Pacific Heights

VANCOUVER, CANADA—Among its numerous idiosyncratic highlights, last month's Vancouver Film Festival featured a sidebar of L.A. movies inspired by Thom Andersen's video essay, Los Angeles Plays Itself, a cinephile's City of Quartz that probes the paradoxical existence of the filmmaker's hometown as the most photographed place on earth and also the most misrepresented. The irony is obvious: Self-effacing location for countless Hollywood shoots, Vancouver almost never plays itself (as the fest unspooled, Catwoman Halle Berry was blowing through town). But the city's expansive and reliably quality-controlled festival, low-key as it is, suffers no invisibility complex—third largest on the North American circuit, with the biggest showcase of Pacific Rim cinema outside Asia.

photo: Vancouver International Film Festival

Jang Jun-Hwan's Save the Green Planet

Related Content

• Free Will Astrology: January 23-29, 2013
  January 23, 2013
• Gold Panda
  May 1, 2013
• The Ten Best Concerts in New York This Weekend, 3/29/13
  March 29, 2013
• Slavic Soul Party!
  March 13, 2013
• Red Baraat
  March 13, 2013

More About

• Pacific Tigers
• Big West Conference
• Vancouver
• Thom Andersen
• Tony Rayns

Special events in this year's East Asian section—the Dragons and Tigers, programmed by Tony Rayns with his usual keen eye for new talent—included Kim Hong-Joon's My Korean Cinema, a series of meditative vignettes that refracts local film history through a personal lens, and the Japanese cult phenomenon Cop Festival, an omnibus of jokey police-detective shorts (in some cases, tossed off in a single afternoon). As for the D&T competition for first and second features, it's hard not to applaud a slate broad-minded enough to accommodate 17-year-old Yusuke Sasaki's Letter, a Japanese DV drama told through cell-phone text messages, and Jang Jun-Hwan's Save the Green Planet, a seismic psychotronic regurgitation that inverts every trope it steals (Misery, 2001, MiB, etc.) and rips through a dozen midnight movies' worth of torture techniques and paranoid conspiracies before alighting on an improbable note of keening pathos.

A standout amid an atypically subdued Japanese contingent, Ryuichi Hiroki's Vibrator is a miniaturist, serenely bittersweet take on the intimate- strangers genre recently fetishized in Friday Night and Lost in Translation. The director is a veteran of pinku erotica, and the setup is softcore-ripe: A withdrawn thirtyish woman locks eyes with a hot bleach-blond trucker (Nao Omori, Ichi the Killer himself, showing a much gentler side) and hops aboard his 18-wheeler. . . . But the film has more on its mind than titillation, nestling deep into the self-aware sorrow of its bulimic, insomniac female protagonist.

A pair of debut features by American directors were likewise powered by the intense yearning of young women. Bradley Rust Gray's Iceland-set Saltis a teen movie with a DV Dogme aesthetic and a most un-Dogme-like sensibility—i.e., a heart. As a close-quarters character portrait, it resembles the Dardennes' Rosetta. Piggie, directed by Buffalo '66 co-writer Alison Bagnall, sends an unstable rural teen in pursuit of a dreamboat drifter, reprising the earlier film's Gallo-Ricci dynamic with a higher humiliation quotient. Luna/Galaxie 500 frontman Dean Wareham delivers a terrifically eccentric performance as the cranky object of desire. (Department of indie-rock crossovers: Vancouver also featured commendable directing debuts from dEUS's Tom Barman and the Skids' Richard Jobson.) Perhaps the best non-Asian entry, No Rest for the Brave is called a live-action Waking Life in the program—which only begins to hint at the ingenious lunacy of French director Alain Guiraudie's deadpan Oulipian odyssey. Its sleep-deprived young hero traverses increasingly alien topography—from bucolic villages to an alt-reality utopia of punk bands and man-boy love to a slapstick nightmare populated by Godardian gangsters.

Mainland China again proved the most fertile site for underground discoveries. Gan Xiao'er's The Only Sons is a wrenching account of poverty and fake salvation in a southern Chinese village. And Diao Yinan (star of Yu Lik-wai's gorgeous Ballardian mood-soak, All Tomorrow's Parties) deservedly won the top prize for his first feature, Uniform, in which a young tailor gets his hands on the titular garment and takes to impersonating a policeman. An accomplished piece of Jia Zhangke-style precision realism, it doubles as a potent allegory of a spiritually uprooted generation's identity quest.