I'm not yet mid-way through the Portland International Film Festival, but I've already seen nine movies since Friday. I'll be seeing the Iranian film
Turtles Can Fly tonight. Last night in addition to
Шиzа (
Schizo), which is a Kazakhstan/Russia production, I also saw the German flick
The Edukators.
These are the best I've seen so far...
- Buffalo Boy - Mua len Trau (Minh Nguyen-Vô, Vietnam)
Set in 1940s Vietnam, a fifteen year-old-boy must take his family's two water buffalo to higher ground after the season's rains completely flood the lowlands where they live and rot all the grasses. He hooks up with some herders who are basically a traveling gang of miscreants who drink and gamble and rape their way across the countryside with a few dozen buffalo in tow. The boy also learns old dark secrets from his father's past. Buffalo Boy is a coming-of-age story and a terribly fascinating look at purely agrarian Vietnam removed from the political struggles with the French occupiers or of course any of the later wartime era that has become familiar territory in film the past twenty-five years. Beautifully shot by cinematographer Yves Cape, most of the narrative takes place on plains flooded as far as they eye can see - shot on location in the Ca Mau provine. Amazingly, this is director Nguyen-Vô's debut effort, and all but one of the actors in the film have never worked in front of a camera before. Ambitious and beautiful.
- The Edukators - Die Fetten Jahre sind Vorbei (Hans Weingartner, Germany)
Sort of a mix between Fight Club, Panic Room and "The Ransom of Red Chief", done as essentially a comedy and with some strong social commentary too. Three young German twentysomethings take their hate of class inequity to a strange battlefield: they break into the estates of millionares when they aren't home and rearrange their furniture with acts of minor non-permanent vandalism leaving messages that money is evil and their riegns of comfort and decadence are coming to an end. They don't steal anything, other than the wealthy homeowners' sense of security and, they hope, cause them to reevaluate their morality. Trouble comes when they pick a target with a personal connection who they kidnap when he unexpectedly walks in on them. Funny, smart and compelling.
- Cold Light - Kaldaljós (Hilmar Oddsson, Iceland)
A quiet and detached man, probably forty-years-old, in contemporary urban Iceland joins an art night-class at a local university. We learn he has been drawing since he was a young boy, when he lived with his sister, mother and fisherman father in a small, secluded fishing village in the mountains. Through flashbacks we see he believes he possesses a sort of clairvoyance through his art, and that he had predicted pain and tragedy explains why he is so cold and distant as an adult. But he falls in love with his art teacher, and through that relationship he reexamines events from his childhood and hopefully starts to come back to life. Gorgeous wintery Icelandic setting, mixed with a bit of magical realism and a probing character study.
and
Dear Frankie are both sweet and well-made Brit flicks but a little too slight to be really great,
The Ballad of Jack & Rose has some great performances but suffers from an unfocused narrative and
Schizo while good but far from spectacular if nothing else it is a very interesting look at the societal margins inside Kazakhstan.
Mercano the Martian, a cartoon from Argentina, was the only real waste of time thus far. Only internet quality at best, it's not terribly funny and it awkwardly attempts to graft social commentary into the nonsense. It does have a decnet punchline, but not really worth the ride to get there.
As for
The Merchant of Venice, it's one of Billy Shakespeare's most problematic plays...and the movie is no different. Pretty faithful adaptation by Michael Radford (
Il Postino), but while lovely to look at ultimately this one leaves me cold. Pacino is not the problem however. Al of course is an actor who goes over-the-top more often than not (unfortunately), but here he is quite controlled and actually manages to bring a good deal of humanity to the character of Shylock - which isn't always easy when you look at the way Shakespeare wrote the role. Jeremy Irons is fine as Antonio, but I continue to have a problem with Joseph Finnes. I just don't buy him as a credible screen presence. The shifting tones of the play/film are awkward to me, the perfect example being the dramatic hearing where Shylock wants his pound of flesh but Portia turns up disguised as a man as the scholar who settles the matter. There's too much comedy mixed in with what I think is hard to take as anything but tragedy. But that's the real problem of this play and makes it difficult to determine what Shakespeare was trying to say about Jews, if much of anything at all other than using them as stereotypes. That problem will continue to hang over the play, no matter who adapts the movie from it.
ANYway, those three films I highlighted are all very much worth seeing.
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