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greater excitement from a straight documentary, of course, and the footage Němec captured is certainly valuable as a historical document.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.