INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL ROTTERDAM 2007

24:01/04:02:2007

ROTTERDAM

In The Shadow Of The Dog

The Indian films are never sold out. Why? Because people expect to see a Bollywood musical, at least 3 hours (could be 5 or 6 hours) full of secret affairs, fights, songs, dance and of course a wedding. But Indian cinema is not all about Bollywood. The Indian arthouse genre, with subtle, slow, beautiful films like In The Shadow Of The Dog flourish mainly abroad. Few Indians have seen director Girish Kasaravalli’s films, although each of his nine films has won several national and international awards. Kasaravalli was Rotterdam’s Filmmaker In Focus during the 2003 festival, and to thank the IFFR this year his latest film premieres in Rotterdam as well.  

Director Girish Kasaravalli refuses to make mainstream Bollywood films, because he thinks Bollywood is just sentiment and nothing more. According to Kasaravalli, serious cinema removes emotions and focuses on political and social motives. He is inspired by the powers that force people to behave in a certain way. It’s not about individuals, it’s about eras.     

In The Shadow Of The Dog fits perfectly within Kasaravalli’s frame, as the film attempts to capture the inversions of social values held by three different generations. Compelled by his wife to bring a boy from another town under the belief that he is their dead son, Achchannaih does so. When this young man appears in the village and claims he is the reincarnation of the husband of Venkatalakshmi who died 22 years ago, she accepts him as her husband (after some initial hesitance). Three generations of women (the grandmother, Venkatalakshmi, and the granddaughter) respond to this in different ways. Each woman is forced to reinterpret her values of life, which leads to three different 'rebirths'.

The visuals are excellent, the acting is great and the music provides a good balance throughout the film. There are not many dialogues in In The Shadow Of The Dog, but the characters show a lot through the director’s poetic cinematic approach, where unspoken emotions provide the drama’s tension.

The title In The Shadow Of The Dog refers to the dog symbolically representing an individual's good deeds and bad acts. The film is an attempt to explain the complex phenomenon of blind faith, and why people choose to wallow in unquestioned faith instead of questioning the situation. Does Venkatalakshmi truly recognize her husband, or is it just a desperate attempt to loose the heartbreaking grief? Kasaravalli does not offer the answers, but he does pose the right questions. And don’t we all drown ourselves in illusions once in a while?

Fantasma

It’s impossible to understand Fantasma if you haven’t seen La Libertad and specifically Los Muertos. Without the memory of Alonso’s previous films, Fantasma is an empty shell. But after seeing Fantasma, you might change your opinion about Los Muertos and La Libertad. I did.

La Libertad follows an Argentinean woodchopper over the course of one day. We see him at work in the morning: long sequences in which he chops down trees in a quiet, sunbaked corner of the Argentinian Pampa. He prepares the trunks for sale, and a neighbour and his son arrive in a truck and help  him transport the goods to the buyer. They haggle over the price of the trunks. Eventually a deal is struck and money changes hands. The woodchopper goes to a local store and buys cigarettes, food and drink. He calls home and asks after his sick mother. That night he catches an armadillo, and cooks it over his campfire. In the background, lightning flashes on the horizon. The camera does not move. After a couple of minutes, one last caption reveals the film’s title: La Libertad

In Los Muertos, main character Vargas has been released after serving a long prison sentence. He goes into the outback to find his daughter. While traveling downriver in a rowboat with a few provisions, we slowly watch him feed himself from a tree, and slaughter an animal and clean it in the boat. Los Muertos is oppressive observation. Style apart, Alonso takes us to a place we don't know and he keeps us there. He doesn't explain; his film suggests you can get very close to things and still not understand them, and sometimes that's the way it has to be. Los Muertos fascinated me from head to tail, and full of expectations I went to see Fantasma.

The catalogue stated “Narcissism without the director appearing on screen. The camera circles meticulously in lengthy shots filled with emptiness and decay around a screening of the previous film by the maker. Empty? Maybe. Brilliant? Certainly.”. Pretty pretentious words.

So Lisandro Alonso is the maker of two minimalist films, one about a woodchopper, Misael Saavedra, and one about a murderer, Argentino Vargas. These two men weren’t actors but real men of the land and the forests. In Fantasma, both men are placed in the city, Buenos Aires. Argentino Vargas, playing himself, arrives in the San Martin Theatre in Buenos Aires for a screening of Los Muertos. for roughly an hour, we observe not only Vargas but also Saavreda, wandering around an almost deserted, multi-level, labyrinth-like Buenos Aires theatre-complex. At one point Vargas finally finds the screening room and sits through Los Muertos, with the unimpressed caretaker and a cinema employee as the only other audience. This is an amazing scene which is loaded with strange lyricism. We find ourselves sitting in a cinema, watching an actor sitting in another cinema, who is watching himself on the screen. A completely new experience, and I couldn’t help watching the audience experiencing the same strange situation.

Alonso uses the same minimalism to pose new questions. The Theatre has obviously seen better days, and the woodchopper and murderer get lost in their quest for the screening room. Does Alonso show us a disappearing (film)culture? Or is it all about getting lost in the emptiness of contemporary cinema? He clearly states that a work of art needs an audience, but does one person fulfill the need of an audience?

Innovative, new and intriguing. And just when you think the film is all work and no play, Alonso plays the funny card with Vargas’ assessment of his performance in Los Muertos: “I spent a lot of time in the boat”.

Filmmaker in Focus: Johnnie To

Every year, special attention is devoted to two directors as Filmmakers in Focus. Directors who have a high-quality oeuvre that has not yet received sufficient exposure in the Netherlands, and who also have exceptional new films. This year, these are Abderrahmane Sissako and Johnnie To. I’d like to focus a bit more on the latter, as the highly commercial director Johnnie To seems to be an unusual choice for the IFFR.

It’s common knowledge: Rotterdam does not, will not and shall not select commercial films. But then again, Dutch distributors don’t offer many options to see non-US commercial films. In fact, most Hong Kong films are released straight to DVD, so it’s not possible for cinephiles to see these highly inspiring films on the silver screen. That’s why the IFFR chose to organize a retrospective about To. His films are full of energy and originality, with dazzling action, cool gangsters and funny absurdities. He actually reinvented the Hong Kong genre film, and is undoubtedly the best Hong Kong genre filmmaker of this generation. His films therefore deserve to be screened on the silver screen, and I’m glad the IFFR agrees with me.

It has not been easy. Since the rights of commercial films are easily diffused, many companies hold the distribution rights of To’s films. Companies that couldn’t care less about a festival screening in a small European country. The IFFR had to persuade many agents, distributors, producers around the globe to acknowledge the importance of this retrospective. In the end they managed to get 18 Johnnie To films. For fans, artists and cinephiles, but also just to amaze Johnnie To himself at the screening of his first film ever, The Enigmatic Case .

::: << 2 - fine :::

Rotterdam, 05:02:2007