Film and Video

Taken from the like-titled American pop tune of 1959 (“ Who will kiss you, hold you tight?”), the name of Piotr Uklanski’s 2006 feature Summer Love could conjure any number of daydream images, but not likely those with which the Polish artist begins his gloriously perverse neo-Western. On a rocky beach strewn with dead and dying cowboys, the so-called Wanted Man–aptly played in Uklanski’s low-budget film by a sought-after Hollywood star–is introduced by a cast credit that is as final as they come: “ …and Val Kilmer.” Andy Williams croons, “ Will you walk along the beach/Like we did last summer?” Alas, no: The movie is less than five minutes old and Kilmer’s fly-ridden Wanted Man is already gone, baby, gone.

Uklanski, whose intermittently mesmerizing and hilarious film runs twice more (Saturday at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m.) as part of the Walker’s “ Expanding the Frame,” spoke after the first screening on January 12. “ I wanted to keep the focus of the film on the concept of dislocation–a Western in Poland,” he explained. “ The plot is clichéd and the characters are iconographic–empty, if you will.” We will, indeed. Near the end of the Q&A, an audience member leadingly asks Uklanski, “ The American actor doesn’t talk at all in the movie, does he?” The director, coolly dressed in shades of black, replies as if channeling Eastwood’s Man With No Name and Few Words. “ No. He’s dead. Yeah.”

Uklanski’s humor may be dry in the extreme, but his movie is verily awash in fluids–vomit, spittle, blood, rain, booze, tears, and piss. As befits the setting in post-Communist southern Poland, the elemental is all: “ Town” here is but a trio of old wooden shacks at the edge of a disarmingly motionless lake. (The title card’s “ S” appears as a dollar sign on a coin that spins but briefly before falling dead. Ka-chung.) In the absence of heroes, our heroine is a busty, redheaded barmaid (Katarzyna Ficura) to whom the guys–those few left alive, that is–blow halfhearted kisses and flash their lewdly wiggling tongues. Kinky, too, is the barebones ESL dialogue. “ You know what dat means,” the town sheriff (Boguslaw Linda) says to his makeshift posse, pointing at a rock. “ Absolutely nothing.” And then the punchline. “ But you did not know that.”

Pointedly plotless, Summer Love, to its credit, isn’t a movie for those who expect or demand “ narrative” and the like. (“ The story wanders aimlessly,” the Strib’s critic complains in a review that wanders aimlessly itself.) Shots from the POV of the Wanted Man’s lifeless eye are tinted red–not for blood, but the sliced tomatoes that some other tough guy pressed into the dead man’s sockets. What is this–The Assassination of Val Kilmer by the Coward Piotr Uklanski?

Maybe so–or else it’s $3.10 to Nowhere, the great adventure of capitalism sans cash. Deadpan to the end, the director makes his Hollywood casting coup sound effortless, as if he didn’t even need to cover the star’s airfare. “ He was in Russia, and Poland is on the way,” Uklanski says of Kilmer–who, in a more justly lawless industry, would get at least an Oscar nomination for his trouble.

Amazingly, Summer Love isn’t the “ Expanding” series’s only Eastern European film that playfully critiques U.S. hegemony in part by borrowing its ironic title from an American pop song(!). California Dreamin’ (February 8 at 7:30 p.m.), a Cannes award-winner and key installment in the Romanian New Wave, follows a Romanian station manager (Razvan Vasilescu) who concocts a 3:10 to Yuma-worthy eye-for-an-eye plot to delay an American NATO train en route to Kosovo. Prater, to my knowledge, isn’t also the name of an old Top 40 tune, but this Ulrike Ottinger documentary about the titular Viennese amusement park (screening February 22 at 7:30 p.m.) takes an alternately wistful and skeptical glance at the culture of escapism. Like the other Ottinger films in the “ Frame” series, Prater is a movie recommended strongly to anyone who wouldn’t rather be taking that new East-is-West rollercoaster ride known as Rambo.

The question that has been echoed for the past few years at Cannes may very well have a refrain here in the Twin Cities, albeit a quieter refrain. A recent article in the New York Times Magazine (”New Wave on the Black Sea“, A.O. Scott) brings to light two films that made brief appearances in the past, but also three films coming up at the Walker starting next week. The New Romanian Cinema section of the Expanding the Frame program will include Cristian Mungiu’s critically acclaimed 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days (2007) and two films from Cristian Nemescu, Marilena From P7 (2006) and California Dreamin’ (2007).

First, let’s do a little local Romanian recap. The film that started this whole critic-coined and director-refuted “New Wave” was Cristi Puiu’s The Death of Mr. Lazarescu. Mr Lazarescu premiered at Cannes in 2005 and landed in the Twin Cities June 2006 at the Parkway Theater when the theater was in a state that was more dismal than the plot of the film (a two-and-a-half hour film about, well, the death of Mr. Lazarescu .) Locally it was well received but sadly under-attended. A mere ten months later, another high profile Romanian film made an appearance at the 2007 Minneapolis St Paul International Film Festival: Corneliu Porumboiu’s hilarious 12:08 East of Bucharest. (Corneliu Porumboiu’s 2005 short entitled Liviu’s Dream played at the 2006 MSPIFF.)

The big story of the three films coming up at the Walker is Mungiu’s 4 Months, 2 Weeks, 2 Days (Wednesday, January 30, 7:30pm) which won the coveted Palme d’Or at Cannes and basically showed up on everybody who’s anybody’s list for 2007. The more quiet story, yet perhaps the more important story, is that of director Cristian Nemescu who died at the young age of 27 in 2006. Nemescu was certainly heralded as a rising star, but seems destine to become the forgotten luminary. The Walker will provide the rare opportunity to see two of his films: Marilena From P7 (Thursday, February 7, 7:30) and California Dreamin’ (Friday, February 8, 7:30).

So if I didn’t see you at Cristi or Corneliu’s screenings, maybe I will see you at Cristian or Cristian’s screenings next week. (There will be a test on Romanian director’s names before each screening.) As for Utah, judging from the reports (one and two), I’m starting to wonder if Rob made the wrong decision.

No offense to the Sundance Film Festival (really, I love Sundance!), but Minnesota-based indie-lovers needn’t brave the countless elements in Park City this month to find alt-cinema of the stimulating variety. Me, with a plane ticket to Utah in hand and a press pass awaiting, I’m honestly half-tempted to cancel this year’s trip in favor of “ Expanding the Frame,” the Walker’s homegrown, far-flung, month-long survey of big-screen mold-breaking, which kicks off January 12 with Polish artist Piotr Uklanski’s neo-Communist oater Summer Love–not at Sundance, as you may have guessed.

What should I do? The Park City High School venue known as the Eccles Theatre has the U.S. premiere of recent Walker guest Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind on January 20, and I’ll likely be there (even though Gondry’s movie opens a mere five days later). But when else will I get to see the newly restored and evidently tantalizing shorts of the late Factory worker and Warhol intimate Danny Williams if not at the Walker on, uh, January 20? And unless you were at the 07 Sundance, where marathon woman (and Walker vet) Jennifer Fox’s six-hour Flying first soared, wouldn’t you do just about anything to catch it at “ Expanding the Frame” over a two-day stretch or on one long Sunday?

These merely scratch the surface of “ Frame,” which also offers a triple dose of the Romanian New Wave–including the area premiere of Cristian Mungiu’s Palme d’Or-winning 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days (January 30), a well-timed antidote to the American “ shmashmortion” genre–along with a four-pack of scarcely seen features by German experimentalist Ulrike Ottinger (February 22-24) and, well, more.

While I wrestle with this excruciating decision, be kind and rewind with me to 1966, a year of burnouts and accidents, when Williams tragically disappeared in Massachusetts after having at least illuminated and quite possibly masterminded the Factory’s landmark Exploding Plastic Inevitable trips with the Velvet Underground. Whatever happened to the young filmmaker and “ Harvard electrician,” and, alas, it remains a mystery even after his niece Esther B. Robinson’s thoroughly detailed documentary investigation A Walk Into the Sea (January 18-20), Williams was clearly another casualty of Factory life.

If Edie Sedgwick has been the poor little poster girl for Factory fallout to the frequent exclusion of Williams and others, even in the four long hours of Ric Burns’s recent PBS study of the scene, Robinson’s film endeavors to expand the frame. And if Warhol has been principally credited with conceiving the mid-60s flood of flamboyantly experimental New York shorts, A Walk Into the Sea–along with Mary Jordan’s similarly intentioned Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis–makes plain that collaboration not only abounded, but that it was rather ruthlessly unacknowledged by Factory bosses eager to share ideas if not intellectual property. We’re encouraged to forgive our great American artists their abundant failures as human beings, but how much? Certainly Warhol wasn’t known by the half-charmed, half-vampiric nickname of Drella for nothing. And the painstaking surreality of Williams’s “ Factory” (excerpted in Robinson’s doc), whose precise rhythms were created not on a flatbed, but in the camera, hardly fails to assert the young artist’s innovations.

Partly through her canny use of otherworldly music, Robinson, a St. Paul native who’ll return to Minnesota for the Walker screenings, helps give her late uncle’s “ Factory” the eerie power of a secret diary. Even with the sound off, it’s no stretch to see Williams’s stroboscopic images of Drella and his soup cans as spooky if not downright threatening. The hypnotically arresting force of these black and white pictures, the near-subliminal sense they give of holding revelations in their grain like seeds in soil, is such that we scan even the scratchy, pen-marked tails of the Williams reels for clues. If I’m haunted enough by these materials to consider staying in Minneapolis until at least the 21st, I can only guess what they must mean to Robinson.