Film '07 -- Bests and more from the Bay Area's scene-makers

The critics have spoken, and the American West is winning in many year-end polls. But a quick survey of Bay Area programmers, curators, distributors, and filmmakers reveals a much richer picture of 2007’s best movie events, from avant-garde showcases to locally programmed extravaganzas. SF360.org offered some of the Bay Area’s leading voices a chance to weigh in on their film favorites and disappointments for the year, as well as their hopes for the next. We present an edited selection of their comments here.

topics: argentine cinema, bay area, castro theatre, critics year end polls, digital filmmaking, film festivals, filmmakers, gay lesbian cinema, jewish cinema, midnight movies, queer cinema, roxie

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RKO Lost & Found at the Roxie

As buffs know, the majority of films made by 1930 are considered lost — no prints are known to exist, or the ones that did exist have crumbled into dust due to the unstable, disintegrating nature of the era’s celluloid. But movies can become “lost” in other ways, too, and I’m not just talking those that don’t get released on DVD because they’re unpopular, uncommercial, or just bad. Probably the most widespread yet seldom-discussed reason why a feature can vanish from access these days is due to legal problems. Sometimes a producer owes the lab or his funders money, and can’t spring the film loose until he’s paid up (one Ed Wood Jr. movie remained a lab hostage until well after his death).

Sometimes distribution rights are being fought over by different parties, making it impossible to show or sell until the conflict is resolved. (I remember years ago going to see Jodorowsky’s “Holy Mountain” at a local rep house, only to be told an interested party had literally seized the film cans moments before, having learned a private collector’s print of the then legally impounded film was being shown at a commercial venue.) Sometimes an individual owner dies, or corporation goes under, leaving a movie without any ownership at all. Dickens’ novel Bleak House is about a lawsuit that’s dragged through the courts for decades, drawing in ever more plaintiffs for ever-dwindling potential rewards. More than a few films have suffered a similar fate, going unseen while their rights hang in legalistic limbo.

Sometimes there’s a happy ending, though. One is being told this week at the Roxie, where the six features in the week-long “RKO: Lost and Found” series are being seen for the first time in 50 (and in one case 70) years. Why such a long absence? Yup: Legal stuff.

The six were all produced between 1933 and 1938 by RKO Radio Pictures, a now little-remembered studio that was at the time one of Hollywood’s “Big Five.” It left its mark in a slew of classics including the Astaire-Rogers musicals, the original “King Kong,” “Citizen Kane,” and many notable film noirs, but more or less died out in the 1950s. (The biggest reason for its collapse was dreadful mismanagement by eccentric multimillionaire Howard Hughes, who’d purchased it in the prior decade.) For reasons still rather fuzzy — beyond the fact that his wife starred in one picture — “Kong” creator and onetime RKO executive Mercian C. Cooper purchased the complete rights to these particular films in 1946 as part of a legal settlement. Ten years later, five of the six were briefly shown on television. Then another legal dispute commenced over them between Cooper and another ex-RKO exec. Both of them died long before a viewer’s query last year alerted Turner Classic Movies to the fact that these half-dozen titles had never aired on the cable channel — despite TCM’s otherwise owning the entirety of the RKO library. Ted Turner’s legal folk weighed in, and voila! — the films were soon restored, ready for broadcast and rep-cinema screening.

So, what we’ve got here is a somewhat arbitrary but still fascinating selection of forgotten movies from a great studio in the middle of Hollywood’s “golden” 1930s. Several of them are light romances: 1933’s “Rafter Romance” has Ginger Rogers as a hard-pressed working girl in the depths of the Depression whose landlord forces her to “time-share” an attic with a nightwatchman (Norman Foster) when she gets way behind on the rent. Naturally, mutual annoyance leads to love. Five years later, it was remade as “Living on Love,” starring the forgotten duo of Whitney Bourne and James Dunn. “Double Harness,” another 1933 title, finds sensible socialite Ann Harding wearing down the marital resistance of bachelor playboy William Powell.

A big star in the early 1930s whose career was killed by too many mediocre vehicles, Harding started out on Broadway-as did Irene Dunne, who seldom got to sing onscreen during a filmography filled with heavy dramas and screwball comedies. If nothing else, 1934’s “Stingaree” should have curio value: She plays a 19th century Australian opera singer (!) who falls for a Richard Dix’s bandit-slash-songwriter (!!).

The other two films are straight-up dramas. “One Man’s Journey” (1933 again) has Lionel Barrymore as a small-town doctor whose life of tireless service and self-sacrifice is only appreciated after his death. Five years later (is there an echo in this room?), it was remade as “A Man to Remember,” with Edward Ellis taking the same role. Earnest but never preachy or mawkish, this well-crafted version was named one of 1938’s ten best films by the New York Times. Yet it virtually hasn’t been seen since then — for whatever reason, it was the only title among these six that was never shown on TV. It’s so rare the only existing print was found in the Netherlands — hence the Dutch subtitles you’ll be seeing at the Roxie.

There’s one more movie in the “RKO Lost & Found” series, though in fact it’s a fondly regarded minor classic that’s never really been “lost.” That would be “Lady for a Day,” which Frank Capra directed just before his big breakthrough with “It Happened One Night.” “Lady” stars the delightful May Robson as “Apple Annie,” a streetwise old NYC dame who poses as a society matron to fool the daughter she’s had raised in seclusion, away from her own disreputable existence. This charming comedy hasn’t been locked away in a vault for 70 years, but it’s still a pleasure to see it back on the big screen.

topics: roxie, theatres

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SF Docfest, hitting you where you live

Reality, generally considered over-rated by the moving-going public, is the unapologetic core of SF DocFest (Sept. 28-Oct. 10). But from its inception in 2001, SF Indie’s (almost) annual documentary showcase (they skipped 2003) has eschewed the dry, serious, good-for-you associations which supposedly plague the genre, emphasizing the idiosyncratic, odd, outré, subcultural, even the sub-subcultural (cf. this year’s attention-hound, “Wiener Takes All”); all the while slipping in some solid social and political fare when, so to speak, nobody’s watching. These more substantive, high-fiber docs, however, can turn out to be among the best surprises, admirably contributing to a sum of films invariably stranger than mere fiction.

In this year’s satisfying slew of urban, suburban, New Urban, anti-urban, and sprawl-mall films, the reality conceit is one that Canadian filmmakers Gary Burns and Jim Brown take for all it’s worth. In their sleek and sly exposé of suburban dystopia, “Radiant City: A Documentary about Urban Sprawl,” shades of Albert Brooks lurk in the Don DeLillo shadows that slowly gather around the real life of the Moss family, a seemingly typical suburban household whose customs and mores unfold before the documentarians’ inquisitive camera with deftly understated humor, and in increasingly uncomfortable proximity to various personal problems and quirks.

As a self-effacing dad, control-freak mom, and their two kids (a wonderfully sardonic but good-natured brother and sister) provide freewheeling conversation regarding the attractions and drawbacks of track-home living, interviewed experts limn the logic and import of mushrooming suburban monocultures. Among the elites who plan, describe, bemoan, or otherwise sum up the environmental and existential reality of our protagonists, the snarky James Howard Kunstler (The Geography of Nowhere) intervenes with cool urban authority and words like cartoonification. “What you’re seeing here,” he explains, “is the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world.”

“‘Community,’” chimes another suburbia watcher, “is shorthand for cluster of houses with people inside them not talking to each other.”

But today’s inhabitants of suburbia are knowing subjects, with a philosophical approach to its tradeoffs — one sometimes laced with ironic detachment as they navigate the gridlocked expressways, empty sidewalks, and anonymous inward-facing abodes of this middle-class world. As still another commentator notes, these people know the critique of suburbia backwards and forwards yet choose to live there anyway. Life, so to speak, goes on. The Moss boy climbs to the top of a cell phone tower to narrate the view into a digicam. Mom meticulously arranges the magnets on the family’s detailed refrigerator calendar. Kids in a dirt lot play “Escape from Mexico” with paintball guns. And Dad spends free time in rehearsals for an amateur production of a musical — about suburbia! — that he found on the Internet. (“It’s kind of like Stephen Sondheim meets ‘Rocky Horror Picture Show’ meets ‘The Simpsons,’” he offers.)

Sure, life goes on. But for how long? “Radiant City” has a pretty straightforward answer for all its genre-bending. Part of it comes along in some unhealthy statistics that show up in animated inter-title sequences (including the slightly brow-raising fact that traffic accidents and deaths are three times more common in the suburbs than in the inner city). More crucially, though, and as an urban planner explains, suburban sprawl fundamentally resists the regeneration and evolution allowed, in contrast, by the grid-patterned density of cities. In the face of peak oil, and other major economic downshifts considered just around the corner, car-dependent suburbia’s stifling pods and cul-de-sacs form part of an overall design so precariously rigid that (as the informed consensus here makes plain) it is thoroughly doomed. “This way of living,” Kunstler certifies, “is coming off the menu.”

Several other docs in this year’s lineup provide some glimpse of the alternatives. At the extreme end, try Jeremy and Randy Stulberg’s fascinating “Off the Grid: Life on the Mesa” (2007), a beautifully made portrait of a loose-knit community of new American pioneers — a mix of radicals, old hippies, eccentric loners, addled and ailing Gulf War vets, and teenage runaways subsisting in the New Mexican desert at the fringes of American civilization. In this punishing but gorgeous landscape, freedom and bare survival depend on a few basic unwritten laws of cooperation and self-defense. “We don’t dial 9-1-1. We dial 3-5-7: Three-fifty-seven magnum.” Definitely not the grid, this isn’t Burning Man either.

“New Urban Cowboy: The Labors of Michael E. Arth” (2007) stakes out some middle ground between suburban wasteland and Mad Max-style desert-dwelling in the pretty astounding tale of artist and New Urbanism developer, builder, and visionary Michael Arth. After some impressive background on a charmed life, the film (by Arth and Blake Wiers) tirelessly documents Arth’s bold project, beginning in 2001, to utterly transform a Florida slum, DeLand’s infamous Garden District, into a vibrant eco-friendly community that downplays car culture (in his own version of New Urbanism, which he calls New Pedestrianism). The story is gripping throughout, except perhaps for a sequence that indulges a better-homes-and-garden tour of his neighbors’ refurbished houses — but by then he’s definitely earned it.

But what will cities, and not just suburbs like Arth’s Garden District, look like in the aftermath of abundant, semi-affordable oil? Turns out we already know. By necessity, Cuba has retooled for a (largely) oil-free world, and the outcome as evidenced in “The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil” (2006) is surprisingly hopeful. In fact, the dire economic crisis Cuba entered after the collapse of the Soviet Union has led in a remarkably short time to a more de-centralized, ecologically sustainable society that looks far saner than the giant, transportation-heavy systems of production and consumption made possible by fossil fuels.

Back home, the fight for comparable forms of community continues in a distinctly American evangelical vernacular. This year’s festival leads off with one of the more righteous attacks on runaway consumerism and the malling of America, “What Would Jesus Buy?” Co-produced by Morgan Spurlock (“Super Size Me”), Rob VanAlkemade’s road film (a super-sized adaptation of his award-winning short, “Preacher With an Unknown God”) follows Reverend Billy (Bill Talen) and his fellow activist-performers in the Church of Stop Shopping (including the first-rate Stop-Shopping Choir and Not Buying It band) as they trek cross-country in the annual “shopping-days” countdown to Christmas. Their mission is nothing less than to save Americans from the Shopocalypse, and by promoting a gift economy over a consumer one, to restore the “true meaning of Christmas” with some old-time direct action in the houses of the beast (including Starbucks, Wal-Mart, the Mall of America, and, of course, Disneyland). A revealing and rousing portrait of serious but joyful activism against the community-destroying forces of global capitalism, opening night’s screening will be blessed with the presence of the Reverend Billy himself, so come ready to be healed.

topics: documentary, film festivals, roxie

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Finn Taylor on natural selection and "The Darwin Awards"

Of course, you have never done anything stupid in your life. But director Finn Taylor admits that he has: He once held up a convenience store with a harmonica, he told SF360 last week while talking about his film “The Darwin Awards.” What Taylor himself netted from the transaction back in the day is unclear, but the effects of the action on his creativity were clearly long-lasting. Taylor’s bringing his movie “The Darwin Awards” to the Roxie this week, and the hybrid romantic comedy/literary satire based on the Darwin Awards themselves — awards bestowed on humans whose self-caused accidental deaths were the result of such inanity and hubris we’re supposed to be glad they’re removed themselves from the gene pool — clearly hark back to Taylor’s own experiences. But unlike the unforgiving Darwin Awards, Taylor’s film offers real empathy for those whose errors are brazen, bold, somewhat moronic, and extremely mortal. With a cast including Winona Ryder, members of Metallica, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jeanette Etheredge, and a Golden State Warrior, among others, and a story that converges at City Lights, the film also happens to be a love letter to San Francisco, ground zero for dreamers, losers, and the very unlucky for a long time now. SF360.org spoke with Taylor (“Dream with the Fishes,” “Cherish”) about all the films he’s directed in a Bay Area that’s offered him years of inspiration.

SF360.org: First of all, a personal note. The last time I saw you, I think, was at a Golden State Warriors game. It warmed my heart to see that Warriors player Adonal Foyle is featured in the film.

Finn Taylor: I wanted to put him in there because he’s done so much. The nonprofit he founded, Democracy Matters, is attempting to talk about campaign finance reform, particularly at universities, because that’s where the next generation of voters and power elite will come from. He’s done stuff with Josh Kornbluth, who’s also a friend. His part got cut down. I had him quoting a poem in the original.

SF360: How did you approach the story?

Taylor: I have an affinity for postmodern things. With film, it’s such a specific form. Much more so than novels or visual art. For the last hundred years it’s the same structure. It takes place in 90 minutes to 2 hours. You’re either following around a protagonist in real time, or chopping up the time structure — or an alternative structure starting with several story lines, intertwine and resolve them, and go into the third act at about the same time. This film had a slightly different screenplay structure. I like playing with the form, and seeing if it can work as an entertainment as well. There’s also the apocryphal nature of the Darwin Awards. Some [of the stories in the film] are true; some are partially true; one is untrue. I love the idea of the documentarian following him around. I love the complexity — the conceits given detectives. With “Vertigo,” Hitchcock has the guy get fired because of his fear of heights. In my film, he gets fired because he faints at the sight of blood.

SF360: The film as a whole is a love letter to the Bay Area. Why?

Taylor: SF’s got such a great history of detective stories, both in literature and film. And such a rich literary history. There was a perverse desire to combine the two. Detective stories often have such unrealistic backstories. I wanted to have fun with that.

I used to run the literary series for Intersection for the Arts, so I was really a fan of the literary history of the city. So I had this whole literary backstory in the film. Then when Winona Ryder got involved, it got even more expanded, because her parents were heavily involved in the Beat scene. Her father, Michael Horowitz, was a chronicler of the Beat scene. He was present at the trials of Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg. Through Winona and Michael, a lot of doors were opened. We shot in Kerouac Alley. It was the first film ever to shoot in City Lights itself. All those details were really fun.

Tim Blake Nelson is the frustrated poet in the film and is a good friend. He did his postgrad studies in comp lit. And sometimes we find ourselves playing the quote game with each other and I wanted to satirize that sort of thing in the film. We had the copy of “Howl” in Tim’s pocket tilted down, because it’s such an iconic book cover. Some people will know. It made me giggle in deep, perverse way to have the resolution of this crime story center around poetry and literature. It matched the comedy and realism level of Darwin Awards themselves.

SF360: I enjoyed the ribbing documentary filmmaking took. Do you have particular concerns about the genre?

Taylor: Many of my friends and heroes are documentary filmmakers. Probably my favorite form of film is documentary. For me, having the documentary filmmaker in the film is more of a commentary on media in general. Some people look at CNN and think it’s an actual representation of reality — during the Gulf War, for instance. I was also having fun making fun of myself as a filmmaker.

The Darwin Awards sprung up on the Internet, much like the famous telephone game, The stopries get altered as they get re-told. When people ask: ‘Are they real?,’ I say they are some version of reality — some are more real than others. That is sort of the form of ‘The Darwin Awards,’ the movie, as well. I like poking fun at filmmakers in general, not documentary filmmakers in particular. We all know people starting out in film, with an attempt to have an objective view, particular set of ethics that’s seriously flawed. I.e., they won’t call 911 because they’re trying to make cinema verite.

I’m a fan of setting up an obstacle of a form — the sonnet, haiku, villanelle — to unleash creativity. The screenplay is an obstacle that frees you creatively. I have disdain for a fear of the new. We totally accept any costume drama based on literature, or documentary because they’re based on a subject you don’t want to attack. But if something is different or varies from the structure expected, sometimes people get very nervous about it. Unless you’re attempting to do something slightly different while telling your story as honestly as you can, why are you doing it? There’s already been another drama made, or better comedy made. I’m never going to equal Hitchcock or Capra or Sturges. I feel like when I’m creating something, it’s important to acknowledge what has come before while trying to do something different now.

SF360: Is comedy particularly difficult? You’ve now done two.

Taylor: They’re all a little meta or postmodern and therefore a little funny. For me when I make a film, the challenge I give myself, is how do I utilize a new structure. This one has a strange structure about a strange subject: The Darwin Awards. Can I pull this off and still make it feel like a recognizable, entertaining form? I drew on the history of film — I have a romantic comedy/road movie thing at the same time. For me, I’m entertained when I acknowledge the forms that I’m using. When I’m making a film I show it to audiences over and over again, to see what’s working. I’m always surprised at what people laugh at, what they don’t laugh at. I like making these films that many people find entertaining. I more often call film a craft more than an art form — it’s a group effort, requires people in unions. As varied as film is, even foreign and obscure films, the structure is pretty set — it’s not like the screen turns blue for ten minutes. Like a good chair, it needs three legs to stand on. How can you make a chair that works quite well as a chair, but doesn’t throw out the fact that there’s been Chippendale or Bauhaus before you?

SF360: The music in your films has always been off-beat and very carefully chosen.

Taylor: I very often use music to define the interior life of a character. In a novel, you can go into the interior of a person. It’s difficult in film — the interior is described by what you see and hear — musical choices can describe their interior world. Burrows likes Billy Joel. You can tell by Winona’s character’s reaction to that, that she does not. That says a lot about her. When David Arquette’s character decides to do the mythic thing with the rocket car, he puts on “Radar Love” by Golden Earring. A song by the early Pretenders may have sounded more dynamic but I don’t think his character would have been listening to The Pretenders.

Of course the Metallica sequence goes without saying.

SF360: Risk has been a key theme in all your films. Why?

Taylor: Joseph Fiennes’ character is trying to solve, mathematically, why people do these things. Winona Ryder’s character says insurance companies reject claims as a practice, then when you call to complain you get sent to a tree of voice mails lasting an hour. These modern insults just build on a daily basis, and people eventually just lose it, and they end up strapping a rocket onto a Chevy. People just lose their shit. When I was 19, I kind of did lose my shit — I held up a drugstore with a harmonica.

I don’t have any problem with people creating great craft from a stringent tradition — I have a problem with being chained by caution or fear. I love that Buddhist saying that the only way to remain truly alive is to keep death over your left shoulder.

I have an affection for losers because any of us on a given day can feel like a loser. I like characters with their rough edges left on.

SF360: You were in the 2006 Sundance Film Festival with ‘Little Miss Sunshine,’ ‘Science of Sleep,’ and some other big films. Why has it taken awhile to hit theaters?

Taylor: We unfortunately pre-sold our foreign rights. Even though we had a theatrical deal in place, because of the time it took to get the deal finished, it had already come out in 25 countries

topics: directors, q&a, roxie

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"Revolution Summer"

The Bay Area is widely regarded as the seat of rebellion in his country or, to put it in more “patriotic” terms, where America’s conscience resides. So although dozens of passionate documentaries have been made here, it’s a mystery why the list of locally produced features with political themes is so short. At long last, Miles Matthew Montalbano has broken the silence with “Revolution Summer,” an evocative and empathetic portrait of Bush-era dissatisfaction among the post-collegiate set opening this Friday at the Roxie New College Film Center. As socially conscious dramas go, it’s circumspect about the state’s crimes, sparing us a harangue. A gentle poke of a napping buddy rather than a call to arms — the soundtrack consists of Jonathan Richman’s low-key picking, not Jefferson’s Airplane’s window-rattling “Volunteers” — Montalbano’s low-budget debut counts the awakening of a single citizen as a blow against the empire. “The politics I’m interested in are much more personal, how it affects [people] as individuals, their relationships with other people, with their lovers, with their families, with strangers,” Montalbano explained in a phone interview last week from San Francisco.

The plot — such as it is, for Montalbano does not supply a surfeit of incident — revolves around a trio of young adults with varying levels of disquiet. Hope (Mackenzie Firgens) is an introspective sort with a vague longing to make more of her life and do something about the direction of the country. But what? One “inspiration” is her friend Francine (Lauren Fox), a stripper interested only in sex, drink and drugs. Then there’s this new guy, Frankie (Samuel Child), who’s involved in planning and executing a dangerous act of sabotage.

“I had been feeling very frustrated with the ways of the world [and] what was going on in the world,” the 41-year-old Montalbano recalled. “It was the start of the Iraq War, the Patriot Act, 9/11, all of these things were at the forefront of a lot of people’s minds. I don’t feel like I have any answers politically, or that that’s the filmmaker’s place, but it came from a personal place of feeling so angry some days and frustrated other days. ‘Why aren’t we all out in the streets right now? Why aren’t we throwing bricks and bottles? No one cares, this is always the way things are. Let’s just go get a beer and have a good time.’ I was trying to reconcile those feelings in myself, and wondering what should we be doing now.”

It boiled down to one question, said Montalbano. How do you live in an imperfect world? That’s not the usual dilemma that occupies young filmmakers, but then his path to the directing chair wasn’t typical. Montalbano was born in Oakland and raised in Chico; he moved back to San Francisco to play music. In his late 20s, after the break-up of his last band, Sister Double Happiness, he enrolled at S.F. State to study film.

“I had this idea about college where I thought I’d find all these hip people to hang out and talk about Godard films with, and it seemed most people I met were interested in moving to Hollywood and working on the next ‘Star Wars’ film,” Montalbano recounted. “I was discouraged by film school, and after my third year I felt like I couldn’t justify my student loans anymore and I decided I needed to make films.”

His frustration may have stemmed from the realization that making music is a more immediate and intuitive process than making movies. Indeed, Montalbano makes it sound as if “Revolution Summer” is the result of an evolution in which he had to alter his approach while also tailoring the standard filmmaking model to his taste. In other words, writing, production, and postproduction were stages in which Montalbano grappled with how to reconcile his oblique storytelling style with an audience’s expectations.

“To me, it was an experimental film, because I don’t know what I’m doing,” he confided. “I knew what kind of films interested me and what kind of film I wanted to make. But I had no idea if it was going to work. Ultimately, that’s kind of how I watch films. I’m not a person who studies film. I never got into dissecting them. I usually watch a film and let it wash over me and do its trip. Godard, Antonioni, who are supposed to be cerebral, I watch them on a gut, emotional level. ‘This rings true to me, this rings false to me.’ Through the heart, not the head.”

Fortunately for his long-term mental health, Montalbano realized that “Revolution Summer” was not destined to be a commercial blockbuster or even a critics’ darling.

“I knew from the beginning that I was making a film probably for a minority audience,” he said. “First and foremost, I was making a film for myself. I had enough confidence to know there would be other people who’d be interested in that. I knew it wouldn’t it would be a Sundance film, it wasn’t ‘Little Miss Sunshine,’ it wasn’t a calling-card film. I just had hope that it would find its audience. And I think everybody involved with it, coming into it knew that, and it was the film we wanted to make. This could have been my student film, and I could shove it under my bed and no one will ever see it again. But I stand by it, and we accomplished a lot of what we were trying to make.”

Montalbano is working on ideas for his next film, although he’s a ways from rolling camera. Much as he enjoyed the DIY strategies and aesthetic of “Revolution Summer,” he now recognizes that a bigger budget would make production and post much easier. But there’s little danger of him going the way of too many indie filmmakers, and gravitating to vapid romantic comedies or hit-and-run heist movies.

“I’m still interested in how you live in a world that oppresses and alienates people,” he said, “living in this modern world that we’ve been born into, and the spiritual needs that are maybe not being addressed for a lot of people, and how hard communication between men and women is.”

topics: bay area, political film, q&a, roxie

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Reviews: "Private Property;" "One to Another"

"Private Property" makes money matter.

Some routine matters that can have quite dramatic consequences in real life aren’t deemed sexy or colorful enough as fare for actual drama — so when they do show up to drive a narrative, the effect is quite striking. Such is the case with director Joachim Lafosse’s excellent "Private Property," opening Friday at the Roxie. It’s about a non-rich family torn apart by money matters — among other things, but principally money — a conflict that happens all the time off-screen but takes center stage seldom enough to seem very fresh here.

On the surface, Lafosse’s fourth feature is pretty typical French (or in this case officially Belgian-French-Luxembourg) arthouse fare: An intimate relationship piece, low-key and nuanced rather than high in melodrama. And like the best of them, it’s an accumulation of finely observed, sometimes ambiguous details that make the sum engrossing — though in excerpt any one scene might evoke ye olde phase "watching paint dry."

An impressive, rambling old farmhouse in the picturesque Belgian countryside is home to middle-aged Pascale (Isabelle Huppert) and her non- identical-twin sons Thierry and Francois (played by real-life brothers Jeremie and Yannick Renier). Though in their twenties, the boys have scarcely made overtures toward building independent adult lives. Thierry seems to be taking a class or two and has a sorta-girlfriend (Raphaelle Lubansu). Francois does a bit of handiwork. But mostly they lay around watching TV, playing video games, screwing around on a dirtbike, and so forth. Though mom works (it’s not quite clear doing what), basically everybody is supported by Luc (Patrick Descamps), the husband and father she bitterly divorced over a decade ago.

This domestic trio acts more like squabbling-yet-inseparable siblings than parent and offspring. The boys tease Pascale mercilessly, backing off with "Mom, we’re just kidding" whenever it gets too cruel. They casually bathe in front of (or sometimes with) each other. They’re not incestuous — just really, really creatures of mutual habit.

But Pascale has a secret — an affair with neighbor Jan (Kris Cuppens) — and as that involvement grows more serious, she contemplates starting a new life as well as a new marriage. Perhaps the two of them could open their own restaurant or B&B — if, that is, she sells the farmhouse that is her only asset. Of course, it is also home and all-around meal ticket for her sons, who naturally freak out once they catch wind of the plan.

It’s questionable whether she even has the legal authority to sell — Luc says the house belongs to his sons, not his ex-wife — but the mere possibility fast drives wedges between all parties concerned. It’s a classic collective-trap situation in which each feels unfairly thwarted by the other, resentments building until some disastrous explosion becomes inevitable.

Huppert is usually the magnetic focus of movies in which she appears, but here she successfully merges into a piece whose principal characters are given equal focus. Lafosse (a twin himself, though he says the screenplay co- written with Francois Pirot isn’t autobiographical, at least not very) encourages improvisation that results in family-life rhythms utterly convincing even when they’re teasingly ambiguous. "Private Property" is the kind of movie whose power creeps up stealthily, but leaves you a bit stunned nonetheless.

Body Contact: Pascal Arnold and Jean-Marc Barr’s "One to Another"

[SF360.org Editor’s note: This review was published originally in indieWIRE on June 27, 2007. The film opens in the Bay Area this Friday.]

There’s an ever more prevalent, if still marginalized, subgenre in international films today that is difficult to classify. In such films as Larry Clark’s "Bully" and Gael Morel’s "Le Clan" (released here as "Three Dancing Slaves"), groups of teenagers descend into violent oblivion while the filmmakers dispassionately, purposely objectify their supple flesh. The gap between the actions of the characters and the voyeurism of the filmmakers makes for an awkward, sometimes stimulating dialogue, even if it also leaves the actors somewhat adrift. The recurring image of these films are young, lithe bodies, supine, entangled: in "Le Clan," three eye-catching brothers lay together in a tableau less motivated by their characters than the filmmaker’s whims. In "One to Another," French co-directors Pascal Arnold and Jean-Marc Barr have their young actors lie atop, next to, and around each other with youthful, sexual abandon, and in a move similar to Morel’s, intimate an incestuous relationship between the film’s two main characters, brother and sister Pierre (Arthur Dupont) and Lucie (Lizzie Brochere), just by the sheer level of proximity and undress the two seem to share. It’s a teasing, half-formed approach to character, and the film, tiptoeing around its own narrative and ideas of sexuality, feels not fully formed.

The story itself, which Arnold based on a true story he read in the newspaper, concerns the murder of Pierre, and the investigation into his death taken up by Lucie. Floating in and out of the past and present without warning (often, you’ll only know what timeframe you’re in if Pierre enters the frame, hale and hearty), "One to Another" follows the distraught Lucie’s attempts to untangle the truth, although more often than not the film feels much less interested in the outcome of the mystery than in the myriad flashbacks presenting the malleable sexuality of hot Pierre and his even hotter friends, often seen shirtless (and in the film’s first, and best image, beat-boxing as afternoon silhouettes against a sunny red rock wall) and in various states of canoodling, sometimes with Lucie, sometimes with each other. It’s Pierre’s declared bisexuality that anchors the group of friends (who also perform together at local clubs in a small-time band), the rest of whose sexual preference remains as vague as their personalities, which usually seem shell-shocked either with grief or perhaps guilt.

"One to Another" almost forthrightly eschews forward motion or drama in its depiction of all this angst, favoring a shooting style so definitively casual that it’s hard to muster up much visual interest. Dupont’s Pierre of course remains a necessary abstraction, yet Brochere’s Lucie often comes across as even more inert. Most easily identified by their matching birthmarks, Pierre and Lucie stick in the mind as flesh and little more; perhaps that was the intention, as it is uttered in the film, "Only a body can know another body." Yet one can’t help but want for a little soul to finish off the equation.

Michael Koresky is co-founder and editor of Reverse Shot and the managing editor at the Criterion Collection. Reprinted with permission, copyright Michael Koresky, indieWIRE 2007.)

topics: french cinema, reviews, roxie

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A Frozen Film Festival five

It’s July in San Francisco, and you know the drill: chestnuts roasting by the open fire, Jack Frost popping up on your laptop. The Frozen Film Festival — a small festival that hopes to capitalize on the fact that San Franciscans like to stay indoors in the bone-chilling days of summer — has actually already started heating up. Thursday at the Roxie was its big opening night, and the films, some straight outta Silverdocs, others controversial enough to cause a stir, continue to warm the Mission throughout the weekend. Bonus events: FFF’s Music Competition winners play at Edinburgh Castle Pub tonight at 9 p.m., and the bands of “Rural Rockers” play Hotel Utah Sat/14. What follows are SF360.org’s thoughts on just which frozen films may turn out to be the hottest picks.

1. Comedic and Experimental Shorts
Frugal and depressed about it? The festival says it best with its cheery little mnemonic: “Hilarious, silly, creative fun — it’s eight different short films for the price of one!”

2. “Millions”
The true story of six Americans linked by what we might call luck: the Lottery. Paul LaBlanc’s documentary reveals not only the figures in the headlines but the hardship and humanity behind the winning tickets.

3. “Stomp! Shout! Scream!”
All girl rock band. Something called a Skunk Ape. A foul smelling pile of detritus. A movie, or three ways to begin an impossible game of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon?

4. “AIDS Inc.”
A documentary that says it sets the record straight on the global AIDS crisis as a corporate construction and institution. Sure to create a stir, see AIDS Inc. to inform your argument. Or, at the very least, for some very heated water cooler talk at the office.

5. “Pillow Girl”
Come see and hear the collection of 200 suggestive paperback covers strung together, the sound actually produced by the image through some very techno-savvy scanning. A sound-art piece turned meta-pulp experience.

topics: bay area, film festivals, lists, roxie

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