EIFF 2012 in retrospect: Never Too Late

Posted on by harrietwarman

Having worked steadily making music videos, television advertisements and short films, director Ido Fluk here makes his feature film debut in a carefully crafted drama about about a 30-year old man returning to Israel , after eight years spent traveling in South America.

In the opening scenes, we see Herzl (Nony Geffen) applying for a job hanging posters, his hair chopped but hardly tidy. Later, he eats dinner with his mother who berates him for taking employment that will have him on the road so soon after arriving back in the country. Unable to resolve his decision not to attend his father’s funeral, Herzl is emotionally in limbo. Foregoing the usual flashback, Fluk opts to portray Herzl’s paternal memories in the present, having the genial, but assertive patriarch (Ami Weinberg) accompany his son as a passenger on his journey. Visiting old friends, Herzl is withdrawn and awkward , as though unsure of his surroundings. His return to his homeland was born of necessity rather than choice; this is a man out of touch with the world, struggling to accept his current time and place.

The themes of being adrift and unsettled are played out beautifully, not only with literary references (Herzl reads Robinson Crusoe), but also in the long takes shot from the front seat of the car looking out of the windscreen. Framed tightly from Herzl’s perspective, these scenes show the landscape passing him by, putting his past out of sight. Favouring the soft glow of sunrise and dusk, Fluk and cinematographer Itay Marom further accentuate their aimless protagonist’s fragile sense of place by blurring the distinction between sky and earth. Perfectly attuned to Herzl’s melancholy journey, Asher Goldschmidt’s haunting original score conveys the the sadness of his efforts to regain an identity lost, whilst subtly introducing hopeful notes as out protagonist gradually comes to terms with the weight of his father’s judgement and hid own decision to leave.

Never Too Late marks a further exploration of the subject of mourning, following Fluk’s short film Cooking for Richard, which was about a woman hopelessly grasping at the last remnant of her husband who died “of too much liver pâté”. Here, too, Fluk demonstrates enormous sympathy for his central character , and he does so with a confidence and sensitivity as a director that marks him as a talent to watch.

 

This text first appeared in the EIFF catalogue, published in June 2012.

Pedro Costa’s Casa de Lava

Posted on by harrietwarman

I could write just about the symbolic red of Mariana’s dress – such is the richness and potential for interpretation in Pedro Costa’s Casa de Lava (1994). Storming around Cape Verde with either a forthright, potentially desperate intent or equally desperate aimlessness, Mariana (Inês de Medeiros) appears a figure of life, potency and sheer bloody will. Towards the end of the film Mariana changes her clothes, adopting more neutral attire and seeming to calm internally too. Colour is used to startling effect throughout the film, in many cases where Costa’s compositions involve a single character framed within a scorched, dramatic landscape.

Costa’s second feature following the monochrome Blood (O Sangue, 1989) is a ‘remake’ of Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked with a Zombie (1943) and frequently cited as alluding to Rossellini’s Stromboli (1950). Construction worker Leão falls on site and becomes comatose, then, in a very concise piece of expository dialogue, the doctor announces that a letter and a cheque have been sent from Leâo’s village, he’s being discharged and will be sent on a plane back home. Nurse Mariana accompanies him from Lisbon to Cape Verde and on arrival attempts to ascertain her patients origins, but is met with denial or silence. A stranger in an unfamiliar land, Mariana’s presence is neither welcomed nor met with hostility, rather a questioning insight that seems to reveal to Mariana more about herself than she is willing to accept.

 

Violinist Bassoé (Raul Andrade) recounts his sorry tale to Mariana admitting that he has many sons, but is vague when questioned on whether Leão is one of them. Finding her equivalent in Edith, a white woman who arrived years ago and simply never left, Mariana is once again left frustratingly non-the wiser by Edith’s refusal to speak. The refusal, or denial as Jonathan Rosenbaum (who provides the booklet essay for the DVD release) puts it, is the locus of the film. Despite the sometimes perfunctory explanatory dialogue, the bulk of interactions have an ambiguity that hints towards many things and many interpretations, with plot points left unresolved and character motivation in doubt. Mariana is herself in denial about the purpose of her stay on the island, it seeming to go beyond the initial week she supposed without her noticing. At once a musing on colonialism and the notion of the individual within a community, this obliqueness of plot is characteristic of Costa’s filmmaking, the trajectory of which has been described by critic Peter Bradshaw as ‘one of the most fascinating in modern cinema’.

Indeed Costa’s films are highly celebrated but hard to access, none of them having had a UK release beyond individual screenings. Lucky for anyone able to get to the ICA in London this Sunday 30th for a special screening of Casa de Lava in collaboration with Second Run DVD. Costa himself will be in attendance for a Q&A with EIFF’s Chris Fujiwara.

Enchanting my heart, DVD Review: Innocent Sorcerers

Posted on by harrietwarman

The first thing worth noting about Innocent Sorcerers is that it looks simply stunning. Transferred from a new high definition restoration, approved by the director, the image quality is crisp, the sound pitch perfect, showing off the film’s gorgeous greyness to full effect. The platinum crop of central character Andrzej (Tadeusz Lomnicki) literally shines with silvery greatness – signalling him as the hippest of the films cast of free-spirited youth. In a new interview the film’s director, Andrzej Wajda – he tells of how impressed he is with new restorations of his films, describing how he barely recognises them as his own work.

The freshness of Innocent Sorcerers is just one of the films many achievements; centring on the aforementioned Andrzej – a recently graduated sports doctor by day and Jazz drummer by night – Wajda depicts the life of the post-war generation in Warsaw. Untrammelled by a war they were too young to fight in, instead their rebellion is against the State’s imposed conformity and involves carving out a more independent lifestyle. Andrzej has seemingly no trouble finding female company but when his friend asks him to talk a woman on his behalf he is still surprised that Pelagia (Krystyna Stypulkowska) is willing to accompany him back to his apartment after she misses her train. Matching his attempts at seduction with quick wit at every turn, Pelagia is both charming and more mature than the women Andrzej is used to meeting. Deciding they should define the boundaries of their evening together, the two create an agreement of the night’s interactions and pin it to the wall.

Depicting young people in this way was not familiar territory for Wajda. In the aforementioned interview he describes the emergence of the Polish Film School, a term coined by French critics that came to represent the endeavour of directors, writers etc. such as Wajda to tell stories about only one subject – what they had been through in the war. Feeling the guilt of surviving when his friends did not, Wajda’s previous features, A Generation (1955), Kanal (1957) and Ashes and Diamonds (1958) are cited as his attempts to depict their experiences. The attempt to represent the current, younger generation did not come as easily however, and required the experiences of one such hip, emerging artist to inform the authenticity of Innocent Sorcerers – Jerzy Skolimowski. At the time he was an aspiring poet – hired to co-write the script, he also appears as a boxer, a sport for which he had particular enthusiasm.

Skolimowski’s small part demonstrates a vital energy – his is just one of many bright performances throughout the film and indeed leads Stypulkowska and Lomnicki have a chemistry that supports the majority of the running time. Pelagia, with a wry smile, enlightens Andrzej (or ‘Bazyli’ as he names himself as the beginning of their agreement) on the defining characteristics of their generation – that in all their assuredness; in fact they know nothing of the world.

The life of liberty that Wajda depicted on screen inevitably incurred demands for cuts from the censors. Perhaps most surprising is the offence they took to a scene in which Andrzej switches off his tape recorder with his foot. This seemingly small act occurs during one of many sprawling long takes, and in which we are introduced to the casual morning routine of our central character. According to Wajda, the censors found the use of the foot in the scene to be of utmost offence to the plight of the worker and that it showed ‘contempt to technology and labour.’

Innocent Sorcerers is a film constructed within its own cinematic world – opening on one of Andrzej’s lovers strolling in front of a poster for the film, we also hear a song on the radio announced as being from the hit film we are watching, not to mention a gorgeous close-up of the jazz club singer staring directly into the camera as she croons, “You enchanted my eyes, You enchanted my heart, Your sorcery Enchanted my world” – perhaps a delirious ode to the illusionist power of cinema.

Accompanying Second Run DVD’s release is a new essay by Michal Oleszczyk in which he notes that Godard’s Breathless (Á bout de souffle) was shot at the same time as Innocent Sorcerers  – a perfect coincidence of two films concerning ‘rebellious’ youth simultaneously coming to fruition, creating separate portraits of the French and Polish post-war generation. What a fantastic double bill that would be.