HOLLYWOOD BRAZILIAN 2011: A FUGA DA MULHER GORILA

A scene from A Fuga da Mulher Gorila.

Time in the mi(d)st

By Don Simpson

The original title of co-directors Felipe Bragança and Marina Meliande’s film -- The Escape, Anger, Dance, Ass, Mouth, The Calm, the Gorilla Woman's Life -- is as nonsensical and free-flowing as the film itself. The film essentially ends in the same figurative place it begins, in media res, like a surrealist fantasy in which time has no influence on the events on screen. In fact, the passage of time is only recognizable by the linear passing of the gorilla costume from one character to the next.

The film’s two protagonists, sisters Flora (Flora Dias) and Morena (Morena Catonni), embark upon a journey across Brazil in an old Volkswagen Kombi van with no destination. Other than the need to earn money in order to afford the bare necessities (gasoline, food) for their trip, Flora and Morena have shed all other earthly chains. They are free to do what they want to do, whenever they want to do it. There is no purpose or deadline for this road trip. As it turns out, A Fuga da Mulher Gorila is an anti-road movie, or at least an elaborate deconstruction of one.

Dirty toilets, gas stations, oil refineries, beaches, forests, bodies of water, the interior of the van, the circus tent -- Flora and Morena are never influenced or affected by these spaces, the settings have absolutely no bearing on the narrative and are completely replaceable; even the actor (Alberto Moura Jr) who they pick-up is inconsequential to their actions -- merely a rag doll for the sisters to keep for a short while. It is as if Flora and Morena are acting on a sound stage and the scenery is just a trick of the eye. Yet, simultaneously, the surrounding environment is the only aspect of A Fuga da Mulher Gorila that is grounded in reality. The gorilla motif is an even more direct comment on the illusions created by light and mirrors (and cinema). Like a Georges Méliès film, a woman transforms into a guerrilla in front of our very eyes. The guerrilla costume, sequined bikini and low-budget circus sideshow tent is how Flora and Morena earn their modest income.

The seemingly nonsensical lyrics of their stream-of-consciousness songs are the truest clues we can gather about Flora and Morena’s thoughts, but these oblique puzzles are nearly impossible to decipher. Sometimes the words appear to be signs announcing what will happen in the future while other times the words are meant to allow us to delve deeper into the present or the past. Even spoken words and phrases (such as "no, no, he has a gun") are toyed with and repeated ad nauseum in order to reveal how different intonations, inflections and vocal frequencies will change the meaning. It is the words -- spoken and sung -- which present Bragança and Meliande’s incredibly unique film in a squishy bubble-wrap of insanity.

HOLLYWOOD BRAZILIAN 2011: BOLLYWOOD DREAM

A scene from Bollywood Dream.

Open up

By Don Simpson

Sofia (Nataly Cabanas), Ana (Paula Braun), Luna (Lorena Lobato) are unemployed Brazilian actresses with families whom they need to support. They travel to India to work in cinema...but, as far as airport customs knows, this trip is purely a spiritual journey. Upon arrival, Sofia, Ana and Luna discover that their hotel reservation has been cancelled; so they haggle the price of another hotel so low that it is difficult not to wonder if karma will come back to bite them.

The three Brazilian actresses are in search of a Bollywood producer, but he is not at the address listed on his business card. Not ones to give up very easily, they recruit a young dance instructor (Mohana Krishna) and an actress (Geetha Satish) to coach them until their big Bollywood break comes along. Sofia, Ana and Luna are prone to arguing and haggling and find themselves repeatedly clashing with Indian culture. Their difficult struggle to find their way commences, but their way does not follow the same meandering path as their destiny. No matter how hard they fight it, their destiny always prevails over their way. Maybe they should not have lied to airport customs after all -- perhaps this is a spiritual awakening?

Writer-director Beatriz Seigner’s Bollywood Dream is a colorful and musical meditation on three Brazilian women who find themselves far away from their native land. Seigner showcases the drastic cultural differences between Brazilians and Indians, but there does appear to be one similarity: the exploitation of women in the entertainment industry. It seems as though actresses are viewed as sexual objects even in Bollywood. What on earth would Radha have to say about that?

FILM REVIEW: CAMERAMAN JACK CARDIFF

A scene from Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff.

Lighting the ways

By Don Simpson

Jack Cardiff’s work in cinema spanned nine decades, starting as an actor in My Son, My Son (1918) and ending his career as visual effects coordinator and art director on Silence Becomes You (2005). Cardiff began working as clapper boy and assistant camera in 1929. By 1935 Cardiff became a camera operator and by 1938 he was a full-fledged cinematographer. In 1948, Cardiff won his first Oscar for his Technicolor cinematography on Black Narcissus; 43 years later, Cardiff became the first cinematographer ever presented with an Honorary Oscar for “exceptional distinction in lifetime achievement; exceptional contributions to the state of motion picture arts and sciences; and for outstanding services to the Academy."

In his documentary, Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff, director Craig McCall allows Cardiff -- who died on April 22, 2009 -- to tell much of his own story. Cardiff explains how he helped elevate cinematography to an art form with his unique vision and technical wizardry in Black Narcissus, The Red Shoes, Scott of the Antarctic, The African Queen, The Vikings...and the list goes on. Cardiff’s biography finds itself fatefully intertwined with the history of Technicolor, particularly Technicolor Europe and Technicolor in the UK. While Hollywood mainly reserved the use of Technicolor film for musicals and large outdoor productions, British filmmakers -- especially Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger -- utilized Technicolor much differently, thanks in no small part to Cardiff’s keen kino eye.

But who gives a hoot about the art of cinematography? So, Cardiff also gives the audience what he suspects they really want, tales about what it was like to work with Cinema’s greatest icons: Marlene Dietrich, Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart, Kirk Douglas and Sophia Loren.

McCall calls upon Martin Scorsese to explain to the audience why Cardiff’s films are so important in the context of the history of cinema while illustrating how Cardiff’s oeuvre not only influenced his own vision, but his peers, like Brian DePalma, Francis Ford Coppola as well. McCall sporadically turns to Douglas and Charlton Heston for additional support.

As the saying goes, a picture speaks a thousand words; and the most moving sections of Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff occur when the pontificating stops and the stunning High Definition clips from Cardiff’s resume are able to speak, albeit visually, for themselves. If anything, Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff gave me the urge to seek out more of Cardiff’s work (especially his directorial efforts) and re-watch (on the largest screen if possible) the films that I have already seen from his resume, namely A Matter of Life & Death, Black Narcissus, The Red Shoes, The African Queen and War & Peace. However, I will gladly forgo another viewing of Rambo: First Blood Part II.

HOLLYWOOD BRAZILIAN 2011: POR EL CAMINO

A scene from Por El Camino.

Sparks-a-flowing

By Don Simpson

This minimalist road movie takes Santiago (Esteban Feune de Colombi), a 30-year-old redheaded Argentinean, across Uruguay from Montevideo to Punta del Este in search of a tract of land he inherited from his deceased parents. Early in his journey, Santiago meets a Belgian woman, Juliette (Jill Mulleady), and they experience the gorgeous Uruguayan countryside together, meeting random locals along the way. Juliette speaks French, Santiago speaks Spanish and English is their common language.

Juliette traveled all the way to Uruguay in search of an old flame who resides in a hippie commune in Rocha, but it is not long before we recognize that she and Santiago have organically developed into more than mere travel companions. Unfortunately, Santiago is totally blind to that revelation; he does not know what he has in Juliette until she is long gone. Santiago is left with the question: How difficult will it be to find a Belgian woman in Rocha?

Writer-director Charly Braun utilizes a very simple narrative structure that is grounded in reality by Bruno Alzaga and Pablo Ramos’ “life caught unawares” cinematography. Por El Camino is as much a piece of ethnographic journalism as it is a love story between a Belgian and an Argentinian in Uruguay. It is readily apparent that Braun is motivated to reveal a wide array of real Uruguayans in their natural habitats, as we observe them via the eyes of his film’s foreign protagonists.

Por El Camino features a beguiling soundtrack that mixes Latin American music with popular Western European artists such as Donovan, Radiohead and Sigur Rós.

HOLLYWOOD BRAZILIAN 2011: ROSA MORENA

Thomas (Anders W. Berthelsen) in Rosa Morena.

The kids of Brazil

By Miranda Inganni

Middle-aged, Danish and gay, Thomas (Anders W. Berthelsen) desperately wants a baby. Unfortunately, Danish law makes that quite difficult for him, so he heads to Brazil to see his old friend, Jakob (David Dencik), and his wife, Tereza (Vivianne Pasmanter). It's here that Thomas learns that when the legal route fails, there may be another way to secure a child.  

Maria (Bárbara Garcia), a beautiful Brazilian can't afford her unborn baby so she and Thomas enter into an agreement that should benefit everyone, but when human emotions, selfishness and an overly protective boyfriend, Denilson (Pablo Rodrigues), get involved, things get ugly.

Directed by Carlos Augusto de Oliveira, the Danish-Brazilian Rosa Morena teeters on the verge of being a sweet and touching film. Unfortunately, it's hard to feel much sympathy for Maria. She can't seem to quit the drink while carrying her child, nor does she show much maternal instinct for the rest of the children in her brood. And Thomas is quite clueless -- apparently losing himself in familial feelings while finding a fondness for females, all the while burning through his bank account.

Politically sensitive to the issue of "purchasing Third World babies", the closing night film for the Hollywood Brazilian Film Festival is a smart drama featuring fine acting.

FILM REVIEW: SUBMARINE

Oliver Tate (Craig Roberts) in Submarine.

Keeping head above w(h)at(h)er

By Don Simpson

Oliver Tate (Craig Roberts) is the cinematic sibling of Harold Chasen and Max Fischer, the young male protagonists from Hal Ashby’s Harold and Maude and Wes Anderson’s Rushmore respectively. A 15-year-old Welsh boy with a geeky penchant for reading the dictionary, Oliver dourly trudges around Swansea outfitted in a black duffel coat with leather briefcase in hand. Solipsistically fancying himself as a fully-formed gentleman with superior tastes and sensibilities, Oliver is the cinematic reincarnation of The Catcher in the Rye’s (Oliver’s favorite modern American novel) protagonist, Holden Caulfield.

Oliver pines over a blissful obsession, despite her eczema, with an iconic first-love character, Jordana (Yasmin Paige), a classmate who bears a remarkable resemblance to Chantal Goya circa Jean-Luc Godard’s Masculin Féminin (one of many film's references to the nouvelle vague). Jordana professes a severe disdain for emotions and romance, preferring a boy who would be willing to allow her to burn his leg hair with matches and co-conspire schemes of petty arson, a role Oliver would not object to playing. 

Oliver causes enough of a splash to gain Jordana’s attention when he collaborates with her in bullying a doughy classmate, Zoe (Lily McCann). Though the guilt from this incident seems to haunt Oliver for the remainder of the film, the event nonetheless leads him to meet Jordana under a railway bridge with a Polaroid camera and diary in tow where Jordana promptly orders Oliver to his knees and their romance commences with a first kiss that tastes like “milk, Polo mints and Dunhill International.”

He may start off as Jordana’s pet, but soon Oliver’s pubescent fantasies of having a girlfriend and losing his virginity are realized. Their iconic young love is presented to us by Oliver via soft focus Super 8 memories propagated by fireworks, sunsets, beaches and bicycles. The superficial first two weeks of their relationship gives way to Jordana and Oliver dealing with family issues -- Jordana’s mother (Melanie Walters) has been terminally diagnosed with a brain tumor while Oliver’s parents’ (Sally Hawkins and Noah Taylor) relationship is on the skids -- that drive a wedge between them.

Incessantly monitoring his parents' sex life by way of their bedroom dimmer switch, Oliver has determined that it has been a long time since his parents have turned the lamp down low, so he takes it upon himself to save his parents’ marriage. First, Oliver plots to pull his mother away from the clutches of her cheesy ex-boyfriend, Graham (Paddy Considine), a cartoonish representation of a New Age-y self help guru who makes a living lecturing about the enlightening benefits of light. Next, Oliver must rescue his father from the oceanic depths of depression, a state of mind that Oliver quickly finds himself slipping into.

Never delving too far into Oliver’s fantastical daydreams, Submarine conveys the teenage wasteland of Wales in the 1980s with a lugubrious backdrop of deteriorating industrial plants, garbage dumps and urban decay. By avoiding the modern teenage rom-com tendency of relying upon overt quirkiness or gross-out jokes to propel the narrative, writer-director Richard Ayoade’s morbidly mundane perspective of pubescence captures the realistic behavior of 15-year olds, specifically the forced pretense of their actions, their incredibly fickle behavior and their all-so-serious dramatizations of seemingly minor events. Despite his hyperactive teenage mind’s knack for self-delusion, Oliver is a precocious and idiosyncratic teen with big, brown puppy-dog eyes and a perspicacious outlook on life.

A series of alternating blue and red, Godard-esque intertitles, separate Ayoade’s feature-length debut into distinct chapters -- including a prologue and epilogue -- thus establishing a literary structure that serves as a nod to Ayoade’s source: Joe Dunthorne’s novel, Submarine. Ayoade makes one significant alteration to Dunthorne’s novel, staging his film in the 1980s (rather than the 2000s). The production design promotes a reverential nostalgia of bygone teenage years which will probably play most effectively for viewers who were teenagers in the 1980s. (As luck would have it I am part of this target audience, which might be why Submarine was so enjoyable to me.) Teenagers pass handwritten notes in class (rather than text messaging or emailing) and keep diaries (rather than posting their every thought on Facebook); and Ayoade fills the screen with antiquated technologies such as typewriters, Polaroids, VHS tapes, Super 8 film footage, clunky cordless telephones, and audio cassette tapes as if creating an ode to the analogue ways of the not-so-distant past. Erik Wilson’s cinematography, which abides by the same primary-colored palette of Raoul Coutard, and the jump cuts and freeze frames of Chris Dickens and Nick Fenton’s editing also lends Submarine the reverential (and referential) air of a film that is submerged in the past. 

However, Ayoade steers clear of a period-defining soundtrack, opting for a new-yet-timeless soundtrack performed by Arctic Monkeys’ frontman Alex Turner.

HOLLYWOOD BRAZILIAN 2011: OPENING NIGHT

A scene from Cold Tropics.

A night to dismember

By John Esther

Riddled with incompetence, the Hollywood Brazilian Film Festival 2011 slowly started its opening night. 

Scheduled to commence at 8 p.m. patrons were held in the cold air outside the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood until 8:25 p.m. No explanation for the delay was offered.

Twenty minutes later after we were admitted, somebody from the film festival addressed the audience. Rather than efficiently go through the typical laborious yet understandable Opening Night procedure of thanking sponsors and volunteers before introducing the filmmakers smoothly and without incident, the audience was subjected to a series of banal flattery, self-congratulatory speeches, lame jokes and repetitive chatter before any films would begin.

Over an hour later after the show was supposed to start, the lights went down and the festival film schedule started with a wonderful short film called Recife Frio (Cold Tropics).  

Directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho, who was in attendance, Recife Frio poses a futuristic scenario where Recife, a northern tropical city of Brazil, mysteriously encounters a drastic climate chance that leaves its citizens coping with some crazy cold weather. In response some discover a new marketplace for further consumption, while others find consolation and answers in religion, others use song, others move out and many others die.

Smart, satirical and shot with impressive precision and scope, the 24-minute mockumentary takes a long bite at global consumerism, self-preservation and idiotic self-reliance. 

After the short was over, and people continued coming to and fro the theater, the opening night film, Craft, started at 9:30 p.m. without the sound. After playing and tinkering with the moving image on the screen for five minutes or so, the theater lights went up to fix the problem.

Having had enough, at that point I departed the Egyptian Theatre for the evening. 

Now running through June 5, for more information on the festival, click HBFF.