LYT at LAFF: Of Magic, Realism and Retardation

It is inevitable, at times, that at a film festival, you may be late for something. Especially if there are venues spread far apart, and shuttling is required. Or if there’s asshole additional security hired by Fox for their screening, and not told that fest-goers with passes are indeed allowed into the show.

It should not be inevitable if that movie is the first screening of the day. And if you must be late, it is appropriate to be humble about it, and find an accessible seat quickly and quietly, whether it’s your absolute favorite seat or not.

If instead of this, you have to walk over the legs of six people who are trying to enjoy a movie that’s been running for ten minutes, then plop your ass down and immediately start wrestling with the loud plastic bag of whatever food you’ve snuck in, I want you to know that I hate you. In fact, everyone in the theater hates you. Quite the achievement you’ve just made, there. And this is why I love that the Arclight won’t sell tickets once the movie starts.

So, as you may have surmised, the quiet beginning of ONE DAY LESS was disrupted just a tad for me. Fortunately, this didn’t keep it from becoming my favorite film of the festival so far.

“This universal love story explores what it means to grow old with the one you love.” Thus spake the program description, and thus did I expect something really slow-moving, gorgeously lit, and mostly dialogue-free. Not sure why, but I did. And I was very pleasantly surprised – the movie’s main characters are an old Mexican couple who are each around 90 years old, and they spend the entire movie gently making fun of each other. Their memories are fading, their bodies sore, but they still find time to argue about who got whom sick first, and joke about their inability to remember what happened five minutes ago. We watch them from one New Year’s, where the whole family gathers,  to the next, a high point the two of them look forward to all year.

The film is a documentary, but it doesn’t announce itself as such, and works perfectly well even if you don’t know it is one – at the Q&A afterwards, one audience member asked director Dariela Ludlow where she’d found such game and aged actors, when in fact all she’d done was film her grandparents, the way they actually are. I don’t mean that “all she’d done” to be dismissive, either – most of the time it was just her with a camera and some minimal lighting, observing...it seems likely that a larger crew might have made for a more self-conscious doc.

Her grandfather is no longer alive, but he did apparently live long enough to see the film, and tell her nobody would want to see two old people just talking, and that he was certain the film would be a failure! Judging by the responses at my screening, the old man was not the best judge of audiences...like so many of his generation, he failed to see the extent to which his own story was a universal human one.

ONE DAY LESS screens again tonight at 7:30 p.m. at the Regal.

Between movies, there was some very tasty free food in the press tent. I’ve been somewhat living off of Zone bars, which are like chocolate-flavored sawdust, and was half-afraid that advertised “free food” would be a veggie and cheese plate (this has happened at past fests). But no – seriously good Vietnamese food was in effect, with deep-fried green tofu balls, pork sandwiches, and a coconut/lychee shake.

The free booze this year doesn’t involve vodka any more – nor are my usual favorite bartenders working it – but there is some kind of Brazilian spirit called Leblon, made from sugar cane and tasting vaguely like tequila-flavored rum. Like everything else, I mix it with Diet Coke and it’s passable. Then there’s a Korean food truck periodically parked up here on the parking lot rooftop...yes, did I mention the festival village is on a parking-lot rooftop? Just like it used to be at AFI Fest before Arclight lost their sense of awesomeness. Anyway, haven’t tried the Korean food yet, probably will before all is over. It’s not one of the famous Korean-Mexican fusion ones, but instead a self-proclaimed Korean take on pub food. With rice-cake nachos.

If it were North Korean food, one might joke that in fact it would have nothing for sale except maybe water...which is an awkward way to segue into my next screening, of THE RED CHAPEL, in which Danish director Mads Brugger brings a Danish-Korean comedy duo into the North and documents it. He’s sufficiently deadpan that the hardliners in the North don’t realize they’re being subtly mocked – at Kim Il-Sung’s tomb, the team reads aloud a poem that goes “Love is like a pineapple, sweet and undesirable” -- and one of the comedians is so handicapped that the North Korean’s cannot understand his combination of foreign accent and speech impediment, so he gets to say pretty much whatever he wants.

THE RED CHAPEL bears the label of Lars von Trier’s Zentropa, and like many of von Trier’s directorial and production output, this does feature yet another take on what we might call the “Magic Retard” – the notion that handicapped people are better than the rest of us because they have an innocence and truth we’ve lost. Here, however, there’s a deeper point to it – not only is self-proclaimed spastic Jacob Nossell able to get away with more seditious stuff, but also merely by existing he puts the North Koreans on the spot, as handicapped people are not seen anywhere in the dictatorship, and the opportunity to appear on camera being nice to a handicapped foreigner serves their propaganda purposes.

Except...the movie ends presumably back in Denmark, with Jacob belting out an awkwardly impaired version of John Lennon’s “Imagine,” and it isn’t clear if we’re expected to laugh at how bad he is (as most audience members seem to), or appreciate it on some ironic level and hope that he does too. It’s an uncomfortable moment of potential mockery, and maybe that’s the point, but for me it is a bit of a distraction from the early Michael-Moore style gotcha goodies that the rest of the film performs to perfection.

THE RED CHAPEL screens again Thursday, June 24, at 7:45 p.m. at the Regal.

Final film of the night was BIBLIOTHEQUE PASCAL, which another critic, in typical hyperbolic fashion, told me was the worst film of the entire festival. I do not consider that judgment to be correct. The film is far from flawless, but in its best moments it recalls an Eastern-European take on HOSTEL as directed by Tarsem Singh. I will be most interested to see who defends this movie but would never dream of defending Eli Roth.

Directed by a Hungarian with the tongue-massacring moniker of Szabolcs Hajdu, what we see onscreen is mostly the unreliable tale told by a mother named Mona (Orsolya Török-Illyés) who wishes to regain custody of her little girl from the flaky, fortune-teller aunt she last left the child with. In dreamlike fashion, we see that the girl’s father was a criminal on the lam, running away from a charge of gay-bashing, who emerged from under the sand while Mona was at the beach. Later, Mona is sold into sex slavery by her father, and purchased in England by the titular Pascal (Shamgar Amram), an Alfred Molina type who runs a club at which he juggles and performs on a unicycle, while secretly running sex dungeons underneath, in which his hookers are forced into literary role-play, as not just the obvious types (Juliet, Joan of Arc, Lolita) but also more twisted variations (Pinocchio). When Mona finds herself in the role of Desdemona, and realizes that a key element of the fantasy involves Desdemona’s ultimate fate, she must find a way to escape...a way that will involve the ability to project one’s dreams.

It’s a story about the stories we tell ourselves, and the delusions we keep in order to stave off more bitter realities. What Mona tells us is not quite the truth, which when revealed is harsher and less fun. Similarly, none of the sex slaves is remotely like the literary character they must embody, and the film’s final note suggests that all these forms of role-play are akin to the stories we read to children and a vital stimulation of the imagination and ability to fantasize.

The titillating rubber fetish suit on the poster doesn’t get a whole lot of play onscreen save for one crucial scene, so don’t go if you’re expecting an entire movie of that. I did find the flick to be a tad on the long side, but when it works, it delivers a unique cinematic experience.

BIBLIOTHEQUE PASCAL screens again Mon., June 22, 10 p.m., at the Regal.

To close out Saturday night, we were told that Fishbone would be performing at midnight, following the Q&A after the screening of their doc EVERYDAY SUNSHINE. Well, Fishbone as I know it is like six or seven people jumping around and playing crazy horns and stuff, not three chill guys crooning mellow keyboard tunes. And no appearance by Angelo the crazy Mohawk guy? It was like if somebody promised Guns N’ Roses, and all that showed up were Dizzy Reed, Izzy Stradlin, and Duff McKagan. In other words, worth seeing for free, but a rip-off if you were hoping for more, especially since the set was under a half-hour. Hell, the interminable and shitty bluegrass band that played at 3:30 in the afternoon did more than that, and had more members too.

Luke Y. Thompson is an actor, writer, and film critic living in Hollywood.