This week's picks are indefensible - if one limits movies in our
little film festival to superlative categories only. I am unsure
whether it was the having to make a choice a month ahead, the
need to have a theme, or just my own devotion to the slightly
offbeat and quirky, but I threw out the names of Lilies and Cosi
(and while looking back a few times), decided that they did fit a
theme, they didn't require much on the part of the viewer, and in
part succeeded as detractions from this dismal hot summer.
My one regret is not going with my other "themed" movie
choices, say Local Hero and Waking Ned Devine (eccentric Celtic
villages) with maybe Breaking the Waves thrown in for those
allergic to too much sweetness. (hint, hint).
So I went with the category of a show within an institution. (Oh,
a sub-theme, perhaps: one word named foreign movies from English
speaking countries that were filmed in 1996 and based on original
stage plays).
Institutions (here a prison and a mental asylum) create the
bringing together of an odd bunch that perhaps would never be
replicated in the so-called real world. War movies used to do
that, the platoon with the southerner, the kid from the Bronx,
the scholar, the thief, the Jewish kid, etc). In Cosi, we have
the motley crew, misfits that find some connection to each other
and to the outsider who learns something from them.
Institutions also provide us with confinement, with boundaries,
but in these two movies, the boundaries are frankly all over the
map. In Cosi, the confinement seems fairly voluntary, except for
the pyromaniac, and even he gets around. In Lilies, we have the
world re-framed. The male actors/prisoners, recreating a forty
year old story, play all the parts, male and female, while the
set or stage switches from a cold prison out building to the
reality of a Quebec lakefront resort in 1912.
Stories within a story, as old at least as Shakespeare, reflect
our need to tell stories, to make a point, to put on a costume
and recreate the world, and can possibly jar us just a bit with a
new perspective. The director's of this week's choices decided,
for the purpose of their stories, to put on a show. So let's
begin.