Film

Rip It Up, Issue 120, 1 July 1987, Page 27

Film

Otis, Jimi, Sid, Nancy

It's that time again when we get out the Optrex and steel ourselves for the annual International Film Festivals. The Auckland event has grown a little like Topsy in its 19 years, from a mere 14 titles in 1969 to well over 50 in the 1987 season. The films are sardined into a little over a fortnight, raising the question: is any cineaste sturdy and wealthy enough to see every frame that flickers on the Civic’s screen? Bill Gosden has — but over a more generous period of time. As director of the festival, he’s very much responsible for the selection. He describes the London film festival as one of his best hunting grounds, “because it presents the highlights from everybody else’s film festivals ... they screen 160 and I'd be lucky to get to half of them.” Another source is what Gosden describes as the “dreaded videotape” — “A lot of them arrive in the mail, but you can make blunders as it's easier to be impressed with something on tape — a film that makes your television vibrate can look awfully limp on the big screen.” Gosden sees the function of the festival in very clear terms. “It's duties are defined by what other people are not doing in the fields of commercial cinema or television, because of our small population.” Another important role of the event is “to convince distributors that they should release films that may appear difficult to handle” He adds wryly that, in spite of its festival success and distributor's promises, Scorsese’s After Hourse still awaits a general theatrical release. * There seem to be a few changes in this year’s programme. There's not one film that would ruffle the feathers of the Moral Majority — no blasphemy as in Godard'’s Hail Mary, no sodomy as in Fassbinder’s Querelle of Brest, and none of the graphic castration

scenes featured in Oshimas In the Realm of the Senses or Ferreri’s Last Woman. The traditional late session horror flicks, too, have become late night quirkies: one is Alex Cox’s Sid and Nancy, an offbeat attempt to fashion a Love Story for our times out of the dying gasps of British punk. Another is Jim Jarmusch's Down by Law, which gives Tom Waits his biggest role out of Coppolaland, a product of the same alternative American scene that gave rise to Joel Coen’s frenetic comedy Raising Arizona. Both Sid and Nancy and Down by Law have intriguing soundtracks and another late night offering is @ must for devotees or survivors of the late 60s. A couple of live performances by Jimi Hendrix and Otis Redding from Monterey in 1967, taken from material shot by D A Pennbaker for his Monterey Pop film, was snapped up by Gosden, without a preview, when he heard they had a new Dolby remix on their soundtracks. There were snippets of these performances on the recent televison documentary Twenty Years Ago Today — now you can see them in context. Gosden feels the festival has a special duty with documentaries and they have always been a feature of the fortnight — “There are wonderful documentaries that become available because nobody else will take them up.” They provide the highlights of the festival this year. The range could not be wider, from Claude Lanzmann’s nine-and-half hour Shoah, a searing investigation of the horrors of Nazi concentration camps, edited from 350 hours of interview footage, to Louis Malle's God’s Country and Eva Rosenfeld’s All American High, the syllabus of which would have Ruth Richardson reeling.

New Zealand films are thin on the ground. Barry Barclay's Ngati, fresh from its ‘“critic's week” acclaim at Cannes, is the only feature. New Zealand shorts include Stewart Main's Captive State, Garth Maxwell's Tandem, and South Africa in Black and White, a film by Terry O'Connor and Tom McWilliams which uses Bruce Connew’s South African photographs to form a powerful narrative.

It could be argued that 50 films in 14 days does not necessarily make a festival. Bill Gosden is aware of gaps — the desirability of alternative screenings of short

films, talks and lectures, visiting directors and retrospectives. It's difficult enough to see many New Zealand films in this country, but it's well nigh impossible to see films of the 20s to 60s in brand new prints. “A Tribute to Orson Welles” offers just that: a sparkling new copy of Touch of Evil, 14 minutes longer than the murky print that was travelling around the film societies last year, and a chance to see the director’s Lady from Shanghai, which must register as an equal tribute to its star, Rita Hayworth. William Dart SOMETHING WILD Director: Jonathan Demme The basic premise of Demme’s film — a kooky freewheeling heroine transforms a nervous young hero into a man of the world — is at least as old as Howard Hawks' Bringing Up Baby. In 1939 Katharine Hepburn didn't avail herself of handcuffs and seedy motel assignations to seduce her man, but then Hepburn had both class and charm, two qualities not so evident in Melanie Griffiths's Lulu/Audrey. Jeff Daniels, on the other hand, has a gangling appeal that gives Something Wild its main anchor. -

Something Wild bops along in a breezy enough fashion as the couple wend their way from New York to smalltown Pennsylvania. There are a few wry asides such as Griffiths's mother sitting pensively at the harpsichord playing a Bach minuet but the film makes a sharp turn of direction with the introduction of the psychotic exlover at a seemingly innocuous school reunion.

Suddenly we're in Brian de Palma territory, climaxing in a feast of violence that could have strayed from Dressed to Kill or Body Double. In any case, as bathroom murders go, Demme himself did it much quicker, tidier and wittier in his 1981 film Last Embrace when Janet Margolin drowned Andrew Duncan in the bathtub while making love to him. Rock soundtracks often hang uneasily on films, seeming to have been instigated more for aloum sales than for any cinematic reasons. As might be expected from the director who gave us Stop Making Sense, the music for Something Wild is brilliant. Held

together by fragments from Laurie Anderson and John Cale (including a wonderfully loopy piece of Cale throwaway for viola and piano during a restaurant scene), there are songs by everyone from David Byrne to the Troggs. My favourite in the context of the film was a particularly deadly cover of David Bowie's ‘Fame’ by the Feelies at the reunion dance. As for the final credits sequence, with Sister Rita in mid-shot against a burnt red, graffiti-encrusted wall, singing her version of ‘Wild Thing, that was the most engaging piece of cinema in the whole film. Perhaps, somewhere between the roadside motels and Newark bathrooms, there was a music film trying to get out. ; '

William Dart