CINEM A Film Festival Preview

Rip It Up, Issue 144, 1 July 1989, Page 34

CINEM A Film Festival Preview

Bill Gosden is the President of the New Zealand Federation of Film Societies and the man who makes the decisions about whatyou see inthe International Film Festival that is currently moving around the country. His main source is the London Film Festival at the end of each year, where they screen about 160 films, and Gosden manages to see “abit, if not all of half of them.” Talking about the lineup for this 21st Festival, Gosden feels a good deal of the films catch the spirit of the times: “In’ many of the North American films there’s some sort of late 80s feel about them. If you look at Talk Radlio, Dead Ringers, Family Viewing or Sex, Lies And Videotape, they're all presented with 80s mirror-glass kind of surfaces, butthey’re also dabbling in quire florid corruption just underneath the surface. There's afeeling that they're summing up the apprehensions at the end of the decade.” Back in the firstfestival in 1969 we saw a very early film bu Canadian

director David Cronenburg, called Stereo. More recently the director has made his name with visceral horror-flicks like The Brood, Scanners and The Fly, and the current Festival features his latest, Dead Ringers. Gosden s quick to point out that many ofthe films we'll be seeing in the Festival are by young directors — movies such as Celia, Crazy Love, Little Veraand Sex, Lies And Videotape. On the music side, he singles out From Russia With Rock as “pretty terrific”, although some of the sound quality is “not that wonderful, so people shouldn't start complaining to the Civicl” While the film is indicative of the breaking down of political barriers around the world, Gosden finds that “part of the enjoyment is reading the lyrics, and seeing the different preoccupations of the songwriters — there are a lot of frozen hearts and alot of coldness.” He’s concerned that audiences don't seem to be drawn to Bruce Weber’s documentary on jazzman Chet Baker, Let’s Get Lost, “a wonderful film, a dense, troubled piece of work,” and feels we might also overlook Nanto Yamakawa's So What, “a smart little movie, with a lovely sense of irony and good visual jokes. The affluence will probably stick in a few throats, but the film doesn’t want in general non-conformist spirit ... and that's remarkable from Japan.” The Film Festival is afrustrating time, with so much fine cinema crammed into

afew frenetic weeks: with the quality of this year’s selection, it will be an even more tense-making fortnihgt. This time around, we should be particularly grateful to the New Zealand Film Archive for making available crisply restored prints of three classics: Mizoguchi’s 1953 Ugetsu Monogatari, Laurence Olivier's 1944 Henry Vand Howard Hawks' 1939 Only Angels

Have Wings. And we've Jan Bieringa, the new film manager forthe Arts

Council, to thank for having Roger Horrocks curate a selection of New Zealand shorts for the Festival. This gives us the chance to see Kitchen Sink, the new film by Alison (Talkback) Mclean — the film comes with various honours and awards from across the Tasman, and a Headless Chickens soundtrack. Afew othertitles to watch out for: Mapantsula Thomas Mogoflane directs and gives ataut, jivey performance asthe hero in this glimpse of living on the edge of the South African apocalypse. The villains are uniformly heavy, but otherwise it'sa perfect film, its special appeal caught by the curious patois of languages spoken by most of the black characters. What is amazing is that this film was virtually shot “unofficially” under the noses of the South African authorities who though Mogotlane was making a routine thriller. A World Apart : South Africa again, but seen from the otherside, through the eyes of a young white girl who can’t quite come to terms with the almost obsessive dedication of her activist mother. Barbara Hershey, together with two actors from the cast, won Best Actress Award at Cannes last year, and yet she returnsto Americato find herself in assembly-line comedies as the current Beaches.

High Hopes Backin the 19705, Mike Leight directed the aptly-named Bleak Moments: although High Hopesis riotously funny for a lot of the time, it paints just as disturbing a picture of the social malaise that has Englandin its grip. Leigh has a field-day pointing out the perils of yuppiedom, but at the centre of the movie, the lives of Edna Dore’s old mother and Philip David and Ruth Sheen as her sonand her daughterin law, show the deeper effects of Thatcherism on the human soul. Let’s Get Lost Using powerful documentary footage, Bruce Weber weaves an elegaictale of decay and lost opportunities in this study of Chet Baker — the other side of the American Dream from Olympic athletes and Calvin Klein models, both so reverently glamourised by Weber in his photographs. Bagdad Cafe Percy Adlon, of Sugarbaby fame, has such fun with film. You can see itinthe quirky, helter-skelter editing of the opening few minutes, and inthe deliriously ridiculous premise of a movie that ha a portly Bavarian tourist stranded in a desert truckstop motel. Jack Palance proves he’s morethana rental car salesman with a dry and sly performance as an old Hollywood

buzzard, and Marianne Sagebrecht, looking like Romy Schneider aftera thousand pastries, is just as delightful as she was in Sugarbaby.

Crazy Love You may remember Charles Bukowski from his bawdy appearances in Poetry In Motion in the 1987 Festival, oryou may be one of the many disappointed by Barfly. This first film from young Belgian director Dominique Deruddere, catches the world of the American writer betterin these three stories about the bizarre twists of fate and sexuality. And you haven'theard anything until you've caught Stroff and the Black Jacks singing ‘Love Hurts' ...

Salaam Bombay Mira Nair brings an almost ' documentarist's eye to herfirstfeature, about aninnocent boy caught up in the intrigues of Bombay's underworld. As with A World Apart, everything is seen through the child’s eyes. There is no need for comment, as the subject speaks for itself. Ghosts Of The Civil Dead A depressing view of man’s inhumanity to his fellow man, and life at breaking pointin a maximum security prison. Be prepared for gut-wrenching violence and a grippingly manic performance by Nick Cave as the psychotic Maynard.

WILLIAM DART