theartsdesk in Los Angeles: Twilight in Tent City

The Los Angeles Film Festival would seem to have everything going for it. There's the perfect Californian weather, the vast number of stars who live and work in the city, and this year there’s been a glamorous new venue in downtown Los Angeles. The 16th festival has also brought in an ambitious new artistic director, former Newsweek film critic David Ansen, who hopes to unite high and low, screening both crowd-pleasers with major Hollywood talent and small, finely crafted foreign films. And yet something has been amiss.

The new broom brought new disorganisation. At the festival village ticket desk, those who had purchased tickets and parking passes online in advance were shuffled into the same, slow-moving line as impulsive filmgoers who weren't sure of the meaning of “standby”. The well-meaning volunteers, numerous in their red T-shirts, didn’t initially know what they were meant to be doing. Things got slightly better, but the sense of a disconnect between red-carpet glamour and red-shirted aimlessness lingered.


It was reinforced by the daily emails that the festival sent out to passholders, filled with photos of stars and galas. Away from the larger events, the experience on the ground was rather different. Even the smaller, 200-seat theatres in the Regal Cinemas complex remained nearly empty for films like the modest, poetic Woman on Fire Looks for Water (pictured right), a gentle multigenerational love story set in and around a rural Malaysian seafood factory. While the programmers had the best of intentions in attempting to include a broad spectrum of work, it made for a highly fractured experience of the festival as a whole.

It's hard to picture, for example, the sort of audience that would emerge from the inscrutable Orly, a French essay filmed almost entirely in the titular airport, and wander into the animated comedy, Despicable Me. The premiere of the hugely populist Twilight: Eclipse brought with it a tent city of young women (pictured below left) who spent days encamped in the centre of the theatre complex, screaming at any real or imagined glimpse of their undead idols, or often for no obvious reason at all. The overflow of devoted fans at the premiere contrasted sharply with the neighbouring screening of Cafe Noir, which despite advanced critical acclaim drew in perhaps 40 enthusiasts. And not all of them lasted the full 200 minutes.

The intermittent shrieks from the Twilight fans, combined with the inhuman scale of the theatre complex, with its looming video billboards and incongruous faux-antique streetlamps sandwiched between gleaming skyscrapers, made for a bizarre experience. It didn’t help that the ambitiously named “festival village” – a few portable toilets, a small cluster of tents housing a lounge and ticket desks, and a truck selling tacos – was situated on the roof of the parking garage directly across from the Staples Center sports arena.

When the Los Angeles Lakers won the national basketball championship the night the festival opened, jubilant fans rioted in the streets. This immediately threw into doubt the wisdom of moving the festival from its previous, more central location to the eastern edge of the city. The more new home, a long drive for most Angelenos, may also have contributed to the low attendance, presumably leading to a number of screenings being opened to either the general public or to members of Film Independent, the festival’s parent organisation.

Where the festival hit the mark was with films that fell within a thoughtful, honest middle ground. Perhaps the best example is Dog Sweat, an underground Iranian film entered into the Narrative Competition. From writer Maryam Azadi and writer/director Hossein Keshavarz, the film telling of young adults trying to lead secular lives in Teheran is sometimes harrowing but often funny, and utterly free of the sorts of clichés – bearded mullahs and brutal soldiers – you might expect. Its depictions of the romantic and artistic ambitions of young women chafing at social and familial constraints are particularly well rendered. Despite the midday screening, the makers’ reception by a good-size crowd was enthusiastic. Keshavarz and Azadi reported a sense of real camaraderie among their colleagues exhibiting at the festival, who were all flown out to a retreat at, of all places, George Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch.

Another entry that dealt with challenging material but left its audience with a sense of hope was En Familie (A Family). A touching Danish film about a young woman’s profound relationship with her ailing father, it similarly relied on generous and intelligent storytelling to win the hearts of the audience, many of whom were weeping openly by its end. It was equally successful with judges, who awarded it the Jury Prize for the Narrative Film Competition.

The other great strength of the festival was its ability to draw on the wealth of film preservation resources available in Los Angeles. A rare special screening of Satyajit Ray's meditative Jalsaghar (pictured above right) at the REDCAT, a multimedia arts space attached to the Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall, was packed. Known in the west as The Music Room, Jalsaghar is indeed filled with gorgeous music, as well as Ray’s characteristic, keen observations of the intersection of class and culture.

It also made for an interesting juxtaposition with a film from another of the great and distinctive directors, Luchino Visconti’s Il Gattopardo (The Leopard). This was even more heavily attended. Part of the attraction was doubtless its location in the splendid Orpheum Theater in Hollywood (pictured left), built in 1926. Itself recently restored, it was a perfect setting for Visconti’s epic portrait of the gentle decline of an aristocratic Sicilian family.

The two films perhaps closest to the festival’s roots as a venue for independent cinema came from veteran art-house directors Percy Adlon and Claire Denis. Adlon, co-directing and writing with his son Felix Adlon, composed the entertaining Mahler on the Couch. While the ostensible subject is a meeting between Gustav Mahler and Sigmund Freud, the film’s real centre is Alma Mahler, whose transformation from seductive society belle to wounded mother is shown with humour and compassion. Having two directors on set, with Percy Adlon working closely with the actors while Felix Adlon watched the monitors, seems to have paid off handsomely, with a memorable performance from Barbara Romaner, in complete command of the screen in moments both large and small. It is hard to believe that Romaner, an experienced theatre actor, had never previously acted on screen.

Watch the Mahler on the Couch trailer



Denis’s film, White Material, is a spare, tense examination of a Frenchwoman’s attempts to complete the coffee-bean harvest at her plantation in an unnamed African city squeezed between the army and the rebellion’s child soldiers. Isabelle Huppert as Madame Vial is a wiry, electrifying presence.

If there was an overarching theme for this year’s festival, it was the importance of foreign films. Where previous years had a much heavier emphasis on American independent offerings, this year’s line-up has comprised films from more than 30 other countries. In an encouraging turn, many were also anchored by strong roles for women. Meanwhile, Ansen’s attempt to bridge the gap between popular and elite cinema may have been well intentioned, you just hope that the frustrations will have been erased by next year. And maybe more people will turn up too.

• The Los Angeles Film Festival concludes today

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