Left Flank

I'm still considering whether today's two movies were worth the bother of the hassle my wife and I had to endure to buy tickets this morning. Walking into a more compact version of the NYSE, with less technology in sight, at 9 am, with hundreds of confused South Koreans and various expats snaking through rope lines was not reassuring. If the low roar of chatter and complaints were not enough, at irregular intervals, a volunteer would shout the code numbers of shows closed for the day across town, and other volunteers at the other ends of the room would scrawl the information on whiteboards. Six other volunteers manned the registers, and two of them only serviced premium customers. Countless other volunteers just stood around chatting and irregularly ran about for visual effect. My wife, after 45 minutes, begged me to write an article to the newspapers to complain. With ten minutes to spare we entered the first theater for Maybe God Is Ill.

More like a series of short films not well demarcated or thematically linked, nonetheless Franco Taviani managed some amazing visual images and blurred the edges between documentary and re-enactment in this African tour. Starting from South Africa and moving northward, the film first centered on HIV/AIDS, lurching to child soldiers in Uganda, and ending with emigration. One cultural element I noticed within several issues was an African predilection to translate complex economic problems into interpersonal ethical dilemmas. For instance, children in Mozambique are often accused of witchcraft when parents or other adults die of AIDS or lose a job. Many children are abandoned or run away from abusive parents and family to shelters. The only way for these innocent children to rejoin families is to endure a Church-sanctioned purification ceremony where the child has to declare his innocence and the family has to forgive him. Still, as the film recounted, children die even after reconciliation after another misfortune. A similar process awaits child soldiers wanting to rejoin their villages.In Senegal, villages celebrate emigrants' decisions to emigrate to Europe by dancing and playing music, in a way also forgiving the individual for leaving them. I regret I could not find the name of the band who contributed the soundtrack.

Later in the afternoon and a few subway stops away, we watched The Pit and the Pendulum, one of my original selections. For fans of Borges and postmodern literature, this film is still quite immature. What the director/screenwriter forgot is, that whatever the philosophical nature of story-telling, stories must be interesting above all else, not undermined. Ascertaining the reasons behind the murder of one friend by another is not entertaining if the characters are not appealing. Instead, the two friends, the aspiring screenwriter and professor, became symbols of what the real screenwriter thought popular movies should jettison, the motivations and conflicts, to focus on how each of the people in their circle of friends interpreted the event. But, the center of the film drops out before the pun, that the viewer is looking for a truth that's not worth the effort to find, takes effect. I just didn't care anymore. But, I await future efforts, if only the screenwriter cares more about his tales and his characters, and doesn't just abuse them for didactic effect.

Unfortunately, tomorrow I'm taking a day off before four straight days of theater-going. Forcing me to fight in lines at 8 am, instead of just showing up ticket in hand on my own schedule, is just too much to ask for this peon. Ineptitude has sapped the thrill of the festival for me.

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