In Brief

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The New York Sun

THE FORSAKEN LAND
unrated, 108 minutes

The mood of the desolate Sri Lankan import “The Forsaken Land” is decided in its first shot, as a solitary figure with a rifle traverses a windswept plain, blue-gray in the twilight. Even when the sun beats down in later scenes, torpor, despair, and distance dominate this picture of life during cease-fire.

The film, the first feature by the young Vimukthi Jayasundara, shared the Camera d’Or at Cannes last year with Miranda July’s “Me and You and Everyone We Know.” Ms. July’s overeager video art-lite was last summer’s critics’ pet, but its genuinely poetic cowinner, picked up by New Yorker Films, has taken until now to grace our screens.

But it has arrived, with a 10-day run at the Museum of the Moving Image that begins today. Suspended in the traumatic haze before and after open conflict, the film takes its time but is definitely worth ours.

A local guardsman, Anura, lives in a shuttered shack with a much younger woman, who turns out to be his idly sensual wife, Lata. His actual sister, Soma, is a spinster, and stays with them. A young girl hangs about, beloved but never really described as a daughter.

Mr. Jayasundara renders his characters as figures in a landscape, waiting and watching. Much of the movie consists of long shots that strand the characters, whether by the waterside, up by the outhouse, or on a thin road bisecting the screen. Anura and Lata are often shown gazing across great distances, evoking vague foreboding or mirage-like desire.

When there’s an actual exchange – a bit of sniping between Lata and her sister-in-law – the moment of drama is almost a shock. The few other conflicts are startling, but it’s the discrete images that prevail: a hand moving across a long fluorescent bulb, a group of men carrying a body in the rain, a geometric landscape reducing a telephone pole to a typographic symbol.

Lata’s simmering sexuality eventually finds her an adulterous partner, an impatiently horny soldier. Her husband is occupied with other matters, eventually tasked with a murderous order that he runs away from even as he’s doing it.

The fragmentary plotting makes for a peculiar ache of a film. It’s a land on the edge of war and, it appears, everything else.

When the spinster sister brings home a radio, its presence seems to promise a connection to the outside world. But the movie ends with the little box’s first clear broadcast: a litany of missing-person reports.

– Nicolas Rapold

WASSUP ROCKERS
R, 111 minutes

Ten years after the film “Kids” left the Angelika crowd a twitter with its images of youth run riot, director Larry Clark presents a nicer, less wild bunch in “Wassup Rockers.” Personality goes some way for these likable skateheads, a subculture among South Central Hispanic teenagers, but the movie still feels like a book of voyeuristic photography.

One such outfit is the shirtless confession, which is how “Wassup Rockers” opens: a cute teen on a bed talking about skating, friends, and stuff. The whole crew – Jonathan, Milton (nicknamed Spermball), Kico, Eddie, Louie, Porky, and Carlos – is at its best when hanging out casually: lined up on a couch, crammed into a car, even actually skating. They’re good company, full of gentle ribbing. Based on Mr. Clark’s other films, you expect some demonic side to emerge, but everyone keeps smiling.

Then Mr. Clark is seized by two urgent desires: first, to work in some encounters with racism; and second, as if inspired by the teenagers’ natural antics, to make the whole movie one giddy romp. One inspired moment of absurdity does result, during an encounter with a cop who sees little difference between one Hispanic teenager and the next. One boy grabs the cop’s sandwich and, to the befuddlement of the officer, the boy eats it.

The moment works because it feels as if it comes from the boy himself. But for the rest of the movie Mr. Clark puts the friends through a wearisome “adventure” through Beverly Hills – a superfluous endeavor to backlight the teenagers’ idiosyncrasy with Mr. Clark’s dull parodies of the rich and strange. “I’m from the ghetto,” one boy says to strangers, in ironic recognition of the cachet. Repeated to the point of almost surreal banality, it’s a joke that Mr. Clark recognizes without really getting.

– Nicolas Rapold

TWO DRIFTERS
unrated, 101 minutes

It’s easy to dismiss director Joao Pedro Rodrigues’s “Two Drifters” as some Almodovarian contraption of controlled excess, what with its forlorn female protagonist apparently being impregnated by the ghost of a gay man. Laughing off its supernatural drama, however, would be to miss an intelligently crafted, curiously suspended tragicomedy.

At the center of “Two Drifters” lie two facets of love lost, folly and grief, told through a genuinely bizarre love triangle. Rui (Nuno Gil) is a bartender whose boyfriend, Pedro (Joao Carreira), dies minutes into the first reel. Meanwhile, Odete (Ana Cristina de Oliveira) dumps her lover for refusing to do his part in fathering a baby. So she decides that she is pregnant with Pedro’s child, conducting a vigil at his cemetery and then stalking Rui, who is still deep in mourning.

Wait, what happened exactly? The mystery of Odete’s pregnancy is purposely left unresolved. Perhaps Pedro’s spirit somehow entered her the night he died, when a haunted-house gust of wind came through her window. Pedro’s mother believes her, after all, and Rui himself sees visions of his lover. Or is a (more boring) psychological explanation to blame?

No, “Two Drifters” is a case where the facts of the plot do not show the way to the movie’s heart. It’s the intensity of Odete’s belief, by most standards insane, and Rui’s devastating despair, played with moving absorption by Mr. Gil, that produce a compelling if unlikely drama of souls adrift. Ms. Oliveira – whose lanky figure and big eyes make her a kind of Iberian Shelley Duvall – accomplishes the tough job of keeping the tone this side of farcical, even when straddling Pedro’s grave.

I could imagine seeing this movie’s bold, enigmatic look at sexual identity getting lost in guffaws or puzzled silence with the wrong audience. But it’s a risk worth taking.

– N.R.

THE GARDEN OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS
unrated, 103 minutes

Rickety hand-held video as a cinematic style is so shopworn that the odd modest success can be thrown out too easily. Now playing at the Pioneer, “The Garden of Earthly Delights” is one such unexpectedly disarming work. Adapted by veteran Polish painter-poet-filmmaker Lech Majewski from his novel “Metaphysics,” it’s a homegrown blend of the arcane and the achingly intimate that can take some getting used to.

The plot concerns a dying young art historian and her digi-mad lover. What we see of Claudine (Claudine Spiteri) and Chris (Chris Nightingale) in their Venice wanderings comes from the latter’s everpresent video camera – elegantly linked scenes of chatter, lovemaking, art-making, gondola-factory visits, and so on. As interwoven cuts to Chris fiddling with tapes show, he is actually the one shuffling through these scenes like a photo album, following his last lingering, heartbreaking associations after what we learn was Claudine’s mortal illness (not, as I initially and pessimistically thought, their breakup). So a sense of melancholy underlies the joy of their plainly presented romance.

The Bosch painting – from which the movie gets its title – in all its surreal diabolical detail, inspires their philosophical and artistic peregrinations, including some sexual ones. Many of their labored, oddball art projects are shown to duplicate some matchhead-size scene from the Bosch. Yet the ordinary tone prevents any of it from sounding pretentious (despite some clunky dialogue), as does the deceptively careless footage. After Claudine’s musings on mortality and Chris’s loving exhibition of the chemical elements that make up the human body, the film almost resembles homemade Peter Greenaway – only with the scorn for humanity replaced by duly ragged and real love. It still felt vaguely embarrassing to watch two academics encase themselves in plastic and have sex, but the last scene, as Chris stops and rewinds footage of a doctor’s bad news, got me in the gut.

– N.R.

SAY UNCLE
R, 90 minutes

Peter Paige, best known for his role in Showtime’s “Queer as Folk,” writes, directs, and stars as Paul in this movie about a young gay man who just wants to play with children. Childless and childlike, he befriends tykes at a local playground until a housewife (Kathy Najimy, the voice of Peggy on “King of the Hill”) starts a campaign to arrest him for pederasty. He’s not guilty, and the movie paints her as an attention-seeking hysteric, but the explanation for his love of children, offered late in game, is not convincing, nor his persona. Paul – a Rain Man without the math skills – comes across as creepy and worthy of suspicion. A potentially interesting attempt to pin the accusations on homophobia, a product of Mr. Paige’s gay rights stance, is simultaneously melodramatic and underexplored. A romance between Mr. Paige’s character and a male friend (Anthony Clark) feels unnecessary and tacked on. The plot veers between the comic and the dramatic, though it is rarely either one, and an obtrusive soundtrack, annoying special effects, and overly flashy shots and cuts make “Say Uncle” a weak first effort.

– Erin Thompson

THE HIDDEN BLADE
R, 131 minutes

Samurai movies are to Japan what Westerns are to America: relics. But Yoji Yamada’s “The Hidden Blade” scrapes off the rust and uncovers the hard steel beneath the cliches. The samurai in this movie aren’t wolf-eyed warriors slicing and dicing for the shogun while obsessing over their honor. They’re country cousins who rarely draw their swords, obsessing about their credit, and how to make ends meet. Katagiri (Masatoshi Nagase) is an eternal bachelor whose friend, Hazama (Yukiyoshi Ozawa), has been shipped off to Edo, where the action is. Katagiri is stuck out in the sticks with his maid, Kie (Takako Matsu), whom he’s got a crush on, and who is being married off to a merchant family.

At the same time, the samurai era is drawing to a close. Modern weapons come to Japan, and swords are replaced by rifles. This results in the expected chest thumping over the lost old ways, but it also wakes up Katagiri to the fact that as traditional society goes in the Dumpster, so too do all its hang-ups, its feudal caste system, and corruption.

Meanwhile, Hazama has led a failed rebellion and returns to his home village in disgrace and chains. He escapes, and Katagiri has his low status used as leverage to force him to hunt down and kill his friend. By the time he begins to show off his swordsmanship, we know him as a decent human being, and his skills seem truly supernatural. Mr. Yamada, who has directed 78 films before this one, is the same: a director so confident that he doesn’t need to show off. You don’t recognize how good he is until it’s all over – and your bleeding heart lies beating on the floor.

– Grady Hendrix


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