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The San Sebastian Film Festival
| Article
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17376 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1990 |
1,418 Words |
| Author
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Lawrence O'Toole
Lawrence O'Toole writes for Entertainment Weekly and other
national publications. |
San Sebastian, the jewel of the northern coast of Spain - the Basque Coast - is a perfect setting for just about anything, but especially a film festival. What better activity than to watch a good film and then reflect upon it on one of the city's extraordinary beaches?
Still, any film festival is, finally, as good as the films it shows, and all of San Sebastian's charms cannot obscure what was essentially a dull and sometimes irritating festival last September. What was best about the festival were the old films, notably a retrospective of films by directed James (Frankenstein) Whale and works by noted directors, from Carl Theodor Dreyer to Orson Welles, not intended for feature showing but for television, industrial films, or commercials,
The thirty-seventh festivals opened with Jim McBride's Great Balls of Fire starring Dennis Quaid as rocker Jerry Lee Lewis, hardly an inspired choice. If San Sebastian wants to attract an international audience, and especially a North American or British one, it is going to have to come up with something fresher than the Lewis bio, which had long ago opened to lukewarm reviews and dismal box office. It wasn't an art film; one still wonders what it was doing there.
The festival would have done much better to open with Tim Burton's tense and tenebrous Batman, which did show in the Official Section but, like Great Balls of Fire, was not in competition. Batman is one of the handful of blockbusters in movie history that is actually an art film, so it would have made some sense to open with it.
Rambunctious Comedy
Of the films I saw in the Official Section, which attempts to be a cross section of the films made worldwide in any single year (God help us all), only the festival closer, Jon Amiel's rambunctious comedy about being Italian and British at once, Queen of Hearts, and True Love, Nancy Savoca's equally rambunctious comedy about being Italian and living in the Bronx, evinced any real charm or distinction.
One also had to admit that Eversmile New Jersy, exotically set in Patagonia, was a true curiousity. Eccentric is the only fitting word to describe dentist Daniel day Lewis' odyssey (by motorcycle) through the arid landscapes attempting to raise the dental consciousness of the population. You can't help but have warm feelings toward this film, directed by Argentinean Carlos Sorin, while wondering
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