SFIFF 54: Critic's Notebook 2.

SFIFF 54: Critic's Notebook 2.

By Craig Phillips

Continuing on from my previous Critic's Notebook piece here on GC Daily, a few more films of interest that have screened and are screening at the San Francisco International Film Festival. For more random thoughts and comments you can follow me on Twitter: @craigary.

Hospitalit�

This droll black comedy from Japanese director Koji Fukada is about a printer named Kobayashi and his much younger second wife (and their two little children) whose lives are altered when they take in an odd stranger Kagawa (Furutachi Kanji), who claims to be the son of a former patron of Kobayashi's father, to live and work with them. Kobayashi's divorced sister Seiko (Kumi Hyodo), newly returned herself. is instantly wary of him and life gets even more complicated when Kagawa's wife turns up unannounced -- she's either from Brazil or Bosnia or somewhere else entirely, depending on who she is telling, but regardless she's far too open about sexuality (she stands on the balcony nude, for one thing) for the prim neighbors.

Hospitalit� is full of surprises, building on each one naturally but with gentle purpose. The film plays like a gentler, grounded variation of Takashi Miike's Katakuris, and on the basest level this is the kind of plot we've seen American films take on with mostly poor results (a certain Owen Wilson comedy f'rinstance). Sure, in Hospitalit�, the newcomer opens up a lot of proverbial closets in this seemingly everyday family, but what is surprising in Fukada's film is how each of them change, as the new guest uses his knowledge and manipulation of said secrets to take control of things.

There's a lot going on under the surface here: commentary on Japanese xenophobia as related to new globalization, on communication, and on people's inability to change. We see this in the neighborhood watch of older ladies patrolling the neighborhood worried about crime, but more worried about outsiders. And in Kobayashi and Nastuki themselves, an odd couple in many ways, who have an "everything's fine" attitude at the start even though it's quickly clear that they are not.

The film's pace is a little sluggish at times but it remains engaging throughout. While Fukada doesn't treat it with the heavier touch of broad farce, thankfully, there is a fair amount of slapstick here, including several laugh out loud moments (one worthy of the Marx Brothers' Night at the Opera's stateroom scene). It also does not make any overt moral statements (this is not Pasolini's more sinister, less accesible Theorem, for instance).

The climax is an unexpected blast, like a hit from warm sake, followed by an ending of quiet renewal and redemption. This is Fukada's second feature, the first as far as I can tell to be seen in the US, and judging by his sure hand I am already most certainly looking forward to what he cooks up next.

A Cat in Paris
Specky Four Eyes

My girlfriend and I eagerly took in A Cat in Paris thinking it had several things going for it: 1) Paris; 2) cats; 3) animation. Unfortunately it didn't take advantage of our goodwill in any of these things very well and we left in some disappointment, though I wouldn't go nearly so far as to call it a waste of time (the under-10 crowd in the audience seemed to like it, for one.) Because it has a US distributtion deal with GKIDS (who also put out the superior Secret of Kells and Sita Sings the Blues) I thought it worth a mention.

The first feature of Parisian artist/animators Alain Gagnol and Jean-Loup Feliciolli, of the French animation studio Folimage, the film's purposefully flat style (very 2D one could say, designs in the vein of Russian propaganda posters meets Friz Freleng's Pink Panther cartoons), while not a problem for me per se would seem easier to take in a shorter piece; over feature length the look begins to grate, especially with the character design a bit weak. But more of an issue was the script, which featured a crime/mystery plot so simple even that under 10 crowd was likely bored by it, and by some asinine dialogue. To be fair I'm not 100% sure how much of that is original script and how much is lost in translation; the print screened features an English language dub of varying quality. Some of the voices sound like non-American actors trying to do cliched American archetypes, others were British, or with French or Italian accents. For kids this might either be confusing, or fit just fine, but for me it felt like incoherent voice direction.

The film is about a mute girl named Zoe and her beloved cat Dino who has a secret life. The cat assists a likable cat burglar named Nico on his nighttime runs. The girl's father was murdered by a mafia kingpin named Victor Costa; her mother, a police detective, has made it her obsession to track the man down. The girl's relationship with the cat and friendship with Nico are the best parts of the film, with both an air of sweetness and good humor coming from that triangle. But elements of farce are pretty weak here, with a lot of missed opportunities for, frankly, more developed jokes, creative visual humor and characterizations. There are a few laughs, and a few touching moments, and again, I think younger kids will enjoy it well enough, but it's ultimately nothing special, alas.

Far more successful in my eyes was the animated short, also from France, that screened beforehand: Jean-Claude Rozec's Specky Four Eyes, about a poor boy saddled with terrible vision, who has to wear ludicrously thick glasses. Poignantly, he begins to feel that the real world around him, which he only sees when glasses are on, is either too mundane or ugly to see, and prefers it better when glasses are off -- when his vivid imagination does the seeing for him. In just 9 minutes this film does a far better job of creating a kid's skewed point of view and the well-meaning cruelty of adults than A Cat in Paris does in its feature length. I also really liked the film's black and white style - which looks like a mix of pencil and watercolor - and characterizations; all make it look like it came straight outta a beloved children's book

A Useful Life

Filmed appropriately in black and white, the Uruguayan A Useful Life is for cinephiles over all others; some might be put off by the relatively slow pacing, the film plays like a deadpan funny, if more naturalistic, Jim Jarmusch comedy, a sweet, slight but utterly endearing film. It is the work of another new-ish filmmaker, Federico Veiroj, (his first feature, Acne, played at Cannes' Directors Fortnight) who knows this territory well, having worked at Montevideo?s Cinemateca Uruguaya, where his film is set. It is the type of place that has a Manoel de Oliveira film festival, not exactly the stuff huge crowds are made of, and, not surprisingly since it seems to have about 7 loyal people in the audience for each screening, the theater finds itself in financial dire straits.

Uruguay's official selection for the 2010 Academy Awards, A Useful Life uses non-professional actors: the head of the theater is played by the real life head of Cinemateca, and the protagonist Jorge, is played by Uruguayan film critic Jorge Jellinek, who has a lumbering sad sack-ness that is quite appealing (he looks like a Latin-nerd version of Ray Romano). While this in some ways makes for some clumsy interactions they give the film an genuine sweetness. As when Jorge tries to steel up the nerve to ask a patron out to coffee; and Jellinek does well when finally needing to show emotion later in the film.

Talk about old school -- we see spools of film, the projectionist translates the title cards via microphone for some homemade narration, while Jorge makes an ad campaign for the fest via tape recorder. In fact, their whole world involves using outmoded technologies: faxes, telegrams, VHS (monte)videotapes, reel-to-reel recorders, pay phones and rotary phones - making it at first blush hard to date the setting, until you realize it's set today, a commentary on people who can;t quite let go of a time when technology was more physical, palpable, bulky, real.

A few parts of the film are a bit too slow-going, but there's an extremely subtle humor even then: a scene where the Cinemateca head talks at length and pretentiously about film structure and viewing is on the surface rather dry and talky but I saw it as a satire of how people who "love" and are engaged by film manage to inadvertently make it abstract and dull. And a scene where Jorge (briefly) pretends to teach at a law school by using a Mark Twain piece on lying as an introductory monologue is odd and quite funny.

As it progresses, the film picks up pace, too, finally mixing in a music score midway through, over a montage of sorts, and later adds in a "cowboy and indian" Western movie sound backdrop to a scene where an emboldened Jorge moves through the city. The film as a whole gets more cinematic as Jorge's world opens up away from the confines of the Cinemateca. Even a haircut scene becomes a cathartic pleasure. This little film is full of them.

Posted by cphillips at May 2, 2011 1:51 PM

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