Cinequest: STRIGOI

Writer-director Faye Jackson has said that Strigoi started with the idea of Nicolae and Elena Ceauşescu (Communist dictators of Romania, deposed and executed for various crimes in 1989) returning from the dead. That's a pretty rarified genesis for a low-budget horror-detective hybrid with "midnight movie" written all over it. But the further you get into the story, the more you grasp how deeply yet subtly informed it is by Eastern European politics of the mid-to-late twentieth century.

The film opens on a group of Romanian villagers executing and burying the local tyrannical landlord and his wife and then cavorting through his mansion, drinking his wine and bedecking themselves with his wife's clothing, to the driving, celebratory strains of Norman Greenbaum's "Spirit in the Sky." Clearly the landlord was a bad guy who deserved his fate, but he and his wife refuse to stay buried and rise by night to terrorize the villagers who thought their troubles were at an end.

Into this scene wanders Vlad, returning from a stint at medical school in Italy to live with his elderly grandfather. He is immediately drawn into the general atmosphere of weirdness that pervades the village. A local dies under mysterious circumstances, a dog disappears, Vlad's neighbor can't stomach food of any sort, everyone develops a peculiar, inexplicable skin rash, and Vlad's grandfather is convinced that gypsies are stealing his cigarettes. The villagers seem curiously helpless, angry at the wrongs done them, yet so wracked with guilt over the murders they themselves committed that it paralyzes them. It is left to Vlad to untangle the machinations of both the spirit world and very corporeal communist land-grabbers in order to solve the crime and finally put the wandering dead to rest.

Gorgeously photographed in rich hues, the Romanian location is everything a vampire story setting should be: eerie and beautiful, alive with a sense of something horrible waiting around every corner, beneath every tendril of creeping mist. The undead are deliciously old-school--evil, ugly, and ravenous. No sexy teenage vampires or werewolves in this neck of the Carpathians, thank you. The creepiness is judiciously leavened with black comedy, and the actors inhabit their roles as if born to them. The unhurried pace requires patience, not the most prevalent characteristic of general horror audiences. But the return on investment, when it finally comes, is high and quite worth the wait and close attention Jackson demands.

Cinequest; THE HOUSE OF BRANCHING LOVE (HAARAUTUVAN RAKKAUDEN TALO)

In Mika Kaurismäki's The House of Branching Love (Haarautuvan rakkauden talo), a pair of family therapists, Tuula and Juhani, are splitting up after years of gradually souring marriage. Neither wishes to leave their lakeside home, so they agree to share it. Juhani persuades Tuula that they shouldn't bring any new amours home with them, an agreement he breaks almost immediately with a woman he meets at a bar. Tuula retaliates by inviting a dashing pilot, with whom she has previously cheated on Juhani, to stay. Juhani hires a call girl to move in and play his girlfriend for a week, including noisy ersatz sex which he hopes will drive Tuula mad with jealousy. The one-upsmanship continues, friends and confidantes drop in and out, and the whole atmosphere is surprisingly convivial--albeit occasionally interrupted by spates of bitter invective flying between Tuula and Juhani like so many bullets. Meanwhile, a bizarre tangle of connections has a pair of cops, a pimp, and the female head of an international prostitution ring converging on the house where all this fun is going on.

It's remarkable that director/co-writer Kaurismäki can keep all these balls in the air without losing his audience. That he does so while also coaxing bravura performances from his cast and dazzling us with witty dialogue is nothing short of astonishing. It takes a certain, rare knack to imbue painful separation with this much hilarity and still keep it believable. Part of the credit is undoubtedly due to co-writer Sami Keski-Vähälä and to Petri Karra, the original novelist, but Kaurismäki coordinates everything with a deft hand and a sure cinematic eye.

Is this divorce, Finnish style? Italians could take lessons.

Cinequest: FRICTION

The tagline on the FrICTION promotional material reads, "What if you were scripted to behave badly?" That phrase also emerges from the mouth of writer-director Cullen Hoback on nearly every occasion one hears him discussing the film. The problem with this tidy little catchphrase is that, while it does in a sense, describe the story without being overly revealing (the reality-bending that may or may not actually go on in the film is, apparently, a big, big secret), it also damns it with praise that is not only faint but also vague, misleading, and not all that interesting. All films contain characters who are scripted to behave badly. Well, okay, maybe not the Lumières' "Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat," but you see what I'm getting at. When you come right down to it, that tagline suggests nothing new or unique about the film, and does so in such a smugly earnest tone that I believe I may be forgiven for going into it expecting a self-indulgent indie wankfest that would make me roll my eyes for ninety minutes and emerge vowing never to watch another movie by its maker.

Well, guess what? It's a pretty gripping little picture that almost entirely subverted my expectations.

Reduced to basics, the story is straightforward. Jeremy and Amy Mathison run a performing arts summer camp for teens. Hoback agrees to teach its seven students in return for being allowed to use them as actors and crew on a feature film. He casts them as themselves and scripts one of the students--a loner played by the unreasonably talented and self-assured August Thompson--to come between the couple, resulting in the unravelling of their marriage. If that were all there were to it, it wouldn't amount to much. Furthermore, the story is full of tiny plot holes, and Jeremy's "character" is so steadfastly unlikeable that I found myself wondering how he and Amy ever got together in the first place. It's the way Hoback toys with the opacity of the fourth wall that keeps you watching and guessing. It's a narrative! No, it's a documentary about making a narrative! Wait, no, it's a narrative about a doc about making a narrative. Or is it?

A more apt question to pique the interest of potential viewers, then, might be: "Where is the fourth wall?" Because a whole lot of lip service is paid, both on and off the screen, to breaking it and yet it miraculously remains intact when the house lights come up. Comparisons to Soderbergh's Full Frontal and Altman's The Player seem inevitable, yet FrICTION is both more intimate and more guilefully slippery than either. If one were to peel away all the layers of this onion, one would likely find at the center a bit of Magritte scrawl proclaiming it not to be an onion. Bring your pipe to the screening.

Cinequest: KILL THE HABIT

Writer-director Laura Neri's first feature opens with a phone call in which protagonist Galia is curtly brushed off by a boy she likes. It is awkwardly comic and poignant, and it is the only believable moment in the entire movie. Neri is a competent, even engaging director, whose energetic style suggests a promising career to come…as long as she stops writing her own scripts.

Galia, a suburban lightweight junkie, makes a purchase from her dealer. After a disagreement about recompense, she ends up whacking him on the head with the nearest heavy object, ostensibly killing him, only to find herself trapped in his apartment by a group of young men loitering outside. Not wanting them to see her leaving and later identify her, she calls her friend Soti to come and provide a distraction. Soti is reluctant, and, as if things weren't bad enough, the dealer's passed-out girlfriend is slowly coming to in the back bedroom.

The plot holes and logic flaws begin with the crime and keep coming. Despite her fear of discovery, Galia talks about the murder on her cell phone with Soti, right next to the door where the boys outside could easily overhear her. She raises her voice as she argues with Soti, practically begging to awaken the sleeping girlfriend. When the dealer's customers come to the door, she dispenses his products to them, even telling them her real name. After a brief flurry of panicked wiping of surfaces, she leaves her fingerprints on damn near every surface in the apartment. Once Soti arrives, and they hit upon a way of disposing of the body, it just gets worse.

The girls, assisted by the revived and surprisingly accommodating dealer's girlfriend, ferry the disguised body around L.A., stopping off en route to fulfill several unrelated and considerably less important obligations and leaving a trail of utter implausibility in their wake. Add some ham-handed dialogue, a tacked-on romance, and a preposterous "twist" at the end, and one begins to sense that, as a writer, Neri thinks insultingly little of her audience's intelligence.

Lili Mirojnick delivers an adequate Galia, and Maria-Elena Laas as the dealer's girlfriend both steals and saves every scene she's in--this actress should get more work!--but the rest of the performances are indifferent. Katerina Moutsatsou is particularly flat and tiresome as the dour Soti.

A lack of feedback at the conceptual/script phase of projects seems to be one of the biggest problems plaguing today's low-budget auteurs. Kill the Habit could have been a fun, if somewhat derivative (why are young writer-directors still trying to be Tarantino?) cinematic romp. Neri's visual style is competent and controlled, her energy enviable. If only someone had brought out the red pen in time.

Cinequest: FERRARI DINO GIRL (HOLKA HARRARI DINO)

In 1968, Soviet tanks rolled into Prague. Prominent Czech New Wave filmmaker Jan Němec filmed the invasion, then smuggled the footage over the border into Austria. Forty-one years later, he released this narrated account, in which the footage shot that day is intercut with modern recreations of the journey, with actors portraying Němec himself as well as sidekicks Enrico, an Italian journalist, and Jana, the titular Ferrari Dino Girl.

Beautiful and compelling at times, the film ultimately works neither as a documentary nor as a narrative. The '68 footage captures little of the much-stated violence of the invasion. Němec seems to arrive at each scene just after something dramatic has occurred, so all we see is the aftermath--people standing around, an occasional injury or burning vehicle, bullet holes in buildings and windows.

It would be ridiculous to critique such things or demand greater excitement from a straight documentary, of course, and the footage Němec captured is certainly valuable as a historical document. Indeed, it was undoubtedly even more valuable at the time, as it was almost the only footage of the invasion that made it to the world outside of Czechoslovakia. However, in seeking to elevate his story from documentary to some sort of entertaining, romantic narrative-doc hybrid, Němec both compromises the documentary nature of the piece and invites criticism.

He further undermines himself with the casting of Jana. Although it is never made entirely explicit in the film, the real Jana was a popular actress who had been described as the sexiest woman in Czechoslovakia. Tammy Sundquist, who portrays her, is a lovely girl, but that's all. She capers charmingly, mugs in Enrico's hat, looks about seventeen, and utterly fails to live up to Jana's legacy or communicate what it was that compelled Němec to love her so much that he would rather see her safe across the border with another man--the film's vague and slippery romantic subtext--than keep her with him. Her extreme youth next to Němec-the-character's fortyish appearance proves a further distraction, as does all of the characters' modern attire.

Where the film triumphs is as a paean to the Czech New Wave, which, although it had been waning for some time before, the August 1968 Soviet invasion effectively ended. The elegiac quality of the modern footage and the voice-over narration can be understood even better in that light and perhaps even forgiven for its occasionally maudlin quality.

Cinequest: HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE

Writer-director Jarrod Whaley says that Hell is Other People started out as a straightforward drama, and, somewhere along a string of rewrites, became the dark, dry comedy that it now is. Thank goodness. Taken at face value, the pathetic misadventures of its anti-hero Morty might drive an audience to suicide by the time the house lights come up.

Looking like a sprawling, hirsute Woody Allen, Morty begins his day with a bong and the classifieds, through which he hunts half-heartedly for a job. One gets the impression that he's not in the market for anything that entails actual work; he's more of an idea man. When the want ads don't pique his interest, he schleps around Chattanooga looking for a quick buck.

He convinces Ryan, a friend of his ex-girlfriend Emmy, to employ his services as a psychoanalyst on the theory that Morty has been in analysis so long, himself, that he knows how it's done. Stranger things have happened in trucks in deserted Tennessee parking lots but surely nothing as uncomfortable as the fumbling exchange of cash that follows Ryan's outpouring of neurosis to Morty's listening ear.

Soft-spoken and slow-moving, Morty gives the appearance of being shy and maybe even a little dull-witted. This is a front; he's always on the make. The advice he passes on to Ryan originates from another of Morty's acquaintances, who knows nothing of the financial arrangement between Ryan and Morty. He dodges his own sizable and long-overdue therapy bill by coming on to the receptionist so strong that, deeply discomfitted, she rushes him out the office door with no further thought for the money he owes. He sleazily attempts a reunion with Emmy (after her best friend Andie rejects his flirtation). It's not so much that he wants Emmy; his landlord has thrown him out and he needs a place to stay.

For all he is contemptible and utterly self-interested, Morty also exudes a peculiar charm, thanks in no small part to actor Richard Johnson's quiet yet considerable charisma. Even as his life circles a drain of his own making, we kinda-sorta want Morty to win. Why? Because Morty is us. Rarely has a filmmaker held a mirror up right smack in front of his audience as adroitly as this. And we can't look away. It's as if Whaley has distilled every wretched thing we've ever done, every situation we've ever handled badly, regretted, and hated ourselves for in the morning, into a single character and then had the audacity to slap us in the face with him. And because Morty embodies everything we loathe in ourselves, we simultaneously want to kill him and see him prevail.

Subtly directed, the mostly-amateur players commit to their roles in a way that those in bigger-ticket productions often don't match. Johnson is a particular delight, but Elizabeth Worthington also stands out as the only character who matches or perhaps even tops Morty in scheming and cringe-inducing awkwardness.

Generally serviceable, Whaley's photography reaches an apex of loveliness in a scene on a foggy mountaintop. Fired by his erstwhile patient, Morty attempts to contemplate the distant landscape, but it's invisible. As much as he's looking to take advantage of others for material gain, he's also searching for a genuine emotional connection. Whether the world denies him this because of circumstance or because he is undeserving is ultimately of no importance.

The story has no ending. The film simply stops. This may leave a significant swath of viewers in the lurch and frustrated, but Whaley knows what he's doing. Never has a lack of resolution been so right. We don't know the future. What it holds for us and for the bits of us that Morty represents, we can only uselessly speculate. Whether hemmed in by opaque blue-gray mist or left standing at the side of the road, options exhausted and nowhere left to go--either up or down--for Morty there really is no exit.

Cinequest: THE ROBBERS (WO DE TANGCHAO XIONGDI)

A pair of shady brothers, Shisun and Chen Liu, ineptly try to rob a farmer and ravish his daughter, only to be interrupted by a platoon of marauding soldiers. Because the robbers' scorn for the military is even greater than their scorn for ordinary, law-abiding citizens, they stop what they're doing and slaughter the soldiers. The farmer and neighboring villagers are so grateful that they take Shisun and Chen Liu prisoner. The brothers escape by distracting their dimwitted guards with bawdy stories. They are caught and imprisoned again. Again, they escape. And so on, and so on.

Half Kurosawa-Mifune swordplay spectacle, half Fear and Loathing in the Tang Dynasty, this tale of 8th-century China unfolds pretty much as you'd expect but is fun to watch despite its predictability. Writer-director Yang Shu-peng seems to operate on a policy of "when in doubt, impale, decapitate, or hang someone," yet the film still manages to feel frothy and light. That's no easy feat.

Hu Jun and Jiang Wu work a very pleasing chemistry as the comically brutal titular characters. Hu as Shisun is the smart one, cool and aloof in the face of any danger. Jiang as Chen Liu is the emotional slob who rails apoplectically against everything that befalls them until he runs short of breath. "Shisun, you go on cursing," he says. "I'm tired out."

A wedge is driven between them when Chen Liu falls in love and wants to remain in the village. Shisun stays, too, but he hungers for their old way of life, feeling that stability will make them soft. Meanwhile, the village is under constant threat from the seemingly-inexhaustible garrison of tyrannical soldiers. In the wake of a particularly vicious attack, the brothers try to convince the villagers to flee, to no avail. The villagers are convinced that the only reason the soldiers keep attacking is because they want to arrest the robbers. Only when the soldiers try to rape the village women do the locals finally lift a finger to defend themselves.

Full of wary alliances, betrayals, and deceit, this black comedy falls apart at the climax. Yang can't sustain the pitch of perpetual carnage and concludes on a dreamlike note that matches nothing in the rest of the movie. (The sudden and complete change of tone was almost as grating as the projectionist who played the movie at twice the volume necessary.) One leaves the theatre feeling baffled and deflated. A more straightforward resolution--any discernible resolution at all, in fact--might have made The Robbers a winner. Close, but no cigar. Still, Yang is a filmmaker to watch. His visual acuity, deft hand with his actors, and knack for creating interesting characters and relationships will serve him well when tempered with a little more restraint.