This summer, Seattle moviegoers had not one but two overblown media events to contend with. The first, predictably enough, was the arrival into town of thousands of Jar Jar Binks dolls and their accompanying two-hour commercial. Those opting for more entertaining fare needed only turn their attention to the twenty-fifth annual Seattle International Film Festival, featuring four exhausting weeks of love, sex, death, angry Frenchmen, egregious displays of hipster credibility, high moralizing, and flat-out star-power. And that was just in the ticket lines.

     Under the direction of Daryll Macdonald the SIFF has proven a strange attractor, growing into a bloated and excessive media circus featuring 300-odd films from some 45 countries. Among the full-length releases were included shorts and "secret" Festival screenings of worthwhile unfinished, unreleased, or otherwise unavailable footage. But it’s hard not to question the artistic independence of a cinematic institution that is sponsored by a small army of corporations, chief among them Blockbuster Video. The fact that Blockbuster’s financial support was contingent on the exclusion of all other video retailers from the sponsorship roster—with the single exception of a local outlet, Scarecrow Video—led to much public protest, picketing, and rending of sackcloth among Seattle’s independent video store owners. Meanwhile, a Festival screening of the Austin Powers sequel was scheduled for the local mall multiplex.

     One gets the feeling the SIFF is really more about commerce and spectacle than the films its sponsors consider mere gravy, but an expensive and undeniably impressive spectacle it is, nonetheless. The sheer number of pictures shown is enough to sustain interest. And it was, admittedly, gratifying to see 750 suburbanites standing in line on a sunny weekend afternoon to attend the screening of a queer coming-out story from Kyrgyzstan. (The aforementioned protests were also heartening— it’s reassuring to find Americans behaving so seriously, so uncharacteristically European, around the movies.) Still, this kind of concentrated art viewing carries a depressingly provincial aftertaste. Where are all these people the rest of the year? If they can convince themselves they’re doing something culturally "good" for themselves by attending the SIFF, why confine their patronage to this event? Where’s the year-round support for the city’s struggling but vital 501(c)3 cinema organizations and independent film education groups? Would a crowd like this line up for a Kyrgyz picture in any other context?

     Bernardo Bertolucci’s latest, the enigmatically titled Besieged, is a bit of a turnaround for him, coming as it does after the double-whammy embarrassments of Little Buddha and Stealing Beauty; but it’s ultimately uncompelling. The narrative is simple, even transparent: after her husband is arrested by the military, a young African woman (played by the strident, capable Thandie Newton) moves to Rome to study medicine and acquires a job as housekeeper for a reclusive musician (David Thewlis). He develops a serious, boy-howdy crush on her. With minimal dialogue, the two dart around his expansive villa, steal occasional glances at one another, and circle concentrically inward toward a shaky, furtive bond.

     Filmed for Italian television, Besieged takes full advantage of Bertolucci’s freedoms outside the studio system, emphasizing experimentation over situation and employing silly dream sequences and a stockpile of lens-filters. A playful, free-associative editing style makes the film move more like vintage Nicolas Roeg than any of the regimented, plodding costume dramas Bertolucci has shown us over the years. Even so, the film would be intolerably indulgent and tedious but for the actors’ abilities to rise above their material. With the barest of essentials, Thewlis manages to create a complex and sympathetic character. Newton is brash and intelligent, even while submitting selflessly to Bertolucci’s customary lecherous indulgences (she vomits, she urinates, she’s filmed pretending to have erotic dreams under surgical halogens…).

     The plot’s matter-of-fact interracial mating rituals might have been made stickier than necessary had its vague suggestions of European patriarchy been emphasized, but Bertolucci handles these with occasional sensitivity alternating with complete disregard, so they manage to escape excessive portentousness. The use of music as a metaphor for cultural alienation—Newton makes plain her incomprehension of Thewlis’s Western piano repertoire—is much less ham-handed than it could have been. The story meanders most of the time, but Fabio Cianchetti’s photography compensates admirably. And, although Bertolucci’s stylistic flourishes rarely augment the characters’ psychology (they’re usually just distracting), it's nice to be reminded of his lighter, more adventurous side. What at first seems slight and ephemeral ends up as his most effective work since Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man from the early 1980s. But then, that’s not saying much.

     The Festival’s glitz quotient reached its zenith in the chaotic, oversold U.S. premiere of Alan Rudolph’s celluloid adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions, with key celebrities and scavenging television crews in tow. But viewers may come away from this film feeling like its protagonist, mentally fragile car dealer Dwayne Hoover (Bruce Willis, sporting the best hair of his career): "pooped and demoralized," to quote Hoover’s savior, hack sci-fi writer and possible channeller of alternate space/time, Kilgore Trout (Albert Finney, seeming more inebriated than usual).

     Rudolph is an interesting but erratic director, and while he manages to inject some appropriate and occasionally amusing millennial satire into his source material, much of the picture seems, inexplicably, intimidated by the constraints of the material (or perhaps, its fan-base). The result is alternately forced, harried, or glum—and essentially useless to anyone but the most avid Vonnegut readers. They, undoubtedly, will be pleased: Breakfast plays like an expensive secret handshake. It features not only the obligatory Vonnegut cameo but an appearance by one of Vonnegut’s literary offspring, Tom Robbins, opening credits "designed" by Vonnegut, and numerous nods to his other novels, characters, and insider catch phrases.

     The rest of us will find this film a shrill annoyance made more irritating by a thoroughly square Martin Denny score and an editing style best referred to as drunken.  It is faithful to the novel, but only in a superficial, literal-minded sense; Hoover’s visions, for example, are presented in garish, computer generated sequences that show us thoughts entering Bruce Willis’s head through his ear and travelling into his brain. But Willis is too self-conscious in the lead to give Vonnegut’s faux-metaphysics any sense of interest, let alone gravity. The rest of the cast (including the usually reliable Buck Henry) is either wasted or unwatchable, though Nick Nolte does what he can with the chore of playing an archaic, mean-spirited man-in-a-dress joke. Altogether, this is boring, nonsensical folly, even if it’s pretty much guaranteed some kind of cult status.

     Brazilian psychologist and filmmaker Marcelo Masagao’s Here We Are, Waiting For You has already won several international documentary awards and is a mess of a different sort. It’s considerably less unpleasant, for starters. Under the blanket of what he calls the "banalization of life and death," Masagao deigns to present to us The Entire Twentieth Century in all its arbitrary spectacle, as a disjointed "film memory." Huge, loping coils of found, archival, public domain, and otherwise extraneous footage are collaged in such a way as to transport the viewer from, say, 1920s India to ’70s Japan to ’40s France, often simultaneously in a single frame.

     Masagao’s psychology background is readily apparent. The influence of Freud is omnipresent—he’s even credited (as "Queen" in the opening titles and "Spiritual Advisor" in the closing credits; just as peculiarly, "The Historian" is credited as "King"). And, Here We Are is structurally a bit like a psychotherapy evaluation, designed to elicit abstract emotional responses through arbitrarily juxtaposed stimuli. At this it excels, playing more like the great, silent films of Walter Ruttmann or Dziga Vertov from the 1920s than the facile eye-candy of Godfrey ("Koyaanisqatsi") Reggio, to whom Masagao currently is being compared. (Indeed, clips from all three of those filmmakers show up in Here We Are).

     Here We Are, Waiting For You eschews narration entirely, except for a string of captions culled from fiction and reference materials almost always unrelated to their accompanying footage. (The definition for the word "silence," for example, is laid over stock footage of a soldier displaying symptoms of shell shock.) The First World War is represented by Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou, run backwards. A composite morph of prominent historical figures who, a caption tells us, "had no interest in theory" (Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Ceaucescu, Pol Pot) inexplicably gives rise to a picture of Margaret Sanger. Masagao digitally isolates the occasional figure from a given frame and assigns biographical details culled from unrelated archives. At the end, the picture’s free-form ephemerality coalesces, more or less. (The film’s title is taken from the gateway inscription over a cemetery.)