New Shorts

Headed for an executive career at his father’s behest, Xavier (Romain Duris) leaves France and his adorable girlfriend (Audrey Tatou) for a year in Barcelona via the university exchange program Erasmus. Taking a flat with six multinational roommates (hence the title, referring generally to "Europudding"), Xavier comes of age, as they say, under the watchful eye of Cédric Klapisch’s high-definition video camera. The action is whimsical, with layered images and split screens (a pile-on of forms he needs to fill out for the excursion cutely crowds characters out of the frame), speedy time-lapsing (denoting traffic, crowds, bureaucracy) and splashy colors (helped by the cluttered apartment and thrilling Gaudí edifices). Xavier’s process is erratic: He moons over his girlfriend, berates his hippie mom and, after learning to "appreciate" a woman from his lesbian Belgian roommate (Cécile De France), embarks on a lazy affair with a doctor friend’s beautiful but dim wife (Judith Godrèche). The film points out associations between commercial and cultural globalizations, but celebrates rather than laments the loss of fixed identities. Sweet, airy and occasionally a little too clever.--Cindy Fuchs (Ritz Five; Ritz 16)

Damian Pettigrew’s documentary, featuring an interview with il maestro conducted just a few months before his death in 1993, will be candy for Fellini freaks, but its appeal to others is needlessly limited by the failure to provide even the most basic onscreen information; the source of film clips and even the names of interview subjects are omitted. (The latter are provided at the end, but who can claim to know Italo Calvino or cameraman Giuseppe Rotunno on sight?) Despite Pettigrew’s genuflection before the image of Federico Fellini, auteur, dreamer, singular visionary, the most pungent passages in I’m a Born Liar concern collaborators who didn’t let him have his way: particularly actors Donald Sutherland (Casanova) and Terence Stamp (the short Toby Dammit). "Puppets are happy to be puppets if the puppeteer is a good puppeteer," Fellini winks, but Sutherland and Stamp unload horror stories of arduous productions, albeit with grudging respect. ("The first five weeks were hell on earth," Sutherland says of Casanova’s shooting, but hints that an understanding may have developed after all.) If only Pettigrew had challenged his subject as Sutherland or Stamp did, I’m a Born Liar might have developed into more than a well-constructed shrine. --Sam Adams (Ritz Five)

In Toronto last fall, you could actually hear the rarely experienced phenomenon of "buzz" at work; everywhere you went, people seemed to be talking about Spellbound, to which their audience would inevitably reply, "Spelling bees?" Maybe spelling champions were the kids even the nerds made fun of, but Jeff Blitz’s piercing, engaging documentary finds that the American dream is alive and well, at least as far as the National Spelling Bee is concerned. Following eight children on their way to nationals, Blitz finds a true microcosm of American society, from the well-heeled New Haven family whose daughter all but expects to win to the recent immigrants from India who’ve tutored first one child and then the other in French and Spanish (in addition to Latin at school, of course), all in the hopes of mastering the art of spelling words no one’s ever heard of. ("Cephalalgia" comes up in the first round.) There’s enough drama on these kids’ faces to make for an epic miniseries, but Blitz ably boils it down in 95 minutes, elegantly interweaving stories once the big contest begins. Even at the end, Spellbound doesn’t falter; Blitz’s climax takes the emphasis off victory, pointing the way toward the post-orthographical future. --S.A.(Ritz Five; Ritz 16)

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April 21, 2005
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