PSIFF 2017 – days 5 and 6

“The Last Family” was my penultimate Polish movie of the festival and the second one featuring painters.  What is normal, in the context of a family-or a life? Look at his apocalyptic paintings, or listen to his S&M fantasies, and you might conclude that the Polish surrealist Zdzisław Beksiński was a strange man… Yet in person he was mild and self-effacing, a devoted husband, son and stoic father who spent the last decades of his life (up to 2005) in a modest Warsaw apartment living with his wife, his mother and his mother-in-law.  As if that wasn’t enough, his neurotic and suicidal son was a frequent visitor and constant source of agitation. Zdzisław obsessively documented all of this in photographs, audio recordings and on video: an archive of everyday banality to counterpoint his extra-ordinary art.

Morbidly witty, impressively controlled, the dramatic feature debut from documentarian Jan P. Matuszyński draws from this dense multimedia diary to illuminate not only the career of a significant artist, but also to illustrate how chaos and despair coexist with the quotidian in every life.  Winner: Best Film, Denver, Lisbon & Estoril, and Polish (Gdynia); Best Actor, Locarno.

in “Souvenir”  Huppert sing – I think she does.  Thomas Lauterdale and Pink Martini provide the score and the music (go PDX). The radiant, astounding Isabelle Huppert does it again in Bavo Defurne’s musical romance. She plays Liliane, a worker at a pâté factory in gritty Ostend, Belgium, who harbors a benign secret: she was once a pop-music star catapulted to prominence via a second-place finish in the kitschy Eurovision song contest three decades ago (no mean feat considering she lost to ABBA).  When young co-worker Jean (Kévin Azais) recognizes her, she initially denies her past. But Jean is a persuasive and, not to mention, handsome fellow: Liliane soon finds herself considering a comeback with Jean as her manager-and burgeoning love interest… It is a credit to Defurne (North Sea Texas) that he lets the  Huppert control the film; everything she does here—including her singing—brings pleasure.  A great break from the heavy, intense films so far.

“Art-house superstar Isabelle Huppert rounds out a banner 2016 with a delicately heart-tugging performance… [This is] a film that stays sweetly on track by keeping its feet on the ground…” Charles Gant, Screen  Her other festival movie “Elle” will be released, so I will catch it later.

They don’t make doctors like this in America today.  She is caring and dedicated to her patients and not to the insurance companies that may pay her.  In “Unknown Girl” we meet the doctor one evening, just as she is getting ready to leave for home, Dr. Jenny Davin hears someone knocking on the surgery door. She decides to ignore them-it’s late, the surgery is closed. But the next day she finds out that her unknown visitor was a young woman who died shortly afterwards, and not from natural causes. Stricken with guilt, Jenny takes it upon herself to investigate the circumstances around the girl’s death-and puts herself in danger.

Increasingly, the Dardenne brothers have drafted their social realism in the form of suspense stories, in films like The Child, Lorna’s Silence and Two Days, One Night. The Unknown Girl is essentially a mystery thriller filmed in a naturalistic style. But like all their work it is ultimately a philosophical drama, a morality tale about what ethical responsibility we have towards other people, and to seeking out truth. Rising French star Adèle Haenel doesn’t just embody the intriguing doctor/detective dichotomy, but suggests a high-achieving, altruistic woman tormented by her own flaws and determined to rectify the world while she’s at it. A good film.IIII

From Slovenia?USA a very wry and wonderfully well-constructed fiction posing as a documentary film, Žiga Virc’s stylish jape arises from the most outlandish of premises: it seems that NASA and the US government were so enamored of the secret “Yugoslav Space Program” in the 1960s that they surreptitiously bought it lock, stock, and barrel-only to find out that what they’d paid billions for was a hoax.  That Virc then does a credible job of selling us on this premise via a careful layering of archival footage-Yugoslav dictator Josip Broz Tito features prominently-and melodrama (a Yugoslav scientist who disappeared when he followed the space program to the US is reunited with the daughter he’s never met) is both a testament to Virc’s skill and a crash course in film’s slippery relationship to truth, especially where government propaganda is involved. The icing on the cake? The presence of philosopher-gadfly Slavoj Žižek, who pops up from time to time to add commentary on myths and the creation thereof…I must say that I bought into it. The best part was when Tito tries to repay the debt to USA by exporting the wonderful Yogos – the worst car ever made. Very amusing.

“A sly commentary on our current climate of internet myth-making and ‘post-truth’ public figures.” Stephen Dalton, The Hollywood Reporter

 In “Juntion 48” Nafar makes a successful transition to the big screen as the co-writer and star of Israeli-American activist/filmmaker Udi Aloni’s timely and vibrant musical tale.  Nafar plays Kareem, a Palestinian would-be rapper in the Israeli city of Lod (near Tel Aviv) whose eloquent raps take issue with the slights and difficulties he and his fellow Palestinians suffer daily in the mixed Jewish-Arab city. His steps towards becoming the first Arab-Israeli rap star are interspersed with sharp commentary on the Israeli-Palestinian situation as Aloni fashions a genuinely humanist take on the struggles faced by those who want to be creative in such a difficult world. The screenplay is credited to Nafar and Oren Moverman (Time Out of Mind; Love and Mercy; The Messenger).  There are side issues, as in several other films, on traditional muslims treatment of women.  “A sweet, polished, deceptively sunny portrait of Palestinian life in contemporary Israel. The attractive young cast and bright color palette make it easy on the eye. Unsurprisingly, the musical elements are also strong, with exquisitely sensual Arab folk songs woven around Nafar’s witty rapid-fire raps in Arabic, Hebrew and English…” Stephen Dalton, The Hollywood Reporter   I would disagree with that assessment – not that sunny, rather bleak, music not withstanding.  Israeli’s don’t come off looking good.

Winner: Panorama Audience Award, Berlin; Best International Narrative Feature Award, Tribeca