Reflecting its 1957 origin as a
festival that highlighted the then emerging post-war Italian film movement, the
San Francisco Film Society presents a week of work by new Italian directors
(November 14th through the 21st at
Landmark’s Embarcadero Center Cinema)
This year’s offerings include two
terrific erotically charged dramas from openly gay filmmaker Ferzan Ozpetek.
Loose Cannons: In his 1999 debut feature Steam, the
Turkish born but Italian residing director Ozpetek told the story of a young Italian
man who becomes ensnared in the complex history of an old Turkish bathhouse and
the seductive young man who is a caretaker to its secrets. Francesco’s decision
to take up with the boyish Mehmet seals not only his fate but also that of his
young bride-to-be. Ozpetek has a knack for making the past appear like a dream
from his characters can’t awake. In Steam, the old bathhouse spoke to
centuries of furtive male love, the guilty secret of an ancient culture still
at odds with modernity.
In his latest piece – set in the
very traditional village of Lecce – Ozpetek launches into the at times
screwball comedy like antics of a pasta plant owning clan who discover to their
initial horror and subsequent confusion that the oldest son is gay. Antonio’s
(Alessandro Prezosi) operatic coming out at a family dinner upstages his
younger brother Tommaso’s plans for a similar declaration. Embarrassed by the
row – their mercurial father Vincenzo (Ennio Fantastichini) suffers a minor
heart attack – Tommaso allows himself to be cajoled away from his original
plans to pursue a writing career in Rome with his lovely doctor boyfriend,
Marco.
Anyone expecting an Italian La Cage
Aux Folles will be disappointed as Ozpetek has a very different dramatic
agenda: demonstrating the obsolescence of the great gay/straight divide. The
longer he dallies tending to the pasta plant – with the assistance of his
family’s new business partner, a rebellious young woman, Alba – the more he
starts to waiver in his loyalty to Marco and to wonder about his life’s true
purpose. Tommaso’s dithering is punctuated by his grandmother’s regret and
dream like reveries about her long ago wedding and the pratfall like romantic
adventures of a spinster sister who accuses her nightly boyfriend visitors of being
literally thieves in the night.
You may grow exasperated with Tommaso,
but hang in for an unusual queer/straight showdown when his flamboyant friends
from Rome pay a surprise visit.
A Perfect Day: This harrowing urban drama finds an
unusual way to provide a riveting autopsy to a domestic tragedy. We flash back
on the last hours of a couple undergoing a separation after a violence prone
marriage. Ozpetek surprises us with a double punch of gut-wrenching violence:
first an almost rape by a enraged husband of his desperate wife and later an
unbearable unfolding of a scene of primal domestic carnage, ironically framed
by an innocent child distracted by watching the travails of animated penguins
on TV. Not for the emotionally squeamish.
The 35th Annual American
Indian Film Festival concludes this weekend at the Palace of Fine Arts with an
awards show Saturday, at 6pm.
Buffy Sainte-Marie: Type first name Buffy and Google
will send you merrily along to the Vampire Slayer kingdom. If you persist and
add Sainte-Marie you’ll uncover a renaissance woman singer-songwriter,
musician, composer, visual artist, pacifist, in many ways a veritable female
Bob Dylan. Getting her start in the same early 60’s Greenwich Village coffee
house haunts as Mr. D, the Saskatchewan born (1941 on the Piapot Cree Indian
reservation/later adopted and raised in Maine by relatives of her parents)
University of Mass/Amherst educated young woman started touring with her guitar
in her teens, eventually developing a live performance/Vanguard Records
“folkie” niche, along with an image that she once joked came across as
“Pocahontas-with-a-guitar.”
Joan Prowse’s intimate Canadian
produced doc charts Sainte-Marie’s journey back to her Canadian res., her
adoption by a tribal leader, her pioneering work in early childhood education
for Native kids (including a Sesame Street stint where she demonstrated breast
feeding with her infant son) and international fame as a recording artist. The
film uncovers the weird way we come to identify certain songs with certain
artists: Donovan’s expressive cover of Sainte-Marie’s Universal Soldier
led some casual fans to think he had penned it, while her early identification
with Joni Mitchell’s The Circle Game caused a similar “branding”
confusion.
Ultimately Sainte-Marie – much like
friend and fellow folkie Pete Seeger – declined higher profile gigs, like NBC’s
The Tonight Show (where she says they wanted her to avoid the Native
protest stuff and stick to her pop hits) for developing a principled career promoting
Native rights and more personal expression.
The film’s Buffy celebrity fan
interviews demonstrate how much “Canadian content” the 60’s music scene
featured: Joni Mitchell, the Band’s Robbie Robinson, Steppenwolf’s John Kay all
sing her praises. The film skirts the extent to which Sainte-Marie may have
been a target of US government blacklisting: reportedly LBJ wrote radio
stations urging them to ban her records. It’s also clear that the now Hawaiian
residing Sainte-Marie (who lives with a white surfer dude) has benefited
significantly from the Canada’s more enlightened policies supporting Native
empowerment. (11-12/Palace)