Retro Chic: The 2006 Palm Springs International Film Festival
January 5-16, 2006
By Virginia Wright Wexman
Everywhere you look in Palm Springs, you're reminded of the golden days of Hollywood. Tour buses ferry tourists around to the homes of the stars of yesteryear. Even the place names - Dinah Shore Drive, Gene Autry Trail, The Bob Hope Cultural Center - evoke a bygone era of moviedom. The community's film festival, now seventeen years old, was itself inaugurated by an old-time star, Sonny Bono, the city's former mayor. In the new Hollywood two hours to west of this resort community, old-time movie legends also cast long shadows with remakes of star-studded hits like Ocean's Eleven and The Poseidon Adventure booked into multiplexes all around the world. The fest's own international offerings, too, sometimes reached out to past artistic glories for inspiration.
Of the films I saw at the 2006 festival, Krzysztof Krauze's My Nikifor most conspicuously honored an old time "star" in the person of an eccentric Polish folk artist (played in a tour-de-force performance by 87-year-old character actress Krystyna Feldman). Feldman's Nikifor is taken under the wing of painter Marion Wlosinski (Roman Gancarczyk), at considerable sacrifice to the younger man. Based on actual people and events, the story is a study of the way in which an aspiring artist like Marion may decide to shelve his own professional ambitions in order to dedicate himself to an older figure at the peak of his considerable creative powers.
My Nikifor's picturesque mise-en-scéne, which reproduces the quaint style of Nikifor's watercolors, suggests that the filmmakers, too, have been captivated by the mystique of creative genius-the old artist becomes "my" Nikifor to Krauze, in a sense, as well as to Marion. Yet Krauze and his collaborators (recipients of well-deserved awards for this film at the Karlovy Vary and Chicago fests) are not called upon to assume the kind of burdens that fall on Marian, who must endure the scruffy tubercular presence of Nikifor himself. A series of vignettes featuring little dogs' comments with witty irony on the moviemakers' privileged distance from the object of their veneration.
A less obvious tribute to an older talent was Wang Xiaoshuai's Shanghai Dreams. The visual style of this Cannes prizewinner honors longtime Cannes favorite Abbas Kiarostami with its slow pacing and a series of long shots of characters traversing a hillside path. But Wang gives the lofty, metaphysical Kiarostamian approach a political twist as he examines the strains placed on a Shanghai family stuck out in the provinces as a result of a patriotic gesture they have made to the policies of Mao Zedong. The largely internal struggle the situation causes for the family's teenage daughter Quinghong (Gao Yuanyuan) lies at the center of the drama. The film's concluding long take focuses on a distant view of a car carrying Quinghong, her brother and her parents as it slowly threads its way along a winding mountain road. The image cements the comparison to Kiarostami even as the sound track crackles with two far off gunshots that provide a final reminder of Wang's culturally specific thematic agenda.
Barrio Cuba was another film that paid homage to illustrious precursors. But in this case the filmmaker's model was the venerable Latin American popular formula associated with the region's ubiquitous telenovelas, which, like American soap operas, feature multiple storylines focused on issues of domestic strife. The plots of Barrio Cuba involve a nurse who must contend with both an unfaithful lover and an unwanted elderly admirer, a pharmacist whose marriage hits the rocks when she is unable to become pregnant, and a railway worker whose life gets derailed by the untimely death of his wife.
Humberto Solàs, the director of Barrio Cuba, is himself a legendary presence in Cuban cinema, with seminal titles like Lucia and Cecilia Valdés to his credit. Barrio Cuba is the second part of a projected trilogy that began in 1995 with Honey for Oshun. But financial constraints have prevented Solàs from making a film for the past ten years. Digital video and an unpaid cast enabled him to make Barrio Cuba. Despite the film's ramshackle aesthetic, however, I can't agree with commentators who describe Solàs's production as a testament to the demoralization of Cuba since the withdrawal of support from the former Soviet Union. Barrio Cuba, which won the Special Jury Prize at the 27th Havana International Film Festival, is a warm-hearted tale put forward by a leading member of the first generation of Cuban filmmakers under Castro. Its episodic plot and grainy visuals represent an adherence to ideas about imperfect cinema that have long been central tenets of this cinematic tradition, as is its focus on the lives of the poor. "The film is made in the slums of the suburbs," Solàs commented in an interview about Barrio Cuba, "the ones that the Cuban cinema rarely shows. I wanted to get out of any Havana stereotypes... I wanted to portray the town such as I feel and see it... The Havana of a habañero like me."
The privileged enclave of Palm Springs with its mix of wealthy retirees and well-heeled weekenders from the new Hollywood, is far removed from Solàs's economically depressed Havana. Its film festival, however, brings images of the second and third world to its first-world audiences with many of the foreign language Oscar hopefuls on display alongside glitzy Hollywood premieres. The festival also reflects the mix of old and new one finds in the town itself as vintage talent takes center stage in some of the newest productions: Ben Kingsley in the topical Mrs. Harris, and Catherine Deneuve and Gerárd Depardieu in veteran French helmer Andre Techine's intelligent Changing Times. Of special note were the screenings of honored classics in the festival's "Archival Treasures" section: Charlie Chaplin's 1928 The Circus, Frank Borzage's 1948 Moonrise, and the 1949 Czech production Distant Journey, which was long believed lost. It's a balancing act the festival pulls off with aplomb as its offerings repeatedly demonstrate how the luminaries of yesteryear inform the cinema of tomorrow.