The Circuit

by Robert Koehler
The Pacific storms that whipped and battered the coast this past weekend came into Palm Springs like a lamb, giving toppers of the 19th edition of the Palm Springs film festival an audible sigh of relief. The relatively mild rains proved to a nice break for the start of this desert town's distinctively international fest, and failed to dampen noticeably large crowds. While the local weather is behaving, Palm Springs continues to look to the world for its movies, loading its program with works from Europe, Latin America and Asia (and nominally, Africa). This has been Palm Springs' signature identity; perhaps only the New York Film Festival--a considerably more boutique affair than this festival's massive 221 film package-- has a higher ratio of foreign to domestic films among U.S. fests.

Part of this profile is boosted by the inclusion of most of the films officially submitted to the Academy for the Oscar's foreign pic nod, pointing to a grand total of 68 non-U.S. countries repped. The global profile lends a palpable sense of local pride, visible in modest welcomes to festival guests from abroad that can be seen in small shops and restaurants around town. There's something about all of this, as well, that implicitly says: We're not Sundance.

The problem with this strategy is that it raises expectations on the part of those who follow the international festival scene that the best from the circuit will be on display--expectations that, this year at least, have been deflated. Given that it falls at the start of the year, Palm Springs is ideally positioned to offer audiences a cherry-picked roster from the fall festival rounds (first) and from Rotterdam-to-Karlovy Vary (second).

Berlin is well-repped here in a range of films including Saverio Costanzo's "In Memory of Myself" and Zhang Yang's "Getting Home" to Yasmin Ahmad's "Mukhsin." The same could be said somewhat of the Cannes imports (from Palme d'Or winner Cristian Mungiu's "4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days" and Lee Chang-dong's "Secret Sunshine" to Serge Bozon's Directors Fortnight discovery "La France"). From the early part of the year, though, films from Rotterdam, Hungarian Film Week, Guadalajara, Buenos Aires and Karlovy Vary are few and far between. From the fall, only Toronto items are abundant in Palm Springs, with few originating in major fests like Venice, San Sebastian and Pusan, and even fewer or none from Vancouver, London, Montreal and Rio.

The other main problem, as any Palm Springs jury member can attest, is that a lot of those films from Iraq, Vietnam and elsewhere are frequently not so hot. This is particularly an issue with the so-called "Awards Buzz" section displaying the foreign-lingo submissions in the Oscar race. A weak year for that field--and this is a weak year for sure--means that the experience of sitting through this section threatens to be about as close to torture as any single festival marathon can be.

Since the original submissions aren't curated (the films are submitted by countries' official committees, and thus vary wildly in quality), and Palm Springs tries to net as many as are possible in the field, this isn't a section that's so much programmed as shipped overseas. That drooping look on the faces of jury members (all of them critics affiliated with Fipresci, the international critics association) at the fest's midpoint is something one can count on. (I've experienced it directly myself, having served on this jury twice.) That they must view 55 films is tough enough; that most of these 55 are sub-par and worse makes the task grueling, for jury and auds alike.

Weekend panels went quite well, according to attendees and participants, with an especially lively session on film composing including James Newton Howard and Marc Shaiman (pictured right of Variety's Todd McCarthy). And the fest's central opening weekend gala was star-studded as usual with Daniel Day-Lewis, Sean Penn, Halle Berry, Emile Hirsch, vet producer Jerry Weintraub and "La vie en rose" star Marion Cotillard, whom Day-Lewis likened to his favorite screen actor of all time, Charles Laughton.

As the rains are becoming a faint memory at the midpoint, fest action is looking forward to a closing weekend capped by the closer, Pierre Salvadori's Audrey Tatou-starring "Priceless."


Photo by John Shearer/WireImage.com