Sara and I love SIFF, the Seattle International Film Festival; we try to go every year. Though we're far from hard-core festival goers, we usually manage to take in a dozen or so movies during the festival weeks (then more when ones we missed come out in general release).
Each year I like to write up reviews of the films I saw. It's a small sample, skewed toward whatever movies happen to appeal to me and Sara, but it represents at least a corner of the festival. You can see my previous years' SIFF reviews here and here; eventually I might move them over to this blog.
Anyway, here's 2010!
Contents
The Eagle Hunter's Son
Kanikosen
The Chef of South Polar
Robogeisha
K-20: The Fiend With 20 Faces
A Spray of Plum Blossoms
Bilal's Stand
Agora
The Wild Hunt
The Two Horses of Genghis Khan
Born to Suffer
Hipsters
The Eagle Hunter's Son
I don't know what it is about a film festival that puts me in the mood to see films about Mongolia. Perhaps it's because, in taking that single step away from Hollywood movies, I stride straight to the total rejection of civilization, and am not satisfied unless I come down amid yurts and sheep in the ancient nomadic life of the grasslands. Judging by the number of such films every festival, I'm not the only one with this craving, and the actual nomads of Mongolia must be getting rather used to the recurrence of cameras and directors amongst their sheep.
The director in this case is René Bo Hansen, the film is Swedish, and "The Eagle Hunter's Son" markets unapologetically to the anti-civilization crowd. In the very first scene, an innocent sheep lies dead in the grass at the bumper of a truck from the city, whose thuggish drivers refuse to pay for their misdeed, and we proceed along the general line from there. 12-year-old Bazarbai (Bazarbai Matei) longs to follow his older brother to the city, but he must stay home in the steppes, to tend the flocks and learn the art of eagle hunting from his father. When he finally runs away, we know what we’re in for: a visit to the city of Ulan Bator will resemble an urban hell, city dwellers will be universally corrupt, a mining operation will be dangerous and exploitative, Bazarbai will be saved by sweet girls and mystical animals, and when he finally returns to the open grasslands he will all but declare "There's no place like home."
The film doesn’t stray from the pattern, then, but it's well-paced, the landscapes are lovely, and best of all it throws light on the interesting world of eagle-hunting along the Mongolian/Kazakh border. The scenes of the huge brown eagles, swooping to their perch on an extended human arm like tamed tornadoes, are worth seeing; they remind us that there really is such a thing as a human bond with nature, primordial and artful, that in some ways empowered man more than the smoke-belching machines of civilization. The early scenes in which urban-dreaming Bazarbai constantly fails to master his father's eagle are both funny and true.
Unfortunately, the film then cheapens the spectacle at its heart by ascribing to the eagle supernatural powers of guidance and protection. When Bazarbai runs away to the city, his father dispatches his eagle with verbal instructions to watch over him; the animal complies, saves Bazarbai from wolves, finds his brother in the city, appears in his dreams, and otherwise is made to act the demeaning part of a movie spirit guide. Bazarbai, meanwhile, falls afoul of predatory trappers, is rescued by the young girl they've enslaved, treks the landscape with her, encounters helpful monks in a remote temple and corrupt agents of an urban circus, loses his eagle to the cruel circus master in Ulan Bator, is symbolically put on stage as a clown to do tricks with the eagle, and takes advantage of the holes in the symbol to easily escape with the bird.
The ending, where Bazarbai implausibly reunites with his brother (and where the character of the girl is mysteriously dropped), is the weakest part, but it's permissable in a sentimental film. A deeper problem, I think, is a certain emotional reserve that overlays the whole picture, as if the director's Scandinavian coldness had followed him to the greenswards of Mongolia. We never really get close to Bazarbai, and even the great beauty of the nomadic steppes, which in the end is what we came for, is somehow held at arms' length.
Kanikosen
"Kanikosen," a Japanese film by Sabu (Hiroyuki Tanaka), lured me in with the promise of an interesting look at Communism in the 1920s, specifically the impact of the young Soviet Union upon Japanese fish-canners laboring under the caste ideology of the time. The film is an adaptation of a 1929 Japanese novel by Takiji Kobayashi, a member of the Japanese Communist Party who was arrested, tortured and killed by the authorities in 1933, so it seemed to carry the further weight of historical credibility.
Alas, I didn't notice that the film is actually based on a recent manga, that itself was spun from the novel. I also didn't know that Sabu is known in Japan for fluffy comedies.
What you get from "Kanikosen" is a dreadful cartoon of a movie, shrill, overly earnest, badly caricatured, endlessly boring, and appallingly low-budget. The action supposedly takes place aboard a 1920s crab-canning ship in the Sea of Japan, but not only do we never see an exterior shot of the ship, the interior sets bear no resemblance to anything afloat: the action takes place in huge open dormitory rooms and inexplicably vast factory floors, and the director even forgets to make them sway (except when it serves one particular stupid joke). At one point the action moves to a Russian freighter, represented in its entirety by a single deck backed by a red wall. The movie is visually so cheap that I half expected to see cardboard waves being moved back and forth in the foreground.
But this would have been acceptable if the story had made even a vestige of an attempt to treat its material seriously. In place of exploited laborers, we have a large cast of good-looking, well-fed, middle-class Japanese actors lounging around in their big dormitory relating stories about how poor they are. In place of a look at the Japanese caste ideology that keeps them down, we have a slapstick scene where they all decide to hang themselves, and with the nooses around their necks compete with each other to verbalize the best new life to which they will awaken. (Then they chicken out, whereupon the ship sways, moving their feet off their boxes and back on again a few times.) In place of the capitalist class we get a screaming cartoonish martinet with a horsewhip. In place of Communist ideology we get the aforementioned Russian freighter, where the crew does nothing but feast and dance.
And that's about it. There's a hero (Ryuhei Matsuda), who manages to look handsome and dashing in his artfully ripped windbreaker. He leads a rebellion, the major feature of which is a snappily-designed icon which gets reproduced on big banners. He has a final confrontation with the martinet captain, which occasions a flood of suddenly realistic gore on which Sabu must have gleefully expended three-quarters of his movie's budget.
"Kanikosen" is such a total failure that it winds up saying something about Japanese cinema—or rather, one of two things. Either: modern Japan is such a successful, prosperous, middle-class society that its artists cannot convincingly portray the idea of the class struggle. Or: contemporary Japanese artists are fettered within a corporate-driven house style of cartoon presentation, such that everything, even the novel of a genuine Communist hero, is defanged to serve the capitalist state.
The Chef of South Polar
The world's harshest and most extreme environment is the setting for this gently charming, gently funny film about, of all things, food.
What happens, director Shûichi Okita asks, if a master chef finds himself cooking for a team of scientists locked up for six months at a research base in Antarctica? Such is the fate of Jun Nishimura (Masato Sakai), a quiet, perpetually bemused fellow whom we meet serving up mouth-watering bowls of noodle soup and plates of glistening sushi to a small crew of grizzled, slightly loony researchers at Dome Fuji, where the outdoor temperature is too cold for even polar animals to survive.
Nishimura, who is not there by choice, is the odd man out in an odd group. As the months go by the scientists gets ever more grizzled and loony, while his cooking becomes an ever more ferociously-defended bastion of civilization. At one point Nishimura has to chase intruders out of his kitchen, bent on slurping up his butter; at another, when the running out of ramen noodles makes the crew chief lock himself in his room in utter depression, he must create a substitute to salvage the project. Mayhem escalates over menus, cravings, food supplies and cooking methods, but each adventure ends with a perfect meal lovingly set forth on the common room table.
Okita treats the scientists' eccentricities with a light touch, and the social meltdowns here occasion little more than frolicking in the snow. A subplot concerns Nishimura's wife and daughter back home, whose relationship with him is as bizarre as anything from the cabin-fevered scientists; but then, it's revealed that Nishimura doesn't cook at home. Perhaps this will change at the end. The film glides to a soft, harmless conclusion without anything much having happened, but the moments along the way are quirky and charming enough so that you almost don't notice. And there's a great final punchline.
Robogeisha
Our third straight Japanese film of the festival was called "Robogeisha," and really, do you need to know anything besides the title? Geisha are robotic assassins! They sprout sword blades from every part of their anatomy! They open their mouths to extend whirling buzzsaws! Their lower bodies transform into tanks! They split open like sarcophogi and bikini-clad demon girls jump forth for more slicing and dicing! With every strike, fountains of blood spray across the screen! Then, a giant robot in the shape of a pagoda marauds through the city smashing buildings—and fountains of blood spray from the buildings!
This cut-to-order cult movie by Noboru Iguchi is a cheerful orgy of over-the-top gore and runaway campiness. Each bloodsoaked, absurdist image tries to top the last in what amounts to a spoof of shock value. You can actually see all the best images stitched together in the three-minute preview (available on YouTube); the movie itself contains a loose plot, which only serves to slow it down. Young Yoshie is abused by her cruel Geisha sister Kikue, until they both fall for handsome tycoon Hikaru Kageno, whereupon they're kidnapped by Hikaru and robotically enhanced to join his secret robot Geisha army. Their sibling rivalry then takes the form of a surgical arms race to win Hikaru's approval, and they incorporate ever greater arsenals into ever more unlikely body cavities. Frequent swordfights and machine-gun battles break out, with no one ever being so gauche as to hold a weapon in their hand. A resistance movement exists of elderly parents trying to reclaim their kidnapped Geisha daughters, but even these have built secret machine guns into their knees.
We saw "Robogeisha" as a midnight movie, and I believe it works best in that format, with an audience that's already exhausted and ready for nonsense. Outside that mindset I doubt it would hold up. "Robogeisha" is actually too self-conscious and kitchy to become a true cult film, and despite the plethora of half-dressed women leaping about it never tries to be sexy. Really it's nothing more than a visual brainstorm session on how to do justice to the title—which proves my point that the title is all you need to know.
K-20: The Fiend With 20 Faces
We didn't intend to watch four Japanese films in a row, but the experience was illuminating, and the last was the most successful. "K-20: The Fiend With 20 Faces" spins a straightforward superhero adventure story, that nevertheless contains a unique Japanese ethic.
The movie is set in an alternate 1949 where, according to the opening crawl, diplomacy has averted World War II. Limestone skyscrapers and hovering zeppelins grace the skyline, putting "K-20" firmly in the Retro Romantic style alongside Western movies like "The Shadow" and "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow." The superhero in question, K-20 by name, is a master thief whose powers of disguise (his "20 faces") enable him to infiltrate any wealthy gathering, whereupon he transforms into a masked figure with a swirling black cloak, and uses surprise and expert acrobatics to make off with his prize from under the noses of the elegant aristocracy. The opening scene before the credits, in which he steals a prototype of a Nicola Tesla death-ray, is so superb that when the title followed over an icon of his cape-billowing silhouette, the audience in our theater spontaneously burst into applause.
But this is a Japanese movie, and it can't quite play by Western rules, especially when dealing with an anti-hero. We aren't, it turns out, meant to root for K-20 after all: in the next scene the master thief sets up an innocent man to take the fall for his crimes, and it's this man, simplehearted circus acrobat Heikichi Endo (Takeshi Kaneshiro) who becomes our protagonist. Our U.S. audience never fully recovered from this shift of gears, but yes, K-20 is the villain, and his oft-humiliated nemesis, rich young police detective Kogoro Akechi (Tôru Nakamura), is actually in the role of the legitimate guardian of society.
We adjusted thanks to the performance of Kaneshiro as Endo, the innocent acrobat; Kaneshiro is a dashing actor who gives a strong turn as the wronged party struggling to clear his name. Endo winds up working alongside detective Akechi, and then even more closely alongside Akechi's beautiful finacée Yoko (Takako Matsu), which is when the film hits its new groove and carries us along again. What follows is an entertaining and fairly tight adventure, as K-20's apocalyptic plan with the death-ray becomes clear, and Endo trains in order to defeat him at their next meeting, all while becoming uncomfortably attracted to Yoko.
Inevitably (in Western terms) Yoko becomes a bargaining chip literally pulled between Endo and K-20, and inevitably (in Japanese terms) the tormented supervillain with the nihilistic agenda proves to be operating on a higher plane than the comfortable herd he would destroy, and in defeat becomes a tragic figure. The final battle scene is good swashbuckling fun, and the movie carries its visual Retro style through to the end, which can't be said of some Western films that use it. For all its cross-cultural confusion, which is interesting in its own right, "K-20" winds up a satisfying whole.
A Spray of Plum Blossoms
One of the pleasures of film festivals is the occasional old treasure that gets pulled from the vaults and thrown forth again upon the silver screen. In this case the screen was small, square, flickery, and badly scratched, because the treasure was a 1931 Chinese silent movie called "A Spray of Plum Blossoms," starring the legendary Ruan Ling-yu (who was to commit suicide four years later). A live piano score by Donald Sosin accompanied, and it’s worth mentioning one moment to highlight his skill: in the movie there’s a scene where a character is actually playing piano, and somehow Sosin transitioned from background music to their playing and back again, with perfect clarity.
I had never seen a Chinese silent, and since I've recently been reading about the Chiang Kai-Shek era I was eager to see both the images and the storytelling of the time. I was a little disappointed with the images, as most of the action takes place on lavish sets with barely a glimpse of the real world, but the story definitely captured the era in its twists and turns of lust, military corruption and betrayal.
Two friends graduate the military academy in Shanghai together, honorable cleft-chinned Valentine (Hu Luting) and philandering, pencil-mustached Proteus (Bai Lede). When Valentine is sent to Canton, Proteus seduces his fetching sister Julia (Ling-Yu), and they get engaged. Proteus then follows to Canton, where at first glance he falls for Valentine's true love Silvia (Shi Luohua), daughter of the General. Proteus intrigues with the General against his friend, with the result that Valentine is dismissed from the service on trumped-up charges, and winds up becoming a bandit. This leaves Proteus free to pursue Silvia, but just then Julia arrives in town (look quick! One street scene from the real world!). Julia and Sylvia compare notes, and Julia disguises herself to spy on Proteus and uncover his treachery. The General is informed and a plan to rehabilitate Valentine is put into motion. The plan somehow involves both girls tied up in the middle of the road while a gun battle rages around them, which doesn't make much sense, but hey, it's 1930s China.
One period detail that did not translate well is the scene amongst the bandits, where Valentine has become a sort of Robin Hood, except that instead of using archery he throws little arrows by hand. With great accuracy. However, a period detail that came through extraordinarily well is Silvia's female house guard: two lovely girls in severe army jackets, short skirts and boots, with leather belts crossed over their chests, standing rigidly at attention to either side of the door. I have no idea how realistic that image is, but I was ready for those two to take over the movie, oust the Japanese invasion, and clean up Shanghai by themselves.
Bilal's Stand
Oh, some independent films are just so painful to review. "Bilal's Stand" is a movie whose heart is absolutely in the right place: it concerns an ambitious young black man in the slums of Detroit who tries to earn a scholarship to college, and winds up an object of opprobrium to his family and friends for wanting something better. It's a complex and powerful issue, told with the authenticity of autobiography. By its nature the homemade film is extremely low budget, featuring 25-year-old debut filmmaker Sultan Sharrief's actual friends in the roles, but it's made with passion and conviction.
And it's awful.
It's wooden. It's utterly predictable. A large cast is introduced and we hardly get to know any of them. A subplot about a character sent to jail is raised and forgotten. There’s an attempt at cute humor, with hand-drawn cartoons overlaid on scenes to illustrate neighborhood social types, but it’s overdone and finally falls flat when it's used to insult women who nag the main character. Bilal (Julian Gant) works for his family's taxi service, but no attempt is made to put a camera in the car and take a look at Detroit. Throughout, locations are unclear and personalities sketchy, and one can almost feel the fuller story, existing in Sharrief's head, running away from him and failing to make it onto film.
Bilal's scholarship possibility involves, of all things, an ice sculpting competition, a detail so bizarre that it has to be autobiographical. This hook could really have given the movie an interesting angle. But the ice sculpting scenes are just imitations of every sports movie cliché: we have the crusty old coach who must be talked into giving Bilal a chance, then chews Bilal out when he's about to quit; we have the snide white teammate who comes around to supporting Bilal in the end; we even have montages of hands cutting ice. There aren't even any good ice sculptures in the movie.
I'm very sorry to have to write this review. But I'm even sorrier to report that the credits of "Bilal's Stand" feature footage of the director congratulating himself on the epic journey he took to bring the film to life. Oh dear.
Agora
"Agora," by Alejandro Amenábar, has ambitions of being a big sword-and-sandals spectacle of the old school. It takes place in ancient Alexandria on the eve of the burning of the famous library: the entire city has been recreated as a set, the streets are filled with hundreds of toga'd extras, the theme is nothing less than the fall of the age of classical reason, as told through the story of the female philosopher Hypatia and the men who love her. It's grand material, and there's no question that the money is on the screen here: Alexandria looks fantastic, and the battles that destroy it come with a full-throated roar and rush that's far superior to the standard computer-programmed melees of, say, "The Lord of the Rings."
Unfortunately, Amenábar gets a little too drunk on his own spectacle. Visually, he can't resist flying the camera around in the air, as if it was a "Lord of the Rings" movie, which for me kept undoing the street-level power of his battle scenes. (And is it really correct for us to see the Pharos Lighthouse as if from a helicopter?) Several times he goes bizarrely further and pulls the camera all the way into Earth orbit and back, a misguided attempt to add cosmic significance to his story that only served to pull me out of it.
As for the story, it tends to get swamped under the history: the human moments take place in short, disconnected windows across the sweep of years and events, making it sometimes hard to tell where people are or how much time has passed since the last scene. In many ways this big-budget epic is surprisingly clunky in the small things.
But on to the tale. We are in the year 391 A.D., when the newly Christianized Roman Empire has emboldened mobs of fanatic Christians to seize power from pagan authorities and remake the city in their image. Hypatia (Rachel Weisz) is a scholar and teacher in the Library of Alexandria, so dedicated to her mathematics that she spurns the advances of the two students who love her, the aristocrat Orestes (Oscar Isaacs) and the glowering slave Davus (Max Minghella). Alas for Hypatia, these are the last days when free philosophic inquiry will be possible. In short order religious violence swamps the city, with Orestes and Davus finding themselves on opposite sides, and culiminates in the burning of the great Library by a Christian mob. From then on Hypatia fights to continue her studies, but despite assistance from both men it's a losing battle in the new order of religious dogma imposed by force.
Rachel Weisz gives a stellar performance as Hypatia; indeed, she's the only character in the movie who has any depth at all, and in an almost solo achievement she fills "Agora" with the humanity it would otherwise lack. Parallel to the battles and bloodshed Hypatia is trying to unlock the secret of celestial mechanics; the scenes of her in her study, confronting and logically overcoming her own received Ptolemaic ideas, are more thrilling than any of the big action pieces, and in a way they almost feel like a separate movie. It's suggested, slightly romantically, that she's on the verge of solving planetary orbits 1,000 years before Kepler when the inevitable charge of heresy catches up to her, and darkness falls over the last light of ancient knowledge.
Let me say right now that I'm all in favor of Amenábar staking his movie so whole-heartedly on the side of sceince and reason as against religion. It's all too rare a choice, perhaps unprecedented in the field of early-Christian epics, and probably inconceivable for an American studio. Admittedly he plays a little fast and loose with the burning of the Library (it most likely happened centuries earlier, and had nothing to do with Christians), but that's all right—the Library of Alexandria fire is perhaps history's most pregnant symbol of everything that was lost during the millennia, in 391 about to commence, when the Christian Dark Ages would hold sway over the West.
Again, however, Amenábar can't play his own story straight: he undermines his Enlightenment case by overdoing the villains. His howling Christians, led by the rabble-rousing Ammonius (Ashraf Barhom), are not only tedious straw men but—swarthy, hooknosed, and bearded—they're blatantly meant to do double duty as "timely" stand-ins for fundamentalist Islam today. Granted the universal message, the symbolic parallel not only confuses the period piece, but hardly brings a reasoned argument to the contemporary issue.
All in all I'd conditionally recommend "Agora": despite being more grandiose than grand, it remains a legitimate spectacle with a legitimately important secular message.
The Wild Hunt
I in no way went into this movie expecting it to be the best of the festival for us. Indeed, it was a complete surprise on two counts. First, the preview had made "The Wild Hunt" out to be a sort of goofy comedy about, of all things, the world of LARP (Live Action Role-Playing); I expected a geeky niche-market homage on the order of "Trekkies." Instead, in a completely untelegraphed move it turned out to be a horror movie, somewhere in the vein of "Lord of the Flies," with LARPers slipping from fantasy to reality and slowly going feral in the woods. Second, it was a superb horror movie, viscerally suspenseful, genuinely shocking, and so immersive that by the time the lights came up I was trembling in my seat, and it took me a minute to remember that a film capable of ravaging my emotions to so evil an extent was, artistically speaking, good.
I have to take a moment to look back in comparison at "Bilal's Stand." Like that film, "The Wild Hunt" is a first feature, by director Alexandre Franchi, and it was likewise severely low-budget—it cost only $400,000 to make, and they had to shoot it half-surreptitiously on location in and around an actual LARP convention, with corresponding continuity disasters in weather and background characters. With "The Wild Hunt" these limitations made no difference at all to the final film; they vanished; thanks to Franchi's editing and storytelling skill you couldn't put your finger on anything that wasn't his complete intent. It just proves (and once again I'm sorry to say it) that such limitations cannot be applied to "Bilal's Stand" as excuses.
I can't describe the movie very much without giving away what shouldn't be. Erik Magnusson (Ricky Mabe) lives in a small apartment in the city dutifully taking care of his senile father, and he's just been dumped by his troubled, thrill-seeking girlfriend Lynn (Kaniehtiio Horn). Lynn has joined Erik's brother Bjorn (Mark Antony Krupa) and other friends for a week-long retreat of LARPing, a game to which Bjorn is totally addicted. The unserious, escapist Bjorn rarely leaves his fantasy persona of a fierce Viking warrior in service of Thor; he's the kind of guy who stalks around gas stations in costume howling battle cries and taking practice swings at the pumps. Needless to say, he never assists Erik in caring for their father, leaving Erik with the weight of the world on his shoulders.
Depressed and lovelorn, Erik resolves to win Lynn back, and drives up to the medieval-themed retreat in the (remote) countryside. He thinks it will be a simple matter to walk into the "game" and pull Lynn out for a talk, but he's unprepared for the bizarre world of LARPing, where grown men and women assume complex fantasy identities, live in the woods, stage improvised mass quests and battles in full costume, and do not appreciate an outsider trying to pull them out of their personas. It's no easy task for Erik to even find Lynn: her "Princess Evelina" character has become a key player in an ongoing quest, and she may or may not be having an affair with another LARPer. Forced to play along with the game to get to Lynn, Erik sinks reluctantly deeper into the fantasy, even as the fantasy world becomes slowly infected with real-life jealousy over the girl. Night falls...
The acting is spot-on, especially the almost wordless performance of Kaniehtiio Horn as Lynn, the inward-brooding, frizzy-sweatered nonentity who by her passive, coyly-smiling indecisiveness becomes the inadvertent Helen of the woods. The world of LARPing, which at first is played for the obvious laughs, is so cunningly inched toward suspense that when one character pulls from his pocket a ridiculous pink scarf, representing a magic spell in the rules of the game, you suddenly realize there is nothing silly about it. As for the Wild Hunt of the title, and the horror conclusion, all I can say is—be ready to jump.
The Two Horses of Genghis Khan
We're back in Mongolia, again courtesy of a European production, this one German. After "The Eagle Hunter's Son" I wasn't sure I needed another Airbus ride to the steppelands, but "The Two Horses of Genghis Khan" at least had a Mongolian director: Byambasuren Davaa, who made "The Story of the Weeping Camel." I'm glad I went: this one proved slower, fresher, funnier, sadder—all in all a lovely and unexpectedly deep movie, that felt much more authentically Mongolian.
As in her previous films, Davaa employs non-actors in her semi-fictional roles. The heroine of this movie is the well-known Mongoloian singer Urna, playing herself; fortunately she has a self-possession and sincere emotional range before the camera, not to mention a gorgeous high-cheekboned face framed by rich tresses of burnished brown hair. The movie follows her on a two-fold musical quest: she is out to restore a broken old horse-head violin that belonged to her grandmother, and at the same time recover the long-lost Mongolian folk song called "The Two Horses of Genghis Khan," fragmentary verses of which are inscribed on the violin neck.
The quest takes her from Inner (Chinese) Mongolia to Outer Mongolia, and from the city of Ulan Bator, where a violin-maker agrees to restore the instrument, into the grasslands, in search of horse hair for the traditional strings. Everywhere she goes, she asks after the folk song, but though everyone has heard of it, no one remembers the words or melody. Her journey into the remote countryside is also a journey back in time, in which the memory of music preserved in the old generation is a last link to an ancient and vanishing Mongolian culture. Eventually we learn that the song hasn't faded away of its own accord: it was proscribed by China, along with other aspects of Mongolian culture, during the terror of the Cultural Revolution. Urna's attemps to recover it evoke deep-seated fears and reluctance from the people she meets, and her quest becomes an attempt to heal, through music, the wound to the nation. There's a lot of Urna's beautiful singing in the movie, and the sense of music as a powerful yet fragile form of oral history.
It's a sentimental film, but it's also full of funny moments, like the adventures of a minivan bus stuck in the mud of the grasslands, or the attempt to send text messages from the middle of nowhere (it can be done, but requires unusual help). When consulting a shaman about her quest, Urna waits in company with a mother whose grown son sports a broken arm: "Two motorcycles in the whole steppe, and they have to crash into each other," she says, shaking her head.
Of course the movie is "for" the grasslands and the slow-paced, hospitable nomadic life, as against the encroaching urban world with its mining and toxic poisons. But this is a more nuanced presentation than we usually get. Ulan Bator has its steaming garbage heaps, through which the indigent pick, but it also has a symphony orchestra, with musicians who know Urna and are helpful on her quest. The nomads do use motorbikes, and plastic barrels for mare's milk, and seem to have incorporated much of the city into their lives. A contant tension exists between Outer Mongolia and China—China is the source of old proscription and current pollution—and yet, when Urna's violin is finally restored it is given life in a Chinese orchestra. That's why the passage near the end of the film, which features a long montage of Urna's figure mystically placed here and there among the beautiful landscapes, feels out of place. For that moment, the film has reverted to a soundtrack-selling simplicity that it otherwise intelligently avoids.
Born to Suffer
The title "Born to Suffer" refers ironically to woman's fate, ironically because in this semi-dark Spanish comedy by Miguel Albaladejo it's the women who make each other suffer.
Flora, an aged matriarch living alone in a small farmhouse, has become dependent on her housemaid Purita, a clumsy, half-witted, yet devoted young woman. When Flora's three nieces scheme to take Purita away and put Flora in a home, Flora shows that no-one can outscheme the matriarch: she marries Purita, in a single-sex wedding of convenience that shocks the church and becomes the talk of their small medieval-preserved town. Having thus secured Purita's services for life, Flora winds up with more than she bargained for, however. Purita has a family of her own, ruled by an ailing, bronchial mother who winds up moving in with them, and from whom they try to keep their marriage secret. When the mother finally learns the truth, she proves the ablest schemer of them all.
Petra Martinez as Flora and Adriana Ozores as Purita turn in convincing portraits of the two unlikely spouses: the silver-haired Flora is elegant, suspicious, and delicately manipulative; the gangly Purita is naive, perpetually confused, and in her own way just as imperious. Through unwanted confessions and unexpected betrayals they wind up discovering each other's secrets, and if their love finally triumphs over Purita's Machiavellian mother, it's not without some severe bruises. Who needs men?
Hipsters
In the dark days of the immediately post-Stalin Soviet Union, youth rebellion took the form of a semi-underground movement of—hipsters! This bright, flashy Russian musical by Valeriy Todorovskiy features the young Communists of 1955 defying their stifling police state with pompadours, jazz records, swinging raves, and above all clothes—lime-green plaid jackets, orange neckties, platform shoes, strapless dresses, high heels and lipstick. Lectured by their police-fearing parents, ostracized by drab-suited neighbors in their crowded urban communes, hunted and broken up by gangs of Party youth, the hipster movement holds its technicolor torch of freedom high in the cause of individuality, dancing, peacock outfits, and hot music. Since half the movie is told in song and dance, this works out well.
The story follows Mels (Anton Shagin), at first a devoted Komsomol member engaged in breaking up hipster dances under the command of his pretty squad leader Katya. On a raid one night, Mels pursues a fleeing blonde in a party dress through the park, who waylays him seductively and then pushes him into the pond. Well, it's love at first sight for poor Mels, who swiftly discards his old identity and "goes hipster" in pursuit of Polly. Before he knows it he has made several hipster friends—the shy, bespectacled dancer "Bob," the kingly bandleader "Fred"—outfitted himself in canary yellows and orange, and (in a daring illegal act) bought a black-market saxopohone. There's no going back for him: in chasing Polly, he has found his own soul—not that he's going to stop chasing Polly.
I came into "Hipsters" with reservations, many of which remain. If you're looking for ideology here, leave your party card at the door. Yes, "Footloose" told the exact same story in protest against Capitalist culture, making it a pretty weak twig to swing against Stalinism. Yes, portraying kids' hunger for fancy clothes as a liberation front does a political disservice to, say, the Prague Spring or the Solidarity movement. If this wasn't a Russian-made movie, in other words, it would be gratuitous and insulting.
And yet, "Hipsters" is a Russian movie, and for all the showy fun it's having, it rings true. First of all—and this is important—the score is fantastic. That alone carries it a long way. You haven't heard anything until you've heard Katya's number in tongue-lashing Russian, backed by a hundred Communist Youth, as she ousts Mel from the Party with flashing eyes.
And the story, to its credit, is not satisfied to stop with Mels kissing Polly: we continue on into unexpected territory, where we see not only the crackdown against the hipster movement but the emotional stress that resistance puts on the couple. The reactions of the ordinary Soviet citizens to the hipsters are multi-layered: some are simply worried about the authorities, but others are legitimately outraged. "We defeated Hitler for that?" one washerwoman spits at Mels. We wind up seeing a surprising amount of genuine Soviet life here, from the communal slum kitchens, to the palatial apartments of the Party elite, to the fabulous detail of bootleg records being cut on the floppy vinyl of used hospital X-Ray prints.
"Hipsters," in short, pulls it off. It's fun, the musical numbers are catchy, and it has just enough grounding in real Russian memory to keep its head. And after all, the urge for outré clothes and shocking music may be the easiest of youth protests, but it's also the most universal—and, as the film perhaps forgets, it's always a protest. The stirring closing number, which features modern punks and slackers parading in full counterculture regalia through the streets of today's Moscow, is meant to celebrate the victory of hipster freedom, but by the film's own rules it may portend the next revolution.
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