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: 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: 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: 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.