The Screengrab : abbas kiarostami

Hathaway Hotness, Rourke Smackdowns Head Venice Comp Lineup

Paul Clark — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Today brought the announcement of the Competition lineup for next month’s 65th annual Venice International Film Festival. Among the highest-profile American titles in the lineup was the upcoming Jonathan Demme film, Rachel Getting Married (starring the lovely Anne Hathaway, pictured at right) and the sorely-missed Debra Winger. Another intriguing title is The Wrestler, directed by Darren Aronofsky and starring Mickey Rourke, no doubt eager to try out a new sport after his abortive boxing career. Of course, if you’re looking for something really great, a solid bet would be the latest film by animation master Hayao Miyazaki, entitled Ponyo on Cliff by the Sea, also in Competition.

Other filmmakers of note in Competition include: Takeshi Kitano (Achilles and the Tortoise), Barbet Schroeder (Inju, la Bete dans l’ombre), Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker), Mamoru Oshii (The Sky Crawlers), Werner Schroeter (Nuit de Chien), and Ferzan Oztepek (Un giorno perfetto). Then there’s the directorial debut of Babel screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, entitled The Burning Plain. Expect a trio of interlocking stores and plenty of tortured, writerly multi-culti coincidence.

Here’s the full Competition slate:

Darren Aronofsky- The Wrestler
Guillermo Arriaga- The Burning Plain
Pupi Avati- Il papà di Giovanna
Marco Bechis- BirdWatchers
Patrick Mario Bernard and Pierre Trividic- L’Autre
Kathryn Bigelow- Hurt Locker
Pappi Corsicato- Il seme della discordia
Jonathan Demme- Rachel Getting Married
Haile Gerima- Teza
Aleksey German Jr.- Bumažnyj soldat (Paper Soldier)
Semih Kaplanoglu- Süt
Takeshi Kitano- Akires to kame (Achilles and the Tortoise)
Hayao Miyazaki- Gake no ue no Ponyo (Ponyo on Cliff by the Sea)
Amir Naderi- Vegas: Based on a True Story
Mamoru Oshii- The Sky Crawlers
Ferzan Özpetek- Un giorno perfetto
Christian Petzold- Jerichow
Barbet Schroeder- Inju, la Bête dans l’ombre
Werner Schroeter- Nuit de chien
Tariq Teguia- Gabbla (Inland)
YU Lik-wai- Dangkou (Plastic City)

Strangely enough, this year’s Out of Competition selections are more impressive-looking overall than the titles that are actually competing. Playing outside of competition are new films from the likes of Abbas Kiarostami (Shirin, starring Juliette Binoche), Claire Denis (35 Rhums), Agnes Varda (Les Plages d’Agnes), a new version of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s La Rabbia, and short films by Manoel de Oliveira (Do Visivel ao Invisivel) and Jia Zhang-ke (Cry Me a River). Also, there’s a little movie called Burn After Reading by a pair of filmmaking brothers. Didn’t catch their names, I’m afraid.

The 65th Annual Venice International Film Festival runs from August 27 through September 6. Click here for more information.

At Least I'll Get My Washing Done: Vikash Dhorasoo's "Substitute"

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 28 May 2008 14:45:00 GMT

Leave it to the French to make the most existential sports film of all time. It's a pity that soccer (or, as it's known everywhere else in the universe, football) isn't particularly popular in the United States, because that means not a lot of people in America will get a chance to see Vikash Dhorasoo's Substitute, one of the most compelling -- and angst-ridden -- sports movies ever made. For a film that it would be a compliment to call 'amateurish' -- Dhorasoo was given a Super-8 camera only weeks before he started filming the movie, and some of its lighter moments come early in the film when he can't seem to quite get the hang of how it works -- it's an extremely fascinating one, probably one of the most interesting sports documentaries ever made. Thrown together as a sort of lark-cum-confessional by its director, it shows a keen insight into the competitive psychology, provides a depressing but sympathetic look at how dull and desperate life can be for professional athletes who aren't lucky enough to be in the upper eschelons -- and does this on basically no budget, putting the glory-whoring pretentions of ESPN and the like to shame.

Most Americans, if they remember the 2006 World Cup at all, remember it for France's spectacular meltdown: Zinedine Zidane, hero of France's previous Cup victory, became frustrated and enraged in the finals against Italy, headbutting a defender and contributing to his team's loss on penalties. But his frustration was nothing compared to that of his teammate Vikash Dhorasoo: raised in a working-class suburban tenement from which he escaped through willpower and his skill at soccer, he fought long and hard to become the best he could, and when he was selected as part of the French National Team, he dreamed of becoming the first player of South Asian descent to become a star in the world's biggest sporting event. It was for this reason that his friend, French filmmaker Fred Poulet, gifted him with a camera: to record his dream coming true. But it was not to be: Dhorasoo, not the best player on the team but still a footballer of great skill, was never given much of a chance to succeed on the team. When the team was doing well, he wasn't needed, and when they weren't they couldn't risk putting him in. His coach used him only as a substitute and wouldn't give him a reason why, and during the entire World Cup, he played only eight minutes in two matches. His teammates won't talk to him for fear of breaking the French team's notorious code of locker room silence; he can't use any official footage of the games because of copyright restrictions; he can't communicate with the German family that hosts him during the game; and, worst of all, as he laments, "I'm a footballer, and I'm not playing football."

Substitute has just opened in the UK, where, as in France, it's been met with both jeers (mostly from sports fans, who consider Dhorasoo a whiner and his talk of aesthetics and Cassavetes pretentious) and praise (mostly from critics, who compare its long, empty silences, deliberate use of negative imagery and highbrow amateur techniques, unironically, to Godard and Kiarostami). During a somewhat difficult interview with the Guardian's Stuart Jeffries -- whose French is about as poor as Dhorasoo's English -- the director discusses the aesthetic in the film, how he completely understands those who mock Substitute's almost cartoonish sense of ennui and despair, and why he defends the football crowds that boo him. Because of the demographics of soccer fans in America, it's not likely to get a US release (I saw it through the good graces of a friend in France), but hopefully an English-language DVD will be forthcoming; Substitute may not be an ideal film for sports fans, but it's one of the best sports films I've ever seen.

The Movie Moment: The Wind Will Carry Us (1999, Abbas Kiarostami)

Paul Clark — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Ambiguity has never been a strong point of narrative cinema. For most directors, film is primarily a literal medium, with the goal of re-creating the real world while conveying all of the necessary information to the audience. But what exactly constitutes “necessary information?” The obvious answer is information that’s directly relevant to the story being told, but for most viewers it goes beyond that, encompassing stylistic considerations that are generally made so that audiences don’t feel lost from moment to moment. But is this information strictly necessary to make the film work? Some directors would say no, and foremost among these directors is the great Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami.

Throughout his career, Kiarostami has become a master of ambiguity in filmmaking, withholding supposedly important information from the audience so deftly that after a while one hardly misses it. In his 1990 film Close-Up the sound cuts out at several key points during a recorded dialogue scene, and in his Cannes prizewinner A Taste of Cherry we are never told why the protagonist wants to commit suicide. 2002’s Ten is composed entirely of dialogue scenes that take place inside a car, with the cameras bolted to the dashboard. In all of these films and more besides, Kiarostami leaves out certain story conventions one would normally expect, but at the same time he imparts everything that’s really necessary for the story. It’s a tricky feat, but Kiarostami somehow pulls it off, and his 1999 film The Wind Will Carry Us finds his style of ambiguity at its most poetic.

In the film’s centerpiece scene, Behzad (played by Behzad Dourani) pays a visit to a young woman with the goal of buying some milk from her. When Behzad arrives at the house, the woman’s mother leads him down to the basement, where he finds the woman, named Zeynab, in complete darkness. Soon, she emerges from the darkness with a gas lamp, which she holds down by her side to light the way. He follows Zeynab to the cow’s stall, where she fills his bowl with milk. Never once do we see her face. But then, do we really need to? If the film was really about her, then we would, but since this is her only scene in the film, so it’s not really necessary. In addition, I believe that by not showing Zeynab’s face, Kiarostami transforms the scene from a fairly standard dialogue into something unforgettable.

In addition, this decision makes perfect sense in terms of the story Kiarostami is telling. Behzad, a filmmaker from Tehran, is an outsider in this small town, finds that the habits and pace of big-city life that he’s grown accustomed to have no place in a rural village. The residents of the village adjusted their lives to their surroundings a long time ago, but Behzad is still an outsider, and he struggles to reconcile his lifestyle with his current circumstances. Perhaps the most famous scenes in the film involve Behzad’s highly irregular mobile phone conversations, which invariably find him asking his callers to hold the line for several minutes while he climbs into his truck and races to higher ground so he can get reception. There are other instances in which Behzad’s expectations are frustrated, and even his reason for visiting the town- to film a strange local funeral tradition- is put on hold while he waits for the woman in question to die.

Throughout the film, Behzad is contrasted with the people of the village, and so it is in his scene with Zeynab. Having already met her boyfriend, he’s eager to meet her as well- “to see what his taste is,” in Behzad’s own words. Yet although she never actually says so, Zeynab’s behavior as she gets some milk for her guest is an attempt to deny him this pleasure. As she milks the cow, the more educated Behzad recites poetry to her and repeatedly asks her her name, but she continues to resist his efforts. It’s not that she’s afraid of him, merely that she sees no reason to show herself to him, especially when he could have gotten milk from anyone in town. The scene even finds a perfect punch line when Behzad has left the house, and Zeynab peeks her head around the corner to watch him walking away.

The title The Wind Will Carry Us was taken from the final lines of a poem by the great Iranian poet Foroogh Farrokhzaad, part of which is recited by Behzad during the scene I’ve described. The poem itself is romantic, but taken both in the context of the poem and on its own, the final lines exist as a philosophy for living. Life doesn’t always run according to our personal timeline, nor is it possible for us to always know what we want to know. So sometimes we need to acknowledge this and allow the winds of life to carry us along wherever they want to take us. It’s a philosophy that Behzad would be wise to heed every once in a while, and in Kiarostami’s eyes, so would we all.

The Rep Report (October 11 - 28)

Peter Smith — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 17:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: The Brooklyn Academy of Music gives the borough's literary poster boy a chance to display his wide-ranging taste in movies with the program Jonathan Lethem Selects (October 15 - November 19). Those looking for hard-to-find rough gems will be especially attracted to the "Hitman Double Feature" on October 22, with Don Siegel's The Hitman (1958) paired with the taut B classic Murder by Contract (1958), well directed by Irving Lerner and starring Vince Edwards as an icy fellow who's putting himself through college by performing mob hits on the side. On November 12, a screening of the gritty seventies Dustin Hoffman vehicle Straight Time will be followed by a discussion between Lethem and the movie's director, Ulu Grosbard.

LOS ANGELES: The Los Angeles County of Museum of Art presents Life and So Much More: The Films of Abbas Kiarostami (October 12 - 27), with ten features and three triple bills of shorts by the leading figure in Iranian cinema. A great opportunity for the curious or the benighted to catch up.

BERKELEY: Attention, Leone freaks: Once upon a Time in Widescreen: The Films of Sergio Leone (October 12 - 28) has everything you could want — the Dollars trilogy, Once Upon a Time in the West, Once Upon a Time in America, and the messed-up but lovable Duck, You Sucker, starring Rod Steiger as a Mexican bandit and James Coburn as a wayward IRA soldier — in the format you love, with many of them shown in restored prints.

WASHINGTON, D.C.: We may not have a labor movement in this country anymore, but that's no reason not to kick back and celebrate the 2007 DC Labor Filmfest (October 11 - 17) at the AFI Silver Theater. "Organized and presented by the Metropolitan Washington Council of the AFL-CIO, the Debs-Jones-Douglass Institute and the American Film Institute," the festival presents "an array of new films and beloved classics about work and workers," including a mini-fest of works by the living soul of socially committed British kitchen-sink drama, Ken Loach. (The selection includes Loach's Los Angeles movie, Bread and Roses and his little-screened documentary on the 1980 British miners' strike, Which Side Are You On?) The program also includes the Japanese comedy Hula Girls, the German documentary Our Daily Bread, and that one American movie in a billion that says something about working for a living in a way that most people seem able to relate to: Mike Judge's Office Space.

— Phil Nugent