Found

The San Francisco Irish Film Festival

The Fifth Annual Irish Film Festival begins this Wednesday at the Roxie with a slate of narratives and documentaries imbued with Ireland’s particularly unique sense of time and place in the modern world; the people, the pubs, and that iconic, green pastoral landscape.

Irish actor and comedian Pat Shortt stars in the opening night film Garage (rhymes with ‘carriage’ when said with the appropriate accent) though the film utilizes his talents less for comedic value and more for his ability to believably portray the subtle mannerisms of Josie, the well-meaning, deeply lonely town simpleton. This is the second collaboration by director Leonard Abrahamson and writer Mark O’Halloran, whose first feature Adam & Paul, was a similar, heavily character-driven narrative marked by what seems to be emerging as a thematic trademark: sympathetic characters in inescapably tragic situations. Garage took home the C.I.C.A.E. Award at Cannes in 2007.

topics: actors, directors, documentary, independent film, irish cinema, oscars, shorts, sundance film festival

Reviews: "Zoo"; "Once"

Sweet Sounds: John Carney’s “Once”

[A review from Reverse Shot. Editor’s note: The review ran originally in indieWIRE on May 11, 2007. The film opens in the Bay Area this Friday.]

A new almost-musical from Ireland, “Once” neatly transcends even the hoariest of cliches about the sublime communicative powers of pop music. This is a treat and a surprise, as films this slight and unassuming often seem more apt to curl up into themselves than approach any sort of expansiveness. And make no mistake, “Once” is slight. A tentative love story between two musicians framed through the lens of an erstwhile folk musical, “Once” is a tiny movie in the best sense: full of minuscule gestures and glances laden with meaning, and carrying the sense of something intricately labored over so as to provide the impression of simplicity and ease.

Neither of its two main characters-played by Glen Hansard, of Irish pub-rock band the Frames, and Marketa Irglov — are supplied with names; she’s a Czech immigrant in Dublin who happens upon a passionate street busker exorcising demons of a past relationship through a battered acoustic guitar late one evening. It’s classic meet-cute – she returns the next afternoon dragging a broken vacuum cleaner (he fixes the machines by day in his father’s shop) and coaxes him over to a local music shop where the pair bang out a guitar/piano duet on “Falling Softly,” a song from their real-life collaborative album “The Swell Season.” Over the course of the film, the pair work their way into a recording studio complete with backing band to set a real demo to tape. The songs and interstitial bits of singing function for the most part to advance the narrative and make interiority explicit-as with any good musical. Performances aren’t chopped up into montages (at least until a few unfortunate bits towards the end) and director John Carney makes room amidst the more straight-ahead singer songwriter material for a bit of variety: Hansard, while on a bus, performing an impromptu life story that careens from honky-tonk to Anglo folk to heavy metal is particularly notable both in its off-the-cuff ingenuity and how it showcases both performers’ natural charms.

Even in the current more technologically incline musical moment, the romance of the acoustic guitar still holds sway in Carney’s grayed-out pre-spring Dublin. About the only notable flaws of “Once” lie in its all-too-expected veering towards and away from a romance between the two principals (after an early proposition from Hansard is rebuffed, this probably should have been left alone) and the hokey ease with which Hansard’s songs turn around even the most callous of listener-whether a bored session producer, his own father, a bank loan officer, or, yes, a young Czech immigrant who supports herself through cleaning jobs and selling roses on the street.

But then, there’s something to be said for the charms of the hokey and well-worn. The film’s opening set piece features a chase sequence that has Hansard go Keystone Kop while pursuing a street junkie who ripped him off. When the thug’s caught breathless in a nearby park, the musician offers a simple: “If you needed money, you should have just asked” and hands over the disputed cash — it’s a bit of morbid, resigned comedy that sketches out character more quickly and accurately than anything I can recall seeing recently. Carney’s just as attuned to the specificities of place: this “new” Dublin of Eastern European immigrants and international commerce is starting to take on the every-city feel of much of Western Europe, but London’s still the “big city” and hints of that Ireland-of-the-mind leak around the edges – this doesn’t necessarily refer to the Thin Lizzy cover band encountered later in the film. Even if you don’t care at all about the Frames (which may very well be most of those who read this review) or find Hansard’s songs in “Once” particularly compelling, it’s hard not to find something to hang onto in Carney’s rigorously trad storytelling. Carney’s made a great deal out of very little-not unlike the way Curtis Hanson, through care, craft, and an electric performance, elevated “8 Mile.” And not unlike, say, a perfect pop song.

The Gift Horse: Robinson Devor’s “Zoo”

In gentler times, a film that sets out to seriously tackle taboo zoophilia might have elicited a bump on the cause celebre Richter scale, but in these post-everything days, when images and ideas far more controversial and chilling are readily available to any who care to look for them, there’s little space to spark real ire about a work like “Zoo.” This is a shame, but not because Robinson Devor’s third film warrants a trip through the rightwing noise machine, but because it’s generally terrific, and deserves to find an audience, by whatever means.

[A review from Reverse Shot. Editor’s note: The review ran originally in indieWIRE on April 22, 2007. The film opens in the Bay Area this Friday.]

Devor succeeds because he’s created a film depicting a lifestyle scandalous and controversial to the mainstream that’s completely disinterested in fomenting scandal and controversy. It’s obvious that he’s wise to the macabre curiosity that surrounds zoophilia – the way it’s furnished hours of late night gross-out enjoyment in freshman dorms nationwide. But “Zoo”‘s more “The New World” than “Jackass;” Devor’s taken a productive risk in that he has indeed made a movie about men who have and desire intercourse with horses, but anyone who enters looking for a dirty and salacious experience will be sorely disappointed. “Zoo” may be the “horse-fucking movie,” but it certainly doesn’t deliver on that most basic premise.

The film’s lengthier original title “In the Forest There Is Every Kind of Bird,” provides a better upfront hint of Devor’s tack than the more cleanly enigmatic “Zoo.” Instead of graphic videotape of the events in question (which does exist and has circulated throughout the internet), the filmmaker coaxes up seductive washes of imagery to evoke the Pacific Northwest setting of the “Enumclaw horse incident,” which left mild engineer Kennth Pinyan dead due to a perforated colon. In deference to the delicacy of the subject matter, Devor allows most of his main interview subjects to remain off-screen; without access to “talking heads,” the unfortunately bland basis for most contemporary documentary, he fills space with dramatic recreations and montage, the majority of which entice even as they precipitate further movement into a discomfiting space. “Tone poem” is an often misused descriptor for things neither tonally coherent nor poetic, but it certainly feels right here – perhaps never more so than in Devor’s hypnotic close-ups of overripe blackberries, or Tarkovsky-esque tracking shots past groves of trees. Watching “Zoo” feels like spending a fall evening out amongst massive evergreens watching the light die from the sky: comfortingly beautiful, but somehow dangerous as well. Devor’s impressionistic take on taboo, and how those who practice desire outside culture’s slim margins of acceptance, is a case of physical necessities breeding aesthetic ingenuity.

The filmmaker’s second film, “Police Beat,” was an unexpected surprise from an American independent scene that continues to regularly under-perform. Maybe it’s the hangover from Tarantino that’s led a generation of young filmmakers to forsake the other parts of cinema in favor of the primacy of the written word (though after both “Kill Bill“s and the explosion of his “Death Proof” from chat to chase, even he seems to be in a more spectacular mode), but in Devor’s hands, the idea of an ultra-low budget indie that looked and felt fantastic became reality. “Zoo” more than continues in its predecessor’s languorous hyperaestheticized path, and its focus on loves requited and non echoes “Police Beat”‘s narrative in ways that their surface concerns (African-born bike cop living in Seattle in the fever of new love, zoophile men) belie. After three films Devor seems to have carved a curious filmmaking niche for himself out of his Seattle environs; let’s hope he never gets too comfortable to keep churning out works that lull even as they unsettle.

[Jeff Reichert is co-founder and editor of Reverse Shot and currently works for Magnolia Pictures. Reprinted with permission, copyright Jeff Reichert, indieWIRE 2007.)

topics: directors, irish cinema, reviews