Last Chance for Little Sky!

The excellent Argentine film Little Sky, probably the best movie I've seen at SIFF 31 to date, arrived with little fanfare and may exit just as unnoticed. No guests, no sponsors. (And no screener??)

I saw it last night at the Harvard Exit. It screens there again tonight around 7--then it's gone forever, unless you're planning an excursion to France this summer. The movie, according to IMDB, opens for a general release there in June. There's no U.S. distributor.

Last night, slightly less than half the audience applauded vigorously at the film's end. The rest of them, including the lady from Olympia who sat behind me and kept going on about how "cooperative" her husband's first wife is, were dumbfounded.

Little Sky, directed by Maria Victoria Menis, stems from a lost cinematic tradition of neo-realism--an art probably best achieved by De Sica in late '40s, early '50s Italy. A slow moving film about the poor, Little Sky is by turns sweet and tender and merciless. It begins with a classic set-up: handsome young male drifter enters the lives of an unhappily married couple who dwell in rural isolation. You'd expect, while the drunken roughneck husband is away, that the neglected wife and sensitive lad would fool around. They don't.

Instead, the young man--Leonardo Ramirez in a spectacular performance--bonds with the couple's year-old infant child. The baby awakens untapped paternal longings in Felix, the Ramirez character, and the scenes between them are wondrous. All this, and the movie sidesteps sentimentality, too.

Little Sky is so much better--by leaps and bounds better--than all the "murdered mistress" duds that have clogged this festival.

Two other films worthy of note:

It may not be saying much to report than Wim Wenders' Land of Plenty is his least terrible film in a very long time. There's one more screening of this tomorrow, but IFC has the rights, so this one will be back or at least easy to get on video.

Michelle Williams, whom I'd previously thought was a terrible actress (she was the white trash library girl in Station Agent) has a dramatic breakthrough in the female lead. She plays a lefty idealist living and volunteering at an LA mission. The movie begins awkwardly, and it ends risibly, but the long middle, during which Williams gets to know her long lost uncle, an ultra-right-wing, somewhat deranged Vietnam vet, is well worth seeing. The DV photography, in non-stop close-up, is hideous throughout. If Wenders has lost something since the days of Paris Texas or Alice in the Cities, at least he hasn't made another End of Violence.

Twice last week, via the miracle of screener DVD, I watched Bill Rose's documentary The Loss of Nameless Things. This is scheduled...you tell me?...the 2nd and the 6th. The less you know about it going in, the better experience you'll have. In brief, it's (partially) about theatre in the mid to late 1970s, memories and evocations of a time gone 'bye. Rose manages to make the film quite terrifying in places. If you are the least bit sensitive (as I know the readers of Siffblog to be) bring something to dry your tears or to dab the cold sweat from your brow.

In other news...I walked out on both Platform and Midwinter Night's Dream. I watched Tudo Azul on screener. There's lovely Brazilian scenery, well-photographed, and superb singing by Virginia Rodrigues. The lectures on the evils of racism, however, exhausted my patience in no time at all.