WHY I GO TO THE MOVIES, WITH LILLIAN: Reflections on the Festival de Cine Internacional de San Juan 2014

THE ROAD TO THE MOVIE THEATER, WHILE PAVED, IS FILLED WITH MANY OBSTRUCTIONS

by Jan Galligan and Lillian Mulero
Santa Olaya, PR

2014 San Juan International Film Festival : Day Four (SPOILER ALERT!)

On a good day, meaning light traffic, we can make San Juan from Santa Olaya in 28 minutes. Over time, we have learned that the preliminaries before the start of a feature movie, a series of commercials and coming attractions, last for 20 minutes.

Calculations for when to leave the house in order to arrive at the start of a movie go like this: the published time for the film is 7:10; which means the film will begin at 7:30; which means we should leave at 7:02; but the chances of heavy traffic are 60%, so we should leave at 6:45; plus 5 minutes for parking the car, so we should leave at 6:40.

Lillian hates to miss the opening moments of a film. For her, it's like a journey by public transportation: if you're late, the train has already left the station; you've missed the boat and the rest of the trip is spoiled, no matter what else might happen. I like an element of mystery. The first ten minutes of most films are filled with expository information which sets the scene and describes the action that will be carried out for the rest of the movie. If you miss that introduction, then you have an interesting problem in trying to figure out exactly what is going on in the story and what is motivating the characters. The movie becomes a puzzle to be solved. “Maybe,” says Lillian, “Regardless, I hate missing the opening minutes of a movie.” We should leave at 6:20, which means we may end up sitting through most of the commercials and coming attractions.

I generally don't like watching trailers for films I am planning to see. Inevitably they show you the entire plot of the film. Watching the movie then becomes an experience of seeing something that you are already familiar with, and for which you have a pretty good idea of how it will evolve and maybe even what the ending will be. For similar reasons, I don't like reading reviews before seeing a film. There's a good reason that they are called reviews, not previews, and trailers should be something that follow the main event. Good reviews summarize a film, but also analyze the story and critique the way it is told. If the movie has an inherent puzzle or mystery, reviews often attempt to provide a solution.

Screenings for the San Juan International Film Festival follow a different pattern, and require a different calculation. Posted start times are fairly accurate, the preliminaries last only five minutes and there are no coming attractions. 

We were late for four of the five screenings. I blame it on the traffic. An accident blocking the highway; a truck broken down in the middle of the road; road repairs and a detour; and in the first instance, two traffic jams along the way. Lillian was not happy, while I found myself plunged into mystery. “What's going on?” I'd whisper to Lillian. “Shut up and watch the film,” she'd reply. The mysteries were complicated by the multicultural nature of the movies being shown: Dominican film in Spanish, no subtitles; Austrian film, in German, with English subtitles; Uruguayan film in Spanish, no subtitles; Taiwanese film in Chinese, with English subtitles, but very little dialog; a film from Turkey, in Turkish, Arabic and English, with Spanish subtitles. My ability to read Spanish is serviceable, but I often get lost in complex verb conjugations. “What'd they say?” I'd whisper to Lillian. “Quiet!” she'd reply.

After four or five films in a few days, the stories start to run together, but here's a brief synopsis: 

QUIERO SER FIEL (I Want to be Faithful) is a Mexican, Dominican coproduction, filmed in the Dominican Republic. The hero of this rom-com is a young, upper-middle class, college educated guy who wrote a book about how to marry the woman of your dreams, and then he did. Now with a contract to write a book about how infidelity haunts the married man, his research seduces him as well. In the end, love and a new-born child triumph over faithlessness and betrayal. The settings for this story: condos, luxury cars, discos and upscale restaurants – are all air conditioned. The only moment in the film when you feel the Caribbean heat is when the hero's wife catches him at a hide-away restaurant, in the midst of a rendezvous with one of his research subjects, and attacks him in the parking lot. She goes back to their air-conditioned house in the suburbs, he moves into an air-conditioned condo. The Dominican Republic is considered a country of upper-middle income, but 41% of the people live in poverty. The hero, and would-be author, owns an auto parts store inherited from his father, his wife is a senior money manager for an international bank, and one of his liaisons is a real estate broker for luxury condominiums. This film is basically a commercial advertising the lifestyles of wealthy Dominicanos.

 

THE DARK VALLEY (Das Finstere Tal) is a German, Austrian co-production, filmed in a hidden valley in the Austrian Alps. Greider, the hero of this turn of the century, Sergio Leon influenced pseudo-Western, is a young man of German descent, born and raised in America, who has returned to the village where he was conceived, to cast vengeance on the people who had held his mother in subjugation until she managed to escape. His revenge, long planned, and slowly executed, ends in the deaths of everyone who wronged his mother, including the patriarch and chief despot, who, it turns out, is his father. “Just make it quick,” says his father. He does. The story was beautifully filmed in color, but naturally desaturated to look like black and white. The most dramatic moments of color, besides sunrise are splashes and pools of blood on white snow as Greider exacts his mayhem. The soundtrack is brilliant. The heavy clomp of boots and spurs on hardwood floors, the creaking and groaning of trees in the winter wind, the crunch of snow under the hoofs of horses in escape or pursuit. Unlike the traditional German heimatfilms (films about the homeland, filmed in the Alps which tell a simple moral story of good, evil and redemption) the morality of this story is not simple. This is a much darker exploration of savagery, oppression and vengeance.

EL LUGAR DEL HIJO (The Militant), is an Uruguayan production. The hero of this story is a working class young man from Salto, who attends college in the capital, Montevideo. His father dies and he returns home. In the process of settling the estate he gets involved in a sit-in at the local university, and radicalized, joins a hunger strike by a group of protesting meat packers. He wears a lapel pin depicting Lenin's wife as a symbol of solidarity in the larger struggle against Uruguay's Crisis of 2002. He is literally handicapped in his efforts by: a limp, an atrophied hand, and a speech impediment. None the less, his protests are effective, and he helps the striking meat packers gain better wages. They return to their jobs and process 100 head of cattle from his family's ranch, the only assets they have left which will help pay down the enormous debt left by the father. After riding horses to round up the cattle and disarming a drunken employee at the ranch who intends to “kill that idiot with this 38”, he rides around Salto on his moped.


STRAY DOGS (Jiao You), a French, Taiwanese co-production, was filmed in Mandarin, in Taipei. The anti-hero of this film, is a middle-aged homeless man, with two children, a young boy and a younger girl. He's an alcoholic and earns money each day working as a human signboard, standing next to a highway intersection in downtown Taipei. He has built a shelter for himself and the children in a storage bin under the highway. They do their nightly ablutions in public bathrooms, including brushing their teeth. This 138 minute film, directed by Tsai Ming-Liang, claimed by him as his “final film” is a text book exercise in the minimalist slow cinema genre, of which Tsai Ming-Liang is considered a leading proponent.

The film contains five very lengthy sequences: (1) 7 minutes – The opening scene where a woman, possibly the children's mother, combs the girls hair. (2) 5 minutes – The man holds his sign board and recites, then sings a 12th Century Chinese militant poem. (3) 11 minutes – The man, in a drunken stupor, attacks, then eats a large head of cabbage which the children had made into a puppet. This takes place in the bed they share while the children are apparently asleep. (4) 8 minutes – The woman tours an underground derelict building, then stares fixedly at a landscape wall mural graffiti painting. (5) 20 minutes – near the end of the film. The man hugs the woman from behind, while they stand completely still. He takes drinks from a series of mini-liquor bottles. She sheds a single tear. They stare into space. A cross-cut reveals they are looking at the painted mural. She leaves; he follows.  


WINTER SLEEP (Kis Uykusu) a Turkish production, filmed in Cappadoccia, Turkey, in Turkish and English. Goggle says that the Turkish title translates as Hibernation. The hero of this 3 hour and 20 minute film is a writer. A middle-aged man of some means, he owns a small hotel, carved from the side of a mountain which he advertises on the internet and runs with the help of his sister. He keeps one small cave accommodation as his writing studio. In another, his very young wife has sequestered herself. They do not seem to be getting along, although since the dialog is in Turkish and the subtitles are in Spanish, I could be misinterpreting. In addition to the hotel, he also owns a series of low income apartments in town. Based on his writing and discussions with his sister about his articles, he seems to be an enlightened man of moral principle, although he belongs to the secular 2% minority of the Turkish population who are not Muslim. Also based on his writing he seems to be promoting educational reform and increased educational and economic opportunity for the Muslim majority children.

One day the child of one of his tenants, a family deeply in arrears on their payments to him, smashes the window of his Land Rover with a rock as he drives past the boy who is on his way home from school. The man is in the passenger seat of his Land Rover. His driver captures the boy, and they drive the boy to his home, where the driver confronts the father and a fist-fight nearly ensues. The boy's uncle, an appeaser, tries to make peace with the man and his driver. Later, the uncle brings the boy to the hotel to confront having dishonored the man, and pay tribute by kissing the man's hand. Instead, the boy faints. The man's young wife watches from across the room. Sometime later, the man has decided to leave for a stay in the capital, Istanbul, in order to give his wife “her space.” Just before his departure, she hosts a meeting at the hotel, of her peers, who have organized a project to raise money for educational reform. The man is not invited to the meeting. In fact, she tells him to leave the room. He retreats to his studio. The next day he confronts her about having dishonored him by her actions and demands the money accounts of her project. At first she refuses. He chides her for her behavior and belittles her efforts. They argue. She sulks. He relents and offers her a substantial donation. She reluctantly accepts.

He leaves for Istanbul, but it is snowing too hard and the train is delayed. Instead, he and the driver visit a friend near the train station. Over a warm fire they are joined by one of his wife's cohorts, a young professor, and the three men drink to excess, while the driver stays outside in the freezing cold and talks on the phone to the cook back at the hotel. In a drunken stupor, the professor accuses the writer of dishonesty. The writer pukes. The professor leaves, and his friend helps the writer into bed. Apparently, the driver sleeps in the Land Rover. Meanwhile, the wife pays a visit to the home of the boy and his uncle. She offers them the money that the writer gave her. This is her revenge on her husband and a sly way of paying him back. Fortuitously, the boy's father has just been released from prison and shows up the moment she hands the money, “enough to buy a house,” to the uncle. “What's this!?” asks the father. “Allah be praised, she's making us a donation,” says the uncle, and leaves the room. “Give me that,” says the father. Grabbing the money, he tosses it onto the fire roaring in the fireplace. The young wife bursts into tears, and continues to cry during the long drive back to her room at the hotel. The next day the writer goes hunting with his friend, and manages to shoot a rabbit with a shotgun. The driver packs the man and the rabbit into the Land Rover and takes them back to the hotel. The trip to Istanbul is postponed, possibly for good. At the hotel, the writer hands the rabbit to the cook, then spies his young wife in the window of her upstairs room. In soliloquy, he declares his love for his wife and states that he has found a new and better man inside himself, and vows that he will live his life as that new person from that day forth. The curtain falls.

Will the young wife tell the man about the money? Will the man leave immediately for Istanbul? How will the poor Muslim family pay their rent? Will the young boy graduate from school and attend college? Will the writer continue to publish his columns on politics, religion, economics and history?

Walking out of the theater at the movie's end, late at night, the drive back to Santa Olaya should be an easy one. Most of the roads will be deserted, and barring any accidents or road repairs, it should be an unimpeded journey. I decide to tell Lillian that during the film, I came to realize that there was a new, better person inside me, one who knows the value of arriving to a film on time, in order to see the opening sequence. “We will leave earlier next time we go to the movies,” I tell her. “Right,” she says, “We'll see about that.”