Matters take a turn for the better, and decidedly darker, with 25 Cent Preview (9:45 p.m.), one of the festival's toughest and most compelling offerings. Like one of Lou Reed's seedier songs come to big-screen life, the film zeroes in on various street hustlers, drug addicts and other damaged goods as they ooze their pan-sexual slime trails through the back streets of San Francisco. The approach here is raw and unfiltered, perhaps trying just a little too hard to locate beauty and poetry within the ravaged characters (many of whose "performances" are so natural they barely seem like acting) as they mumble, slur, rant and screw their way through life. Intense, unnerving and occasionally brutal, this one's definitely not for the squeamish.
Much of Sunday's schedule is devoted to documentaries, the highlights being two fascinating and extremely personal explorations of gender identity: Trained in the Ways of Men (3 p.m.) and Red Without Blue (5). At 7, the festival moves back into narrative mode with Love My Life, an improbably bright and bouncy Japanese love-fest that feels like the cinematic equivalent of bubblegum music (or, for that matter, just plain bubblegum). Based on a popular Japanese manga (comic book), Love My Life follows the ups and downs of two adorably frisky young girls who spend their time consuming sweets, giggling, making love and occasionally pondering — with a minimum of angst — the consequences of coming out to various friends and family members.
Love My Life doesn't run any deeper than your standard comic book, but neither does it have a pretentious (or ironic) bone in its body, making it hard to deny the movie's upbeat and utterly guileless take on modern love.
An even better bet follows at 9 p.m., at least for those with a taste for artsy Euro-mysteries in an existentialist vein. Filled with local French color, enigmatic symbolism and beautiful, naked flesh, One to Another focuses on a group of young friends whose dedicated promiscuity is very nearly a philosophical mission — they engage in sex, they say, to experience the "certainty of existence." At the center of this band of beautiful boys and girls is a bisexual hustler who eventually turns up dead, a murder that consumes his already fragile sister and that provides the tantalizing mystery in which the film revels (without necessarily feeling obliged to resolve it).
Part L'Avventura/Under the Sand anti-thriller, part Les Enfants Terribles incest-tease, One to Another isn't nearly as good as the films it references. But there's some tasty food for thought here, lots of moody, quasi-mystical atmosphere and scattered bursts of French rock that demonstrate those two words aren't always an oxymoron.
One of the happiest surprises of this year's festival turns up on Monday in the form of Tick Tock Lullaby (7 p.m.), in which a lesbian couple ponders the dilemma of how to have a baby born of genes that "crave each other." Despite the cutesy title, Tick Tock Lullaby is tough, smart and often acutely funny stuff — particularly amazing for a movie that bombards us with more nonstop chatter than an Eric Rohmer film (much of it delivered as voice-overs endlessly debating the intricacies of sperm, babies and biological urges). This English import clocks in at less than 80 minutes but packs more of a wallop than most films twice its length.
Not quite as satisfying but still well worth a look is the German brainteaser Vivere (9 p.m.). A story presented as a trilogy of dovetailing narratives, each told from the perspective of one of its three central characters, Vivere follows three lonely women — a pregnant teenager, her cab-driving older sister and a seductive, 60-ish mystery-woman — all looking for love on Christmas Eve. The characters seem to be connected in some vaguely cosmic Kieslowski-lite sense, but the film travels to places we don't quite anticipate, using eloquent silence and painterly imagery to invite us into a universe that initially looks bleak but where everything eventually becomes possible.
Meanwhile, over at Muvico Baywalk, there's more Gallic artistry on display (as well as some glorious views of the French countryside) at the 7:30 p.m. screening of The Man of My Life, a psychologically charged examination of sexual confusion during a summer holiday in the Rhone region. There's a slow-burn intensity to the film, with finely nuanced performances and cinematography that seems to bore right into the characters' souls, but, when you come right down to it, the essence here is pretty basic stuff. Man of My Life's happily married hetero and his gay neighbor are clearly destined to be together — and everything else is just window dressing (albeit often exquisite window dressing). A screening of short films for men follows at 9:30.