The Wily Filipino

SFIFF Note #1.

I struck gold with my Movie #2* of the San Francisco International Film Fest yesterday with Roy Andersson's queasily funny comedy You, the Living (Du Levande), a film I'm already anxious to see again. There is no narrative (although the movie does begin and end with two pieces of a story): just a barely-connected series of almost-frozen tableaus in pea soup-green living rooms, offices, kitchens and bars (and an execution chamber), the camera in one corner dispassionately eyeing, the surreally ordinary lives of urban dwellers. (One review I read afterwards said that the camera moves exactly twice; too bad I missed one of those scenes!). There are a few recurring characters, most notably the disparate members of a brass band, but otherwise we catch people for the single minute they're on screen, and then they're gone, their escaping feet already licked by Lethe's ice-cold wave. I'll be writing more about this movie at the end of the year, I'm sure.

*Movie #1 was Fernando Solanas' latest documentary, Latent Argentina (Argentina Latente), which I think is closer to "Dormant Argentina" -- about the privatization of companies, concessions to multinational firms, and the vast economic inequalities within the country -- had promised to be less dry than the subject matter only because it was by Solanas, but no such luck. Nonetheless it was quite stimulating, if only because I kept thinking of the Philippines the entire time. (It's wonderful how the last time I heard the phrase "el patrimonio nacional" was in a Spanish class reading Claro M. Recto -- something worth thinking about there.) Visually, Solanas gets some beautiful images of the landscape, but this grandeur is dissipated once we get to the second half and we're treated to shots of laboratory after laboratory. (They're not contrasted ironically either, as they're both classified under resources meant to be used.) One treat for Pacific Film Archive viewers: the one time the documentary leaves Argentina is to visit, of all places, Berkeley, and an interview with an Argentinean professor takes place right outside the lobby, a few feet behind where we were watching.

Posted by the wily filipino at April 28, 2008 02:51 PM