The Circuit

by Robert Koehler
Driving back through the desert and windmills to Los Angeles, I realized that after spending ten days in Palm Springs that there were really two festivals this year. There was the festival that delivered what organizers reported as record business: $1 million each for the gala and b.o. Given the lack of red-carpet action in Los Angeles, the gala spread including Daniel Day-Lewis, upcoming Cannes Palme d'or president Sean Penn, Marion Cotillard, Halle Berry and Emile Hirsch (pictured) was a comparative spectacle. (Though, as everyone who attended told me later, dull as watching paint dry once emcee Mary Hart took over.) Big crowds squeezing to get into screenings, plus complaints by festival passholders of not being able to be seated, pointed to hot and heavy conditions for those wanting to get in to see the films.

Of course, that also meant that they were sometimes trying to get into screenings of such inglorious duds as Sergei Bodrov's "Mongol" (just announced as an inexplicable entry in the Acad's foreign-language preliminary list--a list, by the way, stuffed with inexplicable entries). The other festival, inside theaters, was a wildly uneven bag of goodies and inedibles, with a host of fine films from Cannes, Venice, Berlin and Toronto alongside a load of stuff that had no business being there. This included a whole bunch of the films submitted by 55 of the 63 countries for the Acad's foreign race, some so thoroughly awful ("Satanas" from Colombia and Milcho Manchevski's "Shadows" being two of many offenders) that it's hard to imagine any respectable festival anywhere on planet Earth allowing these past their front doors.

There's surely a better means to sample the year's best in world movies (presumably a mission of this internationally focused fest). 

To that end, Palm Springs director managed a terrific move at midpoint in the fest by deciding that, starting next year, the unwieldy section of foreign Oscar submissions would be curated by fest programmers, winnowing out the many shoddy films to a quality few. It will bring this "Awards Buzz" section in line with Palm Springs' "New Voices/New Visions," also curated by programmers. This still doesn't address another problem that was easily detectible this year (and noted in a previous column): Palm Springs' lineup only partially reflected the fact that 2007 was an extraordinary year for global cinema, underlined by a lack of significant films from East Asia, Latin America and other non-European regions. Just by glancing at the lineup, one would never have guessed that China, The Philippines and Malaysia (to note only three) enjoyed banner years.

Part of this reflects a hesitation to present more challenging, art-angled films to an unabashedly mainstream audience (an audience that can be termed as a "Laemmle audience" -- a literate and middlebrow crowd that attends Los Angeles-based Laemmle Theatres' Royal Theatre, or possibly New York's Paris Theatre); part of it purely a matter of programmer taste, and -- as MacDonald indicated in conversation -- part of it the fest's resistance to steepening rental prices from films' sales companies (a near-universal complaint across the international fest landscape). While finding just the right mix of aud-pleasers, art and those that may blend the two is always a challenge at any fest, Palm Springs' identity as an international sampler lends it a special stamp, and, at least for right now, that stamp is a tad blurry.

The outright hostility observed toward some films (largely those that experimented with narrative, or were from Latin America) -- meaning loud cackling or comments and shouting back at the screen -- suggested that the festival has some way to go toward developing its audience, in the same way that such disparate festivals as Mill Valley, Mexico City, Taormina and Vancouver have developed theirs. (A running joke that always comes up in Palm Springs is that the bottom five or ten films in the audience ballots are the ones to see.) As has happened throughout movie history, the filmmaker booed today can win prizes tomorrow, and festivals are now the primary way for film audiences to grow and expand in several ways -- including taste. With its flow of cash in good shape, Palm Springs can afford a few more boos to get to the place where it's a showing ground for everything that matters in current film.

Along with these and other complaints -- a few patient couples in lines groused to me about the lack of filmmakers present to engage in Q and As, to which I mentioned that famed Spanish director Jose Luis Guerin had his travel plans so botched that he arrived at the festival after the last screening of his magnificent "In the City of Sylvia" -- any fest vet would have noted that Palm Springs kept the crowds flowing, managed superb traffic control and started screenings on time, with very few projectionist flubs. On this level alone, the year's first festival (in the calendar) sets a model example.