"You need an
independent spirit if you're going to go into film or music: so many people
will tell you that you can't do it," said Diane Warren, on stage at Łódź's
EC1, a former power station now transformed into a vibrant cultural and
exhibition centre in Poland's prime cinema city. "Independent Spirit"
was not only the name of the award that the popular songwriter was receiving at
the Closing Ceremony of this year's Transatlantyk Festival. It was also, in
part, the theme of the entire 7 day event which, under the title
"Independence Now: Myself, Freedom, Rebellion, and Homeland," took
the occasion of the centenary of the restoration of Poland's sovereignty as the
spur to create a programme that would explore these issues in a range of
contexts far beyond those of the nation's own history, from the personal to the
political to the artistic to the complex interstices between.
 |
| Joanna Kulig, Transatlantyk Best Acrtess winner 2018 |
As I noted in my
coverage last year,
such inclusivity has been a characteristic feature of Transatlantyk since its
inception. Reflecting the stewardship of its acclaimed composer founder Jan
A.P. Kaczmarek, it's a "glocal" festival in which music and film are
equally important elements, and in which screenings and concerts are
supplemented by a city-wide selection of events: master classes, political
discussions, and special film-related foodie evenings presented in the "Culinary
Cinema" strand.
 |
| Wolta (dir. Kotecka and Poryzała) |
The festival's range
was evident in the diversity of winners at the aforementioned Closing Ceremony,
which, alongside Warren, included Joanna Kulig (Best Actress winner for her
performance in Pawel Pawlikowski's Cold War); the critic and
professor Annette Insdorf; composers Dario Marianelli and Radzimir Jimek Dębski; and the astronomer and humanitarian activist
Janina Ochojska, recipient of this year's Glocal Hero Award. Emerging artists
were also celebrated in the exciting Instant Composition Contest and the Polish
Short Film Competition, where it was pleasing to see a preponderance of female
directors, including the top prize for Monika Kotecka and Karolina Poryzała's superb, elegant Wolta. Meanwhile, an icon of
feminist film, Sally Potter, received the FIPRESCI +93 prize, and gave a characteristically
eloquent, engaged and inspiring master class at the beginning of the festival.
Retrospectives dedicated to Miloš Forman, Andrzej Barański and Lucian Pintile
were also highlights of the event.
 |
| Horizon (dir. Kajrishvili) |
With new American
features such as Desiree Akhavan's The Miseducation of Cameron Post,
Steven Soderbergh's Unsane, Joshua Leonard's Behold My Heart and
Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead's The Endless
consistently underwhelming, it was left, as often, to world cinema to provide
more compelling visions. Freedom within familial and domestic contexts was the
focus of a number of films presented in the "New Cinema" section,
with both Guillaume Senez's likeable Our Struggles (Nos Batallies) and Tinatin Kajrishvili's terrific, Ceylan-esque Horizon
(Horizonti) depicting, from opposite perspectives, parents absenting
themselves from their families.
 |
| Scary Mother (dir. Urushadze) |
Horizon was part of a strong showing for
the blossoming new Georgian cinema, which included Mariam Khatchvani's Dede and
Ana Urushadze's Scary Mother (Sashishi deda). Khatchvani's
handsome Caucasus-set drama focuses on a young woman's struggle
for self-determination against prevailing cultural traditions, while
Urushadze's taut film evokes the challenges involved in women's claiming of creative
space, as the heroine (striking Nato Murvanidze) pens a lurid roman a clef that
her family react to negatively. Already awarded at several festivals, Urushadze's
movie suggests a companion piece to her compatriots Nana Ekvtimishvili and
Simon Gross's similarly patriarchy-challenging My Happy Family, one of
the highlights of Transatlantyk last year.
 |
| In My Room (dir. Köhler) |
The influence of
the Dardennes brothers' brand of social realism was evident, with varying
degrees of success, in some productions, including Jean-Bernard Marlin’s Sheherazade, Sebastian Schjaer’s The Omission, Shin Dong-Seok's Last
Child (Salanameun Ayi), Dario Albertin’s Manuel, and Meryem Benm’Barek's popular Sofia, which won the Kamera Akcja award, voted for by the jury of
young film critics. But other filmmakers ventured into odder terrain. Isabel
Prahl's Different Kinds of Rain (1000 Arten Regen zu Beschreiben)
explores a family's increasingly wayward attempts to communicate with a son
who's locked himself in his room and refuses to leave, while Ulrich Köhler's
similarly opaque In My Room offers a lo-fi take on apocalypse, as its protagonist
(excellent Hans Löw) awakens to find himself seemingly the last man left on earth.
 |
| Becoming Astrid (dir. Christensen) |
More immediately
accessible was Pernille Fischer's Christensen's Becoming Astrid (Unga
Astrid), an exceptionally sensitive and absorbing account of the early life
of the children's author Astrid Lindgren. At first - in a church scene that
finds a bored Astrid subverting the priest's rhetoric and geting chided by her
mother for blasphemy - it looks like Christensen is going to be too obvious and
single-minded in presenting the heroine's transgressiveness. But the film's
feminism deepens and complicates as it progresses, and Lindgren enters into a
relationship with her married boss. Becoming Astrid doesn't fall into
the typical biopic trap of elevating the heroine above all the other characters,
and there are lovely supporting performances from Trine Dyrholm as the sympathetic
woman who takes care of Lindgren's baby, and Maria Bonnevie as the apparently
uptight mother who proves to have reserves of acceptance and playfulness. In
the main role, Alba August is radiant; at times suggesting Carey Mulligan or
Maggie Gyllenhaal, but with a delicacy and fortitude that's all her own, she
keeps us attuned to the character's feelings all the time. Christensen's film was
a deserving winner of this year's Distribution Award, voted for by the festival
audience.
 |
| Swinging Safari (dir. Elliot) |
At the less
reputable end of the scale was Stephan Elliott's Swinging Safari, a
broad and rambunctious satire on 70s Australian suburbia, which presents the
interactions of a group of (would be) libertine patents and their perplexed offspring.
As usual, Elliott throws too much into the mix for everything to stick, and a
lot of promising elements - such as Kylie Minogue as a dog-menacing boozer -
are squandered in the film's excessively manic approach. Still, there are some
amusingly tasteless set-pieces, as well a few surprising moments of lyricism,
and at its best the film suggests John Waters remaking The Ice Storm.
 |
| The Harvesters (dir. Kallos) |
African settings
yielded several distinctive films. A French, Greek, Italian, Polish and South
African co-production, Etienne Kallos's The Harvesters (Die Stropers) starts out looking like a fairly
standard gay coming-of-age story, but ventures into darker, more disturbing territory
as it concerns itself with the exchange of identities between two teenage boys.
There are some narrative inconsistencies but the film remains engaging and provocative,
with seductive, burnished cinematography by Michał Englert that sometimes
recalls his work on Małgorzata Szumowska's In the Name Of (W imię…).
 |
| Djon Africa (dir. Guerra and Reis) |
In contrast to the
intense and brooding tone of The Harvesters, João Miller Guerra and
Filipa Reis's blissful Djon Africa is the most joyous, open and relaxed
of Daddy-quest films, following its ambling protagonist as he leaves his home
in Portugal to seek out his unknown father in Cape Verde. Loose, digressive and
fluid in its structure, and completely unpretentious in content, the film
carries the viewer along on its buoyant lightness of spirit. A similar
breeziness characterises Jhonny Hendrix's Candelaria, which finds a
cash-strapped elderly Cuban couple accidentally turning amateur pornographers
when a video camera falls into their hands. Affectionate, funny and deeply
moving in the end, the film blithely transcends the potential tackiness of its
premise, creating a portrait of a couple that's also a portrait of Cuba itself.
A Sundance favourite, Gustavo Pizzi’s Loveling (Benzinho) charmed
too, in its generous depiction of a large Brazilian family dealing with a son's
prospective departure for Germany.
 |
| McQueen (dir. Bonhôte and Ettedgui) |
Finally,
documentaries were particularly well-served in the programme, with two artist
portraits standing out. Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui's McQueen may
follow the now-patented methods of recent doc hits such as Asif Kapadia's Amy
and Nick Broomfield's and Kevin Macdonald's Whitney Houston films in its approach
to Alexander McQueen, the talented, troubled icon of "Cool Britannia" culture, but it
offers a lucid, often insightful account. The main drawback is the over-use of
Michael Nyman's score, a cut and paste affair that jarringly incorporates bits
and pieces of the composer's most well known soundtracks to emphasise every
emotional beat in this take on McQueen's story.
 |
| Love Express: The Disappearance of Walerian Borowczyk (dir. Mikurda) |
Structured, like McQueen,
in chapters, Kuba Mikurda's much-anticipated Love Express: The Disappearance
of Walerian Borowczyk (Love Express. Przypadek Waleriana Borowczyka)
offered one of the most potent explorations of the festival's theme in its
presentation of the confounding career of the Polish provocateur who shook up
cinema with his avant-garde animations and transgressive live action features
before sinking into the tawdrier reaches of the porn industry in the 1980s. Avoiding
the portentous, ceremonial tone that characterises McQueen and its ilk,
the film is sharply focused rather than comprehensive, making no mention of
Borowczyk's childhood background and instead picking up from that most turbulent
of years - 1968 - when Borowczyk made Goto, Isle of Love and embarked on
his most fertile creative period. A good range of interviewees (Terry Gilliam,
Peter Bradshaw, and Andrzej Wajda, among them) offer funny, engaging insights, and
Mikurda incorporates some pleasing, unstressed ludic touches (watch the cutting
go into overdrive when a twitchy Slavoj Žižek appears). Given the dominance of
male speakers, the film's engagement with the sexual politics of Boro's output
feels a bit limited (despite interesting contributions from the writer and psychotherapist
Cherry Potter and The Beast’'s Lisbeth Hummel). But Love Express
remains a terrific, overdue exploration of one of the oddest career
trajectories in contemporary cinema, as well as an intelligent inquiry into the
shifting meanings of artistic freedom during the sexual revolution and beyond.
 |
| People's Republic of Desire (dir. Hao Wu) |
Hao Wu's People's
Republic of Desire brings us up to date with a sobering portrait of the
seductions of online celebrity culture as experienced in a Chinese context. The
film focuses on the ups and downs in the experiences of the singer Shen Ma and
the comedian Big Li, as they compete for viewers and "gifts" in the
increasingly crowded market of webcam live-streams on the YY.com network. During
a period in which upward mobility in China has dramatically decreased, such platforms
offer people a way to get rich, but, as the film broadens its scope to
incorporate the perspectives of fans and, briefly but tellingly, the CEO of YY,
it becomes apparent that it's the networks themselves that are the ultimate beneficiaries.
 |
| Faces, Places (dir. Varda and JR) |
If People's
Republic of Desire offers a disquieting take on the consequences of a life spent
in front of a computer screen, then Agnès Varda and JR's Faces, Places (Visages, Villages) provides a counter:
this is a film about the pleasure and necessity of venturing out into the
world, of making contact with people and places in a sensory, tactile manner. A
close attention to the haptic symphony of senses and perceptions that make up
real, lived interactions has always distinguished Varda's documentary and essay
films, and this time she and her collaborator are on the road through France in
the latter's "photography van," interviewing people that they meet
and then pasting large portaits of them on to the sides of public spaces.
Miners, the wives of dockers, and a woman refusing to leave her home despite
pressure from developers are among the subjects of the film's gentle,
considerate and loving gaze. Varda and JR prove delightful sparring partners
throughout, their affectionate bond a subversive one in a period in which
divisions between genders and generations are being widely stoked.
As usual with
Varda, the structure of Faces, Places
is fluid and associative, constantly teasing out connections and patterns
between film and life, the quotidian and the cosmic. The context is, of course,
entirely - and delightfully - French, as a gleeful homage to Bande à Part and a painful non-encounter with that
film's director attest. But in its unassuming way the movie's reach is much
broader, as Varda once again sharpens our perception of the world, heightening
awareness of what can be noticed, appreciated and loved within it.
No comments:
Post a Comment