Under the Same Moon (La Misma Luna) & 700IS

The Mexican film Under the Same Moon tells the story of Carlitos, a nine year-old boy who smuggles himself across the Mexico-United States border to find his mother Rosario, who is working as a housecleaner in the U.S. Moon is corny, nevertheless, it efficiently uses current Hollywood style to quickly establish characters and make political points. Often, in Moon, plot is subservient to exposition of issues, as it is when Carlitos enthusiastically asks to work picking a tomato crop, and that day, of all days, INS raids that particular tomato farm (one almost writes plantation). However, Moon never loses a warm humanity, and hence never becomes trite, or a film only about political problems. Much of this is because every actor (main to supporting) is well picked for their role. Kate del Castillo, as Rosario, is perfect, and her complicated, unresolved romantic entanglement with Eugenio Derbez, as Enrique, has the screen presence of famous couples from Hollywood's big studio era.

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There are few places better than SF to see experimental film, and Artists' Television Access, at Valencia and 21st, often manages to showcase what I would otherwise never know existed, like the recent showing of short work from the 2007 700IS Icelandic experimental film festival as part of the Global Undergrounds program. (ATA has an international partnership with 700IS. Should SF and Reindeerland be sister cities?) Many of the films I saw deserve praise. I'll single out:

• Fokus by Löffel. Consists entirely of slow-motion close-ups of women before, during, and after they fire a gun. The women range in response from enjoyment to reluctance, from fear to satisfaction. Like good portraiture.
• HOT AIR: Keep Yourself Alive by Ellsworth. A women without ovaries or breasts plays air guitar. She's “a one-woman all boy band!” announces HOT AIR. Pushes gender ID and proclaims performance. Moving in a way I would never have expected.
• Honey by Deinema. Honey drips out of a mouth onto a glass table. Erotic.
• Untitled by Boermans. A lineup of female nudes, echoing the nude in sculpture while reinterpreting/reclaiming the female form. Each women stays in front of the camera until she feels like leaving. Most don't stay very long; shortly there are only two remaining. Both, without shame, return the gaze of the camera, self-possessed, until one chooses to leave, and then the other.

The calendar of events at ATA is available at www.atasite.org.

The Counterfeiters & The Band's Visit

The face of The Counterfeiters (Die Fälscher) is Karl Markovics, and he controls the film with expression ranging from sullen and dangerous, to sullen and passionate, to sullen and kind. Markovics plays Salomon “Sally” Sorowitsch, a Jewish counterfeiter interned in the Nazi concentration camp Sachsenhausen and forced to participate in Operation Bernhard, a Nazi effort to counterfeit first the British pound, then the U.S. dollar. Based on a true story, Counterfeiters has the neatness of a piece of moral fiction. Virtuously, Counterfeiters never sermonizes. Instead, moral questions are developed through juxtaposition of Sally with other characters—Sally and an innocent, Sally and a hero, Sally and a villain. I use labels like “hero” and “villain”, but nobody in Counterfeiters is exactly good or exactly evil. To say this another way, each characters actions can be questioned yet each character can also be viewed with sympathy. This is not to say that the Nazis' actions are forgivable, but like Peter Lorre's pedophile in M, here the villain becomes human. The images of Counterfeiters support this point—few color films more make the world look composed of shades of gray.

I've made Counterfeiters seem cold and intellectual, but it is an engaging, even entertaining, movie. Counterfeiters shares this quality with American Psycho, which I saw at a midnight showing directly after. Counterfeiters is so noble in intent, and American Psycho loses itself so easily in blood-slick play, I panicked when I realized how much greater a work than Counterfeiters I consider American Psycho. How can this be?

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The musical soundtrack to The Band's Visit (Bikur Ha-Tizmoret) is unusually sparse, especially for a film featuring musicians, so that when music is played it seems like a miracle. The Band's Visit is about finding such miracles in sparseness, though the plot concerns an Egyptian police band (really something more like a chamber orchestra) lost in Israel—a mistake in pronunciation leads to the stranding of the band in a remote Israeli town for one night. A great hearted film, humanistic in politics and loving of its characters, the unusual and foreign setup becomes relatable to us in far away San Francisco. In the magnificent finale, when the band's conductor raises his hand, I believed. I've never heard classical Arab musical compositions before, those in this film are beautiful.