For the first twenty minutes of “Lake Tahoe” (Northwest Film Forum July 24-30), Juan walks from one auto repair shop to another, looking for someone to help with his car, which he has crashed into a post. Once he finds assistance, it is another twenty minutes before the car is repaired. The final half hour of the film follows Juan through his grief over his father’s recent death to the possibility of his becoming a surrogate father to the children of an unwed mother and his own younger sister.
Director Fernando Eimbke never moves his camera. Each shot is a tableau, separated by moments of blank leader. But Eimbke shares little with the smug and ironic work of minimalists such as Jim Jarmusch, who delight in reducing life to inertia. On the contrary, “Lake Tahoe” is a series of living photographs that tells us as much about the humane condition as an 800-page novel.
The horizontal compositions are explosive with conflict that is rarely explicitly addressed. In one scene, Juan is suspected of being a thief by an auto repair man who searches for the telephone number for the police, while his dog resolutely guards the innocent suspect, who knows that one false gesture on his part will bring the dog down on him. Sometimes the audio portion of a scene will continue after the visual has been extinguished, leaving the viewer to imagine the exact nature of the ensuing events. One amusing example of this happens when Juan and a new-found friend go to the movies, and the duration of the film is signified by a blank screen.
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The other film playing this week at NWFF would have been better represented by blank leader for the whole of its running time. If “The Windmill Movie” has any value at all, it is as a warning to film-makers with unfinished projects laying about to get to work now while there is time. Otherwise, some young admirer might get hold of your material and make their own film. They might even add some scenes of their own with Wally Shawn impersonating you. What could be worse? Actually, it is doubtful whether anything worthwhile could have been assembled from the junk Richard Rogers shot while he wasn’t employed on some second rate documentary. His 25 years of footage include some nice shots of the beach and some horrific glimpses at his mother, but not much else.
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“The Country Teacher,” this week’s calendar offering from the Varsity Theater, has even less to recommend it. Bohdan Slama’s attempt at a pastoral morality tale aims to be a gay “Claire’s Knee,” except here the fetishised body part is a more private part of the anatomy. Divis Marek’s golden-hued cinematography of the Czech countryside gives a sunny façade to an ugly little story.
A creepy teacher (this is one of those movies where few of the characters have names) takes a job in a rural school to get away from either the wife who has left him after discovering he was gay or the boyfriend who broke up said marriage. The script does not make this clear. He gets friendly with Maria (it becomes obvious why one of the few characters with a name is given one of such saintly origin), the mother of a teenaged boy he finds attractive (shades of Lolita) and makes her feel bad by rejecting her romantic advances when he could have easily explained his disinterest.
As played by Pavel Liska, who also appeared in Slama’s 2001 picture, “The Wild Bees,” this teacher has no redeeming qualities. He is indifferent to his students, hostile to his lovers, an ingrate to those who show him kindness, and a betrayer of those who trust him. In the end, Maria (Zuzana Bydzovska in a quietly noble performance that rivals that of Melissa Leo in “Frozen River”) advocates forgiveness for the wayward actions of this conniving wretch.
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Finally, we have a midnight show worth recommending. This Friday and Saturday only, the Grand Illusion screens the best horror film of the year, a movie that was so despised and reviled at SIFF that few of the festival revelers dared speak its name lest they be shunned by the sophisticated elite. I won’t tell the plot of “Deadgirl,” because such things are not spoken of in polite company and I don’t want to put any bad pictures into anybody’s head, but I can say, without fear of reprisal, that the title is a half-truth.
The picture is reminiscent of erotic horror films such as Jean Rollin’s 1982 “La Morte Vivante.” Entwining sexuality and mortality with the poetic revulsion of a vision from Edgar Allan Poe, directors Marcel Sarmiento and Gadi Harel explore adolescent desire in a way that is almost unheard of in American movies. When I saw this at SIFF, I was so scared that I couldn’t sleep all night. It is a truly frightening and disturbing movie that offers pictorial evidence of William Shakespeare’s weary desire that “this too too solid flesh would melt, thaw, and resolve itself into a dew.”
