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The Winners
The Gold Hugo
"Kontroll" (Hungary)
Directed by Nimród Antal
The Silver Hugo (Special Jury Prize)
"Turtles Can Fly" / "Lak poshtha ham parvaz mikonand" (Iraq/Iran)
Directed by Bahman Ghobadi
A Silver Hugo
Day and Night / Dag og nat (Denmark)
Directed by Simon Staho, for "its perfectly balanced ensemble acting by Mikael Persbrandt, Sam Kessel, Maria Bonnevie, Michael Nyqvist, Lena Endre, Hans Alfredson, Pernilla August, Fares Fares, Marie Goranzon, Tuva Novotny and Erland Josephson."
"Whisky" (Uruguay/Argentina/Germany)
for "the direction of Juan Pablo Rebella and Pablo Stoll, its confident pacing and ironic distance."
Source: www.chicagofilmfestival.com
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(Continued from Page One)
The Run-down
With expectations riding high, the festival started off very underwhelming. My first screening was Jonathan Caouette’s much lauded Tarnation. Standing ovations at Sundance and Cannes. Superlatives from the critics. So on, so forth. But why? Is Tarnation a groundbreaking work? …or is everyone touched by the vulnerability that comes with self-exploitation? And that’s exactly what I found it to be; self-exploitative.
It’s really a home movie in collage form. Caouette will make you believe that the film is about his mother; about her being raped when he was a child; about her life in and out of mental institutions, and the shock therapy there administered. You might be certain of it, especially when he turns the camera on her, and asks her questions about her youth. But the film is really about him. It’s about his coming to terms with his life, with his homosexuality. It’s about his drug experimentation and the artsy, punk subculture into which he was drawn, and she only exists in the periphery.
I think it was Tolstoy who wrote that happy families are all alike, but that every unhappy family is fucked up in its own way. Clearly, I’m just paraphrasing. But this adage will seldom find a more fitting use than here. Sure, Caouette’s is a stirring story, but it’s not singular, nor is its method of storytelling. If you take any “unhappy” family’s pictures and home videos, put them to great, spellbinding music, you’ll induce some form of nostalgia and, later, empathy. I guess the difference is that he actually did it. He documented it. He put it together. He shared it. It now exists. He’s not Anger, Brakhage, or even Morrissey, no matter now much we’d like him to be. So I won’t talk (much) about its style. It might seem organic at first, with its music video layering and psychedelic kaleidoscope and prism effects, but the whole things has this synthetic, out-of-the-box feel, that’s just so iMovie; right down to its playschool inter-titles. And, furthermore, most of the film is without structure.
The film rushed when I wanted it to drift… it stalled when I wanted it to soar. Perhaps it was a matter of available footage… as it became strangely guarded and self-conscious when touching upon something what might reveal to us an unadulterated moment. And Caouette did no research to answer the questions he was posing, as would have been expected from a documentary, but perhaps not from a home movie. It just paused and fast-forwarded through his life. I wanted to feel compassion, but there was no emotional attachment. The entire film lacked a singular moment that felt true. The material felt manipulated.
Also, there’s this notion that the film cost $218. Oh please! They came up with that figure on the basis of the tape stock that Caouette had used throughout the years. I’m sure they didn’t even factor in inflation. So, $200 for the tape stock and $18 for the magic pumice-stone, found at the bottom of Wellspring, which filtered and mastered the sound from the original hi-8 tapes. Not to mention the re-editing.
What I’d really want to see is the original two and half hour cut of this film… before the attachment of John Cameron Mitchell and Gus Van Sant. Why not let an experimental film retain its experimental ways? That original cut contained Caouette’s (whole) reunion with his estranged father and the story of his nine-year-old daughter. Yes, he has a daughter who is never even mentioned in the present cut. Why? They must have gone to great lengths to eradicate any mentioning of her. Perhaps it would not have made him the strong, gay role model that the film so desires to make him out to be. But why, when his human story is strong enough? That’s what I mean by manipulation.
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