Sofia Coppola, The Bling Ring, 2013, HD video, color, sound, 90 minutes. Nicki (Emma Watson).

SOFIA COPPOLA’S REMOTE, REPETITIVE The Bling Ring, inspired by a 2010 Vanity Fair article about a quintet of San Fernando Valley teens who broke into and robbed celebrity homes, is often as insubstantial as the reality-TV stars name-checked (and burgled) throughout. Continuing the writer-director’s favorite theme—the listlessness of the privileged—The Bling Ring centers on adolescent ennui devolving into anomie. But missing from this film are the exacting details and the perfect distillation of milieu that distinguished Coppola’s previous four (even those in which the depressive, pampered protagonists are intolerable, as in 2003’s Lost in Translation). The five felonious teens here are reduced to their cyclical actions: cooing at and pocketing ill-gotten, tacky swag, slo-mo clubbing, drug-consuming, and selfie-taking.

“I want my own lifestyle brand,” Marc (Israel Broussard), a new, pre-gay student at Indian Hills High School, tells his classmate Becca (Katie Chang) before she introduces him to the thrill of removing valuables—wallets, bags of coke—from unlocked cars. With the help of DListed and easily Googled VIP addresses, the two slip into Paris Hilton’s manor effortlessly (she keeps the key under the mat) while the heiress is away, marveling at her pet monkey, the throw pillows emblazoned with her image, and her holiest of hidey-holes, her “nightclub room.” (Coppola’s production designer took no liberties: Hilton, who was repeatedly robbed by the real-life juvie thieves, let the director film these scenes in her home.)

Marc and Becca soon team up with Chloe (Claire Julien) and Nicki (Emma Watson) and Sam (Taissa Farmiga); the latter two are de-facto sisters under the Adderall-dispensing, homeschooling, Secret-quoting, vision-board-making care of Nicki’s mom (Leslie Mann). Nicki, an aspiring supermodel, makes the most petulant demands: “C’mon, let’s go to Paris’s. I wanna rob.” And so we return to the socialite’s lair, this time glimpsing one of her Chihuahuas and her shoes (“Her feet are so big”). Yet the thrill of being amid such gaudy opulence stirs little excitement among this covetous group. The stripling burglars’ lassitude makes a viewer appreciate even more the ecstatic inventorying of James Franco’s Alien in Spring Breakers (“I got my blue Kool-Aid, I got my fuckin’ NUN-CHUCKS….”), still the year’s definitive movie on invidious consumption.

Though slight, The Bling Ring offers further proof of Coppola’s infallible instinct for casting young actresses. Like Kirsten Dunst in The Virgin Suicides (1999) and Elle Fanning in Somewhere (2010), Watson, the biggest name among the five housebreakers, gives a fantastic performance. Watching Harry Potter’s Hermione perfect the aggressive, flat-voweled vapidity of SoCal self-redemption speak (“I think this situation was attracted into my life as an opportunity to grow. I think it’s my journey to push for peace,” Nicki says before her court date) stands as the film’s sole revelation—a rare pleasure in an apathetic project about torpid teens.

— Melissa Anderson

The Bling Ring opens in limited release June 14.

James William Guercio, Electra Glide in Blue, 1973, 35 mm, color, sound, 114 minutes.

WHEN BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN wrote “Born to Run” and sang, “The highway’s jammed with broken heroes,” he might have been thinking of a then-current spate of road movies piled with unlikely co-riders and misfit loners. Two Lane Blacktop (1970), Little Fauss and Big Halsy (1970), Duel (made for TV, 1971), Vanishing Point (1971), The Getaway (1972), Badlands (1973), The Sugarland Express (1974), Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry (1974), Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974): Here was a bumpy Polaroid patchwork of the American Southwest, each snapshot presenting a different tangential angle on wide open spaces and arid claustrophobia, motorized dreams of freedom pitted against a world of roadblocks, scrap yards, tumbleweeds, and dead-end streets.

James William Guercio’s 1973 picture Electra Glide in Blue was a one-shot distillation of that tendency, a drive-in art film that gave Robert Blake his best role as pint-size, overcompensating motorcycle cop John Wintergreen, stuck patrolling a seemingly endless stretch of scarcely populated Arizona asphalt. It was a weird combination that somehow clicked. Guercio was a big-shot record producer who had made his name on brassy, crowd-pleasing albums for Blood, Sweat, & Tears and Chicago—not someone you’d think of as a natural candidate for a naturalistic film director. (He had also worked on records for the Firesign Theater, a clue there may have been more to him than his hard-sell reputation.) At this point, Blake had only two serious credits—In Cold Blood from ’67 and Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here from ’69—and was probably still best known for having been a child actor in the Our Gang series (1939–44).

He brought a desperate, freewheeling conviction to the material that made it believable: Like his character, he knew this might be his only shot at getting out of the also-ran division. Guercio appreciated that, and built the movie around him with a palpable faith in his star: The reciprocity shines in scenes like Wintergreen’s getting dressed up for his first day as a plainclothes officer, dancing to the rapturous doo-wop of the Marcels’ “Most of All.” Blake throughout moves between cockiness and diffidence, a driven and scared man trying to wiggle his way through a narrow opening in a tight spot: His casual eccentricity and socially awkward will to do the right thing make him an unusually persuasive Everyman.

In film noir terms, that’s a nice word for “patsy.” But part of Electra Glide in Blue’s appeal is how it sets up a classic murder mystery—a staged suicide apparently covering up another crime—only to go off the grid and wander into less familiar terrain. It might be something as small as Wintergreen trying a pickup line on a pair of tall girls beside an ice cream truck: “Did you know me and Alan Ladd were exactly the same height, right down to the quarter inch?…Didja know he was so short, they used to have to dig a ditch just for the girls to stand in to kiss him?” Or something as charged as his paranoid, Dirty Harry–manqué boss (Mitchell Ryan) taking him to meet a woman it turns out they’re both involved with, a scene that doesn’t develop into a predictable male confrontation but rather is completely dominated by Jeannine Riley, another small-timer making the most of her chance at glory, delivering an epic, scathing monologue that leaves the two men shaken and virtually speechless. Eventually, the solution to the crime turns out to be something simple and all too human, a rebuff to the logic of conspiracy.

Guercio surrounded himself with smart pros, from cinematographer Conrad Hall to character actors Royal Dano and Elisha Cook Jr. (Cook’s desert crazy is, appropriately, the metaphoric descendant of Walter Huston’s prospector in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.) The director rode in on a stagecoach’s worth of boy-genius hype, but the movie has very few ego-trip trappings—if he was determined to play the wunderkind, he would turn out to be a restrained one. (Guercio did write a pretty terrible score but employed his own music sparingly.) Using someone like Billy Green Bush, an actor who appeared in about one out of three TV shows that aired in the 1970s, he was able to defamiliarize everything about him—creating a monument to cracked instability under a seemingly straight-arrow surface. The Arizona topography is a similarly skewed composite, part Monument Valley, part cactus country. And from the looks of it, the motley motorcycle chase winds through the vicinity of Barstow or Adelanto, CA.

Electra Glide features a double ending: The first is a bizarre, deadly confrontation between Wintergreen and his partner that formally resolves the last loose end of the mystery. The second is a coda that revises (or inverts) the conclusion of Easy Rider in a tour de force reverse tracking shot that is the most sheerly pretentious and purely beautiful thing in the film, a long backward glance down the highway that turns into a visual hymn to the empty landscape. It’s a farewell to arms, dead cyclists, and all the fuel-injected fantasias of the fast-receding West.

— Howard Hampton

Electra Glide in Blue is now available on Blu-Ray from Shout!Factory.

Jonathan Glazer, Birth, 2004, 35 mm, color, sound, 100 minutes. Joseph and Anna (Danny Huston and Nicole Kidman).

A FILM AGAINST FORGETTING, Jonathan Glazer’s majestic, outlandish Birth was itself nearly confined to oblivion shortly after it was released in the fall of 2004. It never received the accolades bestowed on another highly unconventional love story that came out earlier that year, Michel Gondry’s typically whimsical, too cute Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, whose central, just-broken-up couple attempt to erase their relationship from their memory. The somber Birth, in contrast, extols the power, no matter how destabilizing, of remembering.

Fittingly, a film about the tenacity of memory begins with an indelible opening scene: a sweatsuited man, his back to us, jogging through a snow-blanketed Central Park on a gray winter afternoon. He slows down under a bridge and collapses, a shot immediately followed by a newborn, umbilical cord still attached, emerging from a birthing pool. These striking images help viewers take an enormous leap of faith—to believe that the dead adult has been reincarnated in the infant.

Ten years later, that baby, now a grave prepubescent boy named Sean (Cameron Bright), will try to stop Anna (Nicole Kidman), the widow of the runner, from remarrying by claiming that he is her husband (whose name was also Sean). The kid is an annoyance at first, for both Anna and especially her fiancé, Joseph (Danny Huston), a doggedly persistent suitor easily threatened by his beloved’s past. But Sean, who shares with Anna intimate details about her marriage, soon completely convinces, if not seduces, her.

That this ludicrous premise works so well—few films capture as powerfully the delirium of reconnecting with someone thought to be gone forever—is testament to the deep level of conviction evinced by both cast and crew. For his second feature (after 2000’s sado-Ibero gangster romp Sexy Beast), Glazer wrote the screenplay with Milo Addica (whose first script was for 2001’s Monster’s Ball) and, revealingly, Jean-Claude Carrière, whose frequent collaborations with Luis Buñuel include That Obscure Object of Desire (1977). Birth itself is about an obscure object of desire, yet one presented with supreme lucidity and focus. Little is known about Anna except that she lives with her mother (Lauren Bacall, perfectly doyenne-ish) in a luxe Fifth Avenue apartment; mundane details are excised to concentrate more fully on Anna’s growing enchantment with this enigmatic little boy.

Nothing registers that spell more intensely than Kidman’s face, particularly during a minutes-long close-up at the opera as Anna begins to allow herself to believe the impossible. With the slightest calibration—a lip quiver, a blink, a head tilt—Kidman brilliantly conveys both profound reserves of grief and the first glimmers of euphoria. Birth, which is screening at MoMA as part of a series honoring the peerless cinematographer Harris Savides, who died last year, serves another commemorative purpose: It reminds us of how great the actress, whose visage and mannerisms have only hardened in the past nine years, could be.

— Melissa Anderson

Birth screens June 5 and 12 at MoMA as part of the series “Harris Savides: Visual Poet,” which runs June 5 through 21.

Abdellatif Kechiche, Blue Is the Warmest Color, 2013, 35 mm, color, sound, 179 minutes.

IN THE EYES OF MANY, Steven Spielberg’s jury did the right thing—or, rather, the correct thing—awarding the Palme d’Or to Abdellatif Kechiche’s critically lauded lesbian drama, Blue Is the Warmest Color. Spielberg, who showed his sensitivity to French current affairs by voicing support for his host country’s cultural exception policy at last Sunday’s awards ceremony, presented the Cannes film festival’s top award to Kechiche and his two stars, Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux, just as another horrifying antigay demonstration was wrapping up in Paris, which has this month seen hundreds of thousands of far-right and religious extremists gathering to protest the recent passage of the marriage equality law.

A Palme with symbolic weight, this was also a popular win. Kechiche’s critical supporters, especially in France, are legion, and even most of its detractors will concede that Blue is a fine showcase for two terrific young actresses: the relatively unknown Exarchopoulos as the high schooler discovering her sexuality and the increasingly poised Seydoux as the bohemian painter who initiates the younger girl into erotic pleasure and the ways of adulthood. But as a coming-out and coming-of-age narrative, Blue is so familiar as to be redundant, and Kechiche’s rather dogged, airless conception of naturalism, predicated on distended scenes and a surplus of close-ups, largely forecloses the possibility of vitality, humor, and surprise. The detailed, protracted sex scenes—I timed the longest at seven minutes, though some wishfully clocked it at twenty—were the talk of the festival, as they were meant to be, drawing feverish praise, defensive praise, and more than a few feminist disquisitions on the male gaze. Kechiche did not exactly help his cause with the last faction by saying in interviews that he cast Exarchopoulos when he took her to lunch and was struck by her “way of eating” lemon tart; the anti-Blue camp also gained some traction with a blunt post-Palme blog post by Julie Maroh, who had written the original graphic novel and termed the film’s erotic scenes “ridiculous.”

The jury saved its other top honors for two films that seemed to have amassed the least opposition in a lackluster competition. The runner-up Grand Prix went to the Coen Brothers’ atypically fond folk-scene chronicle Inside Llewyn Davis and the third-place Jury Prize to Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Like Father like Son, a typically tender domestic melodrama about the painful aftermath of a postnatal mixup. Meanwhile, in a presumed bid for nominal edginess, best director went for the second year running to a Mexican troublemaker, although on the basis of his brutalizing narco-porn entry Heli, the young Amat Escalante lacks the instinctive hell-raising smarts of last year’s winner Carlos Reygadas.

Alain Guiraudie, Stranger by the Lake, 2013, color, sound, 97 minutes.

Cannes makes no secret or apology of its attempts to build and sustain a pantheon. But the prevalence of brand names and inner-circle auteurs means less room for discovery, and the overall impression, especially acute this year, is of an aversion to risk. The recent insistence on bringing genre pictures into the fold—a tendency in the official selection as well as the Directors’ Fortnight and Critics’ Week sidebars—has only exacerbated the overfamiliarity. This year that meant turning an unwarranted competition spotlight on films like Takashi Miike’s clunky policier Shield of Straw and Nicolas Winding Refn’s turgid bloodbath Only God Forgives. Amid the surfeit of dead-end genre pastiches, Jia Zhangke’s A Touch of Sin—winner of the screenplay prize—stood out as an unusually purposeful reinvention of a time-honored form, applying the martial arts movie’s sense of aggrieved injustice to the inequities of modern-day China.

Given the lockstep predictability of the competition, the Un Certain Regard parallel section remains both essential and frustrating, a hodgepodge of work too weak, too radical, or too bereft of movie stars to earn the ceremonial pomp of a red-carpet walk. One highlight here was the overdue Cannes debut of the Philippine master Lav Diaz, whose devastating Norte, the End of History, at just over four hours, demanded of its viewers perhaps the scarcest commodity at the world’s most clamorous film festival: patience. Spiraling out from a murder that links a disgruntled would-be intellectual and a kind family man, Norte immerses itself in everyday detail and surreptitiously attains the realm of mythic tragedy. At their best, Diaz’s marathon movies reveal just how much others leave out. With its rich colors and relatively streamlined narrative—his films are typically in black-and-white and last upward of six hours—Norte may be his most resounding and accessible demonstration yet of duration as a means of complexity and depth.

Jim Jarmusch, Only Lovers Left Alive, 2013, HD video, color, sound, 123 minutes. Eve and Adam (Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston).

Also consigned to Un Certain Regard, Alain Guiraudie’s critical hit Stranger by the Lake—winner of a directing prize and the Queer Palm for gay-themed films—unfolds entirely in the vicinity of a nudist pickup spot that in the course of the movie becomes a crime scene. If the girl-on-girl sequences in Blue Is the Warmest Color are showstoppers by design, Guiraudie films his male characters’ hard-core dalliances, all conducted al fresco, with the same matter-of-fact sensuousness as ripples on a lake and the shifting light of dusk. A lethally precise film resting on a provocative tangle of wayward impulses—at times it suggests Cruising as directed by Hong Sang-soo—Stranger is many films in one: a minimalist thriller, a work of subcultural ethnography, and above all a tale of amour fou.

Back in the competition, two idiosyncratic bright spots emerged in the home stretch, although both—from American directors more popular abroad—divided critics and left empty-handed. In James Gray’s The Immigrant, a Polish woman’s arrival on Ellis Island in 1921 marks the start of an absorbing saga of disillusionment. The period world that Gray creates on limited means is at once vividly detailed and magically circumscribed; his taste for operatic emotion is here held in check by a withholding narrative and the characters, enigmatic yet sharply etched, are played with note-perfect ambiguity by Joaquin Phoenix and Marion Cotillard. Misleadingly branded a vampire movie, Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive is a wry, tender portrait of (extremely) long-term coupledom and encroaching mortality, as experienced by a pair of centuries-old bloodsuckers (Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton). The couple’s seen-it-all perspective accommodates both goofball whimsy and apocalyptic ennui. Achingly sad and ravishingly beautiful, Only Lovers Left Alive is a rare gift from our most youthful sixty-year-old filmmaker: an autumnal work that is also a rejuvenating one.

— Dennis Lim

The 66th Cannes film festival ran May 15–26, 2013.

Bobcat Goldthwait, Willow Creek, 2013, color, sound, 77 minutes. Jim and Kelly (Bryce Johnson and Alexie Gilmore).

“THEY HAVE THAT SAYING ‘Keep Austin Weird’—and Austin’s great, but people move to Austin to be weird. It’s just something in the water here.”

This was comedian “Bobcat” Goldthwait, introducing his fifth film, Willow Creek, playing on the largest of Baltimore’s Charles Theatre’s five screens to an audience that included the city’s patron saint of indigenous strangeness, John Waters. And during the five-night, four-day Maryland Film Festival, ample weirdness was in evidence, in afterparties and on the screen.

Now in its fifteenth year, the MDFF has distinguished itself as a showcase for American independent films, and a place for those who make them, distribute them, screen them, and write about them to congregate. The festival’s inaugural event, in effect the first in a series of conversational panels throughout the long weekend, is a closed-door filmmakers’ conference bringing together guests for a free-for-all “State of the Art” powwow. The takeaway from the ongoing conversation in the panel tent was that DIY movies are, in many respects, easier than ever to make and make available outside of traditional corporate channels—and more difficult than ever to monetize. In this hopelessness lies a certain freedom. Do exactly as you like! Nobody’s getting money anyways! Shoot your movie!

Baltimore’s fest is as welcoming as its slate is challenging, and its motto, “Film for everyone,” is no put-on. Screenings were almost uniformly well attended by Baltimoreans from all walks of life, and on the stroll north along Charles Street from the Hotel Monaco (where all fest invitees were housed, and whose lobby hosted the nightly bacchanals) to the theater, it was not uncommon to be drawn into a conversation about the merits of, say, Ulrich Seidl’s Paradise Trilogy, with a barista who had noticed one’s festival lanyard.

Willow Creek was the best among the smattering of genre movies, thanks to its appealing, funny leads (Alexie Gilmore and Bryce Johnson); feeling for American obsessives; and a stand-up’s sense of timing, which gives shape to its centerpiece, a static single take lasting nearly twenty minutes. Goldthwait finds signs of life in the moribund found-footage horror template, while Gabriel DeLoach and Zach Keifer’s If We Shout Loud Enough, chronicling the life of punk trio Double Dagger, is an effective piece of boosterism for the arts renaissance in once-moribund Baltimore, featuring interviews with scene luminaries like Dan Deacon and Wye Oak’s Jenn Wasner.

Double Dagger are credited with resuscitating the local music scene after the city’s best-and-brightest had, per credited music historian Tim Kabara, “moved to cultural hubs like Williamsburg, to worship the Strokes.” The arts have since thrived in the last low-overhead city in the northeastern corridor, and an assertively prideful school of Baltimore filmmaking has concurrently reemerged. As one interviewee in Shout observes, supporting your local scene usually means sitting through a lot of crap bands—but I can report, as one with no ties to the place, that the contingent of Charm City cinema at this year’s fest was unusually strong. I Used to Be Darker, the latest from local Matt Porterfield (Putty Hill), is a naturalistic drama on the surface, but discreetly a lovelorn musical. There’s a vignette at an all-ages warehouse show—shot in the Copy Cat Building, a hub of local arts activity—that’s perfect in every tonal detail, and musicians Ned Oldham and Kim Taylor play a singer-songwriter couple strumming through their separation. Moving between their Baltimore homes are two cousins, both barely undergraduate age—their daughter Abby (Hannah Gross), and lissome Taryn (Deragh Campbell), Northern Irish, fugitive from her parent’s supervision, working for the summer in a Maryland beach town when she learns she’s pregnant and flees to her nearest relatives. Porterfield doesn’t aim for emotional resolution but rather dedicates himself to decisively capturing the ineffable atmospheric presence of little moments, and this precision gives his scenes the poignancy of memories that linger for reasons unknown: that warehouse show, a swimming pool on a sticky wine-drunk evening, a stolen kiss in an abandoned tram car, a couple’s hushed and furious spat on the lawn during a soft, rainy morning.

Gabe DeLoach and Zach Keifer, If We Shout Loud Enough, 2013, color, sound, 113 minutes.

The star of the other Baltimore film of note, mythopoeic doc 12 O’Clock Boys, is an African-American teenager named Pug, a scrawny braggart who relishes and seizes the chance to perform his own legend before the camera. First-time filmmaker Lotfy Nathan manages, miraculously, to keep up with Pug while he attempts to join the ranks of the titular gang, outlaw dirt bike and ATV riders who engage in matador-like goad-and-retreat games with police cruisers. The “12 O’Clock Boys” are so named because the ultimate stunt on their hot-dogging pack rides is managing a wheelie that points a vehicle straight up and down, like the hands of a clock at noon. These moments of perfect equilibrium are drawn out into voluptuous reverie with dreamy slo-mo—this is what immortality looks like. Pug was filmed over three summers, aged thirteen to fifteen, zipping all through his Westside neighborhood. He scarcely seems to grow during this time, but much else goes on, as Pug learns to wrangle a bike twice his size, drives mother Coco to the corner bar, and sees his eldest brother set out in a coffin after an asthma attack, a premature death that must be laid at the feet of poverty. (Telling its own health-care horror story is Jeff Reichert and Farihah Zaman’s Remote Area Medical, shot during the weekend-long touchdown of a massive, volunteer-run free clinic at the Bristol Motor Speedway in Eastern Tennessee, where specimens of neglect queue up hopefully outside a shiny NASCAR coliseum with an unfathomable price tag.)

The festival has effectively piggybacked on the city’s new hip stature, fostering relationships with local musicians like Deacon and Animal Collective. MDFF director Jed Dietz, giving a guided tour of the abandoned Louis XIV circa 1915 Parkway Theater up the block from the Charles, which the festival had recently purchased from the city, envisioned Beach House live-scoring silent films there. After the Saturday night Darker screening, Oldham and band Old Calf performed across the street from the Charles; on Sunday morning, Boston’s three-piece Alloy Orchestra, longtime attendees, pounded out their score to the 1925 adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World. Creating the template for just about every rampaging monster movie to come, the film revived dinosaurs from extinction through influential stop-motion animation by Willis O’Brien, later the mentor to Ray Harryhausen, who had died the week before, and to whom the screening made an inadvertent but touching tribute.

Eliza Hittman, It Felt Like Love, 2013, color, sound, 82 minutes. Sammy and Lila (Ronen Rubinstein and Gina Piersanti).

Who can say if the Baltimorean renaissance will continue for one thousand years, or if it’s already in its Indian summer? Eliza Hittman’s feature debut It Felt Like Love takes place in Brooklyn, still the lodestar of cool, but this is the Brooklyn disdained by the New York Times Styles section. When we first meet Lila (Gina Piersanti), Love’s protagonist, on the beach, she looks like a mime, her face painted with sunscreen—the image is recalled in the film’s conclusion, when the hip-hop dance classes we’ve seen Lila gracelessly shuffling through pay off in a recital, her wearing a blank Eyes Without a Face mask. A virginal brown mouse with a pout of a mouth who lives with her father in Gravesend, Lila spends her summer at the bus-convenient waterfront, sullenly trailing her best friend, Chiara (Giovanna Salimeni), watching boyfriends float in and out of Chiara’s arms. (This is their relationship dynamic—Chiara needs an audience; Lila any female role model.) Approximating its protagonist’s eavesdropping perspective, Love is a film of curious, furtive, longing close-ups, while the circuitous rhyming of images proves that there’s nothing haphazard about Hittman’s approach. Chronicling Lila’s cruel sentimental education, Hittman shows an acute sense of crawly, mortifying humor—though never squelches sympathy for a laugh.

A native of the same South Brooklyn territory as Lila, Hittman has created interludes among the wild reeds and tide pools that have the feeling of a guided tour. And here is what unites the best of MDFF, from Hittman’s urban-rustic New York to Porterfield’s humid summertime Maryland to, yes, Willis O’Brien’s handcrafted dinosaurs. It’s a celebration of the personal, the private, the obsessive—the ethos being that for film to be for everyone, it must first be for someone.

— Nick Pinkerton

The fifteenth Maryland Film Festival ran May 8–12, 2013.

Gabriela Golder, Conversation Piece, 2012, HD, color, sound, 19 minutes.

“THIS FILM WAS MADE for very little money, with very few people,” the great Brazilian filmmaker Júlio Bressane told his mainly Argentine audience. He paused. “And it was never released. Nobody saw it. There would be three people at the beginning, and they would all run away before the film was over. This room right now has more people than have ever seen it before. So thank you very much for coming, I hope you enjoy it, and we can have a conversation with whoever is still here at the end.”

Seventeen of Bressane’s films (roughly half his output) screened during the fifteenth edition of the Buenos Aires International Independent Film Festival (BAFICI) last month. “We are the few for Bressane,” a fellow critic said apologetically before a press screening of the filmmaker’s latest, O batuque dos Astros ([The drumming beat of stars)], a jaunt through Lisbon locales once inhabited by or honoring the poet Fernando Pessoa. But no apology was needed. These dementedly titled, delirious films—among them Killed the Family and Went to the Movies (1969), The Herb of the Rat (2008), and The Caraíba Monster—New Ancient History of Brazil (1975)—unfold with a graceful calamity that provides its own justification. These are products of years of concentrated thought, typically shot in less than two weeks, and they often discard plot in favor richly colored musical moments containing drunken characters who gleefully assault each other, with Bressane’s crew sometimes intervening to show them how to do it better. One senses that in, while watching a Bressane film, that society’s foundations are being attacked so as to encourage people to relax and enjoy themselves. In the sublime A Love Movie (2003), total sexual freedom gives lovers such a lift that they can even fly.

The retrospectives at this most recent edition of BAFICI claimed attention during what proved to be a weak year for the largest South American festival’s international competition (whose top prize went to Peter Strickland’s British horror film Berberian Sound Studio) and an even weaker one year for its national one (whose Best Film was Santiago Loza’s family drama La Paz). They included highlights from Argentine cinema’s past fifteen years, an extensive survey of Austrian avant-garde film, four documentaries by Swiss chronicler of mountain life Erich Langjahr, and fifteen works by South Korea’s prolific Hong Sang-soo, headlined by his latest tragicomic treasure, Nobody’s Daughter Haewon. The repertory films generally played on 35-mm archival prints of varying condition, with digital restorations reserved for recent Hollywood classics like House of Bamboo (1965), The King of Comedy (1983), The Fly (1986), and They Live (1988).

The lone DCP revelation was the joint Groupama Gan Foundation for Cinema/Technicolor Foundation for Cinema Heritage restoration of Peter Brook’s multifaceted Vietnam War exploration, Tell Me Lies: A Film About London (1968). The film—adapted from an ensemble-shaped Royal Shakespeare Company theatrical production called US that Brook also directed—was condemned upon its very brief initial theatrical run for not taking a clear position on the war. Tell Me Lies consists of sketches and scene fragments in which civilians debate the war, sometimes directly to the camera, without achieving resolution. Its position is that all clear views on the subject (both pro and con) should be distrusted. At one point, Black Panther leader Stokely Carmichael calmly argues that the Viet Cong act in self-defense, as the oppressed always do when committing violence against the oppressor; at another, a representative of the American Embassy (played by British actor Kingsley Amis) says that the most powerful nation in the history of the world should be admired for using more restraint in asserting itself than any other world power ever has. While most much of 1960s political cinema currently feels dated, Tell Me Lies’s dialogic structure—in which ideas themselves, rather than people, do battle—has kept the film fresh and relevant to wars being fought today.

A lesson of Brook’s film is that one cannot judge without first understanding. The same lesson emerged from my favorite new Argentine work at BAFICI, Conversation Piece, a short video by the artist Gabriela Golder adapted from a previous three-screen installation. (Some of Golder’s 2000 short video In memory of the birds work can be seen on last year’s antennae collection home viewing release, Dialéctica en Suspenso: Argentine Experimental Film and Video.) It consists of Golder’s mother and two young nieces reading The Communist Manifesto out loud together, with the grandmother patiently answering whenever one of the girls asks a question. The older woman explains terms like “Communism,” “manifesto,” “oppressor,” “abolish,” “political struggle,” and “revolution” in clear, simple language while leaving the girls to form their own beliefs. Exposing them to political thought becomes a way of sharing love.

— Aaron Cutler

The fifteenth Buenos Aires Festival Internacional de Cine Independiente (BAFICI) ran April 10–21, 2013.