The 11th Annual Philadelphia Festival of World Cinema

By Rick Curnutte

Richard A. Curnutte, Jr. is the Editor of The Film Journal. He has studied English and Film at Ohio University and The Ohio State University. He is a founding member of the Central Ohio Film Critics Association and a member of the Online Film Critics Society.

54 precocious, beautiful school girls descend a staircase into the subway system below, their mannered marching scored like a funeral dirge. As they approach the train platform, the music becoming more lively, they begin to dance about, engaging in the language of youth, all of it silent to us, but evident through their lovely faces, painting a portrait of blooming wonder. The sleepy people milling about them seem oblivious to the wonderment they imbue. Suddenly, as the next train approaches, they link hands, step over the restricted yellow line, count 1-2-3 and jump in front of the train. We see, very briefly, a girl's head being crushed flat, then the train and bystanders are showered with a sheet of blood. This haunting, horrific scenario begins Ion Sono's Suicide Club. This is the type of cinema that permeated the 11th Annual Philadelphia Festival of World Cinema. Less concerned with the process of studio acquisitions and dealmaking than the "Major" festivals like Sundance, the PFWC instead focuses on stellar retrospectives (John Sayles, Ken Russell, John Schlesinger), cutting-edge independent films and a bounty of international treasures.

Take Valeska Grisebach's Be My Star, a stellar debut film about teenage love. Unlike her American counterpart, Larry Clark, whose Kids and Bully seem to concern themselves with every aspect of adolescence except for reality, the German Grisebach lends her film an aura of almost excruciating authenticity. Like Clark, Grisebach uses nonprofessional actors. Unlike in Clark's films, however, the teens here do more than "perform" realistically. They act with a kind of natural abandon, their performances much more nuanced than could have been expected. The 65 minute film follows the tremulous courtship of 14-year-old Nicole (Nicole Glaser) and Christopher (Christopher Schops). Nicole and Christopher seem to want nothing more than to fall in love and live together forever. But reality, along with teenage hormones, conspire against them almost from the beginning. Nearly every frame of the judiciously edited Star speaks with urgency and honesty. Often morose without subverting into cheap sentimentality, Be My Star announces the arrival of a major new talent.

Already a hit at last year's Toronto and Venice Film Festivals and one of 2001's most acclaimed unreleased films, Laurent Cantet's L'emploi du temps (Time Out) remains a strangely moving curiosity long after it has gone black. Essentially a story about a grand liar (Vincent has lost his job, but failed to mention it to his family), L'emploi du temps is eminently forceful and important. Though many critics have assumed that Vincent (Aurélien Recoing) is ashamed of his failure, it seemed to me that Vincent enjoys quite a bit the games he plays, though his scheme to take money from friends through a phony investment puts him in over his head. Enter veteran con man Jean-Michel (the wily Serge Livrozet), who sets Vincent up as a partner in his low-level moneymaking scams. Recoing is an actor of uncommon talent, his large frame makes him imposing, but his puppy dog eyes and muted gaze give him the appearance of a child. Conversely, Livrozet, who's slight physical size would make him seem undaunting, has the personality of a mongoose and his sly demeanor makes him stand out among the film's lesser personalities. Cantet directs with a very straightforward style, letting the material and the marvelous performers carry the picture. When Vincent finally goes "legit", it is played as a joke against him, rather than a triumph. It only succeeds because Cantet and Recoing allow Vincent to be both the instigator and the butt of the joke.

An entry at this year's Sundance Film Festival, Lucy Walker's riveting documentary Devil's Playground has the distinction of being the only film that has portrayed so intimately the lives of Amish youth. In a little-known ritual, Amish boys and girls, between the ages of 16 and 21, are allowed to taste the pleasures of the "English": they drink, smoke, do drugs, have sex. The idea is for them to contrast their simple Amish upbringing with the ways of the secular world. At the end of this journey, known as Rumspringa, the boy or girl must decide to either be baptized in the church and join the Amish community or remain a part of the English world. They can decide to join the church at any time in their life. But if they return to be baptized, then leave the church, they will be banished for life. Weaving throughout her film the lives of several struggling youths (including a drug-dealing adolescent, a banished girl going to college and several male and female Amish looking for answers in a mixed-up version of reality), Walker's film is both revelatory and redemptive.

In Travis Crawford's "Danger After Dark" series, the weird and macabre prevailed. The aforementioned Suicide Club was, without question, the most squirm-inducing picture I saw, complete with long chains of human skin sewn together, body parts galore and more blood than every other film I saw combined. Director Sono often seems torn between making a message film and an exploitative one, but as a purely visceral cinematic experience, Suicide Club had no peer at this festival. Underground indie director James Fotopoulos' Back Against the Wall, a seemingly drab experiment in indulgent minimalism (I didn't even know there was such a thing), bears all of the longing to be compared to early Lynch or Cronenberg, but none of the artistic weight to support such a claim. In fact, Back Against the Wall, a film I didn't even care for upon initially seeing, inhabits a completely different place in the world of freakish cinema. Lynch and Cronenberg, indeed auteurs of the deranged, nevertheless employ glamorously strange worlds. Fotopoulos' film exists in a dismal, bleak and entirely enclosed world of paranoia and nothingness. On the surface a film about sex and repression, Back Against the Wall seems to be speaking more to isolation and loneliness of physicality and soul. It is an abysmal portrait of humanity, somewhat empty but still effective. Rather than utilizing his nonprofessional cast to call attention to the film's low-budget trappings, Fotopoulos simply hazards an opportunity to dish them out as cold, dispensible window dressing, important components that still seem to disappear into their surroundings. Back Against the Wall is a hard film to endure. Indeed, its tedious nature will make it hard to revisit, but repeated viewings will probably be necessary to take in all of its layers. Finally, Japanese auteur-of-the-moment Takashi Miike (Audition, Dead or Alive) gave the PWFC a welcome quirkiness with The Happiness of the Katakuris. The story of a family running a bed and breakfast, Miike's neo-musical has the Katakuris balling a never-ending string of guests who don't seem to want to stay alive. Not wanting to lose the family business, they decide to bury the bodies near a toxic lake.Miike combines stop-motion animation, outrageous showtunes and a vividly macabre sense of humor to this entry into his singularly innovative body of work.

In addition, Istvan Szabo (Mephisto) delivered the ho-hum, Nazi-baiting docudrama, Taking Sides, featuring a bored Stellan Skarsgård and a heaving, sweaty Harvey Keitel. Beatriz Flores Silva's Tricky Life was a slight, sugary fable about a single mom, turned hooker, turned media darling, turned wife of a cop. Isamu Nakae's lush but empty Twixt Calm & Passion squandered its beautiful photography and two talented leads, Kelly Chen and Yutaka Takenouchi. Finally, the retrospective tribute to Ken Russell gave a great deal of acclaim to a filmmaker of whose contribution and value to cinema I have yet to figure out. His best film, Altered States, was nowhere to be found, but there was a scratchy, popping print screened of the uneven The Devils. Drifting choppily between satire and straightforward drama, The Devils almost succeeds thanks to a riveting performance by the always interesting Oliver Reed. Most distressing was Russell's ludicrous, horrible new film, The Fall of the Louse of Usher. An "adaptation" of the legendary Poe story, as well as others by the acclaimed horror writer and poet, Usher may become the film school equivalent of a petri dish, a prime example of what can happen when indulgent filmmakers gain access to the easy-bake style of DV shooting. Someone please lock Russell away in the lunatic asylum of his own creation. Quick, before he makes Wuthering Blights.

(Note: The highlight of the festival, the New Korean Cinema program, will be covered in full detail in the July/August edition of The Film Journal, where we will have a Showcase on The New Korean Cinema).

All in all, PFWC 11 was a rewarding experience. As it returns next year, this time as The Philadelphia Film Festival, I look forward to seeing how it has grown. This year saw it take significant leaps forward into notoriety. I hope it continues to do so.