Let’s Get Lost

[February 6th, 2008]

In the opening voiceover of the gangster comedy In Bruges , Colin Farrell’s twitchy triggerman admits that he’d “never even heard of fuckin’ Bruges” before he was instructed to hide out there. He dwells on this for a moment, then clarifies: “It’s in Belgium.”

Anybody who’s sampled the Portland International Film Festival is familiar with that feeling of disorientation. The NW Film Center’s three-week program is the biggest event on local cinephiles’ calendars—and an annual chance to see what global cinema is up to—but the glut of options can be overwhelming. Should you see the British movie about Belgium, or the Belgian movie about Britain? Is that Vietnamese epic worth 2 1/2 hours?

PIFF’s a long journey, and you shouldn’t have to take it alone. That’s why WW has once again gathered its crack movie team to tackle the lineup and answer your questions. (You should see the movies from both Britain and Belgium, and skip the Vietnamese thing, by the way.) Consider this your map of the movie world—or at least the first week of it.

The Band’s Visit

[OPENING NIGHT, ISRAEL] The first few scenes of an Egyptian police orchestra wandering lost in and around an airport in the Negev desert are uncomfortably reminiscent of Milos Forman’s early Czech comedies. But then Eran Kolirin’s movie comes into its own when the band’s handsome young violinist (Saleh Bakri), a long-limbed, curly-headed fellow with a Chet Baker fixation, begins to sing “My Funny Valentine” to a woman attendant in a glass booth. Even though her window microphone compresses his mellifluous voice into something metallic, his passion still wows her. That’s the movie’s real subject: how music stirs us up. A group of men at a dinner table launching impromptu into Gershwin’s “Summertime” becomes ineffably funny—both from the guttural rumble of their voices and the way they salivate over the lyric “And your mama’s good-lookin’.” I roared with laughter (the roller disco sequences) until I welled up with tears—an unhappily married butch offering a clarinetist advice on how to end an unfinished concerto may be the dramatic high point of any movie this year. N.P. THOMPSON. NT, 7:30 pm Thursday, Feb. 7.

Tuya’s Marriage

[CHINA] A candid and occasionally amusing insight into the domestic frustrations of a modern female Mongolian farmer. With a disabled husband back at home, Tuya (Yu Nan), the strong-willed mother and film’s namesake, is the matriarch and breadwinner of her family. But after recovering from an acute hay-lifting injury, she realizes she can no longer toil as a shepherd and solely provide for her husband and kids. So she decides to re-enter the dry, dusty Asian steppe dating scene and try to find a new husband: a sugar papa who’ll be able to care for her crew. Gentlemen suitors begin to show up on her doorstep, and the Mongolian romantic hijinks ensue. LANCE KRAMER. BW, 6 pm Friday, Feb. 8, 7:30 pm Saturday, Feb. 9 and 5:30 pm Sunday, Feb. 10.

Flight of the Red Balloon

[TAIWAN] Much like its 1956 inspiration The Red Balloon , Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s latest project uses attention and the way it is directed to underscore the different values of adults and children, favoring the latter. Overlong at an hour and 45 minutes, it is nevertheless impeccably acted; Juliette Binoche particularly stands out in her role as a Parisian single mother and part-time voice talent for puppet shows. The plot is hard to pin down, but on a surface level at least, it has nothing to do with balloons: Binoche hires a Chinese exchange student (Song Fang) to take care of her young son. At times dangerously meta-cinematic—in one instance, the characters walk around holding a video camera, discussing The Red Balloon —the whole thing risks becoming an academic exercise. JOHN MINERVINI. BW, 6:30 pm Friday, Feb. 8, 8 pm Saturday, Feb. 9 and 6:15 pm Tuesday, Feb. 12.

In Bruges

[GREAT BRITAIN] The previews for this Sundance opening-nighter made it look like another glib and obnoxious cockney shoot-’em-up in the unpleasant tradition of Guy Ritchie. They lied: British playwright Martin McDonagh’s feature-film debut has a bad-tempered integrity that makes it as satisfying as anything you’ll see at PIFF. As the guilt-wracked Irish hit man forced to lay low amid medieval architecture, Colin Farrell continues to provide a clinic in little-boy-lost charm—and adds the overactive eyebrows and lilting brogue of an anxious leprechaun. Brendan Gleeson’s even better as his principled mentor, but nothing you’ve heard about the movie can prepare you for Ralph Fiennes as their boss, whose obscenity is matched only by his sentimental affection for the “fairy-tale city” he proceeds to wreck. AARON MESH. WH, 6:45 pm Friday, Feb. 8.

You, The Living

[SWEDEN] Resigned Scandinavians endure comic disasters in the latest effort from Roy Andersson (Songs from the Second Floor ). At least they have free meatballs. BW, 7 and 9:15 pm Friday, Feb. 8, 8 pm Sunday, Feb. 10 and 8:45 pm Monday, Feb. 11.

The White Silk Dress

[VIETNAM] Ambitiously beginning its decades-spanning story at the cinematically untouched sunset of the French occupation of Vietnam, The White Silk Dress could have been a truly unique epic. However, in telling the story of a poor couple and the changing world around them, director Luu Huynh soon proves that, long before American forces began dropping napalm, Hollywood had flown over the region, dropping melodramatic clichés and overwrought symbolism. There are some beautiful images and very emotional sequences in Huynh’s film, but to get to them requires a long journey—not unlike that of the main characters—through seas of tedium. AP KRYZA. BW, 7:30 pm Friday, Feb. 8, 1:45 pm Saturday, Feb. 9, and 7:30 pm Sunday, Feb. 10.

Alexandra

[RUSSIA] Alexander Sokurov (Russian Ark ) continues exploring his nation’s tortured history, this time following a grandmother traveling to Grozny. The inside scoop says it will include more than one shot. BW, 8:30 pm Friday, Feb. 8, 2 pm Saturday, Feb. 9 and 8 pm Sunday, Feb. 10.

Then She Found Me

[UNITED STATES] April Epner (Helen Hunt) suffers from lousy timing: She’s trying her darnedest to have a baby, but she only discovers she’s conceived after her schlub of a husband (Matthew Broderick) leaves her. As a first-time director, Hunt has similarly misjudged her moment. After an entire year of oops-I’m-pregnant comedies, people cracking jokes in front of the ultrasound are starting to wear thin. Then She Found Me offers a twist in the form of Bette Middler as April’s narcissist birth mother (who arrives gracelessly on the scene to become the “She” in the title), but Hunt would have been well served to experiment a touch with the casting. Colin Firth is the best thing in the film as April’s selfless new man, but how much more interesting would the movie be if he played the infantile cad and let Broderick be the charmer for once? AARON MESH. BW, 9 pm Friday, Feb. 8. WH, 6:30 pm Monday, Feb. 11.

The Edge of Heaven

[GERMANY] The latest ensemble piece from Head-On director Fatih Akin teeters at the brink of melodrama. Yeter (Nursel Köse) is working as a prostitute in Bremen when dirty old man Ali (Tuncel Kurtiz) asks her to move in with him. The arrangement ends badly. Meanwhile, Yeter’s daughter Ayten (Nurgül Yesilçay) flees Turkey for Germany, and finds lesbian love with Lotte (Patrycia Ziolkowska). This also ends badly. (I don’t think I’m giving too much away here, since the movie’s first two segments open with titles reading “The Death of Yeter” and “The Death of Lotte.”) Those who watch this parade of missed connections and family forgiveness—and there’s no reason not to; it’s as well executed as this sort of material can be—will be rewarded with a deeply felt performance from Fassbinder veteran Hanna Schygulla as Lotte’s bereaved mother. AARON MESH. WH, 9:15 pm Friday, Feb. 8 and 3 pm Saturday, Feb. 9.

Short Cuts I: International Ties

The festival’s first program of brief films is highlighted by Katie Stern’s Blue Dress , a 20-minute bildungsroman filmed on grainy stock in the verdant South. The story of two bikinis and a bookmobile has the indirect impact of a good short story, with the image of two teenage girls dancing in the dark serving its purpose as well as any New Yorker prose. AARON MESH. WH, noon Saturday, Feb. 9.

M for Mother

[IRAN] Chemical warfare and birth defects are the chief focus of Rasoul Mollagholipour’s last film. He did not go out on a cheerful note. BW, 2:15 pm Saturday, Feb. 9, 6 pm Monday, Feb. 11, and 8:30 pm Tuesday, Feb. 12.

Gates

[UNITED STATES] Christo haters would do well to watch this chronicle of his 25-year effort to install 7,500 orange curtained gates throughout Central Park. In February 2005, the Reichstag-wrapping, umbrella-flinging artist, along with his wife and co-collaborator, Jeane-Claude, spent over $20 million out of pocket in his latest contribution to the field of transitory art. While the film jumps from 1979 to the early aughts (when a more receptive Mayor Bloomberg green-lighted the project), the logistics of the installation and the man-on-the-street-style art criticism are surprisingly gratifying to watch. The public’s positive reaction is slightly skewed on the part of the filmmakers, but they provide as much explanation as you could possibly want for a project which both artists agree has no deeper meaning or altruistic motivation, and was really just something they had to get out of their system. SAUNDRA SORENSON. BW, 3 pm Saturday, Feb. 9.

Irina Palm

[BELGIUM] If you get sick with leukemia, and your grandmother is willing to take a job jacking off bald men who stick their penises through a glory hole in the back room of a dingy London sex shop, and she’s doing it to help pay for you to fly to Australia for an experimental medical treatment—it’s probably a pretty good sign that she loves you. It’s also a brilliant premise for a movie. Irina Palm is hands-turned-sideways the best film about a masturbating grandmother since Cocoon (go back and watch the deleted scenes; Ron Howard was a perv). This is an intelligent, dramatic, well-acted, funny, tragic and extremely nuanced film about desperation, family and hand jobs. Don’t miss this movie. LANCE KRAMER. BW, 4:15 and 8:30 pm Saturday, Feb. 9 and 5 pm Sunday, Feb. 10.

Taxi to the Dark Side

[UNITED STATES] Starting with the story of an Afghani cab driver beaten to death in a U.S. military prison, documentarian Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room ) proceeds to make a devastating case that the Bush-Cheney torture policy ranks among America’s gravest betrayals of its own principles. Gibney’s arguments are varied (and most are persuasive), but for all the conspiring policy wonks and haunted soldiers on hand, the greatest coup is visual: Taxi to the Dark Side demonstrates how the images we see of hooded, gloved and earmuffed terror suspects—as well as the photos of abuse at Abu Ghraib—are part of a systematic program of psychological torment approved at the highest levels of our government. Anyone somehow unconvinced of the immorality of the president’s expanded war powers needs to watch this film; for the rest of us it’s a confirmation that we can believe either the Bush administration or our own eyes. AARON MESH. BW, 5 pm Saturday, Feb. 9 and 3 pm Sunday, Feb. 10.

Not By Chance

[BRAZIL] The good news about this maudlin ensemble piece—about a pretty girl who gets hit by a van—is that it holds true to its title and doesn’t use the central accident as the pretext for a series of coincidences. The bad news is it doesn’t use it for much else, either. First-time director Philippe Barcinski deftly composes his overhead shots—of the highways of São Paulo and a billiards table—but his characters are just as two-dimensional. They end up as passive participants in their own obvious epiphanies. The music—Brazilian pop songs straight out of the telenovela ghetto—does Barcinski no favors. AARON MESH. BW, 5:15 pm Saturday, Feb. 9 and 6:30 pm Monday, Feb. 11.

The Counterfeiters

[AUSTRIA] In this re-imagining of concentration camp movies, writer-director Stefan Ruzowitzky tells the story of master forger Salomon “Sally” Sorowitsch (the long-faced Karl Markovics), an artist whose gift for amazing likenesses first grants him status as portraitist of SS officers, then as the lynchpin for a Nazi operation to flood the Allies’ economies with counterfeit dollars and pounds. Among the treats in this Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language Film: a group of European Jews snapping their fingers, buoyantly singing the spiritual “Down by the Riverside”; and a brief yet infinitely moving scene of Sally encountering another Russian as the two are transported by cattle car from one camp to another. Instead of bemoaning the horror of it all, the men reminisce about the art teachers who influenced and inspired them. N.P. THOMPSON. WH, 5:45 pm Saturday, Feb. 9.

Under the Same Moon

[MEXICO] Much to its credit, Under the Same Moon shows great compassion in portraying the often-neglected human element of illegal immigration. And its fictionalized tale of a 9-year-old Mexican boy’s lone journey across the border in search of his single mother, who is working in Los Angeles, is no doubt reflective of countless real stories. But Patricia Riggen’s movie also commits the sin of reducing the most complex and polarizing issue of our country’s times to the far simpler matter of sentimentality. At points, Under the Same Moon feels like the Finding Nemo of illegal-immigration movies—and that’s no pat on the back. LANCE KRAMER. BW, 6 pm Saturday, Feb. 9 and 4:30 pm Sunday, Feb. 10.

Caramel

[LEBANON] Caramel has the spirit of a Lebanese Sex and the City , and that’s quite a feat, considering the Middle East isn’t exactly the most sexually liberated region of the world. With the kind of woman-centered energy and gusto reminiscent of a Pedro Almodóvar film, the movie deftly follows the desires and exploits of five vivacious female beauticians in recent (but pre-bombed) Beirut. Not quite as masterful or outrageous as Pedro, the extremely talented and beautiful writer, director and leading lady Nadine Labaki still manages to bring together extramarital sex, premarital sex, feminism, lesbian attraction and the schism between traditional values and modern society in an entertaining film full of metaphors and Maxi Pads. LANCE KRAMER. WH, 8:30 pm Saturday, Feb. 9.

Jar City

[ICELAND] In the era of CSI , procedural thrillers seem like dead horses. But director Baltasar Kormákur’s Jar City feels fresh, thanks to its well-developed characters, beautifully eerie landscapes and cold realism. Landing somewhere between Davids Caruso and Fincher, Jar City tells the story of a middle-aged detective (Ingvar Eggert Sigurosson) trying to solve the murder of a reclusive pederast. His investigation links to a decades-old mystery and a grieving father’s obsessive research into a rare hereditary disease. Beginning with a wrenching tragedy and keeping a brooding tone throughout, the film isn’t without humor, and never lags into forensic psychobabble. It’s a terrific little thriller, proof positive that, even in the age of generic Ashley Judd/Diane Lane cop flicks, procedurals can still feel new. AP KRYZA. BW, 8:45 pm Saturday, Feb. 9.

Short Cuts II: International Ties

Judging from the available screenings, the second set of short movies isn’t as compelling as its precursor; at least two of the films (Soft and My Mother ) are drab studies in predictable middle-class misery. The Great Magician is something else: A grotesque fable about a sorcerer who restrains his powers, it makes ironic hay of the clichés about common people and quiet desperation. Also it has a disappearing elephant. AARON MESH. WH, noon Sunday, Feb. 10.

Chicago 10

[UNITED STATES] Director Brett Morgen (The Kid Stays in the Picture ) has pieced together a docudrama that’s true to the 1968 Democratic National Convention riots in at least one sense: It’s a travesty. Morgen’s re-creation of the Abbie Hoffman trial is littered with hideously ugly computer animation and community-theater-level vocal work from Hank Azaria and Roy Scheider. When the film switches to archival footage of chanting yippies and baton-wielding policemen, the sound mixing is so muffled that Hoffman’s speeches are often inaudible. Most embarrassing is Morgen’s decision to score the Vietnam protests with songs by Rage Against the Machine, the Beastie Boys and Eminem. The pathetic attempt to be relevant only underscores the wearying Boomer self-glorification. AARON MESH. BW, 1:45 pm Sunday, Feb. 10. WH, 8:45 pm Monday, Feb. 11.

Family Ties

[SOUTH KOREA] Three tales of love under pressure. None of them involve Alex P. Keaton, sadly. BW, 2 pm Sunday, Feb. 10.

Home Song Stories

[AUSTRALIA] A Chinese nightclub singer gets married and confronts racism Down Under. And here we thought Australians were only racist toward New Zealanders. WH, 2:15 pm Sunday, Feb. 10. BW, 9 pm Tuesday, Feb. 12.

A Man’s Job

[FINLAND] An unemployed family man goes to work as a gigolo. Between this and Irina Palm , 2008 is already the Year of the Unlikely Sex Worker. BW, 2:30 pm Sunday, Feb. 10.

It’s a Free World

[GREAT BRITAIN] Director Ken Loach (The Wind that Shakes the Barley ) sets out to illustrate how even well-meaning Britons can wind up as exploiters of immigrant labor. He only partly succeeds, because his anti-heroine Angie (Kierston Wareing) turns out to be the most ruthless London villainess since Cruella de Vil. (She even shares the bleached streaks in her hair.) A single mom on the make, Angie starts by founding an employment agency behind the local pub, but soon graduates to using Polish illegals for sex and kicking helpless families out of their trailers. Loach maintains his knack for tense rhythms—a kidnapping sequence is subtly underscored by the zombie movie playing on the television—but he’s undone by the two-dimensional protagonist he’s created: a woman who acts like a monster imagined by a good-hearted progressive. AARON MESH. WH, 4:45 pm Sunday, Feb. 10.

Kings

[IRELAND] Uglier Than Leprechauns would have been a more fitting title for this turgid blarney in which a half-dozen drunken Irishmen booze it up at a friend’s wake. Occasional flashbacks to 1977 Conmara show them as young, buff idealists emigrating to England, but mostly the film occupies drab, present-day London where these blue-collar blokes, now middle-aged, are some of the homeliest, paunchiest men to don singlets this side of a Philip Seymour Hoffman movie. There are lots of close-ups of hideous faces, perhaps none more pitiable and repulsive than Peadar Ó Treasaigh’s, whose knotted eyebrows of steel wool we come to know intimately. N. P. THOMPSON. BW, 5:15 Sunday, Feb. 10, 6:15 pm Monday, Feb. 11 and 8:45 pm Tuesday, Feb. 12.

Mongol

[KAZAKHSTAN/MONGOLIA] With the exception of “Bob” Genghis Kahn’s sporting-goods rampage in Bill&Ted’s Excellent Adventure , the great conqueror has gotten the shaft onscreen. Genghis deserves at least one great film. Mongol , nominated for the foreign-language Oscar, gets him about halfway there. The film is sympathetic to an oft-vilified legend, and director Sergei Bodrov focuses  on the young leader’s love and compassion rather than his violent rise. It’s a beautiful film that suffers only from its own restraint. AP KRYZA. WH, 7:15 pm Sunday, Feb. 10. BW, 7:15 pm Monday, Feb. 11.

The Russian Triangle

[GEORGIA] More trouble in Chechnya: This time the war leads to a series of puzzling murders. BW, 7:15 pm Sunday, Feb. 10, 8:30 pm Monday, Feb. 11 and 6 pm Tuesday, Feb. 12.

Import/Export

[AUSTRIA] A nurse and a security guard struggle to find new jobs in a pitiless Europe. Perhaps they could become Unlikely Sex Workers! BW, 9 pm Monday, Feb. 11 and 9:15 pm Tuesday, Feb. 12.

Chop Shop

[UNITED STATES] In a cinematic era of unrealistically precocious children, Chop Shop ’s often-artful dodger Alejandro might come as a shock. But that’s sort of the point of director Ramin Bahrani’s slice-of-life look into the slums of Queens. The street-hardened Alejandro—a pre-adolescent Latino orphan—straddles the line between crime and honesty, boyhood and manhood. Not a lot happens in Chop Shop . Alejandro is simply surviving on the streets, working for a body shop and occasionally resorting to petty theft while saving up for a burrito cart. There’s no real climax or central plotline. There aren’t shocking moments or Kids -style exploitation. That would have been too easy. Instead, Bahrani opts to keep his lens grounded in reality, making for a moving and honest portrait of hard-knock youth and quiet triumph. AP KRYZA. BW, 6:45 pm Tuesday, Feb. 12.

The Duchess of Langeais

[FRANCE] Honoré de Balzac may have been known for his keen observation of Parisian society’s ills, but in this adaptation of his novel, the lady in the tower just comes across as a playa. The Duchess of Langeais (Jeanne Balibar) has an absent husband and a sadistic interest in keeping Napoleonic war hero Armand de Montriveau (Guillaume Depardieu) in her life but out of her bed. What begins as a battle of the sexes turns into an overwrought argument about propriety, and the occasional kidnapping and fleeing to the nunnery isn’t enough to keep things compelling. Balibar plays a complicated ice queen, but Depardieu (who is apparently adhering to France’s one-Depardieu-per-film proviso) has only two speeds: brooding and seething. Still, the duo makes the best of two hours of reversals and plain old bad timing. SAUNDRA SORENSON. WH, 7 pm Tuesday, Feb. 12.

Breath

[SOUTH KOREA] Director Kim-Ki-duk (Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...and Spring ) returns with the friendship of a cuckolded artist and a suicidal Death Row inmate. Misery loves solitary confinement. BW, 7 pm Tuesday, Feb. 12.