Take Two

The mystery of Lucrecia Martel and "The Headless Woman"

Newcomers to Argentine filmmaker Lucrecia Martel’s work might wonder what’s going on as her latest film The Headless Woman begins. In the same vein as her two earlier films, La Ciénega (2001) and The Holy Girl (2004), her story plunges viewers instantly into a microcosm without offering any introduction or explanation. We are simply there, immersed in the senses and perceptions of the scene along with the characters. We hear the same natural sounds vying for our attention: snippets of conversation, shrieks from children, car doors slamming, dogs barking, car engines igniting—it’s a kind of madness but at the same time a perfect replica of reality. We hang on, wondering how this all will unravel and make sense. Martel’s extraordinary cinematic gifts amplify the tension she creates by fully immersing viewers in her story, where plot plays a secondary, though pivotal, role. Martel’s camera shots are like the paintings of Rembrandt or Caravaggio; her brilliant and relentless use of chiaroscuro in darkish, sensual interiors arrest the eye and breath, eliciting excitement.

topics: bay area, directors, sffs screen at the sundance kabuki, south american film, women filmmakers, yerba buena center for the arts

Take Two

The sad dance of "Tony Manero"

Chilean director Pablo Larraín’s sophomore feature Tony Manero, opening Friday on the SFFS Screen at the Sundance Kabuki, concerns itself with Raúl Peralta (Alfredo Castro), a man in his 50s obsessed with the idea of impersonating Tony Manero, John Travolta’s character in Saturday Night Fever. It’s a fixation situated in the midst of the tough social context of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. Raúl leads a small group of dancers regularly performing at a bar located in the outskirts of the city and every Saturday evening he unleashes his passion for the film’s music by imitating his idol. His dream of being recognized as a successful showbiz star is about to become a reality when the national television station announces a Tony Manero impersonation contest. His urge to reproduce his idol’s likeness drives him to the edge.

topics: hollywood, latin cinema, sffs screen at the sundance kabuki, south american film, world cinema

Take Two

“The Beautiful Person” uncorks the high drama of high school

In their recent introduction to a teen-themed edition of the online film journal Rouge, co-authors Helen Bandis, Adrian Martin and Grant McDonald begin by distinguishing between coming-of-age films which defang adolescence of its dangerous vitality by narrating from the perspective of adulthood and those which revel in what they call “teenage wildlife”: “The story of teenagers living in an eternal present moment, like a savage, roaming pack of animals.” The Beautiful Person is too mannered to qualify for the “brutal poetry” concerning the Rouge crew, but “teenage wildlife” seems an extremely apt phrase for the way French writer-director Christophe Honoré films the adolescents starring in his own high school musical. In the movie’s early scenes, when Honoré throws us into the noisy ecology of a tony Paris high school without orientation—we’re following Junie (Léa Seydoux), the damsel of the title, on her first day as a transfer student—he does so with indiscriminate immersion of an ethnographer. Later, when the characters settle into place, there are frequent cutaways to teens draping themselves over furniture and each other: public displays of affection are merely expressive of a natural order of heartbreak.

topics: french cinema, sffs screen at the sundance kabuki

Review

Suspense, stillness, and beauty in "Three Monkeys"

When Nuri Bilge Ceylan won the Best Director prize at Cannes last year for Three Monkeys—which opens on the SFFS Screen at the Sundance Kabuki Friday—it couldn’t have been much of a surprise. He’d been winning awards since his first feature (1997’s Kasaba a.k.a. Small Town), including prior Cannes ones for Distant (2002) and Climates (2006), while Clouds of May (1999) was nominated for the Golden Bear at Berlin.

That’s pretty heady achievement for a 50-year-old director who’s only worked in film since 1995 (debuting with the short Koza), and whose five features to date haven’t yet fully distracted him from his other creative pursuit as a photographer. (It’s a craft that’s very much present in the painstaking beauty of his films’ typically stationary shots.)

topics: directors, sffs screen at the sundance kabuki, world cinema

Critic's Notebook

Lee Isaac Chung on "Munyurangabo" and the language of film

Early Hungarian film theoretician Béla Bálazs, like many others witnessing the transition from silent films to "talkies," saw cinema as a wordless language, or a visual one. Bálazs was disturbed by the coming of sound and speech, viewing it as a second Tower of Babel that would destroy the universality of cinema. Yet, 85 years later, despite newspaper headlines that would make you believe we are all being ripped apart, cinema— through gestures, emotions, and empathy—remains a universal language.

One can’t help but think about the concept of cinematic language, as well as spoken language, when talking with filmmaker Lee Isaac Chung. Prior to making Munyurangabo —which is set in present-day rural Rwanda, and the first film in the Kinyarwandan language—Chung spent 3 months in China without a translator making a film. He also has created shorts in different languages, and now has his sights on Germany for a future project. The transparency of divisions through spoken language is resonant in his work.

[Editor’s note: Munyurangabo plays the SFFS Screen at the Sundance Kabuki through June 18.]

topics: african cinema, directors, sffs screen at the sundance kabuki, world cinema

Take Two

"Fados" finds Saura on his toes

It is a typical complaint amongst older people that they miss most the passions, the fervent enthusiasms of their youth. Some folk, however, discover some new passion late in life that they pursue with unprecedented ardor—possibly to the bewilderment of those (including grown offspring) who now miss the more level-headed, more single-minded person they used to be.

One might conjecture something like that happened to Carlos Saura, the Spanish director who from the late 1950s onward made frequently striking films like Peppermint Frappe (1967) and Cria! (1977). Both of those starred his wife Geraldine Chaplin, who quickly became fluent in Spanish and had just the right sort of grave delicacy to inhabit his alternately sorrowful and caustic portraits of life in Franco’s Spain—a muzzled world whose strictures he (mostly) managed the artist’s trick of criticizing just slyly enough to avoid censorship.

topics: dance, directors, music, sffs screen at the sundance kabuki, world cinema

Take Two

"Examined Life" puts ideas into action

There have been a fair number of films and filmmakers considered to have a philosophical bent—Ingmar Bergman, to cite one of the more obvious examples. But movies have rarely addressed philosophy itself head-on. It makes sense: Really, how much can you do cinematically with an area that must basically come down to people talking about abstract concepts?

Which is exactly what Astra Taylor’s Examined Life consists of. The surprise is how engaging this documentary sampler of nine leading contemporary theorists emerges. Not just because the personalities and ideas are stimulating, but because Taylor (who previously directed another philosophy doc, 2005’s Zizek!) has the very bright idea of interviewing her subjects on the move, in settings that one way or another in real world terms illustrate (or contrast with) the concepts they discuss.

[Editor’s note: Director Astra Taylor and subject Sunaura Taylor appear in person at the SFFS Screen at the Sundance Kabuki Cinemas on Friday, March 6, and Sunday, March 8. More at SFFS.]

topics: authors, directors, documentary, sffs screen at the sundance kabuki