The third day of WIFF brought something I missed after the second - films to talk about, be they good or bad.
On the positive side, the competition of debut and sophomore films showcased The Japanese Dog, directed by Tudor Cristian Jurgiu. I probably have to revise the statement I made yesterday, saying that any Romanian film will be selected for a festival just for the sake of having a film from Romania; although I can't be sure that such quota doesn't exist, The Japanese Dog is a fine film on its own. Taciturn and chary of action - although not enough to fall into the category of "slow cinema", - the film follows an old widower named Costache who lives in a village, his house destroyed by a flood. He is visited by his son - an engineer who emigrated to Japan and married a local woman there. The unlikely combination of rural Romania and metropolitan Japanese culture is in the core of this subtle movie - in the first half we mostly see Costache's everyday life, and, due to the attentive mise en scene and cinematography, are able to examine the tiniest minutiae; then the son with his family arrives, and something very alien appears in the rustic landscape - an epitome of which is a toy robot dog that Costache's Romanian-Japanese grandson gives to him. Interestingly, this story of alienation is set in a rural environment, whereas usually that topic is associated with urban areas.
In Discoveries section, The Whirlpool, directed by Bojan Vuk Kovacevic, was shown. A film set in the 1990s, soon after the Yugoslavian war, is written like a 1990s' film - it combines three different, but intersecting stories (cf. Three Colors, Pulp Fiction, Short Cuts and many more), each with its own protagonist - Nazi skinhead, gangster, and the shell-shocked war vet nicknamed Count. The Whirlpool is designed in such a fashion that the intensity is being built up not only within each story, but also from one story to the next - so as early as in the end of the first segment the film becomes ridiculous and remains so to the bitter end. The movie's lowbrow humor, over-the-top hysteria and cheesy soap opera devices - extreme tastelessness, in one word - remind of the work of Emir Kusturica (who appears onscreen as the abusive father of the skinhead - is there a way to explain Nazism without cheap pseudo-Freudism?), but without Kusturica's rich imagery or Bregovic's music. The Whirlpool looks like an amateur show shot on home digital, which it essentially is. However, the film is so bad that it's sort of good - in a way that Art Brut, like the work of the poor madman Count, is interesting.
My personal journey into the mouth of madness continued with the screening of Ludwig II, the new biopic of the legendary Bavarian king, directed by Marie Noëlle and Peter Sehr. There are dozens of reasons why is it a bad movie, but somehow I don't want to criticize it - perhaps it's a failure, but there is something very estimable in this failure. Of course it's madness to revive in the 21 century the grand style of Visconti (who made the 1972 epic about Ludwig) or Max Ophüls (who directed, among other films, a picture on Lola Montès who is referenced to in Noëlle and Sehr's film). But this madness is akin to that of Ludwig, who himself was building castles in the times of Marx and Bismarck - although the result of Noëlle and Sehr is not that impressive, Ludwig II with its pompous interiors, elaborate costumes and elevated dialogues is rather charming in its old-fashionedness, and certainly doesn't deserve its IMDb rating of 4.4 out of 10.
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