Festival Warning Signs

A quick peek at February’s Portland International Film Festival

By D.K. Holm

It’s February, and the Portland International Film Festival is upon us. As inevitable as a pap smear, the festival is hell for reviewers and, by all accounts, a delight for viewers, who can save up their interest in foreign films for this month-long orgy.
 
The 31st edition of the festival, which runs from February 7 through 24, offers up 113 short- and feature-length movies from around the world, or about six a day. The festival doesn’t offer prizes (though there is a sort of people’s choice award) and doesn’t premiere many movies, and so doesn’t have the international reputation of Cannes or Berlin, but it has its good points. Our festival often anticipates trends (such as the sudden interest in Hong Kong action directors in the late 1980s) and presents films that, as they eventually make it to New York, are glowingly received by big city pundits, reversing the usual drawn-out trajectory. On the other hand, several of the bigger titles will soon be playing in Portland anyway (Van Sant’s Paranoid Park, the animated movie Chicago 10, the Iraq documentary Taxi to the Dark Side, among others) because they have already been signed up by major studios.
 
The festival leads off with the Israeli film The Band’s Visit. It’s the perfect choice because it is gentle, inclusive, optimistic, and plays to our innate desire for peace and understanding for all mankind. A first-time effort by director and writer Eran Kolirin, the film is well-acted and elegantly shot. It is also, however, restrained, at heart a bashful film, almost inert. In the context of a festival, however, its minor flaws can be celebrated as major virtues, especially in relation to the bombastic crap playing at the multiplex down the street.
 
In the film, the eight-member Alexandria Ceremonial Police Band, looking tidy in their powder blue uniforms, arrives in Israel en route to a place called Petah Tikva for a cross-cultural performance. But due to administrative foul-ups, the band winds up in a different place, Bet Hatikv, a thinly populated and conservative-seeming desert town. The vivacious Dina (Ronit Elkabetz), who runs the Israeli equivalent of a road house, takes pity on the group, led by the repressed widower Tewfiq (Sasson Gabai) and arranges for them to stay in various apartments until a bus arrives the next day to take them to their rightful appointment. Through the course of the night, Egyptians and Israelis, speaking mostly English to each other (but occasionally making crude asides in their own languages) make tentative gestures at getting to know each other (there is even a muted version of a typical big Hollywood communal table sing-along), and Dina flirts mysteriously with Tewfiq.  
 
Quietude and small gestures are the hallmarks of this film, indicating that we have come a long way from the manner in which a Federico Fellini, say, would have dealt with the same material. Fellini would have played up the eccentricity of the band members and the locals, would have highlighted the sexual competition, chased the emotion, been unsparing with the music, would follow episodic tangents, and heightened the resolution. There would be no unintended ambiguity. But that’s not what we want in our foreign films anymore. We’ve traded the smorgasbord for lean cuisine. We require that our imports be spare, emotionless, distant, “non-manipulative,” and inconclusive. In this regard, The Band’s Visit will fit the modern moviegoer’s menu.
 
Also on hand is the Romanian film 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and has received glowing reviews, but which joins the ranks of other terribly overrated films from the same country such as The Death of Mr. Lazarescu and 12:08 East of Bucharest. These works are supposed to represent a new wave of serious, artistic, uncompromising confrontations with life, but Lazarescu is tedious and depressing and Bucharest is an unaccountably popular comedy with no actual humor in it. It’s just a critical fad, but one that can’t be stopped, because now all the critics in the backwaters, taking the lead from Variety and the NY scribes, will automatically sing the praises of these and forthcoming films and buy into the belief that there is indeed a renaissance of serious moviemaking in Eastern Europe. 4 Months is the strongest of the three films, but suffers from some of the same problems they have.
 
You wouldn’t know it from the American trailer for the film (which creates the impression that it’s some kind of thriller), but 4 Months is about a college student helping her friend get an illegal abortion. 4 Months takes place 20 years ago, in 1987, in the waning two years of the Ceausescu regime, which criminalized abortions in 1966. Gabita (Laura Vasiliu), the brunette, is pregnant. Otilia (Anamaria Marinca), her blonde roommate, is the go-getter, as able to barter cigarettes from the student down the hall in their dorm as she is to track down the guy who will perform the abortion, a certain Mr. Bebe (Vlad Ivanov).
 
4 Months takes place over the course of about 12 hours, as Otilia rushes around making arrangements and then waits for results. The film seems long, however, because director Cristian Mungiu, in the fashion of Bela Tarr and Eastern European films in general, likes long takes where the camera simply observes, say, Otilia riding on a tram or sitting in a tub. Marinca is also of that European school of screen actresses that includes Sandrine Bonnaire, Isabelle Huppert, and Catherine Deneuve, who don’t feel obliged by any viewer-actor contract to express actual emotion on their faces.
 
Though abortion is obviously important to the plot, the real thrust of the film (which is said to be the first in a cycle of anti-nostalgic tales of life under Ceausescu) is the degradation of daily life in a corrupt society in which rules and laws are severe yet flouted, where every day is a series of wheelings and dealings. An impediment in Otilia’s day is the obligation to meet her boyfriend Adi’s (Alex Potocean) parents at a dinner party, where we are shown the contrast between society as Otilia has experienced it and how the social elites misunderstand it. After she leaves the party, Otilia endures a narratively unnecessary scary night trek through town.
 
The film’s attitude toward abortion isn’t particularly clear. The recipient isn’t likable, and the “doctor” is a rogue who blackmails both women into having sex with him in order to proceed with what turns out to be a late-term abortion, and then leaves before the procedure is completed. There is a lingering shot of the results of the procedure which could be incorporated into a NARAL ad, but at the same time, there is no indication within the film that Gabita is doing anything morally wrong—only that she is subjecting herself to victimization by hustlers. Ultimately, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days isn’t all that different from Knocked Up, Juno, or Waitress, quisling on the efficacy of abortion. These movies are like politicians, afraid to come out wholeheartedly for women’s rights for fear of losing one vote (or viewer) somewhere. 4 Months can be read multiple ways, like a kid’s art flip book.
 
Neither The Band’s Visit nor 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days made it onto the Oscar Best Foreign Language Film nomination list, which is a whole other story. The Band’s Visit is gentle, human, and reassuring, while 4 Months is difficult, thought-provoking, and stylistically challenging. If these qualities are anathema to the curators at the Academy, I’m not sure what’s left.

For further reviews of festival films, check The Vancouver Voice film blog.