So I’m in Montreal for the 51st edition of the Festival du nouveau cinéma, which may be Canada’s oldest film festival. This year I’ll be here for the entire 12-day event. The festival tends to specialize in edgier more auteur-focused films. But with the accent this year on the films of US director Walter Hill, one could be forgiven for thinking it’s heading into the mainstream….I've seen four films so far and the best was Swiss director Michael Koch’s A Piece of the Sky. Set in an Alpine Valley high in the Swiss Alps, people not from the area are known as “lowlanders” much like sailors refer to non-sailors as landlubbers. Meditative and extremely nuanced with plenty of close-up shots, this is a love story about an unlikely couple - an attractive barmaid and a laconic almost brutish farm laborer. The film’s meticulous pacing showing daily rural life among spectacular mountain vistas melds with the studied emotional trauma which characterizes the couple’s relationship. This is terrific acting with a story line that also upends any Swiss cliche, and the only edit I’d make are the periodic scenes of a choir singing melancholy hymns to punctuate the storyline…..Grand Paris (Martin Jauvat) is a stoner comedy, French style. Set in the far reaches of the Paris suburbs these slackers spend their days scoring dope, trying to pick up women and aimlessly riding public transit. One day they explore the excavation for a future train station for the Grand Paris Express, a plan to make Paris into an even greater world class city. They find a disc with hieroglyphic type writing, are mesmerized, and try to find out what it means. This leads them to a few other oddball characters, including one’s former McDonald’s boss (an amateur archaeologist) who try to decipher the encryption. The movie bristles with jokes as these two goofs can’t do much right. But their “find” leads to one type of extraordinary fulfillment, a high for the ages…..No Bears, by Iranian director Jafar Panahi, is an oddball movie about a Tehran filmmaker going to the border of Turkey and making a film about escaping from Iran. (I found it odd that some of the women weren’t wearing hijabs.) Played by Panahi the director finds himself caught up in village gossip, accused of taking a photo of a real life couple that are the target of a ferociously jealous man. This movie won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival and I have trouble understanding why. It’s a confusing mashup of real (the director’s plight) and fiction (his filming of the fictitious couple seeking escape). Panahi is an Iranian dissident and has been jailed in that theocratic country. But it isn't the state that comes in for a drubbing here as does superstitious, antiquated village life…..Much anticipated has been US director Walter Hill’s (48 Hours, Streets of Fire) Dead for a Dollar. Hill was supposed to have accepted an award at the screening last night but was detained because of severe sciatica. The Western has a great cast of Willem Dafoe (who never disappoints; I get a kick just looking at his gnarly face!), Christoph Waltz and Rachel Brosnahan (The Marvellous Mrs. Maisel). The movie opens with splendid crane shots of the vast New Mexican desert and there are scenes of sweeping vistas throughout. The accompanying art work (i.e., credits) is very well done. But there are problems - plenty. The acting is stilted partly because of a bad script. Waltz is too lightweight a personality to play a rugged bounty hunter though he does handle a gun well. Brosnahan, a suspected kidnapped society woman, pouts so much she must have got tired of it. There are tons of space, literally, between scenes - again the sweeping vistas - and the movie could have been tightened by a half hour (it’s 114 minutes long). The dialogue is minimal and stiff. And there are scenes meant to be serious that make you want to laugh (two women behind me often giggled). And Waltz’s last line, understatedly saying he needs a drink after an OK Corral style shootout, is guffaw-making.
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