Report From the 15th Annual Philadelphia Film Festival, March 30 - April 11, 2006

by dave heaton

I can't feasibly summarize a film festival that screened well over a hundred films when I only managed to see 10 of them. Instead I can only tell you about those 10 films, most of which were excellent. Two of them were way beyond excellent - Half Nelson and The Death of Mister Lazarescu rank among the most powerful films I've seen in years and years; here's hoping they get screened widely, and people go see them.

Check out www.phillyfests.com for more information on the festival.

American Dreamz (dir. Paul Weitz)

Though they're given different character names, Dennis Quaid and Willem Dafoe do occasionally spot-on impersonations of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, respectively, as part of the plot of the broad comedy American Dreamz. Quaid in particular has Bush's facial expressions down to a tee, while the film's script portrays him as a president who never reads and isn't allowed to, his handlers (led by the VP) fearing that reading the papers will just confuse him. And that's exactly what happens when he begins his second-term by deciding to read the papers, leading him with an unquenchable thirst for knowledge and an overwhelming sense of confusion, so much so that it threatens to disable his presidency.

That's one set-up for American Dreamz: the President's depression leads the VP to start a PR campaign for him, which ends up hinging on his appearing as a judge on the American Dreamz reality TV show, a clone of American Idol, where contestants compete to be the next big singing star. I say "one set-up", because the president is only one concern of the filmmakers, and as the film proceeds he seems more like a footnote than the main event, despite the film's early portrayal of current presidential politics being the only moments where the comedy aspires to more than just played-to-the-absolute-hilt silliness.

The film is also about the self-obsessed host of the show (Hugh Grant), the equally self-obsessed leading contestant, willing to do anything for fame (Mandy Moore), her maybe-boyfriend, a macho lunkhead (Chris Klein), and her chief competitor on the show, a would-be terrorist from the Middle East who really just wants to sing showtunes (Sam Golzari). All of these characters are sketched in ridiculously broad strokes. All are made fun of at every moment, and written as caricatures more than people, yet as the film continues the audience is routinely asked to care about each one of them, to feel for them in their endeavors. The social/political satire aspect of the film is ultimately washed away through an awkward wedding with feel-good vibes. The film becomes an over-the-top sitcom, with an unwillingness to take the jokes deep enough to matter outside of the film's world, which increasingly bears less and less resemblance to our own. The president starts out receiving well-deserved barbs and ends up as a lovable oaf, a stock character we've seen a million times before.

- dave heaton

The Death of Mister Lazarescu aka Moartea Dommului Lazarescu (dir. Cristi Puiu)

A fantastic interview in CinemaScope magazine with The Death of Mister Lazarescu director Cristi Puiu notes his description of the film as "an examination of love for one's fellow man." That will seem like an odd thing to say about a film that's essentially a real-time, fly-on-the-wall portrait of a dying man seeking medical help and struggling to find it. He (Ion Fiscuteanu) and the ambulance nurse (Luminita Gheorghiu) who becomes his guide through this purgatory turn to doctor after doctor, yet most are either busy from the bus accident that occurred the same night, pre-occupied with their own affairs, dismissive of his problems because he appears to be a drunkard, or restricted by their hosptial's limitations.

Yet love for one another is at the heart of this film, both because we're watching a close-up study of how people treat each other in a time of need and because we're pulled so strongly into the film that we're made to feel for the characters ourselves, to think of ourselves in every one of their shoes.

I can think of few films as absorbing and involving as this one. The camera lurks like an observer; though the scenes are quite carefully composed, and beautiful, we still feel like we've been brought completely into someone else's reality. Each moment that passes hits like a punch, each frame that passes reminds us of time's inevitable fading.

- dave heaton

Half Nelson (dir. Ryan Fleck)

In Half Nelson, 8th grade history teacher Dan (Ryan Gosling) teaches his students that history is the story of dialectics, of opposing forces meeting each other. Meanwhile, in his life outside of the classroom, he lives out his own internal struggle, one driven by the feeling that the world is going to hell, that there's nothing one person can do to defeat injustice, to make the world a fairer place. He watches the news and gets pissed off – at the unjustified war in Iraq, at the way the current administration tramples over human rights considerations. He gets depressed about the world, about what he can really do to make it better with his one class and his barely-getting-by life, and he turns to drugs for relief. He gets hooked on cocaine, and then switches to crack cause it's cheaper.

On paper Half Nelson might read like ludicrous melodrama: inner-city teacher is addicted to crack, befriends student who also has some family connections to the drug trade. As it plays on the screen, though, nothing about it is ludicrous. It's unmarked by the sentimental trappings of Hollywood drama, unmarked too by the seriousness and simplistic social lectures of 'message films'. Ryan Gosling's performance seems note-perfect, you feel his pain even when he's behaving like a self-involved ass.

Yet this isn't a film where the white lead is the focus and the mostly minority supporting characters are just props – each comes across like a real person. Shareeka Epps gives a remarkable, nuanced performance as Drey, the student whose relationship to her teacher becomes more complicated after she walks in on him smoking crack. Her story too is one of struggle, being pulled in various directions and trying to determine which to resist and which to follow. Half Nelson depicts its characters' predicaments as universal human ones. Many of us who have a desire to make the world a better place get frustrated with how hard that is. All of us have to deal with the often cold hard realities of life. And many of us feel like director Ryan Fleck, who said in the post-screening Q&A that the film was inspired by George W. Bush, who makes him want to smoke crack every day.

- dave heaton

Heading South aka Vers Le Sud (dir. Laurent Cantent)

Imperialism – in terms of culture, geography, and commercial matters – has been an underlying theme of several of the films I viewed at the festival, including French director Laurent Cantent's third film Heading South. On the surface this film is about three middle-aged women, each dissatisfied with her own life, who vacation in Haiti during the late '70s/early '80s. It's a time of poverty and political repression in that country, yet the North American women have something else on their mind: mostly sex, or at least companionship, with attractive teenaged Haitian boys. Brenda (Karen Young) and Ellen (Charlotte Rampling)'s fixation on the same boy, Legba (Menothy Cesar), is the film's central plot point. The two fight for his attention, for different reasons. Both are mostly unaware of his life outside of their company, projecting on him their own dreams and desires.

The film's success lies in the way it tells the greater story of Haiti, including the role of the US in the country's affairs, through this other smaller story which resonates in its own way with the larger themes of capitalism, power, and its effects. Serving as a sort of Greek chorus, commenting on the events and their meaning, is the film's most intriguing character: Albert (Lys Ambroise), raised by black militants and now working at a resort catering to white customers, viewing the damage done by what he considers the most dangerous weapon, dollars.

- dave heaton

Lady Vengeance aka Chin-jeol-han Geum-ha-ssi (dir. Park Chan-Wook)

Revenge has been the plot of a million films, and with his 'vengeance triology' Park Chan-Wook has added three more: Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy and Lady Vengeance. But Lady Vengeance is no mere revenge fantasy – it goes deeper and further than most, with both the filmmaking and the story.

Park Chan-Wook's style of filmmaking here is free-wheeling, almost carefree. There's ample digressions, quick fantasy sequences, little visual jokes that appear and exit. The film is stylish, colorful, and moves rapidly. Yet at its core it's also dark, sad, serious as cancer. The story revolves around Lee Geum-Ja (Lee Yeong-ae). Set-up for crimes she didn't commit – and set-up in a way that also separated her from her newborn child – she serves a jail term while planning her revenge. In jail she becomes a guardian angel of sorts, helping out her fellow prisoners in a way that makes them willing to return the favor by helping her exact her revenge years later. During her prison term she's also somehow become a beloved media figure. The media attention, her role as 'guardian angel', her simultaneous adoption of a spiritual demeanor and internal rejection of it…all of this gives the story a richer array of themes and ideas than most revenge films. Add to that the story of a woman whose child grew up raised by others, and combine that with the fact that the crime she was convicted for was the murder of another child, and another dimension emerges, that of the parent-child relationship, the connection between them and the ways they influence each other.

Lady Vengeance's plot is intricate, but more importantly every turn gives the movie more emotional depth and makes its characters' situations more complex. By the end we've been given a film that's filled with big questions without easy answers, with emotions that saturate everything while feeling raw and dangerous, and a highly entertaining, suspenseful movie.

- dave heaton

Lower City aka Cidade Baixa (dir. Sèrgio Machado)

The 'lower city', underworld setting of this Brazilian film is often its most compelling character. It's a place populated with people struggling to get by, willing to do whatever it takes to get enough money to survive. For the main characters Deco (Làzaro Ramos) and Naldinho (Wagner Moura), two men who claim to consider their friendship the most important thing, that means everything from betting on cockfights to using their boat to escort prostitutes across the water. They're increasingly feeling the pull towards more drastic criminal behavior, and trying to fight it.

Mostly, though, they're finding themselves fixated on one woman, a prostitute named Karinna (Alice Braga). The bulk of the film is devoted to this would-be 'love triangle', though the motivation of both men is less love than having someone to hold on to, something to control even. That the woman is mostly an empty character, whose sole reaction to every situation she finds herself in is to have sex with the closest man (almost always Deco or Naldinho) makes the film less interesting than it would be if she seemed like an actual person, with deeper motivations and feelings. Instead, her role as eye candy helps keep the film's role as much the same. The vibrant look of the story's setting, and the faces of its people, are the strongest character, yet we seldom get too far past the surface.

- dave heaton

Our Brand Is Crisis (dir. Rachel Boynton)

The you-are-there documentary Our Brand Is Crisis doesn't quite take us there as vividly as other similar films have in the past, yet real-life circumstances that the film covers are so fascinating themselves that the movie too becoming fascinating. Those events are the 2002 Bolivian presidential election and its aftermath. It was an election that eventually led to the president stepping down in response to riots, and in the next election to a new president who signifies the increasingly progressive politics of Latin America, marked by an opposition to US-led globalization policies.

The genesis of that outcome was in part the 2002 election campaigns captured on film in Our Brand Is Crisis. In particular the film centers on the efforts of the US political consulting firm GCS to elect "Goni" (Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada), the US-favored, pro-big business liberal candidate in the race. GCS helps Goni work to defeat former mayor Manfred Reyes Villa, without caring much about the increasing groundswell of support among Bolivia's poor and indigenous peoples for labor leader Evo Morales. Goni's cluelessness about what the poorest Bolivians want from a candidate shines through the film, often accompanied by a nearly equal cluelessness on the part of the US political experts. The film is at times a devastating portrait of this disconnect, as an increasingly stubborn Goni bumbles through public appearances while GCS does its best to make the race more like US political races, designing negative campaigns, polling the public, creating slogans for the candidate to repeat ('Si se puede!) and pulling together focus groups, which often deliver blunt warnings about the political direction of the country that foreshadow later events.

- dave heaton

The Sun aka Solntse (dir. Alexander Sokurov)

The Sun resolves around Issei Ogata's detailed portrayal of Japanese Emperor Hirohito. For long stretches of the film we're mostly watching him go about his day, with servants doting on him. The cloud hovering over these slow, somewhat ceremonial passages of the film is the reality of the state of Japan at that moment, at the end of World War II. Occasionally director Alexander Sokoruv will pull out from the emperor's palace to show painterly depictions of devestation, making the point that Hirohito and his handlers are living in a bubble. It's a bubble built not from ignorance but myth – at the center of The Sun is the notion that the emperor is thought of as a divine figure. The Sun is at heart a portrait of a man coming to terms with his own flawed humanity, realizing that he is not divine.

This internal struggle is revealed patiently but also powerfully. The film seems obsessed with the details of the emperor's life, from his habits and hobbies to his schedule of meetings. Those details sometimes reveal the emperor's own personality, but mostly reveal the personality of this mythic divine leader, doing as he's expected to do. That myth is unraveling in the face of destruction and death; Sokoruv and Ogata imprint that unraveling onto film in a vivid, compelling way.

- dave heaton

This Film Is Not Yet Rated (dir. Kirby Dick)

The tone of Kirby Dick's This Film Is Not Yet Rated is light right from the start, as the sort of black box that would be used for censorship is playfully employed to cover up parts of the filmmaker's name. With this study of the MPAA Ratings Board, the secret panel that decides on ratings for Hollywood films, Dick does have serious points to make, he also makes an obvious decision to keep the demeanor light, to not come off like he's making a bigger deal of this than it really is.

The filmmakers interviewed for This Film… about their dealings with the MPAA make up the film's most convincing argument against the board's fairness. We hear example after example of the inconsistent ways that the board rules, along with an examination of some of the conclusions that the history of rulings point to For example: the ways homosexual and heterosexual sex are handled differently, the ways male and female pleasure is handled differently, the ways independent and Hollywood films are judged on different standards, and so on. This rough survey of how filmmakers and their films have been handled by the MPAA is fascinating, especially given the secrecy of the board and the process.

That secrecy is at the crux of this film, for better or worse. Dick occasionally gets a bit carried away with Michael Moore-style 'gotcha' experiments involving hiring a detective to uncover who is really on the board, and how appeals are handled. This focus of the film isn't as rewarding as the filmmaker interviews, though Dick and his detective do occasionally stumble onto interesting discoveries, like when looking the trash of one of the ratings board members reveals her remarkably specific notes detailing exactly what 'questionable' scenes exist in a particular film.

- dave heaton

Truth or Dare aka Wahrheit oder Pflicht (dir. Arne Nolting, Jan Martin Scharf)

Partway through Truth or Dare, high school flunk-out Annika (Katharina Schuttler) and her new friend Kai (Thomas Feist) symbolically set on fire all of the expectations of the adult world, pulling for a blank state upon which they can create their own worlds. That's the wish lurking behind the entire film, and the film is at its best when it's evoked most strongly.

Truth or Dare plot hinges not on Annika flunking out of school, but on her lying to her parents about it. It's a lie that inevitably keeps growing, as she struggles not to reveal the truth to her parents, that she's fallen short of their big plans for her.

This plot could be fodder for an afterschool special, with a morale of 'tell the truth'. Thankfully, it strikes deeper chords than that, mainly through Schuttler's portrayal of Annika as a melancholy figure, and that melancholy as representative of what can be lost by becoming an 'adult'. The adults in the film are treated humanely, with understanding not typically shown towards parents in teenager coming-of-age films. Yet the parents are also walking embodiments of loss, of the ways becoming an 'adult' can drain something from your soul.

- dave heaton