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 WEST IS EAST Way out west, Vancouver's 19th International Film Festival looks to the East for inspiration.
The weather outside is miserable, drooling wet and gray and smelling of the Pacific. I am told that the past two lovely days I have traipsed through happily, song in my heart, video in my hand, were a rank aberration. But the festival programmers are happy: now seats will be filled. Almost no Vancouver citizen dares go inside if the sun is actually shining. On my first day at the 19th Vancouver International Film Festival, I hoped to take in as much of the indispensable Asian selection, called "Dragons & Tigers: The Cinema of East Asia" and programmed by the polymathic critic Tony Rayns. But I started early to get some writing done. As I banged away at my computer, outside the window, sun busted through puffy gray curds of cloud, with the intermittent chants of a half dozen animal rights protesters, three in toucan beaks, three in a puppy pound cage with doggy noses, occasionally giving grief to the nice, indelibly polite Shopsy's hot dog cart man. Then the ricketa rhythm in the background of skateboarders launching off the steps of the Vancouver Art Gallery, with its immense yet demure fluttering Cezanne/Degas/Boudin/Sisley/Pissarro/Monet/Renoir flags. Every productive film festival experience is alike, and like that: confused, confusing, edifying, exhilarating. Where I had been concerned about seeing more video work pretending to be 35mm film and failing miserably, I managed to catch work on video, transferred from video, and in various documentary styles that made for a much greater than worthwhile week. I had my eye on a South Korean film to start, but wound up at a flatly shot digital video Vancouver-made character comedy, which, once bumped up to black-and-white 35mm, should actually look fairly sumptuous. What could I expect from a movie titled "No More Monkeys Jumpin' on the Bed"? Not the eccentric comedy rhythms of Ross Weber's tale of the slipperiness of contemporary urban relationships. Filmmaker/raconteur Erik Whittaker was a standout as the ultimate wise-cracking womanizing slacker, and a sculpture-faced thirtysomething actress named Nancy Sivak revealed herself a young master of comic apprehension. The following day, I caught Sivak, a veteran of British Columbia stage work, in the daunting drama, "Protection," a wonderful film about social work that made me teary at both its emotion and its technique. Writer-director Bruce Spangler, who had worked for B.C.'s provincial child protection services, manages to make a straightforward, beautifully acted story as compelling as the work of Ken Loach, but with politics confined mostly to drama, remaining descriptive rather than prescriptive. Sivak plays a social worker who realizes there are few answers but many tasks, and her determined performance is matched by that of Jillian Fargey, as a mother who cannot stop shooting heroin but cannot stop loving, either. The fest's award for most popular Canadian film went to "waydowntown," Gary Burns' dark yet goofy Calgary mall-set comedy about four workers who make a bet to see who can stay inside the longest. Also shot on DV, Burns' stylized take is a step up from his last feature, the teens-in-trouble comedy "Kitchen Party." While I admired the compelling rigor of "Protection," the giddiest Canadian film on show might have been Zev Asher's home-edited documentary, "What About Me? The Rise of the Nihilist Spasm Band." In his chronicle of a squadron of London, Ontario noise musicians who have been banging away for almost forty years, Asher manages to individuate each of these headstrong rapscallions without ever pausing to insist there is any particular value to their riotous experimentalism. An American doc also impressed, Shaya Mercer's "Trade Off," a scrupulous detailing of the boundaries of the anti-WTO protests in Seattle, trading in the stuff of conversation among citizens instead of confrontations with cops. (Vene, vidi, video, I guess.) Vancouver may be the most filmmaker-intensive festival I've ever attended. While more than 200 features were presented, its distance from the white-hot center of events like Toronto or Sundance allows for a level of conversation that doesn't require shouting or the hum of buzz. Walking from venue to venue, there were usually a half-dozen conversations starting at once. And I'm all for places where late-night kitchen parties of Korean and Japanese filmmakers wind up as impromptu kim chi noodle cookoffs, while everyone speaks film in several languages. A couple of the most striking entries were from Thailand, and Wisit Sasanatieng took the eighth "Dragons & Tigers Award for Young Cinema" for his extraordinarily strange "Fah Talai Jone," (Heaven Catches the Wrongdoer), which is a pastiche of Thai stage and screen melodramas of the mid-century. As Rayns points out of Sasanatieng's drenching pastiche, "We will never be able to catch up" to the history reflected, as "most of [the movies from the period] are long since lost." Like "What About Me?," "Fah Talai Jone" has a intimidating yet inviting strangeness, as if the worlds on view were invented whole cloth, and that fact and fiction have melded in a great land called Apocrypha. A sort-of doc from Thailand, Apichatpong "Joe" Weerasethakul's "Mysterious Object At Noon" takes this approach to a dizzying extreme, creating a kind of Exquisite Corpse structure in which the stories told to Weerasethakul and his crew by ordinary folks on the street are strung together in a mad, open-ended, dizzying world that knows only digression. There were several good films from Japan and a selection of South Korean entries that ranged from the spirited near-nihilism of the crowd-pleasing anti-authoritarian romp "Attack the Gas Station!" to the commercially successful ghost-ridden story of sexual hysteria in a girl's school, "Memento Mori." Those entries were offset by the likes of "The Foul King," a story of a meek bank clerk whose life turns around when he assumes the mantle of a masked wrestling villain; the structurally dizzying romantic-comedy deconstruction, "Virgin Stripped Bride By Her Bachelors," and perhaps, most emblematically, director Son Jae-Gon's "The Man Who Saw Too Much." Jae-Gon introduced his shot-on-video film with many apologies for the quality of his work; after making a one-hour version for about $350 U.S., he was given a bit more money to make a second part, which was having its international premiere. Jae-Gon was right. The second half is rushed, unfunny and a sorrow, especially after seeing the superb opening hour. In a way, it's "Rear Window," told from the perspective of the Raymond Burr character. A voyeur, using a VHS cassette from a rental shop, accidentally records a murder. The killer chases him, but not before he's able to return the tape to the video overnight drop slot. The result? The killer must rent tapes until he finds the incriminating evidence. He watches... and watches... becomes obsessed with Hitchcock... becomes a Tarantino-like pedant of all things cinematic... and decides to become a director himself. For its exceedingly modest means -- appropriately, the images have the smeary, underexposed look of VHS despite their DigiBeta DV origin -- the movie is taut, funny, and filled with all manner of implication. Ultra-prolific, doggedly stylized Japanese director Miike Takashi brought a couple more movies, and his "Dead or Alive" is an absurdist Yakuza tale that may be as odd yet affecting as Takeshi Kitano's latest, the set-in-L.A. "Brother." Suzuki Akihiro's featurette, "Looking for Angel," had a jagged sense of space in its story of Tokyo friendships that lead to frenzied couplings; I wish it had better embodied Akihiro's statement that "It's not straight, gay, queer, bisexual, non-sexual or porn. 'Looking for Angel' is an anti-heterosexist movie." Hiroki Ryuichi's "I Am an S+M Writer" was a wonderful surprise, a variation on the family dramas of Ozu that was also a slapstick comedy of desire and the making of art, but also a story about a man's love for a wife who waited, waited, waited for him to ask the right questions, then went away, finding someone else who could do for her the things he could only write about. Shindo Kaze, a female director hardly larger than a Hello Kitty, brought her "Love/Juice," one of the freshest films about female friendship I've seen in years. The intimacy is enviable, plausible, terrifying, timeless -- gorgeously shot and acted. A documentary by the son of Sven Nykvist about the work of the great, retired Swedish cinematographer, offered up a few words that address the result you get when you revere the image, and simply look at the world through the viewfinder: "For me, light has become a passion dominating my life... Light can be gentle, dangerous, dreamlike, bare, living, dead, misty, clear, hot, dark, violet, spring-like, falling, straight, sensual, limited, poisonous, calm and soft." Break out the red wine and popcorn. It's not going to be a blockbuster evening.
Also by Ray Pride THE FODDER OF OUR COUNTRY
HOW THE FEST WAS WON
DIRTY LOOKS & SMILES
RAGING HORMONES
THE WHITE ALBUM
IN THE COMPANY OF RENEE
VOICES CARRY
BENT
KISSER OF MEN
WINONA WEPT
MULTIPLE PERSONALITY DISARRAY
AMERICAN CUTIE
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