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September 7th, 2008
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A healthy break from mediocrity

Karlovy Vary offers a refreshing mix of new movies
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By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
July 2nd, 2008 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
Pushing up or down? Hollywood is the focus of What Just Happened with De Niro.
The 43rd Karlovy Vary International Film Festival


July 4-12
For more information and a complete
schedule, check
www.kviff.com

Taking the waters in a fashionable spa town has long been a good way of repairing one’s physical state. But the famed spa of Karlovy Vary also offers one other helpful service — psychic repair, particularly to film lovers suffering from too many abusively mediocre movies.
The Karlovy Vary International Film Festival is the film festival of the Czech Republic (this Grand Fenwick of cineastes). As in years past, the 43rd annual edition will serve as a platform for new films and talent, as well as a study center for the best of film history, offering a number of retrospectives. With a catalogue boasting 220 films to choose from, there will be plenty to discover.
Space is inadequate here to even attempt a comprehensive list of the films Karlovy Vary will be screening. So what follows is a rough guide to just a few of the films that would be worth finding the time to see.
This year’s festival appropriately launches itself with a critical look at Hollywood, with veteran director Barry Levinson’s What Just Happened. Anyone who has read producer Art Linson’s scathing indictment of the dream factories’ pollution will be anxious to see how his hilarious tirade translates to film. What Just Happened has the potential to be as pointed as Robert Altman’s The Player, and has just as many stars to bring it to life: Robert De Niro, Bruce Willis, Stanley Tucci, Catherine Keener, Sean Penn and more. Star/producer De Niro will also be on hand, picking up this year’s Crystal Globe Award for outstanding contribution to world cinema.
As is so often the case at the better film festivals, there’s not much on tap from Hollywood itself. However, American independent film is very well represented. Sundance’s own Amy Redford will have her first film, The Guitar, shown at Karlovy Vary. The story tracks the adventures of a young woman (played by the brilliant Saffron Burrows) who only has a few months left to live. Perhaps the two most anticipated films from the American margins will be Christopher Bell’s look at steroids in America, Bigger Stronger Faster, and Todd Haynes’ singular homage to Bob Dylan, I’m Not There.
Another film to track down is a documentary by a renowned Hollywood director, Yippee: A Journey to Jewish Joy by Paul Mazursky. The director will crop up again in a festival program called “New Hollywood,” where filmgoers will be given an opportunity to see what Hollywood was actually capable of during its heyday of the late ’60s and early ’70s. Mazursky’s Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice will be featured, along with William Friedkin’s The French Connection, Hal Ashby’s The Last Detail, Altman’s great anti-western, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, and Noel Black’s woefully underestimated Pretty Poison, with excellent performances from Anthony Perkins and Tuesday Weld.
Three Czech films will be getting their official premieres at Karlovy Vary: Karamazovs, playwright/director Petr Zelenka’s modern riff on Dostoevsky, and Night Owls by the Oscar-nominated director Michaela Pavlátová. Juraj Jakubisko’s Bathory, on the blood countess of Hungarian history, is very much an international production, with a European pool of actors: Anna Friel, Karel Roden and Franco Nero head the cast.
The festival is equally interested in the work of its closest neighbors, and so will also finally stage the Czech premieres of Andrzej Wajda’s epic Katyn, and Nikita Michalkov’s very Russian take on 12 Angry Men, titled 12.
Other acclaimed European directors to receive screenings will be the excellent Dardenne brothers from Belgium, with their latest film, Lorna’s Silence. The wonderfully named Norwegian helmer Bent Hamer will have his newest piece, O’Horten, shown. Hamer was responsible for the near-perfect Factotum two years ago.
The always intriguing French director Jacques Rivette (whose Ne touchez pas la hache is scheduled) could certainly be considered a film veteran, though the word seems ill-applied when you consider that the festival will also be premiering Christopher Columbus: The Enigma by Portugal’s great man of cinema, Manoel de Oliveira, who recently celebrated his 99th birthday.
And what’s a film festival without a few midnight screenings of once-dismissed films that now have earned spots in film history? The focus of the Midnight series this year is on British horror and suspense, and will range from Walter Summers’ cheap but chilling The Dark Eyes of London (1939) to Michael Powell’s sinister slice of voyeurism, Peeping Tom (1960). Two others to catch in this late-night slot are Jack Clayton’s haunting The Innocents, based on Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, and Alberto Cavalcanti’s Dead of Night. Throw in Be Kind Rewind, Walkabout, Burden of Dreams and Intimate Lighting, and I feel better already.

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com


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