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.

Cinequest: THE BONE MAN (DER KNOCHENMANN)

If the title of The Bone Man, based on a novel by Wolf Haas, didn't tip you off to the subject matter before you entered the theatre, the gorgeously creepy opening credits will. Vegetarians may find this movie objectionable. There's an awful lot of meat on display, some of it human, and some of it not quite dead yet.

De rigeur for the detective genre, we open with a murder, or what looks like one. Cut to our hero, Brenner, an ex-cop who quit to get away from "too much negative energy" and now spends his days as the world's most compassionate repo man. His boss sends him out into the sticks to deliver a final pre-repo warning to a deadbeat artist named Horvath. Brenner arrives at the inn where Horvath is known to be staying, but there's no sign of him. The inn's staff, an enigmatic, vaguely hostile lot, profess to know nothing of his whereabouts, despite the fact that his car is parked in the inn's lot and his suitcase turns up in their lost-and-found.

Eventually, the brusque head waitress pays off Horvath's debt, thinking it will get Brenner out of their hair. But Brenner's old instincts die hard, and he wants to know what's become of the artist, so he hangs around. Plus, he's developed a tentative crush on the inn's cook, the only person on the scene who seems relatively normal and unambiguously pleasant. He's drawn even further back into the detecting game by the innkeeper's son, a disagreeable wastrel who's incensed that his father appears to be embezzling the restaurant's profits. He tries to hire Brenner to find out where the money is going. And, because this story has its feet firmly planted in the pulp/noir tradition, the son is married to the friendly cook.

Despite their initial antipathy, Brenner and the innkeeper develop an edgy camaraderie as the days pass. The innkeeper is really quite a gruffly charming fellow, who, it turns out, butchers his own animals in the cellar. His inn is known far and wide for its delectable meat dishes, particularly chicken but also goulash. A few misunderstandings and missteps later, bodies are piling up, and, with all that slaughtering and carving and grinding paraphernalia right down there in the basement.... You see where this is headed, right?

Now, for as gruesome as it all sounds--and, indeed, is--what if I told you this is really a story about love? That even the worst of the bad guys is, to some extent, redeemed by it? That the most heinous crimes are motivated by the tenderest emotions? As the Gordian plot unknots itself across the screen, each twist and turn reveals as much warm human connection and compassion as it does horror.

Josef Hader perfectly embodies the straight-shooting Brenner. A Chandleresque tough-soft duality is at play in everything he does and says. His transposition from city streets to snowy countryside immediately calls to mind Nicholas Ray's On Dangerous Ground. But where, in that movie, Robert Ryan's semi-psychotic cop is gentled and soothed by the people he interacts with once outside his normal environment, Brenner is the source of most of the gentling in The Bone Man. He's no saint, no confessor, no psychologist, yet he brings out the best in people, even while they're trying to kill him.

Director Wolfgang Murnberger stands back and lets the story tell itself, lets Hader's middle-aged, unremarkable-looking, and slightly melancholic Brenner go about his business of utterly captivating us. The result is a masterfully wry thriller, subtle in atmosphere and tone despite all its grisly, gristly excesses.

Cinequest: PEEPERS

"Peeping Toms are never praised, like novelists or bird watchers, for their keenness of observation."

- W.H. Auden

So opens Peepers, directed by Seth Owen, and written by Owen, Daniel Perlmutter, and Mark Slutsky.  The ensemble story centers on a band of voyeurs who spend their spare evenings crawling the rooftops of Montreal in search of a good peep.  Some are looking for sexy show, some are merely interested in what other people do in the privacy of their uncurtained homes.  In an age of ubiquitous surveillance, an age in which sharing intimate details of one's life online (and being welcomed to nose around in others') is commonplace, it isn't difficult to empathize with them.  Like the protagonist of Hitchcock's Rear Window, we are easily caught up in the drama of real lives--any lives but our own.

Armed with binoculars and walkie-talkies, they are a close-knit group.  They have their own lingo, and their behavior is governed by a decades-old code.  Their relatively peaceful existence is thrown into chaos by the arrival of an interloper: a professor who teaches a course in "exhibition theory" at university and is looking to do some field research with her class.  She infiltrates the group and finds herself developing an interest in peeping that goes beyond the academic.

It's a well-structured, well-paced film featuring some surprisingly nuanced performances for such an unpretentious light comedy.  The delightfully Madeleine Kahn-ish Janine Theriault, as the bright and brittle professor, particularly stands out.  Solid throughout, the narrative does falter at the end, though.  The climax is weak, and, instead of providing any resolution or strong suggestion of where the characters are going, the story simply meanders to a halt.  There is no sense of intentional ambiguity, as one might expect when dealing with a topic as fertile and charged as voyeurism.  Instead, the story closes as if the filmmakers had abruptly drawn a curtain across the window into their characters' lives.  Appropriate?  Sure.  Satisfying?  Not so much.

The ending is to be forgiven, however, in light of the film's good qualities, and for a couple of scene sequences which elevate it above quite a lot of similar fare.  One of the peepers tumbles from a fire escape and spends the rest of the movie resting his injured leg by his apartment window, binoculars at the ready.  A winsome new neighbor moves in across the street.  He peeps her; she notices and flirts with him.  They end up sharing a clumsy dinner date at her place, but they're too stifled by this sudden proximity to properly express their feelings.  Eventually, they find the solution: they dine and even dance together, each in his or her own window, the space of the street and two layers of glass separating them.  They are clearly enthralled with one another and perfectly happy and content with this arrangement.

In the film's most poignant moment, the shyest and quietest of the peepers stands outside his own house, watching his wife and child at the dinner table through the dining room window.  He has so much trouble relating to them face-to-face that one wonders how he came to be married and a father in the first place.  But the moment is so profoundly, painfully beautiful that one overlooks this minor quibble.  In person, he is awkward and stuttering, yet when he regards them from darkness, through the filter of the window, we see in his face everything he feels for them and everything he wishes he could say.  A cynic might argue that such a scene is predictable, even cloying, and in the hands of a less sensitive director, it might be.  But Owen executes it with such tenderness and such knowing yet subtle depth that it, alone, is almost worth the price of admission.

Cinequest: BABNIK

Babnik, directed by Alejandro Adams, written and produced by Adams and Marya Murphy, unfolds like an elaborate piece of origami with a bomb hidden in the center.  We know the bomb is ticking, but Adams makes us spread open every last crease before it explodes.

Set in the Bay Area expat Russian community, the story revolves around a pair of slick characters named Sasha and Misha who run what appears to be a modelling agency but is actually a front for darker enterprises.  Girls turn up looking for work or seeking refuge from failed mail-order marriages.  In an exquisite character introduction, Misha delivers an identical seductive spiel to a succession of identical babes in tight black minidresses, as cameras flash in the background.  He praises their physical attributes in honeyed tones while encouraging them to invest in expensive vitamin and skincare regimens, conveniently stocked by the agency and guaranteed--as we divine by the scene's end--to indebt the girls enough to eventually coerce them into porn and prostitution.

Hapless telemarketer Artem is fired.  His emasculating wife, Yelena, expects a certain standard of living; if Artem cannot provide it, she will leave him.  Hoping to raise funds, he joins a high-stakes gambling group run by Sasha and Misha, but he only succeeds in becoming deeply financially obligated to them.

Concurrently, volatile Arseniy makes life hell for his teenaged sister, Nika.  She can't do anything right for him.  At one point, he berates her for typing too loudly while he's trying to rest.  When she closes her door so he won't hear, he screams at her for doing so.

Yelena wants money, Nika wants out from under Arseniy's thumb, and Sasha and Misha want whatever will further their business ventures.  An elaborate setup, with Artem as the fall guy, allows them all a chance to achieve their goals.  And Artem is in no position to argue.  In one long take, Sasha and Misha explain to him what he must do.  The camera never moves from their adamant faces, as they goad him with repeated exhortations of "Look at me, Artem" and "Pay attention, Artem."  When Adams finally cuts to Artem's reaction, he is nearly in tears, utterly and fatally trapped.

This is a story about control.  Perception of power in any given scene shifts from character to character, as if driven by a hyperactive focus servo.  At first glance, one is tempted to accuse Adams of playing it easy on the men.  Ultimately, only Sasha and Misha go unchallenged for dominance.  And in this world, a woman's only means of achieving power over men is through sex or death; there is no middle ground between these extremes.  Misha's head girl schools a new recruit, using a porno as a textbook.  "That hurts at first, but don't be afraid to try it.  It will melt any man," she says.  Then she nimbly shifts to instructing Artem in how to kidnap a young girl, while the porn plays on in the background.  But, as we eventually learn, the suffering endemic to the sex trade is equal-opportunity.  And the final and lingering image of Nika, paid off by Misha for her part in the plot and having refused a ride into town, stalking fearlessly alone down a rural road, suggests that the playing field has just become incrementally more level.  Nika is, in her quiet and expressionless way, a force to be reckoned with.  She deserves her own sequel.

If there is any flaw, it is that the pieces of the plot fall into place just a little too conveniently at the climax.  Arseniy does exactly what Sasha and Misha expect him to at exactly the right time.  One wonders what would have happened if he hadn't--a definite possibility, given that he is not only volatile but also intensely self-interested.  How would Sasha and Misha have gotten Artem out of the way?  And under what pretext could they have delivered Arseniy to his eventual fate?  The filmmakers clearly place great value on realism, but at this one small yet vital point in the plot, they appear to reject it.

Babnik remains, however, a masterful mood piece, beautifully executed.  The throbbing electronic pulse of a score builds tension and suspense.  The story is punctuated by scenes in untranslated Russian or lengthy silences in which only enigmatic glances move the action forward.  And move it they do.  The actors--professional and amateur alike--are wonderful to watch.  There are no caricatures in this film.  The bad guys hang at their suburban house or cruise in their SUV like ordinary people, laughing and joking with the few girls who have not only survived the business but mastered their part in it.  Occasional sudden moments of casual violence are often all that remind us of the criminal undercurrents roiling beneath the surface.

The rhythm of the film is the rhythm of sex.  A seemingly interminable build, by the end of which the tension reaches an almost unbearable peak, is followed by an explosive crescendo.  Then the filmmakers roll over and go to sleep while we sit in the dark, limp and drained, considering the implications and wondering whether to get up and leave or linger until morning.  Any theatre that screens Babnik should hand out Ziganovs at the door.

Cinequest: THIRD WORLD (TERCER MUNDO)

Third World focuses on three sets of characters whose stories unfold in parallel in Costa Rica, Chile, and Bolivia.  What ties them together is their anticipation of an approaching total solar eclipse and the possibility of alien contact which some are convinced comes with it.

The scenery, which takes center stage as many of the characters spend a lot of time eyeing the sky, is gorgeous and well-photographed, the acting is generally strong, and there are a couple of memorable sequences, particularly one involving a spaceman and a girl in a ball gown.  Nevertheless, for the most part, Third World fails to deeply engage.

The problem is that we're never given an opportunity to really plumb any of the characters' depths.  In an effort to keep the story moving briskly, director César Caro Cruz switches locations and stories frequently, and, because these sets of characters never meet or cross-interact, we never get to know any of them well enough to really care what happens to them.

The most affecting and relatable story of the lot is that of Amaya, whose search for her estranged father and resulting emotional crisis could have made a deeply engrossing movie in its own right.  But Cruz squanders the opportunity and actress Carmen Tito's subtle talent by diluting her story with paranormal shtick and limp romance.

The serious part of the plot and the campy, over-the-top part suffer equally from their juxtaposition with one another.  Each, on its own, is viable; together, they creating an uneven tone that distances the viewer.  I found myself wishing at times that Cruz had ditched all the solemn and plausibly mystical aspects and allowed himself to plunge headlong into hectic comedy, for which he has an obvious knack.

Another side effect of this glut of characters and locations is that Cruz gives himself too many separate threads to tie up by the end.  Poor Amaya's quest is left dangling, never to be resolved.  I'm tempted to think that the filmmakers got so caught up in the idea of a film that spans three countries that they didn't consider all the potential ramifications.  Perhaps that's uncharitable.  Still, I'd much rather see what Cruz and his company could do with a story grounded firmly in one world.

Cinequest: PASSENGER SIDE

Protagonist Michael (Adam Scott) is disturbed early on his birthday by a call from his brother Tobey (Joel Bissonnette).  Tobey's car has broken down, and he begs a ride from Michael, ostensibly to a job interview.  Michael agrees reluctantly, and the two are off to not just one but a series of seedy Los Angeles destinations.  After the first couple of stops, Michael begins to suspect that not only is there no interview but that Tobey, a recovering addict, has coerced him into driving him around in search of a score.

He confronts Tobey, who confesses that he is trying to locate his estranged girlfriend Theresa, with whom he had a heartfelt phone conversation the previous night.  Theresa wants to get back together.  Both are clean now, and Tobey still loves her and is convinced that this time they can make it work.  The catch: Theresa needs time to put her emotional affairs in order and has given Tobey no way to contact her.  But Tobey can't wait.

Therein lies the problem.  Because if Tobey loves her as much as he says he does, why can he not grant her the few days she requests?  Either he doesn't trust her, or his sheer enthusiasm compels him to intrude on her life before she's ready for him.  Conversely, if Theresa is as serious about Tobey as he is about her (he's talking about marriage and kids), then how could she possibly not at least give him a phone number?  Either she's stringing him along, or the plot is simply contrived to get Tobey and Michael in a car together on this particular day.

The brothers chase around LA, racking up brief, weird encounters and collecting clues to Theresa's whereabouts that ultimately lead nowhere.  At nightfall, they find themselves near a bar and give up.  Tobey, none the worse for their failure, his perpetual beatific grin still in place, offers to buy Michael a celebratory birthday drink.  They go in, and, miraculously, Theresa appears.  She no less a cipher in her one brief scene; nothing she does or says really tells us what we'd like to know about her.  She seems anguished, but for which of several possible reasons?  The twist, when it comes, casts her in rather a bad light and also makes us wonder what motivates Michael to ferry his brother around the city all day and even out into the desert in search of her.  The questions we harbor about both Theresa and Tobey make the romantic union climax more ambivalent than satisfying.

It's an interesting choice, keeping what may be the most complex character off-screen for almost the entire film, and I'm not sure it works, although the twist itself and the scattered incidents which foreshadow it are solid.  Writer-director Matt Bissonnette might have served his story better by spending less time on the screamingly quirky minor characters the brothers run into and more on the logic behind the relationships that are what really move this road movie along. 

Despite the contrivances, however, these characters are real people with real issues, at points in their lives where perhaps getting back up to neutral has become the equivalent of "happy."  Scott and Bissonnette are fun to watch as fractious siblings.  And there is a suggestion of growth in the rigid and eccentric Michael at the end, albeit with a certain haziness about how he arrived there.  Passenger Side is an LA story, after all.  Maybe it's best that some of the answers stay lost in the smog.

Cinequest: LEFT (LINKS)

In Left (Links), even before things start to go obviously awry for protagonist Dexter, something is not quite right about his world.  The surfaces are too sterile, the furniture too perfectly arranged, the quiet, tree-lined streets too empty.  As Dexter scurries back and forth between his quiet, pleasant apartment and his quiet, pleasant workplace, he often appears to be the only moving figure in the landscape.  His life is so perfectly compartmentalized that he is spared the effort of having to really live it.

Only Dexter's pet mice stimulate his emotions.  He calls to them from the door as he arrives home every evening, the way one might call to a spouse or child.  Near the beginning, he lovingly assembles a new wheel for the mice and places it tenderly in their cage.  With humans, however, he is at a loss, interacting with them because he is compelled to, not because he wishes to.  Even with his girlfriend Stella he is restrained, more polite than passionate.  After tripping over some of her stuff in the middle of the night when she stays over, he tentatively offers to build a cabinet for her things.  When she accepts, his face is suffused with the same tenderness as his mice inspire.  He has found a way he can relate to her.

Chaos creeps into his ordered world.  The building he works in is being remodeled, and the workers are none too mindful of Dexter's boundaries.  Stella tries to clean the mouse cage and accidentally allows the mice to escape.  Mysterious scratches and dents appear on his car.  He begins to have difficulty distinguishing one person from another.  Is the woman before him Stella, or the new receptionist at work, or a doctor in the psychiatric hospital to which he suddenly finds himself committed?

 

The combined effects of writer-director Froukje Tan's careful camera work and the clean, brilliant colors of locations and props create the most user-friendly dystopia imaginable.  The restrained score by Easy Aloha's melts down into primitive electronic bleeps and bloops as Dexter's world unravels.  Warning of the perils of modern technologically-enhanced life even as it celebrates the strange beauty thereof, the film is a thematic and aesthetic successor to Antonioni's Red Desert.

When Dexter has finally recovered enough to return to work, the remodelling is finished.  Gone are his workbench, his bins of electronic bits and bobs, his oscilloscope.  Instead, he will now occupy a cubicle containing only a computer.  Slick gray surfaces have replaced colorful clutter.  In a world in which the line between work time and down time is often blurred, when our personal and professional lives are increasingly indistinguishable, the lesson is clear.  And Dexter has learned it; the alteration in the appearance of his world reflects the change in his perceptions.

In the final scene, in which he returns to the hospital to reconnect with a fellow patient--another Stella doppelgänger--we see that, in losing a part of himself, he has gained humanity and the ability to genuinely relate to others.  No longer able to maneuver on auto-pilot, he is left with only one thing to do: live.

Left is a film to be watched closely.  Tan is a master of subtlety who rewards an alert audience and refuses to indulge a lazy one.  As with Dexter's world, both the devil and the delight are in the details.

Cinequest Opening Night: THE GOOD HEART

Superficially, The Good Heart, written and directed by Dagur Kári, seems promising: an intimate, character-driven story with a pleasantly murky aesthetic, starring two strong actors. And it's not without charm. But three major issues, all of which could and should have been solved at the writing stage, undermine the performances and hamper the finished film: lack of character development, unclear motivation, and structural problems.

Kári goes to great length to impress his protagonists' characteristics on the audience. Lucas (Paul Dano) is a compassionate street waif who cares so much about others--even complete strangers--that he's unable to refuse anyone anything, although his generosity is repaid with little but grief. Jacques (Brian Cox) is an irascible bar owner with few friends and no family who needs a protege to take over his establishment for him when he finally suffers one heart attack too many.

But so much of what they do contradicts Kári's careful characterizations. For example, Lucas, the ultimate giver, attempts suicide at the beginning, thoughtlessly leaving the tiny kitten on which he dotes unprotected and uncared-for. Jacques is driven to a frenzy and a fifth heart attack when a relaxation tape tells him to envision himself on a white-sand beach. We later learn that just such a beach in Martinique is his favorite place. The inconsistencies continue throughout.

Predictably, as the story progresses, Jacques is influenced for the better by Lucas' seraphic disposition, and Jacques' molding brings out a few sharp edges in Lucas. However, too much growth happens offscreen, and the motivation for change is too often not externalized. Characters are one way in one scene and different in the next, and Kári rarely allows us to see the progression that gets them from A to B. Additionally, we never get any sense of the characters' past. What brought the gentle Lucas to the streets? Whence springs Jacques' perpetual and debilitating anger? If we were given even a hint, their initial behavior and subsequent transformations might seem less arbitrary, their personalities less one-dimensional.

That it's impossible to tell how much time is passing compounds the problem. How long does Lucas' apprenticeship last? A month? A year? The only chronological marker we are given (toward the very end of the movie) is the winter holidays, but, as it always seems to be winter in this coldly blue-lit city, that means little. Additionally, sometimes the scenes occur in a slightly illogical order, as if Kári had shuffled his index cards before writing the script.

A girl shows up. Lucas marries her immediately, despite the fact that they don't seem to be in love and Jacques hates her. The girl flirts with a customer and Lucas throws her out, whereupon Jacques professes to have liked--or at least not disliked--her, after all. Lucas becomes bitter and withdrawn, although the only reason we really know this is that Jacques tells him (and us) so.

Jacques gets on the heart donor recipient list and gives up smoking and drinking. Stripped of the armor of his vices, he becomes serene; a few scenes later, he's verging on vegetarianism. Lucas, gripping a cleaver in one hand and, in the other, the duck he had been about to butcher for their Christmas dinner, says mildly, "You've become a sissy, Jacques."

The inevitable climax is too telegraphed and too convenient to be satisfying. At least Kári didn't fall into the trap of making Lucas' ultimate sacrifice one of his own choosing, which would have pushed the story irretrievably into bathos. That what happens is due to pure chance is fitting and proper.

There's some good dialogue, although one wishes Kári hadn't predicated most of the lighter moments on the idea that there's nothing funnier than watching an old guy swear. And Cox and Dano entertain despite the script's shortcomings. Certain moments do ring true, and they cast light into the dark corners that do not. Movies, like life, are always imperfect.