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Being
1999, it’s likely you’ll find at least a couple in local theaters, in both
art houses to multiplexes. That wasn’t necessarily the case years ago when
Seattle celebrated it’s first such festival. This is the 5th Annual
Women in Cinema festival, but the roots go back even further, 10 years, when the
germinal series, the International Festival of Women Directors, was helmed by a
small group of dedicated film lovers. For the past five years those at Seattle
International Film Festival put their muscle, their connections, and their
imagination behind it and have grown it to the current week-long celebration. Seattle
becomes a cornucopia of boutique festivals in the fall and early winter: The
Polish Film Festival, The Gay and Lesbian “Queer as a 3 Dollar Bill”
Festival, The Scandinavian Film Festival, and
the Arab Film Festival (every two years) vie for audience attention, and in
1999 the new Seattle Underground Film Festival joined the fray. This year the
Women in Cinema Festival moved up two months, right in the heart of the festival
bustle in the week before Thanksgiving, and saw a marked drop-off in audience
despite their most anticipated line-up ever. With four US premieres (including
the closing night film Onegin with
Ralph Fiennes) and six directors (including Patricia Rozema for the opening
night gala showing of Mansfield Park
and Alison Maclean for Jesus’ Son),
this was indeed the most ambitious collection of the event’s history. There
may be some who argue that you no longer “need” a Women in Cinema Festival. To take that argument at its most
basic, there certainly isn’t the same “need” to showcase films by women
directors that there was even ten years ago (and even then many women were
happily helming Hollywood productions), that is, if you define “need: in those
narrow terms. Many of the films showcased in WIC 1999 will receive theatrical
releases and others will find their way to video, and just like any other
festival worth its salt many wonderful pictures will never prove themselves
commercial enough for even a limited art horse run, at least in the US. One
thing this festival proves: films from women directors are not just “women’s
films” (whatever that old term has come to mean). The rich array of film from
countries all over the world features films about women, about men, about
poverty, about identity, about culture clash and cultural diversity: there is no
single overriding them, no common issue, nothing that pulls the collection
together apart from the sex of their director’s. If nothing else, Women in
Cinema reminds us that women make films and that like men who make films, each
woman director brings her own sensibilities to her films. But let’s not get
lost in such pronouncements. Women in Cinema is important because it brings
movies, many of them good, most of them interesting, and a few quite exciting,
that might not otherwise be seen. Ultimately that’s the real purpose of any
film festival. Patricia
Rozema’s Mansfield Park (Great
Britain) kicked off the festival with an opening night gala and took home the
audience award for best film. Canadian director Rozema, best known for I’ve
Heard the Mermaids Singing and When
Night Is Falling, left her native country for the first time for this
Miramax produced, British based period drama, but she kept with her a sharp
sensibility and her light, sensual cinematic touch. Rozema’s screenplay
incorporates letters and other writings by the Jane Austin into the novel,
injecting the confidence and creativity of the author into more passive
character of Fanny Price. The result is a dynamic and rich character, full of
life and all-too-knowing, and Aussie actress Frances O’Connor (Kiss
or Kill) runs with the part. Price is a poor girl sent to live with rich
relatives, growing up in a social phantom zone between servant and companion,
scribbling away her stories in her upstairs room and giggling with cousin Edmund
(Jonny Lee Miller), the only member of the stiff, socially calcified family who
appreciates her charms and her insights. Rozema directs with the sensitivity of
a ballet dancer, defining her world and it’s inhabitants through body
language, flirts and glances, the way a character takes to a room. In the
film’s most delirious scene, a mock coming-out ball in Fanny’s honor
transforms into a festival of desire and romantic possibility. Rozema could be
accused of tackling too much in her script, and the film flounders in issues it
simply isn’t equipped to deal with (the Caribbean slavery that feeds the
family fortune, constantly alluded to but only revealed much later) but bravely
attempts then regardless. If that was the worst of her lapses this still might
have been one of the most silkily cinematic films of the year, but she loads her
script with unnecessary verbalizations of what’s already made obvious. Rozema
should have been content to let her images speak the subtext and carry the
film’s irony. By the climax the layers of suggestion have been lifted to the
surface and Fanny becomes less a free spirit and more a mouthpiece for Rozema, a twentieth-century woman in eighteenth-century ruffles. Less
ambitious, and far less successful, is the closing night film, the American
premiere of Onegin (Great Britain), an
adaptation of Alexander Pushkin’s “Eugene Onegin” by director Martha
Fiennes, produced by and starring Ralph Fiennes. The siblings must have seen
that Ralph was perfect for the bored, self-hating dilettante, walking through
the film with bemused detachment and a cultured disdain for everything. They
were right: for 106 minutes he plays the society zombie, transforming from
brooding, lonely cynic to tortured, lovesick, brooding, lonely cynic. Ralph
holds out hope that Onegin may turn into something more, a man who covers a
potentially rich emotional and intellectual life with a facade of ennui and
cultured indifference, but by the end he’s a walking well of regret wallowing
in pain, and the film wallows right with him. Director Martha, making her
feature film debut, does nothing to save him from himself, but to her credit
pulls a credible performance from Liv Tyler, who never loses her waifish pout
but holds herself like a properly trained young eighteenth-century socialite
hiding a yearning schoolgirl soul under layers of silk and cotton. Martin
Donovan is unfortunately all but wasted in a tiny part. But ultimately Martha
pins a feature on material that would be served in a sitcom length, drawing out
the slim story with silent stares and pregnant pauses injected with flourishes
of symphonic lushness, the preening heaviness of a self-conscious “art
film.” The hushed soundtrack and effective silences, broken by the scratching
of a quill or the lift of the wind, start off as lovely tone setting details but
become ponderous as the film wears on and the score (by yet another Fiennes) far
too full of import. As the tragedy winds to its end, the would-be lovers frozen
by social expectation and personal compromise, I can almost hear moments from a
much better film through the flat lines: “Lie to me. Tell me that you love
me.” “Let
me start at the beginning…” One of the pleasures of Alison Maclean’s Jesus’
Son (US), her eagerly anticipated second feature (by me at least) after her
edgy 1992 debut Crush, is that the “beginning” is constantly being redefined
through cinematic digressions narrated in an effortless stream-of-consciousness
manner that feels more immediate than anything I’ve heard this year. Billy
Crudup is FH (“Fuckhead”, that dreaded nickname that will never go away),
personable, sweet, and sincere, a dead end twentysomething drug addict drifting
aimlessly from high to high, lost to wander his own little world. Set in America
in 1970s, it revisits territory often better explored in Gus Van Sant’s shaggy
Drugstore Cowboy, but despite the
obvious parallels Maclean makes this one all her own, a film of great charms and
marvelous characters. Samantha Morton, the intense young star of Under
the Skin and countless BBC productions (poised for a breakout with a
starring role in Woody Allen’s latest film), is the manic young woman he falls
in love with. It’s the usual story: boy meets girl, boy wins girl, boy loses
himself in a haze of pharmaceutical head trips and loses her, boy tries to find
himself. Adapted from Denis Johnson’s book of short stories, Maclean’s film
is decidedly episodic, weaving from incident to incident with only the druggy
logic of the narrator to tie them together, but she brings with it the richness
of short story details, moments explored for all their imaginative detail. While
FH is stealing copper wire from a deserted house, a naked woman hang glides
overhead. “That’s my wife,” mutters partner in crime Denis Leary, as if
the information in any way explains what we’ve just seen. Holly Hunter and
Dennis Hopper also appear, doing what they need to: sketching out vivid
characters in a few short scenes. The film tends to lose itself not in
digressions but rambling shaggy dog stories, and it never quite captures the
same natural, stumbling meander of his narration, but at times it suggests the
random connections of memory with digressions and flitting flashbacks. Stories
run back and forth through time, filling in details with earlier incidents, in a
style more easy-going rambling than interweaving Tarantino, and Crudup has the
damnedest way of holding the film together without ever seeming to try. Jane
Campion’s Holy Smoke (US) marked the
festival’s only sold-out house, but it left many scratching their heads. And I
admit at first glance the bizarre punches of humor seemed completely out of
place in the rough seas of this emotionally tumultuous drama. But of all of the
films at the festival, this one nagged at me the longest. The title is perfectly
appropriate: faith, love, even moral strength has the wispy consistency of smoke
as issues of faith and religion and commitment seem to float away in the battle
of wills that forms the center of the film. Kate Winslet is Ruth, a young New
Zealand tourist who falls under the sway of a cult (and possibly it’s
charismatic leader) while on vacation in India, and Harvey Keitel is J.P., the
“cult exiter” her family hires to deprogram her. Ruth isn’t your normal
cult member, and her “conversion” is at best an unreliable report by her
traveling companion, whose remembrance resembles a really amazing drug trip by
way of a Svengali-style hypnotist. J.P., for that matter, isn’t your ideal
deprogrammer, a slick, snappily dressed hot shot in black clothes, snakeskin
boots, dark glasses, and jet black hair, an American urban cowboy with an
insatiable sexual appetite. Things go wrong from square one and J.P. is, against
his better judgment, alone for three days with his headstrong subject. Like The
Piano, sex and desire and power become swirled in a libidinous stew where
tables are turned, weaknesses revealed, and wills broken, but with a savage
sense of humor and a critical yet understanding attitude. Campion fills the film
with delicious images, from the garish middle class cookie cutter home to the
red desert landscape of the arid inland shack where the wills battle to a kitchy
heat-stroke hallucination of Ruth as a pop Kali (set to the tune of “Baby
It’s You”). Many threads fray by the end, never to be pulled together, and
others don’t quite wrap up satisfactorily, the result of a passionate but
haphazardly constructed screenplay (written by Campion and her sister Anna, also
a filmmaker in her own right). But that’s the film: tones change in a gesture
and the narrative turns around in a cut. The herky-jerky mix of styles and messy
dramatic journey become beguiling, if not exactly satisfying, and the film
leaves conflicts unresolved, still pinging around as the credits roll. Watching
Agnieszka Holland’s The Third Miracle
(US), I finally stopped to ask myself: What happened to Holland? The festival
featured her 1985 masterpiece Angry
Harvest (Germany) as a companion to her latest feature, and a reviewing
confirmed her once immense stature, not simply as a woman director but one of
the most exciting and incisive European voices in modern cinema. Angry
Harvest, at its most basic, explores the private tyrant within good people
and the darker sides of human nature, but ultimately digs under the skin of its
two main characters, a Polish Catholic unexpectedly prospering under the tyranny
of the Nazis and an escaped Polish Jew separated from her husband and daughter
who takes refuge in his cellar. As his loneliness leads to an oppressive reign
of terror, her dependency breaks her resolve and her strength. The raw, naked
emotional power of the film, alive in almost every image, is lost in The Third Miracle, a rambling examination of faith by a man whose
job is to ground would-be American saints before they can be petitioned to Rome.
Ed Harris, a priest who has turned his back on the church after destroying a
community after one such investigation, is called back to investigate another, a
Hungarian immigrant woman that a Chicago parish insists is responsible for a
miracle. The dead woman’s daughter (Anne Heche) isn’t so sure: the woman
abandoned her as a teen and never looked back. Heavy handed and well meaning,
Holland never makes the world of derelicts, hookers, and drug addicts on the
streets of the Chicago’s South Side anywhere near real, and the love affair
between Harris and Heche is written just like a second act complication. But
worst of all, worse than the lazy direction and sloppy scripting and phony sense
of locale, is the age-old crutch of “proof” (the belief in miracles as the
face of God) to pull a man back to the faith. It’s a poor case for faith,
which should be about coming from within, for loving God for his everyday
miracles, not his extraordinary crowd-pleasing stunts. “This
is me,” whispers the aging narrator of Nichola Bruce’s I Could Read the Sky (Ireland). “I sleep badly.” Are the liquid
images on the screens a subjective self portrait or the half-seen images in his
head somewhere between dreamtime and waking. The screens looks like dreams
brewed together and spilled across the floor, blurring, merging, fading from one
to another. It hardly matters in this stream-of-consciousness day in the life of
a lonely old man losing himself in his memories. Gaunt, gray Dermot Healy is the
aging Irishman who casts his mind back decades, to remember his mates, his wife,
his string of jobs in Ireland and England, often conversing with characters of
the past, but always with his deadened, weathered old man’s face even while
his remembered friends are preserved in youth. One critic (who very much
disliked the film) remarked to me “Memories don’t look like that.” And
he’s right, they don’t, but there are times where they so feel like
it. I Could Read the Sky threatens to
lose its subject in self-conscious artiness and imagery so obscure it becomes
abstract, but that whispering voice keeps pulling us back, grounding those
streaky, hazy colors in times and events, clueing us to see them not as
photographic reproductions of events past but subjective sights colored by the
tone of remembrance. The music, though beautiful, seems wrong for the film (it
features Irish musicians and singers, including Sinead O’Connor), pretty
background for a film as grimy as it is gorgeous. The appearances by Maria Doyle
Kennedy and Stephen Rea are jarring, familiar movie icons disrupting subjective,
alien imagery, actors infiltrating a personal memory. But those are minor
complaints in a film that bravely defies narrative conventions, a dawn to dusk
journey through the mind’s eye of a man living in his past because his present
is so lonely. The
past as seen through the prism of the present is also the theme of Sylvia
Chang’s Tempting Heart (Hong Kong),
a sweet but overlong look at a film director (played by Chang herself, a
longtime Hong Kong movie star) who tries to turn her memories of first love into
a movie. With the help of a screenwriter (who treats her story as just that, a
story), her idealized conceptions of romantic innocence are complicated as he
challenges her rose-colored naiveté with probing questions about the other
participants. “Love is very simple” is Chang’s motto, while the
screenwriter insists “Love starts very simple.” And indeed is does, with
flirting and dancing and walks home, the cute fumblings of teenagers more
innocent than they think, and more selfish than the adult cares to remember.
Chang punctuates the classic arc of young love broken up by parental disapproval
who briefly reunite ten years later as very different people, with cut-backs to
the story sessions and a framing sequence set in a bar where the director puts
it all together. It’s a sweet film, but it takes far too long to make the
point and almost sputters out in the long romantic idyll before the clouds of
reality fog up her paper moon-lit memory. The weaving of story, memory, and
modern reflection is handled professionally but only resonates in the
conclusion, after Chang has allowed the perspectives of other characters to
finally break through her idealism to paint a rich, generous portrait of all the
characters. Gigi Leung plays the director as a girl with Takeshi Kaneshiro (Chungking Express, Fallen
Angels) as her underachieving boyfriend and Karen Mok is her the best
friend. The
Vienna of Barbara Albert’s Northern
Skirts (Austria) is a very different place than the idealized pre-war city
of romance celebrated in the films of Ernst Lubitsch and Max Ophuls, or the
bombed out ruin where black marketeers and con-men scurry from military patrols
in The Third Man. In fact, Austria has
pretty much dropped off cinematic atlases for decades, which in itself would
make Albert’s film welcome. It happens to be a warm, rich evocation of a city
of great ethnic diversity and restless but lost twentysomething souls, which
makes it not just interesting, but wonderful. A feature length spin-off of her
award winning short Sunspots (which
also unspooled at the fest), it wanders through a winter in the lives of two
young women. Party-girl native Austrian Jasmin (Nina Proll), a busty blonde
pastry waitress, escapes the drudgery of her job and pain of family life through
night clubbing and indiscriminate sex. Tamara, an Austrian raised but Serbian
born nurse, finds that ambition has merely landed her in a job under an abusive
supervisor. Once childhood friends who grow apart when school cliques separate
the popular blonde from the brunette immigrant, they meet again in an abortion
clinic. When Jasmin leaves an abusive homelife and winds up in the hospital
after a couple of club-hopping guys fuck and dump her on the frozen banks of the
Danube one winter night, passed out and almost dead, they become unlikely
roommates. Jasmin is a screw-up, to be sure, who dreams of a better life in
another country, the promise of one of her boyfriends, while to Tamara Austria is
the better life, her Serb family back in the volatile former Yugoslavia. The
story wends through the year, building up to a giddy New Year’s celebration
that becomes an emotional climax for them all, but Albert isn’t about to tease
us with the promise of change without grounding us back in their lives and a
long denouement grounds us back in their reality. But neither is it a grim
“life is hell” portrait. Albert’s hope lies in tiny steps of self
recognition and clear-eyed vision for the future, and she loves her characters
(especially Jasmin, the slutty fuck-up who fights loneliness with sex) enough to
give them the tools for change and the hope that they’ll use them. I’m
not sure exactly what to make of Farida Benlyazid’s Women’s Wiles from Morocco, a colorful fantasy that feels like a
feminist reworking of an Arabian Nights
tale. “Once upon a time…” begins the film as a modern mother tells a fable
to her daughter, and we’re somewhere in an undefined past that could be 20,
200, or 2,000 years ago. A young Prince flirts with Aicha (Samira Akariou), a
merchant’s daughter who lives just outside his courtyard. Prevented by social
custom from leaving the house, she tends the basil garden (a couple of hanging
pots over what appears to be a modern patio) and the Prince climbs her garden
wall to toss riddles and challenges her way. She lobs them right back at him
with cutting wit and remarkable self-possession: truly, the Prince has never
seen a woman this smart or resourceful. As their battle wills escalates into a
guerrilla pranks (how she sneaks in and out of a royal palace is one of many
plot points tossed to the wind in the name of fairy tales), he decides to break
her will by locking her in an underground cell and asking her every morning
“Humiliated Aicha who lives in the cellar, whose wiles are greater, those of a
man or a woman?” “A woman’s wiles are greater,” she answers, ensuring
her continued imprisonment, but she escapes nightly in a secret tunnel and
concocts the most absurdly elaborate plan to prove him wrong once and for all.
Extreme, impossible and, in any real life terms, ridiculous, this is a feminist
fable pure and simple. It’s lovely to look at, draped in a rainbow of colorful
robes and rugs, even if the budgetary constraints leave the palace looking more
like a summer house and the decor an impermanent mix of periods (there’s even
a visible zipper, though I expect that’s a mistake rather than a planned
anachronism). The Prince is an educated man trying to reconcile his dawning
respect for women with cultural stereotypes, but its frustrating that his power
play with Aicha, provoked by pique gotten out of hand, never earns him an
appropriate comeuppance. As the film laughs off seven years of forced
imprisonment you have to wonder how Benlyazid can take such action by an
ostensible hero with such forgiveness. Finally,
the film that wasn’t. The American premiere of Larisa Sadilova’s Happy
Birthday (Russia) was canceled when the print never showed. But just as all
the local critics previewed the film on a videotape screener, I took the
opportunity for an after-the-fact look at a film I for one was most excited to
see. Set in a crumbling, cold Maternity Home over the course of a couple of
days, the film follows the experiences of a ward of women after giving birth.
Without any outward signs to ground us (and the internal clues – fashion,
cultural touchstones, slang, etc. all beyond my American sensibilities), it’s
hard to tell when or where this takes place, but I’m guessing it’s late fall
in pre-Perestroika Northern Russia. The flashback structure suggests the recent
past, but the mix of modern and old-fashioned details gives it an out-of-time
feel. The women lounge around in a chilly ward as nurses regulate the time with
their infants, and their men (barred from the wing altogether) jump around like
fools, waving placards and flowers, in the meadow outside their second story
window. Sadilova’s B&W production, shot in B&W with roving handheld
camera, looks more like a Pennebaker or Maysles documentary than a fictional
film, lending an intimate immediacy to the loosely structured film, more mosaic
than narrative. There’s a rich sense of character and color in her gray
palette, and her performers are full of life, from the joking gynecologist (the
only male on the floor) whose good humor makes him an oddball member of the gang
(and something of a lothario, which the nurses take with a bemused
inevitability) to the madwoman who loses her baby and slowly loses her grip on
reality. At a brief seventy-three minutes, Sadilova leaves the audience wanting
more of the warm and wonderful slice of experience. And hunting for masterpieces
aside, that’s one of the greatest gifts of any film festival. The WIC showing
was to be the film American premiere. Here’s hoping the film ultimately gets
the attention it deserves. Please be sure to read our reports from these other film festivals as well: Contents | Features | Reviews
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