Saturday Night At The Movies

SIFFting through cinema: Wrap party!

By Dennis Hartley

The 2009 Seattle International Film Festival is winding down this weekend, after showcasing 392 features over 25 days (ow, my ass). Again, thanks to the Hullabaloo readers for your invaluable support in helping me get my foot in the door this year. If I may paraphrase Sandra Bernhard: Without you, I’m nothing. Nada. Nichte. Niente. Rien.

Some of the films I have been spotlighting will hopefully be “coming to a theatre near you” soon; some may only be accessible via DVD. So let’s go SIFFting one more time…

Still clueless…OSS 117: Lost in Rio

SIFF’s Closing Night Gala selection this year is OSS 117: Lost in Rio, which is the sequel to OSS 117: Cairo, Nest Of Spies, which was a huge hit at the festival back in 2006. Who is this “OSS 117” of which I speak, you may ask? He is the cheerfully sexist, jingoistic, folkway-challenged, and generally clueless French secret agent Hubert Bonisseur de la Bath, who is played once again to comic perfection by Jean Dujardin. In my review of the first film, I described why I thought Dujardin was a real discovery:

He has a marvelous way of underplaying his comedic chops that borders on genius. He portrays his well-tailored agent with the same blend of arrogance and elegance that defined Sean Connery’s 007, but tempers it with an undercurrent of obliviously graceless social bumbling that matches Peter Sellers’ Inspector Clouseau.

After viewing the second entry in this series, I have to stand by my assertion that Dujardin is a bloody genius. In this outing (which moves the time line ahead about 10 years or so to the Summer of Love) Hubert is assigned to assist a trio of Israeli Mossad agents as they hunt down the son of a Nazi war criminal in South America. As in the first film, the plot is really moot here; it’s all about the killer combo of Dujardin’s riotous characterization and director Michel Hazanavicius’ knack for distilling the very quintessence of those classic 60s spy capers. As I noted in my review of the first film:

Unlike the Austin Powers films, which utilizes the spy spoof motif primarily as an excuse for Mike Meyers to string together an assortment of glorified SNL sketches and (over) indulge in certain scatological obsessions, this film stays manages to stay true and even respectful to the genre and era that it aspires to parody. The acting tics, production design, costuming, music, use of rear-screen projection, even the choreography of the action scenes are so pitch-perfect that if you were to screen the film side by side with one of the early Bond entries…you would swear the films were produced the very same year.

I will say that some of the novelty of the character has worn off (that’s the sophomore curse that any sequel has to weather) but this is still a thoroughly entertaining film, and I hope that Hazanavicius and Dujardin have some more projects on the horizon. I’m there.

Pigtails, G.I. Joes and go-karts: Mommy Is at the Hairdresser’s

Mommy Is at the Hairdresser’s is such a perfect film, that I’m almost afraid to review it. It’s a perfect film about an imperfect family; but like the selective recollections of your most carefree childhood memories, no matter what the harsh realities of the big world around you may have been, only the most pleasant parts will forever linger in your mind.

Set on the cusp of an idyllic Quebec summer, circa 1966 (my guess), the story centers around the suburban Gauvin family. Teenaged Elise (Marianne Fortier) and her two young brothers are thrilled that school’s out for the summer. Their loving parents appear to be the ideal couple; the beautiful Simone (Celine Bonnier) works as a TV journalist and her handsome husband Le Pere (Laurent Lucas) is a medical microbiologist. But alas, there is trouble in River City (what family doesn’t have its ups and downs, eh?). When a marital infidelity precipitates a separation, leaving the kids in the care of their well-meaning but now titular father, young Elise finds herself the de facto head of the family.

Thanks to the sensitive direction from Lea Pool, an intelligent and believable screenplay by Isabelle Hebert, and (perhaps most of all) some of the most extraordinary performances by child actors that I’ve seen in quite some time, I found myself completely transported back to that all-too-fleeting “secret world” of childhood. It’s that singular time of life when worries are few and everything feels possible (before that mental baggage carousel backs up with too many overstuffed suitcases, if you catch my drift).

This is also one of the most beautifully photographed films I have seen recently. Daniel Jobin’s DP work should receive some kind of special award from the Quebec tourist industry, because watching this film gave me an urge to take a crash course in Quebecois, pack some fishing gear and move there immediately. This is easily my personal favorite entry from this year’s SIFF, and I’m hoping that it finds wider distribution- tres bientot.

Barking mad: Harris (l) and Martin (r) in Poppy Shakespeare

Sometimes I get a little bit of a twitch when a movie breaks down the “fourth wall” and a protagonist starts talking to the audience in the opening scene. When it works, it can be quite engaging (Alfie); when it doesn’t (SLC Punk), it seems to double the running time of the film (and not in a good way). In the case of Poppy Shakespeare, the device pays off in spades, thanks to the extraordinary charisma and acting chops of an up-and-coming young British thespian by the name of Anna Maxwell Martin (remember that name!).

Martin plays “N”, a mentally troubled young woman who has grown up ostensibly as a ward of the state, shuffled about from foster care to government subsidized mental health providers for most of her life. She collects a “mad money” pension from the government, and spends most of her waking hours at a London “day hospital” (where many of the ‘patients’ participate on a voluntary basis and are free to go home at night). In an introductory scene (reminiscent of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), we learn that most of the patients in Poppy’s particular day ward appear to gather not so much for the therapy group sessions, but to swap tips on the latest loopholes in England’s socialized health care system. Poppy is a bit of a rock star in the group, due to the savvy she has developed in working the system to her maximum advantage (she’s crazy…like a fox).

She is a polar opposite to Cuckoo’s Nest hero R.P. McMurphy. Rather than looking for ways to break out of the laughing house, she is always scamming ways to avoid being discharged from state-sponsored care (bye-bye gravy train). She seems perfectly happy to bide time at the hospital by day, and make a beeline home to her lonely flat at nights and on weekends to gobble her meds and shut herself in with the telly. N’s comfortable routine hits a snag, however when her doctor “assigns” her to mentor a new day patient named Poppy (Naomie Harris). Unlike the majority of patients in the ward, Poppy’s admittance for observation has been mandated by the state, based on answers she gave on a written personality profile she filled out as part of a job application (some Orwellian overtones there). She desperately implores N to use her knowledge of the system to help her prove to the doctors that she isn’t crazy. In a Catch-22style twist, the financially tapped Poppy realizes that the only way she can afford the services of the attorney N has recommended to her is to become eligible for “mad money”. In other words, in order to ultimately prove that she isn’t crazy, she has to first get everyone to think that she is nuts.

This may sound like a comedy; while there are some amusing moments, I need to warn you that this is pretty bleak fare (on my way out of the screening, I asked an usher if he had a bit of rope handy). That being said, it is well written (Sarah Williams adapted from Clare Allan’s novel) and directed (by Benjamin Ross, who also helmed an excellent sleeper a few years back called The Young Poisoner’s Handbook). The jabs at England’s health care system reminded me a bit of Lindsay Anderson’s “institutional” satires (Britannia Hospital in particular). Harris is very affecting as Poppy, but it is Martin who commands your attention throughout. She has a Glenda Jackson quality about her that tells me she will likely be around for a while. She’s better than good. She’s crazy good.

Off the record, on the QT, and very hush-hush…

Another quick mention here about one more film to watch for. I can’t give you the full review yet, because the press is requested to “hold reviews” on some specific SIFF entries that have already found distributors and are all set for release in the near future.

World’s Greatest Dad is certainly one of the more, ah, interesting films I screened at SIFF this year. Filmed here in Seattle, it’s a (very) black comedy, directed by that world-renowned auteur, “Bobcat” Goldthwait (Shakes the Clown). It stars Robin Williams as a poetry teacher (yes, again) and frustrated writer who leads a life of quiet desperation, thwarted at every turn by publisher’s rejection letters and the odd, disquieting antics of his misanthropic teenage son (Daryl Sabara). I can’t say much more, but you can chew on this: Think The Accidental Touristmeets The Front by way of Pump up the Volume.

Well, next week, I guess it’s back to the cinematic salt mines of the Summer Release Gulag for yours truly. (You can’t make me! Hey…leggo my arm! Owww! Please, nooo!).

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