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The Iron Curtain may have lifted over Poland and Czechoslovakia, but from these nations’ dour entries in this year’s Festival, you wouldn’t know it. “Gloom is everywhere,” to quote a lyric.
“I Am” by Dorota Kedzierzawska, is a bitter tale of an 11-year-old boy, nicknamed “Mongrel,” who is rejected by his abusive, alcoholic, whoring mother (whom he bites, reciprocally). The waif is obliged to live on scraps on an abandoned river barge. Mongrel makes common cause with “Marble,” the lonely, tomboy daughter of a somewhat better-off, dockside family.
While Arthur Reinhart’s glorious cinematography contradicts the sordidness of the milieu, the picture is doused with Michael (“The Piano”) Nyman’s usual, self-important, not to say pretentious, musical score. Unlike the great Polish film composer, Zbigniew Preisner, Nyman proclaims himself rather than the films he scores.

The Czech “Something Like Happiness,” directed by Bohdan Slama, is about the unrequited love of homely, thirty-something Tonik (Pavel Liska) for his childhood friend, Monika (Tatiana Vilhelmova). Will she remain in their ghastly, northern industrial town of the Czech Republic, in which the film is set, and settle for Tonik, or follow her handsome boyfriend to the U.S.–you decide?
In the interim, their surrogate parentage of some cute kids complicates matters. I wouldn’t dream of giving the plot away, any more than I could have remained in that depressing burg.
I am obliged to conclude from the Festival offerings that the mood of Eastern Europe is oppressive, not to say miasmal.

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In “Sympathy for Lady Vengeance” (South Korea/Tartan Films), beautiful Lee Geum-ja (Lee Young-ae) has just spent 13 1/2 years in prison, unjustly sentenced for the kidnapping and murder of a 5-year-old boy.

In detention, Lee garners an undeserved reputation as an angel of mercy for nursing a fat lesbian, whom she is too slim to interest sexually. In turn, she feeds the fattie spoonfuls of tainted blood-laced pablum, which induces the huge one’s death.

There is quite enough ghastliness as well as plentiful Dutch camera angles in this group vendetta film to delight fans of Quentin Tarantino, whose lurid work has spawned such derivatives. I am still squirming from the pistol shots fired into a hog-tied villain’s toes, which emit pools of blood.

I will spoil the ending (SPOILER) by revealing that the actual kidnapper-killer is a male school teacher who has done in a succession of children and who keeps mementoes of his little victims on his key chain.

I am only letting on, because the proceedings ran out of interest for me about half-way through this 112-minute flick, and you may not wish to stay and find out whodunit. I was continually looking at my watch, hoping to will the picture’s end much sooner.

The film’s climax depicts the bereaved parents’ vendetta-slaying of the extra-curricular kid-killer, which takes place, fittingly, in the teacher’s old school room. This room gets unusually sanguinary as the vindictive parents filter the “M”-like monster’s blood through large, plastic sheets.

“Sympathy For Lady Vengeance” concludes director Park Chanwook’s revenge cycle trilogy, but it did not prompt me to catch the earlier two.

The program notes instruct us that the film becomes “an exploration of the spiritual price of vengeance. . . is it possible to atone for one sin by committing another?” I’m quite sure that description enunciates the central theme of Spielberg’s “Munich,” but not this Tarantina.

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I hoped that the three romances of “Three Times” might be as torrid as Wong Kar Wai’s “2046.” Each of “Three Times” features the coupling of the Taiwanese stars Shu Qi–slender, still and handsome–and Chang Chen, strikingly tall and provocative looking, with her hair severely cropped. The film is Hou Hsiao-hsien’s look at Taiwan’s changing sexual mores, set, variously, in a 1966 pool hall, a 1911 brothel and in bustling, present-day Taipei. Sounds provocative, doesn’t it?

The first of the couplings involves a shy, college drop-out (Chen) called up for National Service, and the highly reserved, but too stunning-to-be a pool-hall girl, May (Qi), whom he falls for. This “searching, searching, searching” quest turned into a soporific as Chen goes from place to place seeking May, who has always just departed. The couple’s ultimate, tentative touching and then clasping of hands is this segment’s big, ultra-chaste, C.U. anti-climax.

So I departed after the stars’ first encounter, only to meet, in the men’s room, the glare of the Film Society’s Program Director and the Chairman of its Selection Committee. (That is, the honcho who passed over “Brokeback Mountain” in favor of von Trier’s, deplorable “Manderlay,” proving that we have very disparate taste in films.)
The Chairman and I did not exchange a word, but his disapproving look spoke volumes. I could have said that it would have been far ruder of me to snore than to leave, but I did not. I could have reminded him of how many excellent questions I had posed at press conferences he had chaired, but I remained silent. Transporting my canvas totes to the john was a dead giveaway that I was not returning for two more “Times.”
Manohla Dargis raved so about “Three Times” in the Times (she claimed she was attempting to find an American distributor for the film, though it now has one in IFC First Take), that I know she would have merited the warm handshake which I saw the Chairman extend to her equally laudatory colleague at the Times, Stephen Holden. However, as Ms. Dargis resides in Los Angeles (“nice work if you can get it”), and only sees her Festival imports via screeners, he could not so easily shake hers.

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As I write this appraisal, I notice that Lars von Trier’s “Manderlay” (Denmark/Sweden/France-IFC Films) has closed after only a single week (January 27-February 2) of its uptown, art-house run near Lincoln Center. It failed despite The Times’ Stephen Holden’s favorable comments about this misanthropic crock at the Festival last October. At the start of its public performances, in late January, Holden, in a more qualified, full length appraisal, inquired, “But who, beyond the gifted Danish filmmaker’s ardent cult of admirers, will want to watch it?” Simultaneously, Holden appeared in larger type, in the Times’ quote ad for the film, calling “Manderlay,” “an important film
. . . which asks uncomfortable questions . . . that no American filmmaker would dare address so boldly.” (This publicist’s invention does not appear in either of Holden’s reviews. Perhaps he phoned it in.)
Initially, Holden found “Manderlay” “more tightly constructed, more coherent and more provocative than its forerunner,” the horrendous “Dogville” (2003), a Rocky Mountain low, which starred Nicole Kidman as the virtuous Grace. Grace is so, well, gracious–so kind, naive and good, that the initially welcoming Dogville townspeople reciprocate by chaining her to an enormous lock and then using her as a receptacle until she violently turns the tables on them, at the film’s long-delayed climax. (Daddy, conveniently, is a retributive mobster with muscle.)

There are at least two distinctions between the replicating parts One and Two of the Dogville trilogy, which both feature Brechtian chapter titles, ironic narration by smoky-voiced John Hurt, and similar floor plan or blueprint outlines for sets on a bare soundstage floor, without any backdrop, shot in handheld digital video with frequent swish pans. (As usual, von Trier himself is the in-your-face cameraman.)
On February 13, 2006, it was announced, in Variety, that von Trier had tabled his third “Dogville” feature, dumbly titled, “Wasington.” I can’t imagine why he would not continue his wrongheaded sequels, like the endless hospital satire, “The Kingdom”(1994/97) except that usually admiring critics, like the Village Voice’s J. Hoberman, dissed “Manderlay” as “von Trier’s disappointing “Dogville” follow-up” and even Manohla Dargis accorded it a “bomb” rating in the Spring issue of Film Comment.
Manderlay is the name of von Trier’s Southern, slave-run plantation, set in 1933, nearly 70 years after Emancipation. It is surely not the Cornwall estate of Daphne Du Maurier’s “Rebecca.” (Perhaps von Trier was alluding to that famed Burmese Road of song: “Where the dawn comes up like thunder, out of China cross the bay.”) Von Trier’s ironic point is that slavery persists in the U.S. despite the Emancipation Proclamation and desegregation. (As David Edelstein concluded in New York, “it’s hard to get too worked up over racial injustice when a director has the temperament of a Klansman.”)

As I held onto the seats adjacent to me, in order to prohibit my early exit from this tedious exploitation flick, I called to mind the similarly named “Mandingo” (1975), Richard Fleischer’s rarely shown, mixed-race depravity about a slave-breeding plantation, circa 1840, starring James Mason as the plantation owner and boxer hunk Ken Norton in the studly title role. “Mandingo” was a luridly sensational picture, based on a trashy best seller–although it provided a titillating depiction of slaves’ sexuality. The recently deceased Richard Fleischer may have been a pedestrian director given bad material, but he was, at least, an entertainer–something von Trier has not been since “Breaking the Waves” (1996).

“Manderlay” is von Trier’s tiresome variation on his same-old, same-old tale of the virtuous maiden serially deflowered and degraded until she avenges herself or is slain (“Breaking the Waves” “Dancer in the Dark”). “Manderlay,” however, is 40 minutes shorter than “Dogville,” and Nicole Kidman, who swore up and down at Cannes that she would play Grace in all three of the ‘Doggies.’ Kidman had the good sense to bow out, in favor of a new, red-haired beauty, Bryce Dallas Howard, Ron Howard’s daughter, who was previously top-billed in M. Night Shyamalan’s clinker, “The Village” (2004).
Ms. Howard’s inexperience is accentuated by her difficulty in uttering von Trier’s stilted, evidently second-language script, which makes her seem like an especially inadequate replacement for Kidman.
“Manderlay” has far fewer name American stars than the equally anti-American “Dogville.” They are: Willem Dafoe (Grace’s mobster father), Lauren Bacall (seen briefly as the dying plantation owner) and Danny Glover, as the black overseer who keeps his plantation hands enslaved.
I can’t imagine many other African-American actors who would accept such a degrading role, but perhaps Glover thought the prestige of working with von Trier was worthwhile, and there weren’t many other calls for his services. Glover champions Venezuela’s Leftist President Chavez who is, in turn, outraged both by American imperialism and our attempts to oust him.

What’s galling about “Manderlay” is that this putrid, theatrical, pulp fiction is followed by a coda of harrowing photos–alternately in color and black-and-white–depicting American brutality towards blacks. The sickening gamut runs from savage beatings to a demoralized life of ghettoized poverty to lynchings. These photos are comparable to the Dorothea Lange portraits of impoverished sharecroppers, in their Depression extremity, which end “Dogville.” David Bowie’s “Young Americans” provides the ironic, anachronistic accompaniment to the finale of “Manderlay’s” slide-show indictment.

These horrific photos belie von Trier’s trashy and hypertrophic fictions rather than exemplify them. Of course, von Trier has found an historical precedent to authenticate his rubbish. In the preface to “The Story of O,” (whose wretched film version von Trier could easily surpass), freed slaves in Barbados in 1838 begged their owner to re-enslave them. When he refused to do so, they killed him and his family, and resumed their self-abnegating ways. That’s surely an interesting subject for a film, but it doesn’t have an anti-American setting appropriate to von Trier’s loathing for the U.S., he has never visited, where his works continue to be celebrated in film festivals.

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