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Spending time at the Thessaloniki Film Festival December 3, 2006

Spending time at the Thessaloniki Film Festival, a world-class event, as I always have to assure doubting Thomases, is an unmitigated pleasure, but there’s a catch.

Not a bad thing, certainly, quite the reverse, for most people, but let’s say a source of confusion. The catch is the presence of Greek films, and especially Cypriot films, amid the throng of entries from all over the world, which is like the effect of being on holiday in some faraway place and hearing Cypriot dialect being spoken at the table next to you. Do you acknowledge it? On the one hand, how can you not? On the other, you almost wish those films, like those dining companions, weren’t there, breaking the spell with their reminder of people and places left behind.

This year, the push-and-pull of exotic vs. familiar was especially strong, because this year’s Festival, the 47th, was marked by two things. On the one hand, a ‘New Chinese Cinema’ sidebar curated by Derek Elley, a veteran critic from trade bible Variety, packed with rarities from one of the world’s most exciting and hard-to-find cinemas. On the other, a strong Cypriot presence, with two shorts and two features, both widely liked, one of them extremely controversial.

What to see? In the end I managed to please both constituencies, though I’d have liked to sample more Chinese films than the two I managed to catch, Crazy Stone, a lively variation on Guy Ritchie crime comedies, and a huge hit in China, and Spring Subway, a stylish piece from 2002 that begins as urban whimsy and turns into a great breakup movie. “These seven years are like a piece of flesh torn out of me,” muses our hero in voice-over, talking of his marriage; “I can’t bear to cut it, even though it’s hanging by a thread”. “These seven years are like a child drowning before our eyes,” counters the heroine (also in voice-over), catching the exact mix of fear and helplessness that precedes a failed relationship. Alas, the film subsides into mushy tearjerker, but I’m still glad I saw it.

I’m also glad I saw the Cypriot films, though I sense a slight generation gap opening up. Pharmakon, a 12-minute short directed by twentysomething Ioakim Mylonas, it won Best Experimental Film at the Festival in Drama city, wallows in Expressionist design and a Twilight Zone-ish plot; I didn’t see the other short, Animal Behaviour by Nicos Synnos, but the synopsis, “Television violence leads to a cruel game inside Dog’s house”,  also suggests an offbeat, younger person’s film. Mr. Synnos runs a “cartoon and experimental animation studio” in Limassol. Both the features, on the other hand, Meli ke Krasi, by 43-year-old Marinos Kartikkis, and Akamas, by 55-year-old Panicos Chrysanthou, were frugal and unflashy, making a virtue of plainness.

Meli ke Krasi (Honey and Wine) explores the burgeoning relationship between two lonely women with a deft touch and welcome sensitivity, working effectively within a low budget. Akamas is also old-fashioned, more pageant than movie as it ploughs through 30 years of Cyprus history. It’s “A Cypriot Film presented by Panicos Chrysanthou and Dervis Zaim” note the opening credits, pointedly juxtaposing a Greek and a Turkish name; that’s the Message, that we’re all Cypriots and should put ethnic divisions behind us, and the film sounds horribly didactic but actually works, made with obvious sincerity and mostly understating without toppling over into melodrama.

In a way, I’m being disingenuous. Akamas is already notorious as a political hot-potato, and Chrysanthou publicly accused the Ministry of Culture, which part-financed the film, of “unfriendly” behaviour bordering on “censorship”; if it ever gets shown in Cyprus, a big ‘if’, the debate clearly won’t revolve around aesthetics. Yet its plastic qualities are part of its charm: the placid village rhythm, the obvious love for the Cyprus landscape, the actors’ mostly toned-down performances, Chris Greco is soulful as our Turkish-Cypriot hero. The camera seldom moves, unless it’s to follow someone. A traditional singer narrates in verse, finally wishing the audience good health over the closing credits, and offers a telling parable for the tragedy of Cyprus: “A crazy man threw a pebble down a well, and 10 wise men jumped in after it”. When the film has its heroine sitting in a grotto, head on hand, it feels like a campy 50s love story; when EOKA attack in the night, with very blue moonlight and exciting music, all rattles and swooshes, it feels like some 70s Alistair MacLean adaptation. But it’s all for the best; if Akamas were slick, it might seem manipulative. Instead it’s plain and decent, only really faltering in some over-literary dialogue. As for the Message … well, I agree. But some will cry treason.

In the end, neither film featured in the Greek State Film Awards, where a Greco-German drama called Eduart was the big winner. Maybe the Greeks felt a bit embarrassed by our problems, mired as we are in bitter nationalism while Greece becomes ever more ‘European’, and the Festival’s many events included a tribute to Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan, with both an exhibition of his photos and a screening of his latest film, marital drama Climates. Retros and tributes are often the best part of Thessaloniki, and this year’s goodies included a look at Brazilian cinema, from the ‘Cinema Novo’ of the late 1960s to recent hits like Central Station, a few films by Czech surrealist Jan Svankmajer and a complete retrospective of German auteur Wim Wenders, of Wings of Desire (1987) fame. His superb Alice in the Cities (1974) was shown on the king-size screen at the Olympion, preceded by a ceremony where fellow master Theo Angelopoulos presented Wenders with a special ‘Golden Alexander’. Applause was tumultuous, not least because Angelopoulos used to be President of the Festival, left on bad terms two years ago and was now making his return/reconciliation. Everyone loves a bit of drama.

It’s a feast, a marvellous Festival, and I haven’t even mentioned the Competition itself, which was won by a low-key Korean drama called Family Ties but included gems like the brash Mexican offering Drama/Mex, depressed middle-ager befriends teenage runaway in Acapulco, and the hypnotic Day Night Day Night, young woman prepares for something unmentionable in New York City. Nor have I mentioned the many Special Screenings, more high-profile fare including The Queen, Helen Mirren as Queen Elizabeth II after the death of Diana, The Last King of Scotland, Forest Whitaker as Idi Amin, and Inland Empire, the mind-blowing latest from David Lynch. Nor have I mentioned the many selections from other festivals including my favourite film of the year, the Thai Syndromes and a Century. Nor have I mentioned the beautiful setting, right on the Gulf of Thermaikos where sea and sky merge into cream-coloured light on a hazy day.

Above all, perhaps, Thessaloniki is a young Festival. The audiences are young, mostly students, making them volatile but loudly appreciative. The staff are young, which explains the many parties lasting through the night. At the ceremony giving Wenders his award, I saw the man himself, tall, imposing, leonine, ambling to his seat near the stage, then one of the young volunteers rushing to her friends on the sidelines. “I said ‘hi’ to him!” she burbled excitedly. “And he said ‘hi’ back!”. And they giggled like cinephile schoolgirls.

ROBERT ALTMAN, 1925-2006 > I heard about it in Thessaloniki, at the ceremony honouring Wim Wenders. “But first I have some bad news,” intoned the presenter, and broke the news of Robert Altman’s death. He asked for a minute of silence, and the audience instantly rose as one, completely unbidden. Granted, this was a film-festival audience, but we’re also talking of a massive cinema holding several hundred people, and every one of them had heard of Robert Altman. How could you not?

For such a legendary filmmaker, Altman’s career was surprisingly erratic. He was over 40 by the time he found fame, having toiled for decades in TV and documentaries, which explains his always-acerbic attitude to Hollywood, he never won an Oscar, despite five nominations. ‘M.A.S.H.’ (1970) was the film that made his name, a military comedy,  touching a nerve in the time of Vietnam, with just enough blood to shock and just enough goofiness to charm. Above all, ‘M.A.S.H.’ was anarchic and casual, which made it even more anarchic, not a fiery satire like ‘Catch-22’ but a loose, irresponsible sort of film, thumbing its nose at all Authority.

That was the Altman sensibility, especially in his golden years of 1970-77 when he made six masterpieces and some pretty good movies one after the other. Altman’s trademark was overlapping dialogue, as if refusing to privilege one character over another, which often made his films seem chaotic. ‘The Long Goodbye’ (1973) played fast and loose with Raymond Chandler’s private-eye classic, cast Elliott Gould as a shambling, seemingly incompetent Philip Marlowe, and was assailed as “a spit in the eye to a great writer” by critic Michael Billington. ‘McCabe and Mrs. Miller’ (1971) was deliberately murky, forsaking the clean surfaces of traditional Westerns. ‘3 Women’ (1977) was incomprehensible, if magical.

Altman was a genuine free spirit; that he cared about his films seems self-evident, yet he also refused to care too deeply, at least if caring meant cocooning and coddling them, and sucking the life out of them. He valued their faults; he valued their individuality. In his career he was fearless, and reckless. ‘Popeye’ (1980) may be the oddest children’s film ever made by a Hollywood studio, a failure in almost every way yet somehow admirable for being so perverse, taking beloved kiddie characters like Popeye and Bluto and Olive Oyl and making them cranky and recessive. It made Altman a pariah, till he returned with ‘The Player’ (1992) ironically, a satire of Hollywood.

Altman in his 70s, finally acclaimed as a Grand Old Man, remained abrasive and irreverent, slipping out a couple more masterpieces, ‘Short Cuts’ (1993) and ‘Gosford Park’ (2001) and looking at the world from behind beady eyes and silver goatee. His last film was ‘A Prairie Home Companion’, made a few months ago when he already knew, but hadn’t told anyone, that he had cancer. Death looms large in the film, but there’s no self-pity: “The death of an old man,” we’re told, “is not a tragedy”. Prickly and unsentimental to the last.