Ghosts of Cite Soleil—Directed by Asger Leth

Asger (son of The Five Obstruction’s Jorgen) Leth’s doc on Haitian street gangs opens peacefully on a washed out sunrise over the embattled Caribbean Island. Thematically, it may be a metaphor for the serenity of life should man remove himself from the equation, but in Leth’s hands, the image is swallowed in such bombast the point eludes. Self-named gang chief “2Pac” is a rail thin rapper who smokes weed and wields a glock while patrolling the sewer-infested streets of his port town, Cite Soleil. Once backed by Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, 2Pac, his younger brother Bily and a few other local thugs enforce a paper thin street code that creates order enough to stifle the onslaught of complete chaos. Politically, there’s much in Mr. Leth’s documentary worthy of investigation yet rather than complicate the narrative, the film settles instead for an observational approach akin to watching wild dogs set loose in a hen house. The film is loud, violent and aimless, tracking 2Pac and his cohorts through moments of pain and anguish always bathed in naiveté. When a beautiful French aide-worker falls for 2Pac, her wild blonde mane lain across his naked chest, the childish glee upon his face belies the truth of everything Leth has shown us heretofore. There are no happy endings in Cite Soleil. What begins in joy must end in pain and this film presents that truth as inescapable.

Babel—Directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarittu

Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and Guillermo Arriaga have made three feature films together beginning with the evocative Amores perros. Bathed in the thick atmosphere of the filmmaker’s Mexico City, that film blindsided the moviegoing public with a passion and familiarity nurtured by an accomplished aesthetic. In Babel, the aesthetic remains but the passion seems missing. Like the duo’s previous efforts, this film follows three storylines connected by a single event. In this case said event is the firing of a rifle, the repercussive waves of which extend to a vacationing American couple, the Mexican nanny they’ve left to watch over their children and a Japanese businessman who gifts a hunting rifle to a Moroccan guide. Each of the stories involves a crisis and fraught relationships—whether racial, familial, cultural or societal—dramatized to the point of catharsis at the will of consummate craftsmen. And yet…I could not think but compare Babel to Amores perros, a film that packs much more punch with much less dressing. Where Mr. Inarritu’s first film told each of the three stories in turn, Babel jumps from one to the next and back, always resetting the dramatic scale just at its point of peaking. What’s more, where the theme of interconnected strife seemed novel in the filmmakers’ earlier work, the device seems old hat now, a tactic that reduces dramatic interest rather than creates it. We’ve seen this film from this director in more potent form. Babel feels like the proficient sparring session of a bored prizefighter.

Venus—Directed by Roger Michel

Peter O’Toole may be the world’s most revered living actor and Roger Michel treats him as such in this rewarding, magical film about dirty old men and the poetry of mortality. Mr. O’Toole plays Maurice, a man whom much like himself is an aging actor in the final stages of life. When his best friend is bombarded by the arrival of an angst-ridden teenage niece, Maurice indulges himself insomuch as his will allows. Teaming once more with writer Hanif Kureishi, Mr. Michel again proves himself adept at tackling the taboo without sacrificing complexity. To be fair, much of what takes place is, on the surface, utterly decrepit. As Maurice, Mr. O’Toole willfully solicits a youth with tactics that are morally distasteful. With Venus, however, Mr. Michel is out to investigate the fleeting beauty of life and the amorous power that beauty can have on us; an us that convincingly includes elderly men. The film bears the definitive lilt of a conventional dramedy, Maurice riding the typical three act narrative-coaster before rising from the ashes into a solemn dénouement. It’s in the hedges of such commonplace story markers that Mr. Michel does his work, carving out memorable moments from the details of familiar beats: a monologue read by Mr. O’Toole against a closed bathroom door, a waltz between two aged men amidst the tombs of their contemporaries, a supper prepared for a loved one irrevocably lost by past transgressions. This is the heft of Mr. Michel’s filmmaking and Venus is all the more delightful for it.

Deep Water – Directed by Jerry Rothwell and Louise Osmond

In 1969 the London Times sponsored a much-publicized yachting competition challenging sailors to complete the first solo trip around the world. Of the nine men daring enough to accept the challenge and secure funding, Donald Crowhurst—a father of four and inexperienced sailor—seemed the least likely of candidates. Deep Water is the tale of his journey.

Misters Rothwell and Osmond are fine filmmakers, culling a powerful documentary from interviews and autobiographical film and writings recorded during the sailors’ navigation around the southern globe. But beyond their sober handling of the subject, Deep Water succeeds for the unmistakable affect of the personal testimony of Crowhurst and his fellow yachtsmen. Deciphering a reconfigured take on life after hundreds of days battling the elements without human contact, the men penned searing indictments of their past selves in personal testimony ranging from philosophic to completely mad. Rhymed against studio interviews of the people they left behind, the haunting recitals of the sailors’ logs proves the ultimate punch.

The Namesake – Directed by Mira Nair

Mira Nair adapts Pulitzer winner Jhumpa Lahiri and the translation is so seamless it’s dumbfounding the source material originated anywhere but with Ms. Nair. Spun from a sage father’s life altering incident with the work of Russian author Nikolai Gogol, this tail of Indian immigration into a New York life finds Ms. Nair in peak form amongst the director’s common themes of family, culture and identity. A direct corollary to her Monsoon Wedding, the film floats like memory on a series of episodes charting the family’s evolution through decades of assimilation. The Namesake is a touching novel presented here as an equally powerful film, Ms. Nair utilizing the truth of image to infer the warm tones of Northeastern autumns and springs as a longing dream of the searing oranges and golds of Bombay. In her hands the sounds, sights and emotions of Ms. Lahiri’s novel gain dimension, embellished in translation from one art to the next at the will of a skilled, sensitive and deeply expressive filmmaker. I cried like a baby.

Dodsworth – Directed by William Wyler (1936)


A surprisingly frank examination of the struggles of fidelity. Walter Houston plays the titular Dodsworth, an automotive magnate newly retired from the business. On European holiday after forty plus years of nine-to-five, the Dodsworths find themselves the victims of repressed abandon when Mrs. Dodsworth takes up with European leaches and convinces her husband to return to the States without her. What follows is the simple story of a transatlantic marriage on the rocks, filmed in the period’s stand and speak, back and forth report. Where Dodsworth differs from like films of its time, however, is in the brutal honesty of scripters Sidney Howard and Robert Wyler’s adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’ novel. To watch Dodsworth is to cringe at the sometimes-vicious nature of language. Houston and Ruth Chatterton fight through tête-à-tête standoffs for the better part of the film’s run—shedding grace on the awkward beauty of cinema’s laborious transition from stage to screen acting—while the cinematography of Rudolph Mate’ underscores the verbal sparring solemnly: opening on a deep focus wide of Dodsworth’s expansive top-floor office, the initial image closes in over the man’s shoulder, his attention fully fixed on the lettering on the building adjacent: “Dodsworth.” The simplicity of visual metaphor.

Jindabyne – Directed by Ray Lawrence

I’ve not seen Mr. Lawrence’s previous film, Lantana, but on the heels of such lauded work watching Jindabyne left me empty. This Laura Linney/Gabriel Byrne starring adaptation of Raymond Carver’s short story “So Little Water Close to Home” center’s around a group of fisherman who leave a floating body to rest three days while they continue mining the waters for trout. When the men finally emerge from their trip with the news of their discovery, the truth of their selfishness sets their small town afire. A miniscule short—3 to 4 pages depending on edition—stretched to two-plus hours, Mr. Lawrence’s reworking muddles whatever potency the original held by drenching it in white liberal guilt. The Australian setting and Mr. Lawrence’s seeming fascination with the native tribes devolves to middling social metaphors, Ms. Linney’s character reduced to scouring the town and countryside admonishing native and white townspeople alike to drop their differences and “all just get along.”

In Q&A, Ms. Linney stated that a ritual performed at film’s end was the first ever recording of such a ceremony, the first time in fact it had been glimpsed by non-native eyes. Implicit in Jindabyne’s flaws is the nature of such a cultural breach: in a Haneke film, the point is usually to force characters to accept and understand why they are different, why their world’s are separate and impervious to intersection...thus creating an awareness of such seclusion and the impulse to iradicate it. With Jindabyne, Mr. Lawrence FORCES the removal of cultural borders in both the creation and narrative of his work, leaving whatever truth there is to be gathered from the scenario lying in his wake.

The US vs. John Lennon – Directed by David Leaf and John Scheinfeld

This doc on the most revered Beatle opens with a VH1 Rock Docs logo. While it certainly makes for a great outdoor screening under the beautiful night sky of Southwest, Colorado, that opening logo is about all you need to know about this flick.

Day Night, Day Night – Directed by Julia Loktev

Ms. Loktev’s film opens on a woman whispering so softly her speech is subtitled. All sunken eyes and flushed cheeks, first time actor Louisa Williams reveals nothing despite the frame’s unflinching hold on her indifferent face. Much of Day Night, Day Night unfolds this way, Ms. Williams character ferried from one room to the next, ordered via phone into movement after movement, her commands non-descript to the point of monotony. She’s waiting for something, waiting to be directed, directed toward a goal and yet…in Ms. Loktev’s hands, the path to that goal remains elusive to the very end. Such coyness is maddening but the details are so few that to give them is to spoil the ethereal punch the film metes in a deliberate, decisive drawl. Ms. Loktev is considered a video installation artist and documentary filmmaker. The influence of both weighs favorably on this first foray into dramatic fiction filmmaking.

The Telluride Film Festival is upon us and well…I’m tired. Very tired.

Today is the final push and while I’d love to blog with personality about this year’s lineup I just cannot find the time.

My job ends at approximately 5:30 this evening. Perhaps afterwards I’ll have energy enough to see and write.

The lineup can be found here at indiewire.com. (lame, I know, but somebody's gotta physically produce the festival)