Neil Young in Slovenia caught up with some highly rated movies, including a teenage zombie picture, to see if they lived up to expectations
THIS is my 12th and final Tribune film-festival report of 2008 – after Gothenburg, Rotterdam, Berlin, Nottingham (for the British Silent Film Festival), Amsterdam, Linz (Austria), Lisbon, Split, Edinburgh, Bergen and Vienna. Unlike my despatches from those events, my Ljubljana analysis won’t be focusing on what I regard as the most outstanding films among the programme. That’s partly because I’ve already enthused about several of them (for instance, Shane Meadows’ Somers Town, Terence Davies’ Of Time and the City and Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World, which has now been confirmed for an April 2009 release in Britain) already over the past few months. And it’s partly because I’m on the programming board for the Ljubljana International Film Festival – somewhat awkwardly acronymmed as “LIFFe” – and so recommended many of them to the event’s director, Simon Popek.
Instead I humbly present my verdict on the five most notable new films which I discovered during my week-long stay in Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia and a compact, amiably picturesque university city of 260,000 residents, where LIFFe attracts enthusiastic and youthful audiences in impressive numbers (the financial crisis is still some way off in his part of the world) for a dozen days in mid-November. LIFFe’s large programme allowed me to catch up with a couple of films that have been attracting some spectacular praise on the festival-circuit all year: Wakamatsu Koji’s United Red Army and Antonio Campos’s Afterschool. Now 72, Wakamatsu has long been revered as an influential enfant terrible of Japanese political cinema. I found much to like about his last picture, 2004’s Cycling Chronicles, but at Berlin in February wasn’t so impressed with a pair of his supposed early classics – to the extent that I cancelled my plans to see the 190-minute United Red Army.
The film is a hugely ambitious look back through a particularly complex historical episode – namely, the exploits of Japan’s radical left from the late 1960s to the mid-1970s. The first hour of the film is largely expositional, with narrated newsreel and television footage providing an engrossing, stimulating guide to a turbulent political landscape. Less successful are the somewhat rudimentary dramatisations which purport to show how the URA came into being during 1971 and it’s thus not good news when the emphasis shifts over to such dramatisations for most of the remaining two hours.
Indeed, what we end up with is roughly equal parts The Baader Meinhof Complex and The Beach, as the URA guerrillas retreat to a mountain training-camp where petty personal rivalries result in brutal “self-critique” sessions and a quickly-mounting death-toll. The film becomes yet another example of how cinema invariably presents communal living as a recipe for cataclysmic disaster and it’s odd that such a supposedly maverick artist as Wakamatsu should come up with something that feels like it could have been made as anti-revolutionary propaganda by his country’s more conservative elements.
My Wakamatsu strike-rate is now one out of four and I feel that I’ve devoted quite enough of my time to a director whose exalted status is, from my perspective, decidedly baffling. I’m more likely to give another chance to Antonio Campos, the half-Brazilian, half-Italian 24-year-old New Yorker whose Afterschool – which he wrote, directed and edited – is ranked by savvy American critic Mike d’Angelo as the best film (of any kind, from anywhere) of the past six years.
I usually respect d’Angelo’s verdicts, but on this occasion I can’t endorse his encomium. Afterschool, in which a troubled teenager at a fancy prep school happens to catch the drug-related death of two pupils while working on a video-project, is a classic example of debutant overreach.
Campos deserves credit for tackling major issues of contemporary American society – most notably the way technology is producing a desensitised generation which experiences life at one or two removes – but he’s let down by some basic lapses in storytelling logic and plausibility. Afterschool does, however, herald the arrival of one major talent: cinematographer Jody Lee Lipes, whose limpid widescreen images balance on a tricky edge between hyper-realism and hallucinatory intensity.
If United Red Army and Afterschool both count as noble, intriguing failures, I was ultimately more impressed by a trio of pictures which aimed a little lower, but came much closer to hitting their targets.
One of LIFFe’s major strands this year (which I had no involvement in, by the way) was an impressive survey of the career of Adoor Gopalakrishnan, the 6
7-year-old from Kerala who is generally ranked behind only Satyajit Ray among post-Second World War directors from the sub-continent. I must admit that I’d never actually seen one of his films until catching his latest, Four Women, in Ljubljana. While I can’t claim to have been blown away by it, Gopalakrishnan is clearly deserving of a higher profile in this country. Four Women is directed in a restrained, quiet, classical style, presenting four sensitive and informative glimpses into the lives of Indian females during various time-frames in the past 60 years.
If any of the tales in Gopalakrishnan’s tetralogy had been expanded to feature length, the results might have ended up a bit like Snow, the third film by 32-year-old Bosnian director/co-writer Aida Begic. A realistic tale with fable-like elements here and there, it’s set in 1997, in a village where all the men have been killed in the recently-concluded Balkan war. Women of various ages make the best of their situation and we see how adversity can strengthen individuals into a fragile but resilient community.
A testimony to imagination and endurance, Snow is a small, perhaps even slight piece of work, but there’s enough here to suggest Begic’s name is one to bear in mind over the next few years.
Forced to choose the best film I saw in Ljubljana this year, however, I’d probably have to go for Bruce LaBruce’s Otto; or, Up With Dead People, the latest provocation from the Canadian veteran closely associated with the New Queer Cinema of the 1990s. Now 44, LaBruce seems to have mellowed a bit as he approaches middle-age. Otto, soft-core sex scenes and grisly horror moments notwithstanding, is a surprisingly sweet affair about a teenage gay zombie wandering morosely around Berlin until he’s “discovered” by a wildly pretentious film-maker and commandeered into her latest no-budget shocker.
Part Shadow of the Vampire, part Shaun of the Dead, Otto is much more comic than horrific and manages to say more about disaffected modern youth than Afterschool, with all its austere ruminations, ever does. Some adventurous British distributor ought to pick it up soon, since it’s ideal midnight-movie fare.
