We offer a few choice titles from the Cinematheque’s European Union Film Festival, which returns to Vancouver in better shape than you’d think.
The union is faltering, but an annual fest brings yet another strong slate from across the pond
Europe itself might be looking increasingly wobbly these days, but its big, hands-across-the-continent film festival remains solid as ever. We’ll be treated to entries from 26 member states when this year’s European Union Film Festival gets under way at the Cinematheque on Friday (November 23). Here are the first of our recommendations. Check Straight.com for more.
MADEMOISELLE PARADIS (Austria/germany) Barbara Albert’s opulent period piece starts with surely one of the most arresting images of the entire festival: the contorted expression of blind musical prodigy Maria Theresia von Paradis as she makes her way through a strenuous Bach composition. We’re being asked to check our reaction to the faintly absurd sight in contrast to the high-society Paradis family, ashamed of the young harpsichordist’s unprepossessing disability. They send her off to doctor of animal magnetism Franz Mesmer in this playfully trenchant retelling of a true story. Interestingly, while the film is merciless in its view of unflaggingly cruel 18th-century Vienna, Mesmer’s results (if not the man himself) are spared our 21st-century scorn. He does actually cure Paradis—although that comes with its own unique problems. Rich both visually and in its subtler pleasures—chiefly an astounding central performance from Maria Dragus—this opener sets the bar pretty high. November 23 (6:30 p.m.)
GOZO (Malta/u.k.) Two young lovebirds decamp from grimy, cold London to dry, sunblasted Malta in this moody psychological thriller that pays homage to 1973’s classic Don’t Look Now. Here, the guilt infecting Joe and Lucille’s getaway is considerably harder to escape, as is their dialled-up self-absorption. Fortunately, we have attractive Joseph Kennedy and Ophelia Lovibond to keep us invested; by the time Joe has completely unravelled, he’s won our sympathy, deservedly or not. There are clever touches, like the creeping incursion, thanks to bad plumbing, of stagnant water into a setting that couldn’t be more removed from Don’t Look Now’s crumbling Venice. And some key moments of truly haunting imagery keep Gozo from spinning its wheels with too much time-filling visual abstraction. Look for a cameo from U.K. film vet Nicky Henson, remembered for riding his tiny hog out of the grave as the undead biker of Psychomania (also from 1973, as it happens). November 23 (8:30 p.m.)
QUIT STARING AT MY PLATE (Croatia/denmark) Here’s the kind of movie that almost begs to be abhorred by the middlebrow while supplying the more adventurous with a grisly kind of pleasure. Young Marijana lives with her appalling family in a squalid apartment in the worst part of a Croatian coastal town. When corpulent, bullying Dad is felled by a stroke, she becomes his caregiver of sorts, largely because brother Zoran is a simpleton and Mom is an even bigger pig than her husband. (She leaves him at home, drooling and shitting himself, during a trip to the beach.) The arc here is from Marijana’s browbeaten status to a kind of cool, sadly necessary independence, complete with tawdry gang sexual encounters with the local delinquents. She barely rises above likable on this journey, which is where the film has come unstuck with North American critics, who seem to have forgotten Monty Python’s dictum “There’s some lovely filth down here.” I found its mordant appreciation of the rituals of family torture—for which we all volunteer—utterly exhilarating. November 29 (6:30 p.m.)