Will French Film Festival widen local film horizons?
By Nicolas Colombant
JAKARTA (JP): Audience numbers are in from the second French film festival, and they are resoundingly positive.
The 4,000 attendance at last week's four-day, nine-movie fest at Graha Bhakti Budaya theater in the Taman Ismail Marzuki complex is proof enough there is a public for movie alternatives to the mainstream box office fodder.
Marthe, with Guillaume Depardieu as a wounded soldier during World War I and Clotilde Courau as his muse savior, won the public's prize for most popular movie. Augustin, the tale of an introvert who works four hours a day for an insurance company treating 300 coma patients every year, won the jury's prize from a panel of film students from the Jakarta Institute of Fine Arts.
For moviegoers seeking diverse flavors, the festival was a brief respite from the force-fed Hollywood diet distributed by the Studio 21 chain in glittering malls across the country. The emphasis is not on viewer's choice here, as these movie theaters usually carry the same titles at the same time, with five or six new releases on average every month.
Other movie theaters catering to the less privileged have resorted to screening locally produced soft porn -- with abysmal production values and the appearance of having been filmed in a day -- or their Hong Kong equivalents.
Slim pickings indeed for the picky movie aficionado. Take this week's celluloid offerings: Flubber, starring comic genius but occasionally tired Robin Williams (remember Jack?) in a remake of The Absent Minded Professor; the overblown The Jackal with matinee idols Bruce Willis and Richard Gere; Fire Down Below, notable because star Steven Seagal never has a bad hair day; and perennial princess Julia Roberts in My Best Friend's Wedding.
Big names, remakes and lines dull as ditch water are the pattern here. There is, of course, a wider selection of movies to choose from in most Glodok video stores, but the viewing experience is not the same and not everybody can afford a VCD player.
The best movies, the ones that are critically acclaimed and not intended merely to be accompanied by a laugh track or to increase the collective pulse rate of the audience, are missing in action. Independent movies, low-budget realism flicks, European and Asian masterpieces and cutting-edge films in which the director takes center stage, are few and far between.
Sure, Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction and From Dusk Till Dawn made it to local movie theaters, but what about his breakthrough, and much better, Reservoir Dogs, which was brilliantly worked around a budget shortage? Not considered mainstream, unfortunately.
The same goes for director David Lynch, Generation X movies such as Clerk, Reality Bites, El Mariachi, or Abel Ferrara's The Funeral, too out of bounds for profit-driven movie houses.
Hollywood is all about the final cut and the bottom line. In this framework, producers control the final cut, instead of directors, and marketers shape the product for Joe Average and to soothe the PC worries of their sponsors.
In Jakarta, the American Film Exporters Association works hand in hand with the Studio 21 group to control the world's 15th biggest motion picture market. The souped-up sure bets are served alongside the occasional bust, exiled abroad to cut losses based on the assumption that foreign moviegoers will go see anything as long as it gleams with the Tinseltown logo.
This blinkered focus blocks out quality movies from Asia, Europe and the Arab world, an odd situation for the capital of an archipelago at the crossroads of many cultures. Luminaries such as Hong Kong's Wong Kar Wai, Taiwan's Hou Hoi Sen, Japan's Shoei Imamura, Spain's Pedro Almodovar and Iran's Abbas Kiarostami are all unknowns among Jakarta audiences.
For European and Asian directors to make it to Indonesian audiences, they first have to take the commercial detour through Hollywood, such as Hong Kong's John Woo and France's Luc Besson. The results are not always satisfactory.
Woo has lost almost all of his bite, making sappy and predictable movies to please his American creditors. Besson has shied away from his silently eerie style after crossing the Atlantic. When French movies do make it to Studio 21 theaters, it is invariably in the form of Hollywood remakes, adapted and watered down. This year's Little Indian, Big City is a case in point.
Film director Slamet Rahardjo welcomed the chance to see some authentic French filmmaking at the festival. "After receiving the bombardment of single-track information, of one single-track style of filming, I think this kind of opportunity can make us wake up from our own sleep.
"Indonesians must realize that there are other ways to express the feelings of human beings. For instance, does being frightened mean running away from a terminator? Maybe someone would run away because they are not ready to face a problem," Rahardjo explained, tongue-in-cheek.
Producer and member of the National Film Advisory Board, Budiati Abyoga, considered the assortment of movies a revelation that something must be done to break the status quo.
"We need to open up the distribution system," Abiyoga said. "This dominance of Hollywood movies is definitely narrow-minded. We are starting to think and dream like Americans. Hollywood movies catch people with a style of intense logic filmmaking, even if the plots are themselves illogical.
"At first, it feels that French movies are slow, but then you understand that you have been sidetracked by this semblance of speed in American movies."
A solution may lie with the European Cinema project, built on the strengths of the European Union's cultural budget. About 1,000 movies theaters both in European cities and outside have been allocated special funds to showcase non-Hollywood movies.
One of these is the Alkazar Theater in Istanbul, a metropolis where the cinematographic situation is much the same as in Jakarta. But on the Turkish city's Istiklal street, amid the shoeshine stalls, fast food joints, mosques and the fluorescent arcades, there is now a movie theater for finer viewing.