Attending any film festival is about carving out a path, finding the connective tissue and making film discoveries. Among the films at this year’s San Francisco international film festival were works that signalled deep knowledge and appreciation of film genres, a condition perhaps driven by the easy streaming access to global film. Here’s a very selective overview.
Described by a programmer as a sleeper hit of the festival, Magical Girl is a particularly satisfying work that’s full of narrative surprises and challenging subtexts. The Spanish film directed by Carlos Vermut (also a graphic novelist), is full of dense plotting, pathos, sexual kinks, and powerful psychological subtexts concerning the tensions between head and heart. A bullfight metaphor for the Spanish psyche is described in one scene, offering a salient entry point to the proceedings. Shot in artfully framed widescreen, the film is a mash-up of genres, including film noir, psychological thriller, tearjerker and art film, yet is confidently its own beast.
The superhero genre is reworked in the sinuous Vincent, a French film, the first by director Thomas Salvador, who also stars as an ordinary guy with a modest superpower – he’s dangerous when wet. He has a preternatural ability to swim like a shark and leap like a dolphin, and can bust through walls when doused in H20. But this is no Marvel mega-production – the film’s effects are modest, the dialogue sparse, with lots of opaque stares between the romantic partners. The action is peppered with parkour tricks that keep the beat, though don’t overshadow the magic realism. Salvador’s film is endearing and lean, though watching it in drought-stricken California gave its metaphorical qualities a deeper gravity that in this state we are weakened by dryness.
A very different tale of a man of superhuman abilities is told in Alex Winter’s frightening internet privacy doc Deep Web. Narrated by Keanu Reeves, the film tracks an internet-based, illicit drug-peddling black market called Silk Road, and the insidious nature of a US government crackdown. The focus turns to the case against Ross Ulbricht, a young entrepreneur who was arrested in a San Francisco neighborhood library for being the anonymous leader of Silk Road. With interviews with journalists, legal experts and Ulbricht’s activist parents, the film has a thriller-like tone as it points to possible conspiracies and shady strategies in the legislation of online privacy. The material, however, is very much grounded in fact, and the festival augmented the screening with a panel discussion afterwards.
Queer film historian Jenni Olson’s short feature-length film diary The Royal Road is deeply rooted in California’s actual and cinematic terrain. The title refers to El Camino Real, the state-spanning route taken by Spanish missionary Father Junipero Serra, a man who subjugated native peoples. Olson, with endearingly logy narration, tells stories of lesbian desire and California history over a static shots of urban landscapes in Los Angeles and San Francisco – aging stucco noir bungalows and vistas from Vertigo, only here, the locations, shot in atmospheric 16mm, are barely glammed up by the quality of film stock. Her voiceover character is a butch film nerd, a romantic whose crushes adhere to cinematic stereotypes of femme fatales and other unattainable women. In between, we get actual lessons in the state’s history and its metaphorical effects on human desire.
There’s a brasher, cinematic spirit to Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films, an Australian documentary that tracks the rise and fall of a pair of Israeli producer cousins, Menahem Golan and Yoran Globus, who cranked out exploitation flicks, as well as a few prestige projects (King Lear, a Jean-Luc Godard lark starring Molly Ringwald; John Cassavetes’s Love Streams) back in the 1980s. More of their films, like Charles Bronson sequels and outlandish martial arts spectacles, as we learn from directors, camerapersons and actors, were churned out with gratuitous sex and violence. There are tales of legendary cheapness, extravagant marketing gestures, and a peek at the legendarily bad 1980 sci-fi musical The Apple, directed by Golan. Mark Hartley’s documentary has a workmanlike exuberance that befits the Cannon ethos – the pair are portrayed as crazily ambitious businessmen, but also characters deeply in love with the craft of cinema.
A very different, but equally ardent appreciation of film infused the live musical accompaniment program by the New York-based Japanese duo Cibo Matto. The pair, who came with a bass player and drummer, presented a smart and arty range of short films for which they created new music. The most eye-opening was Das Triadische Ballet, a 1970 filmed version of a Bauhaus dance with costumes presaging the Grace Jones/Klaus Nomi pop robotic look. It was a fantastic choice that brought together art historical chops with Cibo Matto’s musical flair. The also pulled in short films by recent CalArts grads, Marcel Duchamp’s Anemic Cinema, and Yoko Ono’s legendary Fly, a 25-minute 1970 piece of winged insects buzzing and investigating a nude female body, that always seems to go for longer than you’d like it to – though as far as the packed house was concerned, the band could have gone on forever.
