Competition
Dir. Wong Ching Po

The viewer who is at least superficially familiar with Asian cinema of the past decade will have no difficulty in taking the movie into its constituent parts which he has already seen elsewhere. The lovers – she is, to put it plainly, nuts, and to put it poetically, God’s fool, and he is a silent pauper – enjoy their toy festivities of love, merry-go-rounds, garlands of lanterns and toy pandas. Self-mutilation (of which peeling the skin from one’s fingers is the most innocuous) is abundantly offered by the most famous directors. Police stories with shoot-outs and chases along green slopes shot with spectacular slow-motion and fade-outs constitute Asian cinematic know-how. The movie is divided into five chapters persistently using the words “Devil” and “Armageddon” in their titles. It makes use of detective narration, so it is not fare to divulge the plot.

“Revenge” is constructed in such a way that it is not possible to make it sound interesting without disclosing its plot twists. And still you might get the desire to see the film, taking into account that it has been quite some time since the screen emanated such fury defending the little, frail, lost world of someone who cannot assimilate in society. And still if nobody interferes with him, he has the strength to stand on his own two feet, to feel happiness and face the world of harsh omnipresent and lawful violence, which is the equivalent of any known social conglomerates or institutions. This fury outpours into the sweetest images of revenge: pour petrol into the throat, fire into the mouth and watch your enemy burn from within. Were there ever more complete, thirst-quenching punishments of self-confident injustice on screen?

The plot of the movie was invented by the 27-year-old son of a Hong-Kong multimillionaire Juno Mak. From Wikipedia we can learn that at school he used to fall behind in all subjects from mathematics to physical education, had to retake the year’s course three times, squandered a million of father’s dollars on a house which he bought for his first girlfriend and that his singing career was accompanied by scandals, that he gets top listing in charts allegedly because his father buys out al his recordings and at Juno’s concerts he bribes the entire crowd so that they pretend to be his fans. When Juno acts he seems to explode. And it is so nice that there are people among the rich who look upon their situation as an exceptional one and do not consider themselves part of the horde of the chosen few. That they are ready and prepared to express the fury which the hangdog crowd cannot even feel, but which it is necessary to feel and pass on like a relay torch.

Alexey Vasiliev

American Translation
COMPETITON
Dir. Pascal Arnold, Jean-Marc Barr

A youth named Chris drives across France in a van, in which he also lives and sleeps, changing his only two shirts. But those are real party slim line shirts, one is yellow with red and blue flowers, the other is brown with cream stripes. He also suffers from the sweaty smell in his armpits when he happens to strangle someone in the forest. He would rather walk naked, which he gladly does, when the daughter of a wealthy American lets him stay in her apartment after a night of love. Gradually he will disclose and present to her all the constituents of his life: bisexual porn, group sex, laying gay guys and murders. In return he will ask her to marry him and teach him American. He does not understand the lyrics in those energetic songs of revolt and freedom he listens to in his car.

In the post-war French art the image of America as a road along which two young lovers are speeding, loving each other until the police do part them, is even more frequent than in America itself. “L'horloger d'Everton” is just about it and also about America. It was written by Georges Simenon in 1954, 13 years earlier than the American movie “Bonnie and Clyde” and even earlier than the appearance of James Dean. Moreover, it was transferred onto the French rural road in Tavernier’s “L'horloger de Saint-Paul” 20 years after the publication of the novel. The existential awakening experienced by Chris during murders and seductions, which appears again and again in the closing quotes from the studies on the psychology of serial killers, is that very crocodile tail, which cuts him off from the rest of the world, and which the sailor Querelle so happily felt each time he yielded to guys or cut their throats in the 1947 novel by Genet.

The actor Jean-Marc Barr to whom we owe probably the most beautiful male character of the 80s – the deep-sea diver Jacques Mayol in Besson’s “Le grand bleu”, turned to directing on the eve of the Millennium. In collaboration with Pascal Arnold they shot a trilogy about the impossibility of freedom in France (“Lovers”), the USA (“Too Much Flesh”) and India (“Being Light”). They adhered to the “Dogma” technique and worked as artisans, meaning that Arnold wrote scripts, Barr video-recorded and edited and the actors were often mingled with the usual crowd. In their new movie, however provocative it may seem, they are not free of traditions as authors. The 26-year-old Pierre Perrier («Douches froides», «Plein sud») as the protagonist is equally bound by the image of the eternal naked troubadour of sexual ambivalence. He was evidently accepted into the cartel after playing in Barr and Arnold’s “Chacun sa nuit”. In the new film Perrier did not only play the lead but also helped with the make-up and casting.

And there is something else. If something merits to become a tradition, it is exactly what the tradition cannot accept. i.e. the search for the route to freedom through the discovery of the points of freedom in the self-awareness of every unique and inimitable individual. This process is endless and to it the filmmakers made their contribution.

Alexey Vasiliev

Anarchy in Zirmunai (Anarchija Zirmunuose)
PERSPECTIVES
Dir. Saulius Drunga

The detective-like plot development is what fuels our interest in the movie, the title of which includes the word “anarchy” and the name of the dormitory district in Vilnius dating back to the late Soviet period. On the soundtrack we hear the phrase “Lithuanian mess” at least a couple of dozens of times. It is the only way to force outsiders to look into something they generally don’t want to hear about: mysteries, closed societies (which we are promised to be led into), hazards on the way to uncovering as yet unseen mechanisms. Everybody likes that.

In the opening sequence we see a frail youth with a big head on a thin neck photographed from behind. He is wearing a heavy spiked bracelet on his thin wrist. He runs up a few flights of stairs, rings a bell, demands rent from a young tenant. When it turns out that she can’t pay, she gets a blow between the eyes and we get the opening titles against the black background.

Next it is a hot summer day. We are in a sleepy suburban train heading to Vilnius through bucolic Lithuanian landscapes as we listen to the chatter of girls from the provinces and farms. The word “anarchy” is heard. One of the girls draws the menacing encircled “A” on the newspaper margins. The blond Ville, fed on fresh milk, stares at the “A”. She has cut off her tress and intends to enter the pedagogical institute in the capital. Her bag is filled with cans with mother’s jam and in solving the Zirmunuose mystery the letter “A” is our Miss Marple. If the detective-like structure is the locomotive, the actress Toma Vaskeviciute is the anchor of the movie. She is reminiscent of the young Di Caprio of the times of “This Boy's Life” and “What's Eating Gilbert Grape” not only in appearance. With her ironic squint and studied absent-minded look on her pretty face she signals the mental processes going on in the involuntary detective’s head and gives a wink to the viewer that now is the time to put two and two together. It goes without saying that Ville will rent that very flat, that the youngster will turn out to be a fidgety girl called Sandra who looks and behaves like a starved Annette Bening if the latter were to experience the tribulations of her characters from “In Dreams” “Hostage” and “American Beauty” all at once. Sandra will gradually let Ville on to the secrets of “Anarchy”, one of which is (straight from “Five Orange Pips”) the presence of one or more letters “a” in the spelling of the name, which lets you become a member of “Anarchy” and live under its protection.

I don’t feel like giving away the detective pot, but it is important to note that the peasant Ville will delve into the study of the subject deeper than she would have liked to, or than could have been imagined by girls and boys stitching the capital letter “A” on their jackets. She will go the Institute library and soon her flat will be filled not only with the guns and dollars stored by “Anarchy” members, but with copies of Che Gevara’s posters and Bakunin’s writings. The anarchy in Zirmunae will show its true wimpy face of deeply hurt children with too many hang-ups. Ville will watch it complete the circle – like a snake biting its own tale – with a mop in “McBurger’s”. Ville alone will learn what real anarchy is. A movie about the Lithuanian mess will turn out to be a familiar maxim relevant in any country and at any time that “knowledge is power”. That basic education and probably a pair of Ville’s sturdy peasant legs are necessary for a noble revolt instead of ridiculous outbreaks of hysterical misbehavior. And besides it also requires – as the movie will prove – at least one can of mother’s real home-made jam.

Alexey Vasiliev

Perspectives
Dir. Árni Ólafur Ásgeirsson

It is rewarding to observe that the invigorating winds of political correctness have penetrated the territories which were earlier off limits to them. Like, for example, a frail Icelandic fishing vessel where the sturdy crew should be sure that a woman on board forebodes trouble. But far from it, the gloomy Icelandic fishermen do not throw the newly arrived lady into the first wave, like their less reserved colleagues would probably do. Moreover, when the skipper of the rusty boat bearing the dramatic name «Undercurrent», decides to replace one of the crew, who tragically left them during an earlier expedition, with his troubled niece, they do not show any particularly emotional reaction. Though, as this hot pussy avows, she has slept with half the village before boarding the ship. It is not quite that the presence of a woman strains the complicated (as it inevitably transpires) relations in the fishing crew, which gradually succumbs to claustrophobia and loneliness. The employee of the department of fish scraping toils as hard as men do and in the evenings stares at the TV set watching the porn blockbuster «Sperminator», kept on board as a preventive measure. The woman as a representative of a different world and a different life is not so much a catalyst as an observer of the disintegration of the male circle. Then misfortune really strikes: lights go out, some one gets hurt, some one else chooses to become fish fodder. But on the whole, the woman has nothing to do with it.

The best parts of the movie are the inspiring shots of the rusty boat swaying on the waves, the atmospheric scenes from the fishermen’s everyday life, contrastive night shots of the flock of sea-gulls vainly hovering over the torn net which is no longer suitable for catching fish and the transparent daytime shots of the same sea-gulls who are allowed to feed on fish insides. The colors of this exotic spectacle are a pleasure to look at. It must be noted that color patches in this movie are more interesting than the dramatic structure (the group scriptwriter of the film are members of the Reykjavík theatre company Vestuport, who also act in the movie) with flashbacks inserted in the wrong places and seemingly normal characters performing unmotivated antics.

Stas Tyrkin

Perspectives
Dir. Uta Arning

When there is a multi-storied parking on the screen, the viewer has good reason to expect a car chase in the near future and almost certainly there will be a shoot-out. In the same way a lonely hotel or house spells imminent death at the hands of a murderer, an evil spirit or as a result of a suicide. Like in Hideo Nakata’s “Incite Mill”, a Japanese equivalent of “The Haunting” by Jan De Bont. Like in Govorukhin’s “Ten Little Indians”. Like in Kaneto Shindo’s “The Owl”, where a mother and a daughter, living in the only remaining house in the village, solved the problems of their life by taking the life of men, who chanced to come into their dwelling.

Viewers of the Moscow Festival might remember the dark musical comedy by Takashi Miike “Happiness of the Katakuris”. It dealt with a small family hotel which had been built at the site of the future highway, but the large-scale plans changed and the hotel was now standing in the middle of nowhere. That is why the owners heartily welcomed any chance customer. Things would not have been quite so bad if the visitors did not adopt the practice of dieing the very next morning.

“Snowchild” seems an ideal sequel to Miike’s film. This time the owner of the hotel expects her guests to part with their lives earlier, than with her. So she arranges everything accordingly: the rooms are gloomy, the meals are always the same, the railing on the veranda overlooking the precipice is not too high. Clients are wisely asked to pay in advance. The woman has even calculated the number of days it usually takes to carry out their intentions – two or three. But the essential element is the steep cliff with waves breaking at its foot. One look at it is sufficient to arouse suicidal thoughts. It is impossible not to jump from it, like from the notorious Beachy Head near Eastbourne in England.

It is only natural that the young German director Uta Arning decided to set her film about suicides in Japan. This way of ending one’s life is probably more popular here than anywhere else. At least this problem is openly talked about. Just remember the controversial “Suicide Club” by Shion Sono, where groups of schoolchildren held hands and merrily threw themselves under the wheels of an approaching train, jumped from castle walls or the roof of the school.

Lodgers of the Nameless Hotel (yes, that is what it is called) have better reasons to part with their lives, although their stories are incredibly trite: some one has been left by the loved one, some one has been deflowered, another one can’t complete a haiku and still another suffers from an unrealized sexual desire. People come here with the sole purpose of ending their lives quietly and elegantly. Guests are having breakfast, somewhere in the background a blurred figure appears in the window on the parapet and quietly disappears. No thud, no shout. No one would have noticed anything if an old lady had not uttered a cry. But immediately she acquired a businesslike air and started adding another point to the already monstrous figure in her notebook – 1908.
Given the seriousness of the topic, there are nevertheless quite a few grotesquely funny moments in the movie. The young psychoanalyst is using a teach-yourself book to get ready for her next telephone conversation with a potential suicide victim. The owner of the hotel usually has her artificial eyelashes glued at different heights on both eyes. Her son merrily installs photos of the lodgers, who have jumped from the cliff, on the wagons of his toy railroad.

It is heartwarming that in contrast to Sono or Miike, Uta Arning treats her characters with warmth and compassion. The hapless psychoanalyst sincerely cares for each of her “clients” and looks after her paralyzed father with touching faithfulness. The poet pushes the girl away form him no because he is heartless but because he understands that he is better suited to be her father than her lover. Even the owner of the hotel finally starts to see things clearly. But before it happened her own son had to jump from the parapet.

Maria Terakopian

Perspectives
Dir. Cornel George Popa

A very tired woman strolls before the video camera in the Budapest park with the microphone attached to her skirt from behind. She is a single mother of 26. A guy whom she knew in the nursery school and has completely forgotten since, learns that she is employed in a sex shop and persuades her to record a video about her work which is still shocking in the post-Soviet space. In the film we will see part of this poorly shot footage, where Dorina – that is her name – will introduce her work as very similar to that of an accountant. The rest of the movie, showing Dorina’s everyday life in the familiar worn-out interiors of a 10-storied block of flats and her work, is composed of mostly static digital shots. The result is something like a mixture of “Romanian wave” and Godard of the time of his social questionnaires like “2 ou 3 choses que je sais d'elle”.

But the barely perceptible comic exaggeration in the gait of the woman with the microphone should have put us on our guard. Soon we will discover that those around her are super temperamental and easily recognizable prototypes. Like the familiar character of the neighbor who nags the janitress about the elevator which is always out of order and concludes her machine-gun utterance with the fail-safe maxim: “Some day my dog will piss on me while I go down from my 10th floor”. Like the psychological portrait of the mother who fakes total helplessness before her 35-year-old son: “Have you brought me something tasty, dearest?” – “You can’t eat sweets!” “I don’t mean sweets, no… Tomatoes! I haven’t tasted tomatoes for a long time…” Or the social characteristic of Dorina’s father with his endless complaints about how it was under the Communists and where we are going now. Heading to the shop, he is indignant: “Do I look like someone who needs a list?”. And of course he forgets to buy milk for the 18-months-old grandchild but most certainly remembers to buy a bottle for himself, which he skillfully (in his opinion) conceals and from which he even more secretly sips and snarls back turning the air blue.

When we have had enough fun and have believed in the verisimilitude of a dozen of these characters, then at night they will all find themselves in Dorina’s sex shop and all of it will prove a superstructure over the Eduardo De Filippo-like high-strung situation comedy set in one place. For example, Dorina’s suitor, the flabby homosexual mister Nastase, sprouting bouquets and poetry is a typical comic womanizer from Austro-Hungarian operetta, who has finally come clean with his orientation and is sporting a gay-porno cassette in a plastic bag. I have no doubt that on Romanian TV this movie will have a long and happy life and people not only of Dorina’s age but of the age of her baby will nostalgically watch it some 25 years hence. Neither the pitiful cheapness nor the smart allusions to the cinema of the past years and far away countries will be a problem. Similarly in this country the former did not hamper the popularity of the rightfully beloved TV comedy “Cherchez la femme”, and the latter – of the movie “Hello, I am your Aunt!”

Alexey Vasiliev

Competition
Dir. Christoph Stark

“Do you think it’s a sin?” – asks Margareta (Grete) in pensiveness of her brother, an expressionist poet Georg Trakl, after they’ve just had a sexual intercourse in the background of picturesque falls. “I don’t know”, - answers the poet straightly. During the course of the film these two will present to public several prosaic bed scenes, made in a detailed format of soft porno.

However, according to Christoph Stark’s movie, short ecstatic encounters with his beloved one, didn’t bring relieve to the poor Trakl. His existence was poisoned by impossibility of full and complete confluence with his sister, whom he considered to be single body and soul. One day Grete offers her brother to run off to Australia together, where no one could disturb them in their forbidden love, but – tough luck! – Trakl can’t imagine his life without beautiful German language. The poet tries to redeem his frustration with huge doses of cocaine, which will finally drive him to his grave in 27 years old.

Trakl is convinced of miraculous force of sexual discontent by the artist Oskar Kokoschka, who is suffering from unhappy love for Mahler’s widow, Alma. Both Trakl and Kokoschka could’ve found it useful to get a consultation from another famous citizen of Vienna of those days - Sigmund Freud. But unfortunately, the famous psychoanalyst wasn’t pictured as the character of this tragic story.

By the fact, Trakl’s death is not reflected in the film, just like his heroic service in army during World War I of about his selfless work in Polish hospitals, where he, being tortured by depression, had to take care of dozens of badly wounded soldiers, all by himself. Having concealed the tragic end of Trakl’s life, the director ends his picture with the information about the suicide of poor Grete. Doesn’t it prove the fact that the complicated image of the “damned poet” (a bearer of the “mystery Austrian soul”) is not the main theme of Stark’s movie? Relationships of the relatives, which were, probably, much more complicated, are melodramatized and scandalized: theme of incest suddenly became very actual in this festival season…

Stas Tyrkin

Competition
Dir. Barbara Sass

To begin with, in reality the events turned out to happen in a much notorious way. The noted filmmaker Barbara Sass intentionally avoided the most chocking circumstances, which had taken place in 2007 in one of the Polish nunneries in the provincial town of Kazimierz Dolny. Anyhow, according to Sass, she did not try to document what happened there, and did not even talk with the nuns who were participants of the events.

A sense of taste and balance didn’t’ allow the helmer to exploit the most scandalous details which would certainly unnerve the viewer - in order to make one come to some more general conclusion. One of the two Polish entries into the Competition of The Moscow International - In the Name of the Devil – tells of the story about a priest, father Franciszek (Mariusz Bonaszewski), a renegade Franciscan monk and a charismatic charmer, who comes into the convent propagating a radically unorthodox conception of faith, calling on the nuns to devote to the Lord not only their souls, but their bodies too.

Foreseeing complications, the new confessor and his staunch assistant – the severe fanatic mother superior (Anna Radwan) barricaded the nunnery and enclosed it with barbed wire, so nobody was able to break through the thick stone walls. The inhabitants of the convent – mostly young and naïve girls, disarmed by religious fanatism, appear victims of mass psychosis. But in any community, whatever insane, always at least one person occurs who can oppose the total madness. The plot revolves around the 20-years old Anna, the girl who is tortured by nightmares from some terrible past. Whereas strongly determined to get rid from her demons,
Anna (Katarzyna Zawadzka) is trying to resist the manipulations of the priest who evidently substitutes himself for the God craving for the girls’ flesh.

Long before the premiere in Poland the film has been much rumoured about as the subversive gesture aimed against the institution of faith. “I myself am a Catholic and I have not done this film against the Church, - the director objects. - It was conceived against people who try to manipulate others so as to realize their goals”. Thus Anna’s revolt stands for mutiny against any kind of concealed and ingenious manipulation experienced by people in our informational society.

Classical narration deceitfully prompts us that we wisely predict the finale. Against all expectations the leader of the Polish ‘female cinema’ brings us to an absolutely unexpected ending telling something nonpresumable about the mysterious woman’s soul.

Nina Tsyrkun

Competition
Dir. Gustavo Loza

Taking into consideration that his mother is a crack-addict, it is not difficult to guess why the round-faced big-eyed 7-year-old protagonist of the movie has such a strange and not at all Mexican name Hendrix. In the song written by Serge Gainsbourg back in 1978 and called “Ex Fan des Sixties” Jane Birkin missed the legendary black guitarist together with all those who were the meaning of her youth - Brian Jones, Janis Joplin etc. That is not the case with the Mexican Nina. All their bequests and they themselves are still a part of her life. Only her own son Hendrix is calling for his Mom in vain at night. So Nina’s friend, the lesbian Ivana settles him with a family of gays, who have finally registered their marriage after ten years and who live in an impeccable house with a swimming pool. She herself is busy talking her brother into becoming a sperm donor for her friend’s egg cell, which Ivana wants to implant and then give birth to a child.

When one of the gays brings home an unknown boy, everyone is amazed - not merely the servants, but the newlywed, who is having a hangover, as well. During the first hour it is a sitcom familiar from Latino TV series with melodramatic and criminal injections. Servants and maids who have too many personal opinions, nevertheless do their job thoroughly, dusting photo albums like “Big Penis Book”, where the quirkier the fantasies of the rich, the larger their hearts, and by means of which housewives are given the right idea in an accessible language of easily foretold mishaps that all people are equally necessary and important.

But towards the end, when the boy is sent to the orphanage, the sodomites go to court and the lesbian is undergoing surgery at the Huston clinic of artificial insemination, the movie will reveal the contrast, which is probably the deepest for modern society. It is the contrast between what the establishment of today approves and what it tries to push away into he sphere of denunciated, the shocking TV news. The former is everything sterile, impersonal, orderly and artificial, like that insemination. And the latter is everything that lives and breathes. The former is created by the familiar (at least from Paul Anderson’s “Magnolia”) technique of monotonous enumeration achieved by cutting. The latter, the image of the living world which is being ousted, is the sole responsibility of Nailea Norvind playing Nina. While most actors are content with creating familiar stereotypes, Norvind resorts to “acting shrieks”, but communicates the sexual challenge, the animal dependence, Nina’s tears of helplessness and of that other world. This is important for the hierarchy of meanings in the film. The world of Hendrix’s blood mother. And it was Hendrix who caused all the hubbub. It is interesting, that the father of this fantastic actress was the Russian count Pavel Chegodayev Saxon. And her mother was an eminent psychotherapist Eva Norvind, who was hired in Hollywood to train Rene Russo in the sexual behavior, with which she flabbergasted us 12 years ago in “The Thomas Crown Affair”.

Alexey Vasiliev

Competition
Dir. Václav Havel

“Leaving” is the feature film version of the Vaclav Havel’s play, the draught of which he had written in the late ‘80s. At that time the play wasn’t completed since the author had been driven away with something more important: the former dissident, persecuted writer and a political prisoner took the helm of the Velvet Revolution, which ended years of Communistic regime in Czechoslovakia and brought him into the chair of the president of the Republic. But the demonstrative theatrical architecture of the film bears some more profound rationale. If, as Shakespere states, all the world’s a stage, politics are stage twice.
“
"Leaving” is the seriocomical grotesque or rather political pamphlet. No wonder the plot is loaded with lots of citations and allusions at the classical plays – from “The Cherry Orchard” to “King Lear” and even “Hamlet”. The story is focused around Vilém Rieger (Josef Abrham) - the newly dismissed chancellor of an unnamed country (though one shouldn’t look for any similarity between the protagonist and the author). The scene is laid at the premises of his beautiful country residence in the cherry orchard. Rieger, humiliated by sad circumstances of resignation, is told to make a crucial choice: either leave his comfortable state-owned villa or publicly support his successor, Vlastik Klein – his most hated political opponent.

The main hero is surrounded by whimsical figures of his family members, servants, the former secretary and a couple of ubiquitous paparazzi, who play not the last role in the chancellor’s future.

Among the brilliant cast Havel's wife, actress Dagmar Havlova must be singled out as his screen wife Irene. Though 74-years old Havel is a debutant in filmmaking, he is not an occasional person in cinema. The Havel family is closely connected with Czech film; his uncle Miloš built the famous Barrandov film studios, and his grandfather opened Lucerna Palace the first permanent cinema-theatre in Prague.

By the way, Havel says he won’t stand behind the camera anymore; but in this film he appears in a funny prankish cameo, summing up the message of the picture, which can be in other words put as follows: what frustrate the lives of those no longer in office may be less the loss of power than the loss of a sense of purpose, that is human impotence at finding oneself.

Nina Tsyrkun