Festival showers and a bicycle competition

Somewhere towards the middle of Borderlines 2013 I couldn't help noticing that all three films I'd seen in a row featured a significant shower. As I'm sure, I've remarked before, for me, the way coincidence (sometimes deliberate programming, but more often sheer coincidence ) throws movies together in the most unexpected, often trivial ways is one of the deepest pleasures of film festivals.

First of all there was the potential Italian father-in-law in Woody Allen's To Rome With Love. Given the glorious free rein of his shower room, Giancarlo, played by real life tenor Fabio Armiliato, has a operatic voice to die for.

Outside that comfort zone, nerves get the better of him so the character played by Allen, an outré opera impresario, carries through the delightfully silly 'avant-garde' notion of casting him in Pagliacci, boxed in the armour of a built-in shower cubicle.

Quite a contrast in tone the next day, as I watched the grim Post Mortem and noted that the key event, a brutal government raid on the home of his girlfriend Nancy, takes place as mortuary assistant Mario showers. It's an attack that leaves the house wrecked and charred but Mario seems as clueless and cut-off from the political mayhem surrounding him in Pinochet's Chile as he is oblivious in his shower cubicle to the noisy and violent upheaval taking place just across the street.

Day three and the shower scene to end all shower scenes, Psycho of course. Hitchcock catches us and his main character unawares, unwinding after a day of flight, deep anxiety and moral tension under the soothing rays of a penetrating warm shower.

After that, I couldn't help seeing showers everywhere from the spectacular blood waterfalls that accompanied every initiation of a new vampire in Neil Jordan's Byzantium to Philip Seymour Hoffman as second violinist Robert in A Late Quartet attempting to hose off a raunchy infidelity and weeping in the shower at the enormity of the marital and professional betrayal he has just committed.

It got to the stage that I could count on the fingers of one hand the films that didn't feature a significant shower scene. Or any shower scene at all.

In the spirit of a different coincidence - bicycles - you might like to have a go at our Bicycle Thieves competition. Identify the titles of the four films we showed at Borderlines 2013 that prominently featured bicycles.

Email your answers by midnight, tomorrow Friday 22 March for a chance to win a copy of the Bicycle Thieves DVD, courtesy of our long-term sponsor, MovieMail.

More on The Hunt

‘The Audience Recommend[ed] . . .’ The Hunt this year, though not many of them came to see it shown again on Tuesday evening at the Courtyard. Maybe they’d already seen it. A shame, because it was one of the most powerful and thought provoking films I’ve seen in the festival or for a long while for that matter, and it dealt in a very economical, finely paced but strongly affecting way with a hugely relevant and important issue – the rush to judgment on highly charged issues such as child abuse. It was set in a small community, but the urgency with which lifelong friends embrace an almost chance suggestion is eerily familiar to some current media reporting. Strong stuff, beautifully made – unfortunately marred by the effect of a digital disc that defaulted to the ‘long thin format with no subtitles’ beloved of everyone’s home DVD player at a critical moment as the hostility erupted into open violence. Not what you want, but a great film nonetheless.

Richard Heatly

Tony Manero provokes strong reactions

On Sunday night I saw Tony Manero. There are ‘feel-good’ movies and . . . this is not one of them. It’s powerful, gritty and gripping but undeniably sleazy, dank and even clammy in its effect. I felt quite soiled by watching it even while being held with a kind of fascinated distaste. I have seen it described as a comedy, but there weren’t many laughs from me or the – admittedly sparse – audience at the Courtyard. The main character is played with a haggard intensity by Alfredo Castro, whose reptilian attempts to win a talent show impersonating John Travolta’s character in Saturday Night Fever are only marginally more repellent than the rest of a cast of characters drawn into the world of deceit, betrayal and violence that was Pinochet’s Chile. As a commentary on the tawdriness and corruption of a totalitarian regime, and the cheap dreams of a post-imperialist America which are shown as deeply implicated in the hollowing out of the culture and identity of the place, the film is strong stuff. As entertainment though, it wasn’t a great deal of fun!    

Richard Heatly
 

Anyone looking for an antidote to the 'cosy and predictable' sentimentality of Quartet (see RinkyDinks blog of 7 March) should have joined us on Sunday afternoon for Tony Manero.  Challenging and uncomfortable to put it mildly, this film led to much discussion in the bar afterwards.  Perhaps the '18' rating and the brochure description of 'a dissection of Chilean society under Pinochet' should have prepared us for the miserable monomania and the series of brutal, sociopathic acts which we glimpsed through our fingers as we covered our faces with our hands.  "Why is such a film necessary?" we asked ourselves as we nursed our hot chocolates afterwards and considered scaling up to gin to aid our recovery from the experience.  "What did it all mean?"  Maybe those of us who joined Amnesty in the 1970s and marched against fascism instead of watching Saturday Night Fever and saving our Saturday job wages to buy white suits or disco dresses have part of an answer.  I won't pretend to understand it all but as the experience haunts me I am glad that I saw this and I am reminded that films like this - and cultural fixtures like Borderlines to show them - are necessary.

Deb Summerfield