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Film Review

So much “Useless” beauty

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Perhaps cinema is useless. Jia Zhangke entertains this idea — as a subtext — in his 2007 documentary Useless.

As the waves of raves for Jia have rolled in, I’ve felt a bit detached. In the case of Useless, however, I responded immediately to Jia’s vision. By focusing on clothing and to some extent fashion, he takes on subjects I find inherently filmic. (I’ll watch documentaries about Yves Saint-Laurent, Yohji Yamamoto, and yes, I’m a Project Runway devotee). More important, he appears to be outside his comfort zone. The friction that results, and the deep ambiguity and ambivalence at the heart of Jia’s movie, reward repeat viewings.

Useless takes its title partly from a clothing label of that name started by designer Ma Ke, who is profiled in the second of the film’s three sections. After she muses on the "shame" of China being associated with mass-produced cheap goods, Jia films the unveiling of her debut collection for Paris Fashion Week, where at least one older European model is nonplussed by the weight of the clothing, which has been dug up from the ground after a period of burial.

The potential meaning of such moments ricochets silently — yet far from painlessly — off the gorgeous gliding images of employees at work in a clothing factory in the beginning of the film, and a somewhat dramatized portrait of an obsolete tailor shop in Jia’s hometown of Fengyang at the close. Some reviews have faulted Useless for not relying on literal touches such as intertitles or voice-overs. But when Ma Ke’s deluxe car heedlessly speeds by a tailor on foot, Jia doesn’t need words to make a point. He isn’t out to damn Ma Ke — my guess is that the filmmaker in him identifies with her.

NEW WORKS BY JIA ZHANGKE

Thurs/5 and Sun/8, call for times

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2700

www.ybca.org

Comedy of the grotesque

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REVIEW Always looking like the potato famine’s desperately drunk survivor, Stephen Rea is that rare screen actor masochistically gifted at communicating physical as well as psychic pain. No one could possibly have struck more notes on the scale from pathos to giddy gallows humor than he does in Stuck, cult horror director Stuart Gordon’s brutally tart black comedy. He plays Tom, a down-on-his-luck, newly jobless and homeless guy whose already shitty day gets a whole lot worse when he’s accidentally plowed into by Brandi (Mena Suvari), a young rest home caregiver in the distracted aftermath of some major off-time partying. Lodged in her windshield — half in, half out of the car — Tom appears to be not long for this world. So Brandi (afraid that involving the police, to say nothing of jail time, might endanger her potential job promotion) does the logical thing: she drives home, parks the car in the garage, and goes to work, assuming that Tom will expire during her shift. Only he hangs on, finding ways despite his weakened, bloody, and, er, stuck condition to keep the not-exactly-evil but slightly trashy, supremely self-involved Brandi and her less-than-faithful boyfriend Rashid (Russell Hornsby) from disposing of him. Inspired (very loosely) by an actual incident, Stuck is a eminently satisfying comedy of the grotesque, sporting all of Gordon’s flair for balancing queasy horror and near-surreal hilarity. (When you look back on his track record of imaginative genre films and consider the dreck that routinely gets wide-released, it’s shameful that this is practically his first theatrically distributed feature since Re-Animator and From Beyond, both more than two decades old.) Suvari and Hornsby etch shallow yet oddly sympathetic characters in very funny and credible details, while Rea is ideal in one of his best roles ever — not that this is the kind of movie people give acting awards for. Maybe they ought to, though.

STUCK opens Fri/6 in Bay Area theaters.

Senseless violence

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REVIEW Returning from a wedding reception in a glum mood — apparently Kristen (Liv Tyler) did not respond to a marriage proposal from James (Scott Speedman) as hoped or expected — the pair retreat to his family’s isolated vacation home, where they find their evening getting worse, fast. A most unexpected 4 a.m. knock at the door and a strange interaction with a seemingly lost girl is followed by more knocks, then vandalism, then disturbing signs that the house has already been or is being entered — until it’s not a knock at the door but an ax crashing through it. The panicked couple discover they’re being terrorized for no apparent reason by three masked visitors who have disabled the phones and car. It’s downhill from there. Debuting writer-director Bryan Bertino’s effectively stripped-down home-invasion thriller is refreshingly short on the usual cheap shock cuts, sound surges, and false scares. Instead, The Strangers makes excellent use of eerie restraint and quiet in a long, tense buildup before most of the real mayhem happens. Too bad the last five minutes are as uninspired as the prior 80 are crafty.

THE STRANGERS opens Fri/30 in Bay Area theaters.

The orbs

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In Thorsten Fleisch’s five-minute Energie! (2007), an untamed 30,000-volt current exposes photographic papers that are then sequenced in a manner that suggests or reveals systems of electrons. Fleisch’s film is a blast. Its black-and-white lightning formations resemble angry veins in the eyeball of an electrical beast — and the veins in your eyes will sprout similarly after gazing at this strobe attack by Fleisch, a student of Peter Kubelka.

The orb that gradually rises to the center of the screen during Energie could be a ferocious cousin of the eclipse that forms the insignia for the digital projects of Other Cinema, Craig Baldwin’s space for visions in the Mission. It also serves as a core symbol for Other Cinema’s latest calendar-closing "New Experimental Works" program.

Here’s an orb, there’s an orb, everywhere’s an orb, orb! There’s one at the center of Shalo P’s Vengeance 2.0, which begins with a word of warning from Michael Jackson before mixing Bernard Herrmann’s score for Vertigo (1958) and numerous Batman symbols into a brew fans of Paper Rad and Michael Robinson might enjoy. There’s even a character named Orb in Apple, a sword-clanging, sprite-eared, and typically ingenious vision from "from the hideous director of Dawn of the Evil Millennium," Damon Packard, whose movies are as potent as laughing gas and better than all other drugs.

Eli Marias’ and Amos Natkin’s An Internal Camaraderie might not feature an orb, but its new age mix of hilarity and potent hypnotism includes just about everything else, including fluorescent rainbow colors, a sea of testifying infomercial faces, and one well-deployed white turtleneck.

Other highlights among "New Experimental Works" that this reviewer was able to see include: Roger Deutsch’s Act Your Age, where a pencil is not just a pencil; Tony Gault’s Count Backwards From 5 (2007), in which images of water — with a powerful use of voice-over — convey the mystery of family and death; and Danny Plotnick’s Out of Print, a four-minute testimonial that should be placed in a time capsule.

OTHER CINEMA: "NEW EXPERIMENTAL WORKS"

Sat/31, 8:30 p.m.; $7

Artists’ Television Access

992 Valencia, SF

(415) 824-3890

www.othercinema.com

Rich and useless

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Some kinds of artistic ostentation possess a breadth of scale and insularity of purpose that have everything to do with privilege. Matthew Barney is responsible for some enormously pretentious cinematic objects, but even he hasn’t dreamt as self-indulgently big as the mono-monikered Tarsem (birth name: Tarsem Singh) does with The Fall. Shot in 20 countries — from Chile to Fiji to Namibia to Romania to all over his native India, plus plain old Hollywood — it’s perhaps the ultimate "Why? Because I can" movie, sumptuous and useless to equal degrees.

The film’s story (inspired by an obscure 1981 Bulgarian children’s film called Yo ho ho, something the filmmakers haven’t gone out of their way to acknowledge) is a haphazard clothesline on which to hang two hours of pictures. Collected in a coffee-table book, these images might suggest that The Fall is the greatest surreal epic ever — an update of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1973 magnum opus The Holy Mountain.

Actually watching the thing, however, is a different experience.

You might remember — or might still be trying to forget — Tarsem as the director of 2000’s J-Lo vehicle The Cell, an odious serial killer tale tricked out in the biggest wholesale cribbing of Art History 101 imagery since the more enjoyable Altered States (1980). He also directed numerous TV commercials and music videos (most notably REM’s 1991 "Losing My Religion"), two forms of media that suit his empty pictorial flash. The Fall is like an endless high-concept shoot of extravagant fashions no one could ever really wear, presented against backdrops few could ever visit — unless, like this movie’s director, they’re the kind of global citizen who (according to biographical notes) "lives in London, Italy, Los Angeles, and India."

If The Fall‘s exotica had something, anything — a heart, a point, some philosophical intent — behind it, Tarsem’s movie wouldn’t end up seeming like such monumental upscale baloney. But this director has no feel for pacing, actors, or tone; he wobbles from labored whimsy to maudlin realms before abruptly opting for nasty violence.

Just who is The Fall‘s cold pageant-cum-travelogue for? People who wish they had Tarsem’s life, I guess. Perhaps this is his way of sharing it with the proles. Isn’t that generous.

THE FALL

Opens Fri/30 at Bay Area theaters

www.thefallthemovie.com

Bullet time

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› cheryl@sfbg.com

An utterly complete retrospective of Johnnie To’s films would be too much to ask, really. To’s résumé to date involves nearly 50 features, with at least one release nearly every year since 1986. His work also spans such a gobsmacking array of genres that even an audience of dedicated fans might experience exploding-head syndrome. And genre is the key word here; the man’s a master at it, a trait that has earned him admiration if not fame stateside — probably a good thing, given the cautionary tale of the Hollywoodized John Woo. Though even his most bizarre Chinese New Year farces occasionally pop up at the 4-Star Theatre (and probably nowhere else in the Bay), To’s most internationally acclaimed entries are his action flicks, filled with blazing guns, taciturn antiheroes, and, inevitably, at least one scene in which several characters pause their killin’ to enjoy a hearty meal.

So, sorry, completists — To’s exercises in romance (including 2001’s gloriously offensive Love on a Diet, which makes Eddie Murphy’s fat-suit adventures look subtle), his 1993 supernatural tough-chick classic The Heroic Trio, and his goofy comedies (like 2003’s young-doctor yukfest Help!!!) are not repped in the Pacific Film Archive’s "Hong Kong Nocturne: The Films of Johnnie To." Even the PFA admits, in their notes on the series, this is a "small sampling" of To’s output. But if I had to pick nine To films — culled, as the PFA’s are, from To’s output under his own Milkyway Image banner, created in 1997 — my sampling would likely resemble what’s on tap through June.

The essential To screens first: 1999’s The Mission, as close to perfection as he’s ever come. Spare, gritty, and obsessed with the business of male bonding (a To leitmotif), The Mission is about five gunslingers (all character types: a hairdresser, a barkeep, a pimp, etc.) who come together to protect a mob boss, then close ranks when they’re ordered to off one of their own. To regular Anthony Wong plays the hairdresser — a guy so grim he’s known as "The Ice" — so you know this shit is serious.

The theme of loyalty among assassins who’ve become friends despite themselves is echoed in 2006’s Exiled, which brings back much of the Mission cast. In this modern-day spaghetti western, the gang is charged with killing a former comrade who’s left the organization and settled down with wife and baby. A straightforward execution is discarded in favor of an endlessly complicated scheme that involves a gold heist, double-crossing mob heavies, seedy operating rooms, and more; naturally, slow-motion bullet ballets punctuate every act with gory grace. Wong, as a sad-faced killer caught between doing the right thing for his boss and the right thing for his conscience, is typically top notch.

The more overtly linked Election (2005) and Triad Election (2006) also address the gangster code, taking a darkly realistic look at how Hong Kong gangsters select their leadership — honor takes a back seat to power, and money, of course, means everything. Breaking News (2004) adds eager TV crews to To’s usual cops-‘n’-robbers stew. There’s a lesson learned about not turning police business into a media circus, and yes, it’s a lesson tattooed into Hong Kong streets with many, many bullets.

"Hong Kong Nocturne" may be the PFA’s program title, but not every selection is a dark tale. Throw Down (2004) is a judo comedy. The amusing if overlong Fulltime Killer (2001, codirected with frequent collaborator Wai Ka-fai) follows dueling hired guns O (Takashi Sorimachi, stone-faced but Snoopy-obsessed) and Tok (a particularly smirky Andy Lau). To’s meta-intentions are signaled at the start, when Tok voiceovers, "I like watching movies, especially action movies." My general feeling on Fulltime Killer, from a later Tok observation: "Not the best movie, but I like the style." For an even more bizarre Lau performance, 2003’s Running on Karma is recommended; the star plays a psychic bodybuilder turned stripper. A muscle suit that eclipses even Love on a Diet‘s stunt-costume gimmickry is prominently featured.

The series’ local premiere, 2007’s Mad Detective, is unfortunately non-noteworthy. The rubber-faced Lau Ching-wan, a To favorite, stars as the titular detective. He hears voices! The voices are embodied by actors who follow him around! The conceit gets old fast. For a better Lau-To pairing, pick up 1999’s Running Out of Time — not part of "Hong Kong Nocturne" but worthy enough to be. *


"HONG KONG NOCTURNE: THE FILMS OF JOHNNIE TO"

May 29–June 27, check Web site for schedule, $9.50– $13.50

Pacific Film Archive

2575 Bancroft, UC Berkeley, Berk

(510) 642-1412, www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

“Reprise”

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REVIEW Norwegian helmer Joachim Trier may or may not be Lars von Trier’s distant relative. Let me back up a bit: according to several sources, the two directors are kin — but the former’s feature debut, Reprise, pleasantly reassures us that even if Joachim had the misfortune of sharing the same genes with Lars, at least he doesn’t share his bad sense of filmmaking. Nevertheless, the younger Dane did grow up in an environment where cinema was greatly appreciated (he first used an 8mm camera at age 4), which probably explains why his first attempt at full-length moviemaking is governed by such refreshing and refined ideas about the cinematic language. Trier is also a national skateboarding champion — something that might seem unrelated but may, on the other hand, account for Reprise‘s playful, edgy approach. Set in contemporary Oslo, the film follows friends Erik (Espen Klouman-Hoiner) and Phillip (Anders Danielsen Lie), who have dreams and aspirations about becoming great cult authors. Casting mainly nonactors and employing a slew of unannounced flashbacks and flash-forwards, Trier creates a fluid chronology where happiness and sadness coexist, and potentials are imagined, shattered, and rediscovered all at once. Like its 20-year-old protagonists, Reprise is disorderly, hazy, adventurous, and inquisitive, thus adequately reutf8g the agony of youth.

REPRISE opens Fri/23 in Bay Area theaters.

Strange powers

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› johnny@sfbg.com

Witch! The accusation — or is it rallying cry? — that slices through Goblin’s pounding score for Dario Argento’s 1977 Suspiria is newly pertinent. Witchery reigns within strains of black metal and the long-awaited third chapter in Argento’s Three Mothers trilogy (which began three decades earlier with Suspiria), this summer’s invigoratingly zany naked bloodbath Mother of Tears. It’s tempting to credit film curator Joel Shepard with a sorcerer’s clairvoyance, because the "Witchcraft Weekend" he has programmed for the screening room at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts is so damned prescient.

The centerpiece of "Witchcraft Weekend"<0x2009>‘s imaginatively and near-immaculately selected quartet of movies — the dark void or blinding light around which the other three orbit — is Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1943 Day of Wrath. I’ll be brazen enough to admit that my first encounter with this masterpiece occurred one evening while flipping channels, when its flaming dramatic core — a harsh counterpoint to the heroic final stakes of his peerless 1927 The Passion of Joan of Arc — flickered before my eyes and basically branded my psyche (and soul?) for eternity. There are few scenes in cinema as bluntly harrowing as the demise of accused witch Herlofs Marte (Anna Svierkier): her defiance and her fear of death — but not of God — rage as forcefully as the man-made inferno that consumes her.

Day of Wrath might be the most quietly terrifying or suspenseful art film ever made (though it shouldn’t be blamed for the form’s current crimes against patience or intelligence), because Dreyer seamlessly connects realism with a deeply ambiguous understanding of spirituality and fate. That is no small achievement, and one that’s been increasingly rare with the passage of time. The fate of Herlofs Marte is evident from the film’s first scene, where she hands herbs from a gallows garden to another woman, stating, "There is power in evil." Seconds later the bells begin to toll for her and — thinking of a past secret — she flees to seek refuge in the household of Absalon (Thorkild Rose); his bear of a mother, Marte (Sigrid Neiiendam); and his young wife, Anne (Lisbeth Movin), who seems to possess strange powers.

In the feline, fiery-eyed Movin, Dreyer finds this lonelier film’s answer to Falconetti from The Passion of Joan of Arc: in other words, an actor whose face becomes (to paraphrase André Bazin quoting Béla Balasz) a timeless and more ambivalently transcendent "document." Critics have pointed out Day of Wrath‘s abundant visual similarities with Italian Renaissance and Flemish painting, particularly the works of Rembrandt (James Agee went so far as to point out one sequence’s resemblance to Rembrandt’s 1632 Lesson in Anatomy), and Bazin is intuitively and perhaps more insightfully correct in invoking the film’s influence on Robert Bresson’s equally classic 1951 Diary of a Country Priest. But it takes Pauline Kael to sympathetically hone in on the feminine "erotic tensions" of what she deems "the most intensely powerful film ever made on the subject of witchcraft." As she puts it, "Dreyer dissolves our terror" as characters are "purified beyond even fear." But the sense of fear and terror he instills is purer than that engendered by the horror genre’s gleeful scare tactics.

"Witchcraft Weekend"<0x2009>‘s trio of other films steer clear of Blair Witch and Harry Potter terrain as well as the easy, if extremely enjoyable, kitsch of Teen Witch (1989) or The Craft (1996) to explore and connect less obvious instances of celluloid sorcery. In a manner that magnifies the resonance of Day of Wrath‘s austere use of black and white, Shepard brings in a pair of contrasting Technicolor sights: the Queen or Witch (spine-chillingly vocalized by Lucille La Verne) from 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and the scorpio-rising bikini sacrifices of William O. Brown’s 1969 cult obscurity The Witchmaker. The program’s series of spells begins with the wicked Witchcraft Through the Ages, a 1968 abbreviated revision of Benjamin Christensen’s energetically episodic 1922 silent work Häxan, featuring a frenetic and playful jazz score by Jean-Luc Ponty and mordantly misogynist narration by William S. Burroughs. *

WITCHCRAFT WEEKEND

Thurs/23–Sun/25

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Screening Room

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

No one likes to be defeated

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› cheryl@sfbg.com

Most folks who settle down to watch a Harmony Korine film know not to expect the familiar. Korine is, after all, the guy who wrote Larry Clark’s hot-button Kids (1995), and the writer-director of 1997’s Gummo, one of the head-scratchingest flicks ever to attain cult status. His latest — his first feature since the 1999 Dogme entry Julien Donkey-Boy — is perhaps his most unusual effort to date, but not for the reasons seasoned Korine watchers might expect.

Yeah, Mister Lonely is about a Michael Jackson impersonator (Diego Luna) who falls for a Marilyn Monroe impersonator (Samantha Morton) while performing in Paris. Though she’s married (to a faux-Charlie Chaplin), he agrees when she asks him to come live with her in the Scottish highlands — on a commune populated by even more impersonators, including a Madonna wannabe and a pseudo-Pope. That said, the film is conventionally structured, with three acts shot in a straightforward manner. (Of course, there’s also a parallel tale involving flying nuns — but more on that later.)

"[Mister Lonely] is probably my most traditional story," agreed the 35-year-old Korine, speaking from his home in Nashville. "[My] other films were about deconstructing the narrative or breaking down the story and images — kind of an assault, or a collage, with images and sound coming from all directions. With this, I felt a little bit more peace about the story and these characters. So I decided early on that I should just go with the image itself."

Korine, who coscripted Mister Lonely with his younger brother, Avi, kept his own particular fascinations in mind while writing. "I’ve always been interested in marginalized or obsessive people in real life," he said. "I just thought it was a strange existence — there’s something odd about living as an icon. And visually I thought it was interesting. I spent time on a hippie commune as a kid, and I always wanted to make a movie that was set somewhere slightly communal. I started toying with this idea of impersonators and icons all being together — what it would be like to see Sammy Davis Jr. cleaning his socks, or Abe Lincoln riding a lawnmower. It just felt right."

The commune dwellers, whose farm-bound activities are indeed surreal, though not always played for comedic effect, were carefully cast. Some, like the Sammy Davis Jr. character, were impersonators by trade in real life; others, like French actor Denis Lavant, who plays Chaplin, were not.

"What was most important was that [the celebrities being impersonated] needed to have a certain kind of mythology about them, where the myth could actually bleed into the narrative of the story," Korine explained. "Plus, they were also just people that I liked — I loved all of those characters. And I knew I would never be able to work with the Three Stooges, or Buckwheat, so it was like my attempt at going back."

When it came to plotting out his Michael Jackson, Korine — who didn’t write with Luna in mind but did offer him the role first — had some specific ideas about how the character-within-a-character should look. He’s patterned after Jackson’s Dangerous era — face masks, military armbands, fedoras, and shoulder-grazing straight hair.

"I just thought he looked the best during that period," Korine noted. Earlier, he’d mentioned that while he finds Jackson interesting, he’s not a fan on the level of, say, buying his new albums. "He’s like the world’s greatest eccentric, and that was when he was on his way to becoming this incredible abstraction."

Interspersed between poignant sequences depicting Michael struggling to fit in, even among others of his kind, are a series of increasingly odd occurrences in the Panamanian jungle. A group of nuns — overseen by a bossy priest (Werner Herzog, who also starred in Julien Donkey-Boy) — are shocked to discover they can skydive without parachutes. It’s a bizarre conceit that allows Mister Lonely its most glorious images: nuns joyfully clasping hands in the air while plummeting safely to the ground. Yo, Harmony, what’s that got to do with Jacko?

"I always want to write a novel with pages missing in the right places," Korine said. "I think it’s best to leave some things undefined, to not complete the circle. To me, it was the same movie. They are the same story. The narratives were parallel to each other. They spoke to each other. They both had this idea of faith of and transcendence, wanting to be other than who you are, being outside the system and creating your own language. I knew there would be a certain kind of person who doesn’t want to try to make that connection, and that’s fine — but there are so many movies being made where you’re told what to think every step of the way. It’s not that important for me."

What is important to Korine is something that goes beyond the usual filmmaking process. Don’t look for him to pull a David Gordon Green, for example, and direct a mainstream stoner comedy.

"What I like is making things. I like to film things and put them together, whether they’re like movies or features or essays or clips. Movies are what I love, but in some ways there’s too much focus on everything being features. Sometimes it’s nice to see things that are just moments. Sometimes, in 30 seconds, I can feel more than I do in 30 hours," he explained. "I always felt like, in movies, they waste so much time getting to the good part, and resolving after the good part. I was just like, why can’t you make movies that consist only of good parts?" *

MISTER LONELY opens Fri/23 in Bay Area theaters.

She sang, he filmed

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Perhaps you’d like a dark date with Mary Wollstonecraft and Percy Bysshe Shelley. If not, you can always opt for a purple romp with Rimbaud and Verlaine, or Gertrude and Alice, or Paul and Jane Bowles. Maybe you have an ear for rock, in which case you can hit the bed or hit a vein with John and Yoko, or Sid and Nancy, or Kurt and Courtney. Really, what doesn’t fascinate us about legendary bohemian couples of various eras? They’re like Brangelina, but with a more thesis-friendly shelf life for anyone aspiring to a liberal arts degree.

We fetishize intersections between artists in any influential boho scene, from the Symbolists and the Dadaists to the Beats. Whether those bohos are hippies or punks, their brief encounters heighten each other’s retrospective glamour. Andy Warhol might be the all-time champ at making every minor contributor into a cult figure. One woman provided a bridge between the Warhol Factory and the fertile Euro boho scenes of the 1960s and ’70s. That woman was Nico (birth name: Christa Päffgen), the ethereally gorgeous model-actor turned avant-chanteuse who could transform anything — a sweet Jackson Browne ballad or one of her own inimitable compositions — into a postapocalyptic dirge.

The camera may have loved Nico, but that sentiment went unrequited. After she appeared in a few films, including 1966’s Chelsea Girls, and onstage as part of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable tour, Lou Reed dumped her, the Velvet Underground didn’t want her, and MGM Records realized the record-buying public enjoyed listening to this bleating beauty even less than they did the variably twee, glum, cacophonous, and not yet desert island–ready V.U.

Thus, this Germanic grievous angel slunk back to the continent from whence she came, leaving behind a list of ex-lovers that purportedly included Jim Morrison, John Cale, Brian Jones, Tim Buckley, and Iggy Pop. Once there, she fell in with a heady Parisian counterculture — in particular, with the filmmaker Philippe Garrel.

The film series "I’ll Be Your Mirror: Rare Films by Philippe Garrel" cuts a swath through Nico’s and Garrel’s enduring dual magnetism, a connection that endured long after her 1988 death from a cerebral hemorrhage. Ten years her junior, Garrel was barely out of his teens when he met Nico, yet he was already finishing his fourth feature, La Lit de la Vierge. She contributed the song "The Falconer" to that film’s ripe slice of 1969 Maintenant Génération angst, which was heavily dosed on post–May 1968 disillusionment and LSD.

A look at Morocco through a black-and-white CinemaScope viewfinder, La Lit de la Vierge is characteristic of Garrel’s hard-to-find (and hard to watch, some might say) early films. It’s visually striking, madly pretentious, and a perfect time capsule of a particular cultural moment’s entwined adventure and humorlessness. Scrawny and sporting a Prince Valiant ‘do, Pierre Clémenti is the film’s hippie Jesus, who rides into town on a burro only to be knocked off his humble ride by bullies. This Jesus has some real Oedipal issues, and no wonder — the actress Zouzou (Danièle Ciarlet) plays both Mary and Mary Magdalene. In case you can’t tell by now, there won’t be a Second Coming: when Christ makes an exit, it’s to get the hell away from people.

Nico appeared in virtually all of Garrel’s subsequent movies up until their decisive 1980 split. The fallout from their less-than-healthy relationship resonates through his more conventional later efforts, perhaps most blatantly within 1991’s I Don’t Hear the Guitar Anymore. In that film, Marianne (Johanna ter Steege; cute, but lacking Nico’s goddess quality) is a maddening object of desire who abandons lovers after dragging them into her heroin-addicted spiral. "I love you like a madman," declares Garrel’s stand-in Gerard (Benoît Régent). "That means the day you cease to be crazy, you won’t love me anymore," she snaps. Later, when talking to Gerard’s stable new squeeze, Marianna seems to speak for the director and his late muse when she ponders, "Maybe I didn’t make him happy, but it was a different era. Maybe we didn’t need to be happy. We were seeking something else."

Guitar‘s posthumous portrait is more repellent than alluring. But to help the unconverted fathom Nico’s peak mystique, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts film curator Joel Shepard has also programmed The Velvet Underground and Nico, an hour-long 1966 performance directed by Warhol. Static and chaotic, it features Nico on tambourine, with little Ari (her son by Alain Delon), a noise-jamming V.U., Mary Woronov and Gerard Malanga a-go-go, and a bout of performance interruptus courtesy of the NYPD. At the box office, up until 2005’s Regular Lovers, Philippe Garrel couldn’t get arrested. But outside of it, the types he hung with always could.

I’LL BE YOUR MIRROR: RARE FILMS BY PHILIPPE GARREL

Thurs/15–Sun/18, $6–$8

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Screening Room

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

Follow that “Balloon”

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After years of Tarantino twists and shot-for-shot shams, homage has gotten a bad name. Let’s call Flight of the Red Balloon something else: a transportation device in which Paris, Albert Lamorisse’s beloved 1956 slice of magical realism The Red Balloon, and a patchwork family float in and out of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s inscriptive view. At 61, the former Taiwanese new wave pacesetter is on a travel kick. After moving to Tokyo to film 2003’s Café Lumière, his tribute to Yasujiro Ozu, the filmmaker next went to Paris, thanks to a commission by the Musée d’Orsay. Flight of the Red Balloon‘s reception at Cannes was lukewarm, but away from that hothouse it’s plainly a masterwork. Mysterious without being opaque, it is as delightful in its particulars as in its overall musical intelligence.

It starts simply, with a boy and a balloon. The red orb reappears periodically in Hou’s film, like a refrain, but this prologue provides the fullest convergence with Lamorisse’s original. A sleepy-eyed child calls out to the air before descending the Metro steps; the camera pans up, catches a first glimpse of the talisman as it lingers behind wind-brushed trees, and then follows it across the rooftops of an overcast Paris.

The balloon retreats, but Hou’s camera stays alight. We soon find the boy, Simon, living in a jumbled apartment with his mother Suzanne (Juliette Binoche), a blustery creative type who voices puppet shows. She has engaged a young Chinese filmmaker as Simon’s nanny: Song Fang (playing herself) is first seen entering Suzanne’s puppet theatre, her oval visage shrouded in the richly-toned shades of black typical of Hou’s collaborations with cinematographer Mark Lee Ping-Bin.

The conflicts within this autumnal story world pass at a remove. Hou wryly observes aspects of Parisian life (a downstairs neighbor unable to ask a simple kitchen favor without detailing his mutton stew, for example), but doesn’t tether his film to such observations. Instead he emphasizes resonant textures: the musical interplay between the relaxed camerawork and Binoche’s breathy, bleached-blond performance; the lyrical enfolding of a child’s half-comprehending, absorbed perspective with that of a foreigner’s; and too many paired scenes and visual echoes to count, including a couple of lovely pirouettes up and down a spiral staircase. Throughout, Hou’s inclusive model of filmmaking draws from painting, music, and puppetry. Whenever he ventures into the mother and child’s apartment, currents of light and color are pitched between minimalism and reverie.

Much like some of this season’s other film highlights (In the City of Sylvia, Alexandra, Paranoid Park), Hou’s latest foregoes plot restrictions for acute ambience and sustained portraiture. I didn’t respond to Flight of the Red Balloon as quickly as I did to the others, but it’s the one I most want to revisit. Diffuse yet deep, Hou’s vision erases the boundaries between his film and the worlds that surround it.

The red balloon of The Red Balloon beckons, but Hou’s film also bears a surprising resemblance to Olivier Assayas’ Irma Vep (1996) in its skipping ellipticism, its depiction of a detached Asian woman swimming amid unkempt Parisians, its utterly free way of withholding story information and averting linearity, and its double-exposed invocation of a past French film classic. Assayas is no stranger to Hou’s work, having made a documentary about the Taiwanese director in 1997 (HHH), but their unique sensibilities impart common materials with entirely different moods. Where Irma Vep radiates frenetic energy, Hou’s profoundly subdued film lingers in the drowsy quiet of afternoon. In this respect, Flight of the Red Balloon also reminds me of another French film about childhood, stasis, and puppet shows: François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959). One new wave shores up another, and an old man’s meditation reflects a precocious debut like so many carefully angled mirrors.

FLIGHT OF THE RED BALLOON

Opens Fri/16 at Bay Area theaters
www.ifcfilms.com

Bad war, good film

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REVIEW Okay, here’s another Iraq War fictive feature people won’t go see, although this may be the first one where it would be a real shame (as opposed to the many very good documentaries everyone ought to have seen). It delivers sweeping, multicharacter, wide-canvas drama à la 2006’s Babel within a docudrama style that’s as convincing and effective as Brian DePalma’s thematically overlapping 2007 Redacted was — let’s put this delicately — phony, crass, and just plain shitty. A mix of professional and first-time actors (including actual Iraq vet and ex-Marine Elliot Ruiz as the platoon leader) play more disparate elements in post-Saddam society and the US military than we’re used to seeing. They converge on a reenactment of the November 2005 events in which an IED bombing of a Marine convoy triggered indiscriminate, retaliatory, home-invasion killings of two dozen local residents, including myriad women and children. (One point made is that many citizens get identified as insurgents simply because real ones have threatened families with death if they squeal.) There’s a long, ominous buildup in which we’re introduced to lives that will soon be traumatically shaken up — and then bleep hits the fan. Battle for Haditha is like a realpolitik version of a 1970s disaster movie, sans soap operatics, Charlton Heston, or idle pleasure in the spectacle of order collapsing. It’s tense, immediate, and vivid (if not quite so potently) in the way 2006’s United 93 was. A rare dramatic film from veteran documentarian Nick Broomfield, this film’s final outcry of grief, vengeance, and injustice is a terrifying illustration of how badly we’ve bungled — by creating new terrorists in attempting to eradicate established ones.

BATTLE FOR HADITHA opens Fri/16 at the Roxie. See Rep Clock for showtimes.

The end of the line

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"The film is called RR, but I like to call it ‘Railroad,’ because RR sounds like a pirate movie."

— James Benning

TRAINS A short stretch of celluloid is a representation of a train, one image following the other in rapid succession, connected by essential blocks of black, moving forward in time and space, and, when projected, rotating on a wheel. Cinema began with a train entering a station, shot with a fixed camera, chugging toward the screen. Barring a change of mind or circumstance, the masterful RR will be the last of James Benning’s works shot on 16mm, and how fitting that this 37-year phase closes with the image of a locomotive, pointedly stopped in front of a wind farm outside of Palm Springs, scrapped tires lying in the foreground, the end in a line of 43 trains shot across the United States (and the final frame of 34 extant films).

After a prolific three-year period that has seen Benning produce five crucial works — likely exhausting his stock of 16mm film — while teaching, driving across America, and building a full-scale replica of Thoreau’s Walden Pond cabin, technology has vanquished this last of the old-time filmmakers.

Those familiar with Benning’s landscape films will be comforted by RR‘s fixed camera and continental scope, but the film marks something of a crucial advance. As opposed to the awesome 13 Lakes (2006) — 13 individual lakes, each shot lasting the full 10 minutes of the 16mm cartridge — RR finds Benning adopting another structural principle: the signified (the train) takes over from the signifier (the camera).

Every shot is mesmerizing, yet the film builds, acquiring a cumulative power, as the simplicity of structure gives way to infinite experiences. To some, trains invoke nostalgia; to younger viewers, classical antiquity. To trainspotters, well, RR is Valhalla. And just as Benning’s California Trilogy (2000–01) concerns work and water, RR becomes a film "about" American overconsumption. Benning lets what’s on screen tell the story, with the tumultuous history of railroads and western development only alluded to by songs and words on the soundtrack. Filmed and recorded, as always, by a one-man band, all of its shots captured without permissions or permits, maybe RR is a pirate movie.

SFBG How far back does RR‘s genesis go? Were you into railroads as a kid?

JAMES BENNING Yeah, I like trains a lot. When I was a kid I had a little model train, an American Flyer. When I was a teenager we used to play in the train yards in Milwaukee, and that was fun, because we weren’t supposed to go there. We’d hop on slow freight trains and ride them for like a mile, and then jump off.

SFBG When you started making RR, was there a specific plan? Did you know the exact locations where you wanted to shoot?

JB I was pretty familiar with the major US lines. When I drive from Wisconsin to California, I pass by the lines that run through the Midwest. I know the lines that go up and down the [east] coast from New York to Washington. Other lines I knew through research, by getting a good railroad atlas. I wanted to film according to landscapes, too. I knew I wanted to do a shot across Lake Pontchartrain in Louisiana, and a shot in Mississippi of a train going through the kudzu growth, and [a shot of] this famous park called the Rat Hole in Kentucky. I also used a Web site [www.railpictures.net] that says it has "the best railroad pictures on the Net." It has thousands of still photos by railroad fans.

SFBG Is it accurate to call RR a landscape film?

JB The initial idea was to use railroads to define landscape because they can only go up a 2 percent grade. But as it became apparent to me that the film was going to be about trains more than landscapes, I learned more about different kinds of engines. The second shot is of the only piggyback train — where you take semi trucks and load them onto cars — in the film. Later there’s a RoadRailer, the train that looks like a long white snake. I shot that in the Rat Hole, an area that used to be all tunnels. I was shooting from above, which was the best vantage point [from which] to film it.

For me, the film came to be about consumerism and overconsumption — I could feel the weight of the goods going by me. Especially the oil and automobiles, as I saw a lot of tanker cars and auto trains. They pass each other constantly.

SFBG The mathematical nature of RR is impressive. One comes to realize the number of variables at play — the size and expanse of the train, the number of cars, the colors, the speed, the landscape, the angle where the train comes into the frame and where it leaves. All of these factors pile up.

JB It’s the way I always work: I’ll set up a problem for myself. I basically collaborate with the train in that it’s going to suggest the length of the shot. I thought I could vary the distance the camera was from the train, vary the angle that the train approaches from, and change these angles from shot to shot to build rhythms. The variables make it possible to take this idea that is confining and make it grow. The same thing happens with earlier films like 13 Lakes, where I set up an idea — to shoot a lake with the same amount of sky and water — and the problem is how to show the uniqueness of the lake.

SFBG RR must have been a very different experience from shooting 13 Lakes.

JB That’s true, because in shooting 13 Lakes, I was waiting for the best moment to turn the camera on. In RR, I’m waiting for the train, and hopefully it will correspond with the best moment to turn on the camera.

SFBG One is more your choice, and the other is the train’s choice.

JB Yeah, I enter into this collaboration with the train. It’s going to choose the moment. Of course if I am on a line that has five trains an hour, then I can choose the time of the day. But if I’m at a line that has one train a week, then I’m at the mercy of the train. The one place I shot like that was at the causeway that crosses the spillway outside of Lake Pontchartrain — the Kansas Line. That train comes by once a week. I waited all day, and that train came by at 4 in the afternoon, on a day [when] it was 110 degrees with 100 percent humidity.

SFBG Is everything in RR there as you found it? That last shot with the tires strewn by the tracks seems too good to be true.

JB Yeah, it’s outside of Palm Springs. In the film that Reinhard Wulf made about me [James Benning: Circling the Image (2003)], we stop at the same wind farm. On the soundtrack I talk about going back to places I’ve filmed and seeing how the places change. That area is just littered with stuff, so it wasn’t hard to find a good frame with tires.

SFBG When I saw RR, the audience gasped at that final shot, like they do at the mirrored image of Crater Lake in Oregon in 13 Lakes. It isn’t comparable in beauty. But there is perfection to the composition: the colors of the train match up with the landscape, the blue of the sky and the white of the windmills.

JB The other thing is that as the train gets slower and eventually stops, the sound of the train gives way to the sound of the windmills. There is this slow dissolve between train noise and wind energy that somewhat suggests an alternative way of living, a cleaner energy. After [one] screening, an interviewer said that he found it to be hopeful, but I find it kind of ironic, as it seems too late. The tires lying there like the death of the automobile — the death of our culture, really — and the use of oil, all of that is in play.

SFBG The general perception of RR is that the film’s structure is precisely a function of the length of each train — the shot begins when the train enters the frame and ends when it leaves. But that’s not exactly the case.

JB Most of the time there’s an empty frame, the train enters, it leaves, and then there’s a cut. I would like to have drawn that out. For me the film is very much about time and about waiting, but I didn’t want waiting to become part of the film. I wanted you to realize through the absence of waiting that I had to wait.

SFBG Something else happens within RR. At least twice, maybe three times, there is an optical illusion. After the train leaves the frame what’s left behind seems to vibrate.

JB It happens a lot.

SFBG Were you aware that this would occur?

JB I wasn’t when I made the film, but when I started to project the work print, I was shocked. You don’t need a film to get that optical illusion — you can stand in front of a waterfall, follow the water down, then turn your head. [Likewise,] your eyes will follow the train so that when it’s gone, the effect remains and even kind of warps.

SFBG Most of the trains in the film are freight trains, there are maybe only one or two passenger trains.

JB There are two: one was a commuter train, one was a passenger train. The amount of commuter travel, at least on the West Coast, is minimal — you hardly ever see a train with people in it. Amtrak leases the right to use rails from the companies that operate the freight trains. I’ve taken most of the Amtrak train routes. They’re fun … and slow.

SFBG How long did you shoot?

JB I shot for two and a half years, probably. I had so much fun that I didn’t really want to stop. I still miss it. Sometimes I go back to those same sites and wait for trains, just to have that feeling again.

Sci-fi campsterpiece

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PREVIEW OK, so 2007’s Transformers was Michael Bay’s best movie — which is sort of like saying "best strep throat experience," but let it go. Still, he will never, ever equal the achievement of Starslyderz (2005), an intergalactic adventure made with about 1/7,500th of Transformers‘s budget (yes, I used a calculator) and several megatons the awesomeness. Premiered here two years ago at the Another Hole in the Head film festival, Garrin Vincent and Mike Budde’s homemade epic is the poignant tale of Capt. Johnny Taylor (Brandon Jones), dashing and horny leader of the United Planets of America’s elite crime-fighting force. When the evil Gorgon kidnaps the president’s daughter, Princess, Johnny and his mates must pursue, ending up on the prison planet Zoopy, where they are forced to fight gladiator-style for the amusement of bloodthirsty puppets and stuffed animals. Song interludes, heavy-metal twins, gleefully cheesy FX, and a whole lot more are thrown into this giddy campsterpiece, which pays snarky homage to everything from Star Wars, Star Trek, Transformers (natch), the Power Rangers, anime, TV commercials, 1980s video games and … er, Biography. Writer-director Vincent, producer-cinematographer Budde, and some furry pals will be on site for a Dead Channels–presented multimedia extravaganza that encompasses a screening of Starslyderz‘s new-to-SF final cut, "live hyphy Japanimation" by the Zoopy Show, production numbers, reckless acts of audience wetting, and action-figure sales. Perhaps if we are very lucky, an excerpt from Vincent’s original Star Wars: The Musical, which was performed at Palo Verdes Peninsula High long, long ago. If not, you can sample that magic in excerpts on YouTube.

THE STARSLYDERZ EXPERIENCE Wed/7, 8 p.m., $5. Hypnodrome, 575 10th St., SF. www.starslyderz.com

Cross-cultural cosmology

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REVIEW There are many films about Asian immigrants and their cross-cultural experiences after they come to America in hope of a better future. But none of them are like Dark Matter, the feature debut of China-born and New York–based Chen Shi-zheng. Chen is an established opera actor and opera and theater director who left China for the United States in 1987 in search of artistic freedom. Although his innovative staging of the 19-hour-long Ming Dynasty–era play The Peony Pavilion (1999) received international critical acclaim, whether Chen found what he was looking for in the States is debatable — particularly if Dark Matter contains even the slightest hint of autobiography. Starring prominent Chinese actor Liu Ye (2006’s The Curse of the Golden Flower) and the great Meryl Streep, Dark Matter is loosely based on a 1991 incident at Iowa University when a Chinese graduate student picked up a gun and started firing. Chen’s tale about a Chinese PhD candidate at an American university whose initial enthusiasm gives way to frustration and helplessness when his professor turns against him for questioning his cosmology addresses many issues, including the claustrophobic world of academia and where goals and aspirations can lead if violently crushed — revealing how misleading the idea of the "American dream" can be.

DARK MATTER opens Fri/2 in Bay Area theaters.

Black, white, and color

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Clip this article. Put it on your refrigerator to remind yourself, your roommates, your friends and family to see Medicine For Melancholy.

The story seems simple. In the aftermath of a party, two 20-something San Franciscans wake up in bed together with no recollection of how they got there. They exchange names at a Noe Valley coffee shop and share a cab in cold silence with no attempt to reconnect. She leaves her wallet behind. He hunts her down online to return it. From there, they begin a convincing dance of seduction infused with excitement, disclosure, and tenderness. Micah (Wyatt Cinach) is immature, self-effacing, and strong, while Jo (Tracey Heggins) is confident, grown-up, and intense. What they learn about each other — and what the film reveals — is on par with any postmodern romance. Writer-director Barry Jenkins has created complex characters trying to negotiate simple feelings in a difficult world.

It’s always enriching to see talented artists at work. In mixing black and white with color to explore the relationship between setting and dialogue, director of photography James Laxton captures the sublime and gritty sides of San Francisco. The city he sees is the city we know. From the grassy lands of Noe Valley to the quiet hush of the Tenderloin at dawn, Laxton’s eye makes the nearly deserted SF that the two main characters inhabit lush, promising, and sinister.

Medicine for Melancholy is important because it spotlights the most overlooked aspect of SF’s changing face: black people, and the lack thereof. Micah and Jo are black and their race plays into the affair in surprising and subtle ways.

Jenkins has said that Medicine for Melancholy is "a simple, straightforward film that illuminates the modern complexities of living as a declining minority in America’s major cities." At the time Medicine for Melancholy was filmed, SF’s black population was 7 percent and dropping. As one of the remaining black people in SF, I know that black flight is a reality here. The self-evident gentrification and anti-black sentiment of the city play heavily into the dynamic of this movie’s couple: Micah doesn’t do SFMOMA; Jo hadn’t known that MoAD existed. Micah sees himself as black first and a man second. Jo refuses to define herself.

At Micah’s apartment, a poster with a 1962 quote from the Redevelopment Agency sparks a conversation. Jo wants to let go of the past. Micah, the native, sees the poster as relevant to Mission Bay.

"Why is everything that is ‘indie’ mean ‘not black?’" Micah asks at one point. Conversations like these have been going on among my dwindling number in San Francisco for too long. Until now, only we have heard them.

Tell people about Medicine for Melancholy. In the face of an impending cultural extinction and the potential loss of SF’s soul, this excellent movie is part of a necessary discussion.

MEDICINE FOR MELANCHOLY

Wed/30, 9:15 p.m., Kabuki; Sun/4, 8:15 p.m., PFA; May 7, 3:30 p.m., Kabuki

The 51st San Francisco International Film Festival runs through May 8. Venues are the Castro, 429 Castro, SF; Clay, 2261 Fillmore, SF; Kabuki, 1881 Post, SF; and Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, Berk. For tickets (most shows $12.50) and information call (925) 866-9559 or visit www.sffs.org.

Highway 51

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Pixel Vision blog: Additional SFIFF movie reviews, and daily reports by Jeffrey M. Anderson

WED/30

I Served the King of England (Jirí Menzel, Czech Republic, 2007) The sheer delight of this typically spry, witty film by Czech master Menzel is enough to remove the sting from the fact that it’s been 14 years since his last feature. The story presents the dizzy rise and fall of a resourceful waiter during the Nazi occupation. Only Menzel could make a chronicle of such amoral ambition so funny and charming without trivializing the underlying themes. (Dennis Harvey)

6 p.m., Kabuki. Also Sat/3, 9 p.m, Kabuki

Vasermil (Mushon Salmona, Israel, 2007) Salmona’s feature debut threads the stories of a few disaffected adolescents — one an Ethiopian Jew, another a recent Russian immigrant. Asshole fathers and cruel, amateur gangsters abound in this dystopia. Salmona’s skilled handling of nonprofessional actors brings across the script’s twin-toned slice of prejudice and menace. (Max Goldberg)

6:30 p.m., PFA; Sun/4, 1 p.m., Kabuki; Mon/5, 6:45 p.m., Kabuki; May 7, 7 p.m., Kabuki

THURS/1

Valse Sentimentale (Constantina Voulgaris, Greece, 2007) With this infuriatingly pessimistic yet haunting film, the daughter of acclaimed filmmaker Pantelis Voulgaris tries her hand at feature filmmaking. The story is set in the Athenian neighborhood Eksarxia. There, misfits Stamatis (Thanos Samaras) and Electra (Loukia Mihalopoulou) struggle to come to terms with each other. (Maria Komodore)

1:30 p.m., Kabuki. Also Sat/3, 6:30 p.m., Clay; May 7, 9:15 p.m., Kabuki

FRI/2

All Is Forgiven (Mia Hansen-Løve, France, 2007) All Is Forgiven might be compared to Olivier Assayas’ 2004 Clean for its autumnal portrait of one character’s drug abuse, but it avoids that film’s flat reading of an addict’s self-absorption. Unlike most other movies about drugs, it isn’t exclusively about the user. The era-evocative soundtrack selections within Hansen-Løve’s subdued melodrama are emblematic of the film’s assured flow. (Goldberg)

9:30 p.m., Clay. Also Sun/4, 3 p.m., Clay; Tues/6, 9 p.m., Kabuki; May 8, 4 p.m., Kabuki

The Art of Negative Thinking (Bård Breien, Norway, 2007) A big fuck you to self-help culture, this amusing black comedy is as coarse, antisocial, and ultimately soft-hearted as its protagonist. A stoner recluse who seeks solace in Johnny Cash records, spliffs, and his gun, he instigates a mutinous program of catharsis through hard partying. By the end credits, though, the Harold Pinter–esque dinner party has given way to Farrelly Brothers comedy. (Matt Sussman)

9:30 p.m., Kabuki. Also Sun/4, 3:45 p.m., Kabuki; May 8, 8:15 p.m., Clay

Linger (Johnnie To, Hong Kong, 2008) Johnnie To is a one-man HK film industry, and his finely honed skills allow this romantic ghost story to at least occasionally step over puddles of sentimental goop. Li Bingbing stars as a student who loses new boyfriend Vic Zhou in a car accident. The story overstretches, but To’s strikingly clear and vivid compositions — full of nature, architecture, and light — help his film breathe. (Anderson)

8:30 p.m., Kabuki; Sat/3, 3:30 p.m., Kabuki; Mon/5, 3:15 p.m., Clay

SAT/3

Flower in the Pocket (Liew Seng Tat, Malaysia, 2007) Marred only by a wafer-thin Casio score, Flower in the Pocket is one of those slice-of-life revelations that makes you wonder why there aren’t more promising auteurs. The broken flowers here might well be the film’s two neglected, elementary school–age Chinese brothers — adrift after the disappearance of their mother and barely able to speak Malay. Director-screenwriter Liew has an acute eye for detail and a way of teasing poetry out of throwaway interludes. (Kimberly Chun)

3 p.m., PFA. Also Mon/5, 3:45 p.m., Kabuki; May 8, 6 p.m., Kabuki

The Wackness (Jonathan Levine, US, 2007) The kind of movie people get overexcited about within the Sundance Film Festival’s hype bubble, Jonathan Levine’s feature isn’t that good — but it is good. New high school grad Luke (Josh Peck) is a 1994 loner whose parents are on the verge of being evicted from their Upper East Side apartment. A wired and inspired Ben Kingsley provides this coming-of-age flick’s comic high points. (Harvey)

7:30 p.m., Kabuki

SUN/4

Stay Tooned, Kids! (Various, 2007) This sturdy collection of nine above-average cartoons, totaling 66 minutes, is largely suitable for kids of all ages, though the longest one, France’s Saint Feast Day, may teeter a bit too far into suggested violence and gore. (An ogre prepares to eat a child for an annual holiday, but accidentally knocks out all his teeth.) The amusing Claymation Still Life revisits the Shaun the Sheep character from Nick Park’s 1995 A Close Shave. (Anderson)

10:15 a.m., Kabuki

TUES/6

American Teen (Nanette Burstein, US, 2007) When is a documentary so slick it’s not a documentary? You might ask yourself that while enjoying Nanette Burstein’s portrait of senior year for several high schoolers in an Indiana small town. American Teen seems staged, and the ultraslick packaging — including animated sequences that caricature the subjects’ dreams — feels like an upscale version of reality entertainment. (Harvey)

6 p.m., Kabuki. Also May 8, 3 p.m., Kabuki

Locus Solus

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"Even a minor event in the life of a child is an event of that child’s world and thus a world event," declares Gaston Bachelard in his 1958 phenomenology of domesticity, The Poetics of Space. In its attempts to reconcile a science of atomic futurism with visions of quotidian psychology, to link the aberrations and fetishes of modern design with the traditions of hearth and home, Bachelard’s unique poetics are largely identical to the cinematic worlds of Guy Maddin. The Canadian director’s latest film, My Winnipeg, a so-called "docu-fantasia" of his birthplace, engages headfirst in a surrealist topoanalysis (to borrow from Bachelard’s ideas) of the city in which his own poetics of childhood dwell.

Speaking by the phone from his current Winnipeg home, the affectionately christened Atelier Tovar, Maddin waxes rhapsodically of a dream life bound by interiors and interiority. "After 30 years of dreaming about people I miss, I now dream almost exclusively of architecture," he confesses. "Sometimes my old house, sometimes other people’s — neighbors’ — houses, that I never went into. I think my dream self is trying to empathize with what those houses must have meant to someone else. But they’re always missing every second [floor] board, and are incredibly drafty and filled with this incredible longing and unspeakable joy. It always comes down to the house now, there are rarely any people in these dreams. Just houses."

In My Winnipeg, Maddin has taken his lexicon of family trauma and frigid Manitoban climates and deposits it on the doorstep of his childhood home. Raised in a storefront at Winnipeg’s 800 Ellis Street — which was divided into his aunt Lil’s beauty salon, an extended family wing, and an immediate family suite — Maddin was imprinted with the sights and sounds of multidimensional living. A television echoing around catalog furniture and muffled radio sounds droning through thin walls provided the soundtrack of a bee-hived gynecocracy. To this day, the 52-year-old still luxuriates in the simple pleasures the dreamy house afforded him — specifically orange Jell-O, his answer to Proust’s madeleine, and hairdryer slumbers. "I’ve taken many a nap under a hairdryer," he laughs. "I’ve still got a couple of old ones and you have to wear a hairnet or you get sucked up into the propellers. You wake up with a dehydrated head and a pounding headache, but it’s fantastic. My sister [does it], too. We’re like Beckett characters, sitting across from each other with these roaring domes on our heads."

As the youngest of four children, Maddin admits constructing a phenomenology of dreams from his first waking moments — culled mainly from wonder and boredom. "I spent a lot of time imprinting myself on the couch, listening and watching, not particularly attentively. I think I could have averted disaster if I had just been more attentive," he recalls, zeroing in on the instant when, at seven, he learned of his brother Cameron’s untimely death. "I remember when my brother died: he had gone missing and I was sitting on the couch reassuring my parents that he would come back. And that was the last time I ever felt confident about predicting anything. There was this comfortable rug underneath me, and I remember how it just fell away when I found out he wasn’t coming back.

"And that was the final, important piece of the universe for me," he laments. "There seemed to be these trap doors everywhere in my model of the universe — this place of great comfort, and more comfort, and more comfort, and great tracts of idle time. These secreted trap doors could open at anytime in your own home. And that made the place even more exquisite."

Like Proust and Bachelard before him, Maddin’s artistic communion with spirits long gone originates in the everyday objects and machines that share space with the living and the dead. From within the protection of the house, or rather from within its cavernous isolation, he continues to dream his way backward into the perfect womb of the past.

MY WINNIPEG

Sat/3, 8:30 p.m., PFA

Area 51

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I agree with my cohort Dennis Harvey — it is always cheering to see 1962’s The Brain That Wouldn’t Die. There’s something so special about the bodiless head trapped under a glass jar in that movie. As Jan Compton, a.k.a. "Jan in the Pan," actress Virginia Leith seethes and cackles, bringing across pure existential pain more forcefully than any French philosopher with a perma-creased brow. The fact that The Brain That Wouldn’t Die figures in local mad magician Craig Baldwin’s new antic investigation Mock Up on Mu is just one of at least 51 reasons why I’m excited to see it premiere at the 51st SF International Film Festival.

The Guardian‘s deluxe coverage of SFIFF 51 kicks off with a portrait of Baldwin. Elsewhere, Cheryl Eddy discusses blood ties with the sickest father-daughter team around, Dario and Asia Argento. Our stories this week also scope out a pair of life-and-death documentaries; a mod, mod, mod war movie; some new Mexican filmic journeys; the merits of festival awardees; and, last but not least, the eternally fatal allure of the late Gene Tierney. So, before you drown in the dark, before hours of unmapped SFIFF excursions have you feeling like the son or daughter of the brain that wouldn’t die, read all about it here. In the words of José-Luis Guerín, director of In the City of Sylvia, "we should see cinema as a separate continent" — and we should be cheered by what we see. (Johnny Ray Huston)

The 51st San Francisco International Film Festival runs April 24-May 8. Venues are the Castro, 429 Castro, SF; Clay, 2261 Fillmore, SF; Kabuki, 1881 Post, SF; and Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, Berk. For tickets (most shows $12.50) and information call (925) 866-9559 or visit www.sffs.org.

>>For more reviews, previews, news, and daily coverage of SFIFF 51, check out SFBG’s Pixel Vision blog.

>>Highway 51
A road map to SFIFF 51 — films to ride with (and some speed bumps)

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>>Explosive stuff!
Craig Baldwin turns space junk into magickal treasure with Mock Up on Mu
By Dennis Harvey

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>>Blood ties
Asia and Dario Argento go go for a SFIFF trifecta
By Cheryl Eddy

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>>Ashes to ashes
A dance between Dust and Profit motive and the whispering wind
By Matt Sussman

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>>On tour
Mod auteur Serge Bozon makes the war go pop in La France
By Kimberly Chun

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>>Critic’s choice
In praise of J. Hoberman and In the City of Sylvia
By Max Goldberg

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>>Apolitical animal
Mexico’s SFIFF thrillers aren’t thrilling, but Cochochi turns loss into victory
By Jason Shamai

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>>Fierce perm
Robert Towne still knows how to give an award-winning Shampoo
By Maria Komodore

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>>Color her deadly
Leave Her to Heaven‘s strange allure will pull you under
By Johnny Ray Huston

SFIFF: Highway 51

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THURS/24

• The Last Mistress (Catherine Breillat, France/Italy, 2007) Catherine Breillat steps back from one of her bluntest provocations — 2006’s Anatomy of Hell — to deliver this barbed, intelligent adaptation of Jules-Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly’s 1851 novel. Asia Argento is heroic as the titular courtesan, a seething, powerful woman working outside bourgeoisie bounds. On the eve of his marriage to a suitably chaste maiden, Mick Jagger–lipped Ryno de Maginy (Fu’ad Aït Aattou) narrates his decades-long affair with the magnetic mistress — telling the tale to his fiancée’s grandmother, who is rapt. An intriguing cocktail of classical framing and modern malaise, The Last Mistress is Breillat’s best work in years — not least of all because of her clear affection for the material. (Max Goldberg)

7 p.m., Castro.

FRI/25

Alexandra (Alexander Sokurov, Russia, 2007) Alexandra‘s 70-something title figure (Galina Vishnevskaya) takes the laborious journey to Chechnya, where the grandson (Vasily Shevtsov) she hasn’t seen in seven years is stationed at a large army base. This latest by Russian master Sokurov isn’t exactly narrative-driven, but it’s one of his least abstract, most emotionally direct works. In her first film role, opera veteran Vishnevskaya doesn’t need to sing to etch a character whose long-suffering indomitableness is Mother Courage as Mother Russia. (Dennis Harvey)

7 p.m., Kabuki. Also Sun/27, noon, Kabuki; May 4, 4:15 p.m., Pacific Film Archive

• Black Belt (Shunichi Nagasaki, Japan, 2007) Hai karate! Ably armed with authentic martial arts aces in lead roles, auteur Nagasaki transforms his masterful piece of genre filmmaking into a parable, set on the eve of World War II, about the use of power and the wisdom of passive resistance. Black Belt trounces typical CG kung fu: that the actors are karate masters gives the film a texture of authenticity unseen since the days of Bruce Lee, Jet Li, and Jackie Chan, lending weight to thoughts and deeds. (Kimberly Chun)

8:45 p.m., Kabuki. Also Sun/27, 1:30 p.m., Kabuki; Tues/29, 1:30 p.m., Kabuki

Brick Lane (Sarah Gavron, England, 2007) Adapted from Monica Ali’s 2003 novel, Brick Lane is a clichéd, romantic, finding-one’s-home story. Nazneen (Tannishtha Chatterjee) submits herself to the unexciting life of pre-arranged marriage until she meets Karim (Christopher Simpson), who sweeps her off her feet. One of the most aggravating things about the film is that Nazneen finds the power to take charge of her life through her affair alone. Apparently her daughter’s constant plea for Nazneen to start verbalizing her will was of secondary importance. (Maria Komodore)

7:15 p.m., Kabuki.

• The Golem with Black Francis (Paul Wegener and Carl Boese, Germany, 1920) An original score composed and played live by the Pixies’ leader is a mighty enticement, but even without it this classic 1920 German silent would be worth seeing. Drawn from medieval Jewish folklore, it tells of a rabbi’s creation of a clay man to protect the ethnic ghetto from a Christian emperor’s heavy hand. Codirected by Wegener, one of the masters of cinematic German expressionism (who also plays the golem), it’s an impressive, strikingly designed mix of horror, history, and political commentary. (Harvey)

9:30 p.m., Castro.

• Just Like Home (Lone Scherfig, Denmark, 2007) Dogme95 filmmaker Scherfig hones her flair for bittersweet comedy with this goofily enjoyable ensemble piece about a misfit small town that falls into chaos. Much of the film’s story is seen through the eyes of a newcomer who has escaped from a bizarre religious cult; in accordance, Scherfig records the earnest bumbling of town folk through a unique lens, sometimes smeared with streaks of overexposed or double-exposed shapes and colors. The result is only as deep as a standard-issue Hollywood romantic comedy, but it’s deftly handled and slyly endearing. (Jeffrey M. Anderson)

6:15 p.m., Kabuki. Also Sat/26, 1 p.m., Kabuki; Sun/27, 4 p.m., Kabuki; Tues/29, 9:15 p.m., Kabuki

• Lady Jane (Robert Guédiguian, France, 2007) Lean and mean as a killer B-movie, Lady Jane shows that the French noir still possesses a powerful measure of chilly fire. Its namesake, played by the 50-ish, formidable, and fierce Ariane Ascaride, perfectly embodies the genre. Roused from bourgeois slumber when her son is suddenly snatched, Lady Jane reconnects with two old partners in crime to raise a ransom. Director Guédiguian is overly fond of his flashbacks but redeems himself with the care he puts into imagery that avoids Bogart-by-way-of-Belmondo clichés. (Chun)

9:15 p.m., Kabuki. Also Sun/ 27, 9:45 p.m., Kabuki; Tues/29, 4:30 p.m., Kabuki

• You, the Living (Roy Andersson, Sweden/Germany/France/Denmark/Norway, 2007) There is one thing wrong with Swede Roy Andersson’s movies: there aren’t enough of them. His fourth feature in 30 years is another almost indescribable gizmo that strings together absurdist tableaux to increasingly hilarious and elaborate effect. From an incongruous Louisiana brass band to unhappy barflies forever facing last call, the characters here are comic Scandinavian-miserabilist pawns in a cosmic joke told largely through music — and painted a fugly shade of lime green. Bizarre and delightful. (Harvey)

6:15 p.m., Castro. Also Sun/27, 8:30 p.m., PFA; Tues/29, 7 p.m., Kabuki

SAT/26

Fados (Carlos Saura, Portugal/Spain, 2007) Attempting to do for the Portuguese torch song what he once did for Spain’s gypsy blues with Flamenco (1995), Saura soars and stumbles with Fados, presenting wonderful performances and a few unfortunately dated modern-dance treatments. Chico Buarque, Mariza, Lila Downs, and Césaria Évora lend their varied styles and impassioned voices to the form. But one wishes Saura would have stepped aside further for the effervescent, soulful lilt of Caetano Veloso; the plush, liquid tones of Lura; the arch, curled-lip warble of Ana Sofia Varela; and old world narrative grace of Carlos do Carmo. (Chun)

2:45 p.m., Castro. Also Mon/28, 1:30 p.m., Kabuki; Tues/29, 8:45 p.m., Kabuki

Ice People (Anne Aghion, USA/France, 2007) The movies have long made the Antarctic the terrain of terrifying monsters and cute creatures, but the beings discovered by Anne Aghion in this documentary bare fatigue, not fangs, and they are far more prickly than cuddly. Aghion’s portrait of the inhabitants of the McMurdow Research Station spends most of its time with a satellite group of four geologists looking for 20-million-year-old leaf fossils. There’s more depth in the fantastic landscapes, which Aghion lenses far more flatteringly than she does her human subjects. (Sussman)

6:45 p.m., Kabuki. Mon/28, 3:30 p.m., Kabuki; April 30, 1:15 p.m., Kabuki

Mataharis (Icíar Bollaín, Spain, 2007) Charlie’s Angels this ain’t: these investigators and would-be Mata Haris of an all-female Madrid detective agency have the unwashed hair, sensible shoes, and bad marriages of everyday wage slaves. Actress-director Bollaín’s skillful, empathetic knack for capturing the grubby, low-light details of working women’s lives glimmers through the pale haze of this promising film. But she falters with the application of narrative-flattening sentiment, predictably reassuring story arcs, and the occasional cheesy slo-mo effect. (Chun)

4 p.m., Kabuki. Also Mon/28, 7:15 p.m., Kabuki; April 30, 9 p.m., Kabuki; May 2, 1:15 p.m., Clay

Walt & El Grupo (Theodore Thomas, USA, 2007) In 1941, Walt Disney and a band of animators, writers, and other artists — which came to be known as El Grupo — journeyed to South America on a goodwill tour. This documentary, codirected by the son of one voyager, gathers wonderful photos, home movies, and a dazzling collection of drawings and cartoon clips to re-create the trip. The trouble is that there’s no real drama. The cumulative view is as sharply Eurocentric as Disney’s was when he went on to make cartoons such as 1942’s Saludos Amigos. (Anderson)
1:15 p.m., Kabuki. Also Mon/28, 6 p.m., Kabuki; April 30, 12:30 p.m., Kabuki

SUN/27

• Forbidden Lie$ (Anna Broinowksi, Australia, 2007) Norma Khouri made headlines and toured the talk show and lecture circuit as a crusading heroine when her 2003 international bestseller Forbidden Love highlighted the phenomenon of honor killings in pockets of the Muslim world. Trouble was, her heartrending story turned out to be a fabrication. As filmmaker Anna Broinowski grows increasingly exasperated with her subject’s fibbing and evasiveness, this documentary develops from an exposé into a portrait of a serial con artist one would be quite happy to see writing her next book from behind bars. (Harvey)

1:30 p.m., PFA. Also April 30, 12:45 p.m., Kabuki; May 2, 6:30 p.m., Clay; May 4, 8:45 p.m., Kabuki

• Picking Up the Pieces (various, 2007) The most intriguing piece in this shorts program about things lost and found is Death Valley Superstar, Michael Yaroshevsky’s half-hour documentary focusing on Marc Frechette, who was picked off the street to star in Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1970 Zabriskie Point. Taking his role as a student revolutionary into real life, he subsequently tried robbing a bank, was arrested, and died in prison under suspicious circumstances. Also excellent is Radu Jude’s 25-minute Romanian drama Alexandra and John Magary’s The Second Line, a narrative revolving around a FEMA worker in post-Katrina New Orleans. (Harvey)

11:45 a.m., Kabuki. Also April 30, noon, Kabuki.

A Stray Girlfriend (Ana Katz, Argentina, 2007) Writer-director-actress Katz maps out post-breakup transience with a wandering handheld camera and oblique dialog. As her titular character explores a rural township on Argentina’s coast, each scene teeters between bewilderment and menace. Lynne Ramsay covered similar terrain in her minor masterpiece Morvern Callar (2002), though with a dream-inducing soundtrack and enigmatic ellipticism far beyond Katz’s more vanilla approach. (Goldberg)

9:30 p.m., Kabuki. Also May 1, 7:30 p.m., Kabuki; May 4, 6:15 p.m., PFA

MON/28

• Cachao: Uno Más (Dikayl Rimmasch, USA, 2008) Actor, would-be bongo player, and Cuban music fanatic Andy Garcia does right by his idol, the late Cuban musical great Israel "Cachao" Lopez, in this passionate tribute sprinkled with SF sights and centered around a Bimbo’s 365 Club concert. The show was apparently a hot one — it also showcased Bay Area Latin music scholar John Santos, timbalero Orestes Vilato, and vocalist Lazaro Galarraga — and director Rimmasch does it justice by using the performance as a narrative framework for a history that parallels that of contemporary Cuban music. (Chun)

6:30 p.m., Kabuki. Also May 2, 1:15 p.m., Kabuki.

TUES/29

Standard Operating Procedure (Errol Morris, USA, 2008) After profiling Robert McNamara in 2003’s The Fog of War, Morris jumps down the chain-of-command to summon US soldiers punished for the infamous photographs from Abu Ghraib. Ever the showman, he cuts from burnished interviews and photos to reenactments and slow-motion rumbles — we "see" Saddam’s egg frying, giant prison ants, and an exploding helicopter. Such obsessive visualizations seem misplaced and morally confused. The Abu Ghraib story is, among other things, about the unstable, delicate nature of photographic representation. Yet Morris can’t resist auteur-stamped fireworks — how else to explain the typically nutty (and utterly incongruous) Danny Elfman score? (Goldberg)

Part of "Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award: An Evening With Errol Morris," 7:30 p.m., Kabuki


>SFBG goes to SFIFF 51: our deluxe guide

SFIFF: Fierce perm

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SFIFF Robert Towne has accomplished something rare: in an industry that paradoxically singles out the director of a movie as if he or she were the sole creator of what is actually a collaborative effort, he has tasted fame, received recognition, and secured his place in the history of cinema for writing scripts.

Having started his career penning B-movies like Last Woman on Earth (1960) and The Tomb of Ligeia (1964), and working as a script doctor for impressive projects such as Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Drive, He Said (1971), and The Godfather (1972), Towne truly rose to stardom with Chinatown (1974). This dark, pessimistic tale about power struggles and government corruption in Los Angeles, which garnered Towne an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, not only stands up to such noir classics as The Maltese Falcon (1941) and The Big Sleep (1946), but also redefines the whole genre. In J.J. Gittes — as embodied by Jack Nicholson — Towne introduces his own version of a Phillip Marlowe character, tough but hopeless, into a world where crime is hard to detect and impossible to punish, even when committed in broad daylight.

Shampoo (1975) features a Towne screenplay that’s as complex and intriguing as the one he wrote for Chinatown. Yet it takes a secondary role on Towne’s résumé, despite the fact that it yielded an Academy Award nomination. Perhaps this is because Warren Beatty shares Shampoo‘s writing credit with Towne, whereas Chinatown was presented as solely Towne’s creation. (Of course, it’s an open secret today that Towne wrote a different, happy, ending for Chinatown, which director Roman Polanski replaced — fortunately — with a devastating one.) In any case, it’s a pleasant and unexpected surprise that the San Francisco Film Society has chosen to showcase Shampoo while presenting Towne with this year’s Kanbar Award for excellence in screenwriting.

As the critic and teacher Elaine Lennon points out in a 2005 piece for Senses of Cinema, the true complexity of Shampoo‘s script stems from the same element the film has been derided for — its superficially silly comic spirit. Lennon suggests that the many influences detectable in Shampoo include ancient Greek tragedy, the restoration comedies of 17th- and early 18th-century England, and the plays of Molière. All of the above construct poignant social critiques while providing comic relief.

Indeed, Shampoo uses the sexuality that permeates its turbulent and intricately woven Beverly Hills microcosm to farcically comment on the United States of the late 1960s. George (Beatty), the restless hairdresser with a soft spot for his customers, his girlfriend Jill (Goldie Hawn), his ex-girlfriend and lover Jackie (Julie Christie), his other lover Felicia (Lee Grant), and Felicia’s husband and Jackie’s sugar daddy Lester (Jack Warden) not only share the same lovers, they share the same anxiety — a feeling produced by an ever-changing, unstable society. To put it differently, their sexual misbehavior is a manifestation of the fluidity and uncertainty of their lives.

In comparing Shampoo to Chinatown, Pauline Kael perceptively wrote, "Towne’s heroes are like the heroes of hard-boiled fiction: they don’t ask much of life, but they are also romantic damn fools who just ask for what they can’t get." As Kael implies, George is the only character in the film who acts out of a desire for sheer pleasure and lives for the moment. All the others amorally float wherever the wind blows, compromising their true desires in a quest for the seemingly safe environment — the peaceful period of supposed law and order — that President Nixon has promised them.

Shampoo also presents some unconventional, multifaceted perspectives concerning gender issues. George is the poor innocent guy stunning rich women exploit for thrills and then promptly dump. Jill, Jackie, and Felicia are visibly weighing their options and waiting for the best offer, while Lester, although adulterous and money-grubbing, is somewhat sympathetic and humane.

Juxtaposed with the questionable career choices Towne has made over the last couple of decades, Shampoo shines like a bright gem. After 1996’s Mission: Impossible, and 2000’s Mission: Impossible II, one can’t help but wonder whether his rewrite of Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (1935) — which he also will be directing — marks a return to more intimate projects such as 1973’s The Last Detail, or furthers his spiralling descent into Hollywood blockbuster hell.
AN AFTERNOON WITH ROBERT TOWNE (includes a screening of Shampoo), Sat/3, 4 p.m., Sundance Kabuki

>SFBG goes to SFIFF 51: our deluxe guide

SFIFF: Apolitical animal

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SFIFF Do we have Francisco Vargas’s The Violin (2005) to blame for the omission of Lake Tahoe — the follow-up to Fernando Eimbcke and screenwriting partner Paula Markovitch’s imperfect and wonderful 2004 debut Duck Season — from this year’s selection of Mexican films at the San Francisco International Film Festival? Did the success of Vargas’s film, which won the New Directors Prize at last year’s fest, give the selection committee too much confidence in the rookies?

There are three Mexican films this year, all first features. Though one manages to be an infield home run, the overall representation of the country is underwhelming and, we hope, less than representative.

Let’s begin with Rodrigo Plá’s La Zona (2007), an alleged thriller that seeks to eviscerate Mexico’s cloistered middle class.

It does not. Nestled within the dirty vibrancy of Mexico City is "La Zona," a gated community of those same ornate houses with the Mediterranean-tile roofs that blight the American suburbs (I lived in one during high school). When a fallen billboard becomes a stairway over the wall, a violent scuffle with intruders puts the community’s zoning charter in peril. For the residents of the enclave, the possibility of losing their ability to live separately just won’t do. The movie’s message — that a tier of Mexican society is sacrificing its soul to divorce itself from its economically ravaged country — may as well have been plastered across that catalytic billboard.

La Zona is the type of idea Eimbcke and Markovitch might have considered and rejected in high school. The Nintendo light guns in Duck Season do a helluva better job evoking the spiritual violence that is so painfully literal in La Zona. It’s strange to me that Eimbcke and Markovitch haven’t made a bigger splash in the United States. Lord knows the majority of people inclined toward reading subtitles don’t like to work too hard, but the American influence on these filmmakers’ first film (it got a lot of Stranger Than Paradise comparisons) is apparent. It’s a wonder they aren’t already riding the same train, albeit in coach, as Alejandro González Iñárritu, Guillermo del Toro, and Alfonso Cuarón. They’re minimalists, but the likeable kind.

But enough pining. Back to the reality.

One wants to muster the energy to hope that Alex Rivera’s sci-fi antiglobalization flick Sleep Dealer, which wasn’t available for screening, takes La Zona‘s same drive to filter Mexican political concerns through pop conventions and produces something substantial. The centerpiece concept — site-specific American labor outsourced to Mexico with the help of drones — is certainly intriguing. But judging from the easy political humor of Rivera’s short films (the proxy farm worker idea was already played for laughs in his 1998 short Why Cybraceros?), we should brace for another dour lecture hastily fitted with genre tropes and called subversive.

But even if Sleep Dealer turns out to be a powerhouse, its NAFTA-Tron 3000 robots have to be awfully cool to contend with the quiet power of Israel Cárdenas and Laura Amelia Guzmán’s Cochochi. The film, about two preteen brothers from the Raramuri tribe in northwest Mexico, is slightly shy of the visual achievement of The Violin‘s textured grayscale, but it’s also more sincere and less showy in its social awareness. The two boys (real-life brothers Antonio Lerma Batista and Evaristo Lerma Batista), while delivering medicine to family in a neighboring village, promptly lose the horse they "borrowed" from their grandfather. Then they lose one another. Like a bifurcated Where Is the Friend’s Home? (1987), Cochochi is a pleasantly disorienting trek through unfamiliar territory, trailing overburdened children who register their mounting worries with the stony expressiveness kids are brilliant at.

It’s an unassuming naturalist document that, for all its hushed grace, crackles with anxiety and proudly maintains a layer of abrasiveness. In this respect, it reminds me of Mexican director Carlos Reygadas’ gorgeous nutso-realist films, minus the impish provocation. Like Reygadas, Cárdenas and Guzmán use local, untrained actors to languorously stilted effect. The filmmakers relied heavily on the brothers for the film’s story and dialogue, which is spoken in the Tarahumaran dialect of Raramuri.

Cochochi is no thriller and there aren’t any robots, but it is the rightful destination of your dollar. Besides, if the current Under the Same Moon is any indication of distribution trends, there’ll be plenty of opportunity for self-flagellation later.

COCHOCHI May 1, 6:30 p.m., Kabuki; May 4, 3:15 p.m., Kabuki; May 5, 6:30 p.m., PFA

SLEEP DEALER Mon/28, 9 p.m., PFA; May 4, 9:15 p.m., Kabuki; May 7, 6:15 p.m., Kabuki

LA ZONA May 3, 9:30 p.m., Clay; May 5, 2 p.m., Kabuki; May 7, 9:30 p.m., Kabuki


>SFBG goes to SFIFF 51: our deluxe guide

SFIFF: Color her deadly

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It’s a mug’s game determining the correct genre of John M. Stahl’s 1945 Leave Her to Heaven — especially since a true shorthand pitch should dodge the question entirely to note instead that it contains at least one, and arguably two, of the most unsettling murder scenes in movie history. Stahl’s adaptation of a million-selling potboiler by Ben Ames Williams is both a film noir and a melodrama. But even those two genres scarcely cover its facets: it’s also a revealing antecedent to some of Alfred Hitchcock’s most esteemed or idiosyncratically baroque suspense films.

Modern-day responses to Leave Her to Heaven often invoke melodrama yet rarely explore the ironic historical relationship between Stahl and Douglas Sirk, the oft-worshipped master of that genre’s ’50s Technicolor peak. It was Stahl who — between 1934 and 1935 — directed the original black-and-white versions of two crucial volumes in the Sirk library, Magnificent Obsession (1954) and Imitation of Life (1959). Because Leave Her to Heaven predates the first of those remakes by close to a decade, it’s safe to assume that Sirk took a look at Stahl’s movies and liked what he saw. Many Sirk trademarks — an uncharacteristically dramatic use of shadow within Technicolor; a fondness for otherworldly shades of blue evening light; staging that heightens the artificiality of mid-20th century American society; set decoration that turns dream homes into prisons — are to the fore of Leave Her to Heaven.

The harsh visual symbolism one associates with Sirk is also present in Stahl’s most famous movie. Disabled young Danny (Darryl Hickman) is first glimpsed by viewers and by Ellen (Gene Tierney) with his eyes closed in slumber. Later in the film, when another character’s offhand remark gives Ellen the idea to become pregnant, a staircase looms behind her. These foreboding touches are the type of morbid rewards that await anyone who returns to Leave Her to Heaven after experiencing the film’s strange mix of slack stretches and stunning moments a first time.

A unique tension stems from one aspect of Leave Her to Heaven that separates Stahl’s movie from the cinema of Sirk: Stahl gives his anti-heroine Ellen an almost mythic power that even infects the film’s nature scenes, which are so eye-piercingly vibrant they verge on surrealism. At one point glimpsed through binoculars like an approaching enemy in a war film, Ellen’s family are too intimidated by her to enforce suffocating social niceties or break free from them. Instead, they alternately resemble statues or nervous animals that sense the presence of a predator. Ellen meets her soon-to-be husband Richard (Cornel Wilde) at high altitudes on that favorite Hitchcock existential vehicle, a train. His (and Stahl’s) love-at-first-sight gaze into her green eyes — and a later scene in which Ellen rises from beneath green waters — has the uncanny doomed allure that Hitchcock somehow sustained throughout 1958’s still-matchless Vertigo. (A notorious scene from 1981’s Mommie Dearest also tips its bathing cap to Ellen’s swim.)

A place in 20th century film history is a rich reward for Leave Her to Heaven. When Ellen rides horseback through New Mexico’s arid landscape at dawn, coldly tossing her father’s ashes to and fro before hurling the urn with true abandon, the wild horses psychodrama of Hitchcock’s Marnie (1964) steeplechase-jumps through a film buff’s mind. The symbolism of a high-strung woman riding a horse isn’t unique to those films, but in his adaptation of Winston Graham’s 1961 novel, Hitchcock even goes so far as to echo, with a slight reversal, Leave Her to Heaven‘s competitive relationship between Ellen and her adopted cousin — "not my sister," she makes clear — Ruth (Jeanne Crain).

Leave Her to Heaven is a true downer — and feel free to add an extra r to that description. In the 1967 survey Films and Feelings, critic Raymond Durgnat cites it as an example of its era’s penchant for "tightlipped misogyny," suggesting Durgnat wasn’t a film noir fanatic or a Freudian. The movie’s melodrama is classically cruel in the Joan Crawford tradition, built on a story almost sadistically entwined with the lead actress’s autobiography. A year or two before shooting, Tierney gave birth to a deaf, blind daughter after contracting measles from someone whom, years later, she discovered was a fan. The film’s screenplay grazes this experience with a reference to the mumps — watch Ellen tense up and turn ice-cold when it occurs — and through the character of Danny. If Ellen is one of filmdom’s most tragic characters, aspects of Tierney’s real life miseries are more unsettling. She underwent shock treatment at least 27 times.

Not exactly funny — and yet there is a truly hilarious coda to Leave Her to Heaven‘s story. In 1988, the same scenario was remade as TV movie Too Good to Be True, with a lineup too amazing to be believed: Loni Anderson plays the Ellen role, with Patrick Duffy from Dallas as her long-suffering husband, Neil Patrick Harris from Doogie Howser, M.D. as swim-happy Danny, and Julie Harris, a Baldwin brother (Daniel), and Larry "Dr. Giggles" Drake rounding out the cast. If that weren’t enough, the teleplay goes so far as to exaggerate the original’s most vicious scene by turning what looks like a rescue attempt from above the surface into an act of murder underwater.

LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN Sat/26, Castro, and Sun/27, PFA.

>SFBG goes to SFIFF 51: our deluxe guide

SFIFF: Critic’s choice

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SFIFF J. Hoberman — trenchant weekly critic, book author, programmer, teacher — is celebrating his 30th year at the Village Voice, an unheard-of stretch for a film writer. (Pauline Kael’s famous tenure at the New Yorker lasted 23 years.) Freshly garlanded with a three-week program at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and an Anthology Film Archive screening of his early forays in experimental filmmaking, Hoberman continues his prize tour with this year’s Mel Novikoff Award.

The recent programs at BAM and Anthology highlight attributes that made Hoberman an essential buttress against the sycophantic rivalries flowing from Kael’s 1960s showdowns with Andrew Sarris. Over the phone from his New York office, Hoberman told me about his early days at the Voice: "I created a beat of things the other critics weren’t particularly interested in, and that took in a lot of stuff. Originally they had brought me on to write about avant-garde and experimental film, but pretty soon I was writing about documentary, animation, revival series, foreign films that weren’t from France … all kinds of things."

Hoberman’s BAM program was accordingly unwieldy, covering Andrei Rublev (1969) and Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), Ernie Gehr and Martin Scorsese. Cinephilia Hoberman-style seems to be everywhere at once, encompassing Looney Tunes, No Wave New York, Jeanne Dielman (1975) and Yiddish cinema. It’s eclecticism with a program, matched by a willingness to chase the rabbit down its hole — but never at the expense of analytical rigor.

Although Hoberman is a professed admirer of the puzzling jazz in Manny Farber’s criticism, his prose is solidly explicatory and instructive. He knows how to open a discussion: "In its tireless attempts to mean everything to everyone and empirical willingness to try anything once, the American culture industry intermittently generates its own precursors, parallels, and analogues to local or European avant-gardism." He’s an apt profiler: "Pain and Fear — and the convulsive desire for public recognition — are Scorsese’s meat." And he’s not afraid to take a stand, as with a recent rave for David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises (2007): "From Videodrome (1983) through A History of Violence (2005), neither Scorsese nor Spielberg, and not even David Lynch, has enjoyed a comparable run."

He’s also an accomplished facilitator of Jean-Luc Godard’s idea that the history of cinema is synchronous with the history of the 20th century. We can count on Hoberman to connect Terror’s Advocate (2007) with La Chinoise (1967), to draw a line from a prescient film like A Face in the Crowd (1957) to Watergate and Nashville (1975). When his interests come together — as with an appreciation of Southland Tales‘ (2007) avant-gardism, midnight movie appeal, and socio-political currency — sparks still fly. Talking about an upcoming "prequel" he’s penning to his 2005 decoupage of ’60s cinema, The Dream Life (New Press), Hoberman muses, "I think that now, or at least since [Ronald] Reagan, it’s sort of customary to see movies as political scenarios." To the extent that this is true, Hoberman is due significant credit — his meditations on that movie-land president, for one, are as adroit as that of any policy wonk.

Historical markers notwithstanding, Hoberman’s film selection for his special night is likely the most unabashedly sensuous movie not starring Asia Argento to play this year’s festival. Spanish director José Luis Guerín described In the City of Sylvia (2007) as a "simple" film at last fall’s Vancouver International Film Festival, and it certainly does offer a distilled vision of cinematic paradise: gazing and grazing faces, old Strasbourg, and a slow stitch of sound and image.

Our inlet to Sylvia is a whiskered young man, haunting the city at a dreamy remove. He sits in an outdoor café with his notebook, sketching the faces of radiant women while Guerín orchestrates fractal cutting, multilevel staging of faces, and intricately gradated sound design into a sun-dappled symphony. After changing seats, the dreamer recognizes a woman sitting behind a pane of glass. She leaves and he follows, locked in an ambiguous reverie inscribed with resonant detail and sweet ambiguity.

Sylvia fulfills the cinephile’s dream of disembodiment. "It’s a narrative that comes organically from the fact of making the movie rather than dramatizing a story situation," Hoberman opines. "There’s a real love of cinema, the process of it." Each of the film’s handful of extended passages is distinct in its precise design, but this blissful lucidity Hoberman describes is Sylvia‘s central melody and romance.

Late in Guerín’s film, after a yearning bar scene set to Blondie’s "Heart of Glass," the young man sits at a tram stop, considering the waiting women and rushing window reflections for some clue as to his own loss. In a virtuosic eliding glimpse of a passing bus, Guerín dissolves the sounds and images of shots already superimposed by the panes of glass. A quick succession of several more multi-tiered, unexpectedly conversant portraits of women ("Elles," the dreamer notes in his book) finally lands on a mesmerizing rear-angle of a woman’s hair blowing wildly in the wind. The young man can’t put pencil to paper. He’s as enamored as we are with this siren song from what the director calls "the continent of cinema," a place J. Hoberman knows all too well.

AN EVENING WITH J. HOBERMAN (includes screening of In the City of Sylvia), Sun/27, 6 p.m., Sundance Kabuki

IN THE CITY OF SYLVIA Tues/29, 4 p.m., Kabuki; May 2, 9 p.m., Kabuki


>SFBG goes to SFIFF 51: our deluxe guide

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