone in person whom you first admired and got to know over the internet.  At this point, it amazes me how many of the important friendships in my life unfolded this way.  One of these #blessed storylines in my life—though I wish we got to see each other more often, and not just while cramming in four-to-six movies per day at TIFF—led me to Amir Soltani, a film critic, festival programmer, public lecturer, and podcaster based in Toronto (none of which is even his day job!).  Everyone you meet, not just the people you knew first on the web, should turn out to be as kind and intelligent and reflective and big-hearted as Amir.  I first met him through his guest columns at The Film Experience and then started lurking at his own blog (newly relocated to this amazingly swank and impressive site).  I was really chuffed when he invited me to have a conversation with him and Tina Hassannia about Jafar Panahi at their Hello Cinema headquarters.  And I was so proud of and happy for Amir when he and some friends pulled off the first and sure-to-be-annual CineIran Film Festival at Toronto's Lightbox last November.

Like everyone I've spoken to about Cannes '96, Amir is an eager and catholic moviegoer with eclectic favorites.  Also, as with everyone else, his tastes sometimes converge with and sometimes depart from mine. This was never clearer to me than last year, when he was one of my most industrious co-conspirators in the Cannes '95 project that preceded and motivated this year's undertaking.  I miss having Amir's daily opinions about every movie we're both watching, so I couldn't help polling him about this year's roster.  Of course I wanted to know his thoughts about the one major Iranian entry in Cannes '96, but also about the other films floating around the festival.  I was curious, too, how his own latter-day experience as a festival coordinator might have changed his orientation toward the movies...

ND: One more round with my standard opening: Secrets & Lies, Fargo, and Breaking the Waves were the early and persistent favorites for the Palme in 1996. Where do your loyalties lie within this distinguished trio?

AS: It's quite rare that the definitive films from any given year's festival emerge so quickly and manage to remain the most acclaimed and widely discussed films so many years on. That this has happened with the above trio only speaks to their quality. Breaking the Waves is my least favourite of the three, though in fairness, it is also the one I haven't seen in the longest while. Perhaps my opinion of it also suffers from my hotand cold relationship with Lars von Trier, who is always making it difficult for me to go back and revisit his older works. On the other hand, Fargo is one of the most re-watchable films of all time. Is it the warm presence of Frances McDormand or the endearing naïveté of William H. Macy that makes such a cold, bloody film so inviting? The Coens have remained two of America's most singular and provocative voices in the two decades since, but they've rarely matched the narrative precision, emotional depth, and quirky humor of this masterpiece.

That being said, I think the jury made the correct call. I don't have the words to describe quite how much I treasure Secrets & Lies, a film that reduces me to a puddle of tears every time I watch it. The conceit of the story might sound too melodramatic and its characters too ordinary on paper, but the final result is a transcendent, personal experience. You can feel the bittersweet history of that photo studio, and breathe the suffocating air of that new house, and cry for all the lost time in that diner.

I can't help wondering if you, as a Torontonian, have thoughts about Cronenberg's Crash and particularly about the chilly, indelible way it frames your adopted home city.

Toronto is usually a substitute on screen for other urban American settings, so to see the city represent itself in films that cross over to the rest of the world is a delight. It also makes Crash doubly terrifying for me. Having driven on those roads at high speeds myself many times, to witness the crash and subsequent chases on the same streets is frightening. In general, a Cronenberg joint is the last place I'd like to imagine myself inhabiting. As for the film itself, I've been notoriously averse to the cinema of this Canadian giant, with the two notable exceptions of The Fly and Dead Ringers. Crash is neither as daring nor as entertaining as those films, and its air of edginess never quite feels authentic to me.

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Toronto Film Festival XXL

Sep 10: I'll update this post with my tweeted responses to these films, hopefully once a day.

Sep 8: Completed my final ticket selections this morning during my assigned window for the Back Half Pass (which gives you a slightly discounted rate for movies playing in the last five days of the festival). That's 45 features, two programs of 15 shorts, and 14 tickets I got for other people, and I got my first choices across the board. Clearly the other shoe will drop somehow, but for now I'm all blissed out.  I'll try to post some updates here during the fest, but my Twitter account will be the place to catch more immediate responses.  Please follow!  And track these other friends who always provide great TIFF impressions, too: Alex, Amir, Angelo, Bill, Calvin & Yonah, Catherine, Joe (also @decider), Katey, Lev, Nathaniel, Tim, and Yaseen.  If you see a movie you like, I'd love to hear about.  As, I'm sure, would any filmmakers on Twitter, especially those who aren't in the Gala divisions.  I've had great experiences cold-tweeting (?) directors whose work I just saw, and I heartily recommend it.  And if there's no way you can be at TIFF but spot a film you desperately wish you could access, tweet a filmmaker about that, too.  See if there's a college, cinema, library, or other institution near you that might be willing to host a screening, with or without the director's involvement.  Tschüss!

Sep 6: Could things be better? I logged on precisely at 8am Chicago time to buy single tickets this morning and was #143 in line. Others who did the same were 600 spots behind me; by the time I completed checkout at 8:30, there were more than 2600 people waiting. I got into all 13 showings I was hoping to add, too. With the total currently standing at 41 films and from 30 different countries, I have another half-dozen titles to add on Tuesday, when my Back Half pass goes into effect.  And then, just four days from now, the games begin!  Amy and Bradley are still dancing, girl. Channing, keep spinning, keep burning it up. Did he who made the lamb make thee?

Sep 1: I'm updating my listings below to reflect some of the Middle Eastern and African programming that I will be catching in Toronto, in cahoots with my favorite TIFF programmer, Rasha Salti. I didn't know Rasha at all or much about her cinematic beat until 2013, when Ladder to Damascus, Rags and Tatters, and Noye's Fludde (Unogumbe) all ranked among my favorites of the whole festival.  Last year, Silvered Water, Syria Self Portrait and Iraqi Odyssey were my absolute peaks of TIFF, with Timbuktu not far behind, and Rasha and I got to talking.  This year, I'm collaborating with her to see and promote her programming, all grouped here, because it's so dependably excellent, yet few of the films ever achieve a DVD release, much less a commercial distribution. So let's get behind these phenomenal movie-makers and under-heralded cinematic traditions.

Sep 1: Toronto International Film Festival season has begun, baby, and we at Nick's Flick Picks (read: I) could not be happier.  I'll be there longer than I ever have before, and seeing an even greater number of movies.  Logged in this morning at my TIFF-appointed time to make my first 30 ticket selections, 20 of which were for me, 10 for friends who wanted to see movies we worried would sell out.  I'll keep updating this entry over the next week or so as my itinerary expands, when individual tickets go on sale, and when my Back Half discount kicks in.  So, keep checking this page, and click the links if you want to learn more about the movies.  I don't, really: I'm picking based on affinity for the filmmakers, general buzz, and the dimmest notion of premise (and in some cases, I don't even know that).  I like going in as cold as possible, so I'm going to keep it that way.

The list is bound to get more esoteric, since I prioritized films that seemed likely to draw big crowds and/or I hoped to see in the first few days.  And if you're like, "These already look pretty esoteric," then that's Nick's Flick Picks for you.

MY TIFF ITINERARY (Updated 9/20)

3000 Nights (Palestine, dir. Mai Masri)
B+  Stirring drama inside Israeli women's prison, with mostly Palestinian inmates. Gutsy takes on solidarity, maternalism.

Anomalisa (USA, dirs. Duke Johnson and Charlie Kaufman)
C+  Could summon no enthusiasm. The self-pity of Kaufman's men is usually ballasted by much more creative detail or insight.

Arabian Nights, Vol. 1: The Restless One (Portugal, dir. Miguel Gomes)
A  A+? So many good films here but this inhabits a whole other level as piebald art and political intervention.

Arabian Nights, Vol. 2: The Desolate One (Portugal, dir. Miguel Gomes)
A–  Less obviously intricate than Vol 1, and more frontal in stating themes—I thought. Then I grew less sure.

Arabian Nights, Vol. 3: The Enchanted One (Portugal, dir. Miguel Gomes)
A  What Obama said about guns and religion, but about chaffinches. Heavy histories shrink to bearable fetishes.

As I Open My Eyes (Tunisia/France, dir. Leyla Bouzid)
B+  Sonorous, trenchant portrait of an artist as a young woman, riding sharp lines between petulance and dissidence.

The Assassin (Taiwan, dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien)
B+  A royal marriage of many lines, sumptuous, as much Unforgiven as Scarlet Empress. Hou's hand still unsteady on story.

Bang Gang (A Modern Love Story) (France, dir. Eva Husson)
B+  Remarkably assured, richly executed debut. Not all story beats fresh but layered, meticulous study.

Beasts of No Nation (USA, dir. Cary Joji Fukunaga)
B–  Value, impact hard to deny but formal and narrative storytelling are a little crude. Young Attah is a find.

Blood of My Blood (Italy, dir. Marco Bellocchio)
C+  My astigmatism around high-theatrical Italian melodrama persists. Less crude than Vincere but ideas seem simple?

Cemetery of Splendour (Thailand, dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
B  Reader, I must confess I'm starting to find Weerasethakul tedious, as much as I admire his directorial craft.

Chevalier (Greece, dir. Athina Rachel Tsangari)
B  Greek surrealist, quasi-Apatovian remake of American Psycho business-card scene. Finds its berth fast, hangs out a while.

Dégradé (Palestine, dirs. Arab Nasser and Tarzan Nasser)
B–  Entrapment, suffocation are topics, occasionally effects of one-set suspenser in Gaza salon. Bold vision. Hang in there.

Dheepan (France, dir. Jacques Audiard)
A–  Sleek, observant, steadily winching synthesis of prior Audiard themes. Psychology deftly externalized. Actors keep it hot.

The Endless River (South Africa, dir. Oliver Hermanus)
B  Strikingly shot. Taps a rich seam of region-specific tensions and story traditions. Maybe exploits them a bit.

Eva Doesn't Sleep (Argentina, dir. Pablo Agüero)
B  Eva Perón as Addie Bundren. Caryl Churchill-esque. Brute embodiments and symbolic afterlives in unwinnable duels.

Evolution (France, dir. Lucile Hadžihalilovic)
B  What if Matthew Barney and Jacques Cousteau co-directed a YA dystopia? I couldn't imagine, but Lucile Hadžihalilović did.

Fire Song (Canada, dir. Adam Garnet Jones)
C–  Noble intents, rare focus, and solid production values lose out to stiff writing and editing, erratic hold on character.

Francofonia (France/Germany/Netherlands, dir. Aleksandr Sokurov)
A  Louvre, the End of History. Witty, moving essay on doomed objects surviving, enemies collaborating, time as tight knot.

Frenzy (Turkey, dir. Emin Alper)
B+  Formally stunning mitosis of one suspense thriller into two, enigmatically related. Two parts Audiard, one Don't Look Now.

Girls Lost (Sweden, dir. Alexandra-Therese Keining)
C+  A century after Florida Enchantment, we're still using magic-beans device for transgender tale. Shaky on its own themes.

Green Room (USA, dir. Jeremy Saulnier)

F  Blue Ruin had assets in all areas; this has zero in any. What happened? Quoth its own eviduh, "This is taking too long."

High-Rise (UK, dir. Ben Wheatley)
TIFF canceled my screening.

The Idol (UK/Palestine, dir. Hany Abu-Assad)
Couldn't access the screening.

In Jackson Heights (USA, dir. Frederick Wiseman)
A–  Most democratic US community abounds with sidewalk pedagogy and filibusters. Everyone tries to save everyone.

In the Shadow of Women (France, dir. Philippe Garrel)
B+  Tiny ficelle of a film takes witty stock of knotted infidelities. Neither one-sided nor free of judgment.

Ixcanul (Guatemala/France, dir. Jayro Bustamante)
A  Guatemalan drama quietly, sturdily makes expert choices scene after scene, culminating in my biggest jaw-drop of the fest.

Let Them Come (Algeria/France, dir. Salem Brahimi)
Couldn't access the screening.

Minotaur (Mexico/Canada, dir. Nicolas Peréda)
A–  Totally bewitching miniature about profound indolence. Possibly class critique of a new, Lynch-meets-Pina Bausch type.

Mountains May Depart (China/France/Japan, dir. Jia Zhangke)
B–  Hi, I'd like a Hong Sang-soo, a Stella Dallas, a Notes on a Scandal (iced), and a small side of Drrrainage?!

Much Loved (France/Morocco, dir. Nabil Ayouch)
A–  Bracing, gutsy, humane drama of Moroccan prostitutes. Moving and nuanced images, sounds, and characters. Pass it on!

No Men Beyond This Point (Canada, dir. Mark Sawers)
Wound up skipping for Ixcanul

The Other Side (France/Italy, dir. Roberto Minervini)
B+  Beasts of one nation, arguably under God, arguably indivisible. An upsetting revelation no matter how "true" it is.

The Pearl Button (Chile/France/Spain, dir. Patricio Guzmán)
B+  Empathic, poetic speculation from a filmmaker whose equanimity is a miracle. Not quite Nostalgia but much-needed.

Price of Love (Ethiopia, dir. Harmon Hailay)
B  Some story beats are sadly familiar, but this streetside Ethiopian drama conveys them with nuance and piquant detail.

The Promised Land (China, dir. He Ping)
D  Way too airy-fairy Chinese romance between ballerina and hockey coach. Barely a premise, endlessly pre-rehearsed.

Return of the Atom (Finland, dirs. Mika Taanila & Jussi Eerola)
B–  Vividly mounted and persuasive on its basic grounds, but several editing and sound choices baldly manipulate.

Right Now, Wrong Then (South Korea, dir. Hong Sang-soo)
A–  Lovely. Iridesces with sadness. Hong's Purple Rose of Cairo? Well, that's not exactly true. Nothing ever is.

Schneider vs. Bax (The Netherlands, dir. Alex van Warmerdam)
B  Another 18th-century comedy about 21st-century mercenaries. Merrily morbid, somewhat for its own sake. Thin look.

Short Cuts Program #5 (Canada/France/Germany/Iraq/Spain/UK, dir. Misc.)
B–  No clinkers, few coups. My faves were the angry Society and the compactly suggestive New Eyes and El Adíos.

The Sky Trembles and the Earth Is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers (UK, dir. Ben Rivers)
B  As elaborate and idiosyncratic as it is, the postcolonial metaphors become a bit flat and static.

Son of Saul (Hungary, dir. László Nemes)
A  So formally brilliant you can't help noticing, even as you expend all emotional and moral energy. The sound! The story.

Starve Your Dog (Morocco, dir. Hisham Lasri)
B  Boldest shredding I've seen here of cinematic form, story flow. Death and the Maiden as punk Moroccan cherry bomb.

Story of Judas (France, dir. Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche)
B+  Daring rewrite of 2000-year-old treachery, passing for a long time as classical, almost POV-less account. Gorgeous.

Sunset Song (UK/Luxembourg, dir. Terence Davies)
C–  First hour a stilted slog. Middle fights its way to poignancy but last act falters. Barely ten oxygen molecules in it.

Taxi (Iran, dir. Jafar Panahi)
B  Feels less ambitious than Panahi's two previous house-arrest movies but it's funny and wise and has good tricks up its sleeve.

Te prometo anarquía (Mexico, dir. Julio Hernández Cordón)
B+  Rare bird. Rewards patience and trust as it builds from vaguely illicit skater/dealer pic to humbling tragedy.

The Treasure (Romania, dir. Corneliu Porumboiu)
A–  Comic gold, with an impressively ferrous structure of ironies and nuances that hold it together and expand its scope.

Victoria (Germany, dir. Sebastian Schipper)
A–  Morvern Callar rebuilt as pulse-pounding thriller, astonishingly executed in a continuous, 132-minute take. Overwhelming.

Wavelengths #4: Psychic Driving (Austria/Brazil/Canada/France/Spain/USA, dir. Misc)
A–  Links radical activism to African diaspora, occult folklore to synaesthetic abstraction. Dazzling.

The White Knights (Belgium/France, dir Joachim Lafosse)
Wound up skipping for Beasts of No Nation

The Witch (Canada/USA, dir. Robert Eggers)
C  Antichrist meets The Village. Spooky surface meets crossover dreams. Old tropes about faith meet some about the colonies.

The Fifties for 2015

I'm back with one of my most popular features: The Fifties, honoring the year's best filmmaking achievements among the first 50 U.S. releases I saw in 2015.  I think this is the earliest I've ever hit this numerical milestone; it's nice to be drafting this post on July 2, at the exact midpoint of the year.  Many of the films I'm honoring are either still in theaters or newly available on DVD and streaming services, so I hope you'll investigate any titles you've missed.  And, as ever, please suggest your own favorites in the comments, especially if you suspect I've missed the film.

I've gobbled up so many movies post-graduation—ten features in five days, after seeing only three in theaters during the previous two months—that I hustled all the way to a tally of 56 before I could catch my breath. Amy, The Look of Silence, Phoenix, and Tom at the Farm have not technically opened yet, and I'll only believe the last one's planned release when I see it. I'll sideline these for now, which means Tom's Lise Roy, Amy's impressive sound mix, Phoenix's mishandled but interesting script, and just about every stunning aspect of The Look of Silence (easily one of the year's best films, towering over all of the other documentaries I've seen) won't get recognized below.

Otherwise, the eligible movies were '71, About Elly, Amour fou, Blackbird, Blackhat, Boy Meets Girl, Clouds of Sils Maria, Dope, The Duke of Burgundy, Eastern Boys, Eden, Ex Machina, Far from Men, Far from the Madding Crowd, Fifty Shades of Grey, Futuro Beach, Gerontophilia, Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem, Girlhood, Heaven Knows What, The Hunting Ground, Inside Out, Insidious: Chapter 3, It Follows, It's All So Quiet, Jauja, Joy of Man's Desiring, Jurassic World, The Last Five Years, Li'l Quinquin, Love & Mercy, Mad Max: Fury Road, Madame Bovary, Magic Mike XXL, Maps to the Stars, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, Of Horses and Men, The Overnight, Paddington, A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, Play, The Princess of France, Serena, Spy, Testament of Youth, Timbuktu, The Tribe, When Evening Falls on Bucharest, While We're Young, White God, Wild Tales, and The Wolfpack.  And the nominees are...




BEST PICTURE
Girlhood (rent it!), tough-minded but affecting coming-of-age ensemble drama
It Follows (DVD in July), an ingenious and brilliantly executed horror yarn
Li'l Quinquin (rent it!), Bruno Dumont's amazingly effective foray into comedy
Mad Max: Fury Road (in theaters), tense, implacable, and baroquely conceived
Timbuktu (rent it!), a quietly confident and increasingly tense social document
The Tribe (in theaters), come for all-signing conceit, stay for potent storytelling

Also: I followed Oscar's lead and drew a contour line around the choices that most excite me, though the wonderful Eastern Boys, Pigeon Sat on a Branch..., Eden, Princess of France, and Jauja are all closely clustered just beneath this sextet, and The Look of Silence would unquestionably appear if it had opened yet.


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Cannes 1995: Day 6: May 22

Land and Freedom, UK, dir. Ken Loach

And now we're finally talking. Ken Loach and Hou Hsiao-hsien serve up the meatiest, chewiest Palme contenders so far, and without pushing too far outside their stylistic comfort zones, they make some of the most forceful work in either of their filmographies. Regrettable, maybe, that Kids stole a lot of the media attention, but in the context of Cannes, it proved something less of a sensation than its makers and distributors might have hoped. Meanwhile, Chris Newby premiered some British cinema as dissimilar as you could imagine to Land and Freedom, except perhaps in its ethic of unanticipated affinities and identifications across difference, and Iranian master Mohsen Makhmalbaf furnished one of the most austere but committed of several films overtly commemorating the 100th anniversary of the medium...

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Cannes 1995: Day 3: May 19

Beyond Rangoon, UK/USA, dir. John Boorman

1995 boasted the largest roster of Competition titles in recent Cannes history—which is all the more surprising given that some of these entries, like Angels and Insects, would have played equally well in the sidebars, and others, like Beyond Rangoon, could have been skipped altogether. But if the Palme contenders hadn't yet yielded much excitement, the sidebars were starting to pop with buzzy titles, hailing from Tinseltown and Tehran...

Updated: For even richer thoughts on many of the films listed below, head over to the first Jury Roundtable, where we all go into more detail about our reactions.
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Best of 2014: In Salute of Collaboration, Pt. 2

Jafar Panahi, or is that Kambuzia Partovi, in Closed Curtain

(For context on this series, visit Part 1. For continuations, see Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5.)

11. Cast and Crew, Boyhood - One of my favorite morsels in this year's Hollywood Reporter Actress Roundtable came when Patricia Arquette described the experience of having to be these characters on- and off-camera during short spurts over a 12-year period.  Playing a mom to two young kids who had to buy her as their mom, or at least as a second mom, involved the usual interruptions of motherhood. Thus, when one of them needed a sandwich, there was no more line-running or ruminating on the character, just a trip to the micro-budgeted craft-services table to see who wanted what.  In her way, it feels like Arquette is speaking for lots of folks involved in Boyhood, from Ellar Coltrane to the perfectly-cast grandparents to the people who paid for the shoot, edited the footage, and stocked the lunch table with sandwich stuff. They all kept it real. So, fine, I'm in the camp that admired Boyhood without quite absorbing it as a religious experience.  On the sheer scale of artistic accomplishment, I see a prodigious if uneven experiment, a great performance by Ethan Hawke, and an above-average family chronicle with angles and textures a more conventionally produced movie couldn't have, for better or worse.  But as a collective enterprise of trust and long-term devotion, among collaborators who showed us a family and were a family, this was awfully special.

12. Kristen Stewart and Peyman Moaadi, Camp X-Ray - I have, thank goodness, never been to Guantánamo or to any facility resembling it, so I can't fairly assess this film's encapsulation of that environment or of the experiences people have there, on either side of the jail bars. But Stewart and Moaadi certainly convinced me I was privy to a nascent, plausible, and variously friction-filled relationship, hard to put into words, between a mysterious captive and an erstwhile captor, herself a vulnerable underling by virtue of her age, her inexperience, and her gender. Their performances really land.  And as an Army brat, I particularly admire Stewart's strong, persuasive hold on what many young soldiers are like. Movies often seek to show that, but few past the smell test.  In a year where Stewart also showed agility and sensitivity in scenes with Julianne Moore and Juliette Binoche, she was best with Moaadi.  He continues Stewart's laudable run with world-class duet partners.

13. Edward Snowden, Laura Poitras, and Glenn Greenwald, Citizenfour - Doesn't it seem silly to group what this trio pulled off, and the context in which they did so, alongside the collaborative work of even the best actors and storytellers?  Yes and no.  One thing this team understood was that the filming of Snowden's disclosures wasn't finally separable from the disclosures themselves; image and representation are seminal, as boon and as danger. With that knowledge in mind, they construct a scene of History in Action that we can trust, even as they acknowledge the labor that goes into even the most "unvarnished" depiction—and even as they hope out loud that information might just this once travel at a speed of light before cults of personality and image-making inevitably overtake it.  What a heroic and endlessly debatable enterprise. What a rare look at such a pivotal circumstance, reflecting so much thought about what these people were doing, at concentric levels of critical remove from their own minute-by-minute and all-but-unprecedented experience.

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Top 100 Films: #81-#90

Let the countdown of my Top 100 Films continue, and better yet, keep the conversation going in response to the films, the write-ups, and the reading recommendations! I'm partial to my entry on film #90, Abbas Kiarostami's Close-Up, because my favorite essay out there was written by a friend and co-worker. Gratifying to spread the word!

#89: Mary Poppins (after, you know, a three-year delay)
#90: Close-Up

CIFF 09: OscarWatch (Updated)

Cheating a little, since end-of-the-week deadlines at work make it impossible for me to generate a full-on review, but I don't want to default entirely on my daily festival coverage. So, some brief notes about the AMPAS viability of the four official submissions for the 2009 Best Foreign Language Film Oscar I have seen or am soon to see at CIFF, all of which await their full reviews:

IRAN: About Elly (IMDb) - I can easily imagine this film earning a nomination, and though I'd still regret the more sublime and ambitious Iranian films that have gone unrecognized for so many years, I'd be to applaud a citation for About Elly. The strong ensemble acting, mystery structure, and production values jell much more closely than almost any previous Iranian submissions have with AMPAS's preferred templates, and the film has built-in appeal for nominators who vote with an eye toward cultural particularity as well as those who are looking for Hollywood-friendly "entertainment." Plus, most of the people I have talked to who have seen About Elly can't get over how gratifyingly unusual it is to see an Iranian picture get major play in the U.S. festival market without being a highbrow formalist work about children or about alienated drifters. The immersion among eight young, attractive, middle-class friends on a weekend trip will probably prove even more eye-opening to Oscar voters than to the cinephiles who have already been rallying behind the movie since Berlin.

MEXICO: Backyard (IMDb) - Seems like a threat for a nomination, especially since director Carlos Carreras has scored here before for The Crime of Father Amaro. Then again, the Academy has certainly passed up lots of recent chances to recognize many, many Latin American thriller-dramas that deal with the kinds of criminal investigations and headline-grabbing scandals that power this movie. The complicated but not too complicated female protagonist played by Ana de la Reguera may register well, as might the overtly feminist outrage of the script, less because Oscar has an estimable career as a global feminist than because of the Academy's persistent urge to feel somewhat hypocritically well-schooled about forms of "oppression" and sociological or bureaucratic deadlock that flourish beyond the U.S., as long as they are dissected within slick, commercial, ultimately reductive aesthetics. Note that this is basically the same recipe they tend to prefer among homegrown "political" dramas. The casting of industry fixture Jimmy Smits in a sort of privileged cameo cannot hurt.

SOUTH KOREA: Mother (IMDb) - I would be astonished if this made the cut, and given Korea's prior inability to find any traction in this category, either with period epics (Chihwaseon) or crossover hits (Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring) or festival prizewinners (Secret Sunshine), it would be a major plume in Bong Joon-ho's cap to qualify for this defiantly eccentric combination of murder mystery, deep-black comedy, and maternal-sacrifice melodrama. I suspect it will translate as erratic and overworked to most Academy voters, since even the more sympathetic audiences of festival watchers and devotees of aberrant auteurist perspectives have had mixed responses to the film and to the mannered, intense, bravura performance at its center. As far as that goes, see the comments that have already started accruing to this post.

ROMANIA: Police, Adjective (IMDb) - A very tricky case. I couldn't help thinking that the protracted static shots, the repeated scenes of low-intensity stakeouts and zero-speed police pursuits, and the severity of the atmosphere, color palette, and minimal dialogue would be an impossible sell to AMPAS. But then, some pivotal scenes involving a YouTube video, a populist takedown of arcane grammatical rules, and a climactic, tendentious scene with a dictionary that furnishes the movie its title really brought down the house at the screening I attended, which looked demographically like a plausible mirror for what I suspect a Foreign Language Film Committee screening probably looks like. That is, lots of white hair. Police, Adjective works a similar combo of being and of spoofing (or at least generously tickling) a certain kind of arch, minimalist European art form that paid off with a nomination for The Man without a Past in 2002, another Cannes favorite that few had pegged as the Academy's cup of tea. It won't be an easy "get" for a nod, and the snubbings of the even more accomplished The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (longer write-up here) and 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days still cast quite a shadow. Police, Adjective, though, exposes its very, very dry funny bone early and obviously enough that voters who might like it could be tempted to stick it out for the even bigger payoffs to come.

Chicago Film Festival: Scream of the Ants

I purchased a ticket to Scream of the Ants based solely on my affinity for Mohsen Makhmalbaf's past work, which has a nasty habit of receiving no commercial distribution in the United States despite the relative box-office potency of his Gabbeh and Kandahar and the critical adoration of those films and several others. Which is to say, I lacked any notion of Scream's theme or plotline and could not possibly have forecast the poetic, festival-style justice of wandering in the space of a single morning from Wes Anderson's Kool-aid vision of India to Makhmalbaf's assiduously bleak travelogue of subcontinental misery and his fulminating screed against the venal idealisms and disavowals that so often typify a foreigner's passage to India. As an Indian journalist advises a betrothed Iranian couple aboard an Indian train, "Most foreigners who come to India are stupid. They come chasing all the wrong things." Not coincidentally, this pronouncement follows the woman's admission that she and her fiancé have come in pursuit of a "Complete Man" or "Perfect Man" reputed by an acquaintance of theirs to "do great things in people's lives." This is a harebrained, romantically superficial agenda to rival Owen Wilson's—though Makhmalbaf, already savvy enough to set the West aside and show how one south Asian culture trivializes another, is also attuned to how India exploits and mystifies its own. Not only is the journalist riding the train to investigate a rumor about an old sage who can "stop trains with his eyes," and thus to earn a living by perpetuating the very kind of hooey he pretends to ridicule, but he kills time aboard the train espousing his own strain of unqualified utopianism ("Life is a miracle – everything is a miracle!") that is ubiquitously undermined by the status quo of a country where 99% of a billion citizens live below the global standard of poverty. In a brilliant and wickedly funny masterstroke, when the train finally haps upon the celebrated Baba sitting cross-legged on the rails, he privately confides to the Iranian couple that he sat on the tracks one day in hopes of ending his misery, but the train conductors all persist in slamming on their brakes—and now, the adulating crowds of pilgrims who have gathered around and behind him refuse to release him or to desist from holding him up as a spiritual icon.

This 20-minute opening of Makhmalbaf's movie is rendered with the political friskiness and absurdist humor for which Iranian films, much less Iran itself, is seldom given credit, largely because Western festivals and distributors decreed the flowering of Iranian cinema based on the evidence of children's stories like Children of Heaven and somber meditations like Taste of Cherry. The Makhmalbaf of A Moment of Innocence or Gabbeh, and even more certainly his Iranian contemporaries like Kamal Tabrizi and Massoud Dehnamaki, would have spun a teasing but illuminating feature out of this comic entrapment and the serious currents of ignorance, projection, and desperation that give rise to it. The Baba himself, with his weather-beaten body and his doubly-elbowed arm—a souvenir, no doubt, of a long-ago compound fracture—is a transfixing character who may or may not be "in" on the joke of which his fate is the center. Therefore, it's with considerable regret that we watch Makhmalbaf and his characters abandon this anecdote for a shape-shifting movie that never finds any comparably fertile or crystallized point of focus, however much justifiable anger and philosophical ambivalence Makhmalbaf allows himself to vent through the ensuing hour of arguments, monologues, vérité photography, and narrative cul-de-sacs. The husband, a former Communist long disabused of any form of hope or belief in his fellow man, reveals himself to be a colossal narcissist and a chauvinist of epic proportions—not least when he hires a prostitute for an entire night to get down on all fours and serve as a table on which to set his teacup. The wife, comparatively sympathetic but worryingly recessive, hungers for the kind of fulfillment this lover will never give her and hangs more desperately on the dream of finding a Complete Man whom she doesn't even recognize when she finds him.

Scream of the Ants grows nearly intolerable as the two trade bitter barbs over the course of a long night, so much so that we excuse the totally incongruous edit that finds them reunited for a taxi-ride into the desert. In an even more marked demonstration of the narrative listlessness that afflicted his script for his daughter Samira's most recent film, At Five in the Afternoon, Scream of the Ants lacks anything like the muscular, compressed montage that typified earlier Makhmalbaf projects. He resorts to fixing the camera on scenes and objects which are themselves prodigious or harrowing or beautiful rather than making them so through framing and metaphor, as he did so indelibly with the floating prostheses of Kandahar or the titular character of The Cyclist. Scream of the Ants, whose title refers to the unheard protests of people in a godless world, lapses inexcusably into talking-head aesthetics, with various characters spouting different strains of Makhmalbaf's own frustrated and contradictory world-critiques... but then, just as the picture precipitously lost its footing after the first act, it recovers its visual potency, at the very least, in an extended finale along the shores of the Ganges: filled with bathers, bobbing with corpses, strewn with blossoms, lapping against the concrete banks where even the wealthiest of the deceased are burned by their families for want of a proper gravesite. Again, the strange and bitter world yields itself up to Makhmalbaf's camera without his necessarily intervening or shaping our impressions at the level of his most rigorous artistry. And yet, these moments of mysterious and discomfiting realism make Scream of the Ants an urgent record of a denied world (and not an emblem of that very denial, like The Darjeeling Limited is, for all its cosmetic wonders). In its visual austerity, its withering speeches, its unusual tolerance for nudity and verbal vulgarity, and even in its aesthetic self-sabotage, Scream of the Ants maps a Godardian arc from artistic wit and sophistication into dogmatic ideology and ascetic self-loathing, directed if not against the director himself than at least against his medium and against his world. Whether this breakdown is ameliorated or extended by the riverside coda is up to each viewer to decide, just as the question remains open as to whether Makhmalbaf has really made a movie here or else just crudely illustrated an Op/Ed that's been thundering inside his head.

Commercial distributors will sprint in the opposite direction from a picture like this (check out the Variety review!), so I'm doubly grateful to the film festival. For better or worse, this side of Makhmalbaf is exhilarating at its best but still feels essential at its petulant and shapeless worst (embodied, for me, in a long speech by a German tourist who's repeating what a million college-campus T-shirts have contended for years). I wanted to scream several times during Scream of the Ants, sometimes for no better reason than the film's laziness and hectoring tone, but just as often for the same reasons that have pushed Makhmalbaf to this edge of his own outrage. C+

Photo © 2006 Makhmalbaf Film House/Wild Bunch

Picked Flick #86: Where Is the Friend's Home?

Ahmed Ahmadpoor, the eight-year-old protagonist of Abbas Kiarostami's Where Is the Friend's Home?, sits by sympathetically but helplessly as the schoolboy who sits beside him, Mohamad Reza Nematzadeh, is harshly scolded by their teacher. Mohamad Reza has failed, for a third time, to write out his homework in a notebook, as he has so often been reminded to do. The stakes of his forgetfulness are that he will be expelled from school if he repeats the error a fourth time. So, wouldn't you know, in the shuffling speed with which all students, including my own undergraduates, hasten out of class, and in the unbearable unfairness of early childhood, Mohamad Reza's most well-meaning friend accidentally swipes his neighbor's notebook in place of his own. Realizing his mistake only after returning home, Ahmed is heartbroken at the prospect of his friend's certain punishment, and despite the ornery warnings of his parents and the biddings of his grandfather ("Fetch my cigarettes!") he alights from his own village of Koker into the neighboring warren of Poshteh, looking for a friend whose whereabouts he can only dimly guess.

The sweet-temperedness of Where Is the Friend's Home? is a main reason why the film appeals so profoundly, and why it helped to jumpstart the international zeitgeist of enthusiasm for Iranian cinema. Especially by comparison to the rigid conceptions of Kiarostami's recent work, the film is unabashedly rooted in human sympathy, an affecting but never cloying scenario, and a neorealist filming style to make Bazin cheer from the grave. Kiarostami carefully but unobtrusively manages the frame even while tracking young Ahmed through the sidewinding paths and chutes of Poshteh, so that our own visual sense unites permanent dislocation with the constant unfolding of discovery. (10 is a fine movie, but mere moments into Where Is the Friend's Home?, you'll wish Kiarostami would unbolt the camera from the dashboard already.) The repetition of key shots, paticularly that Zorro-swath of an unpaved incline that reaches to the peak of a tree-topped hill, communicates a kind of hermetic life in and around Koker, even as Ahmed intrepidly tests those boundaries, and even as the same gaggle of gossiping men you find in any decent-sized town the world over reminisce about how much more disciplined they were in childhood, and debate the hot topic of how iron doors are fazing out the old wooden ones. Meanwhile, Kiarostami's simple but supple screenplay weaves in threads of local humor and wisps of dramatic irony—his mother, verging on disbelief of his story, thinks Ahmed simply wishes to avoid his own homework—that only deepen the integrity of the young boy's conviction.

For some reason I always think of Abbas Kiarostami's Where Is the Friend's Home? as a sort of Iranian 400 Blows, perhaps because both films pay such animated, concerted, and respectful attention to the quotidian but nonetheless deeply felt quandaries of being a young boy. But it's a bad analogy. Ahmed Ahmadpoor evinces none of the incipient sass or broodish alienation of Truffaut's Antoine Doinel, and certainly the aesthetics of the two films couldn't be more different. If the Kiarostami film has any European counterpart, it's Bicycle Thieves, except this is a saga of trying to return rather than recover something, and the malleable mind of the young boy in this story has direct access to his own vision of the city, unfiltered by a father's shadow. Furthermore, the rural Iranian landscape is not, as in Bicycle Thieves, riven with the signs of martial devastation. It's just, plainly, a tough place to get by, especially if you're small—one of those lean but precious premises of which movies can always use more. Sparer, less pushy, and more resonant than later Iranian exports like Children of Heaven, Where Is the Friend's Home is a perfect tonic to your worst suspicions of kiddie-centered cinema. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)