The Wily Filipino

SFIFF Note #2.

There's a tiny whiff of the exotic about Lance Hammer's powerful debut film Ballast -- a drama set in the Mississippi Delta, with a non-professional cast -- but that fact works in its favor. Otherwise, the story's nothing we haven't seen before, including the way it's structured: the slow accumulation of details, then some (expected) emotional outbursts two-thirds of the way in that fill out some of the back story. But the way Hammer patiently lets the relationships between people unfold is a welcome change from the way characters are quickly sketched out in American movies.

Nonetheless, the movie -- about a convenience store owner devastated by his brother's suicide (and already I feel I'm revealing too much) -- could probably have taken place anywhere, except that the ghostly blue light of a Mississippi winter plays a central role. This shade of blue colors the sky, the mud, the bare tree branches, the burnt-out trailers, and its haunted characters alike, the latter rendered immobile by their grief, the crippling burden of the rural economy, and the emotional weight of things left unsaid.

Speaking of immobility, Bela Tarr's latest film, The Man from London, is also worth seeing, but good god, it's slow -- slow even for Bela Tarr. The movie has a classic noir setup: ordinary station guard witnesses a crime, comes into possession of a large sum of money, and ponders what to do with it as various characters (the police, the money's true owners, the thief's wife) slowly arrive at the seaside village. But The Man from London an even more spare take on the genre, as if Tarr had hollowed it out, leaving only skeletons and gestures to remain.

Everything I love about Tarr is here: the rumbling ambient sounds, the long back-and-forth pans inside rooms, the almost-constant drinking, a bunch of familiar folks from Satantango, the excruciating repetition of musical motifs -- and yes, a surreal dancing scene with an accordion and balancing things on foreheads! -- but all in all it feels too patently an experiment in form. The (almost) all-Hungarian cast's French and English, it seems, is overdubbed (including Tilda Swinton's French) -- a nice touch to foreground the artificiality of the entire venture, as if no one truly fit their role -- but it seems forced. (It's like the reverse of Eastern Promises, another film masquerading as noir, where you had all these non-Russians playing Russians.) I hate to say this: for fans only. I'd see it again, but beginners should treat themselves to his earlier films instead.

Posted by the wily filipino at May 3, 2008 01:15 PM