Despite more rain-filled days than sunny ones, the Palm Springs International Film Festival recently completed its sixth annual movie feast. Held each January just before Park City's Sundance Film Festival, it often features some of the same films, and this year two of the California festival's very best were among those playing at Sundance.
"Before the Rain," a powerful film from Macedonia (part of the former Yugoslavia), was one of the favorites at Palm Springs and provided a provocative cinematic experience for all who were able to get into Park City screenings. Sophisticated in its structure, this stirring film creatively interweaves three different yet closely related stories, all dealing with the tensions at the heart of the conflict in what was formerly Yugoslavia. The promising young director, Milcho Manchevsky, was given a standing ovation when the film played at the Toronto Film Festival, and it garnered the prestigious Golden Lion award at Venice.Also popular at Palm Springs (and at the Seattle and Toronto festivals before that) was the warm and very humanistic "Strawberry and Chocolate," a "comedy" that is every bit as moving as it is amusing. Set in Havana, Cuba, it carefully examines the relationship between two different young men - one gay and one straight - and what a relief it is to find a film of this nature that is neither heavy-handed and preachy nor loaded with vulgar one-liners and played strictly for laughs. Despite its popularity with audiences, I found myself avoiding this at Seattle and then Toronto, but luckily I gave it a try at Palm Springs and found it, much to my surprise, one of the warmest, sanest and all-around best movies of the year.
And there were five more films on both the Palm Springs and Sundance festivals' lineups, which, if I can't recommend them quite as enthusiastically, still found fans among festivalgoers.
A film that many enjoyed is Guatemala's first feature film, "The Silence of Neto." Concerning a young boy's coming of age in the 1950s, when Guatemala was in conflict with the United States, it combines realistic details of growing up in a well-to-do Guatemalan household with more than a touch of Latin American magic.
Still another is the whimsical Russian film "Window to Paris," in which an offbeat group of St. Petersburg apartment-dwellers finds that, just by passing through a certain window in their building, they can suddenly find themselves cavorting on the rooftops - and then the streets - of Paris.
Also featured in both festivals' listings is the bizarre and less-than-satisfying "Six Days, Six Nights" from France, "Little Odessa" from the United States and "Muriel's Wedding" from Australia.
"Six Days, Six Nights" features the radiant Anne Parillaud (from "La Femme Nikita") and the more-irritating-than-ever Beatrice Dalle (from "Betty Blue"). In a plot fairly reminiscent of "Single White Female," two young women who may or may not be sisters are suddenly thrown together in an awkward menage-a-trois (with Parillaud's live-in boyfriend), which is doomed ultimately to explode.
"Little Odessa" stars the excellent young British actor Tim Roth ("Reservoir Dogs," "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead") and the always first-rate Maximillian Schell, but, like "Six Days, Six Nights," it is ultimately more upsetting than satisfying.
Extremely popular with festival crowds but not to my own particular taste is the over-the-top comedy "Muriel's Wedding." Sharing some of the same cartoonish exaggerations as "Strictly Ballroom" (but considerably more vulgar), "Mur-iel's Wedding" is sure to find admirers who like their movies a few notches this side of realism.
Seen at Sundance last year, but a major revelation at Palm Springs, was the delightful and touching documentary "Martha and Ethel," in which two best friends examine their relationship with the two "nannies" - one black and one German - who raised them. Wonderfully researched and edited, it was a definite festival "bright spot" for film buffs hurrying in and out of the rain at Palm Springs' screening.
Equally well received was another documentary - "The Last Klezmer" - in which an aging Jewish musician makes a trip back to Poland after exiling himself in the United States for 50 years, to visit his hometown and the prison camp where his family died during the Holocaust.
Also among the very best at Palm Springs but unfortunately not seen at Sundance this year were two new masterpieces: The instant classic from Russia "Burnt by the Sun," by master filmmaker Nikita Mikhalkov (featuring Mikhalkov himself, as well as his terrific seven-year-old daughter Nadia), and a visually stunning Hungarian version of George Buchner's "Woyzeck" that seems to me to be an almost perfect version of the classic play.
Two more very pleasant surprises at the Palm Springs Festival: The lengthy but first-rate new German production of the wild-child "Kaspar Hauser" (making Herzog's '70s version look like a home movie), and an extremely wild and offbeat experimental film from France that will linger in your mind forever, called "Half Spirit: Voice of the Spider" by a promising new young director, definitely worth keeping an eye on, named Henri Barges.
These then were the gems at Palm Springs - "Before the Rain," "Strawberry and Chocolate," "Burnt by the Sun," "Martha and Ethel," "The Last Klezmer," "Woyzeck," "Kasper Hauser" and "Half Spirit: Voice of the Spider."