Road Movies that Stay at Home
Wales One World Festival
The eighth Wales One World Film Festival took place in Aberystwyth, Swansea and Cardiff in March 2009 – www.oneworldfilm.com
One of the centrepiece’s was Fernando Eimbcke’s Mexican film Lake Tahoe. Fresh from winning the “Best Film”prize in Berlin, Lake Tahoe follows Juan (Diego Catano), a teenage boy who crashes his car in a small Mexican town and wanders around looking for a mechanic to help him get back on the road. The first workshop carries a huge sign announcing that it is “Now Open” – and is closed. The second is run by a retired technician who, fearing that Juan will rob him, sets his dog on the boy. And so it begins.
Lake Tahoeis a road movie with a difference: it doesn’t go anywhere. The car is grounded and as Juan wanders around seeking assistance, he flits back and forth between the town and his family home. His mother is permanently on the verge of an emotional breakdown and his infant sister is living in a state of neglect. His quest for someone to help him on the road appears to replicate the family’s need for guidance back home. On the road, he comes into contact with a young mother who must balance dreams of rock concerts and glamour with bringing up her baby alone. Then there is the trainee mechanic who is obsessed with the films of Bruce Lee and not averse to bending the law when acquiring car parts. Back at home, the tragedy that has reduced Juan’s family to a state of paralysis is gradually revealed before an uplifting conclusion. Lake Tahoesuggests that a road movie does not have to go anywhere: there is just as much to be learned at home.
The same is true of another Mexican film, Enrique Rivero’s Parque Via. This beautiful film gently explores what happens to the caretaker of a large house in Mexico City when he is asked to leave after thirty years of devoted service. It is also true of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Three Monkeys, a personal drama set on the eve of a general election in Turkey. Late at night, aspiring politician Servet (Ercan Kesal) crashes his car, injuring a pedestrian. Not wanting to miss his chance of election success, Servet persuades his chauffeur Eyül (Yavuz Bingol) to take the blame. After nine months in prison, Eyül is to be rewarded with a handsome pay-off. The crashed car motif again leads into a road movie that doesn’t go anywhere, revealing underlying tensions between Eyül, his wife Hacer and his grown-up son Ismail, and asking complex questions about loyalty, guilt and betrayal.
Three Monkeys is an interesting counterfoil to Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s previous film, Climates, which portrayed the unravelling of a marriage against the backdrop of four distinct regions of Turkey – each with a spectacular and dramatic landscape. Where Climates was expansive and explored what happens to human relationships when placed in different environments, Three Monkeys was static and introspective. This was very much the case throughout Wales One World 2009, with several follow-up works by directors who have featured in the festival in the past offering an opportunity to take stock and assess the directions in which they are moving.
Argentinean director Daniel Burman’s Empty Nest examines the world of cynical playwright Leonardo (Oscar Martinez) and his socialite wife Martha (Cecilia Roth) as they realise that their daughter will soon be old enough to leave home and, if they do not act fast, their family life will be gone forever. Leonardo imagines his daughter emigrating to Israel with her Jewish boyfriend, and in a surreal dreamlike sequence follows them there. Recalling the days of his daughter’s lost childhood, he tells her that she used to love playing on the rug in front of the fireplace. No other family member shares this memory, but the boyfriend weighs in with a diplomatic response of touching sincerity: whatever the reality, all family stories are true. Burman’s earlier film Lost Embrace had portrayed an ex-pat Jewish father finally travelling back to Argentina to meet the grown-up son he had never known. The Empty Nest dramatised exactly the opposite process.
Another director returning to Wales One World was Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Krauze. Krauze’s My Nikifor was one of the unexpected treats of the 2005 event, subtly portraying an ageing folk caricature artist’s confusion in the face of attempts to institutionalise both him and his work through the form of a national cultural prize. His latest film, Saviour Square is a different kind of work. Bartek (Arkadiusz Janiczek) and his wife Beata (Jowita Miondlikowska) have lost everything by investing their savings in a new housing development that goes bankrupt. As a result, they move into the home of Bartek’s mother, where Beata soon finds herself bullied and out-manoeuvred by mother and son. Rather like Lake Tahoeand Parque Via, Saviour Squarepeeps inside a private house and finds domestic tragedy quietly occurring. The mood is bleak and introspective.
Introspective also is Franny Armstrong’s Age of Stupid, a quasi-documentary. Pete Postlethwaite plays an archivist in a futurist world which has been ravaged and destroyed by climate change. Looking back at the historical record for the whole globe, he asks simply: why didn’t we stop it?
There were other documentaries too. Mirtha Ibarra’s Titon: From Havana to Guantanemera is a biopic of the seminal Cuban director Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, whose Memories of Underdevelopment (1968) and Strawberry and Chocolate (1994) were shown as part of a series of films marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Cuban Revolution. Taken as a whole, the films included in Wales One World 2009 provide an opportunity to look at where we have come from, and where we might be going.
Hywel Dix |