The Village Voice

Film
TRUTH BE TOLD
DENNIS LIM

06/08/1999

The Village Voice
(Copyright 1999 V V Publishing Company)

At the DGA Theater

Through June 6

There's a horrible timeliness to the two most striking works at this
year's 'docfest': The Valley, which unblinkingly chronicles a gory
Albanian-Serb face-off in Kosovo's Drenica Valley, and Hitman Hart:
Wrestling With Shadows, an improbably enthralling portrait of Bret
"Hitman" Hart, the most famous member of the all-wrestling
Canadian Hart clan, the youngest of whom, Owen Hart, was killed in
a freak accident on live TV less than two weeks ago.

British documentarian Dan Reed and his crew spent last summer in
war-torn central Kosovo with both Albanian and Serb factions,
crossing front lines at great personal risk. Told almost exclusively in
the words of the parties involved (often accompanied by sickening
images of burned-out villages and charred bodies), The Valley is an
admirably even-handed document, tunneling straight to the heart of
the intractable beliefs that have since festered into murderous
righteousness. Without ever attempting to make the conflict any less
complicated than it is, the film is more incisive and meticulous than
any written commentary or TV news report could hope to be.

Wrestling With Shadows, arguably the most deftly constructed work
here, follows one painful year in the life of Hitman Hart--a year in
which the superstar wrestler grapples with the waning popularity of his
good-guy persona, butts heads with creepy World Wrestling
Federation honcho Vince McMahon, and ultimately, in his final WWF
match, is thwarted by a dramatic double-cross. It's a morality tale that
would be too pat were it scripted (indeed, the Hart family itself--gruff,
seemingly sadistic patriarch, resigned mother, eight pro-wrestling
sons, and four daughters married to wrestlers--is a phenomenon
beyond fiction). Director Paul Jay alternately underplays the Hitman's
borderline-surreal dilemmas and exploits them for maximum drama.

The result is fascinating, affording access to an existence so fake it's
real.

Opening and closing night offerings are somewhat lighter. The
festival kicks off tonight at the BAM Rose Cinemas with Roko and
Adrian Belic's Genghis Blues, which follows blind San
Francisco--based blues musician--self-taught throat-singer Paul Pena
on a trip to the central Asian nation of Tuva, where he takes part in an
interna-tional throat-singing competition. Overnarrated and
amateurish in spots, the film gets by on the sheer charisma of its
subject. (As with Hitman, there's a sad footnote--Pena was recently
diagnosed with cancer.)

Sunday's closing night film, Jesper Jergil's The Humiliated--a
behind-the-scenes look at The Idiots, Lars von Trier's film
(supposedly the first shot under Dogma rules) about a group of
young people who engage in "spassing" (pretending to be
retarded)--does little to suggest that the manifesto is much more than
an elaborate prank. In any case, the documentary's most valuable
insights are less concerned with the experimental filmmaking process
than with the director's enormously self-absorbed insecurity (which
may be affected or real, but is revealing either way). Von Trier seems
even more pathological than his press suggests--neurotic,
egomaniacal, temperamental, hypochondriacal (his chronic fear is
"cancer of the balls"), and tormented by his problematic relationship
with his actresses, defined mainly by sexual tension and head games.

Among other highlights, Nick Kurzon's Super Chief is a bracing account of an Indian-reservation election in which the incumbent is corrupt and apparently invincible. Jessica Yu's The Living Museum, about the artist community at a Queens psychiatric center, is conventionally put together but often affecting. There are also two skillful rock docs. Jem Cohen's Instrument splices 10 years worth of Fugazi footage into a vivid (if noticeably overlong) collage. Grant Gee's Meeting People Is Easy sets out to depict Radiohead as Alienated Rock Stars, and succeeds well enough despite relying predictably on the designer ennui and paranoia that clogged the band's much-loved OK Computer.