HIGHLIGHTS OF THE 66^TH VENICE FILM FESTIVAL
Francesca
Great Directors
I’m Glad That My Mother Is Alive
Scheherazade, Tell me a Story  
 

Maybe the most engaging film in the first half of the Venice Film Festival was Scheherazade, Tell me a Story, one of the most sensual films I’ve seen from the Middle East (Caramel included). The sexually direct film, a hit back home in Egypt, also points an accusatory finger at the long-entrenched Mubarak government, where the film’s most insidious (and almost cartoonish) villain is a government economic minister.

Beautiful and adorned in Chanel, Hebba (Mona Zakki) hosts a politically provocative talk show, but under pressure from her equally ambitious husband, who believes her program is curbing his government-appointed career, she tones down her show by focusing more on seemingly innocuous women’s issues, and becomes the Oprah of Egypt. The four episodic tales of her guests, which form the film’s backbone, are rigidly constructed around the film’s thesis that’s all but spelt out in neon lights—all women, no matter what class or how religiously observant, are oppressed—but the stories, especially the centerpiece, are seductive.

That segment, a sly sex comedy of three sisters and one household male retainer, is so beguiling that you’ll forget that, as revealed earlier in the tale, someone will be murdered. In comparison, the inevitable destruction of Hebba’s marriage feels clumsy, with the screenwriter’s fingerprints felt all over the place. However, director Yousry Nasrallah packs every frame with detail, and for 135 minutes, he’s a consistently engaging storyteller. Despite the violence, both emotional and physical, the script cleverly conveys its message with pointed humor.

One of the few films that filmgoers consistently agreed was strong was father and son Claude and Nathan Miller’s strangely erotic Je suis heureux que ma mere soit vivante, which translates as I’m Glad That My Mother Is Alive, which, in the context of the film, emphatically does not have a joyous ring to it. The senior Miller is a master of oh-my-God moments that at first seem to come out of nowhere but have been carefully calibrated (as in A Secret or Betty Fisher and Other Stories), and here there are plenty.

As a teenager, Thomas (Vincent Rottiers) rejected his adopted middle-class parents and secretly searched for his birth mother, who gave him up when he was four years old. She now lives in a nearby suburb, having married and formed another family. Now 18, Thomas finally introduces himself to her, and, with flowers in hand, practically courts her. While he begins spending more time with her and his young half-brother, he lies to his adopted mother, telling her that he’s at his girlfriend’s (which, in a way, he is). Miller narrows down the complexity of Thomas’s emotional volatility and confusion more through many telling moments propelled by actions, big and small, rather than through dialogue—the awkwardly reunited son and mother have no idea how to articulate their incredibly ambiguous relationship.

Director Bobby Paunescu made a strong debut with Francesca, which stylistically follows suit with other recent Romanian indies, with scenes composed of one single take lasting for several minutes and a camera that minimally moves. But unlike so many films that use this real-time approach, you forget the presence of Paunescu’s camera, mostly because of the direct story line and the strong cast.

Its heroine, 30-year-old Francesca (Monica Birladeanu), has saved 2,000 euros to pay a middle man for a caretaking job near Milan. Her boyfriend reassures her that it’s the best decision she could make—to get the hell out of the country and start a new life. What he doesn’t tell her is that he owes an excessive amount of money to loan sharks. (And there’s an additional secret that only he and the audience are privy to.)

Filmed entirely in Romania, the film’s real villain is anti-immigrant Italy. Over and over again, Francesca is warned that she could be treated as a slave, or worse, forced into prostitution, if she immigrates there. The cutting barbs directed at Italian right-winger Alessandra Mussolini, the granddaughter of Il Duce, and the mayor of Verona, who declared his city free of Romanians, received cheers from the well-attended audience.

After the director has laid out Francesa’s dilemma, the film drags a bit before it reaches its resolution. However, Francesca is an exceptional example of a feature film that has the narrative freedom to depict a social issue more viscerally and concretely than a documentary, as in the case with another film at the festival, Il Colore delle Parole (The Color of Words), an amicable and saintly profile of a Cameroon-born poet and teacher who has lived in Italy for 35 years. The film generally describes the Italian resistance to its growing nonwhite population.

Not just for film buffs, Greek-born director Angela Ismailos’s breezy Great Directors is like eavesdropping on the best bits of her candid and casual conversations with her personal favorite filmmakers—David Lynch, Bernardo Bertolucci, Catherine Breillat, among others. Although there are clips from some of the best films of the last 50 years, she and her subjects look forward; all profiled are still active (including Agnes Varda, at age 81).

The film hops from one topic to another—May 1968, Liliana Cavani’s Nazi obsession, the influence of Douglas Sirk—so there will be more than one subject for a viewer to latch onto. Glimpse of little-seen films—like Ken Loach’s mid-60s films for the BBC, Cathy Come Home and Up the Junction, or Bertolucci’s first film—will whet many appetites, and offer plenty of new suggestions for the Netflix queue, if for nothing else but Charlotte Rampling’s nude cavorting in Cavani’s still-controversial The Night Porter. And for gossip, there’s John Sayles calling the historically sanitized Mel Gibson epic The Patriot “a lying piece of shit.” Kent Turner Part one of Venice Film Festival coverage
September 18, 2009