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.