Luck be a lady

Volatile women, charming girls, and a Bay Guardian star shoot through the Vancouver film fest.

By Johnny Ray Huston

THE TITLE OF Kumakiri Kazuyoshi's endearing V-Cinema effort, The Volatile Woman, could double as a thematic subtext lurking inside this year's Vancouver International Film Festival. It introduced more than a few charming girls and ladies of the dark – along with the just-completed Vancouver International Film Centre, host to screenings of landscape artist James Benning's epic poems of water and air, 13 Lakes and 10 Skies, among others.

No woman at this year's VIFF was wilder than the title character of Odete, and big-screen introductions don't come any better than the one debut performer Ana Cristina de Oliveira receives in João Pedro Rodrigues's follow-up to O Fantasma, which proves the Portuguese provocateur hasn't lost his knack for discovering absolutely stunning people to star in his movies. Giving muzak (more specifically, Andy Williams's version of "Both Sides Now") an operatically moving power, the instant Oliveira first roller-skates into view is the most electric moment I've found in a movie this year.

Though sometimes overly schematic, the rest of Odete certifies that Rodrigues is a major-league, versatile stylist. No director today shoots immersive darkness so accurately, and yet the stark Tsai- and Pasolini-inflected approach from O Fantasma also receives new, colorful layers. At the heart of it all is Odete, a character who explodes the ugly term fag hag through the sheer force of her profanely spiritual insistence that she's pregnant with a dead gay man's child.

A woman of a different shape but similarly ferocious spirit powers Marcos Prado's extraordinary documentary Estamira. "My mission, besides to be Estamira, is to deliver the truth," declares this 63-year-old spitfire, whose home is a gargantuan garbage dump in Rio de Janeiro. Estamira's truth is one that extends far beyond the limits of sanity ("You have never seen beyond the beyond," she says at one point), to rage against God "the Punster – a wise guy in reverse," his "remote control," and his "electrospherograms" and "negative offensive astral bodies." Spending five years with his subject in order to dig deep into her institutional and family history, Prado crafts a documentary that shames the cookie-cutter polemics that dominate festivals and art houses today. His Salgado-like black-and-white shots of crows and gulls swooping over heaps of refuse have visionary power, nowhere more than when Estamira's yells at "the Punster" are answered by thunderclaps and angry fingers of lightning.

If Toronto's behemoth of a fest now embodies North America's market-obsessed view of cinema, then Vancouver – thanks to programmers Tony Rayns and Mark Peranson – is the art form's heart beating in the dark, a friendly and intelligent site where economic caste systems aren't so dominant. Fitting, then, that one showcase event was Nagasaki Shunichi's radical remake of his 1982 Super-8 feature Heart, Beating in the Dark. While Nagasaki's original (also screened) owes a debt to pop Godard, his new version – in which the stars of the first return to reprise their roles and cross paths with a younger infanticidal couple – has the nuanced authority of a director who is his own master. Otomo Yoshihide's great kick-drum-and-guitar score augments Nagasaki's magician's flair for temporal play and subtle shifts between gradations of drama and realism.

Gazing down on the Bush-fucked mess of a country below, Vancouver mined the few veins of independence still present within Sundance and ventured outside of it to find the excellent likes of Andrew Bujalski's Mutual Appreciation, a black-and-white follow-up to Funny Ha Ha in which the characters aren't so likable, and the dialogue is even more offhandedly cutting. Cristi Puiu's Cannes Un Certain Regard prizewinner, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, from Romania, might have been the most epic achievement, a bleakly funny descent into the many-leveled hell of the modern-day medical system. But for sheer pleasure, nothing could match the kaleidoscopic splendor of Citizen Dog, Wisit Sasanatieng's long-awaited follow-up to the film the Weinsteins kidnapped and never let go, Tears of the Black Tiger. A gekko with an old lady's face, a chain-smoking preschool girl, and Bay Guardian contributor Chuck Stephens (in a small but pivotal role) are just three of the odd treats to be found in a manic musical that makes The Umbrellas of Cherbourg look drab. Introducing the film, Stephens said that Sasanatieng's visual style is a tribute to Thai movie posters, and indeed, virtually every shot is banner-worthy.

This year's VIFF had a few more counterparts to Odete and Estamira, female characters who carve their way into a viewer's memory, and it's little surprise that a couple hail from South Korea, the country that – Kim Ki-duk's ludicrous misogyny aside – is offering the most trenchant contemporary commentaries on relationships between men and women. As delicate and lonely as the early Smiths sensibility that informs its title, Lee Yoon-ki's This Charming Girl is buoyed by a magnificent performance by Kim Ji-soo, who wordlessly reveals a past of agony in one extended close-up during a wrenching scene near the end. Lee's attentive fellow feeling for his heroine's humdrum daily rituals and unspoken longing is matched only by the deathly still savagery of Zhang Lu's Grain in Ear, a China-South Korea production, set in the former country, that examines nationalist and sexist prejudice with (as programmer Rayns noted) Fassbinder's pitilessness sympathy for the underdog. I saw Grain in Ear shortly after attending a VIFF lecture on Cinemascope by David Bordwell, and while Zhang isn't working within the format, his peerless framing of shots illustrated Bordwell's ideas more clearly than some of the famed Hollywood auteur works from which the critic culled stills.

Ultimately, one of Vancouver's most memorable women exerted authority behind, as well as in front of, the camera. With her debut feature, Ox Hide, Liu Jiayin asserted herself as China's answer to Pixelvision pioneer Sadie Benning (daughter of James) – a seriously hilarious talent capable of taking an unflinchingly clear-eyed look at domestic life. Composed of 23 fixed-angle shots, Liu's family portrait builds drama from daily detritus. Best of all, Liu's ornery dad, stern mom, and Liu herself are comic masters at the art of bickering, especially around the dinner table. On the way back to Vancouver's airport, sharing a ride with the elder Benning – set to take to the sky after a screening of his 10 Skies – and Roxie Cinema's Bill Banning, I found out that Ox Hide won the fest's Dragons and Tigers competition. Liu's peculiar DIY-video use of Cinemascope to microscopic ends no doubt impressed jury member Bordwell. Hers is a deserved win.