This year's World Film Festival in Montreal, Canada, just ended its 12-day-run, leaving local film buffs as well as visiting critics and filmmakers a little bleary-eyed - as usual - but also amply rewarded.
And if no one found that great masterpiece we're always looking for among the new films, it still must be said that this 13th year of the French-Canadian festival was a very good one, and that the number of quality films was reasonably high.Many times when watching films for 15 or 16 hours a day as some of us do, the mediocre movies tend to water down the good ones sprinkled among them, until the festival as a whole takes on a kind of bland "so-so" quality. And sometimes it's not until 60 or 80 films later that going over notes brings the realization of how good some of those films really were.
I keep a detailed review sheet on each film and give a numerical rating, my own scale ranging from 1 to 20. Most films, as you might expect, fall somewhere in the middle.
But somewhere along the line at this year's Montreal Festival, I realized that three out of five films were getting a rating of 14 or above. And by the festival's end, when I counted at least 35 of the films I'd screened falling in the 14-or-above category, I knew that this was not a bad year for international films.
Here are some of my favorites:
Japanese filmmaker Hiroshi Teshigahara (who created the classic "Woman in the Dunes" back in 1964 but had not made a feature film for 17 years) has re-emerged this year with an elegant and controlled film called "Rikyu." Set in the 16th century, it focuses on the conflict between a Buddhist priest and the warrior lord who resents the priest's influence. It's not surprising that the festival jury, this year headed by French actress Leslie Caron, gave "Rikyu" the prize for Best Artistic Contribution to Cinema in Monday night's award ceremony.
Also notable - and winning the festival's Best Direction award - was Jiri Minzel's intelligent and immensely likable "The Last of the Good Old Times." Set early in the century in Czechoslovakia, the film features a mysterious self-proclaimed "aristocrat" who crashes a weekend party at a country estate. Director Menzel, like Teshigahara, also came into prominence during the mid-60s when his own "Closely Watched Trains" became an overnight classic.
A relative newcomer to filmdom, however, is 28-year-old Alejandro Agresti from Argentina, whose memorable "Secret Wedding" was a popular favorite with audiences, even if it slipped by the jury without a prize. In a wonderful blend of the comic and the tragic, Agresti's captivating film deals with a man who emerges one day from a Buenos Aires subway, after having been "put away" 12 years earlier by the Establishment.
Another Argentine film, Eliseo Subiela's haunting "Last Images of the Shipwreck," won the jury's award for Best Script. The plot has a contemporary writer befriending a rather unorthodox family in order to get ideas for his novel, but he ends up "writing out" for them the various courses their daily lives will take. Subiela's last film, "Man Facing Southeast," was also prominent on the festival circuit.
A very powerful film is Italian director Marco Risi's "Mery Per Sempre" - first runner-up for the grand prize. Set in a school of correction for boys, it follows a new teacher's attempts to communicate and even change lives. A kind of tough and painfully realistic "Dead Poet's Society," this one avoids the sentimentality and gives us an honestly moving experience.
Another film about prisons and schools of correction is Russia's "Freedom Is Paradise," which walked away with the grand prize. But many of the films from the USSR in the festival were impressive - from the Tarkovskyesque "Museum Visitor" to the fanciful "Kerosene Seller's Wife" to the provocative "Manservant" and, perhaps best of all, the stirring film about the trials of a young rural couple called "The First 100 Years Are the Hardest."
And Great Britain made an impressive showing. "Resurrected" concerns a young hero supposedly killed in the Falklands War who turns up alive and is then suddenly persecuted as a coward and a deserter.
"The Queen of Hearts" depicts an Italian immigrant couple whose life is suddenly interrupted when the wife's former suitor arrives from the old country. "My Left Foot," reminiscent of "Gaby" and even "Rain Man," became a prize winner for versatile British actor Daniel Day Lewis. In the role of a real-life cerebral palsy victim, Lewis deservedly carried away the festival's Best Actor award.
And there were many more good films: "Autumn Milk" (Germany), "Piravi" (India), "Women on the Roof" (Sweden), "The Glory and Misery of Human Life" (Finland), and others.
But perhaps nothing was better, all in all, than a series of short films by Poland's Krzysztof Kieslowsky, which go under the single title "Decalogue."
Kieslowsky's stunning work comprises 10 one-hour films, each based on one of the 10 Commandments. Each is different, each has its own style, but they are all brilliantly written, acted and directed. It's a major achievement - and it helped make this 13th World Film Festival at Montreal a memorable one indeed.
-Don Marshall is a professor of humanities at Brigham Young University and director of BYU's international cinema program.