MOVIES
Of the two
BY ADR IAN M ACK
dozen–plus feature films coming to this year’s Vancouver Latin American Film Festival, Christian Sida-Valenzuela’s personal favourite opens with what you might call softcore tentacle porn. From that eye-popping intro, The Untamed only gets more darkly and artfully transgressive. How often does SidaValenzuela get to indulge his more outré tastes in this way? “Not as often as I would like,” answers the artistic director, with a chuckle. “’Cause I really want to take care of the audience.” Case in point, he adds, is the charming Gael García Bernal comedy You’re Killing Me Susana, which SidaValenzuela confidently expects will emerge as this year’s most popular title. “They come,” he says, “not strictly from our curatorial point of view, but learning through Vancouver audiences what they have liked in the past.” Indeed, it’s precisely this kind of close attention to viewer taste that brings us to the increasingly popular festival’s 15th year. Assembled by Sida-Valenzuela and his partners on the sixmember committee, VLAFF once again offers a program that’s long on both crowd-pleasers and
The tentacled movie show
An uninhibited Simone Bucio stars as Veronica, a woman who just can’t give up on her slithery, off-planet lover in the eye-popping Mexican horror, The Untamed.
industry and the erosion of “It’s hard, because Latin America can be labour protection. Ditto the very far from Vancouver culturewise, but we vicious São Paulo housing do try to find those films that have a link to crisis depicted in The Hotel local audiences.” Cambridge. Now there’s a Even our small and too often ignored communWild programmer picks and a nose for crowd favourites help theme that’s going to have ity of tentacle fetishists would have to agree. some resonance for anyone to distinguish the Vancouver Latin American Film Festival The Vancouver Latin American Film Festival runs at living here. smartly curated art-house and festival favour“This is a film that addresses an issue that Van- various venues from August 24 to September 3. ites from the region. couver faces every day,” says Sida-Valenzuela. More information is at vlaff.org/. If you’ve missed, for instance, recent raves like Pablo Larrain’s mischievous biography of Film festival opens with story about Nobel Prize–winning novelist Chilean poet Pablo Neruda or Sônia Braga’s acclaimed twilight performance in the BrazilAllow us to recommend four of the best at this year’s Vancouver Latin American ian film Aquarius, VLAFF’s got you covered. Film Festival. For the full schedule, visit vlaff.org/. The rest of the fest is rife with titles—many from its killer new directors series, most getTHE DISTINGUISHED CITIZEN (Argentina) Uncomfortable questions about paroting their Vancouver premiere—that are likely chial small-mindedness, exploitation, class, and the very meaning of “culture” (look out for a searingly to win the same kind of international attenbrilliant speech about that) swirl around inside this wonderfully ill-tempered film, which gets the gala tion. Among these: the Chilean Bad Influence, opening spot at this year’s VLAFF. It all starts with famed novelist Daniel Mantovani accepting the Nobel a coming-of-age tale set inside the fractious Prize for literature with the declaration of his own artistic death. Declining much grander offers of attengrey zone where city life meets Indigeneity, and tion, the depressed, Barcelona-based writer gradually returns after 40 years to his Argentine hometown of director Nele Wohlatz’s formally daring tale Salas, whereupon The Distinguished Citizen morphs into something like a backwoods horror film, offset, of young Chinese immigrants in Argentina, naturally, by some of the finer cinematic devices (witty compositions, punchy dialogue) at the disposal of The Future Perfect. With Cuba as this year’s guest country, Sidadirectors Gastón Duprat and Mariano Cohn. Goldcorp Centre for the Arts, August 24 (7 p.m.) Valenzuela took the liberty of adding one of his THE UNTAMED (Mexico) As with Kill Me Please (see below), the use of oblique storytelling strategies favourite movies to the schedule with Tomás gives Amat Escalante’s libidinous sci-horror flick a convincingly arty sheen. All you need to know goGutiérrez Alea’s 1968 hit Memories of Undering in is that a tentacled thing from another world is holed up in a barn, pleasuring (for the most part) development. Carlos Lechuga’s ’80s-set Santa its ecstasy-drunk human visitors. A young wife, her violently closeted husband, and her gay brother & Andrés closes VLAFF, meanwhile, with a provide the narrative moves in a super-perverse setup that finally signs off with a killer punch line. Espointed critique of the Castro era, featuring a calante’s film is wild and disturbing enough to hold its own in inevitable comparisons to Under the Skin gay central character placed under house arrest and Andrzej Źuławski’s Possession, but if that’s what it takes to get you genre nerds into the theatre… by the intolerant regime. Remarkably, the film Cinematheque, August 25 (9:15 p.m.) and September 2 (9:30 p.m.) was banned by the Cuban Film Institute and removed from a New York–based festival at the YOU’RE KILLING ME SUSANA (Mexico) The ubiquitous Gael García Bernal puts his coninsistence of the Cuban minister of culture. siderable charm and equally substantial comic chops to good use as TV actor Eligio, who’s a “We are strongly LGBT,” states Sida-Valenbit too busy hitting on his soap-opera costar to realize that the titular wife, played by Spain’s zuela, who divides his time between Canada luminous Verónica Echegui, has split for a writer’s college in wintry Iowa. He tracks her down, and his native Mexico. “I’ve been here for many near-slapstick encounters with the TSA and Midwestern taxi drivers providing laugh-out-loud years and it’s easy to forget that the rest of the entertainment along the way, but the infidelity keeps impinging on both sides. You might want to world is not as open as Vancouver. In Mexico slap them both, but the film’s intense likability wins out in spades—this is a mighty hard movie or other countries in Latin America, this film to resist—with added spice coming from its gentle lampooning of Mexican machismo and more would be very provocative. We really like to trenchant (and satisfying) barbs at the expense of American bigotry. Goldcorp Centre for the Arts, show this other face of Latin America. It’s a very August 26 (5:15 p.m.); Cinematheque, August 29 (9 p.m.) complex region, very big, very diverse—this is another part.” KILL ME PLEASE (Brazil) A series of killings in Rio de Janeiro’s tony Barra da Tijuca neighbourThe fest’s progressive streak is most in evihood grips the imaginations of a quartet of teen girls, especially dark-eyed and horny Bia, whose dence in its annual ¡Activismo! series, focused ghoulishness eventually starts to look like possession. Not that anything is all that explicit in this this year on women’s issues with titles like hyper-stylish (think recent Nicolas Winding Refn) not-quite horror movie, which manages to unsetTatiana Huezo’s hauntingly poetic account of tle with something like the cinematic equivalent of negative space. In short, coming-of-age trauma human trafficking, Tempestad, and the docuand the fear of sex get an unforgettable, synth-drenched makeover in director Anita Rocha da mentary Dolores, about United Farm WorkSilveira’s outlandishly good debut. Cinematheque, August 26 (9:30 p.m.) and September 1 (9:15 p.m.) ers firebrand Dolores Huerta. And there’s a > ADRIAN MACK winning universality baked into something like Panamerican Machinery, a Buñuelian satire from Mexico that takes on the decline of
2
☞
F O I LING ALL THE FI NKS >>> REV I E W S THE FENCER Starring Märt Avandi. In Estonian and Russian, with English subtitles. Rating unavailable
Although somewhat boxed
2 in by its own physical beauty, The Fencer is so uniformly wellcrafted, it should be shown in film schools as a model of technical artists operating at the highest level. For his fifth feature, Finnish director Klaus Härö—who’s been at it long enough to have received an award from Ingmar Bergman—chose a little-known true story about an Estonian fencing
master who survived both the Nazi invasion of his country and its long Soviet occupation thereafter. As in many nations annexed by Hitler, young men were immediately conscripted to fight alongside the Germans. This happened to our sword-swishing protagonist Endel Nelis, played here by rangy, ginger-haired Märt Avandi, who resembles a young Max von Sydow. (The real guy didn’t, by the way.) We meet Nelis around 1952, after he has survived some years in the wilderness and then in Leningrad, under an assumed name, while pursuing his love of fencing. Now he has returned to Estonia,
Märt Avandi cuts down the fascists and the commies in The Fencer.
to the nowhere coastal town of Haapsalu, and is hired to teach phys-ed classes to disconsolate children who lost parents in the war. The Soviet-toadying school
principal (a Steve Buscemi type named Hendrik Toompere) sniffs at Nelis’s inclusion of fencing in his skill set, since it’s “not very proletarian”. But when this apparatchik fails to supply any decent sports equipment, the new teach gathers reeds in the forest and fashions foils for his excited students, including a fatherless lad (Joonas Koff) who admires him, and a tiny blond preteen (cast standout Liisa Koppel) whose ferocity sparks the whole class. The director builds dread masterfully, but screenwriter Anna Heinämaa softens the edges by replacing dangerous realities with crowd-pleasing tropes. The upright,
necessarily cagey Nelis exhibits few flaws—okay, he doesn’t like kids at the start—and he’s given a handy love interest in the form of a fellow teacher (Ursula Ratasepp). It’s this sort of by-the-numbers storytelling that lets us down. In fact, there’s little evidence that Nelis was actually chased by the KGB, and the film’s view of him as uncomplicated hero hollows the experience somewhat. Still, the f lawless casting, softly radiant lighting, dusty yellow-and-green palette, and extraordinary wide-screen compositions are ceaselessly engaging, and the tale builds to a satisfying sports-movie finish. see next page
AUGUST 24 – 31 / 2017 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT 23