SITGES 2011: Outro
by Steve Dollar 
One of the attractions of a film festival is the chance to join a vital, engaged audience that can't wait to debate the merits of a movie seconds after the credits roll. As the day or week passes, you keep running into other fans and industry folks with strong opinions, often sharply opposed to your own, which only makes it more fun to argue about?even when things get a tad explosive.
One of my favorites at the
44th annual Sitges Film Festival was Japanese provocateur
Sion Sono's
Guilty of Romance. Along with
Cold Fish and
Love Exposure, it completes his so-called "Hate Trilogy," and shares with both films characters who are maniacally obsessive, oppressed by their circumstances, and capable of dangerous extremes of behavior. Purportedly based on a true story,
Romance is framed by a police investigation of a grisly discovery at a love hotel. The body of a prostitute has been hacked apart, various limbs and organs reassembled with a matching head and torso of a mannequin. The story (at least in the two-hour "international" cut screened in Sitges) focuses on the spiral into depravity and/or sexual liberation of a submissive and sexually frustrated housewife Izumi (Megumi Kagurazaka, of
Cold Fish and a Google image search best enjoyed in privacy) who falls in love with Mitsuko (Makoto Togashi), a literature professor who spends her nights having anonymous sex for money in the sleazy Shibuya district. There's a lot of screwball absurdity and cultural satire nailing down a twisty plot, which is a lot more complicated than you'd expect from a movie with so much nudity and noisy bonking. There is also a lot of sublime, beatific poetry recited (endlessly, in fact) as strings shimmer against the day and the women struggle to articulate a passion that is sweeping, destructive and out of control. Since it's Sono, the exalted blooms from the scuzzy underbelly, so these moments occur amid episodes of oppressively casual violence and hysterical kink that always push the envelope. According to one of the better festival rumors, juror
Ashley Laurence (who played Kirsty in the
Hellraiser films) was so appalled by
Romance that she packed her bags and fled the festival, compelling an emergency search for a new jury member. (Enter
Richard Stanley, the Australian director of
Dust Devil and one of several filmmakers featured in the new
Theatre Bizarre anthology film).
Watching
Romance in tandem with the heartbroken
Himizu?Sono's other new film?is also to appreciate the sheer volume of tenderness his stories evoke after any number of bruising beatdowns and humiliations. Adapted from the manga,
Himizu ("mole") was shot in the wake of the March 11 tsunami and subsequent nuclear crisis in Japan, and for all its immediacy it still looks like a rough cut, long-winded and not entirely coherent. The saga of a high school student abused and abandoned by his parents, harassed by the yakuza and stalked by an obsessed schoolgirl admirer, the film details the making of a would-be psychopath at the same time it serves as a kind of elegy for the lives destroyed by the tsunami and shouts, as loudly as possible, a testimony to the transforming power of love. Leaving the theater, I felt like I'd been whacked in the head by a steel bar, but I was also stirred up inside. Sono's messiness is a method.
And, at least, it doesn't lend itself to the connect-the-dots reduction that can pass for serious criticism of an ambitious project like
Livid (
Livide). The sophomore effort from French filmmakers Alexandre Bustillo and Julian Maury (
Inside) got a damning assessment from a blogger within my earshot after a screening at Fantastic Fest, who delighted in picking out all the other horror movies from which the directors steal (and/or to which they pay homage). That's such a cynical and dismissive way of thinking about a work of art. The spooky old house gothic is a conceptual mechanism, for sure, an art director's movie that has (for me, at least) a distinct kinship with the clockwork machinery of
Guillermo del Toro's films and the terpsichore-on-acid weirdness of
Dario Argento's
Suspiria. On Halloween, three kids burglar a comatose invalid's mansion and make discoveries they wish they hadn't, falling prey to all manner of meticulously choreographed supernatural menace. As the convoluted and not particularly logical plot turns, it becomes clear that teenage Lucie (Chlo� Coulloud)?a novice home healthcare aide whose knowledge of the house's hidden "treasure" inspires her boyfriend to lead the clumsy robbery?has actually been led to the haunted mansion for a special purpose. The third act is a tour-de-force, unleashing a rush of poetic and terrifying images that aspires to be at once tragic and transcendent as tormented souls fly free and a mystery materializes into flesh and blood.
A Couple to Watch: The Brazilian directors Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra were back in Sitges after first showing their short animation
Rojo Red in 2009. Their feature debut
Hard Labor (
Trabajo Cansa) is very much of a piece with other recent South American genre-fest faves in that it roots so much of the character's anxieties in the mundane situations of domestic life and regular Joe struggle. There's a weird piece of real estate: an abandoned grocery store that the plucky Helena (Helena Albergaria) reopens, even though the place is haunted by some unexplained something. Black goo oozes up through the tile. A mysterious stain covers a rear wall. And at night, the bulldogs across the street howl bloody murder. Yet, what's more unhinging is the ordinary fear triggered by a crap economy. Though some kind of monster exists, Helena's really scared of losing the live-in housekeeper who works for almost nothing, while her husband faces daily humiliation looking for work. The slow burn is an excuse for a class anatomy, those ominous curved claws lurking behind the bread rack more symbolic than Satanic.
Turkey Shoot: It's a toss up. First, there's
The Island, a Bulgarian-made suspenser that actually deserves some mad credit (or head-shaking derision) for deploying the single most unexpected third act plot twist of any film I've seen all year. It's unexpected because it seems to arrive from an entirely different film, and while the what-the-huh?-inducing hairpin turn offers some perverse hindsight on the preceding hour of soul-haunted brooding?accompanied by languid interludes of supermodel Laeticia Casta swimming naked off the gorgeously rugged coast of the Black Sea?it's also pranks the audience's investment in a mysterious psychodrama about rediscovered identity. And the dialogue! Danish actor Thure Lindhardt is Daneel, whose stylish Parisian girlfriend Sophie (Casta) has taken him on a surprise vacation to Bulgaria, where she doesn't yet know he'd been raised in an orphanage after being abandoned on a remote island. He leads them there, where through a series of slow reveals, flashbacks and freakouts, Daneel melts down and torpedoes the relationship. Meanwhile, the horny proles from a roughneck work crew peep on Casta, Porky's-style, taking a shower and fail to reenact
Straw Dogs. But first, there's this:
DANEEL (in Bulgarian, to grizzled Bulgarian innkeeper): Where are you from?
INNKEEPER: Sofia.
SOPHIE: What did you ask him?
DANEEL: Where he is from.
SOPHIE: And...?
DANEEL: He said "Sofia."
Yet Still the Most Annoying Movie at the Festival: Womb. This stagnant slab of fog-bound introspection stars
Eva Green, which would seem to be a plus, and revolves around a deeply obsessive romance that transcends mortal tragedy through the agency of avant-garde science. Yes, she gives birth to the clone of her childhood sweetheart, who has been suddenly killed just as they'd reunited. They hadn't even had sex yet! Underneath all the torturted romantic airs and long soulful silent gazing out to the windswept sea, what seems intended as poetic melancholy is just plain ridiculous. She has the kid. He grows up. He finds out he's really a clone. Goes apeshit. And then they fuck. Roll credits. There's a creepy-icky factor that's always enjoyable in a movie that takes itself so seriously, but right down to its final twist it's too studiously glum to buy into for more than a reel.
Posted by ahillis at October 25, 2011 1:32 PM
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