Edinburgh International Film Festival 2006

By the end of this year's Edinburgh International Film Festival, in contrast with previous years, I was feeling a bit of film fatigue. That is not to denegrate the quality of the work on offer; on the contrary, I preferred my selections to what I chose to see last year. My tiredness was rather due to the necessity of packing as much into six days at possible, since I was forced to sacrifice the end of the festival to a scientific conference. As a result, I squeezed nine feature films and five shorts into that time period, with no day “off”. I just hope that the intensity of this film fest won't have made me more impatient with some of the later films than I might otherwise be.

The run started with Summer Palace (Yiheyuan; dir. Lou Ye; China/France; 2006), a semifictional love story set over more than a decade, initially at a Beijing University in the Tiananmen Square era of the late 1980s, and later in reunified Germany and elsewhere in China. The film has elements of typical Chinese introspection, as well as a very atypical sexual forthrightness, although unfortunately the latter gave the impression of being used for its own sake—not to mention overly frequently—and so can't be considered particularly remarkable in any other sense. The use of dramatic music during documentary footage from Tianenmen Square also seemed unnecessary and inappropriate. Overall, Summer Palace is far from wholly uninteresting or unenjoyable, but its various flaws, as well as the plot's generally rambling nature, let it down considerably.

Moving further east in country of origin, April Snow (Wae Chool; dir. Hur Jin-ho; South Korea; 2005) and Sundays in August (Pal-wol-eui Il-yo-il-deul; dir. Lee Jin-woo; South Korea; 2005) make for a particularly interesting comparison since they are both Korean and have extremely similar premises—the protagonists in each case are the partners of comatose car crash victims—but very different executions. The former precipitates into a reasonably straightforward love story between the two victims' partners, who quickly discover that their other halves were seeing each other. They differ in their reaction to the news, with the man telling his unhearing girlfriend that she “should have just died” while the woman seems more willing to make allowances, but the eventual happy ending is justified by the asymmetric outcomes for the coma patients. It's a believable and satisfying work, if hardly a groundbreaking one. The material making up Sundays in August, by contrast, is mainly mundane, with an inconsistently superimposed layer of what the festival blurb describes as Buñuelesque surrealism. I'm no expert on either surrealism in general or Buñuel in particular, but I feel that the claim is overstated. The opening, which shows a slowly rotating countryside road scene—which is then echoed at full speed as the car crash is depicted—unfortunately felt like the film's high point. I wrote last year of Emmanuel Carrère's The Moustache that I wasn't going to call it a masterpiece just because it didn't make sense, and for me, the same comment applies here. I do regret that the director wasn't present in this case though, because I would certainly have been interested to hear his/her^a views.

Excessive subtlety is certainly not an accusation likely to be levelled against Destricted (dir. Matthew Barney/Marco Brambilla/Larry Clark/Sam Taylor-Wood/Gaspar Noé; USA/UK; 2006), a collection of five shorts on the subject of sex and (particularly) pornography. This kind of exercise, of course, has the potential to be either quite interesting or forced and banal; or, most likely, a mixture of the two. In fact the latter outcome in some ways makes the best viewing.

Starting with what I think was the least successful, Sam Taylor-Wood's Death Valley, in which our hero strolls into shot in the eponymous south Californian hotspot and masturbates himself, was without any discernable direction and made no clear comment on sex or pornography. It wasn't even novel: a remarkably similar scene appears in Tommy Lee Jones' recent directorial effort, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (which, incidentally, is well worth a look).^b

Clark was never going to be able to resist trying to turn his contribution, Impaled, into a microcosmic social commentary, but the result is disappointingly superficial. It shows a guy in his early twenties being chosen by Clark from a group of hopefuls to “shag a starlet of his choice” (as the blurb unambiguously puts it), which he then unceremoniously does as we look on in disinterest.

Brambilla's Sync is a very short and to the point composition of sampled images from mainstream pornography, often only a single frame long. As a visual device for demonstrating the obvious point that such material is highly formulaic and broadly interchangeable, it's quite effective. It was a little uncomfortable to watch because of the rapidly changing images, but far worse (and far longer) was Noé's We Fuck Alone, which is edited to strobe rhythmically down to black and back again every couple of seconds throughout the film's 23 minute runtime. In this case the content was a little enigmatic. The film starts with porn scenes that are only slightly unconventional. The set then changes to show a young man “fucking alone” in front of similar scenes on his TV. As the camera meanders fluidly around the room, it periodically shifts seamlessly to the bedroom of a girl who is similarly entertaining herself, and back again. While the latter's masturbation is unremarkable, the man soon engages an inflatable partner, which he ultimately violently penetrates with the barrel of a gun. I have to say that the whole thing is a little incoherent, and I couldn't make out a message of any particular import, but there is certainly some creativity on show.

For me, the best contribution by some margin was Matthew Barney's Hoist. Part of the reason for its success was the fact that it was the only one of the five shorts that really took the specified subject matter less that totally literally. Starting with an exquisite low key sequence^c of the (male) protagonist's lower torso and genitals, with movement that is initially barely perceptible, the film moves on to show him in situ, suspended inside a large piece of construction machinery. The dynamic between the animate and the inanimate is complex in many ways, not least because the truck seems more lifelike in some ways than its human dependent. Barney's artful work is both rich and open to broad interpretation, while at the same time remaining approachable and staying obliquely on topic. I must get around to properly investigating the Cremaster Cycle...

Also rich and inviting of creative interpretation was the wonderful It's Winter (Zemestan; dir. Rafi Pitts; Iran; 2006), a lyrical working class tale with some gorgeous audiovisual design. At the beginning of the film, a man leaves Iran and his family in search of work; a journey that the women in the family urge him not to take, and which ultimately leads to his return in a worse state, to find that due to an errant report of his death, his wife has remarried the roguish Marhab, a recent arrival to the town. At a broad level, the plot is almost cyclic—although not perfectly so because of the nature of a decision taken by Marhab at the end—and there are also additional small scale hints of déjà vu here and there. I asked Pitts (to whom I quickly warmed) afterwards if there was any intention that this cyclical construction, which in the film revolves around the protagonists' search for a good living, be metaphorical for some real world pattern in Iranian, or broader, life. Apparently there wasn't, but the director was keen to keep his own interpretation of the film to himself, so as not to prejudice other people's. Like another recent Iranian film, Alireza Raisian's Deserted Station^d, the ending of It's Winter is pure poetry, so I won't do it the injustice of a written description.

The only proper documentary that I saw this year was 5 Days (Chamisha Yamim; dir. Yoav Shamir; Israel; 2005), which aims to be a meticulously even handed chronicle of Israel's withdrawal from the Gaza Strip; and on the whole it is successful in that aim. The film shows the process from the perspectives of both the military force tasked with executing it and some of the more hardline settlers who seem to genuinely believe, in some cases, that divine intervention will save them from eviction at the crucial moment. When asked by a member of the audience about his decision to add music to the film, some of which was not emotionally neutral and therefore perhaps liable to affect the objectivity of his creation, Shamir justified it on the basis of the necessity to differentiate the film from the plentiful “pure news” reports on the subject. The lynchpin of the film is undoubtedly the final scene, in which Shamir asks the general in charge why he thinks the tact and careful planning that their country's army proved it could muster for this operation was not applied to engagements with the Palestinians. By this stage, one feels that the film has provided plenty of evidence to warrant this question, and it draws things together very effectively. The general, incidentally, refuses to answer on camera...

Dramatically less serious was Colour Me Kubrick (dir. Brian W. Cook; UK/France; 2005), an utterly riotous retelling of the story of Alan Conway, a British conman who apparently randomly chose to pretend to be Stanley Kubrick, despite having little relevant biographic—or even filmographic—knowledge of the man himself; and thus extremely successfully manipulated starstruck acquaintances into all kinds of favours. John Malkovich is gloriously excessive as Conway, and the mainly British supporting cast are often pushed towards the extremes of their natural characters, from Jim Davidson's tackiness to Richard E. Grant's foppish showiness (“Shall we retire to the salon privé?”). In this context it seems strange to criticise an element of the film for feeling overly contrived, but the very unsubtle musical borrowings from Kubrick's films did grate with me sometimes. Nevertheless, it's good fun and Malkovich's performance is generous and energetic.

Madeinusa (dir. Claudia Llosa; Spain/Peru; 2005) is a curious work. When an urbanite limeño^e gets stuck in the Andean village where the eponymous Madeinusa (mad-ey-NOO-sa) lives with her jealous sister and corrupt father, he witnesses and becomes involved in their celebration of the bizarre (and fictional) rite of Tiempo Santo (Holy Time). This part Christian, part pagan festival is predicated on the belief that God is dead between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, and consequently that all sins pass unnoticed during that period. The villagers apparently look forward to this as an opportunity to fit as much transgression as possible into those two days. The overall feel of the film, whose dialogue is in an unpredictable mixture of Spanish and Quechua, is commensurately strange. By sheer coïncidence, while looking for Spanish language literature recently, Susana ended up buying Lituma en los Andes (Lituma in the Andes), a short novel by Mario Vargas Llosa—the uncle of director Claudia Llosa. Although not officially related, the book and the film do have quite similar starting points. The latter does add tinges of the surreal, but both have at their centre the quirky and deeply entrenched belief systems of their respective remote communities.

I had mixed feelings about Birds of Heaven (Les Oiseaux du Ciel; dir. Eliane de Latour; France/UK; 2005), which tells the story of a pair of African immigrants into Europe. One is quickly deported back to their native Abidjan, in Côte d'Ivoire, where he tries to maintain an outward projection of pride while in fact living a somewhat selfcontradictory life. Shad, the one of the pair to remain in Europe, hustles money here and there, with occasional help or hindrance from people he meets; often aiming to do things the official way but never quite managing it. There's no doubt that the film has interesting things to say about the hot topic that is immigration, but some elements of the plot seem gratuitous or excessively simplistic. In particular, at the end of the film Shad seems to be able to suddenly come into large amounts of money with an ease that sits badly next to the conscious complexity of the rest of the film.

My slice of the festival ended with the only film that was not contemporary. I'd heard of The Spook That Sat By The Door (dir. Ivan Dixon; USA; 1973) tangentially through a podcast I listen to, and when I read the festival blurb I was interested enough to investigate. Whilst the film may be technically unexciting and quite dated in some ways, the satirical and political message comes across as surprisingly pertinent, more than 30 years after its production. CIA bosses are grudgingly convinced to take on a “token negro”, in the form of the highly intelligent Dan Freeman. Freeman works diligently within the organisation and learns everything about espionage and guerilla warfare that it has to teach him; but after completing his training—during which he quietly ignores the condescension of his superiors—Freeman immediately leaves the agency and uses his newfound knowledge to start an underground guerilla movement whose aim is to destabilise what they see as a white hegemony. All this could seem melodramatic, but the film is so clearly of its time, and so representative of later black political statements in film and music, that the key message pushes through the contrivance and demands to be noticed.