The 58th San Francisco International Film Festival's second week (through May 7 at the Castro, Kabuki Cinemas, Clay, Roxie, Pacific Film Archive) delivers breathtaking original cinema, a great lead-in to the 2015 Fall awards season.
Love & Mercy The greatest actor of his generation, the oval-faced 30-year-old Gemini Paul Dano first appeared as the possibly gay teen in pedophile peril in 2001's L.I.E. When you have Dano channeling America's most enigmatic pop genius, SoCal-raised Beach Boys frontman/composer Brian Wilson, you have the ingredients for a scary good ride. Toss in John Cusack, who aced the role of a Nick Hornby-inspired record store manager in 2000's "High Fidelity," playing a broken, aging pop prince turned Hollywood recluse by an abusive shrink (scene-stealing Paul Giamatti), and the buzz is off the charts.
Director Bill Pohlad shows how Brian Wilson's high school band, Kenny & the Cadets, pushed by his ambitious dad, quickly morphed into the Beach Boys, thereby hatching a SoCal surf & car music style, and transforming Wilson into a '60s pop icon on a scale with the British Invasion. Dano put on pounds and took piano lessons for this role. He radiates a naive sweetness while showing how a prodigy deaf in one ear could create the revolutionary approach to pop that led to the genius-level compositions in "Pet Sounds." "Love & Mercy" ends in a depiction of how a beaten-down Wilson reclaimed his pop throne, and more importantly, his life, after years of pills and isolation. (Kabuki, 5/1, 5/4)
A scene from Drea Cooper and Zackary Canepari's T-Rex, playing the 58th San Francisco International Film Festival. Photo: Courtesy SFFS
T-Rex It wasn't that long ago that feminists would probably have burned in effigy a filmmaker doing a documentary on female boxers. But this new nonfiction exploration of the world of female Olympic boxers from directors Drea Cooper and Zackary Canepari will more likely receive kudos for its depiction of how 17-year-old would-be pugilist Claressa Shields fights her way onto the U.S. Olympic Squad from the bleak precincts of Michael Moore's old stomping grounds, Flint, Michigan. While sparing us Moore's tabloid visual metaphors (there's no equivalent of Moore's rabbit woman asking, "Pet or meat?"), T-Rex makes it clear that little has changed in the former car capital, or for that matter in the hardscrabble job of punching an age-peer in the face as your stab at stardom. (Kabuki, 5/2; Clay, 5/4; PFA, 5/7)
Sworn Virgin Filmmaker Laura Bispuri has an even harder path to follow in dramatizing how an androgynous young Albanian woman attempts to evade macho/Balkan unwritten, but sternly enforced, rules for proper female behavior. Her protagonist finds a loophole in the custom of women passing as men. Renaming herself Mark, the plucky girl migrates to Italy, where she seeks refuge with her sister in a tiny remote village. (Clay, 5/2; PFA, 5/4; Clay, 5/7)
How to Smell a Rose: A Visit With Ricky Leacock in Normandy In a unique type of "posthumous memoir," director Gina Leibrecht (with the late Les Blank) created this homage to the career and charming personality of nonfiction filmmaker Ricky Leacock at his rural farmhouse. The film revels in the joy of good food as much as filmmaking at its most personal. On the same bill: "Ed & Pauline," an account of the moment in the 1950s when Ed Landberg and future New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael started a small repertory cinema in Berkeley. This program acquires extra poignancy with the recent death of a Kael contemporary, the longtime Time magazine film critic Richard Corlis. Corlis' New York Times obituary ends with the observation that his kind of serious film criticism "is an endangered species. Once it flourished; soon it may perish, to be replaced by a consumer service that is no brains and all thumbs." (Clay, 5/2; Kabuki, 5/4)
The Tribe This explosive drama/romance is daringly set inside a Ukrainian school for the deaf. Director Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy embeds us inside a chaotic world of crime, prostitution and deep-seated passions, all captured in international sign language, Ukrainian with no subtitles. This is without doubt the most physically brutal and emotionally harrowing film I previewed for the 2015 SFIFF. (Kabuki, 5/2; Clay, 5/4)
El Cordero Juan Francisco Olea explores one of contemporary Catholicism's most deep-seated theological-philosophical-spiritual problems, in many ways exploring the dilemmas facing the new Argentinian-born Pope. The film deals with the crisis of the soul of a Chilean Christian man who shoots a woman to death, mistaking her for a burglar. A turbulent encounter with the dead woman's boyfriend threatens to shake Domingo's world to its very foundations. This film may especially resonate with those like me who were exposed early in life to J.F. Powers' fiction about Catholic priests, most particularly his 1962 novel "Morte D'Urban." (Kabuki, 5/1, 5/7; PFA, 5/3)
A German Youth Fans of the troubled queer German wunderkind Rainer Werner Fasbinder will revel in this found-footage doc on the origins of the infamous Baader-Meinhof Gang, which many in the West link to today's "Age of Terror" movements. Director Jean-Gabriel Periot finds archival film to document stories Fassbinder spun into fiction. This film may lead astute viewers to troubling connections between the post-WWII generation's debates over Holocaust survivor guilt and remembrance, and the even more troubling ethical dilemmas of the Boston Marathon Bombing and the ongoing Obama "anti-terror" drone strikes. (Kabuki, 5/2, 5/5)
A Hard Day Fans of hard-hitting, out-of-control South Korean cops will get their hyperviolence fix in Kim Seong-hun's tale involving a hit-and-run accident that devolves into body-in-a trunk mischief by his protagonist, Ko. (Lee Sun-kyun). (Kabuki, 5/3, 5/7)
Deep Web Especially timely following recent government raids and arrests, doc-maker Alex Winter's film explores the story behind the online black-market website Silk Road and its controversial San Francisco founder, Ross Ulbricht. (Kabuki, 5/4, 5/6)
A Few Cubic Meters of Love A taboo-laced love story involving an affair between a male Iranian metal-punch-worker and a female Afghan refugee. Jamshid Mahmoudi's drama was Afghanistan's official entry in the Oscar foreign-language category. (Clay, 5/3; Kabuki, 5/5)
Info: Festival.SFFS.ORG