Wisconsin Film Festival On a quest (AVC at WFF Day Five)

Scott: Bert I. Gordon's The Magic Sword has, appropriately, gone on something of a quest just to get here. Before the screening at Cinematheque, programmer Heather Heckman explained how many of Gordon's films have "literally been played to exhaustion, and nobody's bothered to make new ones." She told us to expect Gordon's personally kept print of the 1962 film to be "pretty pink" due to deterioration. Despite the thin coat of magenta that did indeed seem to lie over each frame, this is the most fun I've had at the festival so far. The credits introduce a couple of actors with "...as The Ogre" and "...as The Hag."

This story of a goodly young knight on a mission to rescue a princess from a sorcerer and a dragon isn't so much kitschy as, well, casual. The more it admits to just being a goofy fantasy adventure, the easier it is to respect it. As the sorcerer nonchalantly points out, "This isn't the first time a princess has been fed to a dragon." The special effects may seem cheesy today, but they are at least resourceful for the early '60s: A group of "little people" narrowly escapes being made into stew and helps the knight in his hour of need, a lusty French milkmaid turns into the aforementioned Hag, and the knight and his companions fight a giant snaggle-toothed gorilla (that's the Ogre). The film doesn't blunder into all the laughs so much as just pleasantly invite them, often by way of silly medieval details: When presenting him with the magic sword, the knight's mother boasts that it can open "floors, doors, walls, and portcullises."

Gordon, now in his 80s, attended the screening and spoke briefly afterward about his journey from UW-Madison (where he made newsreels!) to Hollywood. When an audience member asked him what it was like to work with Orson Welles on 1972's The Witching, Gordon dished that Welles brought along his own chef, grill, and fridge full of gourmet meats, but told him, "Bert, I want you to know, whatever you want, I'm yours."

The day ended with another quest, but it left the audience at Cinematheque with no cheery fanfare or ra-ra-victory music. John Frankenheimer's The Train doesn't allow much time to savor the little triumphs of a French railway worker (Burt Lancaster) and his fellows in the Resistance as they conspire to stop a Nazi train loaded with famous French paintings. In one particularly inspired sequence, a station manager helps Lancaster lead the train in a loop back to its station of origin, while French workers at stops along the way disguise each station as one along the Nazis' intended route to Germany. Shortly after, a shot begins with soldiers unceremoniously machine-gunning the station manager and an engineer against a wall.

Even though Lancaster's on a mission to rescue loads of Gauguins, Renoirs, Picassos, and Cezannes, the paintings show up for just a few minutes at the beginning. Nazi officer Paul Scofield only wants to sell them to fill the Third Reich's coffers, and Lancaster gets involved only reluctantly, because the Allies are coming and this isn't the only act of sabotage he has to juggle today, dammit.

At the end, Lancaster doesn't get to celebrate. He gets a side-by-side outlay—it's almost like parallel columns in a very cruel checkbook—of what he was after and what it cost. Crates labeled with famous painters' names lay strewn about a derailed train, cross-cut with the bodies of Frenchmen slaughtered as almost an afterthought by retreating Nazis. Lancaster has saved a part of "the glory of France," and the victory tastes sickly and infuriating. The Train may not be as brilliantly wired for paranoia as Frankenheimer's masterpiece The Manchurian Candidate, yet it burrows into the sweat and grimness more deeply and less sentimentally than most World War II films dare.

Before that, the Orpheum hosted another thriller that offered no easy moral satisfaction, Denmark's Terribly Happy. At one character's funeral, the sermon focuses on easing the guilt her farm-town neighbors feel about never helping her escape her husband's beatings. City cop Jakob Cedergren, who's just arrived as the lone law enforcer in this country outpost, basically learns that everyone's implicated in how fucked-up the place is, so everyone has to help cover up. Director/co-writer Henrik Ruben Genz makes it funny, or at least creates some moments horrid enough that laughing was the only way for some of us to relieve the tension.

The afternoon shorts program at Cinematheque offered a few cool escapes. Scott Slade Wagner's "Facial Features" felt like the work of a dozen or so artists riffing on one image in a playful frenzy. Photos of a guy's face flick by in quick succession so it looks like he's jerking his head and expression back and forth, then other images begin to rush in over it: gobs of color, drawings of other faces entirely. Chele Isaac's "Promiseland," initially intended for a three-screen installation format, played with disorienting parallels in its simultaneous multi-perspective shots of fields and a rock quarry.

"The Presentation Theme" used voice-over and Jim Trainor's crude hand-drawn figures to matter-of-factly pose an increasingly unsettling and funny situation involving a fanged man, someone having anal sex with a nursing mother ("incontrovertibly demonstrated in the following diagram"), and "litters of defeated men, all naked" marching across a blood-strewn field. It's impossible to sum this up in any logical way, but this was the one film in the program that seemed to have the whole audience engaged and laughing.

Jason: The sold-out Svetlana About Svetlana, at Frederic March Play Circle, didn’t catch my eye until someone made an offhand comment the night before. Apparently, Joseph Stalin’s daughter lives in Madison. Yes, that Stalin—he of the mustache and Siberian work camps and whatnot. Filmmaker Svetlana Parshina was so affected as a child after reading Svetlana Alliluyeva’s (now Lana Peters) Twenty Letters To A Friend, she sought her out as an adult, eventually finding her in a retirement home. Their conversation was fun—Alliluyeva is witty, bright, and engaging. (She left a list of interview demands by voicemail, including “Keep it quiet!” because the “old ladies I live with are bunch of gossips.”) But Svetlana failed to provide any kind of closure for Parshina. Before she met with Alliluyeva, Parshina posed a question wondering if she’d have wanted to set up the meet as badly as she did if Alliluyeva’s father wasn’t Mr. Communism. I left still wondering.

After, Josh Banville’s A Life Taken at Monona Terrace explored the post-prison years of Shawn Drumgold, a Boston man falsely jailed for murder due to a coerced witness. After Drumgold is released on appeal, he tries to hold his family together with varying degrees of success (he had a wife and baby before he went behind bars). It isn’t a hagiography—Life doesn’t skip over Drumgold’s drug arrests both before and after his imprisonment—but from a technical standpoint, there aren’t enough cinematic elements to make it feel like anything that I couldn’t watch on PBS.

Mark: A teary-eyed Meg Hamel took to the Orpheum stage one last time Sunday night to dole out a mouthful of thanks to festival volunteers and tech gurus before screening the unofficial festival closer, Mother. Hamel explained that Bong Joon-ho’s latest had always seemed to be the perfect film for Sunday’s final screening—a contemplative film that would stick with us and keep us thinking during the long year leading back to WFF 2011. For me, the image that would stick would be the entire bottom floor of the Orpheum snapping along with the jazzy Wisconsin Film Fest intro music before the film started.

Mother follows a slow-witted boy who gets mixed up in a homicide investigation after his drunken bender the night of a young girl’s murder prevents him from recalling why he was the last one seen with the girl alive. Regardless, the dimwit signs a confession and he’s swept straight into jail. His overprotective mother refuses to accept that her boy could go to prison, and after becoming fed up with the endless red tape of the legal process, she begins her own investigation into what really happened.

The Fest's Joon-ho series helped to reveal how logically his previous films lead up to Mother. It's heavy on absurdity and frank depictions of violence, much like Barking Dogs Never Bite. The story comes together when the characters organize around a mission, recalling The Host's family-centric rescue plot. And like most of Joon-ho’s films, it falters a tad in the middle as the film’s characters transition from victims of circumstance to conscious actors in the plot.

Still, the twists of this obsessed mother’s unconventional forensic investigation make the story of Mother thrilling in the final act. There was no roar of applause with the film’s conclusion, but instead a polite, satisfied clap as the last of the festival crowd filed out.