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Part III: The 43rd Annual San Francisco International Film Festival

I’m no expert on Italy per se but  Pietro Germi’s The Birds the Bees and the Italians.(a.k.a Ladies and Gentlemen, 1965), which played at the Festival,  is a  boisterous, exuberant film that plays like a time capsule of 1960s Italian mores and manners. It intertwines three stories about a group of men and women in the Italian town of Treviso duking it out in the battle of the sexes, while trying to maintain their bourgeois facades. The original title is ironically appropros, as these farcical characters are anything but ladies and gentlemen. The movie is delightfully racy and un-P.C. The women are mostly bimbos, harridans or hussys and the men are henpecked, lowbrow brutes. And the heavy hand of the Catholic Church hovers everywhere. This is likely too much for tender-minded audiences, but for the rest, the film has that raucous, blustery energy Italian comedies are famous for, dated or not. The film was co-written by the screenwriting team of Age-Scarpelli and Luciano Vincenzoni who also co-wrote The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

Saturday night brought the sober and beautiful Beau Travail (Beautiful Work). Directed by Claire Denis, it’s a unique, visually stunning retelling of Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, the story of a human angel destroyed by the jealousy and envy he ignites in his commanding officer. Denis, who appeared at the screening, has reset the story inhe contemporary East African desert nation of Djibouti and employed the French Foreign Legion instead of the American Navy.  The film lacks the drama of the original novel (or the 1962 film with Terence Stamp and Robert Ryan) and focuses more on the homoerotic physicality of its characters against the backdrop of the beautiful and dangerous desert environment. It was shot on a tiny budget, but every penny is up there. Agnes Godard’s cinematography is stunningly sharp and clear, but without filters, reflectors or extra lighting.  Nature provided everything but camera and highspeed film. During the Q&A session afterwards Denis said she tried to avoid “landscape” cinematography, but it’s to no avail: the desert’s violent beauty muscles its way in. Though Beau Travail may be short on drama, it’s definitely worth a look.

Every year, the Festival holds a special members-only sneak preview screening. This year it was Orpheu, a new adaptation of the tragic Orpheus myth by director Carlos Diegues (Bye Bye Brazil), which has been previously adapted by Jean Cocteau (1950) and as Black Orpheus (1961), which was, like this film, set during Rio de Janiero’s Carnaval.  Diegues’ new version is an eye-filling weepy, broad and melodramatic, full of grand passion and fantastic visuals. Also for non-Brazilians, if you’ve ever had trouble grasping what Carnaval is, you’ll get a good idea of it here.

Up at the Villa (opening in theaters this week) is adapted from a Somerset Maugham novella that resembles his famous story The Letter, which became a Bette Davis 1940 classic.  Here, it’s Kristin Scott-Thomas who gets snagged in an entertaining web of scandal, while living la dolce vita in Florence, Italy on the eve of WW II.  It’s an absorbing and steely look at life among the wealthy and indolent and what happens when one of them cavorts with someone beneath their station.  Thomas, Anne Bancroft, James Fox, Jeremy Davies (as the unlucky lower class miscreant) and Derek Jacobi are all excellent, but Sean Penn is seriously miscast as a suavely (!?) seedy American who gets more involved with the leading lady than she’d like. Director Philip Haas (Angels and Insects), who appeared at the screening, insists that he and his wife and creative partner Belinda Haas, wanted Penn right from the start. While he certainly does an excellent job considering, I find Penn in a tuxedo as credible as Cary Grant in buckskins.

I saw more Festival movies this year than previously. That of course ups the odds of seeing disappointing films. Besides the trailer for the Festival sponsors, there were two of those. The first, Mask of Desire, was a beautifully photographed, but painfully overwrought film, and the first to officially come from Nepal.  It tells a fascinating story about a young couple’s tragic encounter with a medium who tries to save them and her own split soul at the same time. Unfortunately, the acting is so bad it all falls down. It unintentionally, I’m sure, plays like one of those international soap operas we see on cable. Call this one an unfortunate misfire. Better luck next time out for Nepalese filmmakers.

Probably the worst experience of all was Farewell, Home Sweet Home, a French production by 20-year Russian expatriate filmmaker Otar Iosselani. Before the screening Festival director Peter Scarlet told us that among Iosselani’s influences was Jacques Tati. So informed, my heart slumped over for the rest of the evening. Yes, back to the bad old days of French comedy, when mired under the influence of Monsieur Tati and Jerry Lewis, and unable to get a handle on what made Laurel and Hardy tick, French comedies couldn’t get a smirk out of a drunken circus clown.  (Though legend has it, they got one out of James Dean, who allegedly had to be carried out of a Tati movie in hysterics).  In Farewell, the director has lightly strung together a series of vignettes in which the funniest moments belong to a pet stork.  Otherwise, I have the usual gripes: a  listless series of admittedly funny ideas falling flat because they’re executed with no spirit or timing.  The film is a tribute to a vanished Paris of the cinematic imagination. It’s vanishing out my memory right now.