Offscreen Notes
Festival of Nouveau Cinema: Choice Picks
With so many excellent films and programs on offer at the FNC (which runs from October 8-19) some guidance is always helpful to make best use of one’s time. With this in mind, here are some recommendations based on advance notice, intuition, or previous track records. One of my most eagerly anticipated films is Gomorra by Matteo Garrone. Gomorra is confirmation that one of Italy’s most trusted and popular 1970s genres, the gangster film, is back with a vengeance. These films, made during what was called “Anni di Piombo” (“years of lead”), reflected one of the most troubling and violent periods in recent Italian history, with both far-left and far-right political groups terrorizing urban centers with bombings, kidnappings, and murders. There have been many recent Italian films dealing with this period, roughly from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, including La Scorta (Ricky Tognazzi, 1993), Michele Soavi’s masterpiece Arrividerce Amore, Ciao, 2006 (which played at the FNC two years ago) and his made-for-television epic, Uno Bianca, 2000, Romanzo Criminale (2007, Michele Placido), I Cento Passi, 2000, La Meglio gioventù (The Best of Youth), 2003, and Sanguepazzo, 2008, the final three all directed by Marco Tullio Giordana. Gomarra deals with the mafia in Naples, and comes with great advance notice from other film festivals. I was impressed by Garrone’s earlier film L’Imbalsamatore (2002), which played at the Montreal World Film Festival, and I described as follows in my brief discussion of the film in my festival report of that year: “The Embalmer presents a vision of Italy far removed from tourist pamphlets: dark, tenebrous, foggy, overcast, lonely, and dreary are the tones of the day. Director Garrone’s use of architecture and space, the lonely beaches, block-styled project tenements, and desolate border towns, coupled with a restless camera, recalls the great Michelangelo Antonioni.” Another hotly awaited film with an Italian link is the Korean The Good, the Bad, the Weird by the director of the excellent J-horror A Tale of Two Sisters and Quiet Family, Kim Ji-Woon. Kim’s film is the second recent high profile Asian film to cast an admiring wink at popular Italian cinema, along with Takashi Miike’s Sukiyaki Django Western (the latter referencing Sergio Corbucci’s masterpiece Django and the former referencing, obviously, Leone’s The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly). Italy is also involved in longtime FNC festival fave Wim Wenders’ return to his existentialist road-movie roots with Palermo Shooting. Fans of the avant-garde should not miss the special homage screening (October 10, 7:20pm) of the short films of Bruce Conner, one of the most important US found footage film artists. For those who appreciate technical challenges, the Brazilian Still Orangutans (Gustavo Spolidoro) should be worth a (long, stared) look, as it is described as a sequence shot of 81 minutes, recalling other single, real time long take films as The Russian Ark (2002, Alexander Sokurov), Time Code (2000, Mike Figgis), Rope (1948, Hitchcock), and Running Time (1997, Josh Becker). Terence Davies casts his reflective, poetic eye on his hometown of Liverpool, England in the documentary Of Time and the City. J-horror master and Fantasia Festival regular Kiyoshi Kurosawa turns up with a change of pace drama entitled Tokyo Sonata, which sounds closer to Ozu than Nakata. These are but a few choice selections from the bountiful programming at this year’s FNC. Happy hunting.
