SLIFF 2008: Blind Mountain

2007 // China // Yang Li // November 14, 2008 // Theatrical Print (Landmark Plaza Frontenac Cinema)

Conceptually, Yang Li's terrifying, exhausting Blind Mountain is a stone's throw from Deliverance, save that his heroine, Bai Xuemei (Huang Lu) blunders into her nightmare ordeal not via foolish adventurism, but rather naïveté at the hands of vile predators. Li dives into the topic of rural sex slavery in China—"bride purchasing" is the polite euphemism—with an unblinking need to show every sadistic, ugly jot. His approach invites squirming, but only because there's no inkling that Li is exaggerating the horror of the general reality with his fictional specifics. Blind Mountain is the sort of film that's not really "entertaining" in the least, but nonetheless harrowing and sobering. Ferocious and narratively merciless, it takes us deep inside the tribulations of Bai's kidnapping, rape, and enslavement by a family of barbaric farmers, emphasizing not just the harsh physical details but also the young woman's inner hell. All the more remarkable, then, that Li achieves this focus while indulging a fascination with the miserable gray-green landscape of China's impoverished countryside. The film's bleak naturalism calls attention to the story's inertness—in 95 minutes, not much truly happens—but this too is a part of the film's horror, one that paints escape as an illusion.

SLIFF 2008: Vanaja

2006 // India // Rajnesh Domalpalli // November 14, 2008 // Theatrical Print (Landmark Plaza Frontenac Cinema)

Overflowing with aimless melodrama, Rajnesh Domalpalli's sprawled (though not sprawling) Vanaja is covered in the fingerprints of Dickens. Set in the Indian state of Andrha Padresh, the films follows the luminous Vanaja, a skinny, low-caste fifteen-year-old brought as a servant into the household of her Brahmin landlady, where the precocious girl hopes to learn the art of Kuchipudi dance. The story slogs through endless back-and-forth that isn't worth recounting in detail: friendship, discovery, temptation, rape, pregnancy, politics, blackmail, and death. It's not that Vanaja is incoherent—first-time director Domalpalli steers this behemoth well enough—just unnecessarily convoluted and thematically sketchy. In short, there's an undisciplined whiff to it, all the more frustrating given that Domalpalli discovers some gorgeous sights, especially in the small, human details. The film's dramatic heft relies overwhelmingly on the strength of Mamatha Bhukya's performance as Vanaja, an eye-catching, textured portrayal despite is unevenness as written and delivered. It says something that the central pleasure of Vanaja is Bhukya's hypnotic Kuchipudi dance routines. Domalpalli is most confident when reveling in the aesthetic joy of this gawky adolescent conjuring something so exquisite from mere motion and color.

SLIFF 2008: Late Bloomers

2006 // Switzerland // Bettina Oberli // November 14, 2008 // Theatrical Print (Landmark Plaza Frontenac Cinema)

I'll allow that Late Bloomers manages to be "heartwarming," but only in the most calculated and undemanding way. Bettina Oberli's story of elderly women who open a lingerie shop in a tiny, conservative Swiss village wears its life-affirming, faux-rebellious intentions with pride. There's not much to object to here from a storytelling perspective: Oberli introduces four women with a panoply of personal problems, adds some obligatory crises, and by the time the credits roll all is neatly (if not happily) resolved. The villains, primarily a political leader (Manfred Liechti) and the village parson (Hanspeter Müller)—both sons of the entrepreneurial women—are so aggressively loathsome that there's no wiggle room in the story. Doubt creeps in for Oberli's silver dames when their enterprise gets rocky, but Oberli signals with simplistic strokes that unexpected thematic shifts aren't in order (just cheap tragedy). What we're left with is "Be True to Yourself" pablum, served up with rich helpings of schadenfreude and a knowing condemnation of rural Swiss stuffiness. The film's saving grace is Stephanie Glaser as ringleader Martha, a widowed hausfrau portrayed with a fine blend of tentativeness, moist romanticism, and comic spunk.

SLIFF 2008: Humboldt County

2008 // USA // Darren Grodsky and Danny Jacobs // November 13, 2008 // Theatrical Print (Landmark Tivoli Theater)

The tale of a medical student who bumbles into a marijuana farming community, Humboldt County has all the ingredients for a sincere puff of humane drama, despite its at times condescending tone. The fairly ho-hum narrative arc never misses a beat, yet it's still a pleasure to watch it unfold. Credit Grodsky and Jacobs' nimble script, fine editing from Ed Marx, and Ernest Holzman's adaptive, sneakily effective camera work. Humboldt boasts some amazingly potent long shots, whose strength lies in the centrality of their human subjects and their lack of showiness. Brad Dourif and Frances Conroy deliver astonishing, husky performances far better than any indie coming-of-age drama should warrant. Grodsky and Jacobs are plainly striving for a tale of personal transformation, and on that score Humboldt never quite ripens. The problem lies in the mismatch between the film's aims and Jeremy Strong as protagonist Peter. Strong reads as a sort of older, broader, more wilted Michael Cera, and in another film his starched, stammering schlemiel routine might have been bitterly funny. Yet Peter's sheer anxious discomfort in his own skin is too pronounced in a role that needs a touch of melancholy despair and callous apathy.