Fogtown and Ze Boys
Post-adolescent anomie at the 45th annual San Francisco International Film Festival
One of the festival's most telling movies, in fact, was one of its slightest. 25 Watts, co-directed by Juan Pablo Rebella and Pablo Stoll, has the distinction of being one of less than two dozen films ever to come out of Uruguay (although it could easily have been set in Austin or Berkeley). A low-key, sprawling, Slacker-esque film that follows three amiably underachieving friends through hours of television watching and good-natured bickering about nothing, this is the foreign film for Beavis and Butt-head. That's not to say it's bad -- 25 Watts provides a steady stream of low-watt guffaws along the way -- even if it is most notable for how generic it is, telling us almost nothing about Uruguay and everything about the far-reaching effects of the filmographies of Kevin Smith and Richard Linklater.
Which raises a question. Now that American "independent" film has securely nestled itself into the bosom of the major studios and devolved into little more than a marketing hook, what is its function in the world market? As so many First World countries around the globe shamelessly ape big-budget Hollywood fare, is it the role of American indies to similarly and simultaneously colonize the cinema of the Third World? Instead of celebrating and underscoring what is distinctive or unique about their locales and inhabitants (which is what Slacker and Clerkswere about), will small-scale foreign films treat small-scale American films as a template to be followed to the letter, obliterating any hint of individuality or regional flavor? Those questions seemed especially pungent in a San Francisco whose own legendary funkiness has been displaced or weakened by the dominant mall culture and which, having been shorn of much of the quirkiness that made it symbol of and beacon for the idiosyncratic, now stands at the mercy of marketplace whim. Somewhere in the situation of San Francisco circa 2002 is a warning for filmmakers around the globe who would uncritically and wholeheartedly embrace formulaic "independence" in order to ride the jock of the status quo.
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