SLIFF 2008: That All May Be One

2008 // USA // Karen Kearns // November 16, 2008 // Theatrical Print (Landmark Tivoli Theater)

Karen Kearns' That All May Be One is less a documentary than a feature-length bit of boosterism for the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, whose American arm is based here in St. Louis. Kearns boasts a background in television and radio, and it shows. Out of native pride and an acknowledgment of Kaerns' constraints, I hesitate to label That All Be One amateurish, but it does present itself with the earnest competence and nary a whiff of aesthetics that characterize just about every human interest segment in local newscasts. That said, as a nonbeliever, I'm perhaps an appropriate test for Kaerns' bare bones aim: Does she render the subject compelling? I think so, but not because the glowing treatment of the Sisters' work—at St. Joseph Academy, the Institute for the Deaf, Nazareth Living Center, and so on—is intrinsically engaging. Rather, it's the simmering social problems beneath the surface that snag one's attention, which Kearns intuitively backgrounds while allowing the sisters themselves to speak with veiled sharpness. If the Catholic hierarchy of the next century desires a record of where this century's Great Schism began, they might glimpse it in the words of the sisters and laity Kaerns profiles.

SLIFF 2008: Alone

2007 // Thailand // Banjong Pisanthanakun and Parkpoom Wongpoom // November 15, 2008 // Theatrical Print (Landmark Tivoli Theater)

I suppose it's flogging the obvious to suggest that the rhythms and aesthetic of contemporary Asian horror are way, way past their freshness date. The essential question that one has to ask about the Thai conjoined-twin chiller Alone, then, is whether it offers anything unexpected at all. The answer is a half-hearted affirmative, if only because writer-directors Banjong Pisanthanakun and Parkpoom Wongpoom, for all their drifting in familiar gothic doldrums, have crafted a story with some novel, savage sucker-punches. Pim (Marsha Wattanapanich), the adult survivor of a pair of twins, returns to her family home, where menacing visions of her departed sister bedevil her dreams and waking hours alike. Alone's gruesome phantasms—applied in a mind-numbing and seemingly endless pattern of lull-shock-lull—are derivative, never truly scaring on a level beyond simplistic campfire jumpiness. The film's modest success rests on the cleverness of its narrative twists. Pisanthanakun and Wongpoom rely on hoary stagecraft to pull off their tricks—we watch a whirl of handkerchiefs while they pick our pockets—but it's a well-earned illusion, one that seems plucked from a superior installment of Night Gallery. On balance, it's just barely worth the musty wrapping paper.

SLIFF 2008: Slumdog Millionaire

2008 // UK - USA // Danny Boyle and Loveleen Tandan // November 15, 2008 // Theatrical Print (Landmark Tivoli Theater)

Perhaps it's the black-hearted cynic in me, but I no longer accept notions of true love and destiny built on little more than airy invocations. So it is with Danny Boyle and Loveleen Tandan's Slumdog Millionaire, a relatively conventional—even predictable—Dickensian tale told with ingenuity, ferocity, and heaps of seductive style. Boyle and Tandan assert that Mumbai orphans Jamal (Dev Patel) and Latika (Freida Pinto) were Meant For Each Other, but we need a reason to believe it beyond their assertion. No matter. While a paucity of authentic connection is its conspicuous flaw, Slumdog's triumph is the sheer spirit of its cinematic language. The bulk of the film is told in Kane-style flashback, as Jamal explains how he managed to breeze his way to the final question on a Hindi quiz show. Boyle and Loveleen's approach is one of limitless energy, whether dealing in the currency of fear, confusion, despair, or pure zest for life. Despite its narrative problems—including a couple of character turns utterly bereft of motivation—Slumdog offers a tantalizing rebuttal to the Great Man theory of hstory, as evidenced by its repeated references to such luminaries. Sometimes someone is just in the right place at the right time.

SLIFF 2008: Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father

2008 // USA // Kurt Kuenne // November 15, 2008 // Theatrical Print (Landmark Tivoli Theater)

There's really no faulting Kurt Kuenne's intentions or zeal in Dear Zachary, a remembrance of his friend Andrew Bagby that is as unabashedly canonizing in its treatment of the man as it is scathing in its assessment of his death. A young doctor just beginning his career in family practice, Bagby touched people across nations and oceans with his friendship and humor, before he was brutally gunned down by his lunatic girlfriend. Kuenne initially undertook Dear Zachary as a cinematic letter to Andrew's infant son, born to the accused murderess soon after the crime. Frenetic in its pacing and bursting with pride and love for Andrew, the film zips across the world in search of a comprehensive portrait of the man's life. As the girlfriend's extradition proceedings crawl along concurrently, the director discovers a legion of people who adored Andrew, as well as unexpected dimensions to his life (Kuenne had no idea his friend was an amateur photographer.) The film's hiccups are essentially stylistic, including a histrionic and sneering tone to the true crime elements that undercuts Dear Zachary's naked humanity. Still, can you blame Kuenne? His closeness to the story is both its weakness and the key to its power.

SLIFF 2008: Of Time and the City

2008 // UK // Terence Davies // November 15, 2008 // Theatrical Print (Landmark Tivoli Theater)

The rudimentary architecture that one expects of documentary films—facts, tilted this way or that, conveyed by means of a simple narrative—is nowhere to be found in Terence Davies' Of Time and the City. Serving as both ode and elegy to the Liverpool of his youth, the film lazes through archival footage of the industrial city, most in black-in-white, some in color. Davies himself narrates—his exquisitely British voice all scratchy wool and rich cream—offering remembrances of his own life that illuminate the generalities of a bittersweet urban existence. Proceeding much like the wandering thoughts of a reflective old man (which I suppose it is), Of Time and the City takes its sweet time getting nowhere. It's the sort of film-making that throws you for a loop, if only because its approach is so unusual. (The only stylistic fellow traveler that springs to mind is Koyaanisqatsi, but only because that film is so de-personalized in comparison.) However, owing to the potency of Davies' warm, tear-wetted poetics, the film's meditative qualities are never off-putting. In short, Of Time and City, is a strange, beautiful little film, a memory thrown up on screen with all its indulgences and ambivalence intact.

SLIFF 2008: The Unknown Woman

2006 // Italy - France // Giuseppe Tornatore // November 14, 2008 // Theatrical Print (Landmark Plaza Frontenac Cinema)

Lurid and relentless, The Unknown Woman is a thriller that would catch the attention of Hitchcock, Argento, and De Palma—although they would no doubt find much to pick at in the roteness of its third act, as well as its refusal to conclude with dignity. Oh, but there's bloody pleasure to be had in the first forty-five minutes, as director Giuseppe Tornatore weaves a mystery spattered with sex, savagery, and sinister intentions. Kseniya Rappoport, all hangdog eyes and chilly Slavic ferocity, holds the film together as Ukranian anti-heroine Irena, who engages in an elaborate scheme to ingratiate herself into the household of a wealthy Italian jeweler (Claudia Gerini), with clear designs on the family's young daughter. Stacatto bursts of flashback intrude into Irena's conspiracy, heightening the menace by revealing the lost happiness and nightmarish abuse of her past. This is a woman who has nothing to lose, but what she wants—revenge? money? family?—flutters tantalizingly in our peripheral vision. There are some twists that strain credulity, but Tornatore generally keeps things humming along until a conclusion that he doesn't know how to cut short. The black sizzle is by then gone, aside from a bitter, devastating answer to a lingering question. Still, what a ride!