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: 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: 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: 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: 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.