Wisconsin Film Festival The Arctic Ocean, the Lesser Antilles, and Buenos Aires (AVC at WFF 2011 Day Five)

Kyle: Starting the Wisconsin Film Festival’s final day at the Orpheum Theatre, I was expecting to see something like a Woody Allen movie with a dark love triangle. I must have misread a synopsis somewhere though, because Radu Muntean’s Tuesday, After Christmas was far from that. Tuesday is about two characters you don’t like all that much, who are doomed to ruin the lives of two characters you like a whole lot. Muntean did a fine job capturing the rapid descent inside of a snapshot, zooming in on the raw and complicated emotions that make up the characters. But the problem with this method is that there weren’t enough peripheral or contextual elements to make me feel all that invested. I just kept thinking that Woody Allen would have at least had a sense of humor about how miserable everything is. So I guess this kind of thing just really isn’t for me.

I felt more prepared later that evening for Aurora, the Romanian character study of a seemingly normal man who is about to exhibit very troubled behavior. The three-hour marathon crept at a snail’s pace; nearly half of the audience had filed out of MMoCA before the screening was even a third of the way through. Lucky for me, I’d packed enough contraband Reese’s Pieces to hold my attention until the action started. But even when the action finally did take off, I still felt like I was waiting for something. Director Cristi Puiu focuses the story on the exterior elements of the character’s routines, allowing the viewer to construct the story along the way. But by revolving around peripheral pieces, Aurora missed the core emotions and central themes involved. And the fact of the matter is, Aurora was a three-hour character study that could have been half as long and retained twice as many viewers.

After Aurora, I had but 10 minutes to walk across the street to end my festival run with How I Ended This Summer at the Stage Door. The story of two meteorologists (Sergei the old, experienced one; and Pavel, the newbie), How I Ended This Summer is a strong analysis of the isolated geography of the Arctic Ocean. But however taxing the rocky terrain and wild game can be, the true test of endurance comes when Pavel received some traumatic news on behalf of Sergei. Pavel bears the weight alone and wrestles everything around itself until things finally boil over and result in a manic string of unpredictable events. The paranoid tension never seems as rational as Pavel makes it seem, yet still the volatile climates (meteorological, personal, and geographical) keep the conclusion in suspense until the final credits.

Ben: Sunday’s twofer at the Chazen Museum offered a good chance to up your WFF numbers (“You’ve seen 12 films? I’ve seen 14! Booyah!”), as well as to take in an Oscar-nominated short documentary that presented compelling and heartbreaking insight into the effects of global warming. Jennifer Redfearn—who appeared in person to answer questions after the screening—traveled to the remote island of Carteret in the South Pacific to film her documentary, Sun Come Up, about a rustic community whose members were forced to leave their piece of paradise due to the effects of rising tides.

At a scant 38 minutes, Redfearn’s film wisely stands back and gives the Carterets time to grieve the loss of their homeland and to pursue a new home on the neighboring island of Bougainville. But Bougainville still bares the scars of 10-year civil war with Papa New Guinea, making it a frightening landscape populated with rightfully weary people and a difficult starting-over point for Carteret’s “climate refugees.”

As discussed at the end of the film—and as reiterated by Redfearn—the transition for the residents of Carteret is still a work in progress, which explains the short running time of the film and the lack of a concrete resolution. But I’m sure I was not alone in wishing that Sun Come Up would have just continued instead switching over to the second documentary, Fire, Burn, Babylon.

The screening was plagued with technical difficulties—which I should say were the first and only I experienced during the entire weekend—like incomplete subtitles and freezing up twice. But Sarita Siegel’s film about Rastafarians displaced to London after a volcanic eruption forced them to leave their island home of Montserrat, part of the Lesser Antilles in the Caribbean, felt disjointed anyway. Though the film poses interesting questions about how religious beliefs can deteriorate when surroundings and lifestyles change, without a better understanding of the tenets of Rastafarianism, it plays more like Goodfellas light, as the protagonists struggle to make it in the city, no matter the effect on their families.

But any sour taste the well-meaning but frustrating Fire, Burn, Babylon left was quickly washed away by an absolute scream of a movie, Summer Wars, which wonderfully closed out the Wisconsin Film Festival for me at the Union Theater.

Mamoru Hosoda’s deliriously fun tale of a math-genius loner being adopted into an eccentric family, just in time join forces in a battle against a mysterious enemy who threatens to disrupt OZ (a virtual domain that directly affects the real world), has everything. The heavily stylized fight scenes inside of OZ contrast with the artfully rendered family gathering going on at the Shinohara family home, but the film’s central theme of human connections and open communication thrives in both environments. Perhaps a little too hyperactive at times, Summer Wars stops at nothing to entertain, and it sent me home genuinely excited for next year’s festival, which Festival Director Meg Hamel announced would be held April 18-22. Mark your calendars.

Mark: Having a young girl proclaiming, “First one to the top of the tree gets to feel my tits!” over the opening credits set the tone for Amy George pretty well, considering the film’s stream-of-consciousness telling of what enters the mind of a 14-year-old boy. Jesse can’t make sense of the fairer sex from the varying female figures in his life, so finding any shortcut to boobies offers a tempting alternative to wrapping his head around the inscrutable cipher of a girl’s brain. First-time actor Gabriel Del Castillo Mullally gives a sparse, awkward performance that perfectly encapsulates the excruciating embarrassments that compose the daily life of a teenager. Still, the film’s world première screening at the Chazen on Sunday morning received a somewhat tepid reaction from the crowd when the credits rolled—its blend of quiet personal drama and masturbatory fantasy apparently wasn’t for everyone.

I traded art museums next, heading to MMoCA for a packed screening of Anita, the sad tale of a young woman with Down syndrome who is separated from her mother during a terrorist attack. Lost, alone, and accustomed to having someone to make food and cocoa for her on demand, Anita wanders the streets of Buenos Aires, getting into comic misadventures all over the city as she looks for someone to help her find her mom. Those funny vignettes with mostly heartless strangers belie the serious tragedy playing out elsewhere as her brother frantically searches for his mother and sister, fearing they both might have been killed in the attack. The emotion of Anita’s story broke only during the baffling spelling errors and poor translations of the film’s Spanish dialogue—a slight hiccup for an otherwise touching parable preaching understanding and mercy when it comes to people with developmental disabilities.

“Carancho means vulture,” Hamel translated as she introduced the Argentinian insurance-fraud thriller—yes, that’s a thing. The vultures are a mob of crooked lawyers whose main racket involves gathering gullible accident victims as clients, suing on their behalf, and collecting the majority of their settlements as profit. The film is driven by superb performances from the leads: Sosa (Ricardo Darín) is a vulture with an honest face, hooking in gullible clients for his insidious employer. When he falls for Lujan (Martina Gusman), a gorgeous ambulance doctor repulsed by his trade’s lethal methods, he resolves to finally listen to his conscience and get out from under his boss’ thumb. The film takes mafia tropes, like “one last job and I’m out,” and spins them into a bureaucratic-but-still bloody story that brings recent film noir mashups like Winter’s Bone to mind. It explores a new world of violence and loose ethics that’s definitely worth a visit—just look both ways when you cross the street.

Tickets to festival closer Win Win were a hot commodity, thanks to the limited number that the festival was allowed to sell—definitely not to capacity, since the “sold-out” show had plenty of seating to spare—but the fortunate attendees took in Hamel’s traditional thanks to all the projectionists, volunteers, and festival coordinators who made the Wisconsin Film Fest possible before running the animated Festival bumper one last time. Thomas McCarthy’s Win Win was this year’s ringer, the story of Paul Giamatti’s Mike Flaherty, a lawyer who decides to assume guardianship of one of his clients for the extra cash, unknowingly drawing him and his family into the broken home life of the client’s grandson Kyle. The cast is incredible and hilarious—Giamatti and Amy Ryan portray a lived-in marriage with comic grace, and Jeffrey Tambor and Bobby Cannavale sneak in some excellent comic jabs when they can wrest some screen time from the main players. The addition of actual wrestler Alex Shaffer not only enhances the realism on the mat, but also imparts an aloofness to Kyle, who is at once a sage master of his own destiny and a joyless, angst-ridden teen. If you missed out, be sure to take advantage of the theatrical release that Win Win is sure to see in Madison later this year.