No Laffing Matter
Los Angeles Film Festival finally comes of age
THE FILMS THAT GOT AWAY
{mosimage}I’d like to blame the recall election and the fervor of the Bush vs. Kerry campaign for the fact that two provocative and artfully made political films from 2003 and 2004 have never before screened in Los Angeles. It seems like new documentaries on hot-button issues were opening every week back then, so perhaps there simply wasn’t room for a chamber drama about the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact or an operatic account of the Achille Lauro hijacking. More likely, distributors didn’t see a buck to be made. Whatever the reason, this situation is finally being corrected by the Los Angeles Film Festival, which has again partnered with the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and the UCLA Film and Television Archive to give two long-undistributed films — Eric Rohmer’s Triple Agent and Penny Woolcock’s The Death of Klinghoffer — their belated local premieres. Triple Agent has many of Rohmer’s hallmarks: beautiful Continental women, lots of intellectual banter and, of course, even more that’s left unsaid. But like only a few of his films (L’Anglaise et le Duc, La Marquise d’O), it’s also a period piece — complete with Pathé newsreel footage — set in Paris during the lead-up to WWII. One can see the influence of Notorious on Rohmer (who wrote an early book about Hitchcock) in this tale of love and espionage shot in the old-style, full-frame aspect ratio. Triple Agent boasts Nazis, sustained suspense and a sudden, twist ending, all handled in Rohmer’s slow, transparent, seemingly effortless style (no memorable tracking shots here). Woolcock’s film adaptation of John Adams’ 1991 opera, The Death of Klinghoffer, also has effortless moments in its mixture of oratorio and cinema. Klinghoffer has often been called a “CNN opera,” and indeed Woolcock uses news-style editing and hand-held cameras to make this stagy work seem surprisingly natural onscreen. Unfortunately, her grasp of politics is shakier than her camera. She hijacks Adams’ controversial work and makes it unambiguously (and often naively) pro-Palestinian. What could have been a watershed for filmed opera is instead an ambitious, if often cringe-inducing, curiosity.
The Death of Klinghoffer screens Mon., June 25, 9:30 p.m., at the Billy Wilder Theater.Triple Agent screens Tues., June 26, 7:30 p.m., at the Billy Wilder Theater.
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INTERNATIONAL SPOTLIGHT: ROMANIA
Though critics cry “New Wave” all too easily when a national cinema starts popping up at all the right film festivals, there’s definitely something in the water when it comes to contemporary Romanian film. And I’m not just talking about Cristian Mungiu’s lauded abortion drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, which carried off the Palme D’Or at Cannes last month and was due to play the Los Angeles Film Festival until it was pulled by its distributor. From Cristi Puiu’s The Death of Mr. Lazarescu to Corneliu Porumboiu’s 12:08 East of Bucharest, Romania is taking a sardonic yet loving ax to its autocratic past and chaotic present. In LAFF’s spotlight on Romanian film, Radu Muntean’s excellent The Paper Will Be Blue plays like a prequel to 12:08, which focused on a provincial TV talk show host 16 years after the revolution, trying to get a bead on what happened in his town the day Ceausescu was ousted. Muntean takes us back to the night of the revolution itself, December 22, 1989, and follows a militia unit assigned to peace-keeping duties on the anarchic streets of Bucharest as it tries to track down a conscript who’s defected. A deft impassive comedy laced with looming tragedy, the movie addresses both the confusion of cataclysmic social change and its consequences for innocent lives. Less successful is Cristian Nemescu’s 45-minute Marina From P7, a drama about a boy in love with a hooker on the mean streets of Bucharest that takes its stylistic cues from Italian neo-realism and methodically converts them into cliché. Better to stick with the accompanying short, The Tube With a Hat, a delightful 23-minute piece about a father trying to get the ancient family TV fixed for his stolid little boy, which suggests the benefits of capitalism haven’t quite made it to Romania.
The Paper Will Be Blue screens Sun., June 24, 4:45 p.m. at The Landmark & Wed., June 27, 9:45 p.m., at the Italian Cultural Center.Marilena From P7 andThe Tube With a Hat screens Sat., June 30, 10 p.m., & Sun., July 1, 5:15 p.m., at the Italian Cultural Institute.
“This used to be a helluva town,” says Lloyd Nolan of the broken down palace that is Los Angeles at the end of 1974’s Earthquake. If the line doesn’t resonate quite like the parting words of that year’s other, more subtly apocalyptic L.A. story — Chinatown — it’s still a perfect capper to a movie that (pace Thom Andersen) smirks at its host city through crocodile tears: glittering environs ground down so as to remind us of their glory. A few toppled landmarks and — voilà — instant nostalgia! Earthquake is probably the most fatuous entry in the Los Angeles Film Festival’s program of homegrown disaster movies. For an example of a movie that’s funny on purpose, look no further than Thom Eberhart’s 1984 Night of the Comet, which kicks the series off with a free outdoor screening. This bent horror-comedy confection centers on two Valley-gal sisters (Catherine Mary Stewart and Kelli Maroney) who survive an extinction-level event only to be beset by some stray irradiated zombies in its aftermath. Spunky and resourceful, the big-haired pair are, like, totally legend, until their hormones kick in and they redirect their attentions toward hooking up with the last man in Los Angeles (inevitably played by Robert Beltran). A more earnest strain of end-of-days anxiety runs through Steve de Jarnatt’s Miracle Mile, a lost 1988 gem that suggests Fail-Safe as told from the ground up. A pre-ER Anthony Edwards stars as a regular guy who turns Chicken Little after getting his lines crossed during a pay-phone call; newly convinced that there are missiles en route, he tries to rally the folks around him — including winsome new girlfriend Mare Winningham — into getting the hell out of town. The film works its frighteningly fixed perspective (it sets down in Johnnie’s Coffee Shop on Fairfax and refuses to leave) and near-real-time pacing for maximum anxiety. Moreover, it tingles with a sense of impending loss for its eccentric yet palpably human characters rarely attempted by glib all-star destruction derbies à la Earthquake.
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