Out There :: Stylish Thriller Opens Film Festival

Opening night of the 57th San Francisco International Film Festival was a special thrill for Out There, a big Patricia Highsmith fan. The featured attraction at the Castro Theatre was first-time director Hossein Amini's film based on the lesbian crime novelist's "The Two Faces of January."

Highsmith's thrillers have been the source material of some very successful film adaptations, notably Hitchcock's "Strangers on a Train," Anthony Minghella's "The Talented Mr. Ripley," and Rene Clement's "Plein Soleil." But apart from the Ripley novels and a few select others, her pulp fiction is not especially clever, well-written or well-plotted. It's certainly not literary. As a friend remarked after he read one of her books, "Did she get paid by the yard?" She was known for getting into the psychology of her psychopathic murderers (Ripley is the best example), not for the nimbleness of her plots or prose. Take it from us, we've read practically her whole oeuvre and both major biographies of her - and apparently she was rather a sociopath herself.

January seems an odd choice for the Hollywood-star film treatment, though its sordid tale of three American grifters abroad does feature scenic locales in Greece and further afield. Its first murder occurs rather off-handedly in an Athens hotel room, but its second, more spectacular murder is a horrific deed that transpires at the Palace of Knossos in Crete. There is one bit of interesting psychodrama in the book, in that expat gigolo Rydal finds himself becoming an accomplice to murder seemingly because he has unresolved daddy issues. "Rydal realized that Chester's resemblance to his father was the main reason why he had so suddenly and spontaneously helped Chester with the corpse in the corridor."

So the book is a rancid little potboiler. And the film's three main characters are hardly sympathetic. But the setting and cinematography are glamorous, and the camera just loves the movie-star faces of Chester (Viggo Mortensen), Collette (Kirsten Dunst) and Rydal (Oscar Isaac). Fortunately, there are lots of close-ups.

None of the stars attended opening night, but director Amini was there at the step-and-shoot, which transpired upstairs in the Castro's mezzanine rather than on a red carpet outside, as Castro Street is being torn up for some cosmetic surgery. New SF Film Society Executive Director Noah Cowan mingled with the hoi polloi during the afterparty at Public Works, and OT got a chance to congratulate Director of Programming Rachel Rosen. Festival season is off and running.

Modern Times

It was a busy week for Out There, but really, what week isn't? We were in the house for a pre-opening preview of "Designing Home: Jews and Midcentury Modernism" at the Contemporary Jewish Museum/SF, where CJM Executive Director Lori Starr and guest curator Donald Albrecht made remarks about the exhibition before the galleries were opened to excited partygoers. The work of Jewish emigre artists, architects and designers played a big part in bringing the aesthetics of modernism to the American mainstream - even with such quotidian objects as the princess phone and the Honeywell thermostat.

One of the highlights of Designing Home is a slide-show presentation of the title sequences created for midcentury films such as Hitchcock's "Psycho" and "Vertigo," devised by the artist Saul Bass. Bass created a look and vocabulary for modern motion pictures, and largely hand-lettered his work. Definitely worth a visit from art and design mavens, the CJM-SF show is reviewed in this week's issue.

Last Friday night's concert of the San Francisco Symphony under conductor James Conlon was a highlight of the season for OT, as pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet and SFS Principal Trumpet Mark Inouye took Shostakovich 's Piano Concerto No. 1 (really a dual concerto) and made it shine (reviewed in next week's issue).

And last Saturday night we made it out to North Beach and the San Francisco Art Institute for the opening of Wrong's What I Do Best in the Walter and McBean Galleries (it runs through July 26). Curators Hesse McGraw and Aaron Spangler led a walk-through of the show with some of the 15 presenting artists, who include Ashley Bickerton, Nikki S. Lee and Kara Walker, and then it was time to celebrate their endeavor. There's a lot of transgressive art here, including artist Wim Delvoye's pair of tattooed and taxidermied pigs. Take that, Damien Hirst!

The exhibition's title comes from a George Jones song, that spectacular drunk, and the party was fueled by some hard-bitten country music. OT is a big fan.

Choir Boys

The Golden Gate Men's Chorus (GGMC ) will bring their musicianship and Bay Area energy to the World Choir Games in Riga, Latvia this July. The largest choral competition in the world, the World Choir Games attracts 20,000 singers and is hosted every two years in a different city. This year, 487 choirs from 59 countries are scheduled to participate. As far as we know, the GGMC is the first openly gay chorus to sing at the event.

The GGMC's Northern Crossing: Journey to the Baltics concerts will take place on Fri., May 17, at 8 p.m.; Sun., May 18, at 3 p.m.; and Tues., May 20, at 8 p.m., all at St. Matthew's Lutheran Church, 3281 16th St. in San Francisco. Tickets are available at ggmc.org.