The title is appropriately provoking. The Elle Men Film Festival 18-Plus, which begins on Sept 25, has prompted cinemagoers to imagine a feast of mild pornography served up on the big screen uncut. Don't get overexcited, anyway. While three of the six films in this mini showcase indeed feature sexual content deserving the R-rating, the interpretation of the "18-plus" here can be less libidinous than that. In fact, the other half of the films shown are almost family-friendly, and that 18-year-old milestone should designate the intellectual ability to grasp a world whose complexity can only stir feelings in adults.
Taking place at Quartier CineArt, at EmQuartier, the Elle Men Film Festival will show the much-debated sexual misadventure Nymphomaniac Vol 1, Vol 2; the Ukranian sign-language drama set in a brutal environment of a school for the deaf-mute, Plemya (The Tribe); the Hungarian dog revenge film Fehér isten (White God); the documentary of the photographer Seabastiao Salgado The Salt Of The Earth; and Armi elää! (Armi Alive!), a film about a theatre production based on the life of Finnish fashion designer Marimekko.
The first three films (I believe the tickets will be hot-selling) are about sex -- but they're not about eroticism, and if you can't distinguish between the two then the 18-plus tag surely applies to you, as well! In fact, the sex in the two Nymphomaniac films and in Plemya can be scary and gut-wrenching, the copulation in unusual circumstances that is carnal but also deeply psychological.
You'll see a lot of naked flesh, but for the characters, the post-coitus sadness seems to outweigh its seedy joy.
In Plemya, by the young Ukranian director Miroslav Slaboshpitsky, a deaf-mute boy enrolls into a special school where he's immediately recruited into a gang of bullying hooligans that run a prostitution ring. Working as a pimp, the boy falls in love with one of the girls he's supposed to peddle to horny truck drivers in the most desolate spot in town.
The film stars real deaf-mute people, and the entire story uses sign-language -- we have to guess the meaning of many "conversations" between the characters since there are no subtitles in any written language. There's a sense of suffocation running through the film that deals with social and personal brutality, and the sex, usually in an unsavoury setting, resembles the struggle of the main characters to find a lining of tenderness and feeling in their harsh, unfeeling world. Feeling, well, how could such a simple word become so complicated when the flesh is tingled?
In Lars von Trier's Nymphomaniac, showing in two separate volumes here, Charlotte Gainsbourg plays Joe, a woman whom we first see beaten to a pulp and is rescued by a kind older man. Safe in his house, Joe begins to tell him her life story: since a teenager, she's been a sex-addicted nymphomaniac who's been through a long journey of fornicating expeditions, including seduction of old men, an orgy with black men, and sadistic experiments of various stripe.
The men in her life are played by, to name a few, Shia LaBeouf, Jamie Bell, Stellan Skarsgard and Christian Slater (playing her loving father). Uma Thurman also turns up as a betrayed wife of one of them.
What the film is trying to say here seems like a complex riddle, and surely a source of endless debate since Nymphomaniac came out last year. The director, the Danish provocateur von Trier, has been suspected of flirting with misogyny in his treatment of the women in his films (Dancer In The Dark, Antichrist, Melancholia); at the same time, the confused yet strong Joe -- a woman who enjoys and suffers from sex -- also seems like a talisman of feminism, not the mention that the men in the film come across as either weak or weepy perverts. A highly entertaining and disturbing movie, Nymphomaniac (it's best to see both parts, and the festival will show the extended director's cut) wouldn't have got a chance to play on the big screen had it not been for a special event like this festival.
Those are the three films that you won't want anyone under 18 to see (though in some other countries, maybe). Yet the festival also shows three more titles that are provoking in other ways apart from the flesh.
In Armi Elää!, the life of the designer at Marimekko is a study of art, life, suicide and the challenge to accommodate the bright and dark impulses. But what I highly recommend is the documentary The Salt Of The Earth; this is unmissable for anyone who loves photography, and especially those who know the work of Salgado. One of the best known anthropological photographers who witnessed some of the world's most brutal and heartbreaking tragedies, Salgado, in his 70s now, has dedicated his life and his camera to the struggle of the common man, the workers, the forgotten people in the far corners of the Earth, and lately to the plight of the environment. What's so 18-plus about this? The comprehension that the world is a cruel place, maybe, and why it is important that someone has set out to capture that cruelty, and hope, on film. In fact, kids should see this one.
In Fehér Isten, a pre-teen girl is forced by her father to abandon her dog. Bad move, because that dog later becomes a ringleader in a spectacular canine revenge campaign against the human in this thrilling film. Again, there's some violent scenes when dogs are tortured -- and when they unleash their fangs of vengeance on the street -- but the film is a cautionary tale about our complacency as a superior species.
Maybe you have to be over 18 to understand its dark implications.
Screening
Plemya (The Tribe) is showing Sept 25 at 7.30pm and Sept 26 at 5.30pm.
Nymphomaniac Vol 1 (Director's Cut) is showing Sept 27 at 5.30pm and Sept 28 at 9pm.
Nymphomaniac Vol 2 (Director's Cut) is showing Sept Sept 27 at 8pm and Sept 29 at 7.30pm
Fehér isten (White God) is showing Sept 24 at 7.30pm, Sept 27 at 3pm and Sept 30 at 9pm.
The Salt of the Earth is showing Sept 26 at 3pm and Sept 28 at 7pm.
Armi elää! (Armi Alive!) is showing at Sept 26 at 8pm and Sept 30 at 7pm.
Elle Men Film Fetival 18-Plus takes place from Sept 24-30 at Quartier CineArt, EmQuartier. Tickets are 150 and 200 baht. The films have been selected by a panel of nine experts, including the writer of this article. Visit www.majorcineplex.com/news/elle-men-film-festival for details.
