More than anything else, the dominant theme of this year’s festival was womanhood and its attendant issues. The following are some of the programs that worked in this vein:

Persepolis (2007, Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud)

I’ve read Persepolis but not its sequel and my attention to the film was reflected in kind - while the Iranian material which makes up the first half of the film is often riveting, Satrapi’s adolescent musings in Austria are decidedly less so. But what really bothers me about Persepolis is its disjointed, almost haphazard adaptation - at times the episodic narrative - more a collection of vignettes than a story - feels slack. The frequent fade-outs and rough transitions are less cinematic and more televisual. Still, the score is wonderful, the design at times beautifully imaginative. But then, what do I know? The film was wildly popular with festival audiences.

Juno (2007, Jason Reitman)

Again, what do I know? Immediately after watching Jason Reitman’s Juno, I felt like stomping to the nearest computer terminal and writing an angry blog post entitled ‘The Backlash Starts Here.’ As an entry in the recent trend of quirky adolescent comedies, I found Juno unremarkable - its titular protagonist (Ellen Page - when one chill bro on the gondola down from the Mountain Village proclaimed how hot she was, I had visions of him assaulting little boys) is a vague retread of Thora Birch’s wonderfully inventive Enid from Ghost World and it’s simply not that funny. The story of a young woman impregnated by her best friend (Michael Cera), it’s competently executed, with a remarkable directorial restraint (especially remarkable considering Reitman’s execrable Thank You for Smoking) and some winning side performances, but for a putative comedy, I barely laughed.

But why wasn’t it funny? The dialogue - about as overcooked ‘witty’ as you can make it - rarely inspired a chuckle. Page seems entirely uncomfortable with the material - only Cera is able to rise to the challenge, though his role is admittedly entirely within the Michael Cera range of pained awkwardness. Or maybe it was just the viewing conditions - having Reitman arrogantly proclaim, “Are you ready to laugh?!” to a packed house of moviegoers and then proclaiming that every viewer in the audience would remember the day as ‘the day they met [writer] Diablo Cody.’ When the 28 year old Cody, dressed like a retarded Japanese teenager (she’s actually fairly restrained in the below photo, taken on another day), demurred and proclaimed Reitman her favorite filmmaker, I had already had about enough.

So we’ll say this: I’m going to watch it again when it comes out in December and give you my thoughts on it then, my mind hopefully cleared of the bad taste its creators left in my mouth. For now, Reitman and Cody: you’re on watch.

Brick Lane (2007, Sarah Gavron)

The very definition of a UK Film Council lottery film, with all its trappings. Adapted from the controversial bestseller of the same name, Brick Lane is the story of Nazneen (Tannishtha Chatterjee) trapped in a loveless marriage in grim London estate housing inperpetual overcast haze. Caught between her conservative upbringing and familial obligation and a hotheaded suitor (Christopher Simpson), Nazneen crosses boundaries of womanhood, ethnicity, and nationality in her.. blah blah blah MAKE IT STOP. I’m sorry, I just didn’t care at all. Gavron’s filmmaking is tasteful (though her India sequences seem to be transposed directly from every other white filmmakers’ ‘India sequences’ - Wes Anderson, please take note) and the film never really transcends ‘enlightened bodice-ripper’ status. Mehsville.

Rails and Ties (2007, Alison Eastwood)

A daughter after her father’s heart. Probably the most classical, least inflected film in the festival, Rails and Ties would not have been out of place in a double feature with a John Stahl movie. A disease melodrama featuring startling performances by Marcia Gay Harden and Kevin Bacon (though - given how enormously transformative he’s been in works like Mystic River and Where the Truth Lies, can we stop being surprised at the notion that Kevin Bacon is a good, sometimes great actor?), the film is daringly ordinary - set in houses, offices, and stores. Maybe not as inherently dramatic as Into the Wild, but it’s also not a stark-raving piece of shit like that movie. Needless to say, there was a huge backlash during the festival from those who consider melodrama - especially its domestic variety - as inherently flawed. But this melodrama isn’t trying to set the world on fire (we’ll leave that up to, uh… Paul Haggis?) - it’s trying, and succeeding, to start a flame in its audience’s heart by telling a moving story about a couple in crisis. This isn’t great cinema by any stretch of the imagination - but in an age where filmmakers have forgotten how to tell a straight story effectively it’s a startlingly pleasing throwback. And it does exactly what it sets out to do. The packed 500 seat theater I saw it in? Save a few cynics, not a dry eye in the house.

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