The Decade List: Nuovomondo (2006)

Nuovomondo [Golden Door] – dir. Emanuele Crialese

When first learning about literature, children are always taught that a good story has a beginning, middle, and an end. What they aren't taught is that, often, stories can be a lot more fascinating if you forego the former and the latter. Presented by longtime champion of world cinema appreciation Martin Scorsese, Emanuele Crialese's Golden Door (or New World, the direct translation from Italian) slights the audience on a traditional opening and closing, focusing with acute detail on a midsection of a tale of Sicilian immigrants on their way to the United States at the turn of the century. It would almost seem fitting that the weaker areas of the film take place when attempting to provide groundwork for the central family before embarking on the trip and that the finest moments focus on the journey. Golden Door is an adventure film without a clear destination in sight. Certainly, there's a literal finishing point (Ellis Island), but Crialese prefers the excitement of the expedition considerably more than the trophy at the end.

Salvatore (Vincenzo Amato) is a father of two boys, one a young man on the cusp of sexual awakening (Francesco Casisa), the other a curious mute (Filippo Pucillo). After receiving what they believe to be a sign from God, the three men, along with their witch doctor grandmother (Aurora Quattrocchi) and two other young women, embark on a journey to a mysterious land of opportunity. On the boat, however, they encounter an attractive English woman (Charlotte Gainsbourg) in search of a husband to allow her admittance into this new world. A widower and single father, Salvatore accepts her proposal, though she speaks little Italian and he, little to no English.

Long considered dead, or at least dormant, after cinema's glorious heyday in the '60s and '70s, Golden Door is probably one of the strongest films to come out of Italy this decade. Instead of depicting the bleak realities of death, famine, and despair on the long oceanic journey to America, Crialese fills his film with jubilation, and with an amusing surrealist touch. Kudos should also go to Agnès Godard, one of the most visionary cinematographers in European cinema today. Her images reach a sublime divinity in composition and clarity. Similar to her work with Claire Denis (Beau travail) and André Téchiné (Strayed), her artistry elevates Golden Door to awe-inspiring heights. With the combined forces of Crialese and Godard, Golden Door is a lush, joyous cinematic experience of a size Italian cinema has been lacking since the days of Antonioni, Fellini, Bertolucci and Pasolini.

With: Vincenzo Amato, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Aurora Quattrocchi, Francesco Casisa, Filippo Pucillo, Federica de Cola, Isabella Ragonese, Vincent Schiavelli, Filippo Luna
Screenplay: Emanuele Crialese
Cinematography: Agnès Godard
Music: Antonio Castrigano
Country of Origin: Italy/France
US Distributor: Miramax

Premiere: 8 September 2006 (Venice Film Festival)
US Premiere: 3 October 2006 (Cinema Italian Style)

Awards: Silver Lion – Revelation (Venice Film Festival); Best Costume Design – Mariano Tufano, Best Production Design – Carlos Conti, Best Visual Effects (David di Donatello Awards, Italy)

The Decade List: My Summer of Love (2004)

My Summer of Love – dir. Paweł Pawlikowski

Something about the title My Summer of Love evokes the not-so-distant-past. It’s not a sentence, so there’s no verb tense to indicate such. However, it conjures a memory. “That was the summer where I…” And don’t all those summers occur during the strange and exciting period of “growing up?” Everything about Paweł Pawlikowski’s second feature supports the notion of a moment in time remembered rather than one transpiring in some variation of real time on the screen.

Filmed in lush sun-drenched hues of gold, Ryszard Lenczewski’s cinematography is almost too lovely, and as I said before when comparing the film to Sébastien Lifshitz’s Presque rien, rewatching the film never fully lives up to your recollection of the visuals. In fact, revisiting the film as a whole never really lives up to your first encounter with it, which ironically stands as one of My Summer of Love’s strengths, of which there are many.

The catalysts for this particular summer, which takes place in no specific year as Pawlikowski eliminates all cultural indicators of time, arrive within the first minutes of the film. Mona (the wonderful Natalie Press) lies on the grass, next to her engine-less moped, as Tamsin (Emily Blunt), suspended from her boarding school, rides up to her on a horse. After this initial meeting, where an invitation to hang out is offered by Tamsin, Mona returns to her home, a pub left to her and her brother Phil (Paddy Considine) by their deceased mother, to find Phil emptying the liquor bottles and announcing his conversion to Christianity. The scene that follows shows the final sexual encounter between Mona and the married man (Dean Andrews) she’s having an affair with. Within ten minutes, the slate has been wiped clean, each of the characters (Mona, Tamsin and Phil, that is) given a new beginning.

This quick succession of events would have come across as a crude narrative convenience, but Pawlikowski and co-writer Michael Wynne use this as a clever framing device, bookended naturally with the shattering of the characters’ many illusions. I always seem to return to a quote Roger Ebert made about the film: “This isn't a coming-of-age movie so much as a movie about being of an age.” My Summer of Love isn’t about first-love, sexual maturation or identification. Love really doesn't factor into the film. It’s about the intoxicating possibilities three people, all lost in some form and with seemingly interminable free time, develop with one another, each so immersed in their own fantasy that they fail to notice the harm it inevitably causes the adjacent parties.

With: Natalie Press, Emily Blunt, Paddy Considine, Dean Andrews, Paul Antony-Barber, Lynette Edwards, Kathryn Sumner
Screenplay: Paweł Pawlikowski, Michael Wynne, based on the novel by Helen Cross
Cinematography: Ryszard Lenczewski
Music: Will Gregory, Alison Goldfrapp
Country of Origin: UK
US Distributor: Focus Features

Premiere: 21 August 2004 (Edinburgh Film Festival)
US Premiere: 20 May 2005 (Seattle International Film Festival)

Awards: Alexander Korda Award for Best British Film (BAFTAs); Best European Film (Polish Film Awards)

The Decade List: Eastern Promises (2007)

Eastern Promises – dir. David Cronenberg

In a way, Naomi Watts has become cinema’s fatalistic Nancy Drew. In both Mulholland Drive and The Ring, Watts allows her curiosity to lead her down dangerous paths to the point of no return. In David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises, she does the same, allowing both her curiosity and moral code draw her into an unfamiliar and perilous world. As midwife Anna, Watts takes it upon herself to find the whereabouts of a deceased Russian girl’s family in order to keep the girl’s newborn child out of foster care. This, inevitably, has disturbing results, as she becomes associated with London’s Russian mafia, lead by restaurant owner Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl), and must choose between her and her family’s safety or the usually difficult choice of “doing the right thing.”

In many people’s eyes, Cronenberg "returned to form" with A History of Violence, a film with lofty ambitions that I still haven’t decided whether he met or not. Eastern Promises is simpler than A History of Violence in most respects. The film never presumes to dissect the nature and consequences of the violence it depicts, however Cronenberg and screenwriter Steven Knight layer Eastern Promises with so many other levels of intrigue that it poses as almost a more intellectually difficult film than its predecessor. Gone from A History of Violence (and a number of his first films) is the teetering pulpiness of its comic book roots. Replaced is something quieter, less showy, and more mannered. With Viggo Mortensen, Vincent Cassel, and Sinéad Cusack rounding out the rest of the cast, Cronenberg keeps his actors to a level of discreetness without sacrificing competence. In fact, even with the occasional spurts of graphic violence, Cronenberg keeps the whole film from venturing over the top, which pays off in the electrifying naked bathhouse brawl.

A friend of mine commented that if Eastern Promises were released in the 1950s, it would have been simply a pleasant time at the picture show. It has all the qualities of a sophisticated B-movie. One must remember that, unfortunately, we live in an era where most films (A, B, C, or whatever letter you choose to assign them) coast at middle-of-the-road, so in this world, we fall over ourselves when a B-movie succeeds beyond expectation. In regards to Cronenberg’s career over the past decade, Eastern Promises could be regarded as his biggest success as a direct result of its restraint. With Eastern Promises, Cronenberg defines himself as a filmmaker who defies expectation, a man of considerable integrity and the uncanny ability to surprise his audience with each new film.

With: Viggo Mortensen, Naomi Watts, Vincent Cassel, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Sinéad Cusack, Jerzy Skolimowski, Mina E. Mina, Donald Sumpter
Screenplay: Steven Knight
Cinematography: Peter Suschitzky
Music: Howard Shore
Country of Origin: UK/Canada
US Distributor: Focus Features

Premiere: 8 September 2007 (Toronto International Film Festival)
US Premiere: 14 September 2007

Awards: People’s Choice Award (Toronto International Film Festival); Best Original Screenplay, Best Supporting Actor – Armin Mueller-Stahl, Best Cinematography, Best Editing – Ronald Sanders, Best Score, Best Overall Sound, Best Sound Editing (Genie Awards, Canada); Best Actor – Viggo Mortensen (British Independent Film Awards)

The Decade List: Auf der anderen Seite (2007)

Auf der anderen Seite [The Edge of Heaven] – dir. Fatih Akin

The trouble with writing about films you love dearly is the fear of redundancy. How many superlatives can I really throw out there? And what's worse, I often find myself resorting to using absolutes (or suggested absolutes) to the point that they begin to mean nothing (the best example of that was a billboard I saw for Milk where some critic called it "the best live-action, English-language mainstream film of 2008," or something to that extent). Yet I like to think I'm being as sincere as I can be when resorting to them. So when I say that The Edge of Heaven is unlike any film I can think of in its graceful adoption of the language, skill and intricacy of a cherished novel, I'm trying not to exaggerate.

Fatih Akin knows what it takes to make his characters blossom with as little information as possible. All six characters, three sets of parents and their children, radiate onscreen, as fully developed as if he had used written chapters to flesh them out. More than just penetrating the rocky relationship between Turks and Germans, The Edge of Heaven explores the nature of identity through heritage and family. And more than just intersecting the six's lives for the sake of cheap revelation, Akin places a complex blanket of universality to the characters' struggles, having the separate familial bonds stand as facets of the same truth. Akin is too brilliant of a writer for the incidents to become easily compartmentalized and allows The Edge of Heaven to pulsate with utter refinement.

What Akin understands—which most filmmakers who choose to tackle overlapping stories in one film don't—is the balance of human relationships and the capacity to tell his audience exactly what they need to know without oversimplification or slighting. He makes his audience aware of the fates of the two dead girls before you even meet them, and it's to his credit that both of their deaths are as heartbreaking and disquieting as if he hadn't clued you in. It's a feat to draw an audience's involvement into one character, but he does it with six, all of whom are as elaborately sketched as they are beautifully acted. The Edge of Heaven is the sort of film where characters come to intellectual conclusions about themselves and the people around them, void of the forced whims of an ominous film conductor.

With: Nurgül Yesilçay, Baki Davrak, Tuncel Kurtiz, Hanna Schygulla, Patrycia Ziolkowska, Nursel Köse
Screenplay: Fatih Akin
Cinematography: Rainer Klausmann
Music: Shantel
Country of Origin: Germany/Turkey/Italy
US Distributor: Strand Releasing

Premiere: 23 May 2007 (Cannes Film Festival)
US Premiere: 8 February 2008 (Portland International Film Festival)

Awards: Best Screenplay (Cannes Film Festival); Best Screenwriter (European Film Awards); Best Film, Best Direction, Best Screenplay, Best Editing – Andrew Bird (German Film Awards); Best Director, Best Supporting Actor – Tuncel Kurtiz, Best Supporting Actress – Nursel Köse, Best Editing, Special Jury Award (Golden Orange Film Festival, Turkey)

Infill housing on front lawns?

One of the challenges in adjudicating the submissions to the prefab 20*20 housing competition was the fact that some of the ideas were very practical, while others were more conceptual and provocative. In this regard, one of my personal favourites was a proposal to site modular housing on the front lawns of Westside Vancouver single family homes. Now the proponent realized this might upset some of the neighbours so they came up with an ingenious idea...



they disguised the housing to look like a well trimmed hedge! Congratulations to Alyssa Schwann and Sean Pearson and the Rural Urban Fantasy Project from Salt Spring Island, Canada.

Prefabricated Housing is ready for another look

Today's Vancouver Sun Story on the 2020 Pre-fab housing competition

Michael Geller

Special to the Sun

Saturday, October 03, 2009

When I was studying architecture in the 1960s, I was fascinated by a group of British designers, Archigram, whose fantastic architectural concepts questioned the form and function of city and building design and championed new technologies and materials, especially prefabrication and plastics.

Two of their most famous projects were Plug-in City, a giant mega structure with relocatable prefabricated modules, and Walking City, which included 40-storey self-contained buildings with telescoping legs that could move around the world.

I thought about Archigram earlier this month while judging an international design competition, for a 400-square-foot prefabricated home.

Prefab 2020, organized by Architecture for Humanity Vancouver, a not-for-profit society and sponsored by Azure, a Canadian art and architecture magazine; Interior Design Show West and the Architectural Institute of B.C., the competition attracted 285 teams from 26 countries.

Other jurors included Oliver Lang, an award winning architect and a former architecture professor at the University of B.C.; Maged Senbel, a teacher at the UBC planning school and associate at Studio Senbel Architecture + Design; Kristina Lee Podesva, most recently artist-in-residence at Langara College; and Duane Elverum, an Emily Carr University professor.

Submissions ranged from the provocative -- cantilevered modular housing above city streets -- to the practical -- prefabricated modules as infill housing -- to the outrageous. ''Para-site'' attached housing pods to the exterior walls of buildings. Hummer Home demonstrated how to construct housing out of Hummers.

According to Linus Lam and Patrick Chan of Architecture for Humanity Vancouver, one of the goals of the competition was to demonstrate that prefabricated housing need not look cheap or ugly, and thus overcome the social stigma associated with it.

Another goal was to illustrate how compact living can be smart living, contributing to a more sustainable future.

Submissions were judged on their overall concept and design, prefabrication creativity, and social and environmental impacts.

Given the high quality of the submissions and range of ideas presented, the judges had a difficult time agreeing on which projects were worthy of special recognition.

The task was made all the more difficult by the fact that some proposals were more realistic and could be easily implemented in various locales around the world, while others were deliberately fantastic and put forward as provocations.

While the submissions originated in more than 100 cities and the ideas were varied, there were a number of common themes. Many entries explored how we might put housing where it does not normally belong -- above streets, between buildings and in spaces currently used for parking.

Others illustrated how modular housing could be hoisted onto roof-tops, thus giving new life to a variety of buildings. Another popular theme was the floating of prefabricated buildings on water.

Some submissions such as the Drawer House blurred the line between housing and furniture with a high degree of built-ins and expandability.

Anyone who has ever spent time living on a boat or in a recreational vehicle knows that these structures make much better use of space than conventional apartments or houses.

While prefabricated construction is effectively used in other countries, for a variety of reasons it has never really caught on in Canada.

The response to Prefab 2020 demonstrates that given new technologies and attitudes, now may be the time for greater use of prefabricated construction to create more sustainable and affordable housing.

To view submissions, visit prefab2020.wordpress.com/2009/09/17/winners-shortlisted-entries-announced/ on the Internet.

- Michael Geller is a Vancouver architect, planner, developer and Simon Fraser University adjunct professor. E-mail: geller@sfu.ca

© The Vancouver Sun 2009

IFC has the new Dumont

I'm a little slow on the updates lately, but earlier this week, IFC Films picked up the latest from Bruno Dumont, Hadewijch. The film premiered at Toronto and screens at the New York Film Festival tomorrow.