Club Sandwich (2013)

A scene from Fernando Eimbcke's CLUB SANDWICH, playing at the 57th San Francisco International Film Festival, April 24 - May 8, 2014. Courtesy of the San Francisco Film Society..

WHO: Mexican auteur Fernando Eimbcke wrote and directed this, his third feature film, following Duck Season and Lake Tahoe.

WHAT: One of my favorite scenes from Club Sandwich comes toward the end of the film. (You may want to skip ahead if you're a spoiler-averse hardliner, although I don't think this film or this scene depend on narrative surprise for their success.) Four people are in a car driving on an unpopulated road, and the camera is placed on the hood so we can see all four through the windshield. The driver is Enrique Arreola, who played the pizza deliveryman in Duck Season. Here his role is much smaller; just this scene and another, and no words of dialogue (although his voice is heard on a radio in a third scene, presumably not playing the same character). In the passenger seat is Danae Reynaud, who's playing Paloma, a thirty-something mother of a teenage boy named Hector, played by  Lucio Giménez Cacho (son of Spanish film star Daniel Giménez Cacho, making his film debut). Hector and 16-year-old Jazimn (played by María Renée Prudencio, another screen newcomer) are making out in the back seat while Paloma hunches asleep in her seat. Eventually she wakes up, starts looking around at her surroundings, and finally glances in the rear-view mirror the smooching the audience has been able to watch all along. Though visibly perturbed she plays it cool, yelping as she pretends to swat a mosquito as a way to alert the ineptly-furtive youngsters that their romance just might be discovered.

Club Sandwich, like Eimbcke's prior features, has a title that appears almost random and tossed-off upon first glance. Early in the film, we think we understand its connection to the film when that food is ordered by Paloma and Hector, a single mom and her 15-year-old on a cheap vacation in Oaxaca during the too-hot-for-tourists season. With the hotel pool to themselves, they lounge determinedly, their comments about each others' swimsuits and body shapes revealing a habitual closeness between the pair almost as much as does their frequent nagging of each other about stray fluids in the bathroom (the shower floor; the toilet seat) or the apparent awkwardness Hector exhibits when his hot mom rubs sunscreen over his broad back. He's at the age when he's longing for a less motherly form of female touching, but of course Paloma is the last person on earth he wants to know that.

But there's not really such thing as a sandwich with only two elements to it. Another family arrives at the hotel, and the way lovely Jazmin and Hector at first avoid each other makes quite clear that each has got at least one eye on the only other member of their peer group in sight. Eimbcke is after three films proving himself to be a master of presenting unspoken communication. He guides his three lead actors to tell us just about all we need to know about their characters through their glances, their gestures, and their body language. Inevitably, Jazmin introduces herself to Hector, and soon enough she's the one rubbing lotions on his back as they have deeply laconic conversations about air conditioning, which lead to more lustful interactions. Only when out of their parents' eyesight of course.

So can these three form a club? Once she realizes what's going on with her son (or some of it, anyway; I haven't mentioned his fascination with her bikini top or his late-night masturbation sessions), Paloma makes an effort to draw Jazmin into the kind of conversation Hector had no need to stoop to: what's her family like, what are her interests, etc. By now knows she won't get anywhere talking with Hector about her; there's nothing more mortifying for a teenage boy than admitting to your mother that you're a sexual being. But she finally lets her guard down and reveals just how jealous she is of her son's emergence from family cocooning, in a hilariously and poignantly awkward late night variation on truth-or-dare. It's a perfect climax to a charming, funny little gem of a film.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens tonight at 9:15 at New People Cinema, and 1:30 PM on Sunday, May 4, both screenings presented by the San Francisco International Film Festival.

WHY: If you click on the "guests expected" box for any SFIFF program you can find out if a director, producer, actor or other filmmaker plans to be on hand in support of his or her film. However, this method doesn't reveal whether a filmmaker is actually going to attend a given screening if there are multiple showings. For that information it's best to visit the big calendar board in the Kabuki lobby, where each screening is individually marked (or not) with a star indicating whether a guest plans to be there. In the case of Club Sandwich for example, writer-director Eimbcke gave a delightful q&a session to the audience for an afternoon screening April 26th, and is expected to still be around for tonight's showing, but at this point he's not expected for the May 4th showing.

HOW: Digital.
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OTHER SFIFF OPTIONS: Day 5 of SFIFF includes the final screenings of the acclaimed Romainian film When Evening Falls on Bucharest and of Julie Bertucelli's documentary School of Babel. It also marks the first festival screenings of Tsai Ming-Liang's Stray Dogs and François Ozon's Young & Beautiful.

NON-SFIFF OPTION: If you missed Bruce Baillie's appearance at the festival yesterday, he's still in town for another day, and will be screening recent works including the in-progress Memoirs of an Angel tonight at Oakland's always-free Black Hole Cinematheque.

Post Tenebras Lux (2012)

WHO: Mexican auteur Carlos Reygadas wrote, directed and co-produced this.

WHAT: I don't think it's possible to understand Post Tenebras Lux after a single viewing, which is all I've had time to partake in. So I'm just going to link to British microcnema project A Small Cinema, which has created a terrific cross-section of reviews (including some negative ones) and interviews with Reygadas, and if you're considering seeing it, you'll surely be swayed one way or the other by a spending time perusing that site and its links.

I did want to briefly comment on one of the most noteworthy technical aspects of the feature: the use of a image-distortion for (I believe) all of the outdoor scenes and (I believe) none of the indoor scenes. The device has been called "tilt-shift" by some but although the effect appears related to the examples of this affect created by Olivo Barbieri or (more famously) David Fincher, there's not the sense of miniaturization used in their shots, so I feel this must be something else. It's as if Reygadas has shot through a special lens that refracts his images much like the concentric circles of a fresnel lens. It focuses attention to the centers of his academy-ratio images, much like a silent-era iris, but with a distortion and not a complete obfuscation of the frame edges. It seems like an attempt to interiorize exterior shots, making them fit into Reygadas's locked-in, anti-naturalistic scheme.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight through Saturday at 7:30 and Sunday at 2:00 and 4:30 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

WHY: The cinema world tends to fixate on the Cannes Film Festival top prize, the Palme d'Or, but frequently the films earning the Best Director prize end up being the more memorable ones. It's hard to know whether last year's Palme-winning Amour will go down as a great contribution to cinema, or just an average film in Michael Haneke's filmography. But Post Tenebras Lux has engendered more extreme reactions; it was booed at the festival but also won the Best Director award for Reygadas, and has divided critics and audiences as it's toured the world since. Might it be more along the lines of landmarks which won the latter prize and not the former, such as Luis Buñuel's Los Olvidados in 1951, François Truffaut's the 400 Blows in 1959, or David Lynch's Mulholland Dr. in 2001?

Frisco Bay finally has five chances to make guesses along these lines this week, as YBCA screens Reygadas's film here for the first time. It comes in the week following his protégé Amat Escalante's triumph at the 2013 Cannes festival with his third feature Heli, which by winning the Best Director prize only a year after his producer Reygadas did, makes a real statement, giving a Mexican maker that award for the third time this decade; no film from that country has won the Palme d'Or since Buñuel's Spanish-Mexican co-production Viridiana.

HOW: DCP presentation of a digital feature.

Michael Hawley's Two Eyes

Since my own two eyes were not nearly enough to see and evaluate all the repertory/revival film screenings here on Frisco Bay, I'm honored to present local filmgoers' lists of the year's favorites. An index of participants is found here.

The following list comes from cinephile/critic Michael Hawley. He blogs at film-415, where this list has been cross-posted:

The Bay Area continues to be an incredible place to experience repertory cinema. There are few places on the planet where it's possible to see a film every day of the year and not watch a single new release. In 2010 I caught 47 revival screenings at various local venues. Here, in no particular order, are 10 of the most memorable.

Showgirls (Castro Theater)
What better way to celebrate the 15th anniversary of my fave film of the 1990s. Peaches Christ brought an expanded version of her infamous Showgirls Midnight Mass preshow to a sold-out Castro, complete with exploding on-stage volcano and free lapdances with every large popcorn. It inspired me to inaugurate my iphone's movie camera feature and create a YouTube channel to post the results. Apart from Peaches' Castro world premiere of All About Evil, this was the most fun I had at the movies in 2010.

Armored Car Robbery (Castro Theater, Noir City)
I was blown away by this taut and tidy 67-minute slice of obscure 1950 B-Noir about the aftermath of yes, an armored car robbery outside L.A.'s Wrigley Field. It would be brought back to mind months later with the Fenway Park heist of Ben Affleck's The Town. Other 2010 Noir City highlights included the double bill of Suspense (1946) and The Gangster (1948), both starring British ice-skating queen Belita, and 1945's San Francisco-set Escape in the Fog, which begins with a woman dreaming about an attempted murder on the Golden Gate Bridge.


Pornography in Denmark (Oddball Cinema)
There's something weird and wonderful going on each weekend at Oddball Cinema, a funky alternative film venue tucked inside the Mission District warehouse digs Oddball Film + Video. In the spring they screened a 16mm print of this landmark 1970 documentary by local porn-meister Alex de Renzy, which became the first hardcore to show in legit U.S. theaters and be reviewed in the NY Times. Introducing the film was writer/film scholar Jack Stevenson, who was on tour promoting his book, Scandinavian Blue: The Erotic Cinema of Sweden and Denmark in the 1960s and 1970s.

Freddie Mercury, the Untold Story (VIZ Cinema, 3rd i's Queer Eye Mini-Film Festival)
3rd i is best known for the SF International South Asian Film Festival it puts on each November. Back in June they packed SF's snazzy subterranean VIZ Cinema with this revival of Rudi Dolezal and Hannes Rossacher's 2000 documentary – seen in a new director's cut with 43 extra minutes. The audience went nutso at the climax of "Barcelona," Mercury's soaring duet with Montserrat Caballé from the 1986 summer Olympics. Further repertory kudos to 3rd i for bringing an exquisite 35mm print of 1958 Bollywood classic, Madhumati, to the Castro.

Mädchen in Uniform (Castro Theater, Frameline)
A whole lot of LGBT folk must've played hooky from work to catch this mid-day, mid-week revival from 1958 – itself a remake of a 1931 queer cinema classic. Romy Schneider and Lili Palmer are respectively radiant as a student obsessively in love with her boarding school teacher – to the extreme consternation of battleaxe headmistress Therese Giehse. Shown in a gorgeous and rare 35mm print, with the inimitable Jenni Olson delivering a dishy intro. Frameline34's other revelatory revival was Warhol's 1965 Vinyl, in which Factory beauties Gerard Malanga and Edie Sedgwick dance a furious frug to Martha and the Vandellas "Nowhere to Hide." Twice.


The Aztec Mummy vs. The Human Robot (Pacific Film Archive, El Futuro Está Aquí: Sci-Fi Classics from Mexico)
If anything's capable of luring me out of the city on a Saturday night during Frameline, it's bunch of Mexican monster movies from the 50's and 60's. This was double-billed with Santo vs. The Martian Invasion, which had a little too much rasslin' for my tastes. But it boasted a hilarious opening scene in which the Martians explain why they happen to be speaking Spanish. It killed me to miss Planet of the Female Invaders and The Ship of Monsters, also part of this series.

Metropolis (Castro Theater, SF Silent Film Festival)
"When you've waited 83 years, what's another 40 minutes?" Eddie Muller quipped to the antsy, capacity crowd awaiting the Bay Area premiere of Fritz Lang's finally-complete expressionist dystopian masterpiece. In spite of the late start time and disappointing digital format, this was still the repertory event of the year. The Alloy Orchestra performed its celebrated score live and Muller conducted an on-stage conversation with Paula Félix-Didier and Fernando Peña, the Argentine film archivists who discovered the 16mm print of Metropolis with 25 additional minutes. The Alloy Orchestra would return to the fest two days later to perform their heart-stopping score to Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera.

The Cook/Pass the Gravy/Big Business (Castro Theater, SF Silent Film Festival)
Each year this festival invites a filmmaker to program a Director's Pick – and past pickers have included the likes of Guy Maddin and Terry Zwigoff. This year Pete Docter (Monsters, Inc., Up) assembled a program of three comic shorts titled The Big Business of Short Funny Films, each of them screamingly funny. First, Fatty Arbuckle and Buster Keaton had a go at each other in The Cook, followed by some hysterical nonsense involving feuding families and a prized rooster in Pass the Gravy. Finally in Big Business, door-to-door Christmas tree salesmen Laurel and Hardy declared war on a disgruntled customer, taking tit-for-tat to absurd heights.

The Boston Strangler (Pacific Film Archive, Criminal Minds)
This ranks as my personal discovery of the year. Director Richard Fleischer employs a wry tone and magnificent use of wide and split screen to tell the story of 60's serial killer Albert DeSalvo. A restrained Tony Curtis, whose title character doesn't appear until the midway point, gives what must surely be the best dramatic performance of his career. Oscar ® didn't care. With Henry Fonda, George Kennedy and an early appearance by Sally Kellerman as the one girl who got away. Double-billed with 1944's The Lodger, a compelling Jack the Ripper yarn starring Merle Oberon, George Sanders and Laird Cregar.

Johanna (Roxie Theater)
I was woefully resigned to never seeing Kornél Mundruczó's 2005 filmic opera about a junkie performing sex miracles in a subterranean Budapest hospital, which had never screened in the Bay Area or been released on Region 1 DVD. Then the Roxie answered my prayers by showing a gorgeous 35mm print for two nights in November, double-billed with the director's follow-up, 2008's Delta. Earlier in the month, the Roxie revived 36 Quai des Orfèvres, a gritty and stylish 2004 policier that had also inexplicably gone unseen the Bay Area, despite starring Gérard Depardieu and Daniel Auteuil.

Honorable Mentions
Traffic (1971, dir. Jacques Tati, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts)
Insiang (1976, dir. Lino Brocka, Sundance Kabuki, SF International Asian American Film Festival)
Black Narcissus (1947, dir. Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, Pacific Film Archive, "Life, Death and Technicolor: A Tribute to Jack Cardiff")
Hausu (1977, dir. Nobuhiko Ôbayashi, Castro Theater)
A Night to Dismember (1983, dir. Doris Wishman, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, "Go to Hell for the Holidays: Horror in December")

SFIFF52 Day 2: Lake Tahoe

The 52nd San Francisco International Film Festival has begun and runs through May 7th. Each day during the festival I'll be posting about one film I've seen or am hotly anticipating. Starting today.

Lake Tahoe (MEXICO: Fernando Eimbcke, 2008)

playing: 9:15 PM tonight at the Kabuki, with two more showtimes later in the festival.
festival premiere: Berlinale 2008
distributor: Film Movement DVD release scheduled for November 2009.

If you liked Fernando Eimbcke's Duck Season you probably already have this one picked out on your festival menu. I was actually lukewarm to the Mexican director's feature debut, finding its humor sometimes forced and its world just a bit too closed-off to take to heart. The critical references to Jim Jarmusch's early work seemed apt, but even Stranger Than Paradise expanded its arenas for claustrophobic comedy by switching up the locations once or twice.

Anyway, I decided to give Eimbcke another chance while attending the Portland International Film Festival, where I saw Lake Tahoe. I can report that, at least for this viewer, it's better than Duck Season. Perhaps it's the searing-bright color photography, or the wider aspect ratio, or the outdoor location shooting, or the use of more "planimetric" shots, or the more unconventional pacing, but feature #2 feels more like a real "movie" to me than feature #1 did to me. The set-up, a teenager's circuitous quest to repair a car so he can get out of town, provides plenty of opportunity for off-center (sometimes forced, more often not) humor, and even pathos. The use of fade-outs and tricky sound cues make it a film worth analyzing technically in more depth than I'm able to in this capsule.

SFIFF52 Day 2
Another option: Sacred Places (CAMEROON/FRANCE: Jean-Marie Teno, 2009), which Max Goldberg makes sound good.
Non-SFIFF-option for today: the Life and Death of Col. Blimp (UK: Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, 1943) at the Stanford, described by Brecht Andersch as "exquisite fun." I concur.