Breaking Boundaries, Onscreen and Off, at the Rotterdam Film Festival

The sky's the limit

A A A Comments (0) By Nick Pinkerton Wednesday, Feb 11 2009

Enter The Forbidden Door if you dare.

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Likewise honored was Pole Jerzy Skolimowski, a retro prompted by his return to direction after a 16-year hiatus. In the 1960s, young, buzzy-with-ideas Skolimowski made cinema a choreographic carnival, as in Barrier’s concert of blocking in a streetcar terminus. Essential viewing is 1971’s Deep End, and his newest, Four Nights with Anna, which place that bantering resourcefulness over reservoirs of horrible emotion. Set around a suburban London bathhouse and a sodden Polish backwater, respectively, the films are paralleled by their sly control of audience sympathy for their lovelorn protagonists, and an idea of romantic obsession as the mother of invention.

Among new works, Claire Denis’ 35 Rhums towered, as her output continues to loom Eiffel-style over this low decade. Denis does narrative as a constellation of gestures, revealing or merely beautiful. Here they outline the residents — working class, mostly of Afro-Caribbean origin — of one building in the Parisian suburbs. The scene everyone will rightly single out: Alex Descas, Grégoire Colin, Mati Diop, Adèle Ado, Nicole Dogue (and D.P. Agnès Godard, somewhere, somehow ... ) wedged in a tiny neighborhood café, curling smokelike through one another to The Commodores’ “Nightshift.” Behold that rare level of conscious control not set into the slimy aspic of Style — as in Skolimowski’s seamless-elaborate Deep End set piece, where John Moulder-Brown stalks in and out of one Red Light Soho street corner, its clubs, hotdog stands and fuck-cubbies, driven to and fro by the hectoring jam of Can’s “Mother Sky.” This is a medium at its full power of synthesis — a hyperconsciousness of spaces, a song pulse, inchoate feelings invoked — where The Unbearable Limit of the Screen is no limit at all.