For some reason I didn’t have any trouble getting tickets to the movies I wanted to see yesterday, my last full day at the festival. Of course, since it was my last full day, I spent half of it in the video library trying to catch up on some movies I didn’t get to see over the previous 5 days. I was surprised that only about half the Competition films were available in the video library. I would think those would be the films they want to promote the most.

I’ve only seen two Competition films, and one was yesterday, Ibuku, from Indonesia. The title means “my mother,” but the character whose mother is described only appears in the beginning and at the end. She is a young Indonesian woman who has been imprisoned in Saudi Arabia for killing her employer, purportedly to save her honor. Sri went to SA as a migrant worker to escape an abusive marriage that was forced upon her by her parents. Her father has already committed suicide, presumably due to his gambling debts, and the titular mother, Sum, does nothing but struggle to survive. Sri leaves the country because she doesn’t think her mother supports her leaving her husband, but the bulk of the movie just shows Sum’s struggle, and then her desperate attempt to raise money when she discovers her daughter’s plight. It’s a fairly standard Southeast Asia melodrama, though it has a kind of twist ending I found compelling, in that Sum’s ultimate sacrifice is not for her daughter, but for her community, making it all the more moving.

I’m a fan of Asgher Farhadi, even his previous French language feature, The Past, though I didn’t see his last one, which was in Spanish. Parallel Tales screened in Competition at Cannes and received mostly bad reviews, so I wasn’t expecting much. And, yeah, it isn’t half as good as some of his best Iranian stuff, but I found it entertaining. Isabelle Huppert plays a cantankerous novelist who lives in squalor in a nice Paris apartment. She derives inspiration for her latest book by spying on the apartment across the street, where three people do sound effects for movies and videos. She essentially makes up a story about their various love lives. Into her own life comes a young, supposedly rehabilitated thief who her niece has hired to help her clean up the apartment to prepare for its sale, and this guy somehow inserts himself into the cross-neighborhood situation, causing heaps of trouble in the process. The biggest complaint I’ve read is that none of this is even vaguely plausible, though I still thought Farhadi got the disparate pieces to fit together fairly snugly. And it’s got a pretty impressive cast. Other than Huppert there’s Vincent Cassel, Catherine Deneuve (as Huppert’s snooty editor), and Virginie Efira, whom I saw the day before in All of a Sudden.

Speaking of Iranian masters, I watched On the Road With Abbas Kiorastami in the video room. A documentary put together from various tapes the late Kiorastami shot while driving around the country revisiting some of his most famous filming locations, it has a rambunctious, mischievous air to it. Since he was famous for using non-professional actors, he tends to run into many of the people who were in his films, now living lives that are slightly elevated since they were once in a Kiarostami production. On hand in a lot of these clips is his former assistant, Jafar Panahi, who’s like the crew’s class clown, mugging and carrying on for the camera. It’s mostly a film for film nerds, because it doesn’t really reveal anything about Korastami’s methods or even his feelings about movies; though he’s always saying things like, “that boy’s face is perfect for the cinema” and commenting on how photogenic a landscape is. He’s also naturally great with kids. 

The last movie I saw seemed an appropriate closer. Homesick is a documentary by the Danish filmmaker Tanya Sorensen, who was adopted from Korea as a baby by a Danish couple in the late 80s. The movie is essentially an attempt to come to terms with her heritage, which she has slowly pieced together over the years even though she has never been able to meet her birth mother. Though Sorensen does a good job of explaining how the Korean adoption system essentially trafficked in babies, she also puts to the lie the cliche that these babies had better opportunities by being adopted to so-called first world countries. Sorensen’s adopted parents divorced before she was 2, and then her father, a violent man, destroyed a second marriage before drinking himself to death, leaving her alone. I wasn’t too crazy about the stylistic touches that tried to connect the director to her Korean heritage, but it’s a very powerful indictment of the paternalistic state.