Applause
(Denmark; 85 min.) Compelling, close-up drama about Thea, a famous Danish actress (Paprika Steen) currently playing Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? onstage. It’s a role far too close to home for this caustic, alcoholic narcissist who has chased away everyone close to her. Although she’s a great hater of ordinary people, she’s still trying to mend things with the young children she both beat and abandoned. Martin Pieter Zandvliet’s urgent post-Dogme film silhouettes Steen against the harsh white light of hallways and rooms. Thea’s moods are just as starkly contrasted with the infuriating reasonableness of the people around her. Thea never seems like a spoiled child or a serious nutter; this furious woman keeps our understanding and—oddly—our sympathy. (RvB) Feb. 24 at 6:30pm, C3; March 3 at 1pm, C12; March 6 at 4:30pm, C12
Babnik
(U.S.; 81 min.) Just as a beatnik is someone into beat culture, a babnik (in Russian) is someone who is into the babes. Alejandro Adams shows why his work has been getting national attention. His new film is an almost completely sex-and-violence-free tale about a nexus of lives affected by the skin trade. Adams’ usual slipperiness leads to a what-just-happened ending. Let me say that ever since Cinequest started, I’ve been watching semipro actors playing violent criminals in local settings, and it never looked right. By contrast, the actors are believable here, even when the story is more implied than told. As the sympathetic Slavic thug, Michael Umansky is first-rate. The women here have the sharp, expectant look of the performers in Toulouse-Lautrec posters. Adams takes on a regular film noir trope—the beefy hoodlum getting a rubdown—and transforms it into a long scene of a woman getting a facial by a cosmetician. It’s my favorite single shot in this year’s film fest. (RvB) Feb. 26 at 7pm, SJ Rep; March 3 at 7:30pm, C12
The Bone Man
(Germany; 121 min.) Already a sensation in Germany and Austria, this third film adaptation of co-screenwriter Wolf Haas’ Simon Brenner detective novels is a dark, club-footed waltz between old and new Europe. Circumstances reduce hangdog ex-detective Brenner (Josef Hader) to chasing a stolen VW Beetle into a seedy Bratislavian resort with a sinister meat grinder in the restaurant basement (like German cuisine, the film has more dubious meat than a Francis Bacon painting). Groping through the clumsiness, duplicity and gore, Brenner finds a facsimile of love with the innkeeper Birgit (Birgit Minichmayr). The film’s northern European morbidity and the Eastern European absurdity remind us of where the Coen brothers’ sardonic humor was born before it immigrated to the northern plains of America. (DH) Feb. 24 at 9:30pm, California Theatre; Feb. 26 at 4pm, C12; Feb. 27 at 11:15pm, California Theatre
Cooking History
(Slovakia et al.; 88 min.) Ever find yourself waiting in a dentist’s office thumbing through a New Yorker magazine, when you get sucked into a seemingly uninteresting article about something like the invention of the stapler or the function of dewclaws on cats only to be enthralled by great storytelling and new-found perspectives? The superb, beautifully photographed documentary Cooking History is kind of like that. Through poignant remembrances by aging military cooks, re-enactments of war and chilling archival footage, the films tells the story of six modern European wars through the lens of food. It plays like a secret history of World War II, the Chechen war, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the French war in Algeria and other conflicts. Food is a powerful force of national identity as well as a necessity, even more so when troops are in battle, hungry and facing death. In the end the film, and the multitude of meanings food conjures up, is bittersweet, like the memories of meals with friends and family long since gone. (SH) Feb. 24 at 6pm, C12; Feb. 25 at 1:30pm, C12; March 1 at 7pm, C3
Green Waters
(Argentina; 90 min.) The bastard child of some scandalous three-way between Hitchcock thrillers, Polanski mind-melt flicks and ’70s paranoia films, Green Waters just might be the most intense movie you’ll see at Cinequest. First-time Argentine writer-director Mariano De Rosa has taken the simple story of a family on a seaside vacation (at Green Waters, thus the title) and turned it into a sometimes funny, sometimes creepy—but always riveting—portrait of one father seemingly on the road to Crazy Town. Or is he? That’s the question the true paranoia gems keep you asking, right? And there’s a quiver of question marks riddling the first half, as father Juan (Alenjandro Fiore Milagrow) seems to be ruining the family vacation with his obsessive suspicion about his teenage daughter, Laura (Julieta Morav), and a mysterious, good-looking stranger she meets at a gas station who seems to have followed them to their destination. Incredibly, the film only gets more enigmatic and freaky from there, as whispers, glances, cruel smiles and power plays threaten to crack Juan up for good. Is everyone really out to get him? I’m not entirely sure even now, but the end is a shocker no matter how you look at it. Green Waters has more psychosexual subtext than anything I’ve seen out of the United States in a long time. (SP) Feb. 25 at 4pm, C12; Feb. 28 at noon, C12; March 3 at 4:15pm, C12
Heiran
(Iran; 88 min.) In rural Iran, the daughter of a hardscrabble citrus farmer falls hopelessly in love with an illegal Afghan immigrant; the boy faces the same problems in Iran that Hispanic illegals face in the United States. Old prejudices meet new troubles as the daughter has her way and follows him to Tehran. This was likely sold to the Iranian authorities as a cautionary tale to young romantics (and it certainly can be read that way), but the film is simple, critical and compassionate, and the last scenes are very affecting. Even lesser Iranian movies have an understated naturalism that makes them models for low-budget filmmakers. Such is the case with this debut by director Shalizeh Arefpour, who unfolds this tragic tale with no discernible melodrama. It’s the last film starring Iranian superstar Khosro Shakibaei, who plays the father of the bride. (RvB) Feb. 24 at 5pm, C12; Feb. 28 at 2pm, C12; March 2 at 5pm, C3
No Tomorrow
(U.S.; 80 min.) A gritty, emotional documentary-within-a-documentary that focuses on the life and grisly murder of a former ward of the state. Back in 2004, filmmakers Roger Weisberg and Vanessa Roth chose 18-year-old Risa Bejarano as
the subject of their documentary film Aging Out, following one year in the life of the young woman as she was emancipated from the L.A. foster care system and went off to college. After the film wrapped, however, Bejarano was brutally shot to death by a gang member. Suddenly, the duo’s documentary took on a whole new meaning in the hands of the prosecution. In No Tomorrow, Weisberg and Roth narrate their moral and ethical struggles as Aging Out is used as courtroom evidence to tug the jury’s heartstrings and condemn the young woman’s killer. Ultimately, this is a dramatic, suspenseful look at a death penalty trial and a commiseration over the right of the state to take a life for a life. Be warned: the filmmakers show many graphic photos of Bejarano’s bloody, shot-up dead body, and the bodies of other gang victims. (JF) Feb. 27 at 1:45pm, C12; Feb. 28 at 11:30pm, SJ Rep; March 6 at 6:30pm, C12
Passenger Side
(Canada; 85 min.) With a wit dryer than the Joshua Tree desert in its middle third, Passenger Side is a hyperverbal, daylong meandering drive through a greater L.A. and through the minds of two disaffected brothers. Their mood is sullen, but their banter is as well timed as a jazz combo’s. Novelist/ad copywriter Michael (Adam Scott) tells his actor-with-a-drug-problem brother Tobey (an excellent Joel Bissonnette) about his next semiautobiographical novel. Tobey asks, “Is this the one where the stupid white guy sadly wastes his life or the one where the sad white guy stupidly wastes his life?” An ironic ’90s indie-rock soundtrack (including Santa Cruz’s Camper Van Beethoven) is the third character in this road film. Despite the self-pity, this is Sideways for thirtysomethings. (DH) Feb. 25 at 7:15pm, SJ Rep; Feb. 27 at 11:30am, SJ Rep; March 4 at 11:30am, C12
Peepers
(Canada: 83 min.) Seth W. Owen’s vision of a cluster of Montreal voyeurs is well worked out, even if the premise has the dead-end quality of an academic joke. Steve (Joe Cobden) is the lynchpin of a group of roof crawlers who meet in all sorts of weather; their dedicated window peeping is disturbed by a college professor (Janine Thériault, very good) who has come to study them. But her own clear shot at the Hassenpfeffer Fellowship is disturbed when her interest grows: not in destroying sexist paradigms of the watcher and the watched but in the lowbrow pastime of catching glimpses of dicks, balls and girls with big nipples. To the film theorist, all moviegoers are voyeurs; naturally, Peepers cites Rear Window and Peeping Tom (aside from a Scrabble board, is there any other use for the word “scopophilia” than to describe that Michael Powell movie?). One gets a “where was Brian de Palma when they needed him” vibe when watching this. To the rescue: the skin scenes and Montreal’s sturdy tradition of improv comedy, evinced by the sweet Quinn O’Neill as a girl who turned exhibitionist (a turn-off to these peepers); and Daniel Perlmutter and Mark Slutsky as the obnoxious rivals who are caddish enough to sell what they’ve watched on their website. (RvB) Feb. 26 at 9:30pm, C12; Feb. 28 at 9:15pm, C12; March 2 at 1:30pm, C12
Road to Sangam
(India; 135 min.) When India’s greatest martyr died, he asked that his ashes be divided into 20 parts and sent off with the flow of the nation’s 20 rivers. Amit Rai’s proudly humanist film is a fiction, yet it’s based on the real-life discovery, some 60 years on, of a cask of the ashes of Mahatma Gandhi. In Utter Pradesh, a terrorist bombing sets off repression by the Indian police against the Muslims; meanwhile, a humble but farsighted Muslim mechanic in Allahabad gets the job to fix the engine of a vintage V8 truck—little realizing that this truck had once been used long ago to transport some of Gandhi-ji’s ashes, and that the authorities hope to use the truck in the upcoming ceremony. But a general strike by outraged Muslim merchants threatens the mechanic’s task. Star Paresh Rawal and the regal Om Puri engage in a discourse about the partitioning of India that’s real food for thought. (RvB) Feb. 24 at 8:30pm, C12; Feb. 25 at 1pm, C12; Feb. 28 at 1:15pm, California Theatre
The Tijuana Project
(U.S./Mexico; 61 min.) The sunny dispositions of the six kids in this documentary belie its tragic setting: a Tijuana trash dump in which they and their families live and scavenge for survival. The Fausto Gonzales neighborhood is as desolate as a trash-strewn moon. The only other adults around are drug peddlers and addicts living in an adjacent cemetery. Yet a schoolteacher invites an art and music teacher into the two-room dump-side school. Director John Sheedy ably captures the children’s most endearing and enduring trait: the ability to improvise fun anywhere. (DH) Feb. 26 at 7:15pm, C12; Feb. 27 at 7:15pm, C12
Yet More Films
Camembert Rose
(Hungary; 93 min.) Do you know those depressing people who go on about how we have to have a return to modesty? Here’s a movie for them. At first, Barnabas Toth’s film seems to be an interesting sex comedy about the rivalry between a father and son. The debonair old goat Tibor is a bald, bearded Budapest gynecologist whose life is one long one-night stand. His bullied virgin son, Daniel, a pre-med student, feels walled in by the old man’s constant pressure on him to go out and get laid. Daniel has manifested his fear of sex through a horror of cheese (since the father decided to gross out the boy by telling him the scent of a woman is like the smell of Camembert). Hungary has been a real pornucopia, as I’m sure you men know, and this film reacts to the easily downloadable mud slide of smut and its effects on the local morals. In the film’s second half, in the French countryside, Dani meets a gorgeous and available older woman and learns to stop worrying and love cheese. But as he sits and pounds on his Swiss hang (a lugubrious metal hand drum the same size and shape as a wok), Dani’s honorable intentions start to look very prissy. Local color abounds: we see Budapest as a land of petty theft, an inferior power grid and rich humid summers. (RvB) Feb. 25 at 4:30pm, C12; Feb. 26 at noon, C12; Feb. 28 at 2:15pm, C12
Life in One Day
(Netherlands; 91 min.) The conceit of the title, based on a Dutch science fiction novel, is a world where humans are born, grow, love, breed and die in one day. A pastor describes this as heaven. Every experience is new, never to be repeated. The film is indeed frantic and ecstatic during this day. Gini (Lois Dols de Jong) and Benny (Matthijs van de Sande Bakhuyzen) meet but want the day to last. Their devil’s bargain results in some empty but well-photographed trysts and in very compelling use of split-screen photography for the duration. (DH) Feb. 24 at 7pm, California Theatre; Feb. 27 at 9:45pm, C12
Little Fish, Strange Pond
(U.S.; 90 min.) A couple of white guys walking around L.A. talking and killing women. Yes, Sweet Stephen (Callum Blue of Smallville) and his alter ego, Mr. Jack (executive producer Matthew Modine, looking dapper), owe plenty to Tarantino’s hit men in Pulp Fiction, but despite their philosophizing, they’re no Travolta and Jackson. The film peaks early when the chattering pair enter a porn store where the manager, Bucky (Zach Galifianakis), lives by the credo “Don’t fuck around.” When yet more speculations on the nature of being prolong a botched hold-up attempt in the store, Bucky shouts, “What the fuck is this, my robbery with Andre?” If only screenwriter Robert Dean Klein had followed Bucky’s advice and reduced the chatter, the film might not try the viewer’s patience so much. (DH) Feb. 26 at 9:15pm, SJ Rep; Feb. 27 at 11:59pm, C12; March 1 at 9:15pm, California Theatre
Lost Persons Area
(Belgium et al.; 109 min.) Marcus, Bettina and their daughter, Tessa, live in a trailer amid a bleak, spare landscape crossed by high-tension towers. Marcus leads a crew that works on the towers. Bettina lives an aimless life marooned in the trailer, where she runs a commissary/cantina for the workers. As for little Tessa, she’s largely ignored by everyone as she ditches school and roams about the dusty and bleak surroundings collecting animal bones, stones and strange bits of trash that only have meaning for her. Hungarian immigrant and worker Sobolz enters the trio’s life as a lone force of good in all the grinding despair and selfishness that define Marcus and Bettina’s relationship. Director Caroline Strubbe paints beautiful if desperate portraits of these lost lives, particularly that of Tessa, a self-possessed girl driven slowly mad by her mother’s neglect. It’s tempting to dismiss the film for the crushing despair it instills, but the stories and lives it depicts have a way of haunting your thoughts for days. (SH) Feb. 28 at 6:15pm, C3; March 2 at 3:45pm, C12; March 5 at 4:15pm, C3.
Low Lights
(Lithuania, Germany; 92 min.) Antonioni goes to Vilnius. Laura and Tadas are a disaffected young urban, professional couple, stuck in a lousy half-built flat thrown up during the last economic boom in a district called “The Box” for its stunning architectural brutality. The couple—numb from the ugliness around them—go their separate ways for the course of a night: the wedge is the husband’s old pal from school, Linas, who turns up like a bad penny. He takes Tadas out for a drive to nowhere on the freeways of the city. Despite what you’ve heard about the charms of Lithuania’s capital, you just about won’t see a building more than 10 years old in this movie, and aside from a turn in a scary forest, the only natural thing you’ll see is the grass in the median strips. The landscape is thoroughly Americanized in the night-lighted gas stations and aimless rituals: Radas and Linas even go in for an automobile sideshow, burning some of the rubber on Tadas’ Mercedes. Identity games ahoy, with the Mimi Rogers–like Laura turning up tarted up with lipstick and spinning out in a fancy ride of her own. Clearly, a wakeup call to the Baltic States. (RvB) Feb. 24 at 9:15pm, C12; March 5 at 5pm, C12.
Parallels
(U.S.; 16 min.) Norman Mailer once said you measure schizophrenia not by how many selves there are but by how well the selves can speak to one another. In Parallels, we see Emilie Germain weaving and bobbing between two different pieces of herself. One character is a French-speaking woman fresh from a bloody encounter in a man’s apartment—she escapes without too many clothes on. The other character represents the rational side of the psyche, trying to suppress the first character. Several layers of meaning emerge right from the very start, as the Blondie tune “In the Flesh” opens the film. Later, we see Germain contemplating a Warhol print of Debby Harry on the wall of a dude’s apartment. “She looks so disconnected and conflicted,” says the character. Ah! Now we’re getting somewhere. This short shows with Hell Is Other People. (GS) Feb. 27 at 4:15pm, SJ Rep; March 3 at 7pm, C3
Paulista
(Brazil; 82 min.) In an early nightclub scene, volatile chanteuse Justine (Danni Carlos) sings Radiohead’s “Don’t Leave Me High, Don’t Leave Me Dry.” This Brazilian ballad of sexual dependency and desertion is at once exotic and matter-of-fact. To start her acting career, country girl Marina (Silvia Lourenço) moves into her cousin Suzana’s (Maria Clara Spinelli) apartment in Paulista, São Paolo—the best neighborhood in the biggest city in Brazil. Marina soon discovers the unpredictability of loving someone “exciting.” Suzana falls for another lawyer in the macho enclave of a South American law firm. Although not particularly original, Paulista is a sophisticated and worldly story of carnal desire and disappointment. (DH) Feb. 27 at 7pm, C12; March 1 at 3pm, C12; March 5 at 11pm, C12
Raspberry Magic
(U.S.; 88 min.) Although not as harrowing as The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, Raspberry Magic is a well-acted, modest and inspiring family drama hinging on a girl in a science fair. Eleven-year-old Monica Shah (Lily Javaherpour) wants to succeed in the school science fair and to keep her family together. The parents in this economically troubled middle-class family emigrated from India, but writer/director Leena Pendharkar doesn’t fuss over that fact. She focuses on the efforts of Monica to corral her younger sister, engage her father (Ravi Kapoor) and cheer up her mother (Meera Simhan), who is attempting to write a cookbook. Both the family and the film are a long way from Bollywood. (DH) Feb. 24 at 7:15pm, C12; March 5 at 7:15pm, C12; March 6 at 7pm, C12
The Robbers
(China; 92 min.) In a remote Chinese village long ago, two bandits—equal parts rakish and buffoonish—try to shake down a local man and his daughter. Soon, some imperial soldiers show up and do a lot worse. The bandits side with the villages, the villagers turn on the bandits, the bandits turn back against the villagers and so it goes in the rice paddies. Director Yang Shupeng milks the historical warrior genre mostly for laughs: an oft-repeated dirty joke, plenty of mugging, lots of exaggerated scowling and excessive shouting. (MSG) Feb 25 at 6:45pm, C12; Feb. 27 at 1:30pm, C12; March 4 at noon, C12
The Sonosopher: Alex Caldiero in Life … In Sound
(U.S.; 66 min.) A self-styled Sicilian-born, Brooklyn-raised beatnik Mormon, poet Alex Caldiero must puzzle his fellow LDSers in Utah, where he teaches at Utah Valley University. Caldiero practices a particularly abstract form of “sound” poetry, intoning words until they unmoor themselves from meaning—think Allen Ginsberg times 10. He even composes elaborate written flurries of repeated letters that only he can translate. A voluble, bearish man, Caldiero expounds excitedly in this adoring documentary. He must be a hell of an entertaining teacher, although he grows tiring after about 45 minutes—sometimes, he’s a bit too much like a crank yelling on a street corner. In the best parts, the filmmakers combine Caldiero’s wilder soundscapes with rapid-fire edited images that recall the best experimental films of the 1950s and ’60s. (MSG) Feb. 28 at 4pm, C3; March 2 at 7:15pm, C3; March 4 at 2:45pm, C12
Upperdog
(Norway; 90 min.) Another degrees-of-separation drama, this one set in an Oslo circle that includes a dry-cleaners’ daughter, an upper-class cad, a Polish maid and a traumatized NATO soldier whose accidental shooting of an Afghan boy ends up on an antiwar poster. While the playful, unforced sex scenes help out, director Sara Johnsen (Kissed by Winter, Cinequest ’06) has an engineering problem: while the cast is full of good-looking people, she doesn’t have the level of acting she needs to make us care about these characters, their separation anxieties, their rivalries and their hurts. And it’s hard to laugh at them, either, despite the invitation we get to laugh from the classical music contrasted with the farcical behavior. Upperdog has its moments, but films like this are the reason why Crash has been called the worst movie of the Oughties, if only because of the kind of filmmaking it influenced. (RvB) Feb. 24 at 8:45pm, C3; Feb. 27 at 9:30pm, California Theatre; March 2 at 2pm, C12
Will You Marry Us?
(Switzerland; 90 min.) This lighthearted Swiss-German date-night film is certainly not breaking any new ground with its love triangle parable, but the charming cast and startlingly humanlike female leads are refreshing compared to the usual American romcom cadre (no needled-nosed Anistons here). Marie Leuenberger plays an overstressed and underloved small-town marriage official who has the unenviable task of wedding her old flame, played by a rail-thin Dominique Jann, to his prima donna movie-star girlfriend. The romance between the two is reignited through a series of very low-drama tribulations and quibbles in preparation for the big day. Besides a willingness to flirt with the idea that marriage ain’t all it’s cracked up to be, there’s nothing new here, but pretty people falling in love is not something audiences seem to tire of. (JL) March 1 at 7pm at California Theatre; March 5 at 4:30pm at C12; March 6 at 9:15pm, C12
Cinequest at a Glance
Just the Facts
The festival runs Feb. 23–March 7 in downtown San Jose at the Camera 12 and Camera 3 Cinemas, San Jose Repertory Theatre and the California Theatre.
Full Disclosure
Metro is one of the sponsors of the festival.
Getting In
Cinequest can be digested film by film for $5 for students and $10 for general audiences (and only $7 for matinees). The opening- and closing-night galas, with screenings and parties, run $40. The Maverick Spirit events are $15–$20. Run-of-the-festival passes run $145 and up, with privileges priced accordingly. For full ticket and schedule information, visit www.cinequest.org.
For Starters
The festival opens Feb. 23 (7pm at the California Theatre) with The Good Heart. Brian Cox and Paul Dano star in this story of a profane old bartender who makes friends with a homeless young man after the latter’s suicide attempt. The screening is followed by a party with the filmmakers at E&O Trading Co.
Maverick Spirit Awards
Deepak Chopra will be honored March 2 at 7pm at the California Theatre; it’s Benjamin Bratt’s turn March 4 at 7pm at the California Theatre, and he brings with him the film La Mission.
Forums and Workshops
In addition to films, the festival also presents a variety of afternoon forums and workshops about the future of filmmaking and film distribution, including sessions on “The New Distribution” (Feb. 26), “3-D Cinema” (Feb. 27) and “Maverick Filmmaking With the Olson Brothers (March 6).”
Old-School
The Stanford Theatre Foundation screens two silent-film operettas at the California Theatre. Erich von Stroheim’s The Merry Widow shows Feb. 26 at 7pm. Ernst Lubitsch’s The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg shows March 5 at 7pm. Dennis James does the honors on the organ.
Wait, There’s More
Next week’s Metro will contain extra coverage of the films, events and personalities of Cinequest. Keep up with our running coverage of the festival online at SanJoseInside.com and Metroactive.com. Quick hits and updates can be had by joining us on Facebook at MetroFB.com or on Twitter at twitter.com/metronewspaper. And be sure to give us plenty of feedback at our blog www.metroactive.com/moviesandtvblog just in case our reviewers were criminally wide of the mark.
Speaking of Reviewers
Our Cinequest coverage was provided by Richard von Busack (RvB), Michael S. Gant (MSG), Steve Palopoli (SP), Jessica Fromm (JF), Don Hines (DH), Eric Johnson (EJ), Jessica Lussenhop (JL), Stett Holbrook (SH) and Gary Singh (GS).
