Films Worth Watching by Robert Alstead

What happens when cultures clash? Suffering, bravery, anger and comedy.

Mary Steenburgen (Gayle) reflects in John Sayles's Casa De Los Babys. Credit: IFC Films

John Sayles (Limbo, Sunshine State) is a director who avoids the neat, easy solutions of mainstream cinema. He comes at difficult subjects with both a compassionate and critical eye, and his stories, sometimes frustratingly, do not have neat endings.

In his latest film, Casa De Los Babys, Sayles explores the uneasy reciprocal relationship between privileged white Americans and underprivileged Hispanic cultures in the baby adoption business.

Six affluent white American women wait in an anonymous Latin American town for their adoption papers to be processed by the government. The hotel they are staying at is nicknamed the Casa de Los Babys because of the stream of expectant American foster mothers that passes through it.

Together this group of women form a deep well of frustrated motherhood while individually each carries the burden of a deeper personal suffering stemming from their inability to have children themselves: Skipper (Daryl Hannah), an insular fitness fanatic, Eileen (Susan Lynch), an Irish immigrant with romantic ideals of motherhood, Leslie (Lili Taylor), a single New Yorker who has no time for men, Gayle (Mary Steenbergen), a recovering alcoholic, Jennifer (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a wealthy, but bullied wife and Nan (excellently played by Marcia Gray), a demanding meanie who behaves like the obnoxious American from the moment that we meet her berating the waiter on the hotel terrace.

Sayles gradually explores each of the characters' past sadness and future hopes as they pass the time as tourists in the local town. We also see them through the point of view of locals as he introduces the hotel-owner Senora Munoz, her son who thinks all Americans are exploitative imperialists, the lawyer who refuses to be bribed and the neglected glue-sniffing street children.

With such a large ensemble, the 95 minutes is never enough to cover the range of emotional territory of all these different characters and there is a sense that characters had to be prised into the overall thesis.

Sayles still manages to speak volumes in powerful emotional scenes, for example, where a maid Asuncin (movingly played by Vanessa Martinez) who gave up her baby for adoption and expectant Gayle tearfully communicate in their own languages about their different experiences.

Culture clash is explored in a more humorous way in the entertaining Lost in Translation. This gentle comedy with a warm centre, follows two unhappy American travelers who find solace in each other in Tokyo. Bill Murray plays an emotionally weary movie star and Scarlett Johansson the melancholic newly wed he keeps bumping into at the hotel bar. Murray does his deadpan shtick, but he does it so well here that you can't help but go with him.

Writer / director Sofia Coppola has inherited her father Francis Ford's storytelling ability and has a ravishing cinematic style, capturing the bright lights of Tokyo in their sometimes garish and alien, sometimes exciting modernity.

Film festivals update

The Amnesty International Film Festival celebrates its eighth year at the Pacific Cinematheque from Nov. 6 through 9. The festival opens with feature length-documentary Tibet: Cry of the Snow Lion which, looks at this small country's continued resistance to the last 50 years of Chinese occupation. Narrated by Martin Sheen, it brings together interviews and impressive footage gathered from travels in Tibet, India and Nepal over 10 years.

The festival closes with The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, which shows how an Irish film crew who set off for Venezuela to film President Hugo Chavez found themselves in the middle of a coup d'etat. They kept the cameras rolling, showing how the state media was used in an attempt to sanction the illegitimate regime, before Chavez was reinstalled 48 hours later.

For information on all films showing at the festival visit the Pacific region web site for Amnesty International http://www.amnesty.bc.ca.

The Vancouver International Film Festival was a great success again this year with, say fest organizers, attendance surpassing the 150,000 mark, which was reached for the first time in 2002. The winners of the audience awards touched on current concerns about the power of business and state over our lives.

Kamchatka, a compassionate drama about a family hiding in the shadows from an oppressive totalitarian government in '70s Argentina, won the people's choice award for most popular film. The Corporation, sponsored by Common Ground and reviewed in this column last month, won the most popular Canadian film award.

Robert Alstead runs film, DVD and video ezine iofilm. Contact www.iofilm.ca.





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