Darius Silenas and Arvydas Dapšys in The Visitor
“There are so many promising debut features, then all those filmmakers go on to be jury members.” A new acquaintance was lamenting the dearth of directors under 40 with distinct styles and durable careers; I laughed, but it was a fair synopsis of a grim landscape. Per Wallace Stevens, the imagination may always be at the end of an era, but at this particular moment imagination and reality seem truly as one. Still, I’m in my unlikely second act as an (aspirational) optimist seeking reasons to be cheerful, and film festivals can help keep me in that headspace—at least we can see some promising debuts?
A world premiere highlight at this year’s Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, Vytautas Katkus’s first feature The Visitor follows a decade-plus of shorts; the last of those, 2022’s Cherries, ends with one of the only acts of levitation that doesn’t seem like an attempt to invoke Tarkovsky but instead something more low-stakes inexplicable. The Visitor is similarly light on its tonal feet; the barebones premise has Danielius (Darius Silenas) temporarily leaving his Norwegian wife and child and dragging a rolling suitcase across town to his childhood apartment, where he intends to stay until he can sell it off. Danielius’s relocation sets the film’s unhurriedly curious tone as insert shots observe the curiosities he passes: a street busker in a Mickey Mouse mask playing an ad hoc steel drum, a pre-teen boy punching a park water fountain’s upward spray, an animatronic brontosaurus bobbing its head over all of them.
As his own 16mm DP, Katkus has a terrific eye for both static shots and slow lateral dollies but isn’t afraid to deploy the occasional rapid-fire zoom as necessary to let performers spontaneously reset the frame. I spotted zero non-source lighting, befitting a narrative with a semi-documentary feel emanating from its largely nonprofessional cast, many of whom are camera grips, editors (lead performer Silenas) or other filmworkers. Danielius initially registers as the kind of deadpan sadsack that, in a more stock arthouse movie, would sit, stare, sulk and nothing else; one of Visitor’s many little surprises is that he and other unlikely-looking men are enthusiastic dancers when the opportunity arises. The last 20 minutes are a late-breaking shift towards the overtly eccentric, including a few musical numbers; up to then, the film is determinedly lowkey in a more familiar register, illustrating of the restorative effects of limited solitude, a theme directly articulated when Danielius tells the story of how Marvin Gaye wrote “Sexual Healing” after a period of drying out and regaining equilibrium in Ostend. The song is both discussed and heard; if you can afford to license Gaye for your first time out, maybe there’s a future after all.
Katkus shared an ex aequo Best Director prize with Nathan Ambrosioni, who’s all of 25 (26 next month!) and already on his third feature. His previous film Toni, en Famille was built around Virginie Efira, while Out of Love leverages the star power of Call My Agent’s Camille Cottin. The English label is generic, while the French title Les Enfants vont Bien (“The children are fine”) is a more appositely heavy-handed fit for a film about young siblings Gaspard (Manoâ Varvat) and Margot (Nina Birman) abandoned by their single mother Suzanne (pop singer-songwriter Juliette Armanet, whose first-time star vehicle Leave One Day opened this year’s Cannes; her role here is effectively a cameo, but she still manages to sing a little before disappearing). The kids are abruptly left with Suzanne’s sister Jeanne (Cottin), who broke up with Nicole (Monia Chokri), her previous partner of 12 years, in part because of a disagreement over wanting kids—the latter wanted them, the former didn’t. It’s a measure of Ambrosioni’s skill (in the “invisible style is the best style” mode) that Jeanne’s narratively inevitable unbending towards her undesired wards doesn’t come across as purely mechanical.
Out of Love’s most distinctive plot points have to do with the finer points of mind-numbing French bureaucracy. How do you enroll children in school when they don’t have a custodian with official parental authority to fill out the paperwork for them? They’re required to attend school, but how is that bureaucratically possible? But overall, the film is a tearjerker semi-disguised as a nuanced psychological drama; Ambrosioni hits a few narrative beats repeatedly to diminishing effect, but again, he’s 25. I’m not the target audience for this kind of safely-executed middlebrow drama with fine performances all round—but if I were in acquisitions for Sony Pictures Classics or Music Box Films I’d be all over it, and Ambrosioni is 100% going to take one of the French slots in Cannes Competition within the next ten years.
A special jury mention went to Kateřina Falbrová, the (promising debut) star of Broken Voices, which in all likelihood will be the Czech Republic’s Academy submission this year for Best International Feature. Based on the abuse of 49 girls in the Bambini Praga choir from 1984 to 2004 by their conductor, Bohumil Kulínský, writer-director Ondrej Provaznik’s case study of one such victimization plants itself in the mid-’90s and, unusually, delays explicitly discussing or depicting any violation until ten minutes before the end. A whole third act that might be expected—legal fallout, punishment—is missing, denying audiences the soft landing of false catharsis and resolved trauma. Instead, Provaznik introduces signs of baretly articulated unease slowly but never lets them primarily drive the narrative until the very end.
Up to that point, Broken Voices is an absorbing dive into the esoteric rituals of girls’ choirs, whose customs are as strange and specific as those of any hermetic society. The production design and costumes provide a dead-on mid-’90s evocation, within which the default-handheld camera bobs around 13-year-old Karolina (Falbrová) and her 15-year-old sister Lucie (Maya Kintera). Both are in the Cantinella choir led by revered and fearsome conductor Vit Macha (Juraj Loj), whose verbal abuse of underperforming singers (“Do you have air between your ears?”) and power games while whittling down 30 girls to the final 20 that will go on an American tour are accepted as the realm of authority and genius. The girls make a game of counting how many times Macha’s gaze lands upon them for longer than three seconds and clearly understand his interest; escalation from accepted forms of abuse to less-tolerable kinds is a matter of degrees, not actual difference.
João Rosas’s first narrative feature The Luminous Life builds out characters he’s been writing and following over three shorts since age 12 (he’s also previously made a nonfiction feature). Luminous’s lynchpin is Nicolau (Francisco Melo)—first encountered in 2012’s Entrecampos, now a very self-serious 24-year-old far more likely to decline a drink than take one, the better to return home alone to The Brothers Karamazov on his bedside table. Crossing the line between sobriety and outright gloom, Nicolau is a year out from a break-up he thinks has broken his heart for life and unable to commit to a job or non-renumerative passion. The loose plot follows him as he comes unstuck—moving out from his parents’ house, getting a job at a stationary outlet that doubles as a bookstore with only three regulars, trying to nudge his band into finally playing their first show after months of seemingly fruitless rehearsals.
Working in a recognizable cinephile traditionalist lane, Rosas frames two people sitting by a cafe window or wall in the Rohmer-to-Hong lineage and finds plot excuses to have multiple scenes unfold at the Cinemateca Portuguesa. He’s certainly not afraid to show his reference points: as Nicolau passively stalks a woman who’s a dead ringer for his ex, he wanders the city aimlessly a la a pointed insert shot (from the Cinemetaca’s monthly program) of Four Nights of a Dreamer, and later dresses up in a Santa suit at his boss’s request, invoking Eustache via Santa Claus has Blue Eyes. But the movie (which premiered at IndieLisboa) is made now and displays more self-awareness about its gender politics than those reference points indicate, with Nicolau’s former teacher strongly denouncing “romanticism that’s dated, sexist, badly disguised.” Perhaps the film’s greatest pleasure is spending time with 24-year-olds who read books older than themselves and don’t pheremonally emit the desire to either produce or stream content, maintaining continuity with a form of civilization that I recognize and which it seems like every market force around me is rapidly trying to force into obsolescence. (Yes, I know they’re just grad students and will always be with us.)
All these films were in the main competition Crystal Globe section, with which I had better luck than the Proxima slate, the festival’s version of “the slate where we put the edgier, artier projects.” While I saw some dispiriting work from that side, it also contained my other world premiere highlight, Mahde Hasan’s Sand City. Said highlight status comes with several asterisks: where The Visitor and The Luminous Life are all of one accomplished piece, Sand City is a film of great visual accomplishment and several moments of sheerly goofy misjudgment, notably the cliche thematic precis of the first chapter title (“two lost souls in a metropolis”), which makes it seem like we’re about to watch Lost in Translation (Bangladesh Redux), and a very regrettable deployment of that ultimate 21st century arthouse musical cliche, “Spiegel im Spiegel.” Whoever is licensing Arvo Pärt’s work would be saving filmmakers from themselves by making this impossible to use for less than $5 million.
Sand City is, nonetheless, a promising (ulp) debut. From the very first image of laborers transporting sand from a boat onto land, Hasan and DP Mathieu Giombini establish their precise command of the academy ratio in a master shot arthouse mode. Giombini cites Pedro Costa and David Lynch as visual reference points, which, sure, but the dominant presiding spirit is absolutely Tsai Ming-liang. Structurally, the near-intersection but ultimate disconnect between the two main characters—Emma (Victoria Chakma), an aboriginal, white-collar worker preparing to leave the country, and Hasan (Mostafa Monwar), a grunt-level glass factory laborer—isn’t far off from Vive L’Amour; visually, giganticist shots of Dhaka, especially traffic streaming under elevated highway tracks, are adjacent to Stray Dogs. The starting points could obviously be a lot worse, and Sand City differentiates itself via the city of Dhaka (not yet overexposed in the arthouse realm) and some of the specific locations therein, like the mega-sized glass factory Hasan works at. Mountains of crushed glass and sand are constant attractions, and the film is adroit at exploiting scalar differences in its under-construction landscapes.
Sourced from last year’s Tokyo International Film Festival, Katarína Gramatová’s Promise, I’ll Be Fine was shot over the course of a year in Utekáč, which opening titles identify as located in one of Slovakia’s “Hunger Valleys.” Grim! But the film is a spritely piece of work, whose frequently moving camera renders spectacular kinetic views of mopeds racing through imposing forests. Over the course of a summer vacation timline, an initially loose plot eventually tightens a narrative-dilemma-noose around 15-year-old Enrique (Michal Zachenský). When he isn’t dicking around with a motley crew of three other feckless tweens, Enrique’s taking care of elderly Austrians relocated to the village by his mother Martina (Eva Mores), running groceries and delivering their mail. Mom is in Austria eking out a meager living—or so she says, as villagers gossip that Martina’s actually up to predatory financial transactions. Where is she sourcing all these elderly Teutons from anyway?
The film takes its time ramping up to a parent-vs.-child showdown; en route, there’s a lot of teens hanging out and eating pizza while observing/mocking the villagers around them. (“We’re so mean,” one admits.) This is firmly in the “hybrid documentary” realm, with many passing characters who serve as stand-alone anecdotes rather than on-task illustrations of a theme, like an old man who sings a traditional hunting song and shows off his knife in a fine display of bucolic eccentricity. The narrative dilemma, once it takes over from the group portrait, is absorbingly unsentimental, building to a confrontation where Martina feebly protests, “I’m your mother, I’d never do you any harm”—a statement met with appropriate skepticism.
Before the lineup proper was announced, a strong draw for this year’s edition was a retrospective dedicated to John Garfield, a figure whose political timeliness is clear: after refusing to name names before HUAC, the performer’s career was ruined and he died of a heart attack shortly after at age 39. (Cf. Cyril Connolly: “Whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first call promising.”) We are surely on the cusp of multiple at-least-attempted blacklists in the vein of Melissa Barrera, who was dismissed from the cast of Scream VII after its production company spuriously conflated her support for Palestine with anti-Semitism. Karel Och, KVIFF’s artistic director since 2010, says the timing is a coincidence; he’s been trying to do a Garfield retro since 2013 and “foremost, the intention for this is aesthetic and historical, to tell people in my country and in Central Europe who have no clue who he was that this guy was here before Marlon Brando and before James Dean, and he was the first method actor.”
An unexpected peak here was 1939’s Dust Be My Destiny—unexpected in part because it was directed by journeymen’s journeyman Lewis Seiler, who I’ve never heard even the most old-school autuerist try to make the case for as a reclaimable subject for further investigation. Some “genius of the system” virtues include typically breathtaking black-and-white cinematography by James Wong Howe, whose opening rendering of trainyards at night could be spliced right into The Man from London, and a script (mostly) by Robert Rossen of such dialogue pungency that it sometimes rises to Sweet Smell of Success levels of acridness. But undeniably a lot of the movie’s force is political. Both Garfield and Rossen were victims of HUAC in different ways (after initially refusing to testify, a desperate-to-work-again Rossen relented and named 57 names), but their blacklisting probably had as much to do with their opposition to the studio system as their politics (Rossen was a writers’ union organizer; Garfield started his own production company). A simultaneously premature and prescient joint bitterness fuels Dust, which begins with Joe Bell (Garfield) being released from prison after serving 16 months for a murder he didn’t commit when the real culprit is apprehended. Bell re-enters society with an implacable chip on his shoulder and is promptly put back in jail, this time for the crimes of being a “vagrant” and hitching a freight train ride. Then as now, the unhoused and unemployed are criminalized for both and immediately fed into a carceral system run by bullies.
A series of melodramatic contrivances place Joe and his newfound love Mabel (Priscilla Lane, in one of her four pairings with Garfield) on the run for another crime he didn’t commit. Every authority figure they encounter is either priggish or a monster, while every kindness they receive comes from a cross-section of the dispossessed. In the category of manual laborers who provide essential services for too little pay, help comes from Pop (Charley Grapewin)—a brakeman who refuses to narc out stowaways, for which he’s threatened with job termination—and a milkman (Garry Owen) who gives the on-the-run couple a free bottle. A swell guy, Mabel says; anyone who gets up that early is generally a swell guy, Joe responds. More assistance comes from immigrants: diner owner Nick (actual Sicilian Henry Armetta), who wants to pay forward the help he got upon first arriving, and a deli owner (Austro-Hungarian Ferike Boros) who offers to feed Joe unprompted. The final and most significant aid comes from a representative of the enemy of the people, newspaper editor Michael Leonard (Alan Hale). It’s no surprise that there’s a studio-imposed happy ending (which Rossen refused to write) instead of the original fatalistic one, which tested badly. That barely dilutes the film’s righteous anger, which peaks at a trial at which Joe says that the jury is not composed of his peers, but of stolid middle-class citizens who say only one thing when they see someone like him: “Go back to where you came from.” And so, reluctantly, I did.
