A Puzzle Well Worth Solving

There is a wonderfully odd little moment in Natalia Smirnoff’s debut feature, Puzzle, currently playing at the IFC Center. The film’s protagonist, a 50-year-old housewife Maria (Maria Onetto) is on the telephone with one of the other characters. Smirnoff has her framed loosely in a medium shot, holding the phone and talking animatedly. She tells the unseen person on the other end of the phone that she needs to look up the answer to her interlocutor’s question; she walks out of frame, we can hear her faintly in an adjoining room but otherwise there is silence for several seconds, perhaps as many as 20 or 30, then she comes back into the frame and continues the conversation.

It’s a wonderfully casual moment that feels unscripted and unrehearsed, but lived in, and that underlines the great strength not only of Smirnoff’s delightful film, but of much of the Argentine New Wave of the past decade. Like the directors she has worked for – Pablo Trapero, Lucrecia Martel, Alejandro Agresti, among others – Smirnoff’s film emphasizes a splendid combination of spontaneity, economy of means and energy. One could add Daniel Burman, Diego Lerman and Martin Rejtman for their quirky sense of humor, slightly off-kilter rhythms and gift for understatement. Maybe it has something to do with growing up in a country that has seen so much turbulence and insanity in the past fifty years . . . .

The premise of Puzzle is simple and at first glance unpromising. Having turned fifty at the outset of the film Maria is clearly the backbone of her family, the one who keeps the clocks ticking. Her husband and she seem to have a very loving relationship; their two college-age kids are amiable, if a trifle selfish, but one sense that is just a phase they will outgrow. But something is lacking. Among the many gifts she receives at the birthday party is a large jigsaw puzzle. Something about engages her and she sits down to assemble it. And she does so with remarkable alacrity. What can be done with this newly discovered talent? She answers a flier seeking a partner for puzzle contests and find herself working with a rather odd, reclusive man of wealth, Roberto (Arturo Goetz, a Burman regular).

One can easily imagine what an American filmmaker would make of this material today. We would have yet another treacly comedy-drama (i.e., a film that fails as both), with the tedious Sandra Bullock or some other supermarket-magazine bait finding her true vocation and – god help us – true love in the puzzle world. Happily, Smirnoff treats the material with a lovely balance of detachment and dry humor that allows it to breathe, and a formal elegance that fits the film’s title nicely. She shies away from unnecessary melodrama, but lets Maria's character explore possibilities in a very real sense. Puzzle is a charming film that never strains for feeling but finds it naturally in the everyday ordinariness of its characters. As a first feature it shows great promise but more important than that, it is a genuine low-key pleasure to watch.

Major Birthday Greetings

This week marks the 50th anniversary of the founding of Amnesty International. I cannot imagine a more profoundly important milestone in human history in my lifetime. Forget about men walking on the moon or the Mets winning the 1969 World Series; in the larger scheme of things, one can honestly point to Amnesty as the direct spur to the pro-democracy revolutions of 1989 and of this spring, the entire shift towards greater attention to human rights as a factor in foreign policy, even if only as lip service. And I can't think of another group that so totally embodies the work of the NGO as a positive force for good in the world.

Over the years, I have come to believe that the basic rights enunciated in the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights are the bedrock on which any decent political system must be built. When all the other certainties in my political thinking eroded with time, those principles still stand. And Amnesty has been working for them for almost my entire life.

Go here and join the celebration.

A Little Quick Housekeeping

Two items that may be of interest:

First, my piece on the Gold Coast International Film Festival is here, as previously promised.

Second, the latest on Jafar Panahi -- he's not just a very talented filmmaker, he's also a damned clever one. His new film, This Is Not a Movie, made its debut at Cannes under most unusual circumstances. You can read about it in The Guardian here.

Another Film Festival?

Does the New York area really need another film festival? Personally, my first instinct would be to answer in the negative, but when my editor at Jewish Week asked me to do a little looking into the 1st annual Gold Coast International Film Festival, which opens on June 1 on the North Shore of Long Island, not all that far from where I wrote my first published film criticism 40 years ago, I felt at the very least an atavistic need to check it out. If there had been a film festival within easy driving distance when I was in high school . . . I might still be in high school.

I filed the story a couple of hours ago and will link to it when it's up on the JWeek website, but let me say a few things in defense of this new festival, as I'm sure that most of you will be as skeptical as I was. First, keep in mind that although Long Island already hosts several film festivals but, as my wife -- an Island native herself -- observes, it's called Long Island for a reason. It's 150 miles long. I can't picture driving from New York City to Albany to see a movie (unless someone was paying me an exorbitant sum). Second, the demographics of the area around Great Neck and North Hempstead are very different from the target audiences of the other LI festivals anyway.

But the real defense of this festival is its programming, which is highly intelligent, featuring a deft mixture of documentary and fiction, foreign and American independent.They have stayed away from the really obvious, nausea-inducing "audience" movies, but there are numerous films on their schedule that are genuinely entertaining, and more than a few that are challenging. Of the four they are showing that I have written about, three are excellent -- Dover Kosashvili's Infiltration, Yoav Potash's Crime After Crime and the criminally over-looked Iranian film Tehroun, by Nader T. Homayoun -- and the fourth, Just Like Us by Ahmed Ahmed, is decidedly amiable. And although several of the films on the schedule have played in other New York festivals and other venues, there is nothing here that could remotely be called over-exposed.

I'm told that the organizers of the festival have some fairly detailed transportation arrangements worked out and, as someone who commuted on the Long Island Rail Road for four years of college, I can tell you that it's not that hard to get out to this part of the island. Check out their website (the link above will take you there), and give it a thought.

Holding Pattern

Yes, I have little to say about movies this week. Or, more truthfully, most of the stuff I've seen hasn't opened yet.

Some folks, however, get to immerse themselves by going to Cannes (Cinema? You're soaking in it.) Michael Giltz, friend, colleague and fellow Ira voter, is one such happy fellow. He covered the big festival by the beach for the Huffington Post, and you can read his wrap-up, which includes a list of all the prizes (including best canine -- who knew?) and links to all his columns from the event, right here.

One film that I did see and can comment on is actually 69 years old. Alberto Cavalcanti, who surely had one of the most unusual career paths in film history, made a truly bizarre thriller during his lengthy stop in England. Although he is best known for Dead of Night, you could make a strong case for his anti-Nazi film Went the Day Well?, currently in revival in a new 35mm print at Film Forum. After a brief framing device that is, in its own casual, understated way, rather unsettling, the film quickly moves from being one of those Ealing village comedies, filled to the brim with lovable eccentrics, to a dark and violent wartime thriller with that remote village suddenly under siege from Nazi paratroopers disguised as English soldiers on manuevers. Adapted from an obscure Graham Greene story, the film is loaded with stalwart English character players on both sides of the battle (David Farrar, a personal favorite of mine, is impressively nasty as the German second-in-command, a dry run for his equally sinister good guys in Powell/Pressburger classics). Cavalcanti creates a genuinely unnerving tension between the bland surface of the community and its seething underside, and when that tension bursts out in real violence, it feels more like Peckinpah than Ealing. A fascinating piece of history that transcends mere nostalgia through sheer blunt force. It will be there through June 2.

Taiwan: The Future Secured

With Edward Yang's death in 2007 and the comparative silence of Tsai Ming-Liang and Hou Hsiao-Hsien (although in Tsai's case, it's not so much silence as the lack of interest by US distributors), it was inevitable that we should start wondering where the next great Taiwanese director is coming from. National film cultures go through lulls and streaks, like home-run hitters and EPL strikers. Of course, since so few foreign films find their way to the States (okay, it's a lot better in NYC, among other places), there is no accurate way of gauging the actual state of a film industry, short of moving there, or spending many, many hours in the region's film festivals. For those of us who actually have to work for a living, those are not viable options.

Happily -- again, in NYC -- we have the Film Society of Lincoln Center, BAM Cinemathek and so on, and in the case of Taiwan, the FSLC is doing yeoman service with an excellent series, currently in midstream, that offers not only a few of the obvious names like Yang, Hou and Tsai, but also some all-but-forgotten delights, from the acrobatic martial arts cinema of King Hu (A Touch of Zen), to the politically tinged farce of Stan Lai's The Peach Blossom Land, an unjustly neglected work that played ND/NF in the early '90s but never found a distributor.

But what about contemporary filmmakers? On the strength of his second feature, The Fourth Portrait, I'd say that Chung Mong-Hong has a good chance to be the next major voice from the little island. This tale of an 10-year-old boy who suddenly loses his father and must return to the ome of his estranged ex-hooker mother is a sober piece of neo-realism reminiscent of early Hou, but with a mathematical precision that undercuts the film's potential for treacly melodrama. Chung's approach to the material is satisfyingly cerebral, but the heat generated by his actors, especially the preternaturally self-possessed Bi Xiao-hai as the boy, brings the film's emotional temperature up a few notches. It's an excellent formula, cool director meets hot cast, to put it in McCluhanesque terms. The film is a bit langorous in the middle, but that doesn't hurt it one bit. Indeed, there are moments when one wishes Chung had taken his time even more. At any rate, if he's an example of what is going on in the Taiwanese film industry, the future of this small but powerful film culture is in good hands.

The Tragedy in Iran Goes On

Jafar Panahi and Mohammed Rasoulof are both in prison in their native Iran for opposing the Ahmedinejad regime, but their work continues. Each of the pair has a new film playing at the Cannes Film Festival this month. The titles are depressingly suggestive, "Goodbye" from Rasoulof and "This Is Not a Film" from Panahi. I cannot stress enough the necessity for anyone concerned with cinema -- or humanity -- to publicly express their support for these men. In the meantime, you can read a bit more about the new films here. And there are petitions available on-line, and Facebook pages for each of them. Panahi's is here, Rasoulof's here.