Thou shalt not miss this film festival

Noel Vera

Cinemanila 2005, again the single biggest and best event to hit
Manila cinemawise, features yet another cornucopia of riches: the
latest and best films from China, Iran, France, India, Denmark,
among many others. An overview of some of the films offered:

Krzysztof Kieslowski's "Dekalog" (Decalogue, 1988) is a ten-hour
mini-series for Polish television, where each fifty-minute episode
takes off from, or is inspired by, one of the Ten Commandments in
the Catholic or Christian bible. It's a difficult work to describe
because it encompasses so many things: drama and comedy, sensuality
and horror, nobility and base malevolence; what unites all ten
stories is that they mainly take place within an apartment complex
that Kieslowski describes as being "the most beautiful housing
estate in Warsaw," adding (with the kind of rueful irony
characterizing his work) that "it looks pretty awful, so you can
imagine what the others are like." Major characters in one episode
show up in cameos in other episodes; the plot of one episode is
recounted and discussed during a university class on ethics in
another; an enigmatic young man, played by Artur Barcis, appears in
eight of the ten episodes as a homeless man, a university student, a
tram driver, and so on. You can assume that these oddities are
Kieslowski's little jokes, his way of goofing off the way
Michelangelo might goof off, by drawing little doodles in the
margins of the Sistine Chapel's ceiling. It's also his way of
showing how interrelated our lives are, how even the least of us are
part of some bigger picture--in this case, his ten-hour masterwork.

Add to this the variety of visual styles: from grimly realistic (the
bleak outdoors, often featuring an unsunny Polish sky) to vividly
surreal (a Christmas tree toppling onto a taxicab, flooding its
interior with a deep red), from long static shots to handheld
camerawork (to avoid boring his viewers, Kieslowski shot the ten
episodes with nine different cinematographers). If there is a common
image across all ten episodes it's the close-up of the human face--
often side-lit, often caught in a pensive or thoughtful mood, often
held long enough for us to ponder the character's thinking processes
or emotional state, perhaps wonder if we've been given a glimpse
into his soul.

The stories are richly complex, not the least in the way they are
related to the actual commandments. Kieslwoski, an agnostic as well
as an artist, avoids direct correspondence, and part of the
fascination of the series is in the way the episode as it unfolds
forms links to the biblical text, however indirectly (Does the story
illustrate the commandment? Show some unexplored aspect? Criticize
it, perhaps?); you might say Kieslowski is inviting us to winkle out
the implications--not necessarily the moral--of each story, which is
never as simple as it seems, nor is he very helpful in giving us
hints.

The fifth episode, for example, ostensibly about the
commandment "Thou shalt not kill," follows killer and victim until
we know both enough to have our sympathies aroused, then shows the
murder in unblinking detail; then, as if we had not yet as Macbeth
put it "supped full of horrors," we see the killer's incarceration
and eventual execution. It's arguably the most powerful onscreen
condemnation of killing (and by extension capital punishment) ever
made and a high point of the series, but what to make of episode
eight (Thou shalt not bear false witness)? A young woman sits in at
an elderly professor's class on ethics, and tells the story of a six-
year-old Jewish girl fleeing from Nazi persecution; she needs to be
baptized as a condition to finding a hiding place but the godparents
have refused her, condemning her to almost certain death. The young
woman speculates that perhaps the couple refused to 'bear false
witness,' to accept a Jew as a converted Catholic--something that
simply isn't true, as another student points out (anyone baptized is
a true Catholic); later we learn that the young woman attended the
class with an ulterior motive. Who is bearing false witness here--
the Catholic couple? The young woman? The elderly professor, who has
dark secrets of her own? I have my theories, but Kieslowski doesn't
give me any assurances that my thoughts are any truer or more
definitive than anyone else's. Often considered Kieslowski's
crowning achievement, "Dekalog" is I think one of the great works of
world cinema. Thou shalt not miss it.

Other movies: Alejandro Amenabar's "Mar Adentro" (The Sea Inside,
2004) is the true story of Ramon Sampedro, who struggled for thirty
years to win for himself the right to die; Javier Bardem, in one of
the most magnificent performances I've seen in years, suppresses his
considerable physical charisma to play the paralyzed hero. Mamoru
Oshii's "Inosensu: Kôkaku kidôtai" (Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence,
2004), the sequel to his 1995 film is, if anything, even more
complex and beautiful, evoking disturbing images that confuse robot
form and mind with human; creating closed-off plotlines that loop
forever, trapping its characters within. In a more expansive mode,
Katsuhiro Otomo follows up the spectacular but rather
soulless "Akira" (2001) with "Steamboy" (2004), an in a sense more
measured adventure (Otomo seems to have finally found the right
balance between heart and intellect, story and spectacle), about the
dangers of technological advance without a considered and coherent
philosophy; instead of trying to outdo his previous efforts at
realizing a visually stunning future, Otomo goes the opposite
direction, into the past, and envisions an alternate universe where
steam technology has reached its apotheosis (story, spectacle, AND
19th century style--what more can anyone ask?).

Of the Korean Cinema Focus, Kim ki-Duk's "Seom" (The Isle, 2000),
which made such an impression on audiences in both Cinemanila and
the Venice Film Festival (viewers reportedly vomited during one
especially intense scene) is a particularly guilty pleasure. Kim,
like Lars von Trier, or Takashi Miike, or Gaspar Noe or the rest of
what I like to call practitioners of "Shock Cinema," wears his
misogyny on his sleeve; unlike von Trier or Miike or Noe, he seems
(on his good days, anyway, a stretch of which I believe he was
having when making this picture) able to tell a reasonably coherent
story, hanging his scenes that provoke outrage and disgust on a well-
shaped structure like so many Christmas baubles.

The Belgian focus holds many pleasures: Alain Berliner's "Ma vie en
rose" (My Life in Pink, 1997) is about as entertaining and
imaginative a boy's coming-of-age story as you'd like; that it's
also a coming-out-of-the-closet story (with wonderfully chichi
renditions of his pink Barbie-doll fantasies) adds a distinct spin
to the fun. Jaco van Dormael's "Toto le heros" (Toto the Hero,
1991), about a man who feels his birthright had been taken from him
and plans revenge, takes a page from Dennis Potter and weaves
fantasy and reality into a bright pattern. Jean-Pierre and Luc
Dardennes' "La Promesse" (The Promise, 1996) is a spare yet moving
tale about a man and his son who live off the money of illegal
immigrants; in terms of grim realism and spare effort yielding art,
I think it's superior by far to anything dreamt up by the Dogme '95
crowd--may perhaps be the best Dogme '95 film (without actually
being one) ever made.

(For further details on Cinemanila, schedules, and venues, visit
their website at http://www.cinemanila.com.ph. Or join their egroups
at http://movies.groups.yahoo.com/group/cinemanila)

(First published in Businessworld, 8/12/05)

(Comments? Email me at noelbotevera@...)