11.45am: Breakdown
You get days like this sometimes: having made a commitment to review at least three films each day, you find that there simply aren't three you particularly want to see. Which is why after considering and rejecting the various mediocre-sounding features on offer, I'm up at the crack of dawn (or what passes for it these days) to see a programme of shorts with an audience that feels heavier on film industry spods that usual. (After all, what sane member of the general public would be watching this sort of thing at this time on a Monday morning?)
The LFF team bundle the year's short films into a series of vaguely themed programmes: and the theme of this particular programme, Breakdown, feels especially vague. Of the seven films on offer here, three can be dismissed fairly quickly. The weakest is probably Martina Nagel's Black Mark, a very thin gag about a confrontation between a Muslim driver and a racist speed cop: stretched out longer than it deserves at six minutes, and murkily shot too. Then there are two amusing but lightweight contributions from the National Film and Television School: Toby Haynes' Lost And Found stars Phil Daniels as a lost property clerk who takes a personal interest in a recent arrival to his office, while Martin Gent's Dudley's Ducks is an enjoyable enough fable set on a plastic duck assembly line.
The third British short is more substantial, though. Peter Lydon's The Silent Treatment is a two-hander where only one person speaks, as a man desperately tries to find out from his girlfriend why she won't talk to him following a drunken night out. Inevitably, he just ends up digging an even deeper succession of holes for himself. Sharply written and played, its cynical take on relationships is matched by that of Joel Anderson's The Rotting Woman, a series of dialogues between an Australian couple who talk endlessly about everything except the obvious problem. "Would you still love me if I was ill?" asks Ann Browning. Paul Lum thinks about this. "You mean too ill to have sex?" he asks.
It seems unfair to have these low-budget and student shorts bundled in the same programme as a couple of expensive professional productions from North America, but that's what's been done here. Lynne Stopkewich's Man From Mars is a neat little tale that appears to be part of a series of Margaret Atwood adaptations made for Canadian TV. Student Emily Hampshire starts to receive unwanted attention from a Chinese stalker on campus, and then gets confused as to how unwelcome that attention is. But the really big money has been spent on Amy Lippman's House Hunting, a glossy widescreen production with proper stars and everything. It's a well-structured story about two young newly-weds (Paul Rudd from The Shape Of Things and Zooey Deschanel) trying to make sense of their estate agent (Terry Kinney from Oz), the houses he's showing them, and each other. With a smart twist in the final seconds, this probably counts as the best short of the set.
6.30pm: Goodbye Dragon Inn
I'm still not sure about Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-Liang. There seems to be one of those cults of arthouse worship surrounding him, where people think that because his films are slow and audiences walk out of them, that automatically makes them good. (Notorious idiot Tom Charity says more or less just that in Time Out this week.) I've seen a couple of Tsai's films - the unbearably dull The River, and the somewhat more charming What Time Is It There? - and I think he redeems himself on the occasions when he remembers he has a sense of humour. Thankfully, he's remembered it here.
It helps that this film is preceded by one of his shorts, The Skywalk Is Gone. Its twenty-five minutes don't add up to very much - two people, connected only by their use of a Taipei overpass, and how its closure changes their lives - but its glacial pace and sudden bursts of dry humour set the viewer up for the feature that follows. Goodbye Dragon Inn is set in the Fu-Ho Theatre, a decaying fleapit currently showing the old Chinese swordsman flick Dragon Inn. The woman at the box office desk appears to be running the place almost single handed, running around throughout the performance cleaning the toilets, coping with the leaking ceiling and leaving gifts of food for the mysterious projectionist. Meanwhile, a young man in the ever-diminishing audience tries to avoid noisy and disturbing neighbours, pops out to get a light and discovers a bit more about the Fu-Ho's secrets.
I'm reminded of Bruno Dumont's work, such as last weekend's Twentynine Palms. Like Tsai Ming-Liang, whenever Dumont has a figure in wide shot, he refuses to cut away until that figure has crossed the full length of the screen, because it makes him look challenging and provocative. However, Tsai's equivalent of those shots is to have a cinema with dozens of flights of stairs connecting its various parts, and make the woman in charge climb up and down those stairs with a club foot, in a single take that lasts several minutes, because it's funny. And I think that's the important difference here. Besides, some of the most overextended shots gradually tell you that this film isn't just about the weirdos you meet as part of the cinema experience, but also the romance of the cinema building itself: and given that I've spent the last two weeks more or less living in rooms like this (albeit with better protection from the rain), I can sort of see his point. But there's no getting away from the fact that for large swathes of the film's running time, nothing is happening.
In the end Goodbye Dragon Inn is just a hair's breadth away from being a really boring movie. How much that distance will affect your enjoyment of the film is left as an exercise for the reader.
8.30pm: The Dreamers
I can now tick off Bernardo Bertolucci in my I Spy Book Of Important Film Directors, as he personally attended this gala screening. In an introduction on the subject of dreams and dreamers, he talked about his five hour epic 1900, noting that audiences sometimes fell asleep during it. But Bertolucci didn't mind: his theory was that the audience's dreams would mingle with the film's narrative to make something uniquely interesting to them. Given some of the sleep deprivation experiments I've been involved in during the last two weeks, I like the way this man thinks.
Dropping off is less likely to happen during The Dreamers: it's a much shorter, rather simple story, adapted by Gilbert Adair from his novel The Holy Innocents. It's Paris in 1968, and a young American film fan called Matthew (Michael Pitt) is staying there for a year to learn French. Mind you, he seems to be spending most of his time watching American movies at the Cinematheque: "only the French could show movies in a palace." (But are their ticket collectors as snotty as the ones in the Cine Lumiere?) At the Cinematheque he meets brother and sister Theo (Louis Garrel) and Isabelle (Eva Green), who will become his first real friends in the country. Despite barely knowing him, Theo and Isabelle invite Matthew to stay at their house while their parents are away. During those few weeks, they'll closely examine each other's attitudes to the three most important topics of the time: cinema, politics and sex.
Most of the advance word on The Dreamers has focussed on its sexual content, and in particular how a couple of the most explicit shots are almost certainly going to have to be cut for American release. But as this gala was sponsored by Berkmann Wine Cellars, it's probably only fitting that a key sequence involves a young man with a semillon. (That gag only works when you say it out loud, doesn't it? Sorry.) Anyway, us Brits aren't as terrified as the Yanks by the sight of aroused genitalia, so we can get to see the uncut version and appreciate the film for what it is: a modern update/homage to those three-in-a-bed movies that the nouvelle vague was built on.
The cinephilia of the three central characters allows for some ingenious use of old film clips. For example, at one point they attempt to beat the record for running the full length of the Louvre, as set in Bande A Part: and as they do it, Bertolucci throws in some perfectly matched cuts to Godard's original. It's a trick that's performed frequently throughout the film, subtly used as a reminder to those who've seen the referenced movies already, but not so overdone as to make everyone else feel excluded. It's obviously the work of a director who genuinely loves film and wants to share, not one who's merely showing off his knowledge. And as you'd expect from Bertolucci, the look and the performances are exquisite throughout. The Dreamers may not have anything particularly new to say about its time, but it's a treat for lovers of cinema. (And lovers of music too, given an eclectic soundtrack that ranges from Hendrix to Piaf.)
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