SIFF Week 4: Picks & Pans

Wednesday, June 11

Fields of Fuel

Apparently this documentary got a standing O at the Beverly Hills Film Festival earlier this year, but Fields of Fuel is likely not going to bring folks to their feet in greenie Seattle, where nearly every month there's a new place to fill up your car with old French-fry grease. However, though Australian director Joshua Tickell will be preaching to the choir in these parts, it's still a sermon with relevance. The wide-ranging eco-doc chronicles Tickell's discovery of biofuel on a trip to Europe and his subsequent cross-country U.S. tour by van. En route, he tries to persuade people to grow their gas rather than relying on the petroleum resources of unstable nations. Fields rambles on from war to refineries to Hurricane Katrina to the Bush family. You won't hear much about the downside of biofuels or the food-for-fuel debate—but, yes, there is the obligatory cameo by Willie Nelson. (NR) AIMEE CURL Harvard Exit: 7 p.m. (Also: 4:30 p.m. Thurs., June 12.)

The Girl by the Lake

Like Prime Suspect in Italian, one could watch a lot of TV criminal investigations under the acute, weary eye of Inspector Sanzio (Toni Servillo). The emphasis here isn't on shootouts, car chases, or C.S.I.-style forensics, but rather the slow conglomeration of character and detail. Sanzio's wife is in a nursing facility with Alzheimer's. His teen daughter ignores his fatherly advice. In the small village where he's called up from Udine to investigate the drowning of a beautiful teen athlete (a kind of double to his daughter), the local yokels hardly appear dangerous. ("This is the season of the snake," says the village idiot usefully; however, no snakes are in sight.) Based on the Norwegian crime novel by Karin Fossum, Girl by the Lake is an extremely well-edited, smartly paced procedural. That said, director Andrea Molaioli dawdles too much in the details and pathologies beneath the postcard scenery (northeast Italy, near the Dolomites, looks like Switzerland). Besides Sanzio's wife's dementia, there's cancer, autism, infidelity, and paralysis beneath the surface idyll. Catching the killer ultimately seems less a resolution than an invitation to watch the next episode. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Uptown: 9:30 p.m. (Also: 7:15 p.m. Sat., June 14.)

Perfect Match . . .

You've seen Perfect Match... if you've ever seen any romantic comedy before, but that doesn't prevent it from being charming and entertaining. Upper-crust Hélène, an academic who writes books on class prejudice, meets Valentin, a homeless movie projectionist squatting in the apartment next door. They hate each other at first, of course, but not for long. Carole Bouquet and Marc Lavoine share wonderful chemistry as the two. Yet Florence Foresti steals the movie as Hélène's neurotic sister Roseline, a difficult task when she's up against both a precocious child and an adorable cat. The film works because the storytelling is so natural. It also manages to explore homelessness in a serious way that's not cloying or sluggish. There are no plot machinations or forced gags here, just a sweet tale of two unlikely people falling in love, however predictable it may be. (NR) FRANK PAIVA Uptown: 7 p.m. (Also: 9:30 p.m. Thurs., June 12.)

Salawati

On film and in person, Singapore is downright dull compared to Hong Kong. A highly paternalistic government keeps a tight lid on the ordered and generally prosperous population. Yet that population is fascinatingly divided, like Salawati's story. A 12-year-old ethnic Malay girl, Salawati, tries to cope with the accidental drowning death of her older brother. (She belongs to a close, grief-stricken Muslim family.) Meanwhile a Hindi-speaking Indian barfly hangs out with his buddies at a motorcycle courier service. During which time a hard-working Chinese insurance salesman ignores his wife and child for the sake of his next big account. They're all related somehow, and debut writer-director Marc X. Grigoroff does his best to tease out the suspense concerning a fatal day at the beach. Unfortunately, the interweaving and flashbacks are paced way behind the guesswork of any average SIFFgoer. Someone's to blame, and someone needs forgiveness. We're ahead of Grigoroff, and his young heroine, from the start. The film never catches up. Salawati is told in four languages (English among them), suggesting what a complicated patchwork Singapore comprises. If the lid ever comes off, some good movies might boil out. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Pacific Place: 7 p.m. (Also: 4:30 p.m. Fri., June 13.)

Villa Jasmin

Shot for French TV, the flashback-heavy tale of Tunisian Jews before World War II has enough colorful history that it might've worked back in the Miramax '90s with Nicolas Cage cast in dual roles as the socialist father lobbying against prewar colonial rule, and as the sensitive writer son who returns to his boyhood home to indulge in endless flashbacks. And I mean endless. Nothing makes sense here unless you assume the son (Clémant Sibony) is visiting Tunis during the '70s (no dates are given). Henry confusingly rechristens himself Serge to honor his late father (Anaud Giovaninetti), a crusading journalist and Freemason during the '30s, who, despite being sent to the Nazi concentration camps, conceived Serge II during the '50s. (Most films would use the Holocaust for suspense, not tell us who survived.) Serge I woos the mother of Serge II. Serge II's wife is pregnant with Serge III. Serge II is uncomfortable identifying himself as Jewish, while Serge I refuses to compromise his ethnicity. Oh, and the ancestral villa smells of jasmine, which Serge II sniffs from across the Mediterranean. And like Hamlet and his father's ghost, eventually Serge I and II meet to discuss their relationship. This would be fine on stage, but I don't recall Hamlet ever hugging his ghost daddy to reassure him this whole Holocaust thing will soon be over. (There's no hugging allowed in French movies!) Otherwise, the women are gorgeous and Tunis ain't bad either. And if I ever have a son, I won't name him Serge. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Egyptian: 9 p.m. (Also: Harvard Exit, 9:30 p.m. Sun., June 15.)

Thursday, June 12

Apollo 54