Bright Leaves
How many documentaries can boast a featured appearance by Gary Cooper? In BRIGHT LEAVES, the celebrated nonfiction director Ross McElwee—filmmaker, academic and godfather to the Boston doc community—returns to his North Carolina birthplace to root out the story of his family’s agricultural downfall: were the McElwees swindled out of their rightful share of America’s tobacco bounty by their rivals, the unscrupulous Duke family? Is there a lesson or a legacy in all this that will be handed down to the director’s own son? Did Cooper really portray a character based on McElwee’s tobacco-baron grandfather? 107 min. USA, 2003.
Since Otar Left
How elaborate a fraud would we perpetrate to protect those we adore? There’s no limit, of course, and the tangled, pan-generational web spun throughout SINCE OTAR LEFT—the debut feature by Julie Bertuccelli—is all about lying for love. Eka (a wonderfully moving Esther Gorintin) lives on the morsels of communication she gets from her beloved son, Otar, who long ago left Georgia for Paris and is apparently thriving—and, just as apparently, never coming back. Eka is cared for by her daughter, Marina, who resents her mother’s obsession with Otar and therefore works for her all the harder, and Marina’s daughter Ada, who is suffocating in the consequent vacuum. 102 min. France, 2003.
Crimson Gold
CRIMSON GOLD, the latest provocation by the politically courageous and visually nimble Iranian director Jafar Panahi explodes off the screen without the camera ever moving. And yet the smash-and-crash jewel robbery with which the film opens is really just a scream of anguish from its chief character Hussein (Hossain Emadeddin), whose history we learn via flashback and a cleverly elegant script by Pahani collaborator Abbas Kiarostami. Pizza delivery-man Hussein—veteran of the Iran-Iraq war, victim of chemical warfare and casualty of his country’s short-term memory—is a symbol for Panahi of Iran’s economic stagnation, the unspoken cruelty of its class distinctions, and the embarrassments of its past. 95 min. Iran, 2003.
Goodbye Dragon Inn
It is nighttime in Taipei. Half a dozen lonely souls are watching King Hu’s Dragon Inn in a local revival theater. Or rather, some of them are watching, communing with the cinema. And some are just marking time, or looking for love. Meanwhile, a silent cleaning woman is slowly prowling the backrooms and hallways, the heavy step of her bum leg echoing down the corridors. “This theater is haunted,” someone says. And it is, by these people and their desire to connect. Tsai Ming-liang’s GOODBYE DRAGON INN is the director’s most minimal film and cinematically his most eloquent. 81 min. Taiwan, 2003.
Distant
From Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan, whose Clouds of May premiered in the 2001 New Directors/New Films festival, DISTANT is a subtle and incisive character study of a big city photographer and his rural cousin who has come to Istanbul looking for work—hopefully on a ship that will take him away from his troubled country. The older man's disillusionment—he has been forced to abandon his artistic ambitions to concentrate on commercial jobs—provides a funny and revealing contrast to his young visitor's naiveté and enthusiasm. The two lead actors, Muzaffer Özdemir and Mehmet Toprak, shared the best actor prize at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival; the film itself won the Grand Jury Prize. 110 min. Turkey, 2003.
