FESTIVAL QUICKIES

Alrighty, time to buckle down and do a quick blast of short reviews of things I saw at the Chicago Film Fest, about which I don't have anything particularly enlightening or passionate to say. I hate to do it, but I hate even more the fact that I'm starting to get backlogged, and this is the best way I can think to try and get back on top of things, especially if I'm going to have more mornings like this one where I get stuck on the phone arguing with a bank for hours.

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Nymph (Ratanaruang, Thailand)

The first thing I must confess is that I lost a losing battle to fatigue for the first (and so far only) time at this year's fest to a movie that was clearly better than that; but many great films are also slow-moving to the point of lethargy when you're not pulling all nighter's one after the other like you're still an energetic college student, in the desperate hope of keeping up with various viewing and blogging obligations. So I missed about half of the movie, right in the middle.

But what I did see was altogether odd and fascinating, starting with one hell of an opening shot: for several minutes (one of these days, I'm going to have to start bringing a stopwatch to movies), the camera wanders around the Thai jungle, looking this way and that at nothing in particular, at one point wandering past two men chasing a half-naked woman through the underbrush but not really stopping to comment on that fact. Eventually the camera hops (not quite seamlessly) onto a crane, and moves out over a river, where we see - also without comment - the bodies of those two men floating lifelessly in the water. It's, with very little competition, the most accomplished & nervy opening shot I've seen all year; sort of a "hey, look at ME!" bit of posturing, but that's good for the soul every now and then, right?

Of what I saw, it didn't seem that anything else was going to live up to that level of stupidly ambitious filmmaking, although in another respect, that opening shot clearly set the tone for what was to follow: Nymph is first and above all a movie about its jungle setting, and the question of what happens is not vaguely as important as where it happens. Though as much as I can tell (and to be honest, I think that I got back up to speed pretty well once I awoke), here is what does happen: May (Wanida Termthanaporn) and her husband Nop (Jayanama Nopachai) are out camping when he finds a tree nymph (Porntip Papanai) and is abducted/seduced away. May cannot find him, until she does (this is where the impromptu nap really hurt), and eventually he is reborn, after a fashion, having been given a clearer idea of what is valuable in life through his experiences.

Mostly, though, it's a reflective mood piece, creating a very particular image of the jungle that transcends narrative or even meaning; it is simply about the experience of a place so otherworldly by its very nature that we've started to feel spirits and ghosts even before the spirit world intrudes into the plot. Writer-director Pen-Ek Ratanaruang (of the marvelous, underseen The Last Life in the Universe) does a fantastic job at capturing the sights and sounds of his location in precise detail without ever seeming fussy about it, and the mere presence of the jungle is so profound as to be overwhelming - at times it almost feels like we're watching a horror movie, so oppressive does the great green mass become. Setting as mood and setting as theme makes for a rather inscrutable kind of cinema, of course, but everything I saw in Nymph was hypnotic and beautiful.

NR/10 (though my feeling is that it was on track for a 7)

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Who's Afraid of the Wolf (Procházková, Czech Republic)

Advertised as a "fairy tale for grown-ups", which isn't precisely inaccurate, Who's Afraid of the Wolf is the story of a little girl, Terezka (Dorota Dedková) who is a little bit too young, or at least much too Romantic, to figure out that there's a difference between reality and her very well-developed fantasy world, in which she is Little Red Riding Hood and her mother (Jitka (Cvancarová) is an alien being, and this causes her parents frustration at a time when there's frustration a-plenty already; Terezka's dad (Pavel Reznícek) has been working excessively long hours at his airport security job, her mom is more and more open about missing her glory days as an opera singer (she quit, very willingly, to be a good mother to Terezka, and seems to have some buyer's remorse), and oh boy! her old flame, Patrik (Martin Hofman) has just come back from Tokyo, ostensibly to play cello in his hometown now that he's made it big, but mostly because he apparently wants to re-kindle that old romance that ended because he put his career first.

There are two things going on here that I usually really love: stories about children profoundly misunderstanding what the adults around them are doing, and stories about children escaping from the misery of their daily lives into a rich fantasy world; and I managed to convince myself for a while that I liked Who's Afraid of the Wolf, because it's very easy to form snap judgments in a festival environment that have little connection to the movie you actually just saw. But with a few days between me and the movie, I have to concede that there's not much to it, one way or the other. With no offense meant to Dedková, a charming and distinctly talented child actor, Terezka is a flat character, who undergoes essentially no re-awakening or growth as a result of her experiences. She has no concept of what's happening around her, her actions nevertheless affect everything and everyone, and at the end everything is just like it always was. It is of course the privilege of a fairy tale to present the ending as a restoration of everything back to exactly the way it was at the start, only happier, but it's tricky for a film to carry off the same trick, especially when the audience is a great deal smarter than the POV character, and so what seems to her like the (low-stakes) stuff of fantasy is to us the (high-stakes) stuff of family tragedy.

It doesn't help matters any that director Marii Procházková (who struck me as a very earnest and sincere person, and it makes me feel a bit shitty to talk badly of her) shoots the whole movie in a rather slack, plain style; only Terezka's fantasies (and these are not as frequent as they should be), have any kind of spark to them, although to be fair they have quite a lot of spark. I suspect that Procházková is attempting to underline the difference between Terezka's free-wheeling interpretation of everything that happens in the most childlike, fantastic way with the banal, unpleasant reality of what's happening. And I suppose if that is the purpose, it works fairly well.

Although this is a well-acted film, with a dramatic scenario at the core that ought to provide a fair degree of emotional impact, there's still something that's just plain off about it. I think it's ultimately Terezka. She seems so detached from her own life that she's basically indestructible, and rather than her fantasies providing the only escape hatch for her to get away from her daily sorrows, it seems rather like she's so busy spinning those fantasies that she doesn't even notice that she has a real life.

6/10

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Backyard (Carrera, Mexico)

Proof that certain Hollywood tendencies aren't unique to Hollywood at all, the fine director of the perhaps overly-rewarded The Crime of Father Amaro has come out with his first feature in seven years, and it too is a fine thing. Indeed, the only thing that keeps Backyard from transcending "fine" and turning into "pretty good, hell, pretty great" is that it has a massively swollen sense of its own Incredible Significance and Importance in Exploring and Condemning the Great Problems of Our Times. It's a message movie, to call it by its right name, and the message here is: "It is terrible that so many women are raped and murdered in Ciudad Juárez, and more terrible still that more than a decade after that fact became the national shame of Mexico, nobody has done much to address the problem".

This has the advantage of being a message that it is virtually impossible to disagree with, which is both good and bad for Backyard: good, because when the year-end lists and awards come out, it is exactly the kind of noble-minded work that Serious Critics and trophy-granting bodies cling to like flies on shit (it's Mexico's official submission for the Foreign Film Oscar, and from where I stand, it's almost unimaginable that it won't get a nomination); bad, because by virtue of having such an unimpeachable sensible and righteous moral underpinning their movie, director Carlos Carrera and writer Sabina Berman seem to have concluded that it's just perfectly fine to go ahead and coast by without actually doing anything to make the movie, actually, y'know, interesting.

Harsh! Unduly harsh! I liked Backyard. I really liked the performance by Ana de la Reguera in the lead, as the woman police officer thrown headlong into the institutional sexism of the corrupt Juárez police force; she managed to give depth and reality and passion to a cardboard character (I must give the filmmakers credit: she's not a stock saint, but actually gets to be a little bit nasty in her pursuit of justice). I like the cinematography by Martín Boege, a name wholly new to me; he captures the grimy, sandy look of that city (one of a very small number of places in Mexico I've actually seen with my own eyes) without feeling the need to rip-off Traffic, like you sometimes see done.

But you can like all of those things without loving any of them, and there's the greater reality that Backyard doesn't tell a particularly compelling story; oh, it's sure a compelling scenario, as Carrera and Berman know full well. But the actual narrative of the film is kind of hard to pin down, and not really worth the effort. There's some political corruption here, business pressure there, and mysterious discoveries here and here. And a subplot about a country girl (Amorita Rasgado) who comes to Juárez and finds it a more exciting and much less safe place than she'd imagined, though well-executed and supremely well-performed, can never quite overcome its barbarically functional origins: we apparently need to have the story of a particular girl who gets brutally fucked over by the Way Things Are in Juárez, because just hearing about rape and murder isn't enough: we have to like a specific rape and murder victim. And the fact that it's patently obvious the story must end in her rape and murder a good 90 minutes before she is either raped or murdered gives the whole thing a nice veneer of miserabilism.

It's not a bad movie, by all means. But there's just something about this self-conscious Message Picture bullshit that gets my hackles up. I'd love to find Backyard moving, but it's just so damned calculated!

7/10