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San Francisco International Film Fest

By Justin Lowe

A controversial opening night film can create a public relations dividend for a festival, producing plenty of buzz before the screening and afterward as partygoers dissect the hype. This year the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF) generates a bit of that ado by premiering Wayne Wang’s new digital feature, The Center of the World, a techno-inspired tale of sexual fixation and exploration. The film initially gained attention because of distributor Artisan Entertainment’s decision to release Center un-rated, after the motion picture ratings board slapped it with an NC-17 designation, owing to a number of sexually explicit scenes

“To me, controversy is provocative,” says Rachel Rosen, SFIFF associate director of programming. “I think controversial films make for good opening night parties because they incite discussion.”

Wang again collaborates with screenwriters Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt (Smoke, Blue in the Face), in an examination of the commodification of intimacy. When a young Internet millionaire offers a stripper $10,000 to spend a long weekend with him in Las Vegas, their encounter takes on unanticipated dimensions as the couple enters an unpredictable private fantasy.

French porn actress Coralie Trinh Thi and co-director Virginie Despentes exploit the same digital technology in a far cruder manner with Baise Moi, a graphically violent and sexually explicit statement on the war of the genders. The film’s widespread condemnation in France assures it a steady stream of curious audiences as it travels abroad.

Among films from Asia, Junji Sakamoto’s Face, recently screened in New York’s prestigious “New Directors, New Films” series, features a riveting performance by renowned actress Naomi Fujiyama as Masako, a shy, spinsterish seamstress trapped by oppressive family obligations until a sudden act of violence forces her out of isolation and onto the road in a journey of self-discovery.

Other Japanese films at the SFIFF include Dora-Heita, a wry, entertaining samurai drama originally co-scripted by Akira Kurosawa and Kon Ichikawa in 1969, and finally produced by Ichikawa 30 years later. Makoto Shinozaki delivers pointed social commentary with Not Forgotten: three World War II veterans band together for one last battle against an exploitative cult targeting the elderly in a touching tale of loyalty and honor. It seems that no festival would be complete without a yakuza movie — this time it’s Brother, Takeshi Kitano’s first U.S. production, in which he co-stars with Omar Epps as a disgraced Japanese gangster trying to muscle in on the L.A. mob.

Lee Chang-dong’s Peppermint Candy is another “New Directors” film making an appearance at the SFIFF — an ambitious attempt at incorporating the last 20 years of South Korean history through a long, wrenching flashback on the bitter life of a suicidal, middle-aged man. Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors is a humorous, black and white narrative from Hong Sang-soo that uses multiple viewpoints to show the courtship between a young woman and her two suitors, playfully reminiscent of French New Wave romances.

Chinese films are represented by both well-established directors and newer artists alike, including Jia Zhang Ke, whose Xiao Wu won the SFIFF’s 1999 Skyy prize for first-time features. Jia’s Platform again examines the predicaments of ordinary people caught up in the sweeping changes of the 1980s, this time through the members of a regional theater group. Horse Thief is part of the festival’s “Indelible Images” retrospective — Tian Zhuangzhuang’s 1986 portrayal of a Tibetan tribesman banished by his peers. Jiang Wen revisits the World War II conflict between Japan and China with Devils on the Doorstep, a feature about the curious dilemma of a rural Chinese village unexpectedly forced to decide the fate of two Japanese POWs.

Another festival veteran, Marilou Diaz-Abaya, returns with Reef Hunters, a Philippine narrative about the harrowing adventures of impoverished children recruited for a dangerous and destructive fishing business. The Vertical Ray of the Sun, the third feature from Tran Anh Hung (Cyclo), follows the secretly entwined lives of three sisters in present-day Hanoi.

With short films, documentaries and additional features about the Asian experience from Cambodia, Thailand, Iran and the United States interspersed throughout the festival’s 220 titles, as well as gala special events with star performers and directors, the San Francisco International Film Festival is virtual globetrotting at its best.

The Center of the World will be Wang’s fourth film to open or close the SFIFF, following 1998’s Chinese Box, and his first digital video production. Richard Longman (Peter Sarsgaard) is a twenty-something computer engineer on the brink of ever-greater wealth with his pre-IPO startup. Still, he feels empty. He tries to fill the void with frequent visits to a strip club called Pandora’s Box after meeting the lovely, lap-dancing Florence (Molly Parker) in a local cafe.

Mistaking a business transaction for a relationship, Richard impulsively offers a reluctant Florence 10 grand to take a long weekend with him in Las Vegas. She consents only after Richard agrees to her stringent restrictions, including a 10pm-2am schedule for sex, a kissing prohibition, and “no penetration.”

While Wang would like this situation to play like a Last Tango in Paris descent into private sexual obsession, he never reveals enough about the characters for us to really care. In spite of impressive digital production values, the film ends up pretty much back where it started.

The problem is not that Wang stretches the anecdote of a lonely Gen-X dot-com millionaire beyond the bounds of good taste, but rather that he drags it out past any reasonable expectation of audience interest.

Also un-rated, but far more explicit than anything else in the festival, Baise-Moi delights in the raw depiction of both violent sex and random violence. With a title translating roughly as “Rape Me,” this controversial feature, widely condemned in its native France, is directed by porn star Coralie Trinh Thi and novelist Virginie Despentes (from the book by Despentes). It’s a bleak and queasy vision, indeed — a nearly nonstop succession of rapes, shootings and hardcore sex, linked to the thin plot of a recreational crime rampage.

After being violently (and graphically) raped by a gang of thugs, part-time porn star Manu lashes out at the only man who seems to care anything about her, shooting him with his own gun. Meanwhile, kinky prostitute Nadine strangles her bitchy flat-mate in a pointless fit of anger. Before you can say “road trip,” the paths of the two marginalized women (real-life porn actresses Raffaela Anderson and Karen Buch) converge for a senseless series of robberies, spree killings and random sexual encounters, leaving behind a trail of bodies and banner headlines as they flee across France.

But a tarted-up Thelma and Louise this is not. Without any clear internal logic or a more objective character to frame the women’s situation, it’s nearly impossible for audiences to sympathize, resulting in a film that plays more like sexploitation than serious social commentary. Ultimately, one hardly needs to side with widespread distaste for the film to recognize that Baise-Moi’s poor reception is due more to sub-par filmmaking than allegedly inferior morality.

What at first appears to be an almost satirical choice for a documentary subject, Gaea Girls reveals itself as a sensitive and insightful journey into the world of Japanese professional women’s wrestling. Like the World Wrestling Federation, the Gaea league boasts lavish productions, outlandish characters and bizarre fighting styles.

The film is saved from superficiality by its behind-the-scenes observation of the Gaea Japan training program — a boot camp for would-be wrestlers — and the triumphs and (mostly) defeats of its recruits.

Nagayo Chigusa is the camp director — a stocky, deep-voiced, tough-love tyrant who’s earned her stripes in the ring as one of Japan’s top women wrestlers. She passes on her experience through a rigorous program of training, instruction and sparring that sends more than one young woman home in tears. But not Takeuchi Saika. She’s been at the camp for more than a year enduring Nagayo’s abuse, bloodied lips and nearly nonstop workouts, still determined to make her debut as a Gaea Girl.

Directors Jano Williams and Kim Longinotto — notching their fourth joint documentary on Japanese cultural issues — wisely focus on the titanic struggle between Takeuchi and Nagayo, adopting a cinéma vérité style and forsaking narration to let the women tell their own fascinating stories. While the fight-ring violence may seem all the harder to watch because it’s real, our admiration for these women’s determination makes their victories even more inspiring.

After an initial rebuff by the Cannes International Film Festival in 1999, Chinese director Zhang Yimou’s The Road Home has picked up momentum, winning a Silver Bear at the 2000 Berlin International Film Festival and receiving this year’s audience award for world cinema at the Sundance Film Festival.

The Road Home is a sentimental journey back to the bucolic pre-war countryside of northern China, related in one long flashback by Luo Yusheng (Sun Honglei), a businessman who has returned after a long absence to his home village following the death of his father, the revered local schoolteacher.

When his elderly mother Zhao Di (Zhao Yuelin) stubbornly insists that her husband’s coffin must be hand-carried back to the village from a distant hospital in observance of local custom, Luo’s admiration for his mother’s devotion prompts him to recall the well-known circumstances of his parents’ courtship.

His father, Luo Changyu, was a 20-year-old, city-bred schoolteacher who sought work in the countryside, arriving to great local anticipation in Zhao Di’s village of Sanhetun. Smitten with the handsome and capable teacher, a determined 18-year-old Zhao (portrayed by Zhang Ziyi) takes advantage of Luo’s dependence on the local people for food and shelter to cook him special dishes and deliberately cross his path by passing the school almost daily. At first, her strategy succeeds, but their incipient flirtation is threatened when Luo is forced to return to the city because of unspecified “political problems,” painfully separating the would-be lovers.

Director Zhang frames their romance in expansive scenes of forests ablaze with fall foliage and golden fields of grain, which contrast with the bleak, monochromatic sequences of the family’s present-day grief. Downplaying the political dimensions of the story, The Road Home’s strength is its convergence of sumptuous, naturalistic imagery with a largely metaphorical treatment of the universal themes of love, loyalty and loss.