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Seattle's International Film Festival: Part 6

SIFF Day 10 – Getting Creepy, Seeing Rouge and Finding a Happy Shade of Blue

By Sara M. Fetters.

Kiyoshi Crazy

For the last three years, the Seattle International Film Festival has honored a select few directors from around the world as “Emerging Masters.” Past artists recognized have included Germany’s Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run), France’s Erick Zonca (The Dreamlife of Angels) and England’s Michael Winterbottom (The Claim, Wonderland).  This year’s talented auteurs: Poland’s Jerzy Stuhr, Japan’s Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Italy’s Ricky Tognazzi and Argentina’s Marcel Piñeyro. If Stuhr and Kurosawa are any indication, this is one extremely talented group well worth recognizing.

At this point, it’s fairly clear what I think of Stuhr and his two films, A Week in the Life of Man and The Big Animal, so let me focus the attention on SIFF’s second “Emerging Master”: Kiyoshi Kurosawa. I managed a short interview with the director after Friday’s screening of his 2000 macabre suspense thriller, Séance. The film is a twisty adaptation of Mark McShane’s novel Séance on a Wet Afternoon concerning a psychic, her sound engineer husband, a kidnapped child and ghostly spirits. Quite frankly, the flick creeped me out. I spent a great deal of the night staring at the closet door, waiting for it to open ominously.

Being a columnist for an Internet movie site, I was only allowed a few brief moments with Kurosawa. I won’t complain, though, for any time alone with an “Emerging Master” should be relished.

Both of Kurosawa’s films being screened at SIFF, Séance and his 1997 horror tale Cure, appear to be pretty straight forward genre thrillers on the surface. Yet, the director continually subverts the typical conventions of these genres in a way that keeps the audience continually off balance and unsettled. The director spoke to this, saying, “I’ve always believed that as film remains an art form with time restrictions, [movies] typically running 90 to 120 minutes, we have a great deal to learn about genre conventions that help us tell a story. Certainly, you can call any film of any length a film, and with Hollywood movies you seem to be typically running [well] past two hours, but 90 to 120 minutes seems to be the norm and as such I will rely on genre to tell stories.

“But the old ploy of looking at a ‘Clint Eastwood’ type and know all about the character and the genre does not work in Japan today. I make films in Japan and we can look far and wide but, no matter how interested I may be in finding one, we’ll never find a ‘Clint Eastwood.’ For me, film is most interesting and compelling when it shows life before our eyes. In order to portray Tokyo of today, I show the inner landscapes to keep my characters compelling, using genre as a device to help frame them.”

Séance plays in many ways like Robert Wise’s classic black and white adaptation of The Haunting. It is subtly terrifying from frame to frame, with sound and light causing more queasy apprehension than the actual presence of anything supernatural. “It is a ghost story, but not a ghost story with the ghost doing anything in particular,” said Kurosawa. “It does not kill or throw knives or anything. Personally, I find a ghost that does nothing absolutely terrifying. Hopefully the audience will feel the same. If they don’t, then they [can] at least get a good laugh.

“I wanted to try and have an experiment, an experiment where death is not portrayed. You have a tender moment, a thunderclap and then the moment where [the main characters] knew [someone] was dead. I portray this death off screen, so in that sense it is up to the audience to decide what has happened; where has the couple crossed the line of average citizen and a criminal.”

The result is particularly discomfiting, and Séance achieves a hallucinatory brilliance in tone and structure that is mesmerizing. Was this level of quality evident in the film’s shoot? “We shot this film in two weeks” laughed the director. “I’ve never gone into a film without a budget constraint, but I do not believe that money buys freedom or artistic expressionment. It is a question of how you use the time, quality not quantity. For a 90 minutes picture, two weeks is plenty for me.”

Can-Can Cacophony

Almost everyone I know attending SIFF this year, at least those of us unable to get into a press screening, took a break from the festival to attend a matinee showing of Baz Luhrmann’s hyper-kinetic musical masterpiece Moulin Rouge.  I’m not going to burden reader’s with another review of the film, you can read Angelo’s take on the film here, let me just say that this over-the-top music tour de force is the love-it-or-hate-it movie going experience of the year.

Personally, I found it a sublime re-imagining of classic Hollywood move musicals; particularly Vincente Minnelli’s The Pirate and The Band Wagon. Like in those films, especially the Judy Garland/Gene Kelly The Pirate, Rouge fuses modern music, dance and vibrant color into a period stranded romance. Granted, while Minnelli’s camera could never be accused of being stationary, it’s movements were downright anemic in regards to Luhrmann’s hyperactive – almost headache inducing – approach to storytelling. For me the ploy works (especially the “El Tango de Roxanne” number) and while I’m not going to say Luhrmann’s approach is going to reawaken musicals as Hollywood standard for storytelling, Moulin Rouge kept me gleefully entertained and fondly reminiscent of a style of cinema seemingly forgotten.

Happily Blue

As far as I know, writer/director Jan Egleson has not made a feature film since 1990’s Michael Caine black comedy, A Shock to the System. He resurfaced at SIFF Friday night for the Seattle premier of his recent film The Blue Diner along with three members of the film’s cast. If Diner is any indication, the simple fact is that Egleson needs to work more often because cinema is at a loss without him.  That might be a slight exaggeration, we aren’t talking about Terrance Malick after all, but The Blue Diner is so well done it would be a shame to have him take another decade between projects.

The film is about young, Puerto Rican Elena (Lisa Vidal) who has a small stroke completely erasing her knowledge of Spanish, her first language and a vital link to her own heritage. Egleson’s and co-writer Natatcha Estébanez have fashioned a universal tale about culture, memories, family, love, loss and the true sense of self. A gem, for some insane reason Diner has yet to find a U.S. distributor due to fears that the film is too ethnic a won’t play to a broad audience. During a brief Q&A directly after the film, Egleson, Vidal, José Yenque (who plays an artist with eyes on Elena) and William Marquez (playing the owner of the title restaurant) addressed these and other questions.

“I’ve had a longtime interest in memory and culture,” said Egleson. “Could you tell a story about culture if language disappeared? That was the question Natacha and I set out to answer.”

“This is actually the first major American film festival we’ve been at,” said Vidal, a regular on TV’s The District and Third Watch.  “We’ve always felt this was a universal film, not a “Latino” film.  [Diner] speaks to many audiences, which makes [Seattle] the perfect audience for the film.  Seattle has always been a city known for its diversity and love of film.”

And how did the actress go about preparing for a role in which she would have to lose a part of her own culture?  “Well, I was born and raised in New York, so keeping my [Spanish] language was very important. Having [to lose] that was very interesting to me. How do you prepare?  What do you do? It was really hard. Finally I decided that whenever anyone spoke English to me I would hear only Chinese. During the film, I transferred that to Spanish.”

“We watched tapes of people with this sort of Aphasia and saw the blank, horrified look on their faces before we shot the film and while we were writing the script,” added Egleson. “Lisa just nailed that. It was creepy.”

“This is an American film [to us] and is what America sounds like,” said the director. “The dinner where we shot the film was actually owned by a Greek family. The father could only speak Greek, the mother was bilingual and their children did not want to learn Greek at all. At first, they did not want us to shoot at the restaurant, but we got the ok after we told them the plot. In the parent’s eyes, this was about their family. This was when we knew the universality of the plot was genuine. I hope distributors will be enlightened.”

On a humorous note, Egleson thanked James Cameron before rolling the film for the audience. “Believe it or not, [Cameron] didn’t use all of his film stock when shooting Titanic. Kodak sold us the leftovers at a far reduced rate so I just have to thank him for keeping his [three hour] film so short.”

Personally, The Blue Diner is a wonderful film and deserves to find wide distribution. It is a universally funny, charming, witty, moving and dramatic portrait. Egleson elicits sterling work from his accomplished cast including prize-worthy work from both Vidal and renowned character actress Miriam Colón as Elena’s mother. The script is warm, wise and inviting and Diner is full of perfectly sublime quirks in personality that keep the viewer on their toes.  Definitely one of SIFF’s more charming and perfectly pleasant surprises.

Check out their splendid website at http://www.bluediner.com/ for more information.

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