I learned to love movies from my mother. She took me to libraries, the planetarium, the natural history museum, which was fabulous for me but more like a duty for her. She took me to movies because she grew up in the Golden Age of the 1930s and ‘40s and loved them. When I was six or seven we’d head for Saturday matinees of “War of the Worlds,” “It Came from Outer Space,” and “The Creature from the Black Lagoon.” Occasionally she’d make me accompany her to some inappropriate snoozer, for a kid, like “Party Girl,” with her favorite leading man, an aging Robert Taylor, as a mob lawyer.
I’m still cuckoo for film and have been lucky enough to be able to binge at film festivals in Minneapolis, Santa Barbara and my local version, RiverRun which just celebrated its 20th anniversary. They all come with their annoyances — the lines, too many films to see in too few showings, the feeling of being cattle wrangled. But festivals do offer a chance to view films that will never open in a theater near you, or these days even appear on a streaming service, films from neophytes and from overseas.
This year I managed to squeeze nine films into five days. Three I chose happened to be singled out for recognition by the festival’s end. One of my favorites didn’t, but I am pretty sure I am right and the festival is wrong.
The big prize went to “Angles Wear White,” a muckraking Chinese production. Mia is a teenage girl in a job she shouldn’t have in a place she shouldn’t be. In China one’s opportunities are geographically restricted unless you get a special dispensation, so like our illegal immigrants people like Mia are easy to exploit.
She is working as an ill-paid cleaning woman at a seaside hotel and her desk clerk friend often gets her to take her place on the nightshift while she goes out to party. On one such night Mia witnesses a sex crime when a man arrives with two young girls. A crusading female attorney seeks justice, but by the end a powerful patriarchy hushes up the crime. Mia is beaten and robbed, doctors who examined the girls change their testimony, the parents are silenced with threats, and virtually every woman involved is shown to be powerless. Plucky, resourceful Mia escapes, but her prospects in such a system seem poor.
“Bye Bye Germany” is a joint production by Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg about a group of concentration camp survivors in a displaced persons camp after world War II. It is overseen by American troop as they await permission to emigrate to America or Palestine.
One of their number is a man, Berman ( Moritz Bleibtreu), whose family owned a retail business before the Nazis. He still has connections and creates a scheme whereby he and
his fellow detainees can make a buck on the side selling table linens door to door. He is a cousin to such scroungers as those played by James Garner and William Holden in POW movies. Or perhaps a kind of Schindler after the fact. Mark Ivanir is also excellent as his hangdog bookkeeper.
This is a comedy, but one with tears, since these survivors are haunted men, and with a dark suspicion. Berman is called before Special Agent Sara Simon, a tough Jewish, American lawyer (Antje Traue) who tells him he is being investigated for collaboration with the Nazis and may be going to prison rather than to America.
He tries to prove his innocence while wooing his interrogator. And the story he tells is so ridiculous it has to be true. Dark comedy, farce, love story, tragedy, this mash-up ought to be impossible to pull off, but it succeeds.
Another film singled out for recognition was “Saints Rest,” a family drama with music set in Grinnell, Iowa. In the sort of multiculturalism typical of indie films, it is a USA/Israel production set about as solidly in the American heartland as possible but directed and co-written by Noga Ashkenazi and starring the luminous Hani Furstenberg as Joni, both Israelis.
It concerns two estranged musical sisters. Joni is older and has taken over her mother’s coffee shop and nursed her through her terminal illness while putting her own life on hold. Her younger sister, Allie, has gone off to college in California, hasn’t returned home for three years to lend a hand in her sister’s time of trouble, and now swans into town en route to a small part in a Broadway musical.
The conflict is reminiscent of “The Turning Point” and “Old Acquaintance” about an artist who stayed home and one who went on to success, and focuses on the residue of mixed emotions left behind. This is a sweet, little picture. Furstenberg gives a fine performance in the lead, mixing affection and resentment and sings beautifully. The supporting cast is filled with quirky, charming small town characters.
My favorite film was “Chasing the Blues” which stars Grant Rosenmeyer and Ronald L. Conner as Alan and Paul. Their prickly relationship is reminiscent of the collaborations of Gene Wilder’s sweet schlemiel and Richard Pryor’s hyperkinetic rascal. Alan is a school teacher and fanatical collector of vintage 78 blues records. Paul owns a record shop.
He learns Alan may have discovered the whereabouts of a legendary record that was never released. Only three copies were pressed and would be extremely valuable if found, but they are also said to be cursed — a cross between the Maltese Falcon and Tut’s tomb. The widow of the last owner doesn’t know what she’s got and the two rivals compete to obtain the dingus. This comedy of errors escalates until both wind up in jail, but as soon as they are out, they are on the trail again. Very funny with surprise assists from Steve Guttenberg and Jon Lovitz.
Finally, I will mention three documentaries which may show up on PBS or HBO. “Laddie: The Man Behind The Movies” is an appreciation of the influential movie producer Alan Ladd Jr., by his daughter. “Generation Wealth” is a look at the grotesque and wretched excess of the nouveau riche by photographer Lauren Greenfield. “Far From The Tree” is derived from the book by Andrew Solomon concerning children profoundly different from their parents. It was inspired by Solomon’s personal coming to terms with his parents’ rejection of his gay identity and his realization that experiences as diverse as dwarfism, Down Syndrome, autism, and schizophrenia inflict a similar toll on anyone seen as the other.
All are watchable and interesting. In a sign of the times, to my mind, at least two suffer from a similar flaw. If documentaries are akin to journalism, the credo used to be that the story is not about the reporter. But a good deal of “Generation Wealth” ends up being about the photographer behind it, her work and her relationship with her mother, all of which seem unrelated to the ostensible point of the piece. Similarly, the otherwise fond homage to Ladd by his daughter spends rather a lot of time on his remoteness when she was young and he was working non-stop. In each case these issues may be interesting to the film makers but simply distract the audience from the story they came to see.