SLIFF 2009: 24 City

2008 // China // Zhang Ke Jia // November 16, 2009 // Landmark Plaza Frontenac Cinema

It was only last year that Zhang Ke Jia's sad, sedate, occasionally whimsical little masterwork, Still Life, landed on American shores. And here we are again with another difficult, gorgeous film, 24 City, that continues to express both Jia's profound affection for his countrymen and his ambivalence towards China's modernization. Here Jia adopts a blended documentary-fiction approach, wherein his camera explores the ruins of an munitions complex as it is transformed into luxury high rises, and interviews former factory employees and actors posing as employees. Even more than Still Life, 24 City is a film enamored--in a mournful sort of way--with the industrial and post-industrial spaces of China, echoing Jennifer Baichwal's ominous and beautiful documentary, Manufactured Landscapes. The wondrous enigma of Jia's talent is evident here, manifest in his blending of cool observation and authentic, piercing emotion. Grave and challenging, 24 City is a testament to the director's novel vision, a succesion of sensory pleasures that prods expectations. Oddly enough, perhaps the most perplexing aspect of the film is its "Ocean's Twelve moment": the use of Joan Chen to portray a women who is known for her resemblance to Joan Chen.

SLIFF 2009: Crude

2009 // USA // Joe Berlinger // November 15, 2009 // Theatrical Print (Landmark Tivoli Theater)

Director Joe Berlinger has had a uneven career--from the definitive West Mephis 3 documentary Paradise Lost to the bafflingly ill-considered Blair Witch 2--but he's never produced a work of socially-conscious agitprop like Crude. While the film hews to the general tone of slicker docs like The Corporation and Food, Inc., Berlinger has a much tighter focus. Specifically, Crude follows the fifteen-plus-year lawsuit that has pitted Chevron-Texaco against the native peoples of Ecuador allegedly poisoned by the company's drilling wastes. Strictly as a vehicle for raising awareness about a critical Third World environmental battle, Crude is absorbing and grimly presented stuff, with Berlinger avoiding the smugness or breeziness that plagues many progressive Issues Documentaries. Content to let his subjects speak for themselves, the director presents the story without narration, adding only title cards to explain factual tidbits. Accordingly, Berlinger can be forgiven the romantic character his rough style lends to this David-and-Goliath conflict, and even his dewy delight when celebrities such as the President of Ecuador and Sting get involved in the fight. Ultimately, the plaintiffs couldn't ask for a more straightforward, concise statement of the political, cultural, and emotional dimensions of their case than Crude.

SLIFF 2009: Amreeka

2009 // USA // Cherien Dabis // November 15, 2009 // Theatrical Print (Hi-Pointe Theater)

Triteness wins out over heartfelt sentiment in Cherien Dabis' take on the Immigrant Experience Film, Amreeka, a by-the-numbers celebration of tolerance, love, perseverance, etc., etc., etc. Here the immigrants in question are divorcee Muna (Nisreen Faour) and her teen son Fadi (Melkar Muallem), Palestinians who journey to small-town Illinois where they settle in awkwardly with the Westernized family of Muna's sister (Hiam Abbass, whom I adore... but Christ, can we give another Arabic actress a shot, please?). Amreeka hits all the standard indie drama and comedy notes, but its approach is graceless and its insights insufficient to warrant a retreading of such familiar territory. The narrative is tightly constructed, but utterly predictable, and the messaging is so overwarmed--Racism sucks! Family is important!--as to be off-putting. Faour, who fills Muna with eager-to-please earnestness and anxious confusion, is likable enough, so much that the film's best moments of humor come courtesy of her, while those at her expense just seem mean-spirited. The film's occasional wit enlivens its otherwise bland turns, but next to a keenly observed marvel like In Between Days, or even Sundance darlings like The Visitor and Frozen River, this is tired stuff.

SLIFF 2009: Lake Tahoe

2008 // Mexico // Fernando Eimbcke // November 14, 2009 // Theatrical Print (Landmark Plaza Frontenac Cinema)

In recent years, Latin American auteurs have apparently been paying attention to Asian film-makers such as Zhang Ke Jia and Tsai Ming-Liang, tossing out those directors' affection for surrealism, and delivering a new Spanish-language Cinema of Patience (to coin a term), a mode exemplified by challenging works such as The Minder and Los Muertos. With its static camera work, lengthy shots, and cut-to-black punctuation, Lake Tahoe fits comfortably within this current. It goes without saying that Eimbcke's deliberate and often slyly funny film, which chronicles twenty-four hours in the life of a Yucatan youth, is not for everyone. The remove that Eimbcke establishes from his subject lends Lake Tahoe the tone of an uneventful slice-of-life snapshot, but a moment's consideration reveals that for Juan (Diego Cataño), this single day is remarkably pivotal. He may be a bit of a cipher, but, the film's style notwithstanding, his story is an identifiable mini-odyssey about indignities, opportunities, and reversals. The result feels a bit slight, but Eimbcke admirably maintains a mood that is both biting and yet warm-hearted. Lake Tahoe's aesthetic might be stripped-down Weerasethakul, but its worldview is distinctly Coen, transplanted with emotional authority to a dusty Mexican town.

SLIFF 2009: Blackspot

2008 // New Zealand // Ben Hawker // November 13, 2009 // Theatrical Print (Landmark Plaza Frontenac Cinema)

For what it is--an ultra-low-budget bit of horror mindfuckery that employs only a handful of actors and locations--Ben Hawker's Blackspot is a worthwhile, white-knuckle stuff. While Hawker cribs a little from urban legend for his story, Blackspot is essentially a pleasurable mash-up of contemporary horror film tropes, Twilight Zone twists and "It-Was-All-a-Dream" fake-outs, and, most surprisingly, David's Lynch brand of pitch-black psychological surrealism. It's hard not to ignore the debt to Lynch in the film's identity-swapping and (seemingly) context-free interludes, not to mention its direct referencing of Lost Highway's iconographic speeding interstate stripes. Hawker nails both the distinctive creepiness of a nocturnal rural road at night as well as the flesh-crawling sense of the uncanny that pervades nightmares. Yet he is too enamored with jump-scares and comic releases to permit grimness to overtake the film. This is both to Blackspot's advantage and its detriment, stranding it in a middle ground between an old-school ghost story and something more ambitious. While Hawker eventually comes around to something like an explanation for all the preceding weirdness, it seems weak tea compared to the dizzying fear that swells the film's best moments.

SLIFF 2009: XXY

2007 // Argentina // Lucía Puenzo // November 13, 2009 // Theatrical Print (Landmark Plaza Frontenac Cinema)

High-profile films that address intersexuality are few and far between—When will HBO ever pull together that rumored Middlesex adaptation?—and so it's no small thing when a work like XXY comes along, which tackles the reality with commendable sensitivity and frankness. Director Puenzo takes her sweet time uncoiling the story of Alex, an adolescent intersexual who has been living as a girl in an Argentine seaside town. The story is a slight little thing, and it's hard to shake the disappointment that Puenzo didn't do a little more with the subject than offer a slice of Alex's life at a critical juncture in the development of her identity and sexuality. Furthermore, the concessions to melodrama—a gratuitous rape scene especially—make the film less potent, not more. Still, XXY is poignant and appropriately anxious in tone, and its principal characters are full of subtly conveyed intricacies that elevate it beyond a crude coming-out story (of sorts). Puenzo utilizes a richly presented sun-bleached aesthetic and a prominent marine life motif to fine effect. The film's emotional success, however, lies principally with a Inés Efron, who at twenty-two plays the fifteen-year-old Alex with a riveting blend of boldness, anger, and vulnerability.