Rotterdam 5

Pebbles (Vinothraj P.S., 2021)

Nothing struck me as particularly award-winning here. What we've got is 66 minutes (plus seven minutes of credits) of a drunken jerk of a dad (Karuththadaiyan) being a jerk, to pretty much everyone but especially his young son Vanu (Chelle Pandi). Dad picks Vanu up from school so they can go find the kid's mother and the dad can beat her up. They go to the mom's old village, but her family tells them she has gone to the dad's village, so they just missed each other. Vanu gets fed up with his dad and destroys their cash supply, so they can't take the bus and have to walk. I guess Vinothraj demonstrates an awareness of what contemporary art films do (long takes, examination of landscape, even a brief moment of self-reflexivity), but shows no particular gift in terms of deploying or organizing those tropes. Also, this is a film that bets so much of its power on visual communication, and the whole thing looks like it was shot with a motion-smoothing setting on the camera. Oh well.

Maat Means Land (Fox Maxy, 2020)

I'd been hearing a bit about Maxy in avant-garde circles. They are a young, Native, nonbinary filmmaker of Southern California's Payómkawichum and Kumeyaay tribes. Maat Means Land is a significant achievement. It's a political film about Indigenous land rights that eschews all of the typical forms and modes of address that political films tend to employ. Instead, Maxy uses breakneck editing, wild camerawork, and contextualizing superimpositions that situate speakers and subjects around and within the contested land they're talking about. There's a punk rock energy to Maat Means Land that manages to sustain itself over 30 minutes; the disjointed, digressive style reminded me a bit of Isiah Medina and, actually, Ryan Trecartin. If this is how contemporary artists are adapting to the alleged short attention spans of the YouTube / TikTok generation, then count me in.

The Women's Revenge (Su Hui-yu, 2020)

Almost assuredly coming to Vdrome sometime this year (this is the kind of work they lap up), Su's The Women's Revenge is one of the more interesting entries I've seen in the popular "excavating a hidden national film history" genre. Here, Su is recreating scenes from a 1980s Taiwanese actioner, the sort of violent cheapie that was banned while the country was under martial law. We have a group of heavily armed, badass women infiltrating a building with a lot of guys, and basically beating, stabbing, and slicing them to death, all in a highly stylized mode that would make Nicolas Winding Refn wet his pants. To complicate matters, Su sometimes stops the action and inserts stock-still master shots, long, slow zooms, and other tasteful touches that seem to nod ironically to the "official" cinema of Taiwan. (Hou, Yang, Tsai, etc.) There's nothing particularly groundbreaking here, but it is kind of fun.

There Is a Ghost of Me (Mateo Vega, 2021)

There was a grating sameness to a lot of the films in the Shorts Competition, a predilection for desultory images ostensibly held together by a "poetic" first-person voiceover. There Is a Ghost of Me was one of the chief offenders. Vega uses both voiceover and onscreen text (in a horrible font that he's clearly proud of) to yoke together runimations about the body, urban space, isolation, etc. As bull-riders have been known to say, it was a long seven minutes.

For the Sake of Calmness (Newsha Tavakolian, 2020)

A film that considers the sparsely-populated super-urban spaces of Iran, For the Sake of Calmness uses a slow, lingering camera to produce an awkward, highly formal form of portraiture, showing numerous people covered in gleaming sweat and various locales bristling under the weight of abandonment. It is suitably evocative, at times even calling to mind Pedro Costa's use of painterly chiaroscuro. Then, I read the catalogue description, which claims quite forcefully that Tavakolian's film is about a very particular topic. I didn't get that at all, so take that as you will.

Flowers Blooming in Our Throats (Eva Giolo, 2021)

A brief, well-wrought study of the cramped interiors of the COVID quarantine, and the moments when boredom demand a redefinition of both fun and personal space. Giolo is clearly familiar with Dorsky and Beavers, particularly their attention to reflected color, hand gestures, and the subtle editing on directional action. Flowers never approaches the depth of their work, but it does strike me as the first "Corona film" that seriously thinks about the aesthetic ramifications of one's world becoming much smaller.

Sunsets, everyday (Basir Mahmood, 2020)

I am beginning to notice a pattern here. Tavakolian's film is (very) obliquely about PMS, and now Sunsets, everyday, according to the IFFR description, is based on various women's experience with domestic violence. Both films list Iran as their nation of origin, and perhaps we're seeing the strain on artists there to address highly sensitive topics in more and more allusive, roundabout ways. As I watched Sunsets, I sort of thought I was looking at an abstract depiction of a makeshift art auction scenario, as various works of pottery were presented to the camera and different people (some masked, some not) moved around the curtained-off room. Maybe I'm the problem. Maybe I am watching too much, too late at night. Anyway, it's well-shot.

The Cemil Show (Barış Sarhan, 2021)

Another reconsideration of a national cinema's B-grade glory days, this time in Turkey, where cheap toupees, declarative acting, and preposterous gunplay were the coins of the realm. Sarhan recreates these forgotten Yeşilçam chestnuts quite lovingly, and one wishes he'd just made a Guy Maddinesque retro-style pastiche. Instead, there's a frame story regarding Cemil (Ozan Çelik), a hapless mall security guard who dreams of becoming an actor. As it happens, a fellow mall employee is the daughter of an aging, now forgotten Yeşilçam superstar Cemil idolizes. Meanwhile, the daughter (Nesrin Cavadzade), a voluptuous sexpot who does sale announcements over the mall's PA system, is having an affair with the chief-of-security (Alican Yücesoy), who despises Cemil.

Despite its high-key, almost cartoonish style, The Cemil Show is mostly a broad mall comedy, albeit one that intersects with a standard "film shoots are crazy, man!" subplot. Cemil is a classic nebbish who's been pushed...too...FAR, eventually becoming the hard, dangerous man he wants to portray in the movies. It's painfully obvious that Sarhan was influenced by The King of Comedy, and The Cemil Show doesn't benefit from the comparison. This film does, however, nail the sort of blithe sexism that marred Taxi Driver. CWC filler at best.

I Comete: A Corsican Summer (Pascal Tagnati, 2021)

As this film wends its way through the festival circuit, I suspect it will end up with a somewhat different title. I Comete, in Corsican dialect, literally means "the comets," and although there are no comets in this film that I observed, the title probably has a poetic meaning that eludes me. In any case, I hope they come up with something more memorable than the flatly descriptive A Corsican Summer.

"Rohmeresque," said several of the French reviews, and I suppose that's true. Actor / theatre director Tagnati, making his film directing debut, certainly commits to the plein-air atmospherics and green-and-brown landscape palette one finds in certain Rohmer films. And there is a Renoirian interest in articulating personalities and relationships gradually, moving from scene to scene with the promise that the mosaic will eventually form a fully formed network of community and familial relationships. 

Tagnati fashions this small-town Corsican retreat through accumulation, trusting the viewer to infer major plot complications and long-simmering resentments. This subtlety makes it all the more disappointing when he decides to impart information through clunky dialogue, like "ah, my sister!" or "I know he never got over his wife leaving him for me, but still...." Taken as a first film, however, I Comete is quite impressive in its character work and general ambiance. I am not certain, however, whether his reliance on stationary long takes really serves his dramatic purposes, or if this is just how art films are made in 2021, full stop.

Oh, and I really didn't understand how the lakeside cam girl fit into everything. Was she somewhere in Corsica? Another identical locale? In any case, it will be interesting to see how these sexually frank sequences affect the film's fortunes down the line.