SIFF
From left: Ledoyen, Mouret, and Bel in Shall We Kiss?
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Seattle International Film Festival Continues through Sun., June 15. Tickets, schedule, and information: www.siff.net and 324-9996.
See our SIFF Guide 2008 for other stories, reviews, and full coverage throughout the fest.
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The title is from Goethe: "Rejoice, you the living...ere dark Lethe's sad wave wetteth thy fugitive foot." A trolley car in the film bears that underworld river's name for a destination, and everybody in this film by Swedish director Roy Andersson (Songs From the Second Floor) is destined to go there someday. But while they're still alive, he treats us to vignettes of these inherently hilarious humans, most of them caught in midstare by a becalmed camera and the greenish tinge of a world's last days. A disgruntled woman chases off her boyfriend and sits on a park bench, singing and complaining. A man recalls a nightmare in which he is condemned to fry for a tablecloth trick. My favorite vignette is one near the end, as a forlorn girl dreams of being a newlywed in her kitchen as the scenery mysteriously rolls by outside and wellwishers stop her and her guitar-playing groom for a sendoff on, as it turns out, a train. (NR) FRAKO LODEN Egyptian: 9:30 p.m. (Also: Pacific Place, 4 p.m. Fri., June 6.)
Mr. Big
Nina Shapiro's related news feature this week tells you all you need to know about the current appeal status of the notorious 1994 Rafay-Burns murder in Bellevue. It's occasioned by this new documentary by the former TV-journalist sister of Sebastian Burns, Tiffany Burns, who will likely be appearing at SIFF in support of her film. Don't expect her, however, to argue that Canadian citizen Sebastian is innocent of bludgeoning to death the three family members of Atif Rafay. She's a little too smart for that. Instead, Mr. Big attacks the supposedly coercive method by which the RCMP extracts confession by duress—the "Mr. Big" sting operation. Her film includes police videotape of the two (now convicted and imprisoned) killers as they shoot the shit and drink beers with the undercover Mounties who presented themselves as petty Vancouver mafiosi. A weird, breathtakingly unbalanced documentary, like something cut in half from one of the two comprehensive reports on CBS, with dissenting voices erased, Mr. Big omits all the presumably more damaging surveillance tapes. It completely elides the family dynamics of the Burnses—the son, who fancied himself a Nietzschean übermensch, wanting to be a filmmaker; the daughter who became a filmmaker to exonerate her brother. (Were they raised on VHS from the womb?) And the movie-centricity of the case becomes even more of a psycho-vortex. For an alibi, Rafay and Burns, a pair of college-age dudes, said they were out seeing The Lion King at the Factoria Cinemas. The Lion King? WTF? And the whole reason their crypto-confession was taped in Vancouver was because they were hoping to raise money to make their dream script, The Great Despisers, about a couple of Leopold-and-Loeb types falsely charged with murder. Then, freakier still, at their King County Court sentencing in the fall of 2004, Sebastian Burns delivered to the court what he thought was some kind Brando-Clift-Jimmy Stewart-worthy soliloquy, not a mea culpa at all (unlike Rafay), which lasted almost an hour. I would pay money to see the entire thing unedited, but the few seconds Tiffany Burns excerpts in Mr. Big (i.e., the least damning few seconds) are beyond bizarre—a tall, smart, well-spoken, and almost handsome (i.e. Canadian) guy delivering a stiff-armed, badly blocked, amateur theatrical version of, well, what he must've considered to be the Oscar-winning final scene from The Great Despisers. "With all due respect to jurors, the verdict was wrong," he says. "We've been tried and we've been convicted for something we didn't do." You can just tell—and all bad actors telegraph their thoughts this way—that he expects the court to burst into applause, the jurors to weep at their wrongheadedness, the cops (led by Ray Liotta) to lower their heads in shame, and the judge (played by Paul Newman), to firmly gavel the room to order, then declare, "This has been a terrible miscarriage of justice! I order Mr. Burns released immediately! And, as a form of restitution, I demand that the taxpayers fund his brilliant screenplay. And furthermore, I intend to make him my ward and give my consent for him to marry my granddaughter"—played by Jessica Alba—"who has been so patiently waiting outside the King County Jail every night, singing folksongs and baking muffins for her beloved incarcerated Sebastian." Mr. Big is only slightly less delusional than he is. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Harvard Exit: 7 p.m. (Also: SIFF Cinema, 4:30 p.m. Thurs., June 5.)
