PSIFF 2018 – Days Eight, Nine and TEN

“The Motive” from Spain, is a  darkly funny new film from acclaimed director Manuel Martin Cuenca. Aspiring novelist Álvaro toils away as a notary until his wife’s affair pushes him into a bachelor’s flat and the lives of his new neighbors—prime material for his novel. The idea that art should be taken from life, as taught in the writing class he is taking, is taken all too literally by a protagonist with no imagination whatsoever. This adaptation of prominent Spanish scribe Javier Cercas’ short novel revolves around a would-be author who begins manipulating people in his apartment building to provide fodder for the fiction he’s always wanted to write.

When leaving his wife Alvaro announces that  he will at last write real “literature,” not “a mere sub-genre novel” like her own current success. Trouble is, Alvaro hasn’t an original idea in his head. Heeding the advice of his rather overpowering writing-class instructor he begins to find inspiration directly from life — although not exactly his own life. Realizing his bathroom window is within easy eavesdropping distance of a young immigrant couple facing serious financial woes, he pumps building concierge Lola for intel on them and other tenants, including gruff old fascist Don Felipe. Willing to do just about anything for his “art,” our protagonist even commences an affair of sorts with the married but antsy (and ample) Lola to gain her assistance in infiltrating others’ lives.

This duly has the effect of enlivening his prose, which hitherto had the airlessness of writing that imitated other, better writers. But Alvaro isn’t content to use his neighbors’ personalities as raw material. Instead, he actively, deceitfully prods them into conflicts and actions he can then use — most appallingly, telling the immigrants that their plight (i.e. the husband’s job loss) is a lost cause in legal terms, when he knows precisely the opposite is true. Things escalate to the point where Alvaro is encouraging a crime to happen.

All this is intriguing enough, though only the business with Lola — who, once her passions are aroused and then ignored, proves a formidable woman scorned — ascends to an inspired level of grotesque absurdism.  As the human void in the center of these goings-on, Gutierrez is aptly blank, but my problem with this film is that I could not stand our main protagonist – he seems devoid of human qualities except envy.

“Gold Seekers’ from Paraguay seems a slapsticky take on parts  of Paraguayan society our protagonist ensemble of treasure hunters in Asunción is pitted against a security-laden embassy building.  Seekers is based on the Paraguayan legend that there’s buried treasure in the country, concealed there during the Great War that may have killed up to 70 percent of the country’s adult male population. The treasure created a generation of gold diggers (and indeed, news reports still pop up in Paraguay from time to time about some unfortunate hopeful being killed in pursuit of it).

In line with the film’s general air of innocent old-fashioned entertainment, an old treasure map falls out of a book which newspaper delivery boy Manu, living with his mother, receives from his one-time gold-seeking, now-ailing grandfather. Manu, with the help of buddy Fito and older Elio, who runs a local computer store, are drafted to help. It’s a sign of the film’s rapid pacing that the loot’s likely location has already been established after 20 minutes.

The gold is (perhaps) beneath an embassy building to which Manu must now try to gain entry by pretending to be romantically interested in one of the maids, Ilu, herself under suspicion for having stolen a brooch belonging to the ambassador’s wife. Much of the film’s second part takes place in the embassy, some of it filtered through security cameras, since Gold Seekers has now stopped being Indiana Jones and is now a heist movie.

Characterization is slim, with priority given to a zigzagging plotline which is able to maintain respectable levels of interest until the last 20 minutes or so, when it teeters over into a slapstick  farce.

In “Suleiman Mountain” from KyrgyzstanA small-time con man, his two wives, and his recently returned son travel through the countryside of Kyrgyzstan, in an unconventional family-road-trip drama. If circumstances become too difficult to bear, blatant lies may be the only means to create a truth. After his son Uluk is suddenly thrust back into his life, charismatic con artist Karabas takes to the road with his two wives, swindling everyone they encounter along their path. But Uluk has a strong conscience and, once confronted, Karabas must choose between his scheming ways or a life of fatherhood.

“The Great Buddha+”  from Taiwan Meek security guard, Pickle, and his trash-picking nomad friend Belly Button get more than they bargained for when they begin a nightly voyeuristic ritual of watching footage from Pickle’s boss’s car dash cam and his promiscuous meetings. While trying to kill time on the long nights spent in the security room, Belly Button suggests that they view the dash-camera footage of Pickle’s rich boss, Kevin. While watching the promiscuous meetings Kevin has with various women, they witness something they never should have known about. Peppered with dry humour, this darkly comic misadventure is shot in black and white, the only exception being the dash-cam recordings. These images are like wormholes, taking Pickle, Belly Button, and the viewer from one universe into another, from the colourless existence of the poor and forgotten to the illuminated world of the powerful. The people in the movie were not interesting enough for me to care what happened.

“I am not a Witch”  in which  a  defiantly uncategorizable mix of superstition, satire and social anthropology, it tells the story of a small Zambian girl, Shula,  who is denounced as a witch and exiled to a witch camp, where she is alternately exploited and embraced. In the film’s elegant Vivaldi-scored opening, a tourist bus disgorges its passengers, including a large woman who is one of the only white people we’ll see. They file past a makeshift fence behind which sit rows of women wearing white paint on their faces, each tethered by a long narrow strip of white cloth, to a spindle. This is a “witch camp” (such arcane places do exist), and it’s no summertime retreat for maladjusted middle-class kids to learn some Wiccan rituals. The camp is a place of exile and containment for women who have been declared to be witches within their communities. But also, as this opening suggests, they are there for public display; this is a human zoo, and the tourists gawk accordingly.

We’re on a quiet dusty road following a woman carrying a large pail of water on her head. Unexpectedly, because this image of African womanhood is usually imbued with such sure-footed grace, she trips and falls, and the water spills all around. She looks up and sees a small, boyish girl, Shula and with that, we are in an official’s office where a woman in uniform is listening to the water carrier’s complaint: The child is a witch, she claims.

Shula, incongruously dressed in a ragged T-shirt emblazoned with the word “#bootycall,” is fitted with one of the spindles, which are there to tether the women to the earth and stop them from flying away — and from which they cannot detach themselves for fear of being instantly turned into a goat: The movie is played partly for laughs, partly as social critique and partly as feminist allegory. Shula is tattooed with a symbol that looks like pi on her forehead. And then she is shopped around, using her “powers” to identify thieves and launch a range of presumably magical eggs, by the opportunist manager of the witch camp, Tembo.

Shula is not a witch, of course, because such things do not exist, but she is a mystery, especially since the director paints her with very little in the way of characterization or understandable motivation. Rather like her treatment by Tembo and by the community that seems to get some catharsis from her denouncement, Shula is a means to an end, a vessel around which Nyoni gathers disparate fragments and impressions.

But the intentions are not always clear: Nyoni herself is a young Zambian-born Welsh woman, who was inspired to tell this story following a research trip to a witch camp in Ghana, and her film is a similar admixture of points of view and perspectives. So while there is a definite critique of the visiting tourists and their prurience, there are also scenes that smack of a tourist’s attitude. Mostly it feels like we’re being asked to empathize with the plight of a little girl being victimized by a cruel society that targets and exploits the vulnerable (or the merely unpopular) in the name of traditions they may or may not actually believe in. But occasionally events feels faintly like cultural condescension, by which we’re meant to laugh or tut-tut at the backwardness of these people with their silly superstitions.

Nyoni’s approach may itself be a little too chaotic, and a little too oblique to be fully comprehensible (in particular her music cues can overreach, and some of the narrative ellipses confuse). But in the investigation of the dichotomies of ancient and modern, familiar and alien, prosaic and mystical, she clearly has a great deal she wants to say.

“Angels wear White” from China,On Hainan Island, where the giant “Forever Marilyn” sculpture provocatively watches over beachgoers, everyone is on the make. When two schoolgirls are lured into a hotel and assaulted, it brings to light social injustices and double standards. A moody, modern film noir, featuring complex female characters

Exposing the sordid corruption of police and government officials through their incriminating involvement in a child sexual assault case,  could give parents of young daughters a cold sweat. Chinese director-producer Vivian Qu’s depiction of the protagonists’ fates can be unflinchingly cruel at times, but the bleak tone is soothed by grace notes such as the protagonists’ fragile beauty and the desolate poetry of its seaside setting.

One of the increasingly rare mainland films to tackle social injustice without skirting around issues that would fall foul of state censorship, the film appears to stake its chances solely in the international arthouse market.  What happened that night quickly comes to light after a medical examination. The physical punishment and psychological abuse Xiaowen’s divorced mother heaps on her own daughter in one scene are so monstrous it’s excruciating to watch. She’s internalized society’s double-standard, which assumes a woman is to blame for being “seductive” when she’s preyed on by men. Equally distasteful are Xinxin’s bourgeois parents, who are easily bought off from pressing charges.

Qu demonstrates an unsentimental and lucid understanding of the social factors that push people into selfish behavior, such as the fact that Xiaowen’s father who was Commissioner Liu’s subordinate, had made his boss “godfather” of his daughter to curry favor. Things are even tougher for Xiaomi, who, as a migrant worker, is driven to take big risks to raise money for a fake ID so she can work legally. So, when Attorney Hao, who fights an uphill battle to convict Liu, tries to appeal to Xiaomi as a fellow female to help vindicate the girls, her response indicates that a hardscrabble existence leaves no room for empathy.

Given the unchecked entitlement of certain government officials, the thuggish methods Liu employs to cover-up comes as no surprise but the suggestions of collusion between police, cadres and hoods are still quite bold — and though the ending is low-key, it hits like a dull pain in the stomach. Represented as a shadowy figure who can still “summon wind and rain” even if he’s locked up, Liu personifies the so-called banality of evil, and barely appears on-screen.

Engaging female dynamics result in strong, convincing performances, especially as their relations eschew platitudes on sisterhood or exploitative images of victimization. Fifteen-year-old Taiwan-born, mainland-raised actress Wen Qi evinces a jaded maturity beyond her years, scuttling quietly like a mouse wary of being caught, her large, expressive eyes full of mistrust and lips pursed with determination to survive. Well made film.

“Sex, Pity and Loneliness:” from Germany  The title may sound forbidding, but this wicked satire about… well, sex, pity and loneliness among contemporary German urbanites, is a spirited, darkly funny view of the way we live now. Director Lars Montag interweaves the stories of 13 characters. Two cute porcelain kittens are smashed to smithereens on the screen as a slightly sinister voice-over tells us: ‘When everything’s destroyed, all that remains for each particle is to revolve around itself,’ Such is the fate of the characters in this bleak adaptation of Helmut Krausser’s 2009 novel, a LA RONDE of contemporary German angst and frustrations.

As with the novel,  the ‘loneliness’ coming first. This defines the Pfennig family whose dysfunctional existence is responsible for a lot of the spun-off action. Father Robert  is trapped in a loveless marriage, with beekeeping his only consolation as the family prepares to downsize. Meanwhile, his out-of-control teenage daughter Swenjta  is fending off the attentions of two boys, one of them the forlorn and tormented Christian Johannes and the other the lascivious Mahmood. She also has to deal with her teacher Eckhardt  who has been duly dismissed for inappropriate behaviour.

After a wonderfully funny meltdown in his local supermarket (prompted by the absence of a new variety of Kettle Chips from the shelves), Eckhardt’s desperation leads him both to anger management classes and to create a sort of ‘anger shop’, patronised by several of the film’s characters, where they can take out their rage with a sledgehammer

r on domestic and office furniture (especially photocopiers). Having dealt with Eckhardt, the dull supermarket manager Konig tries to impress his computer date, the artist Janine  by bringing up the anecdote at a silent disco, but she’s only interested in having sex in a disabled toilet. Rarely will a robot vacuum cleaner have elicited such pain and laughter.

And so the connections proliferate, driving on towards the conclusion, where all the characters take turns in singing to the camera in an echo of MAGNOLIA’s ‘Wise Up’, only here it’s an ironic hymn to self-absorption (‘I’m everything that I want… Nothing can keep myself from me’). Scenes of self-help—at the gym, in the sauna and other bizarre German cleansing methods, both external and internal—punctuate the action throughout. While raising some social issues, the film didn’t do too much for me – again the characters seemed too bizarre to be taken seriously.