Since I’m used to watching an optimum of one film a day, rattling through four in 10 hours is beginning to be a little enervating. Although there’s a certain charm in being forced to make snappy dogmatic judgments before a film’s pleasures or otherwise are swiftly erased to make way for another, it sure would be nice to let something settle for a few hours. All this mental headache has been compounded by the incessant rain and snow that’s neatly coincided with a big gash appearing in the sole of my right shoe, which is turning what would be a quick trip between theatres into a drawn out muggy nightmare. But so it goes, and on to the movies!
The producer of Raya Martin’s Independencia spoke before its screening in the After Victories strand of the festival about how the absence of a substantial Philippine film archive provided the impetus for re-imagining a lost history, to create a picture that fantasizes how a 1940s melodrama might have appeared. The result is a fable set during the American occupation of the Philippines shot in lush black and white, with plainly fake backdrops, theatrical emoting by the actors, and even an insertion of a fake newsreel that abruptly splinters the narrative, which follows three generations of a family as they hide out in a forest hut. Soundtracked by an insistent melancholic score, the bulk of the screen time is devoted to observing the flora and fauna of the beautiful landscape the set designers have created, yet this pictorial obsession with artifice smothers the political urgency the title promises, save for the tragic final shot of a young boy who at least makes some small step towards independence.
Elsewhere, Nicolas Cage provides a towering performance in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call: New Orleans, playing a ludicrously depraved, drug addicted police officer who transforms a run of the mill detective case from shit into gold, erupting in bodily tics and verbal mania as he shuffles through the streets of New Orleans with a chronic back problem. The joys of this wilfully perverse film are generated from the perpetual displacement of meaning through reversals of signification, top and tailing the signifiers of the crime genre to render everything askew.
This is a sequel to Abel Ferrara’s original that Werner Herzog claims not to have seen and a film set in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina that could pretty much have been located anywhere. Cage’s cop continues to rise through the ranks as his activities become increasingly nefarious, joining forces with the people he’s supposed to prosecute, busting the public so he can score a fix of heroin, threatening to cut off oxygen to an innocent old lady, investing every scene with wild, hypnotic rhythms. Shot through with successive jolts of kinetic energy, this film thrillingly nails the experiential alienation of moving through an alien world.
Lastly I caught a burst of sharp materialism from Swedish filmmaker Jesper Ganslandt. The Ape has little aspiration and suffers from a severe paucity of ideas. The handheld camera remains fastened to the protagonist’s face throughout every scene as he wakes up extremely agitated and covered in blood, but nonetheless tries to get on with an ordinary day, even though it’s palpable that something incredibly bad has happened. Taking a cue from Mike Leigh’s methods of filmmaking, lead actor Olle Sarri was unaware of how the plot would develop day to day, placing him in the same state of confusion as the audience. There’s no doubt it provides his performance with some vitality, but the procession of events are so dramatically thin and Ganslandt’s obsession with the slow reveal so one-note that this comes off as a distinctly sub Dardennesian bore, morally and psychologically inert.
