Talking with Clemens Klopfenstein in Taipei, it's difficult to associate him with his latest film Who Afraid Wolf (Wer Angst Wolf), which plays tonight at 7pm at the Golden Horse Film Festival.
The Swiss-born, Italy-based director appears sanguine, always smiling, and has a playful attitude for the cameras taking pictures with his 13-year-old son.
But it probably takes a more sensitive eye and a theatrical appreciation, preferably in classic drama, to view Klopfenstein's disjointed version of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.
PHOTO: NIEN KENG-HAO, LIBERTY TIMES
"It is an experimental documentary, with famous actors playing actual drama in it," said Klopfenstein, defining his film.
Eight groups of people, all theater actors, are on the way to Rome, where they are going to meet Mr. Baumann at the city's Goethe Institute. The subtext "all roads lead to Rome" is evident early in the film.
The traveling actors are converging on the city in cars, vans and buses. The road signs indicate Rome as being to the right and then left. They are somehow incapable of making it to Rome, either through having taken a wrong turn, getting lost, getting into a fight on the road, or being stuck in a snowstorm. They all have to constantly call Rome, saying they will be late, that they got stuck, and so on.
The actors, including Bruno Ganz and Tina Engel, are rehearsing their roles and quoting passages from classics by Shakespeare, Shaw, Chekhov and from Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf by Edward Albee. They rehearse by the beach, inside cars, on the grass, in a small grocery store by a village and on snowy mountain sides. Sometimes they are just reciting the lines, sometimes they are really acting as if they were on stage. And very often, these groups of two, three or four people, have their personal problems between each other, and end up venting emotions during the rehearsals. The rehearsal segments reflect the actors' emotional turmoil, making it difficult for viewers to distinguish what is real acting and what is not.
Klopfenstein said it was unclear if the actors were rehearsing or expressing their genuine emotions through reciting the classic lines. "This was a challenge I faced during shooting and something I would like to present in the film," he said.
In a way, the whole film can be seen as another version of Waiting for Godot -- nobody reaches Rome, but they all act out excellent drama on the road. There are several couples rehearsing the classic argument scene in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, but in this case it's in different languages, different locations and with different moods, adding different layers of dynamics between the couples.
One of the film's creative experiments is to create a kind of theater sensation in the wilderness of the Italian countryside near Rome. "It's like culture crashing against the wilderness, through the passing of landscapes," Klopfenstein said.
The landscapes at least provide some visual diversion that the audience can appreciate even if not familiar with the classic playwrights and their works.
"Just listen to the talk and follow the looks," he said.
Klopfenstein's preference for fragmented, improvised aesthetics is probably related to his other identity as a painter. Making this film, he said acted like a painter, first collecting the desired colors on the pallet and then beginning to paint only when inspired by the colors before him. Apart from being a prize-winning painter, he has also been a cinematographer for 30 years. His previous film Silence of the Men, a winner of the Swiss Film Prize, is a hilarious film shot in Egypt about a bunch of men babbling about their women problems.
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