Aruba Fest spotlights movies about movies

Claudio Masenza, the director of the Aruba International Film Festival, is not only a journalist and consultant to the Venice and Rome Film Festivals, he’s also the writer-director of several documentaries on Hollywood icons like Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando and Alfred Hitchcock. Which may explain why there are several documentaries in the 2012 Aruba lineup about films and filmmakers.

With Aruba’s Dutch heritage, it should come as no surprise that two of those movies center on Dutch auteurs. On Sunday night, the fest screened Anton Corbijn Inside Out, an intimate portrait of the photographer and pioneering music-video director who graduated to feature films with the acclaimed Control and the George Clooney thriller The American. The taciturn, introspective Corbijn opens up about his emotionally withholding parents to director Klaartje Quirlijns; for him, salvation came from rock music, and before long he was photographing iconic images of icons like Mick Jagger, Miles Davis and Iggy Pop (naked in Central Park!). The next step was striking music-videos for the likes of Nirvana, U2 and Depeche Mode, and then his logical feature debut was Control, about troubled Joy Division leader Ian Curtis (whom he once photographed). Featuring excerpts from his classic videos and appearances by U2’s Bono, Lou Reed, Metallica and Arcade Fire, Inside Out (with a great Dolby Surround mix) offers a strong case for Corbijn’s talent and influence, despite his glum onscreen persona.

A much livelier filmmaker is Holland’s Pim de la Parra, the outspoken subject of In-Soo Radstake’s entertaining doc Parradox. A true bad boy of Dutch cinema whose films often feature graphic nudity (one of his actors complains, “You were usually naked by page three”), de la Parra made an artistic breakthrough with his 1976 comedy-drama Wan Pipel (One People), also screened in a restored print at the festival and reported on in our Monday blog post. But, with its black central character and its tale of racial culture clashes in Suriname, the film was a commercial flop and coincided with money woes at de la Parra’s production company and the end of his marriage. But de la Parra pressed on, pioneering “minimal movies” done on very low budget. (“Why not? Holland is a minimal country,” he argues.)

This volatile, immodest but utterly charming filmmaker lays his life bare for director Radstake, even orchestrating a reunion with Willeke van Ammelrooy, the Dutch star of Wan Pipel who’s been brooding for decades over his cruel treatment of her during the making of that film. In a unique ploy, Radstake actually films de la Parra watching the unfinished documentary, laughing and crying in close-up—scenes that are then included in the completed documentary. Despite its warts-and-all portrait, de la Parra seemed delighted with Parradox at last night’s Aruba screening.

The Aruba schedule also includes Laurent Bouzereau’s Roman Polanski: A Film Memoir (unfortunately, the print had not arrived for yesterday’s first screening), and Hollywood Invasion, a one-hour assemblage of NBC news reports on Hollywood’s love affair with Europe, from the 1959 making of Ben-Hur through epics like Cleopatra and Clint Eastwood’s spaghetti westerns. Though essentially cobbled together, the doc does offer rare glimpses of some movie icons in their prime, with Sophia Loren winning Miss Congeniality.

Last night also saw the first screening here of James Franco’s Sal, his recreation of the last day in the life of Rebel Without a Cause star Sal Mineo, who was murdered at the age of 37 outside his apartment building in 1976. Those expecting more than a mundane slice of life will be streaming for the exits—Franco shows Mineo exercising at the gym, getting a massage, playing with his neighbor’s dog, rehearsing his play P.S. Your Cat Is Dead and making phone calls asking friends to come to opening night. But the film does have a sense of authenticity for the period and what this then-struggling gay actor’s daily routine was like, and actor Val Lauren, never off-screen, is surprisingly persuasive.