International film festival reaches near and far.

San Francisco Examiner
Wed. April 21, 2004

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

Three words: "Goodbye Dragon Inn." That's the movie to see at the 47th San Francisco International Film Festival, which kicks off Thursday at the Castro Theater and plays through April 29 at various Bay Area venues.

The sixth feature film by Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang, "Goodbye Dragon Inn" is the perfect festival film: A masterful meditation on both the singular and collective experience of going to the movies. Taking place in a leaking, dilapidated movie theater on the last (rainy) day of its existence, patrons watch an old kung-fu film (King Hu's "Dragon Inn" from 1967) while seat-hopping, looking for some kind of human connection. Meanwhile, a hobbled ticket girl has one final chance to bond with the handsome projectionist (Tsai regular Lee Kang-sheng), and spends the entire film searching for him in the theater's dank intestines. With barely a stitch of dialogue, Tsai uses yawning physical space and aching time to lay bare loneliness in visual form.

Opening the festival is the latest by an American master, Jim Jarmusch, though "Coffee and Cigarettes" is arguably the least of his feature films. Stringing together new segments with several older short films from throughout his career, actors and musicians such as Tom Waits, Iggy Pop, Jack and Meg White, The RZA, Bill Murray, Steve Buscemi, Cinque and Joie Lee and Cate Blanchett get together over, yes, coffee and cigarettes to talk about ... stuff. While entertaining, the film never really coheres or ignites. Still, it's undoubtedly the coolest film in the festival.

This year the festival bestows its annual director's award to Milos Forman, a slightly inconsistent filmmaker who was very recently honored at the Mill Valley Film Festival. Moreover, the award will be presented at a screening of the director's most embarrassingly dated film, "Hair" (1979) -- which was dated even when it first opened. Happily, they are separately screening his very best film, "The Fireman's Ball" (1967), made while Forman was spearheading the Czech New Wave of the 1960s.

The Peter J. Owens acting award goes this year to Chris Cooper, who won the San Francisco Film Critics Circle Award as well as the Oscar for his wondrous performance in "Adaptation." The festival will be showcasing an early Cooper performance, in John Sayles' film "Matewan" (1987), as well as a selection of clips.

She of the long luxurious legs, dazzling dancer Cyd Charisse will also be honored for her spectacular career. Though she is at her best in films like "Singin' in the Rain" and "The Band Wagon," the festival has instead chosen to screen Rouben Mamoulian's "Silk Stockings" (1957), a sluggish remake of Ernst Lubitsch's "Ninotchka" that only proves how good Lubitsch really was. Fortunately, the evening will also include clips of her other films and an on-stage interview conducted by our own Jan Wahl.

Film archivist Paolo Cherchi Usai receives this year's Mel Novikoff award, and presents a series of silent short films by Georges Melies, Lotte Reininger, Gregory La Cava, Leo McCarey and others, called, appropriately, "Life Is Shorts."

Not surprisingly, this year boasts a strong crop of documentaries, topped by the brilliant and infuriating "The Corporation." Tracing a loose history of the business mentality of the 20th century, the film explains just how we lost control of our lives. It runs 140 minutes and could have been much longer without losing steam.

In the local arena, we have two standouts. Lexi Leban and Lidia Szajko's forceful "Girl Trouble" looks at three teenage girls and their struggle to break out of the San Francisco criminal justice system. And Judy Irving's "The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill" tells the heartbreaking story of drifter/loner Mark Bittner and his touching relationship with several species of little green birds.

The festival continues its run of "extreme" midnight movies with four Asian delights, high among them Cheng Chang-Ho's classic "Temptress of a Thousand Faces" from 1968. I caught Andrew Lau's "The Park," from Hong Kong, which is merely a collection of "I Know What You Did Last Summer"-type teen movie clichés. Still, it's presented in 3-D.

Much creepier and better is Kiyoshi Kurosawa's "Doppelganger," which re-unites him with his frequent star Koji Yakusho -- twice. Koji plays an inventor who is suddenly confronted with his evil twin. But Kurosawa knows not to use the gimmick as an end-all-be-all, concentrating instead on the tense atmosphere.

I usually check out the festival's annual collection of animated shorts, which this year is nowhere to be seen. In their place, we have "Circus Cinematicus," a mish-mash of seven children-friendly shorts, including the wonderful animated "Cirkustour" from Denmark and the delightful live-action "Colorforms."

This year from Iran comes "Deep Breath," an interesting, unusual film with thriller elements that focuses on the ennui of that country's young people and constantly goes off in unexpected directions. And from France comes the latest by the prolific Raoul Ruiz, "That Day," which follows the bizarre relationship between a loony bird-like young woman and a serial killer. It's either too unhinged or not unhinged enough, I haven't decided yet.

Another oddity comes from Thailand, Pen-ek Ratanaruang's "Last Life in the Universe," featuring Japanese star Tadanobu Asano and the famous Australian-born, Hong Kong-based cinematographer Christopher Doyle. It's a lovely, dreamy tale of an uptight librarian who likes to plan neat, clean suicide scenarios, until a girl changes his life forever.

I tried looking at Sarah Gavron's "This Little Life," hoping for a hardcore docudrama. Instead, I got a ham-fisted television melodrama filled with the usual ancient nuggets, such as the stale old handheld camera to suggest chaos in the delivery room.

Writer Hanif Kureshi and director Roger Michell deliver a slightly more even-tempered melodrama with "The Mother," a kind of cross between "Tokyo Story" and "Harold and Maude." When her husband dies, an aging mother (Ann Reid) finds she can't connect with her selfish adult children and so takes a young lover -- her daughter's secret boyfriend. The brilliantly nuanced central character is ultimately rendered at the expense of some of the supporting characters.

The festival closes with a much-needed romantic comedy, Peter Howitt's "Laws of Attraction," with Julianne Moore and Pierce Brosnan as lawyers in love.

Finally, if you have to see only one movie in this lifetime, make it Buster Keaton's "The General" (1927), a great silent comedy set during the Civil War and centered around an astonishing train chase but steeped in sublime smaller moments of sheer poetry. The beloved Alloy Orchestra will be on hand to provide their crisp new score, a perfect compliment to this beautiful, suspenseful, hilarious film.

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