On balance, it was a good week to be in Slovenia. True, I arrived in the capital of this most northerly and wealthiest former Yugoslav republic – the first and so far only one to join the EU – on the day that the British newspapers carried extensive obituaries for local hero Tomaz Humar, a 40-year-old mountaineer and author whose body had just been found in a remote Himalayan region. But the mourning soon gave way to wild jubilation, and before dawn this small nation had a new hero to cheer.
This was Zlatko Dedic, the footballer whose crucial goal in the play-off match ensured that little Slovenia denied the mighty Russia and thus landed a slot in next summer’s World Cup tournament. I passed by the crowds noisily celebrating victory just after midnight and almost fancied that I glimpsed the shade of Yugoslavia’s Soviet-baiting leader Tito among the throng, gesturing rudely in the direction of.
I did toy with watching the match in one of the city-centre bars, but my sense of responsibility as a film critic propelled me to the one-screen, gloriously old-school Kinoklub Vic (pronounced “Veech”) to catch Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant – Port of Call: New Orleans Fortunately, the picture provided just as much entertainment and unlikely drama as the football. An in-name-only remake of Abel Ferrara’s 1992 cult favourite Bad Lieutenant, Herzog’s berserk film stars an unbridled Nicolas Cage as a corrupt, backache-plagued, drug-addicted cop in an atmospheric city still recovering from the ravages of Hurricane Katrina.
Cage’s prolific work-rate over the past few years is reportedly due to a colossal tax demand. But his semi-accidental collaboration with the legendary German auteur represents cine-serendipity of the very highest order.Herzog, now 67, has enjoyed a welcome career-revival over the past couple of years, with the likes of the Oscar-nominated documentary Encounters at the End of the World (2007). This brought the long-time Los Angeles resident to the attention of some adventurous producers and he was signed up to bring scriptwriter William M Finkelstein’s Bad Lieutenant remake to the screen.
The result is something entirely rich and strange, which works on multiple levels. It is entirely possible to regard the picture – which co-stars Val Kilmer and Eva Mendes – as a pretty straight thriller with weird trimmings.
Indeed, many of the Ljubljana audience seemed to take it at face value, paying rapt attention with stony faces. Not wanting to disturb their viewing, at times I found myself crying into my handkerchief with suppressed laughter at Herzog and Cage’s baroque excesses, bizarre visions and behaviour which lift Bad Lieutenant into the realm of the genuinely satirical and subversive in its depiction of contemporary American “success”.
Also keep an eye out for Cheang Pou-Soi’s Accident, produced by Hong Kong’s reigning action-thriller king Johnnie To. An ingenious and cerebral affair already slated for a Hollywood remake, it chronicles the murderous exploits of an assassination bureau whose “hits” are designed to look like random-chance occurrences. But the leader of the pack – a cool, analytical chap aptly nicknamed Brain (Louis Koo) – starts to suspect that his outfit is being targeted by an even more skilful team operating along similar lines, tipping him into a state of paranoia that’s not-so-coincidentally reminiscent of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974).
After a gangbusters opening and an intriguing first act, Accident loses its way somewhat in the middle section, during which director Cheang and scriptwriters Szeto Kam-Yuen and Tang Lik-Kei seem to take their eye off the ball in terms of narrative development. The slog through this soggy patch proves worthwhile, however, in a satisfying finale which lays bare the limits of intellectualism in, ironically, decidedly brainy fashion.
I only caught one other feature during my five days in Ljubljana: Danish writer-director Nicolas Winding Refn’s Valhalla Rising. A speedy, change-of-gears follow-up to his engagingly true-crime biopic Bronson, this is a ponderous Viking-era mini-epic set in the wilds of medieval Scotland, in which a one-eyed, mute Nordic warrior (Mads Mikkelsen) seeks a return to his long-forsaken homeland.
A promisingly violent, mud-splattered, bone-crunching first reel gives way to protracted, pretentious, nebulous sequences which see Refn unwisely groping towards spiritual and psychological significance. Previously responsible for the Pusher trilogy, he’s long been one of Denmark’s more commercially-minded directors – which makes this detour into leaden mysticism all the more head-scratching.
My relative paucity of full-length screenings in Ljubljana is partly due to the fact that I am a member of the festival’s programming board, a role that disbars me from commenting on the event in general. It was also related to my time-consuming duties on the short-film jury.
Pick of this bunch for me was Arena
by Portugal’s 25-year-old João Salaviza, a
15-minute essay on borderline criminal masculinity and dysfunctionally grand modern architecture. Although it won the Palme d’Or in Cannes, Arena cut surprisingly little ice with my two fellow jurors and our consensus pick was Jochem De Vries’ Dutch miniature Missing, a delicate and nicely uninflected tale of a dysfunctional mother and her precocious child.
Among the other candidates, a name to watch is Hungary’s Esztergályos Krisztina, whose 28-minute Variations is as formally ambitious as it is trite content-wise, Sweden’s Andreas Tibblin, with Good Advice, and Bulgaria’s Dragomir Sholev, with the audaciously-titled The Go-Between, also figured strongly in my personal notebook. l
Neil Young
