Art, Commerce and the Dream Market

Quirky pigheadedness or delusional optimism?

As I walk through the Marche, the film market/tradeshow area of Cannes, those are the only two reasons I can come up with for why I went ahead and made a second short film. When you see the sheer number of higher budget films that will never make it to a Cineplex near you, you not only have a greater appreciation for what it takes to get a film to that Cineplex, but you stare slackjawed at the odds against one of your own films ever making it.

I admire every one of these gutsy bastards trying to break through the noise in the same way I admire every novelist and poet who keeps on writing knowing that bookstores are disappearing and access is going to be mediated (for better or worse) through social media in the near future.

Here it’s like a moshpit at an Art and Commerce concert; everything is a blur: arms, legs, heads. So it’s hard sometimes to see which of these films might be an earnest attempt to tell a story in a visually and aurally fascinating way and which is just a machine for making big bucks. It’s especially hard to tell from the Synopses on the posters and postcards, such as:

Victorio, a movie from Mexico, in which “A reckless Mara gang member and a beauty who knows no fear look into each other’s eyes and fall in love forever.” Heck, now I’m just have to see that “look”.

My favorite title: Dancing Ninja. A musical? I’m imagining a cross between Enter the Dragon and Flashdance.

And at the risk of seeming culturally insensitive, I also get a chuckle out of descriptions like this one for the next big Bollywood blockbuster, Housefull:

‘Housefull’ is a romantic comedy entertainer which is the story of Aarush – the world’s unluckiest man. Being jinxed, he believes his bad luck can vanish if he finds true love. In this quest for true love one lie leads to another and different people from different walks of life come together adding even more confusion to this hilarious comedy of errors resulting in total chaos and mayhem. As Deepika tells Akshay in the film: ‘Jis jhooth se kissi ka ghar basta ho, voh jhooth nahin hota.’

Hard to argue with Deepika on that.

I especially liked the description of a Iranian film that is being marketed in that country's large film booth at the Marche: Two blind men decided to rub (sic) a jewelry shop. A policeman loves a saleswoman in their office and his subordinate loves a movie star. Two killers are to be evolved and become nice guys. A young man, who wants to commit suicide, causes some problems. A disappointed sculptor wishes to immigrate. However, everyone’s destiny is changed when a strange fish is freed and a charming ring is moved.

Sounds like the perfect film to come from the land of Shahnemah and the Arabian Nights.

But my award for the most unabashedly honest description has to be the Russian film called Pokhoronite Menya Za Plintusom which apparently translates to Bury Me Behind the Baseboard. Now, if you’re thinking this sounds like a rather depressing film in an otherwise rollicking canon of Russian cinema’s of romantic comedies, wait until you read the synopsis:

Sergei Snezhin’s film “Bury Me Behind the Baseboard” shows us 3 days from the life of eight-year boyy Sasha Savelyev. He lives with his grandparents, he is very sickly, and goes to school less often than to the doctor. The grandmother stuffs the boy with medicines, health food, and morals….

[Hang on, this may be looking up….]

And Sasha has only one dream – to meet his mum at least on his birthday.

[Surely his dream will come true, no? No?….]

The film reveals the suffocative atmosphere of the rough 80s in the USSR, the real face of Russian intellectuals. The movies is so sincere that makes afraid of its closeness to the reality of the Soviet people’s everyday life – terribly sad, hopeless, and infinitely gloomy.

[And yes, there’s more…]

The Granny (Svetlana Kryuchkova) is represented so vividly that you really hate her at the beginning and empathize with her at the end.

What I love about this “marketing” is that it’s so unabashedly honest. From the title on down there’s no attempt to woe, much less seduce you with “a heartwarming fable” or “a touching family drama”.

I wonder if Pokhoronite Menya Za Plintusom will ever make it to the U.S. (not make it in the U.S., because we all know it could never do that!)

I’ve always loved the French word for “dream”: rêve. Dreams – from the comically absurd to nightmares – are what these films are all about. Some have at their heart a longing to reshape or redeem reality; some want to present a view of the world you have never seen… what they share in common is the human urge to connect, to present something we might share… whether a moment of frightened tension and release or, like Sasha, some deep longing which (if I’m reading the synopsis right) is illuminated by grace.

Now, if you’ll excuse me… I’m off to enter an Italian dream of neo-realism.