Translated material
The bank that burst
Script problems became the theme of several films shown at the Moscow International Film Festival
The MIFF's non-competition program "Eight and a Half Films", which over the years of its existence has become something of a showcase of advanced cinematic ideas, opened this year with the film "The Waiter" by the Dutch director Alex Van Warmerdam. A witty plot pitting a hapless screenwriter against his indignant character marked the beginning of a whole series of festival works reflecting on the newly relevant topic of the shortage of script ideas and the predictability of cinematic moves.The plot of “The Waiter” is built on a single formal device, which, however, works throughout the entire film and makes the viewer burst into fits of Homeric laughter. The beginning of the picture is confusing: in the darkened room of a run-of-the-mill restaurant, an elderly waiter is hanging around (the main role was played by Warmerdam himself). The customers are dissatisfied with the quality of the steaks, the partner is firmly entrenched in the toilet, at the table in the center of the hall, as luck would have it, an annoying mistress has sat down, and a crippled wife and unruly thug neighbors are waiting at home. This existential situation makes the lower jaw yawn, but at the moment when the viewer, suspecting something is wrong, is ready to move from the heated seats, the director sharply reveals his cards.
A would-be screenwriter is “chasing a line” at a computer in a sterile interior, and from the toilet in the back of the apartment his bespectacled girlfriend calls out: “Well, what kind of terrible life have you come up with for him? Where is the sex and love? No one is interested in your script." To prove her words, the main character himself breaks into the apartment and demands that the author give him a chance for at least a little adventure. Subsequently, the whole picture rests on a series of script cliches that are hilarious in their inconsistency, interspersed with hysterical pleas of characters who put forward new demands to the author - sex, adventure, love, reciprocity, a happy ending. From time to time, the screenwriter's girlfriend intervenes in the writing of the story, and the viewer unmistakably guesses a woman's handwriting in the chaos happening on the screen.
Warmerdam's film could be considered a witty eccentricity of a decadent master, if the theme of the deterioration of the worldwide “script package” had not become the leitmotif of the works of young directors.
Thirty-year-old Chinese woman Guo Jiaoliu makes the protagonist of her film (“How’s the catch today?”) a young screenwriter who receives an order from the producer for a big-budget thriller. The hero watches a bunch of Hollywood blockbusters, from which he quickly compiles his story - something between “The Fugitive” and “The Godfather.” Actually, why bother with an original plot in an era when nothing will surprise the viewer anyway, and all the genre moves have long been invented and tested. And only after receiving a turn from the studio at the studio, the young man thinks about what his hero looks like, in which direction he is moving and what relation he has to himself.
The recipe for a new film is found on a dusty shelf - where the pioneers of auteur cinema left it in those days when it was not yet called the ill-fated name of art house and meant not status-bound boredom, but absolute freedom. The young Chinese woman Jiaolu echoes the seasoned Dutchman Warmerdam: in her film, the screenwriter also communicates with the hero and even goes along the route he laid out - to the border village of Moe to see the snow-capped horizon and the northern lights - pictures that have tormented him since early childhood. Well, and at the same time answer the question of where the movie begins. And with the same thing it ends with - with the pronoun “I”. You say like a spell: “Anna Karenina is me,” and everything goes like clockwork.
Belgian director Joachim Lafosse offers a completely radical version of the fight against genre pressures and script shortages in the film “What Makes You Happy.” The main character, a failed director, puts together a film crew of unemployed actors, failed cameramen and restless sound engineers. The film is commissioned by cash-strapped producers, and the script is based on a story about an unemployed director who dreams of making a movie. “This story is very similar to our life, how do we play it?” - one of the actors is indignant, demanding a director's direction. To which he receives a sharp answer: “This is our life, fool, so you have to play it brilliantly.”
Director Joachim Lafosse, it seems, also made the film based on his own experience, so the result is a script doll, at the core of which is an idea that has long been in the air. Nowadays, you can shoot a movie with a digital camera, and take the plot either from a book or from your own life - the main thing is that it “makes you happy.” Then there is a chance that it will touch someone else too.
By the way, our viewers received Lafos’ film very kindly. And one teenage young lady reasoned with her mother, who suggested escaping from the hall to the buffet, with a short phrase: “This is more interesting to me than “Wolfhound.” So the Belgian director, it seems, was more interested in making a film “on his knees” than listening to standard producer nonsense about “genre affiliation” and “target audience.” And if at the end of the last century directors lamented that the audience left the audience, then soon producers will mourn the professional directors who left big cinema.