Grit and Glamour



Ghost Hunter: Charlotte Rampling in Under the Sand.

PFWC 2001 has something for everyone.

by Ruth and Archie Perlmutter

PFWC is on the road to festi-Valhalla. There is something for everyone — glamour for the mainstreamers, comedy for entertainment-seekers, "danger after dark" for the "screenagers" and an array of foreign films from every part of the globe.

There are plenty of upbeat comedies, from Waiting for the Messiah (Daniel Burman), a heartwarming portrait of growing up Jewish in Argentina, to the Polish The Big Animal, a whimsical adult fairy tale. The fourth film by Polish filmmaker Jerzy Stuhr, a veteran actor in Kieslowski’s films (Camera Buff and Three Colors: White ), Animal adapts an unfinished 1973 script by his "best friend" Kieslowski. Stuhr plays the lead as a humdrum clerk who adopts a dromedary to escape boredom and thereby incurs the jealousy and rejection of his village. The "big animal," not a familiar household pet, takes on allegorical significance about intolerance and the rigidity of bureaucratic banality.

When the typically droll wit of Central Europe is good, it is very good, as in Marshal Tito’s Spirit (Vinko Bresan), another send-up of the establishment. On an impoverished Croatian island, covert communists emerge to make "capital" off the presumed sighting of the ghost of Tito at the funeral of a Yugoslav soldier. The superstitious townspeople are gripped by gleeful greed at the prospect of exploiting the "ghost" to promote what the mayor euphemistically calls "socialist" tourism. A low-budget political satire with grainy, pseudo-realistic images and wry, ironic charm.

Five strong character-driven classical dramas display impressive performances. Krzysztof Zanussi’s Life as a Fatal Sexually Transmitted Disease is a Polish film about Tomasz, a cynical middle-aged doctor facing his own impending death. Played with ironic dry wit and appropriate solemnity by Zbigniew Zapasiewicz, Tomasz sets out to challenge the beliefs of an ambivalent monk and the romantic illusions of a young couple in love. Like his colleague Kieslowski, Zanussi is an idealist who pursues issues of moral choice, faith and the yearning for evidence of God’s presence. Despite the gravity of its musings about the human condition, the film is witty and never ponderous.

Death in a different way plays a major role in Under the Sand (François Ozon), an elegant film about mourning. In a great performance, Charlotte Rampling plays Marie, a bereaved wife who struggles to come to terms with the disappearance of her husband. In the midst of Marie’s efforts to resume her old life, the friendly ghost of her missing spouse returns to haunt her, and the viewer is left to ponder his unexplained disappearance. This sober drama represents a departure for French filmmaker Ozon, best known for hard-edged shockers like See The Sea and Sitcom. For all its meditative and elegiac mood, however, Under the Sand still displays Ozon’s skill in portraying ambiguity in the motivations of his characters.

Rampling has a smaller role in Aberdeen (Hans Petter Moland), a taut road movie about a desperate attempt to reform an alcoholic husband/father and restore the unity of a dysfunctional nuclear family. Stellan Skarsgård (Breaking the Waves) is superb as the rummy whose neurotic, drug-addicted daughter (Lena Headey) pulls him kicking and screaming from London to Oslo to Aberdeen, to rejoin his estranged wife (Rampling). Headey alternates between insistent determination and vulnerability, while Skarsgård is by turns recalcitrant and consumed with self-loathing.

The King Is Alive, by Danish filmmaker Kristian Levering, concerns eleven disparate tourists stranded in a remote Namibian desert. Like survivors from an actors’ workshop, they try to divert themselves by rehearsing King Lear, whose sanity was similarly jeopardized by disorientation. Involving self-revelations and engrossing ruminations about life play out in a stark doom-laden setting. Actors like Janet McTeer, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Romane Bohringer contribute to a solid ensemble piece about the terror of inner truths that emerge in a life-threatening reality and about the crucial need for artistic self- expression to make life bearable.

Concerned with Italian Jews, The Sky Will Fall (Andrea and Antonio Frazzi) is graced with able performances by Isabella Rossellini and Jeroen Krabbé, the same duo who starred in last year’s Left Luggage. Adapted from an autobiographical novel by Lorenza Mazzetti about her own experiences in WWII Tuscany, the family tragedy brings out all the personal and historical factors of that time: the gullibility of Italians who were misled by Mussolini and the naïveté of others, who became apologetic and secretive about their Jewishness. Set in a luxurious campagna, the film is reminiscent of The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, a far more accomplished evocation of the plight of affluent Italian Jews caught in the maw of Fascism. But the film’s beauty and earnestness offset some of its predictable melodramatic excesses.

A number of films reflect the marginalization of diasporal populations in postcolonial societies as they experience prejudice, impoverishment and cultural deprivation. The Peruvian The Back of the World (Javier Corcuera), is a gripping tripartite portrait of the silent, unseen and disaffected. Focusing on despair and resilience, the gritty doc exposes the dark side of globalization.

The fragmentation of families that stems from diluted ethnic identities takes its toll on the characters of Maryam (Ramin Serry). A first film, made by an Iranian-American, it takes place in a suburb of New Jersey during the Iranian hostage crisis. Although over-extended in its awkward attempts to incorporate personal and political complications, the timely film succeeds in telling an involving multi-cultural story about the effect of remote political events on family and community relations.

The Swedish Before the Storm (Reza Parsa), is also a first film by an Iranian and has a similar theme — about third world politics that come to haunt the apparently carefree first world. Written and directed by Parsa, who has lived in Sweden for twenty years, it concerns an émigré taxi driver who tries to live a normal family life in Sweden until his Middle Eastern career as a terrorist catches up with him and he is forced to undertake a dreadful mission. Things get more involved when he befriends a 12-year-old boy (the director calls him a "miniature De Niro"), who has to marshal his own courage to confront a vicious bully. Although the film is florid toward the end with overly-familiar thriller sequences, Before the Storm is a fine accomplishment for a debut film.

The ambitious PFWC may not bring back Conan the Barbarian nor enter you into Gladiator’s arena, but you will be rewarded with a cornucopia of screen gems that transcend the formulaic banality of the multiplex syndrome.