Finally, risotto! Helen von Layers dragged me through the rain to a Lido
restaurant specializing in this rice-like dish. I was embarrassed as she
ransacked the antipasto cart, but, in the end, I'm happy when she's happy.
Liam Neeson was not so happy. The star of "Michael Collins" (the
Irish political tract which was not very well received here) had to cancel
all of his interviews (including mine) on account of a very nasty case of
food poisoning. The word was that he had contracted it not in Venice, but
on the Concorde.
Gina Gershon looked happy. You must remember her as Crystal in "Showgirls"
("Hey, darlin' "), and now she plays a lesbian again in "Bound",
directed by Larry and Andy Wachowski. Maybe Gina's nervous about being typecast,
but Helen kept noticing how she never had her hand out of the hand of some
long-haired male companion. Of course Helen, who's much more cynical than
I am, made several comments about the number of times a day Gina changed
her clothes. And the clothes: a dark wraparound sarong number, and some
tight pants that were blinding in their multi-coloredness.
I told Helen that I had to think about more significant things, like trends
in the festival's film selection. Besides pedophilia, it seems like American
imperialism is also a recurring subject. Naturally, the filmmakers who take
on this task are not American.
I already talked about the Taiwanese "Buddha Bless America", about
American war maneuvers in the late '60s on the southern part of Taiwan.
Today I saw "Carla's Song", the latest film by Britain's Ken Loach
("Land and Freedom", "Ladybird, Ladybird", "Raining
Stones").
Loach, who has always made clear his leftist political agenda, tells a story
set in 1987 that deals with the war between the Sandanistas and the Contras
in Nicaragua. To give outsiders a cinematic point of entry, he focuses on
a Scottish bus driver (Robert Carlyle, the mean guy in "Trainspotting"
and the lover in Priest), who falls in love with a Nicaraguan immigrant
(Oyanka Cabezas, a former dancer) in Glasgow and takes her back to her homeland.
Carlyle's nightmares shift from minor problems on his bus route to being
in the center of brutal Central American battles. Loach shows the Marxist
Sandanistas as good guys, the right-wing Contras as sadistic fighters who
targeted civilians. The American volunteer played by Scott Glenn is Loach's
mouthpiece. "The CIA runs the whole show," he tells Carlyle. "The
Contras get their orders from Langley, Virginia, the headquarters of the
CIA."
The film is didactic, and quaintly old-fashioned in its structure and black-and-white
ideological position. Scott Glenn says that he did a lot of research that
confirms the fact that the Contras did attack civilians, and that the CIA
has a terrible history of helping the wrong side. And few people are as
committed as Ken Loach in terms of putting on the screen such important
issues.
I'm getting ready to go to a party for "Carla's Song". Unlike
most of the fancy dinners for films here, this one is supposed to be as
humble as the movie.
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