IFFR 2006

Thursday

I had a ticket for the new Hou Hsiao-hsien film, ‘Three Times’, but apparently the film was rescheduled. By the time I found this out, the film had already started, so I missed out on this one. Bummer! But life goes on…

Japanese Animation Trips (various)

This was a short compilation of some Japanese animation, far more obscure than the popular anime. While not everything was interesting, there were two films that really captured my imagination: Yellow Night (Nobuhiro Aihara) and Sea Roar (Kurosaka Keita). While both films were wildly different (both in length and in style) both films had something that appealed to me, but I can’t really explain what. Nice overall experience.

13 (Tzameti) (Gela Babluani, 2005)

This French/Georgian film was quite a remarkable one. A boy, early twenties, needs money and gets into some serious trouble. The program dropped the name Tarantino in the description of this film, which undoubtedly has something to do with this film’s popularity at the festival, but it is nothing more than a selling strategy. The film is shot in beautiful, grainy black and white, which somewhat recalls early Jarmusch, while the scripts is full of tension and the film holds middle ground between art film and mainstream. The highpoint for me was undoubtedly the protagonist, George Babluani (I assume the director’s son) who came across like a combination of a young Jean-Pierre Leaud (in his looks) and a young Robert De Niro (in his physical acting). Because he has very little dialogue, he really has to do it all physically and turns in an extraordinary performance. A little gem.

Princess Raccoon (Seijun Suzuki, 2005)

Tzameti was supposed to be my last film at this years festival, but when I saw the new Suzuki film played immediately after Tzameti (at 9.30 pm; it would have been quite a different thing had I seen this film, a day earlier at 9.45 am) I decided to jump into the unknown and try to get a ticket (in doing so, I knew I wouldn’t be able to get home with public transit, but who cares?). Thankfully it wasn’t completely sold out, so I got my ticket. This must have been one of the best decisions of my life, because I wouldn’t want to have missed what I was about to see for all the gold in the world! ‘Princess Raccon’ is surely one of the most unclassifiable films to have emerged in recent years, and for me also one of the best films. Jean Renoir once remarked that the reason he loved the art of film so much, was that it’s because a collaborative art and that dogma surely applies to this film, because this film scores in every department: the lavish costumes and decors, the uplifting music and songs, the wonderful actors (I couldn’t decide who was better looking: Ziyi Zhang or Jô Odagiri) and of course Suzuki’s visual flair. The film is unparalleled in its scope and imagination, a film that is full of vibrant colors, humor, melodrama, romance, dance and above all, a brilliant childlike fantasy. Talk about a genre bender and this is it: the film effectively blurs the lines between so many genres it’s almost unbelievable. It probably has its flaws, but it has so much going for it, I’m not even willing to consider them. Right from the start I felt this was going to be a wonderful experience, but Suzuki managed to exceed even my boldest expectations. I felt tears filling up my eyes from the very beginning, and after a while I didn’t even care anymore; I cried like a baby during the whole film, in a state of bliss. I haven’t had this kind of uplifting, life affirming experience in a movie theatre since I first saw Luhrmann’s ‘Moulin Rouge’ in the theater. Words cannot describe this unique film, so I just want to urge everyone who hasn’t seen this film yet to go see it. And please try to see this one in the theatre, because this is the kind of film that just won’t be the same on DVD. The most wonderful thing is that the film played in one of the biggest venues of the festival and that probably around 500-600 people were watching a Suzuki film. I bet only a very small percentage even knew who Suzuki was, but the vast majority of the audience seemed to genuinely like the film. After the film, you really could feel some kind of buzz, a certain excitement I don’t often feel in the audience. As it happened, I stepped outside at the same time as avant-garde filmmaker Tonino De Bernardi, who had a very big smile on his face. I guess he liked the film too. Boy, what a wonderful way for me to end this festival!