His recuperation complete, JACOB POWELL asks himself what made his year, and what threatened to spoil it at the Telecom New Zealand International Film Festivals 2006.


FESTIVAL ‘06 was my biggest year yet in terms of number of films viewed. 39. Not a stunning number by the tally of some, but a fairly respectable figure in anyone’s books. It would have been 44 had I not had a wedding to attend on Saturday, the cake for which my wife and I were responsible for assembling?!? This resulted in having to drop five films from my list! Five! Only one of which I could reschedule, and even then at the expense of another – and I was pretty dark on it – but in retrospect I was glad to have had the break. It helped preserve my sanity and allowed me to start the last week with a fresh eye and clear head. Oh, and the wedding was pretty damn enjoyable too!

The film I couldn’t skip was the highly anticipated The Death of Mr Lazarescu. The film that got bumped from its place was Danis Tanovic’s addition to Kieslowski’s Heaven-Hell-Purgatory cycle, L’Enfer. This precipitated a minor disagreement between me and my lovely wife as we had booked in a date to see the latter, but managed to resolve it. I have every confidence that L’Enfer will do the rounds at our fine, arthouse cinema establishments over the coming year; the same can’t be said for Lazarescu, which I was not going to miss.

My programme this year was fairly diverse and included a large portion of old/classic cinema revisiting the big screen. In past years I’ve wanted to commit more time and resource to the revival screenings but have always erred toward the new when it came to putting money down. This year the temptation of catching the retrospective by highly respected French auteur Maurice Pialat was all it took to make the desired change (even though I had no previous experience with his work). Nothing like the fear of “where the hell is this every going to play again!?” to provide pocketfuls of motivation.

I made it to seven of the ten Pialat features that played: Naked Childhood, Van Gogh, Loulou, Police, To Our Loves, Le Garçu, and Under Satan’s Sun (in that order). I thoroughly enjoyed his films and his style of filmmaking, though there were definitely highlights. The two standouts in this array were his first film, Naked Childhood, and his penultimate biopic, Van Gogh. The former is one of the most perfect screen representations of what it is to be a child. The complexity of feeling, the unsteady mix of innocence and cruelty. This is stirring stuff that avoids the need for ‘cause and effect’ explanations and focuses on simply what it is to be a child in the world.


Van Gogh portrays the artist in the last months of his life, living in the small village of Auvers-sur-Oise, near Paris. Played luminously by Jacques Dutronc, Van Gogh’s celluloid portrait is so startling real and human, you cannot help but be drawn into the beguiling, insistent genius/madness of this unique individual. Pialat’s direction is again commanding but warm. His shots are so aptly framed. This was illustrated to me in the final scene where we see Van Gogh curled up, lying dead on his rented bed. The frame is dominated by the background – a wooden door and a chest of drawers – while the bed occupies the bottom left hand corner; part of it, and the body on it, every so slightly out of shot. Resting in death as in life; not quite comfortable, not quite connected. Perfect.

Pialat’s filmmaking, though firmly ensconced in the cinéma vérité tradition, exudes a sense of warmth and care toward its characters which is atypical of the works of his predecessors and also the likes of the Dardenne brothers who have followed. Two thumbs firmly pointed skyward.

Other classics I made my way to were Jean-Pierre Melville’s The Army of Shadows, Luis Buñuel’s Los Olvidados, and Paul Grimault’s lavishly animated The King and the Mockingbird. These were all poignant and enjoyable viewing experiences, in very different styles and settings, which I’m glad I made the effort to see.

My selection also included a fair share of ‘big name’ films, heavy laden with audience expectation. This is never the best way to see a film; you can’t quite enjoy it as much as when you have heard virtually nothing about it. Fortunately for me my picks, for the most part, at least met, if not exceeded these expectations.

On opening night, The Wind That Shakes the Barley impressed me, but apparently not a noticeable chunk of the audience who got up and walked 15-20 minutes into the film?!? I have long been a Ken Loach fan. I find his handling of social-realist film leaves him in the company of a select few who manage to present the everyday as emotionally charged as it often is, and events, highly dramatic, with the real people who would live them. I think it was, perhaps, this sense of immediacy he creates as events unfold that sent so many punters scrambling for cover. It is easy to overlook a gory action, thriller, or horror scene. It is hard to watch a scene, even a not particularly graphic one, when it feels like it is unfolding in front you.


Rian Johnson’s ‘Teen Noir’ sensation Brick definitely exceeded my expectations. Every aspect of this film is pulled off in a slick, self-assured manner. Johnson manages to take classic film noir and mould it into a fresh new beast – a very similar one, but distinct. On the other hand, Richard Linklater’s adaptation of the Philip K. Dick story of the same name, A Scanner Darkly, firmly fulfilled expectations. The apocalyptic material in a tangible ‘near future’ mirrored current global themes of paranoia and political control. On a slight downside, Robert Downey Jr and Woody Harrelson steal the show with their darkly comic turns as drug induced, surreally paranoid miscreants. Perhaps this is not a bad thing though, as anything that distracts from my natural dislike of post Bill & Ted Keanu is positive. I think the rotoscoping helps as well; it kind of freaks me out seeming to fade between live action and animation. Definitely a film to check out. As is Andrew Bujalski’s Mutual Appreciation. What Naked Childhood is to disaffected children, Mutual Appreciation is to those making the ad hoc journey into adulthood. This film was so closely observed that my friend and I felt like this could have been us and some of our crew a few years ago. The conversation, the feel, the sense of confused anticipation mixed with lazy ambivalence – wonderful.

There were a few comedies on the schedule to lighten the mood; some, in between bouts of vérité depression. Topping the list, depending on your mood or bent, were Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (English, inflated ego, awkward moments comedy), 12:08 East of Bucharest (Romanian deadpan), and Dave Chappelle’s Block Party (kickass political hip-hop meets casually sharp stand-up). All original, well crafted, and genuinely funny.

Back into my bag of psychological head jobs, Lodge Kerrigan’s Keane danced me around the edge of my own sanity for 100 minutes. All the full-screen, extreme close-ups with a hand held camera in the first 45 minutes sent me into a paranoid spin as it sent others scurrying for the exits. Jan Svankmajer got up to his usual tricks in Lunacy, morphing Edgar Allan Poe and the Marquis de Sade into a kind of kitsch Freudian spectacle, replete with animated supermarket meat. Pavel Liska, in the lead role, brought the same kind of mournfully trustful innocence that he did in Sasa Gedeon’s Return of the Idiot in 2000 – what a face! Twelve and Holding won the award for most “Oh God, please, no…” awkward moments. A fine display by some great young talent but the plot suffered from overload as the film couldn’t quite decide if it was more ‘twisting drama’ or ‘life imitating art’.

[As an aside, there did seem to be an awful lot of get-up-and-bugger-off-15-minutes-into-the-film this year. I’ve never seen so much of it before. Maybe it’s the growing popularity of the film festival; more people think taking in a few festival films will be ‘cool’ but have no idea that they ain’t in Kansas (read: Hollywood) anymore? Who knows, but it is somewhat disappointing and a little annoying to have random people holding a loud, unrelated conversation, or getting up and leaving during a film.]


The standout ‘sleepers’ for me kicked off on day two with Police Beat. A beautiful surreal gem, this film is both original and, I think, accessible to a broad audience. The contrast in aesthetic between the protagonist’s inner monologue and occasional connections with the surrounding world was adroitly crafted. (The late) Fabián Bielinsky’s The Aura was another sublimely impressive discovery, delivering more with the mute button on than scores of noisy action film pretenders. Topping my documentary chart was American Cannibal: The Road to Reality. This stab at the oxymoron that is reality TV cuts the viewer as much as it does the industry, but directors Michael Nigro and Perry Grebin produce such a sharp edge and smooth delivery that we don’t even realise our self respect is draining away as we laugh. The Death of Mr Lazarescu. Ok, so this wasn’t really a sleeper; we all expected it would bury us when we read the festival programme write-up. That still doesn’t prepare you for the intensely affecting story of an old man’s un-dramatic journey out of life. Cristi Puiu’s beautifully captured, docu-drama was indeed one of the highlights of this festival and one that will go under too many people’s radar.

There were also one or two low points for me in this festival, as you would expect. Foremost on the wish-I’d-missed-list was Spanish psychological thriller-drama, The Method, which played like a European version of Sunset Beach. The idea wasn’t so bad but the execution?!? Not nearly so bad was Olivier Meyrou’s Beyond Hatred. Some friends found this French documentary illuminating viewing but for me, unfortunately, it made a truly interesting topic somewhat arduous to watch. Korean indie Host and Guest was a great, slightly bizarre, character drama/deadpan comedy which I did enjoy. However, going into my festival run I expected this to be in my top five so was a little disappointed – but only a little. Still one to see.

Of my 39 films there were only two which I could have done without and 37 I am stoked to have seen. That’s a pretty good ratio in my books.

See also:
» Post-Fest Wrap ‘06 #2: Fuzzy Reception
» Post-Fest Wrap ‘06 #3: Film Will Eat Itself




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