Check out this pitch: “Why doesn’t Muni run more express buses?” and journalist 39 here will do the leg work to deliver the all of the juicy details we’re all interested in.


- thanks to Jeremy Toeman for the headsup

In other news, I was abandoned on my bus for 5 minutes while the driver went into a liquor store. Me, on the 49 articulated bus, while it’s running. I like the level of trust they have in me, ( I was engrossed in a Sudoku game) but this is pushing it a little far. Especially since the drive then goes one stop and yells “end of the line!”

It’s hard to know where to start with a film as rich as A Christmas Tale (trailer), which opens tonight, November 21^st at the Bridge Theater for an exclusive one-week run. It’s under consideration for one of France’s top film honors, the Louis Delluc prize, and no wonder: in two and a half hours that never drag or bore, director Arnaud Desplechin explores every aspect of a crazy dysfunctional family, and takes us on a journey that, for all its length, almost feels a bit too short.

The heart of the story is Junon (Catherine Deneuve) and Abel (Jean-Paul Roussillon), whose three adult children have been locked for years into a state of passive-aggressive feuding. Overshadowing their lives is the fate of their oldest child Joseph, who died of leukemia forty years earlier at the age of seven. When Junon develops the same disease — and there is a chance that one of her children may be able to donate marrow to save her life — they all return to the family home to be tested, and for the holidays. Merry Christmas!

It sounds like a depressing film — as Desplechin himself said of it, everything “in the scenario should scare a producer half to death” — but in fact it’s often quite hilarious, and all the tragedy is treated with a light touch that somehow doesn’t trivialize it. But in the end that’s very true to life. Add in the wonderful cast — Mathieu Almaric, Emmanuelle Devos, Hippolyte Girardot, and Chiara Mastroianni (the only actress I can’t stop thinking about and Deneuve’s real-life daughter) — and it’s a film you just can’t miss.

Desplechin visited San Francisco back in October to attend a screening of the film at the San Francisco Film Society’s French Cinema Now festival. We chatted in his hotel suite; his accommodations delighted him so much that he took us out onto the balcony to share the amazing view he had of downtown and the bay. We enjoyed a rich, wide-ranging discussion about this and his other films, about his process, his opinions about various films ranging from Fanny and Alexander to The Royal Tenenbaums to The Outsiders, his plans to make a film about the birth of hip-hop in France, and why he refuses to think about casting while working on a script — even if, as with the case of Catherine Deneuve in this film, there’s really nobody else who could do the role.

It’s a lengthy interview but well worth your time, if you’d like to get a glimpse into the mind of one of the finest directors working in France today. Full text after the jump.

You’re sometimes compared to Truffaut, but as I watched this film, I kept thinking of Fanny and Alexander. It was partly the Christmas holiday, but it was mainly how comprehensively this peels back the surface of one family’s life, and really explores the tensions between the individual family members.

Fanny and Alexander must be the one film I know by heart. For me it is the absolute Bible; everything that I love in cinema, is in that film. It was very important for me because, in a certain sense, I was its exact contemporary. It came out at exactly the right time, and I was exactly the right age to receive it. And it was extremely important for Eric Gautier [the DP] as well. So when we did our first film together, which was La vie des morts, we just used Fanny and Alexander because we knew it by heart. But when we started working on this film, for me it was too close because of the Christmas thing, so I didn’t allow myself to watch it again. I used three other films to escape from Fanny and Alexander.

What were those other films?

One was The Dead, the John Huston movie, because there’s a Christmas there too. But mainly I was in love with two movies that were released the same year in France. One was Saraband, the last Ingmar Bergman movie, and the second one was The Royal Tenenbaums.

No kidding! Well, I can certainly see the connections there.

Yes. And I really fell in love with the two films. They were so close. To me they both had the same plot. You have one divorce, one suicide, you have one family, trapped in a house.

One is funny but it’s not that funny. Mainly the Anderson movie is about despair, like all of his movies, and the other one — you could say, because Bergman was the director, that it’s not funny, it’s threatening, there is incest … and I was thinking, am I the only person who sees these two films and sees how much they have in common? And I thought that my film could be the thing that these two films share.

Okay, you mentioned La vie des morts, and of course that was the film of yours that I kept thinking of, because obviously, in both films, the threat of an impending death draws a fragmented family together into one physical space. Was this film a way to have another go at that material?

Well, yes. When I brought my first sketches of this to the producer, I felt a little embarrassed because, you know, it’s a little silly, I already did this, and it was kind of a trick to do it twice, just with brand-new materials. The structure of it, I mean — come on. It’s a house, it’s a family, they’re attracted there. But the producer really responded to it. In a way, it wasn’t entirely pleasant for me. Much like Fanny and Alexander, La vie des morts was something I wanted to keep out of my mind.

This is a rather somber drama, but there’s also a great deal of humor in it. And wherever there is alienation and hatred in the family, there is also tenderness and love. Junon has this wonderful line: “Thanks to my disease, we’re being reunited.” Did you consciously try to strike a balance between melancholy and humor?

Not really. I’d say it’s worse than balance, it’s something much deeper than that.

First of all, everything that is in the scenario should scare a producer half to death. I mean listen to me, “it’s actually a family with a dead kid, plus the mother is dying, and her grandson is going crazy and tries to kill himself, plus the sister and the brother hate each other’s guts, and these three couples are just moved by despair and brutality.” It’s a story with despair, death, failure, lack of money, suicide.

So how can one transform this material into something that would be pure enjoyment? You know, to transform all the things that, on a narrative level, would seem to be a burden, and to transform this burden into energy.

Really the first sketch I showed the producer was that quote from Emerson, the opening lines, being said by the father in the graveyard. He’s speaking of the death of his young kid, who was seven years old. The point of those lines is: my son has died, but I feel no sorrow, he’s just like a leaf falling from the tree. It’s just so cruel, it’s so brutal, but I knew it would be good material for an actor because it has such poetic strength. It became a kind of quest to create a character who would be capable of saying such a thing.

So here you find the narrative principle of the movie: the father is not denying the fact that his son is dead; he is contesting the value of sorrow.

What we usually think is that the gentle parts of life won’t teach you anything, but that the brutal parts will. Sadness or suffering or cancer or suicide, they all teach me things about life, and the gentle part teaches you nothing. But the father is saying: no, no — I contest sorry, I contest death. I think laughter has more value than weeping.

Obviously this is absurd. That’s why, I guess the family is so sick, because this contestation becomes the moral principle of the family. It’s a family that contests the value of sorrow.

Do you think that’s because otherwise their sorrows would overwhelm them?

I suppose so. For sure for the father, because you can see that he can’t spend a day without thinking about his lost son. I guess all the rest of the family forgot him, but for the father, well … you see photos of the son on the table, on the bed, everywhere, the father can think of nothing else. But — he contests the value of sorrow.

Told you it was worse than mere balance!

Where did this image of the wolf come from? It’s such an effective way to remind the audience of all these sorrows hanging over the family. The hallucination, the story about the wolf in the basement, and so on.

Well, there’s always stories like that in families, and in people’s houses. But it’s true what you say, the wolf represents sorrow, the cancer, and all that. But at the same time it represents a kind of power that the grandson is attracted to. There’s a scene I like very much, when the young man looks at his reflection in the mirror, and when he says, if I donate my bone marrow, I might kill my grandmother. There’s a feeling of power he gets from that, and even enjoyment. “This could make me an adult, and I could even be as nasty as my uncle!” And so that wolf, the image of that wolf, it’s an ambiguous image for the young man, in his episodes of madness.

It’s both an omen and a promise.

Yes, that’s right, exactly. It exists in both senses.

Many of these actors have worked with you before. Did you have casting in mind as you developed the script?

I forbid myself to think about that question while writing. Otherwise I’d be certain to restrict the role, to bend the role around my preconception of what that actor could do. If I think I’m writing for Mathieu [Almaric], for example, it will restrain the part.

You know that scene where he’s walking along drunk and he’s mumbling all that obscene, weird stuff? When I wrote that I thought, Mathieu won’t be able to act this. So I wrote a second text that I thought would be easier to do. So on the third day of shooting I said to him, let’s do the new text because the old one would just be too weird. And he looked at me almost with tears in his eyes and said: “But I can play it. Let me play it.” He was so sad, because I was trying to restrict the role according to this idea I had about him.

This was so even with Deneuve. That character is an older woman, and you know, there just aren’t that many French actresses, of her caliber, at her age. So the producer said of this character, “Deneuve, for sure.” But I said, “forget it.” Deneuve can play perhaps this, that, or the other, but not this role. And so we worked very dilligently to find five other possible actresses for that role. After we did all that, we were looking at all the photos we had up there on the board, and when the producer saw it he just laughed, saying, “obviously, it’s still going to be Deneuve.” In the end, she came by the producer’s office on some other business, and before she left she said to him, “I hear that Mr. Desplechin is making a film and he needs an actress, may I give you my photo?” So we called her the next day. But we did all the other stuff before that!

What’s next for you?

I have two little embryonic sketches that I’m working with. One I’m sure I’ll use is — you know this new American genre of films set in the 1980s? They evoke the 80s and the feeling of 80s films — late 70s, early 80s. And recently I saw a film set in the early 90s, it was called The Wackness. It was okay. I saw the trailer of it and thought it would be great, then I saw the movie and thought it was a little lazy.

Even so, I thought it would be really interesting to try to adapt that kind of genre to a French setting, and the birth of hip-hop in France. Because we are actually the only country outside the USA where hip-hop is so strong. And why? Yes, a lot of French hip-hop is made by North Africans, and black Africans, but also by a lot of white people, and it’s — so you see, it really belongs to everybody. And I would love to show this moment of its history.

You remember The Outsiders, the old Coppola movie? I recently saw the new editing of it. It’s a little bizarre because, it’s an 80s film, but it’s this revival of the 50s in the 80s.

I’d forgotten about that movie. I haven’t seen it since I was 14!

Well, don’t see it again, because now you are too old for it. You would be a little embarrassed by some of the writing, sometimes it’s just — well. The cast is amazing. But the idea I have is, this bunch of young people during the 80s, you know, at the very birth of this music that we don’t always understand, because it’s so bizarre and political, and has drug dealers and gangs and so on. So what I was a little disappointed by in The Wackness, what I missed there, I would love to try and create that.

There’s another aspect to this. One of my first films was a spy story. I was really young then, and I had certain views about the cinema. I’d like to do something like that again, but in the meantime we’ve seen all these impossibilities become reality: September 11th, a united Europe. I’d like to go back and revisit that genre, in light of the impossible having taken place. You could say that I’d like to find some way to acknowledge September 11th from Europe. You know, it’s so difficult to tell a big story about the state of the world, but it should be possible for me to find a way to make a personal statement about the way things have changed.

And the hero will be a girl. That much I know!

[Translation from the French, where necessary, by myself and Don McMahon.]

Bill O’Reilly Smear from Huffington Post.

Great quotes that have been getting attention on some discussion groups:

“You wouldn’t go to the Presidio at night, I wouldn’t” - Bill
“Every city has a tenderloin, and North Beach is San Francisco’s” - Bill
“Lots of dopes everywhere. Those clinics are everywhere.” - Bill

[Image from Black Sea.]

Another one of the many, many film festivals of late November, the San Francisco Film Society’s New Italian Cinema series continues at the Embarcadero Cinema tonight through Sunday, November 23^rd. If you haven’t been to any of the films since it started Sunday, don’t fret: you’ve only missed three out of the twelve features that comprise the festival. So don’t write it off!

There are a number of good-to-great films in the lineup, as KQED’s Michael Fox reports here. The films for this afternoon and evening include two that Fox reviews: A Night at 4:30, and Cover Boy: The Last Revolution at 6:15. (Each has another screening on the 22^nd and the 23^rd, respectively.) Don’t miss Black Sea, pictured above, which screens at 7:00 on Friday and Saturday night.

Above all, don’t miss the closing night reception on Sunday from 7:30 in the former Gallery One space of One Embarcadero. The reception offers “complimentary Peroni beer, wine from Siena Imports and delicious appetizers from Fuzio Universal Bistro,” and it will be followed by a screening at 8:45 by a film I’ve been advised no one should miss: Gomorrah, a “hyper-realistic drama” based on Robert Saviano’s groundbreaking expose by the same name: “far from the glamorized portrait of the Mafia common in American films, Gomorrah is grim, gritty, almost documentary-like cinema—an exposé of widespread corruption and an impassioned demand that something be done to halt its spread.”

In other words, if you are weak of stomach, don’t hit the Peroni too hard before viewing this one. But don’t skip it, either.

Full schedule here; all films screen at the Embarcadero Cinema, in Embarcadero One. Advance tix here.

[Ai Qin Lin in Ghosts]

Nick Broomfield has directed 24 films, almost all of them investigative documentaries of one sort or another, some of them lightly fictionalized. Ghosts [trailer], which opens at the Roxie this Friday night, is in the latter group. It follows the story of Ai Qin, a young woman from Fujian province who pays a snakehead $25,000 to be smuggled into the UK. Once she finally gets there, she finds herself trapped in a situation where she has to do the worst jobs almost without respite. Her ordeal comes to a climax when she gets trapped by the rising tide with a crew of Chinese cocklers in Morecambe Bay, and nearly drowns there — as did twenty-three of her fellow workers. The film is based on Ai Qin’s actual journey, and all of the people who appear in it are non-actors who either were formerly, or currently still are, illegal immigrants. It’s a fascinating and moving film.

Last Friday we had a chance to sit down with Mr. Broomfield and talk about Ghosts a little bit. We discussed the undercover research he did, the unique challenges he faced in casting and working with non-actors, and the relief fund he has set up to aid the families of the victims at Morecambe Bay, since they are still liable to ruthless loan sharks for the huge debts the victims incurred in order to be smuggled to the UK. As Broomfield told me, “the family left behind in China, which is generally the very old and their children, are held as hostages, as a kind of surety for the loan. So if they default, they take it out on the family. It’s been known for them to get the kids and sell the kids, do awful stuff. So the people in England, they’re just literally working around the clock to fulfill these things, and they’ll do any job that comes along.”

The interview begins below and continues after the jump.

SF METBLOG: So, this film is something of a minor departure for you: it’s a narrative film, but it’s based on a great deal of hard research. How did you approach the research?

BROOMFIELD: Well, I personally worked undercover for a couple of weeks, living in a Chinese house. I was pretending to be an Afrikaner, because you get Afrikaners who do that kind of thing. Ai Qin and I paid some kind of introductory fee to these snakeheads, and they gave us the name of a gangmaster in Birmingham.

So we went up there and lived in this house for a couple of weeks. It was like ten people to a room, and we’d get up at 4:30 in the morning. It was very hard work. But I was able to at least get a basis to work from, first-hand knowledge of what the people were like and what the work was like, and to try and make something that was as real as possible.

[In addition] I had some Chinese students working for me. We’d go undercover and get statistics such as how much they were being paid per hour, how much tax they were having to pay the [recruitment agency], because they have all these recruitment agencies, these labor agencies, that are also very corrupt. [Certain individuals who worked there] would charge people some 42% tax, and they’d just pocket the money themselves. I wanted to document that kind of stuff as much as possible, and also to be able to name some of the people who were doing it, which we did in the film.

Really? I didn’t realize that. I assumed that all the individuals apart from Ai Qin were invented.

Some of them are real. And obviously the supermarkets — Tesco’s, Saintsburys — that was all based on first-hand experience. We were able to prove that all these things were happening.

I read that you picked onions for Tesco’s, posing as an Afrikaner.

I did, and afterwards you’d stink like a spring onion, because you’d get all this onion under your fingernails. It’s very hard work. You have to pick so many spring onions to make like two quid, about four bucks. They’re very exacting, actually. You have to put eight spring onions into a bundle, and then you have to cut the roots off, you have to strip the first layer of the spring onion down, and you have to cut the tops off so they’re all [the same length], and then you have to put them in a rubber band. And then I think you had to get 45 bunches per box, something like that. You were paid by the box, and it would take really a long time to get a box done.

One of the most interesting things about this film, for me, is that you used only non-actors who had been through that life, and in fact a large number of illegal immigrants were in it.

Yes. The casting was done with great care, to find people who were very close to the characters in the script. And then to allow those people to bring some of their experiences to the film. Ai Qin, who is the lead in the film, had a journey very similar to that, and left her son behind in China. We met her through the Chinese church in King’s Cross, as the pastor there helped a lot of the illegal immigrants. She was working as a waitress. She didn’t even want to be in the film! At first she thought we were going to make a porn film.

We would wander around Chinatown trying to find people, and of course they all thought we were mad. No one really wanted to be in the film. It was kind of soul-destroying. We ended up having to put adverts in Chinese papers and do stuff over Chinese radio.

One of the difficulties, if you don’t want to cast in a normal way, is that all the casting agents are set up with books of actors with their head shots and so on. You’re throwing all of that away by saying “actually, we want real people.” In the end we got a casting director who specialized in getting non-actors, and it became much easier from there.

How did you come to the initial decision to use only non-actors? Even though some of the performances were not very polished, it had a very powerful overall effect. Many of them were just sort of reciting their lines, but it was clear that they were drawing upon these deep reserves of feeling and experience.

Well, I was determined to make something that really felt real and authentic. And we probably wasted a lot of time doing really desperate and crazy things, like trying to cast the film in Chinatown. But I was convinced that I could get a much more powerful performance from these real people, in the way that you do in a documentary, if you can get through to people’s emotions and experiences, [than I could get from professional actors].

Also, we pretty much re-created what it was like to be a Chinese illegal. They all actually lived in that house where we filmed. And they all got very used to being with each other all the time, and they would provide their own food, and Mr. Yu [the gangmaster] would drive them around in that van. That was their transport. So they were pretty much actors within that environment. That was their environment. So when we filmed in the house, I think they felt very secure, because that’s where they were, it’s where they lived. It would be very different if the house were seen as a set. So I think that’s why the scenes actually feel real, because they really did have this kind of camaraderie.

And of course, you also get certain people who are very natural actors, like Mr. Yu, who was the gangmaster.

He was just wonderful.

He was very good, and he was a natural actor, and he loved it. He had never really done any acting. I think maybe he had done some at school. But he loved doing it, and whenever the scene was flagging, I would push him in, and he’d always come up with something. And I think he and Ai Qin were very good together. I mean, there were other performances that, particularly with some of the British people, that I didn’t think were so good, and I cut a lot of people out.

So the British people were also non-actors, like the guy with the rings on all his fingers?

That guy — he was such a natural guy. All those rings, those were his.

Seriously?

Yeah. It was pretty incredible. Because I do think that reality is stranger than fiction. Most of the time. And I think that the trouble too is that, if you have a non-actor next to an actor, the actors always feel so false. You get these big performances from the actors. For example, on the next film I did, The Battle for Haditha, I had this sort of well-known American actor, and I tried to cast him as a Marine with these other real Marines, or ex-Marines, and the two just would not fit.

Like they didn’t belong on the same screen.

They didn’t! They were like, one felt totally real and the other felt like he was giving a performance.

What kind of research did you do in China?

One of the first things we did was we go and meet the families of some of the victims, and in one case, there were two children who had lost both their mother and their father at Morecambe Bay. And they were being brought up by the village, and the village would aggregate their money. And it was just terrible.

Were they being predated upon by these loan sharks?

Yes, they were. They were.

How is the relief fund doing?

We’ve raised about $200,000, which is not bad, considering that we haven’t done any charitable auctions for it. But we need to raise about $750,000 altogether. So we have a ways to go. The difference between what we’re doing and most charities is that 100% of the money goes to China. We don’t charge anything for running it, we just throw our time into it to make it work.

Best detail in the Chronicle’s story: A 20-year-old cat, Paws, was saved by a 19-year-old man, a resident of the flat.

The ballot initiative to fund a BART extension to San Jose may have squeaked by, KNTV was reporting this afternoon. Though initial balloting showed the measure falling short of the required two-thirds majority, mail-in ballots are turning the tide.

With 17,000 of 42,000 mail-in ballots still to be counted, the vote to fund the 22-mile BART extension with a 1/8-cent Santa Clara County sales tax was 66.61 percent yes; the measure, like any tax increase in California since the 1978 passage of Proposition 13, requires at least a 66.67 percent yes vote.

If the Bart-to-San Jose tax passes, it would complete a surprising trifecta of voter support for mass transit projects at a time when local and state budgets are tight. Earlier this month, voters in Marin and Sonoma Counties passed a rail initiative, and statewide Proposition 1A also passed, kicking off the state’s bullet train project.

Meanwhile CNet links to who’s firing, who’s hiring.

I wonder if the folks at TheStreet.com followed the advice they printed last month about layoff do’s and don’ts.

Friday a 47-year-old engineer who had been canned earlier in the week allegedly killed his company’s CEO, the operations VP, and the HR lady, before fleeing. Yesterday police arrested Jing Hua Wu, former test engineer at a semiconductor company called SiPort Inc. and were holding him in the Santa Clara County jail pending arraignment on three murder charges.

Update: An earlier version of this post implied that the alleged shooter might have snapped after being laid off. But a recent report on Valleywag states the suspect was fired, and that the company has never laid people off. A report on KCBS radio Monday morning said the suspect was fired for poor performance, though a profile on the station’s website still says he was laid off.

I think the second (okay, well, third) weekend in November should be officially declared San Francisco’s Too Damn Many Film Festivals All At Once Weekend. Like a complete chump, I forgot to post about one of them in time for the opening: 3rd I South Asian Film Festival, which is pretty much how it sounds. This is their sixth time out. Check out the schedule here, and get your tickets here.

Tonight’s feature, screening at 8:30 PM, is called Kissing Cousins, and if I didn’t have a prior engagement, I’d drive out to the Brava tonight just to gaze at Rebecca Hazlewood on screen (pictured above with Samrat Chakrabarti at left) for 99 minutes. Although such devotion might be a little weird, since she’ll be there, along with producer Manish Goyal and director Amyn Caderali, one of the Bay Area’s own. Here’s the story, as told by Christopher Au:

Amir (Chakrabarti) is a professional heartbreaker. Except, he hasn’t dated any of the unfortunate souls with whom he breaks up—he’s just the hired messenger who bears the bad news. And for an additional fee, he can even get your stuff back! As his friends begin to couple up, get married and settle into new homes, they wonder if bachelor Amir will ever let his hardened heart fall in love.

When Amir’s gorgeous British cousin Zara (Rebecca Hazlewood, ER) visits him in Los Angeles, she fools his friends into thinking that she’s his girlfriend. But as Amir spends more time with Zara, she opens him up to feelings that have lay dormant for far too long. How long can they keep up this ruse of faux-love? Or will they become more than “just cousins”?

The rest of the schedule is pretty great too: it includes a wide range of documentaries; a screening of Om Shanti Om; A Throw of Dice, which is a 1929 silent film involving eastern splendor and torrid passions (what else?); and most irresistably, Hell’s Ground, which is best described as a Pakistani zombie flick: “They should have listened to the warnings of the creepy old guy at the chai stand a few miles back.” Yesssssss.

Oh yeah, they’re also playing the totally ignored, poorly covered Slumdog Millionaire on Sunday night at the Castro Theatre. Tickets are a bargain at $9 a show.