Reel Politique: Movie Review, PIFF movies for Saturday, Feb. 9
27, 000 Days (USA, 2007, Noon, Saturday, February 9) is a short film about a sick man remembering with regret his past. It’s like a blend of Tolstoy and Beckett, only essentially non-verbal, and it’s depressing as hell because filmmaker Naveen Singh doesn’t leaven his dire vision with humor, as does, say, Alain Resnais in Providence.
The Gates (USA, 2005, 3 PM, Saturday, February 9) is three movies one. The first is the remnants of a 1976 film in which director Albert Maysles chronicles the attempts of the installation artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude to set up The Gates in Central Park. That attempt failed but now with co-director Antonio Ferrera, revisits the project as New York mayor Michael Bloomberg approves the project. The third and final section is a tone poem that salutes the finished project, shown in almost all lights, weathers, and degrees of local population. The film is a throwback to documentaries of the 60s, cinema verite, with no narration. The younger Christo looks a tad like Woody Allen, downtrodden by the contrariness of New York, his adopted home. Jeanne-Claude is prone, over the decades, to motherhood metaphors when talking to the media. But when it comes to The Gates themselves, the non-standard celebratory manner of Maysles, who has made several films about Christo, is winning.
I’m a little worried that Taxi to the Dark Side (USA, 2007, 5 PM, Saturday, February 9) is coming too late in the cycle of Iraq documentaries, when the choir has definitively been converted and when the subject appears to have dropped out of the national election conversation. Yet this documentary by Alex Gibney Enron is important, and well made, with a combination of archival and new footage. It takes as its focus the case of a young Afghan cab driver named Dilawar, seized by a team of roving Afghan soldiers, and sent to the interrogation center at Bagram Air Force Base, where he shortly died, his death ruled a homicide. Gibney expands from this story to explore the use of extreme interrogation techniques elsewhere and the Bush administration’s attempt to evade the political and legal complications of its approval. Taxi to the Dark Side is powerful, but also clear and filled with new information. If you miss it at the festival it will probably show up at the Cinema 21 or somewhere else.
Not By Chance (Brazil, 2007, 5:15 PM, Saturday, February 9) concentrates on all that presumably obsesses the Brazilians: traffic, apartment hunting, and coffee. Like Crash and Amores perros, Philippe Barcinski’s film follows a group of bourgeois citizens as their lives mildly intersect and they cope with tragedy. Enio (Leonardo Medeiros) is a traffic coordinator getting to know his daughter; Pedro (Rodrigo Santoro) is a pool table designer who ends up dating the coffee snob trader who moved into his now-dead girlfriend’s apartment. It’s Amores perros light: sure, there are a couple of “ironic” traffic tragedies, but in the end the film wants to uplift and inspire.
Something of an anti-Schindler, The Counterfeiters (Austria, 2007, 5:45 PM, Saturday, February 9) is a fascinating dramatization of the true account of a group of criminal and financier concentration camp prisoners gathered together at Sachsenhausen to British forge bank notes and American money. The main counterfeiter is Salomon Sorowitsch (Karl Markovics), whom we first see just after the war and then in 20-minutes of backstory before he is arrested. Director-writer Stefan Ruzowitzky puts his characters in an ethical thumbscrew, as the prisoners both enjoy privileges others are denied while helping the tyranny that put them there. The Counterfeiters is one of the best films in this year’s festival.
If Caramel (Lebanon, 2007, 8:30 PM, Saturday, February 9) starred Julia Roberts and were called Steel Magnolias the chances are that it would not be a festival selection, but because Nadine Labaki’s film, in which she also stars, uses amateur actors and has a “new wave” shooting style, the film’s essentially soap opera elements are at first disguised. Set mostly in a Beirut beauty parlor it follows the romantic and personal trials or several westernized women (although I didn’t catch why caramel was important enough to be a title, unless it was to evoke memories of Chocolat). The tale could have used a lot less iced tea and a lot more Ice-T, although, once you’ve made the commitment to absorbing the whole film, the last shot is very powerful.