Spank's LFF Diary, Tuesday 02/11/2004
1.30pm: D.E.B.S.
Napoleon Dynamite originally started life as a short film called Peluca, in which director Jared Hess first introduced his main character. The same thing applies to Angela Robinson's D.E.B.S., which has been expanded from a short of the same name she made a year earlier. Its best idea is more or less used up in the opening credits: there's a secret component within the Standard Aptitude Test which measures students' capacity for working as spies. Those who pass it are enrolled into a special academy and taught how to save the world. The feature follows Amy (Sara Foster) and her three pals as they go on a surveillance mission, following supercriminal Lucy Diamond (Jordana Brewster) as she meets up with a female Russian assassin. But a shocking discovery is made - Lucy's not meeting the Russian on business, it's actually a blind date. Amy and Lucy meet for the first time in the ensuing chase and gunfight. And then, as Richard Herring is so fond of saying, they lezz up.
If D.E.B.S. has taught me anything, it's that I must never trust the critical judgment of FilmFan when he starts raving about movies featuring teenage girls in tiny school uniforms. Because this is the most utterly retarded film I've watched all year, and yes, I've seen Starsky And Hutch. You can understand exactly what Robinson was aiming for: make a dumb teen comedy, and then smuggle in a sweet lesbian romantic subplot while nobody's looking. It's an admirable aim, scuppered by the dumb comedy element being so obscenely dumb: hamfistedly written and unenthusiastically performed. I've seen films like this go down well in the kitscher programme sections of gay film festivals, where the mere love story's existence would be cause for celebration, and that's all well and good. But in a more commercial environment, it just feels offensively lame, and the teeniest bit exploitative.
4.00pm: Lila Says
Chimo (Mohammed Khouas) is an Arab teenager living in Marseilles with his mum. There's nothing there to do during the day, apart from hang out with his delinquent mates. Things change when Lila (Vahina Giocante) strolls into town, a blonde haired, blue eyed minx living with her religious fanatic aunt. She quickly gets a reputation for going around without pants and talking dirty. The Muslim community is outraged, but Chimo is more tolerant: "if I have to choose between free pussy and free Palestine, I'll take free pussy any day." When he gets a handjob off Lila while they're on a moped - and a moving moped no less - it looks like his life may finally have some purpose. But his pals, inevitably, disagree.
And you can probably work out the whole of the rest of the plot from that first fifteen minutes. During her post-film Q&A, Giocante says that she's never seen a character like Lila on screen before, but that's obviously nonsense. Lila's just another one of those damaged women that the creepier misogynistic end of French cinema has worshipped for decades. The exact nature of her damage might be a new twist, but this is really just Betty Blue all over again, with a smidge of the racial dynamics of La Haine added for spice. And as with Betty Blue, once it's established early on that Chimo is a frustrated writer, we know exactly how it's going to end - so, yes, Lila ends up a complete wreck, but Chimo gets to develop a literary career off the back of that, so that makes it all okay. Director Ziad Doueri contributes some impressive visual flourishes, but there's no covering up the fact that we've seen this tired old plot far too many times already.
8.30pm: Czech Dream
Film school graduates Vit Klusak and Filip Remunda have created the ultimate consumer paradise, a Prague hypermarket called Czech Dream. With the help of the Czech Republic's leading market research and advertising specialists, they've devised a campaign guaranteed to suck shoppers in like a Dustbuster. And on May 30th, 2003, they're delighted to discover that a couple of thousand people are queueing to grab their opening day bargains, literally running for the doors as soon as the tape is cut. The catch? Czech Dream doesn't actually exist: it's a cloth facade standing in the middle of a field.
I've always been a sucker for a good Situationist prank, and about one third of the fun of Czech Dream is watching Klusak and Remunda carefully plan and execute this industrial-sized scam. But the great thing is that it's only one third of the fun. Behind the (literal) facade of the prank, the film has a stealth agenda: in the same way that Supersize Me used its MacDonalds diet stunt as a framework for a study of America's obesity problem, and Mondovino was a documentary about globalisation disguised as a nice film about wine. Czech Dream lays bare the whole process by which an idea is planted in the heads of a couple of thousand people: the idea could be a political ideology, or a lie about weapons of mass destruction, but the idea they've chosen for their experiment is the prospect of cheap steaks and television sets.
So in the first half of the film, the directors get themselves smartened up in Hugo Boss suits (brilliantly, we get to see the product placement deal being negotiated and executed), and hand a collection of marketing creatives enough rope to hang themselves with. They discuss the exact wording of the adverts to ensure they're as truthful as possible, because as one creative says in a jaw-dropping moment "you filmmakers may be able to tell lies, but advertisers can't." They agree on a series of posters with slogans like "Don't Come", and hire a composer to create a suitably cheesy jingle. Throughout, we get a series of vox pops with punters which show just how effectively this campaign is tweaking their interest.
But most importantly, if this film was just about the con, then the punchline - two thousand people standing in a field - would be relegated to the last couple of minutes. Instead, the final third of the film is dedicated to detailed post-scam interviews with those people, in which they're asked why they came and how they feel now. Their reactions make for the most fascinating part of the film. Some of them are inevitably angry: some understand the joke: some are philosophical about how it's a nice day to be outside anyway: one or two can be seen searching a nearby forest to see if the hypermarket is hiding in there, as they can't quite believe what's going on. Hilariously, Klusak and Remunda's scam is simultaneously condemned as a protest both for and against the Republic joining the EU, as punters start to make the connection between the lies of commercial advertisers and the lies of political ones. Czech Dream is possibly the best of the documentaries on display at this year's festival, leaving you both entertained and convinced that you won't be fooled again. Though I bet you will.
November 3rd 2004
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