Friday, October 13
*Postman: One of the most striking recent works from China’s sixth generation filmmakers, He Jianjun’s Postman recalls the films of Robert Bresson, Pickpocket especially, in both its subject and its gorgeously austere manner. Xiao Dou, the film’s young protagonist, is chosen to replace a postman fired for reading the letters he handles and immediately begins repeating his predecessor’s transgression. While at first it seems this behavior may simply be a way for the shy loner to share in other lives, the film carefully avoids endorsing that interpretation or any other, leaving us to puzzle over why this voyeuristic obsession becomes an end in itself, a duplicate existence that Xiao prefers to any authentic one. Painting modern Beijing as a jumble of flaking tenements and sterile high-rises, He portrays a society where the concern for “face” inevitably engenders its hidden opposite, one in which urban anomie and a thwarted will to power combine to produce pathological manipulators like Xiao. Not only is the political allegory endlessly resonant, but He achieves his ends with a spare, elusive style that finds as much meaning in empty streets as in evasive gazes. (GC) (Music Box, 7:00)
Neurosia: The German subtitle of Rosa Von Praunheim’s satirical pseudodocumentary might be translated as “50 Years of Perversity.” At the premiere of his new film Von Praunheim is shot dead, and a TV journalist (Desire Nick) sets out to make a documentary about the gay underground filmmaker, with unexpected results. Valentin Passoni is credited with the script. (Music Box, 9:00)
*Siao Yu: See listing under Friday, October 13. (Fine Arts, 1:00)
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Provocateur: For over 120 years, until 1918, Poland did not exist on the maps of the world, having been partitioned among Austria, Russia, and Prussia. During that time, it was sometimes difficult to tell what a given person’s loyalties were. Set in 1909 and based loosely on real-life characters, Provocateur follows a Polish terrorist-turned-traitor (played forcefully by Poland’s leading movie star, Boguslaw Linda) in an attempt to examine the fatal toll of harboring split political allegiances. This attempt falls far short of its promise, however. The film proves sketchy at best at presenting the psychological and political aspects of the story, and the few oblique historical references it does provide merely muddle the picture. Many of Provocateur’s narrative problems begin about half an hour in, when the setting moves from Warsaw to the picturesque mountain town of Zakopane. At this point the film’s focus inexplicably shifts away from politics, first to a brittle love triangle and then to mountain climbing. Any dramatic tension, however weak, is then eclipsed by the physical challenges and danger of scaling inaccessible summits. The mountains take over as the real stars of Provocateur, and at least on this level the film delivers: the images of sharp peaks and nearly vertical gorges in the sun are nothing short of exhilarating. But if anyone wants to fully understand the plot of this Polish-made drama, reading the synopsis–if there is one–in detail is a definite prerequisite. (ZB) (Fine Arts, 3: 00)
Two Crimes: Mexican director Roberto Sneider’s first feature is a strange hybrid, as if each of the title’s two crimes could yield its own discrete film. It starts as a sardonic urban political thriller in which the hero’s innocent helpfulness makes him and his girlfriend the targets of a paranoid police force that sees terrorist conspiracies everywhere–even at a birthday gathering in his apartment. Once on the lam, the hero leads the film into a smalltown Volpone. He takes refuge with a rich uncle whose ill health has attracted a swarm of greedy relatives not at all happy to see a favorite nephew. In the ensuing tango of greed, sex, jealousy, betrayal, and murder, it’s hard to distinguish the good guys from the bad. Everyone schemes and double-crosses–including the ironic but manipulative uncle and our erstwhile hero, who proves to be far less disinterested than probably even he imagined. Sneider manages to sustain a delicate balance between caricature and identification in a black comedy that, for the most part, successfully walks that peculiarly Latin American tightrope between soap-opera naturalism and slightly feverish myth. Even though this film is too long, collapsing under overloaded conceits, it’s an interesting failure. (RS) (Fine Arts, 3:00)
The Garden of Eden: There’s always something subtly seductive in a film by Maria Novaro–and always something slightly amiss, like a whisper in a church during high mass. Within the cathedral of Mexican culture she casts a sidelong gaze: her “labyrinths of solitude” are populated with strong-willed women gone astray because there’s no other place for them to go. In The Garden of Eden she chooses the border town of Tijuana–a place that’s neither here nor there–as a metaphor. Serena wants a new life there with her children, Elizabeth is looking for her Mexican roots, and Jane, an American, starts out looking for her brother and ends up with a Mexican lover in the trunk of her car. Felipe sees the grass as greener on the other side of the frontier, and Jane good-naturedly agrees to be “used” by him to cross to the other side. Yet their story never turns ugly: they discover, if not love, at least mutual respect. Novaro has a fine playful touch, seen in her almost nonchalant way of handling the narrative, her love and respect for the characters, her semiverite approach to the mise-en-scene. Like Lola and Danzon, The Garden of Eden is a small, precious, almost fragile cinematic miracle. (BR) (Fine Arts, 5:00)
