The first weekend of the San Francisco International Film Festival saw me make four out of five scheduled screenings. By Sunday evening I was just too pooped to catch House of Sand, which breaks my heart because it was the one film a random stranger implored of me after spying me with the film program at a coffee shop weeks ago. MUCH PROPS to Philippe Garrell’s fleet managing of his three hour epic: I arrived at Friday’s screening in the thirteenth hour of a pulsing hangover on four hours sleep yet never came close to dozing during this excellent film.


Regular Lovers

The story of Francoise, a young poet enraptured with the Paris riots of 68’, Regular Lovers is writer/director Philippe Garrell’s counter polemic to Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers, a film that covered the same subject matter in more romantic (ludicrous?) fashion. From the moment Louis Garrell – son of director Philippe and one of three leads in Bertolluci’s very recent film – enters the first 1:33 to 1 black and white frame, it’s clear this treatise is equal parts artistic dialogue and snarky pissing match.

Francoise lazes about dodging military health inspections, torn over publishing his poetry and, finally, amidst the ash and smoke of the May riots. Mr. Garrell photographs this all with the same eye, a fixed gazed that edits little and moves less, the frame slowly panning left to glimpse a couple making out beside an overturned vehicle, then drifts back again to a helmeted protestor shouting orders to shadowy agitators in the haze. A straight cut plants us directly opposite, on the other side of this fog where three policemen, comically gruesome in their plain demeanor, adjust a mortar in search of the protestors. The possibility inherent in the film’s aesthetic—photographing without conventional motivation—serves as a parallel to the general disregard of both the rioters and policemen’s actions: just as their projectiles seem blindly hurled into a tulle of smoke, impervious to guidance, Mr. Garrell’s “objective” coverage pronounces the indiscriminate danger. Who knows where these things may land? Perhaps on the blissed out lovers beside the Molotov cocktail? Why am I not seeing this? The persistence of such questions suffuses Regular Lovers’ version of the uprising with a verve and paranoia I envision to be equatable with the real thing.

And that’s just the first fourth of this, a bloated three-hour picture that never again reaches such sustained mood but rather flitters through a series of free floating episodes. Disillusioned by the revolution and the lightning bolt change it failed to spawn, Francoise boards with a wealthy friend in a Parisian flat that serves as commune to…well…a group of characters not at all dissimilar from Francoise. Jumping in and out these lives, coming back to Francoise now and again, Mr. Garrell takes this time to build his recollection of the post revolutionary consciousness through the collective struggles of he (Freudian slip) and his friends. For the better part of an hour, Francoise slides to the background and the remembrance of possibility becomes heartbreakingly warm: in Mr. Garrell’s hands, lust, love and longing are an apropos mesh handled by these characters in awkward, tender, bracing fashion. The film peaks here, unrestrained by the bland Francoise. When he and his “regular lover” finally take over the film for it’s final third (whew) the results are middling, a more earnest rendition of the mushy sentiment rendered through sexploitation in Bertolucci’s film.

There’s something to be said for schoolyard antics at this level of artistry; Mr. Garrell gets a few blatantly low blows in on Bertolucci that scored huge chuckles at this particular screening. Along the way, however, he exhibits extreme control over his craft: two-thirds through the film, Francoise’s lover is having lunch with a friend, reminiscing, speaking of love and such and the possibility of loving one person for all of life. The scene plays across a table, two women cut in reverse shots then, without warning, we’re right in the lover’s face, extremely close, hand-held, the first shot of this type I can recall the entire film. The lover’s hair is matted, sweaty, strewn by wind and the look on her face? Crossed, confused as though attempting a memory of an epiphany lost before grasped. It was craft employed as foreshadowing – as opposed to literal, cutaway clunk – and an image that, rhymed against the static rigor of its preceding moments, informed the narrative in ways cinema at its purest projects to.

When he seeks to Mr. Garrell takes this film there. And when he’d rather indulge himself, he takes Mr. Bertolucci to the woodshed. Not a bad combo for a black and white meditation on the riots of ’68.


Taking Father Home

There are “films” shot on digital video that approximate a “filmic” look and there are “films” shot on digital video with the explicit objective of recording a story now. An extremely low budget, do it yourself piece about a teen from the Chinese countryside who journeys to the city to retrieve his estranged father, this debut feature is quite effectively the latter.

Xu Yun is a soft-spoken seventeen year old filled with angst. As the image fades up on his angular face, the boy declares his intentions to his off-screen mother in a scene that establishes both the subversive humor and a reassuring lack of pretension. Director Ying Liang follows his naïf lead without ANY serious efforts toward exemplary lighting or color, but rather wields his low-grade DV Camera with a relentless focus on exacting composition. The results are sweet, disarming, and consistently heartbreaking with a humorous bent. By the time tragedy gains steam enough to pose a threat, you’ve been so won by Xu’s resilience the only response is to wilt at the film’s narrative whimsy.


ILLUMINATION

What a mess this film, just a complete hodgepodge of so many things and wholly representative of its first time director status. Following the exploits of a mildly psychotic twenty-something, Pascale Breton’s film careens all over in a manner not at all unlike her lead’s mental state. And while such connections between aesthetic and premise seems fine on the surface, Ms. Breton’s lack of control in the exercise renders the association muddled. I couldn’t say whether I like or dislike, laud or deplore this film. What I could say, however, is there were just as many instances of rolling my eyes at the screen as there were moments I found myself leaning toward it.

Maddening. At one point Ildut packs his bags and treks into the countryside for a cultish commune seeking mental therapy. Amidst beautiful light, up on high with the horizon midframe, Ildut comes upon a turn about in the road and Ms. Breton straps her camera to the bed of a truck and circles him…around…and around, and around, and a…. A solid two minutes this shot lasts, tack sharp focus as the image rounds about, holding Ildut in frame, a pristine marker of Ms. Breton’s technical command. And yet, whatever thematic association this exercise of craft purports is frustratingly fleeting or, and here’s the ticket, reductively simple.

Such daft moments undercut those where Ms. Breton exhibits a control of her scenario obviously responsible for securing the funding for this initial feature film. Moments like Ildut sequestering his crush in a weathered sedan at the corner of auto yard. The boy turns on the stereo and a cascading melody of guitar and base fills the cab as he spills his guts of the manic love and longing he’s harbored all film. The scene is hilarious and gut wrenching, inseparably so. And the trick is the music Ildut is playing has been randomly pumped through the mix throughout as score. I cringed as Christina, the muse, ejected the tape only to have Ildut force it back as he quips maniacally, I can’t say this without the music.

This, Ms. Breton, is when I lean toward your screen.


A PERFECT COUPLE

An impossibly simple premise: a married couple travels to a wedding and, at a dinner with old friends, reveal they’re divorcing. Japanese director Nobuhiro Suwa’s French language film unfolds at a snail’s pace, a series of wide masters with mostly stationary actors emoting within simple frames. There are but two reactions to a piece like this—so much formal restraint in the technique as to leave nothing but people in places—and while the dope Chris Knipp found the endeavor plodding, I was completely enmeshed.

The film covers a few days in Paris, waiting, talking, eating and drinking until the inevitable wedding and return home. There is no propulsion to the piece; the players bide their time, creaking and cracking their way through sets paved with eggshells. Mr. Suwa clearly has written few lines for his performers and seems to have removed himself completely by foregoing the impedance of coverage. What results is such stillness throughout–the framing, light, color, sound, all still—that for the majority of this exercise the sole evolving stimulus within the scene is the actors’ performance. Trained almost exclusively on Valerie Bruni-Tedeschi, the woman is absolute affect here, purely pitiful, purely angry, purely vulnerable, purely a mess.

Cinematographer Caroline Champetier stuck around for a Q&A following the screening, waxing romantic on le image in a breathy accent that left this brown boy a bit smitten. In between stealing my heart she confirmed a few specifics of the film: “filmed” on high-def, six page “script” of no dialogue but rather “of feelings,” and forty days of prep versus a scant fifteen day shoot.

The camerawork is subdued within a hair’s width of a fault, Ms. Champetier letting the shadows play and underexposing actors in ways high definition is ill suited and consequentially never employed. Matched with this material, however, with so much tucked just beneath the surface and meted out in only the smallest doses, such calculated murkiness plays to the strengths of Mr. Suwa’s endeavor by shrouding the actors’ impromptu free falls in a housing of technical neutrality. I thought the warm light and, conversely, its lack, were just…graceful.

And then again, I have a HUGE crush on Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi so my opinion is cheap. Ms. Champetier’s other comment presented a pat summation of French actresses, of their directors restricting their performances to the space between bosom and forehead, illustrated in hilarious deadpan by Ms. Champetier creating a box about her own person. Satisfied that we’d gotten the visual, she said, “But Valeria, she is different, especially in this film, she is acting with whole body, she is using everything.” Reflecting on A Perfect Couple I’d have to agree, a film made in such a removed gaze as to force everyone to emote with “whole body.” Ms. Champetier took a swig from her bottle and laughed, “But Valeria, see, she is Italian, so, maybe that is why she is different.”

Ummm, maybe that's why she's gorgeous ;)