Let’s move to Cleveland

It’s
probably just a coincidence that bombs started falling over Baghdad about 10
minutes after I checked into my hotel in Cleveland, where I was to cover their
27th annual International Film Festival. But there seems to be some unfortunate
connection between me leaving town to watch movies and the occurrence of a
horrible international incident with a ridiculous body count (9/11 went down
during the Toronto fest). For the record, my next trip is in June, so you have
until then to load up on the duct tape and bottled water.

            Much like Toronto, albeit to a
lesser extent, this New Kind of War had major ramifications on us regular folk
who just wanted to hang out in the dark and lose ourselves in independent and
foreign cinema (between running around trying to catch basketball scores,
anyway). The star power were too scared to fly into town to help promote their
films, and several screenings were canceled because airport customs officials
were wary of releasing large metal boxes from strange, unpronounceable lands
(which turned out to contain film prints and not WMD).

            But none of that nonsense prevented
Clevelanders from turning out in droves to support their festival. After all,
why stay home and hide in the bathtub when you can see any of the three
tremendously entertaining Mental Hygiene programs? Remember
those messed-up, post-World War II classroom films they used to show kids in an
attempt to mold them into one big, subservient, Village of the Damned-like mass of well-mannered little cretins?
Well, they had about six hours of them in Cleveland. Shorts with titles like Beginning To Date, What Made Sammy Speed? and Narcotics:
Pit of Despair made me laugh until my face and stomach both ached. As funny
as the extremely dated films were, they were made even more enjoyable by the
knowledgeable introduction of Ken Smith, the author of the encyclopedia of
classroom films (also called Mental
Hygiene).

            The other comedic highlight of the
festival didn’t really have anything to do with a proper film, either. If
you’re the kind of person who watches the Super Bowl for the ads rather than
the game, you’d really dig World’s Best Commercials, which was
a last-minute replacement for one of those movies that couldn’t clear customs.
Thankfully, WBC only sounded like one
of those stupid television specials hosted by Dick Clark and Ed McMahon. For
starters, there’s none of that “witty” banter between the hosts —
it’s just non-stop award-winning commercials from all over the world.

            As far as the “regular”
films went, the first two I saw happened to be in black-and-white, from Eastern
Europe, and happened to feature gypsies putting deadly curses on the male
lead’s best girl. Temptations, a Hungarian picture, is about a young man named
Marci (Marcell Miklós), who is searching for his father. Along the way, Marci
ends up swapping a bunch of onions for an underage gypsy (Julianna Kovacs)
capable of some pretty nifty sleight-of-hand.

            Romania’s Every Day God Kisses Us On the
Mouth tells the sad story of Dumitru (Dan Condurache). It starts out
promisingly, when Dumitru gets out of jail and wins a girl in a card game. But
she’s a vindictive gypsy who reads his palm during sex and tells him he’s going
to die. Then Dumitru gets home, finds out his brother knocked up his wife, and
decides to travel around with his new best friend, who happens to be a goose.

            Gypsies don’t play a major role in Edi,
Poland’s official entry into the last Oscar race, but there is a character they
call Gypsy in it. The titular Edi (Henryk Golebiewski) is the George half in an
Of Mice and Men-type relationship
with a slow alcoholic named Jurek (Jacek Braciak). The two men live together in
squalor, but Edi’s love of books lands him a gig tutoring the rebellious
younger sister of the town’s two biggest illegal liquor tycoons. When Princess
(Aleksandra Kisio) gets knocked up, she’s afraid her psycho brothers will kill
her boyfriend Gypsy, so she pins the pregnancy on Edi. Trouble ensues, as do a
lot of rather dazzling overhead shots. Edi won the juried competition for Eastern European films.

            Another unusual recurrence was films
in English that were still subtitled. A couple of them, such as Lynne Ramsey’s Ratcatcher,
were due to heavy Scottish accents. Ken Loach’s Sweet Sixteen is a very
compelling departure about a teenager named Liam (Martin Compston), who
desperately wants to give his mother the best homecoming ever when she comes
home from prison. It’s nice to see Loach put away his sledgehammer and tell a
thoughtful story, while letting us all know that there is still a lot of
poverty in Glasgow.

            More subtitles and another Of Mice and Men story surfaced in This
Is Not a Love Song, a Public Image Limited-inspired tale about two
colorful individuals (Michael Colgan and Kenneth Glenaan) who run out of gas,
hike to a farm, accidentally kill the farmer’s daughter, and then find
themselves on the run from a frightening tracker (Harry Potter‘s David Bradley). It’s a little like Deliverance mixed with Beckett and a
smidgen of Gerry (which, ironically,
is the name of the farmer’s daughter).

            Hong Kong’s Fulltime Killer wasn’t
entirely in English, but the parts that were still had English subtitles.
Anyone who digs high-octane Asian action flicks, or really enjoyed the Sly
Stallone-Antonio Banderas movie Assassins (which was written by those Matrix brothers, by the way), should be enthralled by this tale of competing
hitmen-slash-interesting love triangle. Plenty of wonderfully edited
slow-motion set pieces, lots of delicious gunplay, and an almost alarming
number of references to other action movies, like El Mariachi and The
Professional, make it pretty clear writer-director Wai Ka-Fai is a big film
fan himself.

            The highlights of the Cleveland fest
included Lukas Moodysson’s brilliantly disturbing Lilya 4-Ever, about a
teenage Russian girl (a shockingly terrific Oksana Akinshina) who gets mixed up
in a Swedish prostitution ring; Levity, the directorial debut of Men In Black scribe Ed Solomon, which
pits an emotionally broken Billy Bob Thornton against an inner-city missionary
(Morgan Freeman), a drug-abusing teenager (Kirsten Dunst), and the sister of
the kid he accidentally killed 26 years ago (Holly Hunter); and the opening
night film American Splendor, a very Ghost
World-ish true story about a sad sack Clevelander, named Harvey Pekar (Paul
Giamatti), who turns his boring life into a popular Robert Crumb-illustrated
comic book. This Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner masterfully shatters the
fourth wall by incorporating commentary from the story’s real-life
participants.

This article appears in Apr 2-8, 2003.