What has happened to the main competition?

9. 7. 2010 / Ema Čulík

< Pawel Sala

Mother Theresa of Cats (Matka Teresa od kotów ) (Poland 2010 dir. Paweł Sala ) is supposed to be an exploration of the nature of evil, or the modern Polish family. It tells the story of a family destroyed by a strange young man called Artur. At the start of the film we see that the mother of this family, Theresa, has been killed. (They find her head in a wardrobe.) The rest of the film goes backwards through the previous year and a half. We see Artur persecuting his mother and alienating her from the other son, Marcin, who hasn't been going to school under his brother's influence. Artur also managed to get his father to leave the family and go and live in underground barracks (he worked for the army until recently when his superior recommended that he transfer to the civil department because of the changes that had occurred in him since his return from Iraq.) A contribution to the negative situation is also seen to be the arrival of a lodger, Ewa, a music student, who Teresa is helping by letting her stay with them. Finally, the presence of an entanglement of cats in their flat is explained by the fact that Teresa loves to take in suffering strays.

The blurb for this film claims that it's supposed to examine the state of the family in modern life, and to ask how two boys can be led to decapitate their own mother, especially one who is kind enough to extend her welcome to all sorts of creatures, like felines and music students. However, we shouldn't have to be told what a film is about -- it should speak for itself. This one does not. The actors seem to be trying hard, but they still don't reveal much to us about these characters, who are little more than sketches if anything. The main focus of the film is Artur, who is supposed to be mildly telepathic, able to read thoughts and make minor predictions, as well as bring creatures back to life. (If not people, then definitely cats). I am confused by the combination of supernatural thriller and social drama. Surely if you want to examine social motives, then psychic powers would cancel that out? There is little motivation behind anything in this film, most of all the structure. The backwards view is probably supposed to examine some kind of cause and effect, but because there is no motivation present at all, putting a film back to front is not going to create it.

The next film is opposite in almost every way.. apart from that fact that it was equally disappointing.

Frederic Sojcher >

Hitler à Hollywood (Belgium, France, Italy, 2010 dir. Frédéric Sojcher) is a mockumentary about the life and career of French actress Micheline Presle, who has been appearing on the silver screen for more than seventy years. The film is being 'made' by Maria de Medeiros (whom you may have seen waiting in a motel for Bruce Willis and dreaming of pancakes in Pulp Fiction) and a clunky cameraman who, rather inappropriately, falls in love with his wide-eyed colleague. They start off filming Presle, then end up searching for a long-lost print of her first ever film, Je ne t'aime pas. They get caught up in an international investigation of some organisation Hollywood Hits by a producer called MacBride (who had apparently had talks with Hitler about this) to kill off European cinema so that Hollywood would have no competition. Presle's first ever director, one Luis Aramcheck, was trying to counter this by building his own studio, "Utopia" on Malta. (Because France was occupied, Italy and Spain were fascist, and of course Germany too). The action is interspersed, and followed, by a number of interviews with actors and filmmakers about the possibility of such a conspiracy -- is America really trying to kill European cinema? When the directors are speaking about this, for example Konchalovsky, Kusturica and Angelopoulos -- this is the most interesting part of the film. The story itself is extremely unsatisfying. As a 'mockumentary', the film is not very adventurous. It would have been possible to do any number of things, but the film does not go deeply into the ideas, rather skims along the surface of it.

Sojcher had a number of theoretically good ideas for this film. He wanted to be self-referential and post-ironic by using Hollywood's own techniques to make fun of it: explosions, mysterious spies following the characters, big stars, a love story (totally unexplained and unmotivated, and even though he claims to love her, he leaves her to go off on her own to get blown up. Not very nice.) His use of these Hollywood tools fails to be ironic, however, and ends up just being boring, as they add nothing and are fulfilled with a smaller budget and an uninteresting script. The film is shot in an extremely strange visual style -- Maria and her cameraman, Micheline Presle and Luis Aramcheck are in high-contrast colour, the rest of the film is in monochrome. It looks extremely weird, there is no clear justification for it, and one can see the seams where Maria de Medeiros's bright orange chin meets the black and white sofa behind her.

The main problem with this film is the simplistic and blunt anti-americanism behind it. Perhaps it might be more useful to put more thought into making a powerful and coherent European film than poking fun at America. Their film industry was based on the studio system from the very beginning and was always focussed on entertainment rather than art. Commercial films tend to sell better -- hence why they are called commercial. This film is like a badly-constructed moan, based on a flimsy fantasy of stars and spies.

< Dmitrij Mamulja

The last film, again, was totally different. Another Sky (Drugoe Nebo) (Russia, 2010, Dmitrij Mamulia) tells the story of a father and son who come from the steppe to Moscow to find the boy's mother who had left the family to find herself a better life in the capital. They have great difficulty finding her and supporting themselves. They go to work in a sawmill, both father and son. One day when the father goes on yet another search, he gets a call from their place of work to say that the boy has had an accident (read -- dead). Soon after, he gets a letter from the police saying that they have found his wife. He goes to find her, and they drive away together. But, are they happy? The end.

There is extremely little dialogue in the film and most of the time the father, Ali, is walking from place to place, seeing the underbelly of Moscow and the life of Uzbek immigrants. Everything is shown in long, repetitive scenes, no doubt to show the difficulty of his existence.

Before the film, both Macháček and Arsen Gottlieb, the producer, emphasised the fact that Mamulia is a philosopher, and that hence "this film will not be superficial". This is like a quiz. They've told us that the film has some wonderful meaning, now we should watch it and try to catch what it is. I tried to work out something about futility, the ties of the family, of death of your children, of existence in a big city... There was nothing that would give significance to the whole film. It was just not captivating or moving or thought-provoking. The only thing I felt was upset and annoyance at being made to feel pain at the son's death, when the rest of the film gave me almost nothing, despite all my efforts to find some philsophical gem in it.

This is not to say that all the competition films are bad. There have been a couple which have been quite good, and a couple which have actually been very interesting! But I know that next year I'm probably going to choose some films in other sections, and stop torturing myself with these half-baked bores.

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