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Plays Thursday, May 1, at 9:30 p.m., and Saturday, May 3, at 9:30 p.m. (Also at the PFA Monday, May 5, at 7 p.m.)
A Drifting Life
(Taiwan, 1996)
* This is a first feature? This semi-autobiographical, uncannily confident debut captures the rootless rhythm of a young widower (Lee Kang-sheng, who also stars in another superb festival entry from Taiwan, The River) as he drifts between a city life with his city lover and his parent's farm in the country, where his two children live. Deeply moving and extraordinarily beautiful, it's very much in the meditative, elemental tradition of fellow Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien, and every bit as good. (Booth)
Plays Friday, May 2, at 1:30 p.m., and Saturday, May 3, at 6:45 p.m.
Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask
(England, 1996)
The great revolutionary thinker of the 1950s (he died in 1961) is a ghostly presence in this composite look at his life, never quite emerging from icon status to flesh and blood. The facts are all here, and some of them -- like Fanon's galvanizing experiences working at a psychiatric hospital in Algeria -- are powerfully sketched through interviews with colleagues and friends, and historical footage. But using an actor (a not very good one at that) to re-create key moments in Fanon's life seems particularly inappropriate for a man driven by the idea of living "authentically." (Morris)
Plays Tuesday, May 6, at 2 and 7:15 p.m. (Also at the PFA Wednesday, May 7, at 9 p.m.)
Irma Vep
(France, 1996)
* Hong Kong megastar Maggie Cheung is hired by Rene Vidal (Jean-Pierre Leaud), a has-been French director, for a remake of the silent serial Irma Vep. This ill-fated film-within-a-film gives director Oliver Assayas a dazzling platform for an attack on the pomposities of the French film industry, but Irma Vep is more than a polemic. Assayas' nervous, constantly moving camera gives his characters a bracing immediacy as they gossip and fight over everything from action films vs. "dead French cinema" to whether lesbian wardrobe mistress Zoe (Nathalie Richard) has managed to bed the star. The entrancing Cheung suggests another dimension to the film as a virtually abandoned outsider, and her relationship with Zoe resonates particularly in a scene where Zoe longingly tries to convince her to come to a "bonne rave." (Morris)
Plays Saturday, May 3, at 10 p.m.
Jour de Fete
(France, 1947)
* Jacques Tati plays pastoral hide-and-seek in his 1947 feature debut, restored to its original pastels in a characteristically idiosyncratic comedy about a rural postman-on-wheels who tries to modernize his deliveries "the American way" after catching a movie on same. The comedy is broader and his character more talkative than in Tati's later Hulot films, an awful toothbrush mustache making the gawky star look like an elongated Wimpy. The provincial charm is laid on with a trowel. Nonetheless some inspired and/or agreeably stylized comic routines and running gags point the way toward the formalist mastery of Tati's later work. (If there's a funnier film playing in this festival, we'd like to hear about it.) (Rickman)
Plays Saturday, May 3, at 2 p.m.
The Maker
(U.S.A., 1997)
* Aimless teen Jonathan Rhys Myers' pretty vacant life upends when slickly criminal big bro Matthew Modine returns after a long absence. Director Tim Hunter himself fruitfully returns to the grunge-kids-in-a-moral-bind narrative he has long since made his own (Tex, River's Edge). An ethical gangster flick, The Maker displays an unforced stylistic virtuosity and intelligence of a caliber rapidly vanishing from American budget cinema. The brooding Rhys Myers and the joking Modine are an excellent unmatched sibling set, and Fairuza Balk is particularly tasty as Rhys Myers' lesbian gal pal. (Rickman)
Plays Friday, May 2, at 10:30 p.m., and Monday, May 5, at 3:45 p.m. (Also at the Lark Saturday, May 3, at 9:30 p.m.)
Mandela
(U.S.A., 1996)
The title defines this documentary's limits -- it's a dignified portrait of the South African leader, not a political explication or a psychological probe -- and the directors, Jo Menell and Angus Gibson, fill those limits handsomely. What's most intriguing about this movie's straight-ahead, heroic rendering of Mandela's life story are its fleeting depictions of his sarcasm and caginess. Since this production derives from Jonathan Demme's company (Clinica Estetico), it's not surprising that the music on the soundtrack accentuates the film's attention to the spoken and stomped rhythms of a folk revolution. (Sragow)
Plays Saturday, May 3, at 7 p.m., and Wednesday, May 7, at 1 p.m.
Marian
(Czech Republic, 1968)
* A stunning indictment of the orphanages and penal institutions of communist Czechoslovakia. The government dealt with the "problem of the Gypsies" by taking Romany children from their parents, officially to give them running water and an education. But in reality years of abuse and neglect produce enraged and alienated adults who cannot function in the world they've supposedly been specially prepared for. (Stachura)
Plays Friday, May 2, at 7:30 p.m., and Monday, May 5, at 1:15 p.m.
Mean Streets
(U.S.A., 1973)
* Martin Scorsese's Little Italy Graffiti, written in hot blood, stars Harvey Keitel as the would-be street saint Charlie -- a mob kid on the rise -- and Robert De Niro as Johnny Boy, his out-of-control friend. Twenty-three years ago, its view of a claustrophobic, unjust ethnic life startled those who misread The Godfather as a paean to the traditional Italian family. And the conflict raging in the hero's skull, between his religious sensibility and pursuit of success, mirrored all the confusion and compromise of the Vietnam-Watergate era. Scorsese's talent exploded in jolting camera moves and a febrile rock soundtrack. The result was a breakthrough depiction of urban life in extremis. Selected by writer Barry Gifford for the fest's "Indelible Images" series. (Sragow)
