Last February when on holiday in Spain, I was fortunate enough to meet Mike Hostench, co-director of Sitges Festival Internacional de Cinema Fantàstic de Catalunya, the largest fantastic film festival of Europe and one of the largest and most important in the world. His enthusiasm convinced me to attend the festival last month. Believe me, when you’re sitting on a resort restaurant patio surrounded by some of the biggest names in genre cinema it can be hard to motivate yourself to go to a movie; but it was not hard at Sitges considering the plethora of offerings.
Europeans have a very different attitude towards genre film (by genre I mean science fiction, horror and fantasy). Rather than being a niche market that caters to a certain type of individual, genre film is welcomed and watched by a hefty portion of the population. It is not cult; it is (almost) mainstream. This also leaves the field of what is considered genre very wide open. This can be detrimental, but in Sitges case it works very well. Here is a sampling of some of the strange and wonderful (though not always both) films I saw.
Splice – Directed by Vincenzo Natali. Starring Adrian Brody, Sarah Polley
One of the most anticipated films of the year, Splice definitely does not disappoint. In fact, it dares to go places no American film would – but of course, it’s written and directed by a Canadian, filmed in Canada with a Canadian star. And it’s about genetic manipulation. Brody and Polley are a husband and wife scientific mastermind team who specialize in mixing up the DNA of various animals in order to create new pharmaceutical products to cure humanity’s ailments. In order to maintain funding, they secretly combine the DNA of several animals with human DNA; low and behold their experiment works and an artificial womb gives birth to Dren, a human-bird-horse-I don’t know what else hybrid. The scientists hide her, educate her and ultimately imprison her. They bond with her as parents, but in the end they are not her parents, but her creators – and there is a world of difference between these two roles. The former is nurturing in order to allow the offspring to survive on its own; the latter is controlling, wanting their own vision to supercede any independence of the creation. Perhaps this is why Nietzsche said that God is dead; creations are more trouble than they are worth (creators too). How can you separate your emotions from your work when the thing you create is alive and sentient? How can you hope to control it? Are there things that science simply should not do? While Polley is her usual boring self (sorry, her acting has never impressed me), Brody gives a fantastic performance as a man caught between his work and his heart (and occasionally his libido). This is Natali’s best film since Cube.
