The Screengrab : barbet schroeder

Hathaway Hotness, Rourke Smackdowns Head Venice Comp Lineup

Paul Clark — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Today brought the announcement of the Competition lineup for next month’s 65th annual Venice International Film Festival. Among the highest-profile American titles in the lineup was the upcoming Jonathan Demme film, Rachel Getting Married (starring the lovely Anne Hathaway, pictured at right) and the sorely-missed Debra Winger. Another intriguing title is The Wrestler, directed by Darren Aronofsky and starring Mickey Rourke, no doubt eager to try out a new sport after his abortive boxing career. Of course, if you’re looking for something really great, a solid bet would be the latest film by animation master Hayao Miyazaki, entitled Ponyo on Cliff by the Sea, also in Competition.

Other filmmakers of note in Competition include: Takeshi Kitano (Achilles and the Tortoise), Barbet Schroeder (Inju, la Bete dans l’ombre), Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker), Mamoru Oshii (The Sky Crawlers), Werner Schroeter (Nuit de Chien), and Ferzan Oztepek (Un giorno perfetto). Then there’s the directorial debut of Babel screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, entitled The Burning Plain. Expect a trio of interlocking stores and plenty of tortured, writerly multi-culti coincidence.

Here’s the full Competition slate:

Darren Aronofsky- The Wrestler
Guillermo Arriaga- The Burning Plain
Pupi Avati- Il papà di Giovanna
Marco Bechis- BirdWatchers
Patrick Mario Bernard and Pierre Trividic- L’Autre
Kathryn Bigelow- Hurt Locker
Pappi Corsicato- Il seme della discordia
Jonathan Demme- Rachel Getting Married
Haile Gerima- Teza
Aleksey German Jr.- Bumažnyj soldat (Paper Soldier)
Semih Kaplanoglu- Süt
Takeshi Kitano- Akires to kame (Achilles and the Tortoise)
Hayao Miyazaki- Gake no ue no Ponyo (Ponyo on Cliff by the Sea)
Amir Naderi- Vegas: Based on a True Story
Mamoru Oshii- The Sky Crawlers
Ferzan Özpetek- Un giorno perfetto
Christian Petzold- Jerichow
Barbet Schroeder- Inju, la Bête dans l’ombre
Werner Schroeter- Nuit de chien
Tariq Teguia- Gabbla (Inland)
YU Lik-wai- Dangkou (Plastic City)

Strangely enough, this year’s Out of Competition selections are more impressive-looking overall than the titles that are actually competing. Playing outside of competition are new films from the likes of Abbas Kiarostami (Shirin, starring Juliette Binoche), Claire Denis (35 Rhums), Agnes Varda (Les Plages d’Agnes), a new version of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s La Rabbia, and short films by Manoel de Oliveira (Do Visivel ao Invisivel) and Jia Zhang-ke (Cry Me a River). Also, there’s a little movie called Burn After Reading by a pair of filmmaking brothers. Didn’t catch their names, I’m afraid.

The 65th Annual Venice International Film Festival runs from August 27 through September 6. Click here for more information.

Forgotten Films: "Love Is a Dog from Hell" (1987)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 30 May 2008 15:00:00 GMT

This week, the Screengrab is honoring "the 15 Top Bars of Cinema", which provides us with a handy occasion to remember many filmmakers' favorite literary drunk, Charles Bukowski. Aside from the best-known Bukowksi-based movie, the 1987 Barfly (which Bukowski wrote in tribute to himself), the man has been well-represented on-screen in such films as the 1981 Tales of Ordinary Madness (in which his alter ego--"Charles Serking" he's called this time--is playing by an enthusiastically rutting Ben Gazzara) and the more recent Factotum starring Matt Dillon, as well as the posthumously assembled documentary Bukowski: Born Into This, which is full of footage of the man himself, explaining the world to the camera to kill time while wondering when his good friend Peaches is going to call. Worth tracking down: J. J. Villard's 2003, award-winning animated short Son of Satan, a heart-warming tale of cruel youth based on a Bukowski story. (We're still holding out hope that we might someday get to see the 1977 Supervan, in which Bukowski is said to have a small, uncredited role as "Wet T-Short Contest Water Boy.") The real ringer in the Bukowski filmography is the 1987 Belgian feature Love Is a Dog from Hell, a sensitive three-part story about a man with a romantic spirit who longs to be in love and to be loved but whose inability to meet the real world halfway dooms him to a life of terminal loneliness. It was directed by Dominique Deruddre, who used Bukowksi's story "The Copulating Mermaid of Venice, California" as the basis for a short film and then came up with the other two episodes as lead-ins to the concluding episode so that he could expand it to a feature. It's about how the adult Harry (Josse De Pauw), a ruined drunk in his early thirties, finds one night of bliss with a beautiful woman who can't reject him--a corpse (Florence Beliard) that he and a buddy swipe from the back of a hearse.

All the major Bukowski movies have been made by foreign directors--the Italian Marco Ferreri (Tales of Ordinary Madness), the Swiss-German Barbet Schroeder (Barfly), the Norwegian Bent Hamer (Factotum). Probably they see his work as giving them a chance to explore the parts of America that don't make it into Hollywood movies, and part of the fascination of those movies has been seeing where those guys have gone when they've landed in L.A. with Bukowski as a tour guide. Love Is a Dog from Hell is different in that it transposes the material to a European setting, and it feels very different. In the opening sequence, the twelve-year-old Harry (Geert Hunaerts) is starting to feel sexual urges which are all mixed up with the soaring, unattainable romantic feelings he experiences watching a movie, in which the princess in need of rescuing is played by the same blonde actress who'll later turn up as his necrophiliac soul mate. And in the middle section, with De Pauw as the adolescent Harry, a dead man walking as the high school graduation dance approaches. The dance is the high point of the movie. Harry the teenager expresses his hopeless romantic feelings by writing poetry, but his body seems to be expressing its gnarly desires by bestowing on him a case of acne that makes him look like something out of a David Cronenberg movie. In his peak of daring, Harry wraps his exploding-pizza face in toilet paper in the men's room and then successfully asks his dream girl to dance with him. It's as lucky as he'll ever get until he starts dating the newly deceased.

In the movies that others have shot on Bukowski's home turf, the directors have celebrated the wildness and low-rent hedonism that are the pay-off for his acceptance of himself as a "failure" by the standards of polite society; those directors probably see him as one of the last embodiments of the American frontier spirit. But Love Is a Dog from Hell concentrates on the reject's sorrow and rage over what he's being denied, and it has a gentle, heartbroken quality that goes with the country-village look of the settings and the soft light and the slight off-ness of the high school band's versions of American pop songs from the 1950s. It's an art movie, but of a special kind: it's one of those foreign films that, because of its subject matter, was thrust not into the art theaters but into the grindhouses. It played there under the title Crazy Love, and that's the title under which it's now available on DVD.

"A Tiger Can Devour You; A Pussycat Cannot": Jacques Vergès on Barbet Schroeder

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 09 May 2008 14:45:00 GMT

A while back, a friend of mine and I -- neither of us members of the odd species of paranoids usually referred to as 9/11 conspiracy theorists -- were discussing that, just the same, there were some troubling questions about the aftermath of the attacks, like the shifting story of what happened on Flight 93, the all-too-convienient discovery of one of the terrorists' passports in the wreckage, or the fact that several of the men identified as the 9/11 attackers have since turned up alive, well, and innocent of any wrongdoing. When I asked why, given that this was one of the most important historical events in the history of the modern world, so few people seemed interested in getting the facts straight, he said, essentially, no one cares about giving murderous terrorists a fair hearing.

Jacques Vergès does. The subject of Barbet Schroeder's latest documentary film, Terror's Advocate, Vergès is one of the few people in the world who believes in defending the indefensible. Having first defended and later married an Algerian woman accused of terror-bombing French civilians during the war against occupation there, the notorious attorney has gone on to represent people most of the world would just as soon see buried alive in a deep, dark hole: Carlos the Jackal, Klaus Barbie and Khmer Rouge bigwig Khieu Samphan. The question at the heart of Terror's Advocate is a compelling one: is Vergès as he describes himself, a dedicated anti-colonialist who believes in his heart that even the worst people deserve a fair defense, an adequate trial, and a chance to make their voices heard? Or is he, as Schroeder describes him, a decadent aesthete and a monster whose clients are little more than devils in human shape?

The question is hardly resolved when the Telegraph's Sheila Johnston talks to both men at Cannes. Each claims to have gotten one over on the other after the completion of filming; Schroeder draws self-flattering comparisons ("I asked all the right questions") between the interviews he did with Vergès and those he did earlier in his career with Idi Amin in an earlier documentary, Idi Amin: A Self-Portrait, where he famously coaxed the African dictator into revealing himself as a horrible brute. Vergès, for his part, is amused by the entire thing, claiming that people aren't so easily fooled and that if the film is well-received, it will be because of himself. "A message is being put across in the media that I'm a bastard," he tells Johnston with a swagger, but "this film will give (people) even more reasons to love me."

Tribeca Film Festival Review: "Savage Grace"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 14:00:00 GMT

The 1985 book Savage Grace by Natalie Robins and Steven M. L. Aronson, told the story of Barbara Daly, a social climbing beauty who married Brooks Baekeland, the heir to a plastics fortune, and her incestuous relationship with her damaged son, Tony, who wound up stabbing her to death in 1972. Coming out when it did, in the era of the Reagans and Dynasty and Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, the book had a special appeal, especially since it was written mostly in the form of an oral history, with testimony from various observers and other interested parties. Tony's murder of his mother may have made it possible to file it neatly under "true crime", but what gave it is juice was the chance to sit in on what amounted to a seminar's worth of gossip about just how deeply twisted and fucked-up a very rich, very beautiful, very socially ambitious family really was. For maximum impact, the book ought to have been filmed not long after it came out, maybe with Brian De Palma or the Barbet Schroeder of Reversal of Fortune at the helm, but it might still be good sleazy fun if Tom Kalin hadn't gotten ahold of it.

As he demonstrated with his first film, the art-house train wreck Swoon, Kalin lacks, and may be completely uninterested in, certain attributes that are helpful to narrative filmmakers. He isn't very good at working with actors to develop characters, he can't shape his materials into a coherent story, and he has no ability to create a sense of believable life onscreen. What he mainly has is an interest--a chilly, academic interest--in "transgressive" behavior that, in Swoon, resulted in a movie that, to the extent that it was coherent at all, seemed to suggest that Leopold and Loeb were martyred victims of society because all they did was kill a kid, whereas everybody else was homophobic. Savage Grace seems taken with the idea of Barbara Daly Baekeland as heroic victim, a woman who's so much ;arger than life that the world can't possibly give her all the love and attention she requires. It's a choice that cuts off Julianne Moore's oxygen supply as an actress; instead of getting the chance to play the sacred monster of the book, she's stuck in a vaccuum, working her Mona Lisa smile. The movie begins with Barbara (Julianne Moore) and Brooks (Stephen Dillane, whose performance as a stiffly dashing natural aristocrat looks to have been researched by spending a few mornings studying Eric Braeden's Victor on The Young and the Restless) already married, and already practically sworn enemies. It's less interested in even comprehending how they wound up together than in charting the downward spiral of Barbara and Tony (played as an adult by Eddie Redmayne, a relative newcomer to movies who needs to learn that it's okay to just tell the camerman, "Look, don't light me so that I look like that guy in Napoloen Dynamite, okay?"), in each other's arms.

Even with Moore spouting such lines to her son as, "Will you still love me when my hair is gray and my tits are sagging?", the relationship is much closer and more tender than it was portrayed in the book; Barbara is no longer the kind of woman who'd ship her kid off to school to get him out of her way while she's planning to lay siege to the dinner-party circuit, and Tony is no longer a violent, angry boy whose final attack on his mother was just the last in a series. (The actual death scene is staged as a Sid and Nancy-style cop-out: Hey, let's go in the kitchen and act out hysterical scenes from old Joan Crawford movies, oh shit, look out for that knife!) It would seem odd if Tony did have a well of killing rage stored up against his mother in this version, because Moore's Barbara doesn't seem to cause him much pain; her social-climbing foolishness hurts no one but herself. Dishonest as it is, what really kills the movie is Kalin's simple inability to bring any of this stuff to life. His erotic images--Tony dancing on the beach with another boy to please a girl he likes; Barbara, at the wheel of a car with Tony and the girl in the back seat, swerving around to toss them into each other's arms; a little homage to Un Chant d'Amour with Tony's boyfriend from the beach delicately slipping a puff of cigarette smoke into his mouth-- have no excitement to them, and the most explicit sex scene, with Barbara coming to Brooks as a supplicant on her knees and he brutally taking her from behind, is mean-spirited in a way that does nothing but stress the dubious notion of Barbara as everybody's victim. She winds up alone in her big house, attempting suicide in between bouts of sex with gay men, including her son. Julianne Moore goes through her paces dutifully, but she might need to take a little break from representing scandalously rethought versions of maternal figures from earlier eras. The truth is that she doesn't get much of a chance here to do anything that doesn't set off echoes of things she's done before, and when you consider what she actually gets up to here, it's kind of scary to think that she's in a rut.

Jessica Yu's Protagonist

Peter Smith — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 20:00:00 GMT

Jessica Yu's previous documentary feature, In the Realms of the Unreal, did a scarily inventive job of fleshing out the fantasy life of the reclusive "outsider artist" Henry Darger and detailing the lonely existence from which Darger had only his imagination as escape. For her next trick, Yu was offered the job of making a film about one of the great shapers of classical tragedy, Euripides. Yu took them up on it, sort of: her new film Protagonist intercuts between four men as each describes part of the major dramatic arc of his life, according to Euripides' chain-reaction formula of "Provocation" followed by "Opportunity", leading to "Doubt", etc. Yu sifted through hundreds of potential candidates before settling on her four stars. As it happens, the final four included her husband, the writer Mark Salzman, who narrates a hilarious account of his adolescent attempt to transform himself into Caine from Kung Fu. [Also memorably retold in his memoir Lost in Place. — ed.]

The others are Hans-Joachim Klein, a former German terrorist who participated in the 1975 attack on meeting of OPEC leaders in Vienna (and who can also be seen in another current documentary, Barbet Schroeder's Terror's Advocate); Mark Pierpont, who spent years proselytizing for Christianity as a "cure" for homosexuality, using himself as Exhibit A, before he snapped out of it; and Joe Loya, whose rough childhood shaped him into a nihilistic serial bank robber. About the worst thing you can say about the finished film is that, with four good stories split up over the course of its running time, it can leave you a little hungry for more, and in this interview with Aaron Hillis, Yu confirms that she had to cut out a lot of good stuff. (Here's hoping the DVD will make room for some choice deleted scenes.)

One surprise is that, having concentrated on getting the subjects who seemed best suited to her game plan, she found herself making a movie about what seems to be a specifically male form of craziness. She was looking for people who thought they "had to go on this quest where they had lost track of the original idea — we called it the 'Fever' stage — and then that fever needed to be broken by one moment, this dark epiphany, where they realized, 'What am I doing?'. . . It's something you see in drama all the time, in narratives, but it hardly ever happens in real life, yet it seems to have happened to them. The five or six women we found, when things went awry, tended to notice things were falling apart. Then it would go to an end and they would stop what they were doing. But the men seemed to be going full speed and then crash into a wall. That, for many reasons, was what we were looking for: the crash, not things crumbling."

— Phil Nugent