The Seattle International Film Festival is rife with special guests. Sometimes they are immediate, necessary parts to the conversation, such as Sunday’s screening of Frame by Frame with the subjects in question. Other times, the guests have little to add to the film. Luckily, Monday’s screening of Romeo is Bleeding came with the subjects who had given plenty of thought and were extremely articulate in their answers.
Romeo is Bleeding paints a portrait of gang wars in Richmond, CA, where two neighborhoods – Central, and the unincorporated North districts – have been shooting each other for well over a decade (if not far longer). With this backdrop, slam poet Donté Clark and the RAW Talent poetry school launch a modernization of Romeo and Juliet, tying the themes directly to Richmond’s specific background. Director Jason Zeldes constructs the film in an off kilter manner, with rises and falls, outbursts and quiet, meant to emulate the rhythms of slam poetry. It takes a little getting used to, and doesn’t always work as planned. Zeldes wanders around town, seemingly hopping from one topic to the next without much connective tissue. He wanders from broad painting of the city to cops to interviews with the locals to intimate portraits of the people. At first, it seems almost random. But, on a second viewing, all of the editing fell into a natural place, and Romeo has a drive unto itself.
SIFF’s presentation brought in the director and his producer, as well as Donté, Molly Raynor (director of RAW Talent), D’Niese Robinson (Harmony; formerly Juliet), and Deandre Evans. Throughout the day, SIFF toured with them and the film, showing the movie in various schools and then holding Q&As with these subjects. When I stepped out to use the restroom, Donté was giving an interview with local PBS tv station KCTS in the lobby, and I stopped to listen to him. He talked about how he has seen RAW Talent influence some of the youth, the lessons he wants to teach, the expansion of RAW Talent into a bigger school, and how he is channeling energy from the destructive into the creative.
The first evening screening was a revival of James Whale’s 1932 film The Old, Dark House on a Library of Congress 35mm print. The Old, Dark House is seen as a genre-definer. Two couples and a fifth man are driving up a mountain in a torrential rainfall, when a rock slide blocks their path. They are forced to shack up in an old mansion inhabited by a creepy guy, his sister, their werewolf-esque butler, and perhaps a few others. Creepiness ensues.
The formula was later emulated in movies ranging from This Island Earth (aka the MST3K: The Movie movie), to Rocky Horror Picture Show to the still lost Thundercrack! Of recent times, The Old, Dark House has been seen as both satirical and defining, and also as a closet queer classic. In Harry M. Benshoff’s academic Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film, he notes that James Whale created a movie where the normals are weird, and the monster is a borderline explicit representation of queer sexuality. Hell, the owners of the house have the last name of Femm. Besides that, many of the incidents are bizarre and camp, such as Ernest Thesiger’s demanding people have a potato.
Regardless of your actual reception of The Old, Dark House, Whale’s direction is gorgeous, and the movie should be seen with an appreciative audience. This audience regarded The Old, Dark House with its full campiness in full effect, reacting as a gay audience should receive a movie potentially filled with coded queer sexuality. It was the perfect atmosphere for such a movie.
The last screening of Monday was a repeat of Goodnight Mommy, which revealed itself in a different way. Normally I sit at the front of the theater, and this was no exception for my Friday night viewing of this wonderful piece of tension. This time, I sat at the very very back of the theater, and the pacing changed completely. Watching this movie twice showed how tension can elongate moments of extreme tension, especially if you’re being pulled into it. The final sequence I thought was 3x as long as it actually was.
The themes of identity as it relates to womanhood also really poked through. The house is filled with images of Mommy as a model, but she’s always blurred, degraded, or otherwise distorted in large format art printings. She is also on television, and her visual identity is essential to her being. In her bedroom, a wire frame dress form stands guard, highlighting the illusion of identity. We’re surrounded by her concept of self, even as her face is completely covered in gauze.
Showing elsewhere was the absolutely abysmal The Golden Hill, an amateur production out of Nepal about people with dirt in their eyes. After getting an education in the city for 8 years, native Lhakpa returns to his poor farming community to help for the summer. He plans on returning to get an education as an engineer, and then returning to the community to help advance it. He also falls in love with a girl. Everybody discusses how hard it is to live on the farm, and the role alcohol plays.
On the plus side, the cinematography is frequently breathtaking. On the negative side is literally everything else. Bad acting by locals (worse than Soderburgh’s Bubble), a rather light plot are only overshadowed by the use of camera mics in outdoor settings, allowing digital wind to penetrate the soundtrack. No ADR for this movie, despite having post-production sound. Besides that, all the themes are discussed at very surface levels, and nothing is shown within the movie itself. It’s just so amateur hour.
Despite efforts, I was not able to make it to Tuesday’s screening of Song of the Sheik, accompanied by the Alloy Orchestra. But, I did make it to see Esteban Roel and Juan Fernando Andres’ Spanish horror movie Shrew’s Nest. A blend of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, Misery, and Dolores Claiborne in the style of a Spanish telenovela, Shrew’s Nest is a fun nasty piece of campy horror that delights with its extreme style that reminds you it was produced by Alex de la Iglesia (The Last Circus, Witching & Bitching).
Set in 1950, an agoraphobic dressmaker, Montse, and her younger sister, Nia, are shacked up in an old labyrinthine apartment. When the hunky upstairs neighbor, Carlos, falls off the balcony and enters the apartment to fall in love with Nia, all hell breaks loose as Montse sets about protecting their home.
This movie is batshit insane, to say the least, but it appeals in a way that spreads across the genders. There were a lot of females in the audience, and they LOVED it. While the plot does have a fear of women thing going on with it, it is only fear of this one woman. Besides that, it does have a mini-allegorical quality to it, having to do with Franco’s tyrannical reign over Spain highlighted by strict Catholicism and repression of women. Besides that, Macarena Gomez turns in an absolutely amazing performance as Spanish Telenovela Kathy Bates.