I’m hadly the first to point this out, but it bears repeating: The 13th Spokane International Film Festival begins its 11-day run on Thursday with a screening of
“My Words, My Lies — My Love”
at AMC’s River Park Square Theatres.
2, Geefwee Boedoe, director of “Let’s Pollute,” is scheduled to attend the opening-night premiere, Saturday’s Animation Showcase and Saturday’s Filmmaker’s Forum.
If you’re curious about the opening-night movie, here’s the review that I wrote for
Spokane Public Radio
:
There was a time when foreign films didn’t play in Spokane. Not that they pose any threat to Seth Rogen cinema even today. But even if they do draw just handfuls of area movie fans, foreign-language films at least do make it to theaters such as the Magic Lantern and AMC’s River Park Square Theatres.
So it’s no surprise that both venues will, as they have in the past, host the 13
th
edition of what has become an annual event, the Spokane International Film Festival. And it’s only fitting that the opening film of this year’s festival, which kicks off at 7 p.m. Thursday at River Park Square, should hail from Germany.
“My Words, My Lies – My Love,” released in 2009 with the far more succinct title of “Lila, Lila,” tells a familiar story. In fact, Woody Allen’s most recent release,
“You Will Meet a Tall, Dark Stranger,”
used the same main conceit, literary theft, as a subplot.
Young David, played by Daniel Bruhl, is a waiter so diffident that he slips through life virtually invisible. Even customers tend to look right through him. But when he spies Marie, played by Hannah Herzsprung, he girds his loins and tries to attract her attention. No such luck. Marie is a lover of literature, and David can’t even pronounce rendezvous, much less spell it.
So he remains frustrated. Until that auspicious day when, having fumbled into the purchase of a small cabinet, he forces open a struck drawer and discovers – yeah, you guessed it – a novel. Which he then co-opts and shows to Marie, claiming it as his own.
But this is no ordinary novel. So when Marie sends it off to a publisher, without David’s knowledge, no one is more surprised than he when the publisher responds positively. And from that point, David finds himself caught up in a lie that grows bigger than a gaggle of Pinocchio noses. Pretty soon he is reading reviews that call his novel the “Anna Karenina for the Internet generation” and finds himself giving readings to gradually growing crowds. Things gets even more interesting when one of David’s new fans claims to be the book’s real author, hits him up for cash and begins making ever-more disturbing demands.
Movie fans from the
Fassbinder school of cinema
may be disappointed with “My Words, My Lies – My Love” because, in the end, it feels more like Hollywood than anything darkly Teutonic. Directed by Alain Gsponer, from the novel by
Martin Suter
, the film wracks the emotions of those sensitive to prevarication only to channel us, ultimately, toward the light.
But that lightness is what makes “My Words, My Lies –My Love” such a perfect opening-night festival film. Unlike some past openers, it invites potential fest-goers back for more. To see what else that SpIFF, which runs through Feb. 13
th
, has to offer, go online at
www.spokanefilmfestival.org
.
Until then, do your best to catch Thursday’s premiere. You just might have a good time. Really.
I wouldn’t lie to you.
Below
: The trailer for “My Words, My Lies — My Love” (in German).