Living & Arts

Under the radar: picks at Philly's film fest

In print | April 10, 2008

Like most things in the city of brotherly love, the Philadelphia Film Festival — running until April 15 — doesn’t seem to have anywhere near the same clout that the Toronto International Film Festival or the New York Film Festival or even South by Southwest does. But amidst the Sundance leftovers, there definitely are more than a few refreshingly underexposed treats that seem worthy of a train ride to the city. Last week, some of the interesting selections screened included “Jesus, the Spirit of God,” an Iranian film about the holy prophet as told by the Qur’an, “Universal Signs,” a drama that uniquely tells its story from the perspective of its deaf protagonist and takes place on the streets of Philly and “Like a Shooting Star,” a gangster-infatuated “Breathless”-reminiscent 1967 Japanese film. Unfortunately, the Swarthmore workload did its darnedest to cause me to miss out on these films, but here are a few more films that I’m really hoping I can get a chance to see this weekend, and that you should check out too!

Not to be mistaken with the Hemingway novel, “The Sun Also Rises” is the third film by Chinese filmmaker Jiang Wen. Both his previous two films unflinchingly tackled moments in China’s recent past from a novel and unsentimental perspective. His first largely autobiographical film, “In the Heat of the Sun,” looked at the Cultural Revolution in Beijing through the eyes of bratty children of military officers, living completely carefree, happy lives. His second film “Devils on the Doorstep” is a black and white satire that’s anything but black and white. It’s pretty much “Dr. Strangelove” for the Sino-Japanese War, indicting both Chinese and Japanese characters, and was tellingly banned in China.

As an awesome comedic actor, whose performances I’ve seen in both of these films, Jiang also knows how to make his films dramatically entertaining, something that can’t be said for all Chinese auteurs, all too eager to follow the solemn foreign art film paradigm. It makes me all the more excited that “The Sun Also Rises” has been described as reminiscent of David Lynch, following four disjointed, discontinuous vignettes during the Cultural Revolution. So the film’s been criticized as hard to follow? All the better! I know next to nothing about the plot, but the fact that Jiang Wen himself and the goddess that is Joan Chen star in it is enough of a recommendation for me. I’m prepared to say that audiences didn’t know what hit them when they chose the somnambulant mess that was Ang Lee’s “Lust, Caution” over Jiang’s film at last year’s Venice Film Festival.

American cinema lost its New Wave aspirations sometime in the ‘70s, or arguably never had any with its lumbering studio system, but “Chop Shop” seems to make an admirable bid for the existence of some semblance of realism and class-awareness in a film set in the U.S. The director Ramin Bahrani’s first film was “Man Push Cart,” which looked at the Sisyphus-like stasis of a Pakistani immigrant resigned to selling food from a cart in Manhattan. Here, Bahrani tells the story of two orphaned siblings in the dilapidated milieu of Queens who are falling into lives of delinquency. Critics have cited Bahrani’s documentary style as an update of neorealist tradition. “Chop Shop” seems pretty promising in today’s world of liberal guilt pictures.

On the more experimental end of the festival is an animated film that is being featured prominently as a part of the festival’s homage to film noir. It’s appropriately titled “Film Noir” and by the looks of its trailer and its animation style, it’ll probably be a really hokey, underdeveloped story, but definitely fun and interesting to watch. Creators D. Jud Jones and Risto Topaloski render their film in traditional flat animation style that’s nonetheless clearly computer generated, admittedly making the film look like a computer game or Flash animation. Still, the simplicity of the animation allows Jones and Topaloski to play up the dramatic lighting and camera angles that define film noir. That it’s animated in the first place allows “Film Noir” to execute the most lurid sex scenes and gun shootouts possible that no live action film, not even blue-screen-happy “Sin City,” could get away with.

It’s these kinds of films that make me feel like the under-the-radar nature of the Philly Film Fest is a blessing in disguise.

“The Sun Also Rises” is showing on Friday 2:30 p.m. at The Bridge: Cinema DeLux. “Chop Shop” is showing on Friday 2:30 p.m. and Saturday 9:30 p.m. at Ritz Five. “Film Noir” is showing on Saturday 10 p.m. at Ritz East and Sunday 5 p.m. at The Bridge: Cinema DeLux. More information is at www.phillyfests.com.

Alex is a sophomore. You can reach him at aho1@swarthmore.edu.