Now in its eighth edition, Panorama Europe - screening from May 6 through May 22 at the Museum of the Moving Image and the Bohemian National Hall - has consistently proved itself to be an essential addition to New York cinephiles' fest calendars. Featuring some of the most innovative and acclaimed European films on the international festival circuit, this year's selection is especially eclectic and enjoyable. Ranging from fascinating genre films that delve into the realms of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, to sobering documentaries and fiction films tackling Europe's current migrant and economic crises, Panorama Europe offers a satisfying and inedlibly memorable cinematic feast.
Opening with Giuseppe Gaudino's Anna, a kaleidoscopic dramatic study of a troubled woman played by Valeria Golino (in a tour de force performance that netted her the best actress prize at Venice), this year's festival will screen 19 features from Italy, Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Kosovo, Lithuania, Malta, The Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Spain.
Below are my takes on a few notable fest selections. For more information, and to purchase tickets, visit the Museum of the Moving Image's website.
THE LURE (Agnieszka Smoczynska)
This year's festival closes in exuberant, wildly imaginative, and startlingly erotic fashion with this distinctive fantasy from Poland, marking an audacious debut by its young female director. The tagline in a nutshell: it's an 80's-set vampire mermaid disco musical. And with its spirited performances, catchy musical numbers, and lovingly surreal palette and set design, it more than lives up to that tantalizing description. The film deservedly won a jury prize at this year's Sundance festival for Unique Vision and Design.
The Lure centers on two mermaid sisters named Golden (Michalina Olszanska) and Silver (Marta Mazurek), who come ashore when Silver falls head over heels in love at first sight with a hunky young bass player (Jakub Gierszal), who plays at a local Warsaw strip club. They sprout human legs when they get on dry land, and they soon become the latest hot dancers at the club, performing topless and elaborately staged song-and-dance routines that make the girls a draw from miles around. However, these mermaids also prey on human men, their vampirism being the dark side to their alluring mermaid nature - their fish tails reappear when they're in water. Silver wishes to remain in human form so that she can live with her newfound love, and she resorts to a dramatic transformation to make that happen, risking turning into sea foam if the bass player rejects her.
The film plays as a distinctly adult take on The Little Mermaid - both the Disney version and the original Hans Christian Andersen tale - suffused with an eroticism, exoticism, and sensuality that practically pop out of the screen in almost 3D fashion. This indeed is a unique vision, one that hopefully bodes well for its young director's future career. Incredibly, as of this writing, this movie, which should be immediate catnip for genre-friendly U.S. distributors, remains unspoken for. Get in on this, you guys, you're really missing out if you don't.
(May 22, 7pm, MoMI)
THE BEAT OF LOVE (Boris Petkovic)
If ever you were curious about the Slovenian hip-hop scene, consider your curiosity appeased by this film, a lively and energetic effort that may be light on strong storytelling, but more than makes up for it in its unabashedly crowd-pleasing sweetness. The protagonist here is Bruno (Jernej Gasperin), an aspiring rapper who performs with his friends in local rap battles and competitions, throwing himself headlong into hip-hop culture, both the music and the attendant activities of beatboxing and nocturnally tagging trains with graffiti.
Then Bruno meets, and falls hard for, Nina (Judita Frankovic), a violinist at a local conservatory. Thus begins Bruno's dogged attempts to freestyle his way into Nina's heart, and while he initially succeeds in this goal, he begins to lose focus on his musical ambitions, to the consternation of his friends/rap crew. Soon after this, class differences and their divergent life goals threaten to tear Bruno and Nina apart.
The trajectory, and even the rap milieu it depicts, notwithstanding its unique setting, may be familiar, but this makes it no less enjoyable, and at a mere 77 minutes, it makes sure it doesn't outstay its very pleasant welcome.
(May 21, 3:15pm, MoMI)
GHOST MOUNTAINEER (Urmas Eero Liv)
Based on a true story that happened to the film's director, Ghost Mountaineer is an ambitious, if flawed movie that partakes in the genres of the thriller, the horror flick, the alpine adventure, straight drama, and even bureaucratic satire to relate its tale of a group of mountain climbers searching for treasure minerals, who find themselves hopelessly in over their heads.
Set in 1989, during the waning days of the old Soviet Empire, we follow a group of Estonian geology students setting out on a trek in the mountains of Buryatia, a remote region near the border of Mongolia. They're searching for samples of nephrite, a precious crystal-like mineral, but poor planning, harsh conditions, and male competition over women soon doom them. Things become especially dire when one of them gets lost in the midst of an avalanche, and the rest of them are forced to lodge in a Buryatian village, where they must contend with a hostile Soviet official who detains them and seizes their passports, and equally hostile Buryat villagers pissed at them for what they see as theft of spiritually significant materials.
Ghost Mountaineer is mostly successful at sustaining its spooky and quasi-supernatural atmosphere, while it's rather less successful at the use of horror flick-like shock cuts and jumpy editing. When the film dispenses with that sort of hackneyed technique, it becomes far more compelling. Also, it convincingly makes a case that bureaucratic tyranny is just as scary as, if not more so, than the ghosts rumored to be floating around in the mountains.
(May 8, 2pm, MoMI)
HISTORY'S FUTURE (Fiona Tan)
The audacity and the flouting of normal cinema conventions of History's Future, visual artist Fiona Tan's debut feature, is demonstrated right at the very beginning, with a title card that reads "THE END." Over the opening/ending credits, we see the interior of a movie theater - a nearly empty one, a self-deprecating reference to the marginality of such a boldly experimental film as Tan's in today's increasingly profit-driven global marketplace. Scenes of people leaving the theater and the closing images of the film being screened within this film play backward, again alerting us that we're about to see a work that refuses to follow the perceived rules of cinema.
Soon the action settles on a man (Mark O'Halloran) who's suffered severe head trauma in the course of being mugged, consequently losing memory of his past life. Initially known only as "M.P.," which stands for "missing person," he tries to reconnect with his previous existence, but he fails at this, his amnesia and attendant paranoia and emotional turmoil making it all but impossible for him to readjust. He decides to leave his old life, trying to find himself again by traveling through modern Europe's tumultuous landscape, with economic strife, mass protests, wrecks and devastation, M.P.'s personal identity as a blank slate making him the ideal vehicle and refracted lens through which to view the convergence of past, present, and future that informs Europe's current problems. As M.P. says early in the film, "I can't remember tomorrow."
Tan - with the valuable assistance of co-writer Jonathan Romney - combines archival material, original documentary footage shot across the expanse of Europe, strong performances by O'Halloran with crucial cameos by the likes of the great French actors Denis Lavant and Anne Consigny, as well as interviews with ordinary folks, to create a heady mix of drama, documentary, travelogue, essay film that ultimately - and beautifully - transcends any and all categories.