Surf’s up at the Balboa this weekend, with the first-ever edition of the hopefully annual Ocean Beach Surf Film Festival, co-presented by CinemaSF, Tunnel Records (one of whose two stores is inside the 4 Star Theatre), and Mollusk Surf Shop. Breaks nearby have fostered San Francisco’s own surf scene over the last eight decades, and the city was long an important stop on the surfing documentary circuit—the late, lamented Red Vic Movie House premiered many such features.
The festival kicks off the evening of Fri/13 with the enduring Big Kahuna of that genre, Bruce Brown’s 1966 The Endless Summer (shown in an “original, pristine 16mm Technicolor print”), which probably did more to draw newcomers to the sport than anything before or since. Between its two screenings will be Andrew Mackenzie’s brand-new Trilogy: New Wave, which similarly follows elite surfers around the world on a quest for the “perfect wave.”
The rest of the program mixes more titles archival and new, plus some live elements. On Saturday afternoon there are two prime examples of the surfing world according to Hollywood, which is almost invariably a realm of guilty pleasures and unintentional laughs: The original 1991 Point Break, with Keanu and Swayze ridin’ waves and robbin’ banks; then the lesser-known 1987 North Shore, a teen romantic drama closer to Gidget terrain, save that the villain is played by none other than Laird Hamilton.
There’s also a multimedia and lecture event entitled “Sanctuary Sharks of the Deep,” and in the evening two screenings of another 16mm-shot documentary classic, Thomas Campbell’s The Seedling (which is variably listed as a 1999 and 2004 release), about the travels of several California longboard riders. It will be accompanied by a live score composed by SF native Tommy Guerrero, played with Josh Lippi and Matt Rodriguez.
Sunday will see the festival hosting a free block party with music by long-running retro surf rock faves The Mermen among the outdoor attractions, while inside the theater there will be open screenings of local surfing films on one screen, and episodes from Dylan Graves’ web series Weird Waves on the other. The festival’s grand finale is a premiere for Grant Washburn’s debut directorial feature Chasing Big Waves, at least the third documentary about Maverick’s that he’s been involved in. He’ll be joined in discussion by a multigenerational panel of fellow big-wave surfers afterward.
For complete info on the Ocean Beach Surf Film Festival’s program, schedule and tickets, go here.
Some new releases this weekend with appeal beyond the wetsuit-owning demographic:
Close Your Eyes
In the twilight years of the Franco regime, Victor Erice’s first directorial feature The Spirit of the Beehive—a haunting tale of fearful childhood imagination starring six-year-old Ana Torrent—emerged as what remains one of the most highly regarded Spanish films ever. It took him a full decade to complete an equally acclaimed followup, 1983’s El Sur. But that was not a happy experience, as a plug was pulled on financing the second half of what had been intended not as a 90-minute but a three-hour opus. Another decade on, Erice made the lesser-seen Dream of Light, a hybrid documentary seeking to capture the creative process of painter Antonio Lopez. Then… nada, apart from scattered shorts, contributions to omnibus films, and aborted larger projects.
So it’s a big deal that this influential if far-from-prolific talent is back at last with a new feature, which opens at the Roxie this Friday. Close Your Eyes begins with a ruse: A meeting on the outskirts of 1947 between two Spanish expatriates, one an aging wealthy patriarch seeking to hire the other in order to find a child who is “the only person in the world who carries my blood.” But it turns out this is just a sequence from a film that commenced shooting in the late 1990s, then had to be abandoned when the lead actor disappeared.
Years later (this film’s present-tense is 2012), a muckraking TV show revives that still-unsolved mystery, and the never-finished film’s director (Manolo Solo as Miguel Garay) is too impoverished to turn down its offer of a broadcast appearance. The whole matter remains painful to him, however, as the original incident basically ended his career. He now ekes out a threadbare existence in a seaside town, living in an RV on land he’ll soon be evicted from.
Nearly three hours long, Close Your Eyes is hard to interpret as anything but fictionalized autobiography from an artist whose own path has suffered more than a couple serious roadblocks. At a certain point, the leisurely narrative finds Miguel tipped to the vanished actor’s possible whereabouts—he may still be alive, an amnesiac oblivious to his past, in the care of a church-run elder care facility. This development certainly heightens viewer interest. But graceful and accomplished as it is, the 84-year-old Erice’s belated return arguably requires more patience than it provides reward, particularly when a cryptic fadeout leaves central questions hanging. It’s a movie more fascinating within the context of an auteur’s oft-frustrated professional biography than as an opaque, stand-alone work of art.
Look Into My Eyes
The eyes also have it (sorry) in a concurrent Roxie opening, the latest nonfiction feature from Lana Wilson, who previously peeked behind the celebrity curtain with Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields and Miss Americana, about Taylor Swift. She treated those subjects with just as much querying seriousness as she had violence against abortion providers in After Tiller, or a Buddhist monk’s suicide-prevention efforts in The Departure. Here, she tackles something that sounds inherently silly: The NYC practices of self-proclaimed professional psychics, whose advertised skillsets encompass everything from communicating with dead relatives and pets to “strolling readings” as entertainment at parties.
It is not surprising when we realize after a while that many, if not most, of the otherwise diverse personalities spotlit here are, were, or at one point wanted to be professional actors. Some also seem damaged, alienated, misfits and recluses in one form of recovery or another. They offer strangers a sort of supernaturally-tinged therapy in part as a way of managing their own issues of PTSD or low self-esteem.
But are they phonies? There are some cringe-y moments here when we see the real-life protagonists clearly flailing, making blind guesses about clients that turn out to be wrong over and over. But there are others when such exchanges give every appearance of being too uncanny to be a matter of mere luck or savvy speculation. (Confession: I’m a skeptic who’s had a couple inexplicable experiences where mediums who were complete strangers “knew things” they couldn’t possibly have guessed. Which to me just reinforces the notion that we do not yet understand everything about our existence, and probably never will.)
Its occasionally bemused but always respectful tenor reinforced by the lack of any musical scoring, Look Into My Eyes is unexpectedly touching and well-crafted, though it can also be a little dull at times. Wilson’s focus on individuals precludes any general insights into the overall industry of paranormal services, about which we learn nothing. Still, there’s poignancy in seeing how earnest the practitioners are, and how often what they do helps people deal with tragic loss, or any other “Terrible things happen[ing] that we have no control over.” After these 104 minutes, the world seems both a little more mysterious and reassuring.
Lies We Tell
A 19th century Irish writer who is largely forgotten today, Sheridan Le Fanu nonetheless casts a long shadow over the popular imagination as one of the main architects of Gothic suspense storytelling. He’s probably best known now as the author of Carmilla, an 1872 novella that predated Stoker’s Dracula, and is the wellspring from which all “lesbian vampire” depictions have flowed—though very few among those he inspired were remotely faithful to his original. (Hewing much closer than most was a 2020 film, also called Carmilla, which we reviewed here.)
His most prominent full-length novel remains 1864’s Uncle Silas, which has been filmed before under that title and several others. This is not a supernatural tale, but fairly hair-raising nonetheless, as its heroine is put in increasing peril by unscrupulous relatives. In Lisa Mulcahy’s new screen version, newly orphaned Maud (Agnes O’Casey) is sole heiress to her father’s vast estate. But as she is still legally under-age, she becomes ward to an interim guardian, nearest living relative Silas (David Wilmot).
He wastes little time moving in with his rather awful adult children, airheaded Emily (Holly Sturton) and boorish Edward (Chris Walley), as well as a domineering French governess (Grainne Keenan). They treat Maud as if she were a fortunate guest in their home—one providing a great economic leap for a family of swindlers and fuckups—and it is soon clear why her father might’ve grown estranged from his predatory sibling. When she flat-out refuses to marry Edward, which would have firmly placed her entire fortune in Silas’ hands, things take a very dark turn.
Elisabeth Gooch’s screenplay takes major liberties with the source material, while retaining its essential spirit. But those changes work well, underlining the eventually terrifying injustice of a level-headed young woman being completely at the mercy of supposed “protectors,” simply because she is young and female in the Victorian era. It is very easy for those schemers to find a doctor willing (after he’s paid off of course) to claim she suffers from “hysteria,” which might translate into institutionalization or waterboarding-like “treatment.”
That threat isn’t even the worst thing that happens to Maud, by a longshot. This is very much a story about abuse. The trappings might be those of well-upholstered, widescreen costume drama, but there is nothing enviable about the heroine’s plight. Born to great class privilege, she nonetheless has almost no rights in this society.
Though it remains within the bounds of old-fashioned period melodrama, Lies We Tell is pretty strong stuff…maybe a little too strong for those who expect something comparatively cozy like another Jane Eyre or Howard’s End. Yet it is one of the best movies in that general category to come along in quite a while, well-acted, handsome and gripping. Why it’s bypassing US theaters, I couldn’t say. But Quiver Distribution is releasing to Stateside On Demand and Digital platforms this Fri/13.
