MAS Y MAS #4 - Deviances (en)

MÁS y MÁS Friday 25 May 2007

More young talent, more European cinema in Cannes

#4

Funukedomo Malos Hábitos La Soledad Emir Kusturica English version www.nisimasa.com

Deviances

Editorial T

Small

sins and other films…

fulfilled quest for death (Magnus). The directors are not taking sides. More than anything, they are simply bold enough to take up their cameras in order to deal with tough subjects. Often first or second long features, these films focus on the most deviant aspects of our society.

Perhaps this is the real reason which made us board the boat headed for the port of the 60th anniversary. Taking us by surprise like a slap on the face… as on the poster for the Critic’s Week.

Luckily, Emir has disembarked with his fanfare to bring a lighter touch to proceedings. His film Promise me this is eagerly awaited, too much perhaps. In any case, one never tires of his cinéaste persona…

Joanna Gallardo

Photo Yana Dzharova

he Cannes festival, with its abundance of films, stars, bulbflashes, Rolls Royces, mobile phones glued to the ear, applauds, screams, money, men in black suits with earpieces, gawping passers by, soirées… In the end we lack time to simply look at the palm trees and the horizon across the water.

In order to turn our attention away from this veritable orgy, directors from around the world are forcing us to observe behaviours much more extravagant than the outfits and attitudes of certain festival-goers. Amongst others: a trio of brothers who tear each other apart (Funukedomo), isolation within a family unit (La Soledad), dangerous eating habits guided by moral conduct (Malos Habitos), a woman who beats her husband (Genenüber) and an un-

Homer, could you replay the walk down the red carpet?

Photo of the day

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Funukedomo, Kanashimo ai wo misero Funuke Show Some Love, you Losers!

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or several years now, Japanese cinema has been demonstrating its vitality.

The few films reaching Europe however generally consist of animated movies and other manga adaptations. It is therefore with much pleasure, but also some apprehension that one approaches Funuke Show Some Love, you Losers!, the first long feature from director Yoshida Daihachi. Fortunately, this burlesque comedy with an exotic flavour fully deserves its selection at this year’s Critics’ Week.

If the title of the film is already amusing, the first minutes of the screening confirm a somewhat quirky sense of humour. Free in all meanings of the word, this new ‘pic’ of young cinema opposes two visions of Japanese society, both modern and still rooted to its traditions. This is also the case for this weird family…

After the tragic (and comic) death of their parents, two completely opposing sisters, their half-brother and his new wife find them-

Yoshida Daihachi, Japan, Critics’ Week

selves stuck in their native village. A wacky familial drama then begins within which the two young rival sisters are constantly at each other throats. Both of them have their own characters and personal ambitions.

One dreams of becoming an actress in Tokyo, whilst the other is struggling to get her horrific mangas published.

In this colourful atmosphere, at times very close to the universe of animated films, Yoshida Daihachi skilfully mixes love and hatred, devastating emotions and disillusions.

These characters, so strange and yet still very human, give Funuke Show Some Love, you Losers! its ongoing energy and dynamism. The filmmaker, who used to be an advertising director, has set himself apart with this eccentric, unnerving, but above all endearing comedy.

Clément Petitmangin Constance Dechelotte Very Young Critics

Malos hábitos Simon Bross, Mexico, Critics’ Week

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exico under incessant rain, an anorexic woman forces her slightly plump daughter to go on a strict diet in order to fit into her communion dress.

Matilde, a young doctor taking holy orders, fasts in the hope of making the torrential rain which is battering the town stop. We find in this film the same carnal and religious preoccupations of Carlos Reygadas, but here Simon Bross develops them on a social level.

The convent is transformed into a caterer for financial reasons; gastric acid damages the pipes of a university where the students make themselves vomit.

Here, each character has their own particular relationship with the flesh, like the husband who, sexually unsatisfied by his anorexic wife, seeks refuge with a voluptuously attractive woman who opens her arms, and her fridge. The di-

etary “bad habits” of the characters are not so much destined to change their own bodies as those of others. Whilst Linda’s mother does a kind of diet for two because her daughter fails to lose one single gram, Matilde inflicts dietary torture upon herself to save her fellow neighbours.

We are thus lead into a twilight world where the main characters work towards their own destruction. The aesthetic choices of the director are

radical; the film functions with three colours: white, black and night-blue.

The only sources of light come from the nun’s veils. The film, shot mostly indoors, gives us the impression of almost prison-like suffocation. In the end, whether the awaited redemption comes or not is of little importance.

In Malos Habitos, the fats don’t go to heaven, the fork is an instrument of torture, and saintliness is a reward of dieting. The Christian credo (one must suffer on this earth in order to reach a better place) is here degraded by the absence of the next world, the hereafter. Presented in a special one-off screening at the Critics’ Week, Malos Habitos, a kind of Mexican anti-Grande Bouffe, has perhaps not received all of the attention it deserves. It’s not easy, between two cocktail parties...

Thierry Lebas

Gegenüber F

or his first feature film German director Jan Bonny addresses a subject rarely evident in cinema; domestic violence where the victim is… a man. Georg is a deserving policeman who is on the point of obtaining an important promotion within his police station. His wife, a teacher, is a depressive person. Anne bears less

Magnus S

Jan Bonny, Germany, Directors’ Fortnight

and less the daily decline of their relationship. Only the coming of their two children, students in another town, brings gladness.

Georg attempts to protect the happiness of his home but it is already too late. Anne is sombre, in a violence where the provocation towards her husband intensifies whilst he retreats into himself and

averts confrontation at all costs.

Here the violence is sordid, permeating to the heart of domestic intimacy. The shots are dark, unframed.

The characters distress one another behind closed doors, in a corridor. Anne makes a fine figure from the outside, in front of her oppressive parents, at school. Here no-

thing is said, all is hidden, so as to give the impression that everything functions normally. Georg is positive, “this is not a drama Anne”.

But in reality the drama that unfolds is his own. In return for his silence he is submitted to the worst humiliations. Of this Jan Bonny gives no explanation. He is obliged to construct a banal daily existence within which to exercise this violence. But in keeping this distance the drama looses its substance.

There is not a victim or a torturer. The ending being not particularly affirmative we look for explanations, a boring life, an Oedipus complex, a lack of recognition…

The interpretation of the actors does not support the film sufficiently, which could perhaps gain from being more engaged with this domestic hell or contrarily at more of a remove.

Joanna Gallardo

K adri Kõusaar, Estonie, UCR

hunted between the plump arms of a heroin-addict father and a vulgarly made-up mother who works as a madam in a brothel, Magnus is a boy dreamer who, suffering from diseased lungs, somehow repeatedly manages to cheat death. Years later, cured, Magnus has not stopped playing with the Grim Reaper, despite everything. He continues to set himself childish dares in order to persuade himself that he won’t die that very day. An enthusiast of all kinds of illicit substances, Magnus (played by the magnetic Kristjan Kasearu) cares little for social manners or taboos. Does he not after all even propose cunnilingus to his own (apparently lesbian) sister between two puffs of crack?

Casually suicidal, one day he takes an overdose. Failed. Hospital-bound.

Sheltered by his father, this post-adolescent is forced to rediscover his taste for life. Except the method used here is anything but ordinary. On the programme: smoking joints, taking acid

and visits to brothels. The destination and point of no return before the final swallow dive: a forest at the heart of Hiiumaa Island, for one last father-son encounter. Sometimes, the characters in Magnus struggle to move us, as if they

were confined to an overly demonstrative and even monotonous marginality.

The Estonia filmed by Kadri Kõusaar at least has the merit of being unusual: by turns realist, surreal, dark, hallucinogenic. Poetically incorrect.

Emilie Padellec

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La Soledad Jaime Rosales, Spain, Un Certain Regard

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odern-day Madrid, the lives of two families and some friends who, despite their ties, remain in isolation. They are are trapped in a double-edged loneliness, at once spiritual and physical.

Jaime Rosales has excluded all music from this film, throughout which we only hear the sounds of daily life and the often ambiguous dialogue. No over-sentimen-

tality in this drama, which uses not one but two stories typical of the genre in order to reduce events to their bare skeleton. Nothing enables us to envisage the disaster which is to come. At Rosales house, there is no visible symptom, only the illness as it is.

The remarkable usage of the split screen technique proves to be a formal way of

exploring loneliness, beyond the details of the plot. The montage loses its function of putting things in relation to one another : different places, different people. Instead of montage, we have the simultaneity of two isolated spaces. One can guess that they are close, but only through the clue provided by the entrance and exit of the characters in and out of the

Short: La route, la nuit P

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resented at the Semaine de la Critique La route, la nuit is a short film that carries us onto dangerous ground: the sublimation of a love story through cinema.

The film begins with a series of still shots, representing as many steps following the heroine from the rupture to the creation. Each shot puts the spectator in a position of attentiveness of movement, waiting hypnotised, whilst the film reel becomes a haunted material.

Far from the fashionable process, of the film in-the-

making, Marine Alice Le Du proposes something radical - the ‘film in the unmaking’.

Because we will see only one scene from the promised work, one magnificent continuous shot in which a man leaves his partner and runs away, as if the film after having drawn us in to this series of still shots wanted to run.

La route, la nuit reminds us (finally!) why we love cinema, and those who have not seen this film have an ephemeral advantage over others; the chance to discover it.

Thierry Lebas

M arine Alice Le Du, France, Critics’ Week

frame. We know that they are close physically, but feel that there is an infinite distance seperating them.

The loneliness in this film is not, as in Asian cinema, the simple consequence of a lack of communication. Here the people talk a lot, but in vain.

This is an illness without a solution. Nevertheless, it’s always better to live through it with someone.

Carlos Marques Pierre Trouvé

Professional encounter:

cinema theatre industry Alain Bouffartigue, vice-president of the French Association of Art House Films (AFCAE)

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rt-house cinema suffers, amongst other things, from stereotypes which can be attributed to it unfairly: ‘inaccessible, pseudo-intellectual, elitist’, but alongside this ‘special’. Alain Bouffartigue tried above all to redress this notion of art-house cinema, currently facing many challenges.

A profound contrast exists between artistic cinema and commercial films in cinema theatres. The danger for this industry, so diverse and difficult to classify, is to fall into a Manichean analysis which places the cinephile audience in opposition to the general public.

The paradox of cinema is that it is at the convergence of art and industry.

Thus it must strike a balance between economic and artistic imperatives. The

fundamental question for this genre of cinema is which identity to express?

The AFCAE was founded in 1955 at the initiative of five Parisian cinema theatres seeking to diversify the field and above all give a place to the critical regard of cinema. The managers of this network of theatres want to ‘represent diversity in cinema and not to oppose the general public’. They did not struggle to oppose audiences or to create a niche but to enliven the curiosity of everyone.

For Alain Bouffartique, one should keep in mind the definition of the word ‘cinema’ in accordance with Daniel Toscan du Plantier: art-gens (evoking the word for money in French).

Mathilde Engélibert

Three questions to

Olivier Koos

Photo Lasse Lecklin

If you could be a character in a film which would you be? (laughs) I need to think. I think I would be someone like Jack Sparrow (Pirates of the Caribbean). His character is a bit like mine. I like the fact that he is neither good nor bad.

Do you think that cinema is light?

For me cinema is 50% light, 50% sound. The combination makes cinema. But in silent cinema the pianist who played during the screening was important.

Oliver Koos, Luxembourg, 22 years old with eyes full of curiosity, is member of the 60 at Cannes. He studies cinema.

In effect the fathers of cinema were the Lumière brothers, do you think it is a coincidence that this was their name?

(Smile) Yes, they were predestined for this! They gave a helping hand in the creation of cinema. However, cinema developed thanks to other parents.

The Lumière brothers stopped fairly quickly because they conceived of cinema as a science and decided the filed of industry was not for them. I think they were inventers not artists. They are not far from being business men.

They are fathers of cinema from a technical point of view, but they did not create cinema.

Questions

posed by

Mercedes Alvarez

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Portrait

Emir Kusturica

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harismatic, emotional and uncompromising.

Emir Kusturica, a regular visitor to the festival, is this year presenting Promise Me this (Záv_t) in competition.

Will this film allow the cineaste born in Sarajevo to be the first director ever to win three Palme d’Or? Over one decade - in 1985 with When Father was away on Business, and in 1995 with Underground - Emir has already won twice the favour of jurors. In 2005, it was his turn to decide between his colleagues for the giving out of awards, notably his friend Jim Jarmusch, as in this year he was President of the Jury.

If you watch any two films by Emir Kusturica, you are sure to find common elements: the fanfare music,

the lively atmosphere, the sensitivity and magic of the images. A little like the development of a party: intense, exciting, long, but never boring. Each time, we detect recurring leitmotifs: the world seen through children’s eyes, the ‘American dream’, the important role given to animals, marriages - often very kitsch - in the face of death and suicide.

Beyond these images which form such a particular universe, what is perhaps most typical in the work of the Serbian director is folk music. From The Time of The Gypsies onwards, we have found in each film, with great pleasure, music composed by the superb Goran Bregovic. Balkan folklore has become symbolic for

Emir’s entire body of work.

Its admirers seek it in his films as much as the films themselves. For Promise Me This nevertheless, Kusturica changed his team, notably the musical composer. Now it is none other than his own son Stribor who has taken on the job. An unknown new element in Kusturica’s 9th feature film? Admirers of Goran Bregovic can reassure themselves: both Emir and Stribor are part of Bregovic’s group the ‘New Smoking Orchestra’, today considered as one of the best fanfares in Central Europe.

The synopsis of Promise Me This strongly reminds one of the story in Black Cat, White Cat, directed by Kusturica in1998, a village fable set on the banks of

the Danube which brought together a young couple, several grandfathers, a godfather, animals… and, to top it all, ‘gypsy’ culture. Since the international success of Underground, rejected in his native country because of the more than tarnished image of ex-Yugosavia portrayed in the film, Kusturica seems to have put off taking political stances for the indefinite future. With this new village tale cohabited by different generations, as well as a cow, the fanfares have been called back to let us hear their excessive, comic and eccentric voices. Will Cannes be again susceptible to this certain charm, and will the Lumière Theatre be caught up in the whirlwind of the dance?

Magdalena Koutska

MÁS y MÁS is a magazine published by the association NISI MASA with the support of the French Ministry of Health,

Sports and Youth. EDITORIAL STAFF Editor-in-chief Matthieu Darras Secretary of the editorial Joanna Gallardo Artistic director Lasse Lecklin, llecklin@uiah.fi English translations Camilla Buchanan, Judy Lister Contibutors of this issue Mercedes Alvarez, Constance Dechelotte, Yana Dzharova, Mathilde Engélibert, Magdalena Koutska, Thierry Lebas, Carlos Marques, Emilie Padellec, Clément Petitmangin, Pierre Trouvé Print Imprimerie Cyclone, 12 rue des Mimosas, 06400 Cannes. NISI MASA 10 rue de l’Echiquier, 75010, Paris, France + 33 (0)1 53 34 62 78, + 33 (0)6 32 61 70 26 - europe@nisimasa.com - www.nisimasa.com