Wisconsin Film Festival The porn fairy and the Virgin Mary (AVC at WFF Day Two)

Scott: The Wisconsin Film Festival's trailer—shown before each film—is usually a bit of a delight in itself. In this year's animated spot, blue moths flit around a light bulb, turning magenta as they approach it, to the sound of a chill jazz combo. This year's theme, "It Changes You," is a little more restrained than last year's hysterically hokey, Sconnie-booster slogan, "We Like It Here," but it's still a nice part of the ritual.

The trailer has about a tenth as many moths as Lourdes (which screened at the Orpheum Stage Door) has Virgin Mary figures. As a young woman paralyzed by multiple sclerosis (Sylvie Testud) makes a modern-day pilgrimage by tour bus to the French town's shrine, figures of Our Lady crowd gift-shop shelves, perch conspicuously on nightstands, are awarded as prizes for "best pilgrim," or loom so large that the top of the frame cuts across her shoulders. "It's a bit touristy," Testud says as a group of invalids and caretakers herds into the dining hall on the first night, "But that's how every pilgrimage is."

Jessica Hausner's 2009 film on the whole doesn't deny it: A cynical officer at the shrine tells one good joke too good to spoil (the setup: Jesus, The Holy Ghost, and Mary are making their vacation plans…), and a hard-boiled old caretaker delivers at least one Dr. Strangelove-worthy one-liner. ("Today you have free time—you can choose between confession and going to the baths.") Testud and her fellow invalids, all hoping God will reach down and heal them, get mixed messages from their priests and caretakers: Miracles can happen; accept your fate with grace. At the same time, Lourdes fights to preserve the majesty of the religious experience. Right after that officer's joke, cinematographer Martin Gschlacht's camera sweeps solemnly over a nighttime gathering of thousands of candle-clutching worshippers. Never once is Gschlacht's framing glib or distant: If you want to jeer at the giant, gold-statuary Stations of the Cross, you'll have to look past a group of flawed, unlucky people who are desperate for some help and comfort. As many laughs as it offers to the snide unbeliever, Lourdes defies anyone to take a side.

The sparsely attended documentary Simonal: Nobody Knows How Hard It Was (at the Frederic March Play Circle) could have used a little of that balance. Directors Claudio Manoel, Calvito Leal, and Micael Langer make it easy to bask in the smart-assed, "rascal-style" charisma of Brazilian singer Wilson Simonal during his 1960s prime. As a black man rising to fame in a divided country, Simonal dared to sing tributes to Martin Luther King, and, in one number, goaded the public with a parody of minstrel-show antics. When he sang "Mother Sprinkled Sugar On Me," he bubbled over with glee and sarcasm all at once, like an uncanny mixture of Sinatra and Morrissey. Several numbers, including Simonal's duet with Sarah Vaughan on "The Shadow Of Your Smile," play out in their entirety, a nice break from the rush of interviews. Even when he's twisting his lips into antagonistically goofy expressions, Simonal has a voice that is expert and divine. In a commercial for Shell oil, he sings down to happy motorists from a helicopter, and they sing back up at him. Above all, the film makes one admire his embrace of the ridiculous.

The doc just about rips in half when it turns its attention to Simonal's downfall: Upon finding out he was broke, Simonal allegedly had the police kidnap and torture his accountant. Not only are we never properly introduced to the political context in which all this was happening, the entire episode is so muddled and complex that it warrants a documentary of its own. The accountant speaks, and so do Simonal's two sons, but it is almost hopeless to try and get beyond the cloud of accusations and political paranoia. Simonal feels like two documentaries jammed into the space of one, but the first of them offers a terrific introduction to a star who was clearly ahead of his time.

Jason: When people ask me why I enjoy the WFF, I usually tell them it’s because it’s like a birthday party: There’s a palpable buzz, and for the most part folks are in a good mood; the camaraderie around a common passion is infectious; and the movies themselves function like presents. Every couple of hours you get to unwrap something unknown and share that fun with everyone around you. But at any party, there are always going to be a few jackasses who don’t know how to act, and then there’s that present—the jumbo pack of black dress socks from your grandma.

A title like The Happiest Girl In The World comes laced with obvious irony. Whoever this girl is, she isn’t going to be all that happy. That said, the movie is so dour, and so unrelenting in its exploration of the mundanities of generational discord, that its 115 minutes feel like twice that. The setup is simple: A young Romanian girl, Delia Fratila, wins a car in a contest after sending in a label off a juice bottle. She’s required to be part of a 30-second promotional commercial. Her parents want to sell the car, she doesn’t. The commercial is shot. (How many full, on-screen takes did we see? 15? 20? 50? It’s hard to remember.) Delia argues with her mother, her father, and her mother and father together. No one is happy. The biggest surprise during this screening was that four or five folks from the typically stalwart WFF audiences walked out of the Madison Museum Of Contemporary Art mid-film. Maybe all the patience-trying was exactly the point and I completely missed it. I’m willing to accept that.

Later, I checked out the series of five UK-based shorts at Cinematheque. Overall, it was a strong group,"Bale" and "Love Does Grow On Trees" in particular. Both attacked the pains of adolescence, from two completely different angles—the first with stark and gorgeous pastoral imagery, minimal dialogue, and a gut-punch closing scene of innocence lost. The latter was a truly sweet take on teenage boy’s budding sexuality. "Love" also featured a “porn fairy.” Maybe it’s inherent to the sloped-brow tendencies of my gender, but I couldn’t help but wish I’d been so lucky to have had a porn fairy showing me the ropes when I was 15. The only complaint here was with audience. First, if your kid can’t sit still and stay relatively quiet for 78 minutes, he probably shouldn’t be at a screening. Second, a quick shout-out to that passionate couple sitting in the second to last row, kissing between every reel: It may be dark, but you’re not invisible.