The 29th WFF has now reached its equator, and here's what I managed to watch in last two days.
Heavenly Shift, an acid comedy film noir directed by Márk Bodzsár, is another, and much more obvious, homage to Bringing Up the Dead (after The Gambler). Again, we follow a paramedic involved into illegal and vicious activities, such as profiting from letting people die, or eutanasia. The central character is Milan, a twentysomething Serbian soldier who deserts the army, flees the war-struck 1990s' Yugoslavia and ends up in Budapest. Hungarian capital city as seen by Bodzsár is kindred with Scorsese's New York - dark, neon-lit, delirious place full of lunatics and misfits of all sorts. Milan is the only normal person here - for example, his mates in the ambulance car are the megalomaniac doctor and the outrightly barmy driver who wears snakeskin boots and carries around a Chinese sword. Scorsese is not the only point of reference - Heavenly Shift is full of visual quotes and influences from cult American directors of the Nineties - Lynch, Tarantino, and Coen brothers - and, at times, the film is as hilarious as the best works of these people. Perhaps there are even too many quotes, and sometimes there's a feeling that Bodzsár prefers to put in another nod instead of inventing something own. Still, the strong, vivid imagery, offbeat gallows humor and unconventional dramaturgy make Heavenly Shift the most enjoyable experience of WIFF so far. Bodzsár who hasn't made any feature films before is certainly a director to watch.
Whereas Heavenly Shift offered a blazing, bigger-than-life vision of its setting, the Turkish Yozgat Blues (dir. by Mahmut Fazil Coskun) is an example of the contrary approach. The title assumes something like a Wim Wenders urban movie (Yozgat is a place in Turkey where the protagonist, an aging singer who looks like a moustachioed Geroge Clooney, arrives from Istanbul), but in fact, we never get to see the town - it's all interiors, all closeups and medium shots. The melancholic, subtle story of the lounge singer whose repertoir is apparently limited to a single song - a sugary Joe Dassin's ballad - is not so bad, but the movie lacks space and is banal visually, which makes it easily forgettable.
Much more ambitious was Little Spartan, yet another Romanain entry into the FIPRESCI competition, screened as a part of Discoveries section. Shot and edited in a very unpredictable manner, Dragoş Iuga's movie is a mockumentary about the rich and cranky Bucharestian dwarf Gabriel Dita (all the way he reminded me of the dwarf tycoon from Mo Yan's book The Republic of Wine, although this is probably a coincidence). Presented as a behind-the-scenes material for a fiction movie produced by and based on the life of Dita, Little Spartan is, apparently, entirely fictitious. Or not. This deliberate ambiguity that allows to classify the film to the cutting-edge category of post-documentary cinema, is Iuga's main achievement. Alas, the task of showing a (contrastingly) large character in the spirit of Citizen Kane falls flat, but nonetheless, Iuga seems to be a director who has something to offer (even if it, to a large extent, remains only an ambition) and a possibility to grow as a director - after all, as we know from Werner Herzog, even dwarves started small.
Films out of FIPRESCI competition included The Geographer Drank His Globe Away, a mostly successful attempt to fill the niche of intelligent Russian mainstream film - the niche that has for years been vacant. And also The Selfish Giant - the newest example of the good old British kitchen-sink realism and another movie to seek for greatness in someone small, this time a 12 years old troubled teenager. Among the huge skyscrapers of Warsaw's Downtown these contrasts of big and small seem exactly in place.
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