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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 Two)
Next came Theo Angelopoulos’ return to his customary, epic form with Trilogy I: The Weeping Meadow; yet another tragedy from the Greek master. Once again, the film is set before, during, and after the Second World War, and features a band of traveling players. Formally, the film was as impressive as anything in the festival. The camera movements were so elegant, with well-manicured frames, and the production and costume designs were so meticulously employed, that the story, however ineffective at times, became secondary to the experience of just watching the film.
There were singular moments in this film that will remain with me throughout my life; an abandoned theater acting as a public house, with the box seats being transformed into small apartments; a town, flooded, with its residents taking refuge on their roofs, going to and from on boats; and landscapes as sweeping as anything from Jancso. The first half of the film was magnificent – theatrical? …yes, at times, but beautiful nonetheless. And the story worked because Angelopoulos took his time telling it, allotting as much time to its development as he did to acquainting us with the Greek landscape. And then, two hours in, he realized that he still had nearly a decade of events to span, and he did so – on a few occasions, moving ahead many years without conveying any passage of time – in the final hour. So, once he broke from his careful pacing, that final hour felt, as counterintuitive as it may seem, like it lasted longer than the previous two. Running some three hours plus, I’d be willing to see the five hour version, if it were to exist.
Another anticipated film was Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Tropical Malady, winner of the Jury Prize at Cannes. The film is really three films in one: two short films that bookend a really short, crudely drawn cartoon, depicting a shaman legend. The structure of the film is unorthodox, and that’s what makes the film worthy of discussion: in trying to connect the three separate films. The film’s prologue puts us in a certain frame of mind: “man is beast” it claims, citing some ancient passage. There is a “beast” within us all, and to be “human” is to tame that beast. Something like that. So, without going into it at length, the first film examines the courtship between a soldier and a simple country boy. The soldier woos the boy, through visits to his county home, or notes that he leaves in his pocket: “I like you” and the like. But to what extent does the boy return the soldier’s affection? …or does he just mimic the soldier’s actions? Like in the last scene of the first film, when they lick each other’s hands? So ends the first film. Then comes the short film, depicting the account of a shape-shifting shaman who lives inside the body of a tiger. At its conclusion, as reality gives way to dream, and the third film begins as the soldier finds himself in a jungle, hunting for the shamanic ghost / tiger played by the same actor who played the country boy. Or is it the soldier who is the hunted? I admired this film a lot more than I actually liked it. And I liked it a lot more than I understood its all-encompassing raison d'être. The third film moved very slowly, dream-like, through the dark jungle, giving us ample time to enjoy the film’s texture of images; hanging foliage mixing with limbs, obscuring faces, to the point where you’re left exploring the partially lit frames for any sign of movement. In that regard, we too were involved in the hunt. A fascinating experience.
Another Cannes entry followed; Hirokazu Koreeda’s Nobody Knows. It tells the true story of four children abandoned by their single mother. The story is told, mainly, from the eldest boy’s perspective. He, age eleven, tries his best to keep house during her extended absences… which she claims are work related, but we’re led to believe that they are vacations spent with boyfriends; pattern behavior, for at least three of the four children are from different fathers. The eleven-year-old boy, Akira, cooks, cleans, and manages the finances, neatly writing them down in a notebook as if they were a substitutive homework. Of course, none of the children attend school. That would require them to leave the apartment, which, aside from Akira, for fear that the landlord might find out how many of them reside in the apartment, they are strictly forbidden to do. And so their routine continues. Until the mother leaves for one such “business trip” and does not return; it seems that she started up another family, without them. The film’s style is clean and fresh, with fluid, handheld camerawork, mostly in low-positioned medium shots and with well-chosen cut-ins… establishing a world as seen through the eyes of a child, with danger looming around every corner and with each subsequent return home.
The story is extremely compelling, although dark and disparaging, and, technically, it’s very well executed. I liked it right up till the end, when the end title appeared: Nobody Cares… a twist on Nobody Knows. Okay, I get it. Thank you. Furthermore, as the credits went along, each of the children was named, and when they came to the mother, it said, Mother: You. I was enraged. Unless the film serves as a metaphor, and by going to see this movie we are abandoning our real world responsibilities, i.e. our hypothetical children, we, individually, or as a collective, should not be made to feel guilty by a director who knows nothing about our sensitivity to the matter. Of course, I later found out that the actress’ name is You, just “Y-o-u”. Still, could she have been cast for that very reason? For the purpose of that double-entendre? We’ll never know. We’ll never care.
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