Limbo

What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
-- Gerard Manley Hopkins

Thursday, May 27, 1999
One year ago: War Zone
Two years ago: Harvest of Sweetness

I'm glad to see the warmer weather coming. Today, for the first time, I wore one of the dresses I bought at the street fair the other week, with sandals and bare legs! I'm having to wash all these new dresses by hand before wearing them, to remove some of the excess dye from the rayon batik prints. (I'll wash by machine after this first time, though.) These fabrics are so great! It's one of the few reasons I wish I had a scanner here, to let you see the details. The dress I wore today was mostly dark mottled teal, with a vine/flower pattern that blended from pale green to purple.

Because of special programming at the film festival tonight, lots of pass holders showed up for the five o'clock show at the Egyptian. I'd stopped at KFC for some food to sneak in -- eating fried chicken in the dark is an interesting sensation -- so I arrived a few minutes later than I planned, and was surprised to see the line extending much farther than usual. The very existence of the line wasn't normal -- I'd expected that pass holders would already have been admitted by twenty minutes before five.

People came to see the five pm show, an Iranian movie with no subtitles, so they'd be sure of their choice of seats for the second event, an interview with John Sayles and a screening of his latest feature.

• Dance of Dust
  (IMDB page for this film) This is one of those Iranian movies where there is almost no dialog. Poor people are ekeing out a living making mud bricks. The cinematography was good. The sound was too loud! When the children started calling to each other across the mud plain, it kept waking us up. I didn't grasp that the reason the little girl left at the end of the movie was because the coming of the rains meant that the brick-making season was over -- I had to glean this from the synopsis. I probably wouldn't have gone to this movie except to ensure a seat for the following feature, but it wasn't bad.

Between shows, as we were standing in the concession area, I ran into Jason, a PSS guy who had been working with our team this past winter. I didn't know he had a Platinum pass! So my film buddy A--- filled him in on some of the privileges that he should be taking advantage of.

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John Sayles was the special guest for this event. He's very popular with the festival crowd, ever since his first movie, Return of the Secaucus 7, in 1980. He's been at the festival six or seven times, at least, so he's very comfortable in Seattle.

They kicked off with a ten-minute clip from Lone Star, which showed Sayle's skill with editing, directing, and story-telling. Then we had a half-hour interview. Darryl MacDonald, festival director, was the interlocutor. Sayles talked about his film-making process, and how useful it is to work with the same folks over the years. He's built a repertory company like Bergman (my comparison, not his). Then the movie!

• Limbo
  (IMDB page for this film) There's something about Sayles films that I really enjoy. He gets points for stories that aren't predictable, but do grow out of the characters and their wants and needs. This one's about a singer, a single mom, who is performing some small-time gigs in Alaska, and a former fisher and pulpmill worker who has had some tragedies in his past. Lots of other interesting characters, as well. I really liked the process of the main couple getting together -- some really telling details. The other folks in the town are interesting, as well. The ending wasn't what I was expecting, but it was oddly satisfying and didn't drive me nuts.

There was a question and answer session after the movie. Someone asked what the reaction had been from the money people and distributers when they first encountered the film's ambiguous ending. Sayles said that he's not in the Woody Allen position of having a single secret copy of the script that only one top exec gets to read, so when Sony Screen Gems green-lighted the project, they knew what they were going to get and were fine with it. He also said that since the budget was nine million and they only spent eight, and since that's by far the least expensive project that sony/Screen gems made last year, they were happy and felt they got a bargain.

He talked about Alaska and how people come there to reinvent themselves. A lesbian couple was in the film (this came out from a compliment on how he's done well at depicting gay women) because he wanted to have some characters in an ongoing, successful relationship, and he wanted them to be newcomers, in process of proving themselves. Then he thought to himself, what could make them question, "Are we getting this attitude shown us because we are new, or because of ---?" and decided to have them be gay women as the X factor. I thought this was an interesting view into his creative story process.

He also spoke quite a bit about his cinematographer Haskell Wexler, and how the choices Wexler made brought out how close to the natural world you are in Alaska, even in the middle of a town.

I hung out on the sidewalk for a few minutes after the show, and took the bus up the hill with two other passholders, familiar faces but I don't know them. We speculated on upcoming festival movies and parties.