I’ve introduced the 31st Portland International Film Festival in the lead review for the February Vancouver Voice, which will be posted on this website shortly, and for the rest of the festival I’ll post short reviews of the movies I’ve managed to see, beginning with the films slated for Friday, February 8, in each case giving the film’s first showtime — but check everything against the Northwest Film Center’s website, where changes and updates are posted.

We’re in a form of Michael Haneke country in The Edge of Heaven (Germany, 2007, 1 PM, Friday, February 8), which follows the intersecting lives of six people (four Turks, two Germans, including Hanna Schygulla) and is divided into three large parts. Like Crash it follows these people as they intersect across Germany and Turkey, it is essential that the plot not be spoiled (though the chapter titles do that already). The fifth feature by Fatih Akin, it’s a complex, gripping drama that unreels at a brisk pace, and on the basis of what I have seen so far it is already one of the best films in the festival.

Tuya’s Marriage (China, 2006, 6 PM, Friday, February 8) is another “perfect” film fest movie: a slow, deliberate account of Mongolian life with lots of careful detail about how the “other half” lives. Directed by Wang Quanan (Lunar Eclipse), this emotionally complicated film follows the day to day experiences of Tuya (Yu Nan) as she uninterestedly considers various candidates for marriage after a major life change (a back injury makes literal what she has been denying, her culturally imposed dependence). The films embraces the ordinary. A horse riding Tuya can’t just encounter a guy on a tractor for a hectoring chat, we must first see her in the distance for several seconds of “reality” as she clops along. We must be shown her making the complete trek to a shack carrying tea. Eventually there is a little bit of contrived suspense over a missing son, and then an active climax, but by then it is too late.

There is no narrative per se in You, the Living (Sweden and other countries, 2007, 7 PM, Friday, February 8). Instead there is a series of tableaux in which a static, usually distant camera, in the manner of Wes Anderson, observes a series of mostly non-sequential moments of frustration from daily life (it’s the new universal style; The Band’s Visit has something of this look, too). For example, a commuter train lets off a tremendous number of people, all of whom have to cross in front of the train. Impatient to get going, the train honks its horn, straggling commuters pause to let it go by, and the train proceeds to execute a snail’s pace forward momentum. A woman complains, often in song, that no one understands her; someone is fried in the electric chair for a magic routine gone bad. Director Roy Andersson offers a world of traffic jams, long waits, interrupted music rehearsals, and so forth that purport to capture what life is like for we, the living. Andersson appears to be making the same mistake that cinema verite filmmakers make, which is that reality is more likely to be captured honestly through simplicity and unobtrusiveness, despite several hundred years of theatrical history that show how drama, when done right of course, provides the true intimacy that makes films more real than real.

Alexandra (Russia, 2007, 8:30 PM, Friday, February 8) is a wry, methodical tale of a woman’s visit to her grandson’s military base in Chechnya. As a symbol of Mother Russia, Galina Vishnevskaya, an opera singer whom director Aleksandr Sokurov profiled in a previous documentary, is a stolid observer. We are meant to see the mechanical minutia of war — rifle cleaning, the humidity of a tank, the intrusiveness of a checkpoint — through her eyes, “making strange” the otherwise day to day life of an occupying force. Sokurov ( The Second Circle , Mother and Son ) shows no battles, only the longeurs of base life, and he wears his points on his sleeve, as he ponders Vishnevskaya pondering the baby faces of the soldiers she encounters. A break in the litany of military ironies comes when Vishnevskaya visits a market and forges a temporary, uneasy bond with a Chechnyan woman, her unironical mirror image. It’s an elegant (with help from the score by Andrei Sigle) if static movie (despite the constantly moving camera) that ends up feeling slighter than the portentous close ups of rifles and faces intend.

Then She Found Me (USA, 2007, 9 PM, Friday, February 8) is this year’s Away From Her, the last festival’s film in which an actress made her directing debut in a tapped down melodrama. It’s unlikely that this film, however, will carry on to win awards and Oscar nominations. Based on a novel by Elinor Lippman, the film is directed by Helen Hunt who also stars as a woman recently married whose husband (Matthew Broderick), also a teacher, leaves her in only a few weeks. While she is slowly falling for a harried father of two (Colin Firth), she is also tracked down by her biological mother (Bette Midler) who gave her up at birth. If the film didn’t have the imprimatur of being in the festival, it might comfortably fit into the string of Hallmark movie tear jerkers, for it is life affirming in all ways.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 6th, 2008 at 12:07 pm and is filed under Reel Politique - Film columnist DK Holm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.