Greek to me
Communing with the oracle of cinema in Thessaloniki
JETLAG 8AM ON A SUNDAY MORNING, or is it midnight Saturday?
The north of Greece: I am trying to discern Mt. Olympus through lustrous fog over the silvery sea, shimmering like scales on a great fish. I've got PJ Harvey's "Stories from the City, Stories From The Sea" clamped to my ears, a song called "A Place Called Home." I stare at the horizon, city behind me, the Aegean before me, watching a pair of tankers over the duration of a song just discernibly part, move to opposite ends of the world. I had watched five films on the first Saturday of the forty-first International Thessaloniki Film Festival, I'd been on the phone to the states near dawn for an hour, and I craved the narcosis of sun and sea and mute dazzle. I stared, tried not to blink.
My vacation the third year in a row, indulging a grand secret city filled with food, drink, cultural mysteries, and as for the festival, the best of a poetic, alternately sober and delirious kind of cinema. The tossed-off term is "arthouse," and U.S. distributors and exhibitors call it "specialized." I just say it is what I want film to be. Thessaloniki is not a premiere festival, like Sundance or Cannes, or a catch-all like Toronto, but ten days with one and a hundred pockets. Most of the films have played elsewhere, including Chicago's festival. But the combination of films and filmmakers are always a great treat.
Several retrospectives are shown each year, in 2000 including the old man of the Greek cinema, Theo Angelopoulos, and it gave me a chance to revisit a couple of movies he shot in Thessaloniki, the city so many of his stories return to. Jerzy Skolimowski was the president of the festival jury, and getting to see "Deep End" on screen, his 1970 masterpiece of male adolescent dreaminess and erotic rage, would have been a highlight of any festival.
Borders and cultural miscommunication were the subject of many of the films I saw, as if the lowering of frontiers in the European Community had freed both the imaginations and the production capabilities of the filmmakers. David Gordon Green's "George Washington" was a strange jewel out of its American context: its fragrant Southern poetry is so delicate that it was lost in translation to south central Europe, and I had to do a kind of simultaneous translation for a friend from Bucharest. Pawel Pawlikowski's "The Last Resort," a sturdy BBC-made film, shot on digital video, took the festival's three highest prizes, and its tale of a Russian woman and her child stuck in an emigrant encampment in the U.K. -- and made by a Polish-born director -- gained greater cosmopolitan clutter by having its Russian dialogue subtitled only in Italian and Greek. Paddy Considine, excellent as a scary neighbor in "A Room for Romeo Brass," is superb here as an arcade manager who takes the lost pair under his profane wing.
Dino Tsintsadze's deadpan comedy, "Lost Killers," was also filled with cross-cultural commotion in the story of a pair of inept assassins in Mannheim, Germany, one Georgian, the other Croatian, who keep stumbling in their attempts to kill a Russian businessman, eventually soliciting an immense Haitian who is about to sell a kidney and his girlfriend, a tiny Vietnamese prostitute, into their ill-fated schemes. The film takes a while to warm up, but eventually its skewed, drunken universe is as convincing as it is laughable. "Im July," Fatih Akin's hilarious road movie, was perhaps the champion border-crosser, with "Run Lola Run"'s Moritz Bleibtreau as a naif pursuing a mysterious Turkish woman from Hamburg to Istanbul. The story races across southeastern Europe, and it may be the most polished German movie I've seen since Tom Tykwer's masterful bubblegum. (It also has one of the best scenes I've ever seen about someone discovering marijuana: both poetic and hilarious.)
More traditionally German was Christian Petzold's "Die Innere Sicherheit" (The State I Am In), a lovely, severe and haunting story of couple on the run since their terrorist past in the 1970s, with a teenage daughter straining their camouflage. Julia Hummer's performance as the young girl grounds a serious, elliptical story, and the film's look, emulating the brilliant hyperrealism of the photographs and figurative paintings of artist Gerhard Richter, dazzles. Mokoto Shinozaki's "Not Forgotten" was a sentimental favorite, about a quartet of aging Japanese war veterans who still have not reconciled with their treatment after the return from the islands. One of the characters is played by an actor who was one of the children from Ozu's 1932 masterpiece, "I Was Born, But... ," and the spareness of Ozu is present in the film. More importantly, as a protege of Takeshi Kitano, Shinozaki understands a thing or two about bursts of the unexpected, and the ending of the movie is both shocking and grand.
Some of the Best Foreign Film nominees played as well, including a snort-worthy comedy from Croatia about the return of a late dictator's ghost, "Marshal Tito's Spirit"; and the unlikely but lovely light-hearted look at schizophrenia from Iceland, Fridrik Thor Fridriksson's "Angels Of The Universe." (Among Fridriksson's other loopy Icelandic gems are the comic culture-clash road movie, "Cold Fever.") A movie that should be wending its way to Sundance and onto U.S. screens is "Songs From the Second Floor," Roy Andersson's Swedish black-comic parable of a world in unending gridlock. Its dry wit that suggests Terry Gilliam, Ingmar Bergman and Luis Bunuel having a big laugh over several pitchers of Bunuel's Virgin Martinis.
I miss the white light on the screens there, but even more? I miss the Greek sunlight. Movies are always better as part of a balanced diet.
JETLAG 8AM ON A SUNDAY MORNING, or is it midnight Saturday?
The north of Greece: I am trying to discern Mt. Olympus through lustrous fog over the silvery sea, shimmering like scales on a great fish. I've got PJ Harvey's "Stories from the City, Stories From The Sea" clamped to my ears, a song called "A Place Called Home." I stare at the horizon, city behind me, the Aegean before me, watching a pair of tankers over the duration of a song just discernibly part, move to opposite ends of the world. I had watched five films on the first Saturday of the forty-first International Thessaloniki Film Festival, I'd been on the phone to the states near dawn for an hour, and I craved the narcosis of sun and sea and mute dazzle. I stared, tried not to blink.
My vacation the third year in a row, indulging a grand secret city filled with food, drink, cultural mysteries, and as for the festival, the best of a poetic, alternately sober and delirious kind of cinema. The tossed-off term is "arthouse," and U.S. distributors and exhibitors call it "specialized." I just say it is what I want film to be. Thessaloniki is not a premiere festival, like Sundance or Cannes, or a catch-all like Toronto, but ten days with one and a hundred pockets. Most of the films have played elsewhere, including Chicago's festival. But the combination of films and filmmakers are always a great treat.
Several retrospectives are shown each year, in 2000 including the old man of the Greek cinema, Theo Angelopoulos, and it gave me a chance to revisit a couple of movies he shot in Thessaloniki, the city so many of his stories return to. Jerzy Skolimowski was the president of the festival jury, and getting to see "Deep End" on screen, his 1970 masterpiece of male adolescent dreaminess and erotic rage, would have been a highlight of any festival.
Borders and cultural miscommunication were the subject of many of the films I saw, as if the lowering of frontiers in the European Community had freed both the imaginations and the production capabilities of the filmmakers. David Gordon Green's "George Washington" was a strange jewel out of its American context: its fragrant Southern poetry is so delicate that it was lost in translation to south central Europe, and I had to do a kind of simultaneous translation for a friend from Bucharest. Pawel Pawlikowski's "The Last Resort," a sturdy BBC-made film, shot on digital video, took the festival's three highest prizes, and its tale of a Russian woman and her child stuck in an emigrant encampment in the U.K. -- and made by a Polish-born director -- gained greater cosmopolitan clutter by having its Russian dialogue subtitled only in Italian and Greek. Paddy Considine, excellent as a scary neighbor in "A Room for Romeo Brass," is superb here as an arcade manager who takes the lost pair under his profane wing.
Dino Tsintsadze's deadpan comedy, "Lost Killers," was also filled with cross-cultural commotion in the story of a pair of inept assassins in Mannheim, Germany, one Georgian, the other Croatian, who keep stumbling in their attempts to kill a Russian businessman, eventually soliciting an immense Haitian who is about to sell a kidney and his girlfriend, a tiny Vietnamese prostitute, into their ill-fated schemes. The film takes a while to warm up, but eventually its skewed, drunken universe is as convincing as it is laughable. "Im July," Fatih Akin's hilarious road movie, was perhaps the champion border-crosser, with "Run Lola Run"'s Moritz Bleibtreau as a naif pursuing a mysterious Turkish woman from Hamburg to Istanbul. The story races across southeastern Europe, and it may be the most polished German movie I've seen since Tom Tykwer's masterful bubblegum. (It also has one of the best scenes I've ever seen about someone discovering marijuana: both poetic and hilarious.)
More traditionally German was Christian Petzold's "Die Innere Sicherheit" (The State I Am In), a lovely, severe and haunting story of couple on the run since their terrorist past in the 1970s, with a teenage daughter straining their camouflage. Julia Hummer's performance as the young girl grounds a serious, elliptical story, and the film's look, emulating the brilliant hyperrealism of the photographs and figurative paintings of artist Gerhard Richter, dazzles. Mokoto Shinozaki's "Not Forgotten" was a sentimental favorite, about a quartet of aging Japanese war veterans who still have not reconciled with their treatment after the return from the islands. One of the characters is played by an actor who was one of the children from Ozu's 1932 masterpiece, "I Was Born, But... ," and the spareness of Ozu is present in the film. More importantly, as a protege of Takeshi Kitano, Shinozaki understands a thing or two about bursts of the unexpected, and the ending of the movie is both shocking and grand.
Some of the Best Foreign Film nominees played as well, including a snort-worthy comedy from Croatia about the return of a late dictator's ghost, "Marshal Tito's Spirit"; and the unlikely but lovely light-hearted look at schizophrenia from Iceland, Fridrik Thor Fridriksson's "Angels Of The Universe." (Among Fridriksson's other loopy Icelandic gems are the comic culture-clash road movie, "Cold Fever.") A movie that should be wending its way to Sundance and onto U.S. screens is "Songs From the Second Floor," Roy Andersson's Swedish black-comic parable of a world in unending gridlock. Its dry wit that suggests Terry Gilliam, Ingmar Bergman and Luis Bunuel having a big laugh over several pitchers of Bunuel's Virgin Martinis.
I miss the white light on the screens there, but even more? I miss the Greek sunlight. Movies are always better as part of a balanced diet.
