Rotterdam Film Festival 2009

At the Rotterdam Film Festival, Geoff Andrew hides in embarrassment from the British entries but finds nourishment in films from the rest of the world

The Rotterdam Film Festival is known for its diversity – for its international outlook and for embracing the unfamiliar alongside more established arthouse fare. While that variety wasn’t lacking this year, it was odd that of the 16 movies I caught, ten were concerned somehow with the fraught relationship between young people and parents.

Sadly, three British films failed to impress. The trendy young clubbers in Alexis Dos Santos’s sub-Godardian 'Unmade Beds' – about, allegedly, the experiences of foreigners in London – were too insufferably cute and self-absorbed to hold the interest, while the late ’70s Merseyside football hooligans in Pat Holden’s 'Awaydays' were unappealing for very different reasons: not just their tribal machismo, but also because they’re too often clichéd and incoherent as characters. But neither title matched Simon Ellis’s 'Dogging: A Love Story' in its capacity to repel.

It’s not so much the subject (exhibitionistic sex in cars) that’s problematic as the approach: that teasing title barely hints at the stew of cynicism, sensationalism and slick sentimentality that fuels this manipulative stab at a romantic comedy-drama.

No need to explain why the parental characters in the latter two titles might be concerned about the paths their offspring might be taking. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Kazakhstan’s 'Together with My Father', Taiwan’s 'No Puedo Vivir Sin Ti' and India’s 'A Crime in Kerala' treated different anxieties, but were all, at best, minor. Garin Nugroho’s 'Under the Trees' offers remarkable moments in its interwoven stories of several women in Bali, but lacks the momentum of his ‘Opera Jawa’. More conventional but boasting a powerful turn from Hafsia Herzi (‘Couscous’) is Souaid El-Bouhati’s 'French Girl', in which a young woman raised in France is driven to revolt against her parents and the traditional mores of their Moroccan homeland.

Miguel Gomes’s 'Our Beloved Month of August' eventually focuses on a teenager’s collision with her father over her choice of boyfriend, but only after the story has emerged from a lengthy near-documentary first half charting a band’s tour around rural Portugal. It’s a funny, eccentric, intriguing and, if you’ve the patience, enjoyably inventive film – though not the masterpiece its advocates suggest.

In 'West of Pluto', Henry Bernadet and Myriam Verreault offer a likewise fruitful blend of fiction and reality to show a day in the life of a dozen teenagers in Quebec, but the film’s concision and lack of self-consciousness ensure it’s a more fully pleasurable and rewarding film than its Portuguese counterpart.

This and Alexei Balabanov’s 'Morphia' were the most impressive new films. ‘Morphia’ was adapted by the late Sergei Bodrov Jr from Bulgakov’s ‘Notebooks of a Country Doctor’, about a young Moscow medic starting at a rural hospital in 1917, and battling superstition, resources and his increasing addiction to morphine. Superb narrative assurance, painterly images and fine performances made this darkly comic, finally touching film quite compelling throughout.

Read David Jenkins's report from the festival

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