This year, as always, the Seattle International Film Festival has been a launching pad for a number of movies that go into general release after festival screening. Three festival movies that opened last weekend provide a small sampler of the variety of a festival; they couldn’t be more different from each other.
For instance, Zelly and Me, the best of the three, is a quiet American film, an uncommercial property that, remarkably, was produced by Columbia Pictures. It’s also the first feature of a promising writer-director, Tina Rathborne, who drew on her own Southern girlhood for some of the flavor of her story.
It’s about a young orphan (Alexandra Johnes) who lives with her strict, dmnlneertng grandmother (Glynis Johns) in a Southern estate in 1958. The lonely girl spends much of her time in a fantasy world peopled by her stuffed animals and her favorite historical figure, Joan of Arc. Her favorite real-life figure is not her grandmother but her nanny (Isabella Rossellini), who is carrying on a quiet affair with a shy man (Blue Velvet director David Lynch) who lives in a mansion.
Not a lot happens in the film, but Rathborne convincingly creates the hot, smothering world of the little girl. Some of the business, such as the elaborate wedding between the girl’s teddy bear and elephant, seems a bit precious. But Rathborne is obviously a talent, and her evocation of time and place is impressive.
In another time and place altogether is Consuming Passions, from England, which derives from a play by Monty Pythoners Terry Jones and Michael Palin. This black comedy takes off from an industrial accident in which three candy-factory workers fall into a vat of chocolate and wind up as part of a new assortment.
Naturally, the human element turns the new candy into a huge hit with the public. The problem for the company executives: bow to duplicate the formula? Other kinds of meat simply don’t blend well with chocolate. But an enterprising young management trainee (Tyler Butterworth) finds that labs and mortuaries are more than willing to be the suppliers of raw ingredients.
This tasty (so to speak) material is treated none too subtly by director Giles Foster. But a good deal of it is amusing anyway, in part because the actors have a field day.
Jonathan Pryce plays a creepy executive who believes only in demographics (“We’ve taken the quality out of the product and put it where it shows: in the advertising”). And Vanessa Redgrave does an amazingly bizarre extended cameo as a lustful, outrageous widow. Redgrave, gleefully refuting her image as an overly serious actress, seems to be having fun, with mixed results.
The Canadian film Night Zoo is yet another kettle of fish. This crime drama, about a minor hood (Gilles Maheu) coming out of jail and reconciling with his father (Roger Le Bal), is marked by passages of startling brutality and lulling dullness.
Writer-director Jean-Claude Lauzon is good at browsing through the city underworld and at snubbing conventional storytelling methods, but the movie feels shapeless. It’s puzzling that Night Zoo has been widely honored, winning a batch of Genies (Canadian Academy Awards) and opening the Director’s Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival. Maybe that’s down to the shock of finally seeing a Canadian film that speaks with its fists.
First published in the Herald, June 2, 1988
A lot of stuff in this triple. Zelly and Me is mysterious for a variety of reasons, including the disappearing act by director Rathborne; she directed a couple of Twin Peaks episodes after this, and nothing else. Oddly – at least it was odd to me – I once, long ago, spent some time as a script reader and coverage-writer, and one script I read was a Rathborne project, and it would have made an interesting film. But again, uncommercial. Lynch’s presence as an actor is compelling, and his chemistry with Rossellini interesting to watch. The leading lady went on to play the Childlike Empress in Neverending Story II, which is kind of weird somehow, and has lately produced a lot of documentaries. I remember nothing about the quasi-Python film, but I’d quite like to see Redgrave’s performance again. Night Zoo director Lauzon died in an airplane crash after completing one more film, Leolo, a film with a much stronger following than this one. Night Zoo surely deserves more than I gave it in this review, but hey – SIFF will wear you out.
WHAT A FEELING! 