Rotterdam 2009: The Wrap-Up

The Rotterdam Film Festival has had a history of promoting the weird, the obsessive and...

The most purely cinematic feature on display was Claire Denis’s magical “35 Rhums.” Denis returns to the everyday after her metaphysical workout on “The Intruder,” and it’s absolutely lovely. A father and daughter in a West African neighborhood of Paris spend their days cleaning the house, buying groceries, and slowly clashing over the teenage girl’s developing sexuality. The images are so ravishing that the drama sneaks up on you, but by the end, it’s clear it had been building throughout, a delicate edifice of gestures revealing a growing maturity increasingly constrained by home’s cocoon. Masterful work. The same can be said for Hirokazu Kore-eda’s relaxed family drama “Still Walking,” which contains a rippling of grief underneath it’s placid exterior. A gathering commemorating a son’s decade-old death abounds in familiar family jousting, but the power plays turn more resentful and intractable, and Kore-eda never lets the surface break its calm. Everything happens underneath, and the pain of repression is visible on all of the remarkable performers’ faces.

One of the more challenging and rewarding films at the festival is Lisandro Alonso’s “Liverpool.” Set in Ushuaia, the southernmost point of South America, the film frames the story of a sailor, Farrel, who disembarks in this desolate town in search of his mother. But no emphasis is placed on the narrative — more important are the rhythms of life as an itinerant worker, as Alonso captures Farrel packing, drinking, eating and walking. Alonso works from the setting inward, deciding on a location before sketching a story. He’s more interested in discovering topography than character motivation, eager to capture the look of a particular strip club or mountain range, and the cinematography by Lucio Bonelli is stunning, leaving Farrel adrift in his routine, reminded by the windows, doors and valleys of an escape he’ll never pursue. Alonso leaves entire histories unsaid in his elliptic films, but goes further here, cleaving the narrative in two, burrowing into the habits of a sawmill family after Farrel bolts. But in an ingenious bit of cinematic remembrance, a keychain acts as a talisman for all of the places he visited, and of all those that are beyond the characters’ reach.

[Additional photo: "Looking for Cherry Blossoms," Style Jam, 2007]

Pages: 1 2