As usual, as we come up to this year's film festival (less than a week to go!), I remember that I never got around to posting my responses to last year's festival films. So here they are. These were originally posts on Facebook that I wrote after watching each of the films at the film festival, recording my immediate thoughts on each of the films I saw. These are not reviews - although I admit that in posting them I certainly hope that my comments on the films I liked will encourage people to seek them out - but are more an attempt to try to capture my responses to the film, so that in future years when I remember a particular film I can have something to refer to to recall how I felt about it at the time. It also forces me to actively reflect on each film, rather than just going from film to film without really engaging with each of them.
Please bear in mind, these are not crafted, but rather impulsively written. Seeing them all collected together, I can see the writing tics that I resort to far too much.
[My reactions to all 40 films I saw at the 2018 festival come after the jump.]
The official Opening Night film of the festival, Birds of Passage spans a period of about 15 years in Northern Colombia, opening in a small village in 1969 with a Wayuu tribal coming-of-age ceremony for a young woman. Raphayet, an older outsider with family ties to the village, wants to marry the girl, but when the family imposes a heavy dowry, the only way he can hope to generate the necessary money is to by selling marijuana. His domineering mother-in-law realises how Raphayet must have made this money, but still allows him to marry her daughter, seeing in him an opportunity to make a better life for her family. The drug business grows for several years, until Raphayet’s friend and business partner gets too involved in the business dealings, people die, and the entire exercise escalates out of control. And it all worsens over time, as people involved in the operation are poisoned by the power that this lifestyle creates and start to feel an entitlement to whatever they desire.
What really worked for me about the film was the sense of the clash between film genre and cultural traditions. The film is filled with sequences that should feel like clichés, with moments we’ve all seen a million times, but there's an energy and freshness that comes from this utterly original context. So there’s the scene where there’s a tense standoff and everyone is pointing a gun at everyone else; there’s the moment that seems to happen in every crime drama where one character sneaks up on another character while he’s having sex; there are characters who forcefully remind you of previous film characters, like the hot-headed curly-haired blonde who had me seeing him as a more-detestable Sonny Corleone. But they exist in this world of highly structured rules and traditions, and the way the film explores that tension is really fascinating. The term “alijura”, meaning outsider, is used frequently – right from the start when Raphayet is condemned for being such an alijura that he doesn’t know the correct way to deliver a dowry. But you get the strong sense that these traditions don’t just exist for the sake of it; these are rules and patterns of behaviour that have developed over time as a result of situations that have gone badly in the past and in an attempt to stop them from occurring again. So, for instance, there are very strong rules about how communication is to be carried between parties in conflict, with messages being taken by the Word Messenger, and there are careful rules about how this person is to be treated, and when the family finds themselves dealing with someone who doesn’t respect these traditions, the situation inevitably escalates. But there’s a very clear sense that the decision to hold to the traditions is seriously damaging to them; in a world where the enemy is not bound by these rules you cannot follow those rules yourself because that will put you at a disadvantage - but that just means abandoning the very lifestyle that they’re trying to preserve.
That merging of the crime drama and the tribal tradition tale is done really quite expertly, with the characters moving constantly between the desert-hut life that their people have lived for hundreds of years and a more modern lifestyle. It’s weird to see this drug-dealer walking around wearing sunglasses and western shirts, and then they’ll cut to a full-body shot and you’re reminded that this guy is walking around in a traditional skirt that is little more than a loincloth. There’s a surprising amount of focus given to necklaces, but we learn that in their traditions these necklaces will be used to offer protection, so even as the characters are dealing drugs and smashing their way into “graves” to recover the hidden stashes of weapons, the family matriarch will be holding onto necklaces that keep her family from harm. And it seems weird to think about the opening coming-of-age-ceremony sequence, complete with the traditional dance, which feels exactly like life has been for these people for generations, and reflect that this is the same film that culminates with a gang of people with machine guns and a bazooka firing on a crime lord’s house. As Raphayet takes power, he moves his family away from the desert-hut they’ve always had and moves them into a mansion – a stark white multi-tiered blocky modernist mansion that exists in the middle of the desert without any sign of life for miles around (the sight of that mansion is so bizarre that it got a laugh from the audience the first time we saw it) – but then the film keeps coming back to these meditative images of the bizarre-looking legs of birds just wandering around the mansion like they would wander around any other tribal village.
There’s a fairly well-executed line of condemnation in the film against the west and its international interventions, a pet theme of the directors. The entire film only starts because the US Peace Corps have come to Colombia, supposedly to stop communism, but in practice mainly with a focus on just trying to get high and get laid; it’s never heavy-handed or commented on, and the American characters disappear pretty quickly from the film, but as the pile of bodies builds up, you’re always aware that these people would never have died had the Americans not come to this country and disrupted their traditions with their better ways.
I really did have a lot of fun at Birds of Passage. While it’s not quite up to the level of Embrace of the Serpent, an earlier film from the same creative team that was one of the highlights from last year’s Film Society schedule, it is a very strong film. It does require some patience, but in return it offers some great rewards.
I had really enjoyed Bart Layton’s earlier film The Imposter, a fascinating documentary that skillfully intermixed documentary material with narrative filmmaking that went beyond mere recreation. In American Animals, Layton flips the approach – it’s now undeniably a narrative film, with recognisable actors in the lead roles, but interspersed throughout the film are appearances by the actual people who were involved in the story, commenting on events and offering their own memories of what went on.
The film is about university students Spencer and Warren, played by Barry Keoghan and Evan Peters. Spencer, an art student, feels frustrated that his life has been too easy, that he hasn’t had the trials to give his art meaning, while Warren is just a bored student on an athletic scholarship who can’t be bothered going to practice. But one day Spencer discovers the university library’s rare book collection, with one book in particular worth $12 million, all being guarded over only by one older librarian (Ann Dowd). And so they begin to plan the perfect heist, which requires bringing in a couple of other friends into the scheme. Given that the film features the real people openly talking about the events, you can guess how well their perfect heist actually goes.
The film has a lot of fun with the fantasy of the heist as opposed to the reality. We’ve all watched crime films and imagined how we would pull off the perfect heist, but the problem is that what seems simple and easy in our imagination is incredibly hard and imperfect in reality. What I found particularly amusing was how, because there’s really no real place you can go or information on how to plan a heist, they find themselves studying the great heist movies – The Killing and Reservoir Dogs being the two most prominently featured examples, which is interesting because as I remember it, neither of those films’ heists ultimately succeed. And then you get to the actual practicalities of the heist, and particularly the need to subdue the librarian. Early in the film, we see the suave cool movie version of the scene, where the librarian is tasered and instantly collapses unharmed, the heist is pulled off with expert timing, and it all plays out with Elvis on the soundtrack. And even though most of the participants refuse to take part on the actual incapacitation of the librarian, because they all deep down know it won’t be as simple or as painless as they imagine, they nevertheless rely on that fantasy version to justify their involvement. And when the actual robbery comes, and they are forced to deal with the practicality of the event, it’s not easy, it’s not painless, and even though it’s a comparatively mild moment of violence by movie standards, it’s still shocking and horrifying and deeply, deeply traumatising for the woman being attacked. (The real librarian really only appears at the end of the film, which I did appreciate; we get to hear her viewpoint about the kids who planned this all out, but the film relies on its filmmaking to communicate the terror of the experience, without forcing her to relive the experience - incidentally, there's a really interesting interview with the real librarian here.)
And even after they've dealt with the librarian, they still need to pull off the rest of the heist. And Layton displays some impressive cinematic technique, making the heist thrilling and suspenseful, even as we know exactly how it's all going to end. And we can see how it's all going to end, because we can see them making the exact same mistakes that we all know to avoid making and that we would certainly never make were we in that position. Because we would be better at this than these idiots.
One thing I really appreciated was how the film focused on the difficulty in trying to deal with stolen goods once they've been taken. You can't just take a $12m stolen book to a fence and get them to connect you with a buyer; you need to be able to provide proof of the authenticity of the book, and that comes from reputable organisations who don't deal in stolen goods. And so you get our leads trying to put in place measures to delay the reporting of the theft of the books so that they can have time to get the books to Christie's to get them appraised before anyone realises the books are stolen - and this becomes another source of tension. It's something that I don't remember ever seeing a film deal with before; it feels particularly unique to this film. And it is thrilling.
As with his earlier film, there’s a strong sense of the unreliability of the story being told. So there are points in the story where we find ourselves watching a scene, and the actual people will disagree about the details – who brought up this idea, or where they were when they had a conversation, or what that person looked like or might have been wearing – and the film will change itself to reflect these differences of memory. Layton does a nice job in balancing that approach, recognising the moments where it’s safe to throw a bit of unreliability into the story in order that it colours the rest of the film without ever being overbearing about it.
That said, one problem I do have with Layton’s work is that he often seems to want to throw odd twists into the tale right at the end of the movie. It happened in The Imposter, with a late-in-the-film suggestion about a possible murder for which there is no real evidence. And it happens here, with the real Spencer casting doubt on whether Warren actually did something that he tells us he did, and that we watched him do in the narrative. While it’s another instance of the unreliable narrator that drives the film, it also didn’t seem to add anything of substance to the film, and I personally found the suggestion that Warren didn’t do this thing unconvincing, if only because I don’t believe his actions if he didn’t do this thing – and besides, as with The Imposter, there’s no actual reason to think that he didn’t do it.
Still, American Animals is a fun film and worth seeking out.
A fascinating documentary, The Cleaners initially starts out focusing on the people in Manila working for a company contracted to clean social media feeds of disturbing and offensive videos and photos. They have to meet a target of 25,000 images checked a day, which works out to one photo a second for seven straight hours, which is insane. They have to make calls based on strict criteria with little leeway, so for instance the famous photo of the napalm girl during the Vietnam war is deleted because, even though it's an important and known historical record, it features a minor girl and it features genitals and so therefore it has to be removed. The cleaners talk about the mental anguish that it inflicts on them, whether it be the images of children being sexually abused that linger in their minds, or the live streams of people committing suicide that they have to watch. There's one person who has seen so many videos of beheadings that he can look at a photograph of a beheaded person and identify the type of blade that was used to kill the victim.
And so that is a really fascinating film. Trying to make an instant decision about the offensiveness or acceptability of this image or that video with the knowledge that you're only allowed to make three mistakes a month puts the staff under incredible pressure. And it doesn't seem as though the companies have much in the way of support to help their hundreds of staff deal with the horrors that they are looking at on a daily basis. There's a clear indication that the reason this is all done in places like the Philippines is because it's cheap; you can get hundreds of people who are so desperate for any work that they will take a job for low pay that involves hours and hours of looking at the worst that humanity can do to itself. And there are some fascinating discussions about what should and should not be allowed to be available online. For instance, we hear from one former Google executive who discusses a couple of videos of the hanging of Saddam Hussein that were leaked onto YouTube shortly after his death, and how she personally had to make the call about whether to let the videos stay on the site or not. In the end she decided to let the video of the actual execution stay up for historical significance, but she decided to take down a video of the body after death because it felt gratuitous, but at the same time she admits that she doesn't know if she made the right choice or not.
But at the same time the film goes much wider than just the people having to make these instant decisions. So while we watch them trying to assess whether or not a painting of a naked Donald Trump or a photo of a drowned refugee child is offensive and contravenes their rules, we also meet the people who generated those images and discuss hear from them what impact those choices have. We see the photographer painstakingly removing dead children from photographs leaving just a blank white space as a protest against Facebook's censorship. We meet the people trying to report news about the horrors being done in conflict zones struggling to keep essential information available, having to save every video they find as soon as it's uploaded because there's no way to know whether it will be available in an hour's time. And we hear their frustration when they come up against censorship by people who don't fully understand the cultural context of content. And all that is really fascinating.
The problem is that the film starts to go a little too broad. In particular, in the last third, it starts to look at the wider social environment and how polarised politics has become, and condemns the social media companies for creating a world where this has been facilitated, where people can create their own bubbles and never be challenged with other viewpoints. And that's a very valid criticism, but it is a much wider issue than this film was previously dealing with. These are all matters that could be or should be discussed in more depth then at the tail end of a documentary. At the same time, I think it's something that we all fundamentally know and recognise, and so it doesn't feel as much of a revelation as I think the filmmakers think it might be, whereas the information about the work of the cleaners was genuinely interesting and unexpected. I think the film really needed to keep its focus on their work, and leave the wider commentary about the broader impact of social media for another documentary. Still it was an excellent film, hard to watch at times, but I would recommend it.
So that Jimi Hendrix really knows how to play guitar.
For what it is, Monterey Pop is extremely entertaining. Legendary documentary filmmaker D A Pennebaker set out to capture the three-day Monterey International Pop Music Festival in 1967. And it seems like it was a fantastic concert, with some of the most important artists from the late 60s giving legendary performances. One of the challenges that I have watching the film is that I'm really not a music person, so with many of the performances I often wouldn't know who I was listening to, even when they were singing a song I know. I found myself being appreciative of those artists who would project their names on the background or who would have their band name on the drum kit, just because it would let me know whose work I was enjoying. But the performances were often quite extraordinary. Janis Joplin sings this powerhouse song that astonished me. Otis Redding has a clear playful delight enjoying the event that is just joyous. The Who give great power to their performance of My Generation, and the performance-ending guitar-smashing lends the set an air of being genuinely out-of-control. I really enjoyed Hendrix’s work playing “Wild Thing”, although I was less convinced by his decision to light the guitar on fire; it was a stunt that felt like a transparent attempt to outdo the Who’s destruction, but it felt pre-planned (if only because of the need for lighter fluid) in a way The Who did not. I don't think I've ever seen Ravi Shankar actually play before but his extended sitar performance at the end of the film is just one of the most stunning and exhausting pieces of music that I have ever seen. Not every song was great - as a Simon and Garfunkel fan, I was disappointed that their only song was Feelin’ Groovy, which is a song I enjoy but that does feel somewhat hollow when compared to the blindingly great work being done by the other artists. Surely Simon and Garfunkel must have had something better in their setlist for Pennebaker to include. But that’s what happens when you have to select one song to represent an artist.
But that leads me on to my main problem with the film - it's just too damned short. The film is inevitably going to be compared with Woodstock, which I finally saw a couple of years ago when it screened as part of the film festival's Autumn Events. Woodstock is a very long film, possibly too long at over 3 1/2 hours. But it does give you a genuine sense of having been at that festival. It has the time to let the performances breathe, with multiple songs allowing the artists to build their shows, even in the abridged sets we got. And you also got time just dwelling in the atmosphere of being at Woodstock. The problem with Monterey Pop is that it's only 80 minutes long, which means almost all of the performers get just one song to represent their work, with no time for their shows to develop. And there's also no sense of the wider context of the festival; I found myself needing to look it up on Wikipedia just to discover what the event actually was. You get the odd little scene, like the girl we meet wiping down the seats in preparation for the show. But there's never any real sense of what it's like to be there. There's also some weirdness around the editing of the show. It would frequently cut between daytime and night-time in a way that felt almost erratic. You never really know when you are in the context of the show. It was made even worse towards the end of the film, when they bring in footage of The Mamas and the Papas performing a second song that seemed pretty clearly from the same set that opened the film, so you were left wondering "why is this here, why put this song now at this point in the film?".
Still it's a very fun film for what it is, and watching it on the big screen with a full cinema sound system is just a great experience. Thoroughly enjoyed it.
A film that starts out seemingly as a character drama and that only slowly reveals himself to be a low-level thriller. Maggie Gyllenhaal stars as Lisa, a kindergarten teacher and aspiring poet who can see that her artistic ambitions will never be realised. One day she sees one of her students, a boy named Jimmy, start pacing up and down, almost in a trance, while he starts writing out loud a poem far more advanced than should be expected from a boy of 5 years old. Believing him to be a child prodigy, she decides to take the boy under her wing and nurture his talent. But her motivations seemed shaded, particularly after she decides to present one of the boy’s poems as her own work in her poetry class.
It's quite a fascinating film. There's a moment where someone tells Lisa that she's not an artist, she's a dilettante, she's an art appreciator. And so she finds herself recognising the talents of this young boy, and out of a frustration that these talents will be lost she finds herself driven to extremes to try to nurture him. Trying to help people understand the level of this child’s prodigious talent, she frequently compares him to Mozart, and in a strange way, that led me to reflect on the film Amadeus, with Gyllenhaal almost as a reverse-Salieri. She seemed almost cursed with enough understanding to recognise her own lack of talent, and the ability to appreciate the clear talents of the boy before her - the difference obviously being that she tries to nurture the talents in the boy, rather than actively destroy it as that film’s Salieri did, but there’s not a lot of difference in the end result. Lisa seems almost helpless in the face of this genius; at every point when she's faced with a choice, she always seems to choose the wrong path, as though she's being driven by her determination to capture this child’s work almost to her own destruction. As an audience member, you’re sitting there yelling at her “Don’t give the child your personal phone number; don’t sneak off with the kid; don’t do this; don’t do that; it will be bad for you”, and yet we could understand her motivation, even as she takes actions that will certainly wind up suppressing and destroying this talent she loves.
Maggie Gyllenhaal is just a heart-breaking figure here; her sadness at her inability to live up to her own artistic ambitions, her frustration at her family’s failure to make use of their own abilities, pour out single-mindedly onto this young child. In the hands of a different actress the character would be an actual villain, but she manages to retain an incredible sympathy even as she does take terrible steps; there’s a moment where she makes one final choice, and there were audible gasps in the audience as we realised that she had just passed the point of no return, and from that point the film was just filled with unbearable tension as we were waiting for the ultimate outcome. And yet even as that outcome arrived, we wanted the best for her; at the end of the film she just has one small request, one tiny thing that will allow her to try to recapture some small amount of dignity, and it’s unbearably tragic.
My one frustration with the film is with the believability of the poetry. I entirely recognise that there are child prodigies in the word, but I question the believability of this child being such a prodigy at poetry. Poetry is such a specific talent, and is so reliant on a tool like language that we use every day, and the poems he’s writing seem almost too advanced given the way he speaks when he’s not writing a poem. It’s not something like music that draws on talents that otherwise aren't easily seen in everyday life and where you could easily lose a prodigy if he’s not nurtured; I feel that if a child had this talent it would bleed out into the way he communicates normally, and I didn’t feel that. In fact, I sent much of the film waiting for the reveal that the child wasn’t writing poems and was actually reciting some obscure poems that his uncle had been reading to him, and was surprised when that reveal never came. But I was willing to put that quibble aside, because I otherwise did find the film to be incredibly strong.
I've really liked everything I've seen so far in the festival, but this is the first film that I absolutely adored. Essentially a contemplative and meditative take on films like Taken or John Wick, with a little bit of Taxi Driver, the film stars Joaquin Phoenix as Joe, an ex-special forces veteran who specialises in recovering missing people. Hired by a senator to save his daughter from a brothel for underage girls, the rescue initially seems as though it should be fairly straightforward until he discovers that there are larger forces behind the sex trafficking operation.
I really need to dig into the work of director Lynne Ramsay – I’ve previously only seen We Need To Talk About Kevin, which was excellent, and her work here is similarly astonishing. Her scenes are fragmentary, often sparsely written, with only the bare minimum dialogue needed to move the story forward. And there’s a strange beauty to the way she shoots her moments; she’ll often work in close-up – not close-ups of a character’s face, like most films would employ, but close-ups of some other detail that would usually go unobserved. There’s a great moment of a jelly bean being crushed where you can feel Ramsay just zeroing in on that one thing and delighting in every little change as the sweet is transformed. Meanwhile there's a bizarre, heightened, almost fantastical element to the film that often left us somewhat disoriented. Her approach that makes the climax fascinating as we suddenly find ourselves behind the action, knowing that there are things that we haven’t been shown and trying to work out why we weren’t shown these things, all the while trying to catch up and find out what is really going on. Ramsay also employs some fun techniques to filming the action, with one particularly memorable action sequence playing out over black-and-white surveillance cameras in a manner that effectively communicates both Joe’s skills in fighting and killing people but also his experience in these types of situations and his absolute understanding about how to work around the cameras to preserve his identity. Her approach to the action is skilled, but the violence is rough and nasty, without the sheen or the fun of a John Wick. He’s not running around like some expert taking people down with headshot after headshot; his weapon of choice is a ball-peen hammer, which means he has to fight in close quarters, bludgeoning people to death, almost as a way of getting out his anger and frustration with the world.
Joaquin Phoenix is just extraordinary here. It's a tragic and mournful performance; he’s a person who is haunted by memories of witnessing his mother being abused by her husband, of witnessing children being murdered while on patrol, by just the total horrors that he's encountered throughout his life, unable to shut out the world, and so he spends the entire film constantly on the verge of suicide, kept alive only by his need to care for his mother (I loved their relationship) and a need to protect the helpless in order to make the world right.
I also appreciated the sense of genuine trauma that seems to run through the film. Joe’s suffering marks every moment of Phoenix’s performance, but he’s easily matched by the traumatised girl Nina. Usually with films of this nature, there's a sense that all the person being rescued needs is just to be picked up and taken away from this situation and everything will be okay, but Ekaterina Samsonov’s performance makes clear just how damaged this young girl is from the experiences she has endured, and if she is able to make it out of the end of the film there is no doubt that she will be dealing with this for the rest of her life.
It feels weird to be praising a Jonny Greenwood score that wasn’t written for Paul Thomas Anderson, since for me the two are so intertwined as collaborators, but I see that the last time Greenwood composed a score that wasn’t for PTA it was to accompany We Need To Talk About Kevin, so it makes sense that Ramsay would return to his work. His work here is harsh and insistent and jarring, it never fades away but sets you on edge and demands that you hear it. It’s not music I would ever just sit down and listen to for fun, but it matches so perfectly with the film that I cannot imagine the one without the other.
It’s a stellar film, a marvellous cinematic experience. It’s intense and exhausting and horrific and not fun, but I adored it.
I've never seen any Guy Maddin films before, so the opportunity to see his new film The Green Fog, which he made with Evan and Galen Johnson, was a particular excitement for me. It's not a film that would have wide appeal at all, if only because there is no plot, little dialogue, no characters, pretty much nothing conventional for you to hold onto. The only way I can see this film appealing to anyone is if they know Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo intimately - you couldn't just have seen it once or twice, you need to know its every beat, every moment, every location. But if that's you then the film works incredibly well. Fortunately, Vertigo is my favourite film and so The Green Fog was exactly right for me.
The film is essentially a compilation of clips from dozens of movies, TV shows, even music videos, that have been shot in San Francisco, all pieced together to form a type of remix of Vertigo. So the film opens with scenes of people climbing fire escape ladders, scenes of various chases across rooftops, scenes of people falling from rooftops, all echoing Vertigo's famous opening sequence. From there it moves on scene-by-scene throughout the rest of the film. So when Scotty was following Madeline, we get extended sequences of various cars driving around the San Francisco streets, we get people going into flower shops or churches or looking at paintings, much as Scotty and Madeline did. But the connections are not always entirely straight-forward or obvious; the sequences of Judy's transformation, for instance, are represented just as much by people renovating their houses as they are trying to change their personal appearance.
There's a real wit at times to the way the editing works. We open with the famous opening shot of Vertigo, with the horizontal bar of the fire escape ladder, but instead of a figure immediately climbing over it, we cut repeatedly between that shot and a scene of a person slowly trying to clamber up a fire escape, while we all wait in anticipation at the top of the building. The sequence representing Scotty's mid-film catatonic state is composed almost entirely of footage of a young clean-shaven blank-faced Chuck Norris, which once we realised what was happening was hilarious. And the climactic moment where Scotty has his sudden realisation is represented by Donald Sutherland's final moment in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which caused much laughter in the audience.
But what was it all in aid of? I'm not entirely certain. I think to a large degree it's a celebration of the city of San Francisco, its incredible cinematic beauty, and its long history as a movie location. I think it offers an interesting point of view about cinema as an art form - you see moments pieced together where you can tell that some are just generic and workmanlike and uninspired, while other moments feel dynamic and thrilling and inventive, even when they're trying to achieve the exact same thing, and that contrast is fascinating to see. It's interesting to watch some of these performances being stripped of the dialogue, so that you can see the way some actors really do make use of all of their acting skills to communicate with the audience, while others seem rather blank-faced when they lose their vocal work. But ultimately I'm not sure what else I should be taking from it. I'm excited to go in search of some interviews with Maddin and see what he has had to say. In the meantime, I really enjoyed this film, even if I wouldn't expect anyone else to.
A delightful and sweetly observed anime film that centres on a young child, Kun, after his mother returns from hospital with his new sister Mirai. Initially resentful of the baby, he's visited by the human-form spirit of his dog, the former prince of the house who complains about how he's been ignored since Kun was born. He's visited by Mirai from the future, a teenage girl who tasks him with a mission to ensure she isn't cursed to remain a spinster. Angry after being forced to tidy his toys, he encounters his mother as a young child and plays with her. After struggling to learn to ride a bike, his great-grandfather teaches him to ride horses and motorbikes. And after declaring his intention to run away from home, he finds himself going on a spectacular tour of his family's history and their future.
Quite without realising it, I seem to have become a bit of a fan of Mamoru Hosoda. After hearing his credits mentioned during the pre-film introduction, I suddenly realised how many of his films I had enjoyed without ever putting them together as the work of a single artist - The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, Wolf Children, The Boy and the Beast, all utterly charming and delightful films. Mirai is a film that sits well with those titles. There’s a keen observation to the work, and an honesty to its approach that undercuts its sweetness. Kun is not an especially likable child; he’s a 4-year-old who is tiresome and demanding, and the way he vacillates between loving this newborn child and being intensely resentful of it felt very honest and real to me – there’s a fantastic scene where he starts out reading Mirai a story, but then it morphs into the train-mad Kun showing the baby all his toy trains, explaining which lines each different model serves, before ultimately getting so annoyed at the baby that he starts hitting her with a train.
One thing I appreciated was the film’s decision to not tie itself down about the reality or otherwise of the magical sequences. There’s a wonderful fantastical element to the sequences, which are beautifully animated, often with a watercolour style or intense stylisation that really sets those moments apart from the rest of the film. There’s an unexpected darkness to some of these fantasy moments as well, with one moment in particular (where Kun finds himself trapped on a bullet train straight out of your nightmares) proving to be surprisingly disturbing. (The main child in the film might be 4 years old, but I wouldn’t let a 4-year-old watch the film, solely because of this sequence.) But the film never declares whether this is really happening or is just part of his playtime imaginings, and there are good reasons to argue in either direction. What matters is the emotional journey that they represent, and I really did find that story believable and compelling. The thing I particularly liked was its honesty towards his relationship with his sister and how this was shaped by these fantastical visitations; while his affection for her does develop after he encounters Mirai of the future, he does take time to really connect this annoying little baby with the mature teenager he encounters, without the kind of easy instant change many movies resort to, and the emotional climax of the film revolves around him being willing to accept her existence as part of her family.
In the family-film anime world, Studio Ghibli obviously dominates for good reason, but this was a nice reminder that there is great work being done beyond that environment. Mirai is a wonderful film, sweet without being saccharine, and well worth seeking out.
Winter's Bone was my favourite film of 2010, an absolute masterpiece of suspense that starred a then-unknown Jennifer Lawrence. It was the film that really created her career; I remember when Lawrence was announced for The Hunger Games not long after seeing it, knowing she would be perfect for the role because there was so much similarity between Ree and Katniss. So it's depressing to realise that, while Lawrence has been a major movie star for nearly a decade, it has also taken that long for that film's director, Debra Granik, to give us a new narrative film.
Leave No Trace opens with a young teenage girl, Tom, seemingly camping in the middle of the forest with her father, Will. But very quickly it becomes clear that these are not people out on a holiday for a few days - they have a garden, they’re well-stocked, they run drills on how to respond if anyone finds their campsite, and it's clear that they've been living out there for quite some time; they could very easily have been out there for years. But one day they're discovered, taken in, and offered a proper house and an opportunity for Will to work. Tom is quite excited about the possibility of having a regular life in a regular house, even if she is nervous about having to socialise with other kids. But Will chafes against the constraints of living in a house with modern comforts - his first response is to hide the television in the closet, he rejects the bed in favour of sleeping outside, and refuses to take a cell phone. And then one night, afraid that his reluctance to accept modern living might lead to them taking Tom away from him, he wakes her up and takes her out in to return to their old life alone.
So this lived up to my every hope. I found the portrait of this father/daughter relationship utterly compelling, and ultimately heartbreaking. It’s clear that Will is a veteran suffering from PTSD and who genuinely cannot bear the thought of having to be around other people, and this infuses into Tom's life. She longs for a normal life, but she has taken on the burdens of a father who desperately needs to be alone, and so without realising it she's chosen to sacrifice the life that she needs because she has to support him. She holds to her father because for her home is where her father is, and she needs to learn to find her own place separate from him; this is not a story about a parent needing to let go of their child, but the child helping her father let her go. The relationship between Ben Foster and Thomason Harcourt McKenzie was absolutely convincing, with a natural intimacy and understanding between the two that felt real and lived in. McKenzie, a young New Zealand actor, has been the subject of significant praise, but this isn’t just a small country taking excessive pride in the success of one of our own; she is exceptional, giving a heartfelt and genuine performance while working closely with one of the most interesting character actors around.
In the Q& A afterwards, Debra Granik commented how this is not a film that has an antagonist, it doesn't have a villain. It has a complete affection for all of its characters. It looks at the people who are pushed out to the margins and connects with them at an genuinely loving way, but it also looks with understanding on those people who are representatives of the system that they’re fighting because it knows that these are people who are desperately trying to do the right thing in the midst of an incredibly tough situation. It's just a story about people dealing with their own issues in their own way, and the burdens that are created when you have this deeply damaged person trying to care for another person in the best way that he knows how.
One hallmark of both Winter’s Bone and Leave No Trace was the use of non-actors in smaller supporting roles, local natives who lend a sense of authenticity to the world, and as in that earlier film it worked really well. Often when filmmakers use real actors it can become something of a barrier in the film - people feel awkward and uncomfortable, giving stilted performances - but Granik seems to have a real talent for helping people feel natural and open on set. And that really reaps rewards; one of the best scenes in the film comes when Tom meets a beekeeper, and the resulting sequences of the beekeeper introducing Tom to these animals feel quite remarkable, simply because this was a real beekeeper introducing Tom to her own bees that she has a genuine connection to. In that moment, you’re not watching a bunch of actors act; you’re watching a real relationship being formed between people and creatures in a way that you could never achieve with a conventional cast.
Much like Winter’s Bone, Leave No Trace will definitely be pretty damned high in my ranking of films from the year. It was a fantastic first weekend of the festival for me, with ten really good films and no bad ones, but this was easily the highlight.
(Also, the film featured a scene where the characters prepared some fried mushrooms. They looked so good that I impulsively decided to make a late-night stop at the supermarket on my way home to buy some mushrooms and then fry them when I got home. This was literally the first time I have made fried mushrooms in my life.)
So I'm definitely going to be judged for liking this one as much as I did.
The movie has a pretty incredible opening, with a father holding an ice pick inches away from the face of his newborn baby; we're unsure if he's trying to convince himself to plunge the ice pick into its face, or convince himself not to. He eventually restrains himself but then, as he holds the baby, it looks at him and in a deep voice declares "You know what you need to do". And so the father makes plans to check into a hotel, hire a prostitute, and murder her; he has to do this, just to relieve this tension in him. Mia Wasikowska plays his planned victim, who turns out to have her own self-destructive tendencies that might make her more open to his intentions then he had intended or desired.
This was a weirdly, disturbingly fun time. There is a creepy, dark relationship that develops between the two that was just an utter delight to watch. Wasikowska radiates with a kind of sinister innocence and nasty playfulness that leaves you constantly on the edge; you're never entirely certain where you should be with this character, but you're always excited to see where she will take the story. Meanwhile, Christopher Abbott, as the would-be killer, has to maintain a sense of genuine menace while also carrying much of the film's comedy; his scenes rehearsing all the post-killing steps he'll need to follow, or his absurd efforts to avoid leaving fingerprints in the hotel, or his disorientation as the situation goes out of his control, was a reliable source of laughter throughout the film. The twists and turns that took place, both in the characters' relationship and their actions towards each other, were just enthralling and exciting and horrifying and hilarious, but never dull, never boring, never ordinary. And the film had this eagerness and commitment to its premise that I found weirdly likeable; from very early on, I found myself shocked and pleased at how far the film was willing to go.
One detail that I particularly enjoyed was the use of miniatures throughout the film. The film takes place in a city of high-rises that look unlike any high-rise has ever looked, and while there is some beautiful design work that went into these incredible miniatures, they are deliberately shot in a way that they never feel more than a foot tall. The film never attempts for realism, we're always supposed to be fully aware that this takes place inside an artificial reality, and in that context the artificially of the miniatures worked perfectly.
I will admit that I’d found myself struggling to place the inspiration for the film; it was clearly drawing on some film tradition, but I wasn’t really able to place it. It wasn’t until the end credits when I noticed that half the music tracks were composed for films with Italian titles that I realised it must be drawing on the Italian giallo horror style. (Admittedly, giallo is a big blindspot for me; my sole experience with the genre is a single viewing of Suspiria a couple of years ago). As soon as I realised this, it made complete sense; the bright lurid colours, that beautiful retro setting (the 70s were probably the highpoint for giallo), the delight the film took in its exploitativeness and its bloodletting - to me as someone who really only knows giallo by reputation, these all felt like hallmarks of those films.
This is not an important film, nor a deep film; it's just a film that, if you connect to it on its level, just wants to entertain. And I was entertained.
I'm not really sure how familiar I was with Hedy Lamarr prior to seeing this documentary. To be honest, I don't think I've even seen any of her films. But I thought I knew the general overview of her story - how she was one of the great Hollywood beauties, and how it has only been in the last couple of decades that she's been recognised as one of the most significant inventors of the 20th century. But it turns out to be a much more incredible life than even that.
She was born an Austrian Jew in Vienna, where from an early age her father inspired a love of machinery and science in her. After her incredible beauty developed as a teenager, she became a movie star in Austria, where she scandalised the world after starring in a film called Ecstasy which featured both a nude scene and a scene where she simulated an orgasm. Her first husband was a Jewish manufacturer producing munitions for the Nazis. After a late night escape for America, she became part of the MGM stable of stars. In her spare moments she would return to her trailer, which she had set up as a workshop for her inventing. During World War II, she worked with a composer friend to invent frequency hopping technology for guided missiles, where the radio signal jumps around between different frequencies to make them impossible to jam - the initial version of this technology relied on player piano rolls to track the frequency hopping, but today this technology is fundamental to WiFi, GPS, and Bluetooth. When her career went into decline, she tried film producing at a time when actors didn't produce movies. After her career ended, she moved to Texas where she married an oil tycoon, one of the six short-lived marriages she had. She was an early adopter of plastic surgery, and apparently even applied her inventor mind to the surgery, suggesting ways of hiding the scarring that had never been tried before but are now commonplace. And then in her last years she became a recluse, seldom even letting family members come to see her. And although she apparently never saw a cent from the frequency hopping technology, in her final years she was finally recognised for her place as the inventor of a technology that has become vital to modern life.
If I'm being honest, Bombshell isn't an especially great piece of documentary filmmaking. It's good, entirely serviceable, but not great. But then it doesn't need to be. Sometimes all you need from a documentary is for the filmmaker to simply step back, become invisible, and tell the story. And in this case, Hedy Lamarr's story is so unbelievably incredible that all you need is for her story to be told straight without excessive flourishes. You just find yourself hanging on to every moment of the film, wondering where on earth this story could possibly lead to next. The filmmakers were lucky enough to get access to the tapes of an extended telephone interview with Lamarr from about 10 years before her passing; even in her advanced age she retains a quickness of wit and a clear intelligence that makes her a compelling and fun figure to spend time with.
When I saw how involved her family members were in the project, I was initially a little bit wary. Often in these types of projects, you get the sense that the family really wants to whitewash and preserve the reputation of their loved one. Fortunately this doesn't seem to have been the case with this film - it's much more honest about her shortcomings then I might otherwise have expected. They're upfront about her addiction to methamphetamine, at a time when use of such drugs was encouraged and the damage they cause was not yet appreciated. They're open about her career failures and how she contributed to these. And most notably they're honest about how hard she was to share a family with - there's a sad story about a young boy who was originally adopted by Lamarr and then was essentially abandoned after things didn't work out quite as expected, or the story about the granddaughter who only ever met her grandmother a couple of times and who was sent an autographed photograph from Lamarr's heyday, because Lamarr seemingly didn't seem to recognise her granddaughter wanted to know her, not the movie star. Most surprisingly, they even give voice to those who accuse her of stealing her most famous invention - it's an accusation that doesn't seem to really stick, motivated mostly out of a scepticism than a beautiful woman could also be smart, and Lamarr does seem today to be generally recognised as the co-inventor of frequency hopping, but just the film's willingness to admit that accusation is out there was surprising to me.
It's an unexpectedly tragic story, a woman who was almost cursed by her good looks which led her to be judged and dismissed and never really seen is the person she really was. It's a fascinating and fun opportunity to appreciate this incredible woman. If you can get an opportunity to see the film, I wholeheartedly recommend it.
Brady Blackburn is a minor celebrity on the rodeo circuit until one day when he's thrown off a broncing horse and suffers a near-fatal head injury. Unable to ride, he passes his time hanging out with his friends, being a big brother to his younger autistic sister, being in conflict with his father, and hoping against hope that he'll get to ride again. But it's a forlorn hope, as the doctor makes very clear that if he steps into the rodeo ring and gets on the back of a horse then he will die. And so he has to try to discover who he is outside of being a horse rider.
The thing that’s really notable about the film is that it’s effectively a true story. Brady Jandreau, who plays Brady Blackburn, was a talented rodeo rider until nearly dying from a head injury caused by being stepped on by a horse. His injury prompted director Chloe Zhao, who knew Brady, to start filming this film shortly after. When the film opens with Brady prying bloodied medical staples out of his skull, that’s real, and doctors really have told him that he can never ride again. When we see Brady talking to his father Wayne, that’s his real father; that really is his sister Lilly, and she really is autistic. Those are his real friends he’s hanging out with, including his best friend Lane Scott, who was indeed a well-known rider until an accident paralysed him and left him unable to speak. (His heartbreaking scenes with Lane are probably the hardest scenes in the film to watch, simply because Lane serves almost as a symbol of just how bad Brady's injury could have been, and therefore how lucky he truly has been.)
This is one of those films that's really grows in the mind. When I saw the film, I initially liked it, but it was probably my least favourite of all my films in the festival so far - honestly, it was a bit slow, and didn't fully grab me at the time. But over the past day since I saw it, I've found myself coming back to and thinking about the film, and the more I reflect on it, the more I find myself really liking it. It's not the most immediately dynamic movie, and there's a particularly mournful tone running through it, but it's also rich and contemplative. There's a fascinating consideration about what it means to be a man, particularly in this world that is built from the iconography of the cowboy and the western, and how Brady has to deal with the loss of the only thing he knows how to do. You'll get the sense there's really very little opportunity for people in this area of South Dakota, and Brady had a definite opportunity to build a good life for his family, so much of the film is focused on him trying to come to terms with that loss and with him trying to find it in himself to be willing to move on. There's an absolutely incredible extended sequence of Brady taking a wild horse and just slowly working with it, teaching it, earning its trust, until finally he has a tame horse. It's fascinating to watch the tenderness that develops in the relationship between man and horse, and how much work goes into developing that. I also really loved the cinematography, which is definitely playing with those Western sensibilities, capturing the way the light dances across these wide open fields. I was particularly glad to have had the chance to see this in a cinema, where you can just bask in the beauty of the image.
My main frustration about the film comes back to the idea to do this as fiction. The parts of the film that I loved were the genuine moments, where Brady is just alone working the horses, or where he’s reflecting on the impact this injury has had on his life, or where he’s visiting with his injured friend Lane, or where he’s just being a brother playing around with his sister – moments that would probably play pretty much identically whether the film was fictional or not because they seem like genuine moments to begin with. The moments that didn’t work as well for me were the moments where people had to actually act – admittedly, Brady did seem to become more comfortable acting through the film, as would be expected for someone who is on screen in every scene of the film, but none of the other actors seem to have had enough practice or to have received the necessary support to ever seem at ease on screen, and it frequently took me out of the film. I found myself wishing they had made this as a documentary, capturing the truth of the best parts of the film without the distraction of people trying to pretend that they’re not in the room with a movie camera. But if you're willing to look past that, you'll find a beautiful and tender piece of filmmaking.
A likeable Icelandic comedy, Woman At War tells the story of Halla, a woman who, outraged at the impacts that globalisation and environmental destruction is having on her country, decides to wage her own form of eco-terrorism by attacking power pylons to cause them to short out. Her attacks are so successful that she provokes a nation-wide crisis and a massive investigation to find "the Mountain Woman". At the same time she's excited to learn that she's been accepted as an adoptive parent to a 4-year-old Ukrainian orphan.
With the exception of one running joke, which I'll comment on shortly, much of the film relies on a fairly dry and dark sense of humour that I found extremely appealing. Lead actress Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir (thank you cut-and-paste) seems to be having an extreme amount of fun making fun of both self-righteous eco-terrorists convinced of their own moral superiority and of smug yoga teachers taking pride in their own self-actualisation. I was also pleased by how well the drama of the film worked without undercutting the comedy. There's a genuine sense of tension that builds around the hunt for the Mountain Woman that I was completely caught up in. The high point of the film is a fantastic extended sequence in which Halla finds herself running across the Icelandic countryside, after a particularly spectacular pylon attack, being hunted by drones, helicopters, and men with bloodhounds. It's an absolutely thrilling sequence, made even better by the fact that the Icelandic countryside is simply stunning and almost unlike any other location that I've ever seen. Even if there was nothing else in the film to like, it would be worth watching just to see the stark beauty of this country.
The music for the movie is provided by a small three-piece band and a group of three female singers. I know this because, in a curious running joke that I'm not entirely certain I understand the point of, they decided to show the musicians on screen every time they play. I'm pretty sure I remember that same joke being done about 20 years ago in There's Something About Mary, so it's not exactly an original joke, but the audience did seem to find it very funny, laughing pretty much every time it happened. I just found it to be distracting. It reached the point where I couldn't simply be enveloped in the film because, even when we're watching a serious dramatic moment, every time I heard a note of music I would be waiting for the band to appear in some unexpected location. Sometimes you can see the band before the music starts and you find yourself distracted waiting for them to start playing. Often the film acts as though the band doesn't actually exist, and the characters can't see the people, but there are points where the characters do seem to actually see and respond to the band. And at other times the film decides to actually involves the band into the action - witness the moment Halla decides to turn the television off, and one of the band members actually picks up the remote and turns the television back on so she can continue watching. It's something of a baffling choice that I found extremely distracting and frequently took me out of the film, and I'm uncertain what they thought they were actually going to achieve with that gag.
I was also somewhat bothered by the decision to give Halla an identical twin sister. I'm not complaining about the character herself, as she is very funny - it's always a reliable source of comedy to make fun of yoga teachers. But you don't casually include an identical twin character into a movie, especially when it means that visual effects are required to duplicate the actor - that's something you do when you need there to be someone who does look identical to your lead. And Halla's sister Asa is not well integrated into the film, really only getting a couple of scenes before the film's climax, so that her presence feels less like an essential element in the film, and more like the screenwriter wrote himself into a corner and grabbed the idea of an identical twin to get himself out of it. Which also unfortunately means that the conclusion of the film is rather predictable.
Still it's a fun film, and I was very happy to see it.
It was sad to see a fairly small crowd at the Embassy for the only festival screening of Angels Wear White, a quiet but compelling drama from China that really did deserve a larger audience. The story focuses on Mia, a young woman without identity papers working illegally in a seaside hotel. One evening she checks in an older man with two 12-year-olds into two separate rooms; feeling that something is wrong, she later notices the man in the hotel corridor pressuring the young girls, and uses her phone to video the surveillance video as the man forces his way into their hotel room. A few days later, Mia learns that the man has been accused of raping the two young girls, Wen and Xin, but the surveillance tapes are recorded over, and because there's no evidence that the man ever entered the girls’ hotel room he won’t be charged. Realising that she has the only evidence that will prove his guilt, and under the pressure of being an illegal in desperate need of money to get fake identity papers, she finds herself forced decide whether to use the video to further her own needs or to help the girls.
It’s a fantastic film that explores Chinese attitudes to women, sexuality, and purity. There's the casual way the police conduct their investigations, allow the influence of the accused and the fact that the girls were probably asking for it to influence their investigation. There's the abusive boyfriend of Mia's work colleague, who suggests that there are "other ways" Mia could pay for the identity card, and who inquires into whether Mia is a virgin because "there are people who will pay for that". There's the fact that the rapist, Commissioner Liu, is the boss of Wen’s father, and had been made the girl’s godfather in an attempt to curry favour – the suggestion that he may have essentially prostituted out his daughter for career advancement is made but then left hanging. There's the scene in which we hear about an operation to "restore virginity". And in one of the best sequences in the film, there's the scene where Wen goes walking along the beach and finds herself running into multiple wedding photo shoots, the brides all in elaborate white dresses that for Wen forcefully remind her of her trauma.
Wen Qi’s work as Mia is exceptional. She’s a character of extremely strong will and real determination, but in many ways that has led her into her current situation, where she is extremely vulnerable and susceptible to exploitation, and the way. But I also think attention needs to be given to the performance of Zhou Meijun as Wen, one of the two girls who becomes effectively the second lead. It's a very quiet performance that feels genuinely damaged and awkward, as though she is genuinely struggling to deal with a life-changing experience that she's not equipped to deal with, and all the while her mother is angrily (and violently) holding her responsible for her own victimhood.
The movie open with footage of a massive statue that dominates the beachside recreating Marilyn Monroe in the Seven-Year Itch pose, her dress flying up around her. It's a disconcerting image to open with because, with a statue that large, if you're anywhere in the vicinity of the statue you’re almost forced into a position of looking up the statue’s dress. (Indeed, I think it’s only late in the film that we even see the statue’s face; while it’s obvious who it is, for much of the film the statue might as well only consist of legs, dress, and panties.) The film comes back to that statue repeatedly; over time we see the lower leg being damaged and defaced, until the final shot which is once again an upskirt shot of this statue. It’s a fairly heavy-handed metaphor in the film that feels very uncomfortable in a conscious and deliberate way, but it worked for me. The statue is clearly supposed to remind us of the medical exams that the girls go through to ascertain whether or not they were raped, or the virginity restoration operations. But I think we’re also supposed about Marilyn and the fact that this woman, who was a genuinely talented actress, is primarily remembered in our culture for this moment that unambiguously sexualises her, and ponder the attitudes to women that are reflected in a culture that would build a monument like that right next to a children’s playground.
The only thing that disappointed me about the film was the fact that the film seemed to focus so much on Wen and her struggles that the second victim, Xin, almost feels like she gets lost in the mix. There's a point later in the film where we see Xin, and to be honest it almost disoriented me because I had kind of forgotten that she existed. Xin seems to exist in the film less to be a character in her own right, and more because they needed a second girl so that they could use her parents as a contrast – while Wen’s mother is enraged at her daughter for actions that contributed to the rape, Xin’s parents see these events as an opportunity to get the wealthy culprit to pay for Xin’s expensive schooling. It’s an fascinating element for the movie to explore, but it’s unfortunate that in doing so it did somewhat overlook one of the victims at the centre of the story.
But this is a small quibble about a fantastic movie. If you can somehow find it, it is well worth watching.
Searching is a compelling thriller about a father named David, played by John Cho, who conducts a desperate search after his daughter goes missing one day. The hook of the film is that it takes place entirely on David's computer screen - we watch him FaceTime with people, search the computer, search the Internet for any type of clue that would allow him to locate his daughter. It's a skilfully constructed thriller that effectively explores the degree to which our lives are lived online and through our devices, as well as examining the degree to which parents can easily become divorced from the lives of their children.
It's not the first time that a film has approached its storytelling through the use of computer screens. A couple of years ago, there was an extremely effective horror film called Unfriended that similarly played out entirely over Skype, and I seem to remember hearing about an episode of Modern Family that used a very similar style. But it's still new enough that it feels fresh and original as a means of storytelling. It also means that they are still exploring the limitations of storytelling in this style. Think about this as essentially a new version of the found footage film - in the same way that found footage films need to find some excuse for people to be recording events when no person would stop to record them, there are points in Searching where the characters are doing things for no reason other than for them to be captured in the film. So for instance, David will often just leave the FaceTime video screen open even when he's not using it, just so that we can capture the video of him making phone calls. Similarly there are points where he watches news videos about events that he is already very well-informed about, just so the audience can get that information. But, for the most part, it works and is surprisingly effective in communicating information. Witness the opening sequence of the film, where we watch David creating a new user account on his Windows XP machine for his 5-year-old daughter and then, in the course of a few minutes of screen time, we're taken through 10 years of life, the joys and tragedies, until we brought completely up to date. It's a remarkably impressive sequence, that manages to elicit an unexpectedly emotional response from a few photos and internet searches and email subject lines. And this storytelling approach even opens up a few unexpected opportunities for humour of recognition - witness the audience's laughter when David has to access his long unused XP machine, and immediately gets a notification about it having been 2 years since his antivirus was last run.
Once the mystery gets going, it's extremely compelling, with a wide variety of plausible suspects and red herrings for David to pursue. My one real disappointment is with the film's ultimate conclusion. I do think that the film plays fair with its audience - on reflection, I do recall various elements throughout the film that point to the ultimate conclusion, and I suspect if I go back and rewatch the film again, it will be much more obvious now that you know what you're looking out for. But it is a conclusion that relies on a particular actor giving a specific performance, and I'm not certain that the actor has the ability to effectively pull that off. But that's a small complaint in the context of a very good film.
John Cho is an actor I've enjoyed before, but he gives one of his best performances here. It's an unforgiving filmmaking style, with so much of it by necessity being shot fully in close ups, and he needs to convince us with every concerned wrinkle just how desperate he is to find his daughter, and yet it also needs to feel utterly natural. His disorientation, his hurt and sense of betrayal, his shock at realising how little he understood about his daughter, are all given a wonderfully nuanced performance.
It's an excellent film that makes a very strong case for its filmmaking style being, not just a noteworthy gimmick, but a legitimate approach to telling this story in the only way that it could be told. Extremely entertaining, and well worth seeing.
Well, it took 7 days and 16 films, but I finally had my first festival film that I didn't like. In fact, that's an understatement - I hated pretty much every single second of this film. Nicolas Cage plays the Nicolas Cage character, this time called Red, a forestry worker living in the Smoky Mountains in 1983 and happily married to a woman called Mandy. But one day a hippie apocalyptic cult driving through town happens to see Mandy, and the aspiring folk music singer that leads the cult declares that he wants her. And so the cult, accompanied by a group of bikers (who may be regular bikers gone insane after a bad drug trip or literal demon bikers from Hell) kidnap Mandy and take her back to their base. But when Mandy laughs at the manhood of the aspiring folk music singer that leads the cult, they burn her alive in front of Red. Red does not take well to this course of events and, after meeting with Bill Duke (who is in this film for some reason), decides to forge himself a massive silver axe and go and take on the hippie apocalyptic cult himself.
Well, that sounds like it could be an interesting movie. It's not. Words can't begin to describe how deadly dull I found this movie. It's a weird combination of the worst impulses of Terrence Malick and David Lynch. It has that drifting reflective tone that Malick often employs, but without the sense of beauty or awe, adopting instead the nightmarish tones of David Lynch without the sense of depth or instinct, while mimicking the excessive sound design but using it almost as a cheap trick.
There's a fairly fundamental inconsistency in the main character. Throughout much of the film he is relatively silent and taciturn, without any of the indulgence is that one normally expects from Nicolas Cage. That is, until we reach the second half, when Nicolas Cage turns into Nicolas Cage. There's a moment early on in his rampage where someone cuts his shirt, and his response is to say "That was my favourite shirt". It's a quippy response that is not the type of person that Red was initially established as. From that point, it's just silly. There's one scene, for instance, where Red is fighting one of the bikers until he manages to slit the biker's throat and finds himself covered in blood gushing from the biker. Suddenly the television explodes, as another biker has walked into the room. Red jumps up, runs to the new biker, grabs him by the head and twists it to break his neck. Nicolas Cage then gives his standard bug-eyed crazy man look, that just felt goofy in that moment, as though it was Nicolas Cage just being Nicolas Cage rather than inhibiting his actual character. And then he just grabbed a massive pile of cocaine on a piece of glass and shoved his entire nose into the powder. (Later on he goes on a really bad drug trip after randomly sampling some icky-looking substance he finds, which leads me to take away the lesson that when you're attacking a hippie apocalyptic cult, don't assume that every substance you happen to find is safe to consume.) Now it's not that I need my films to be dry and serious, but I would really like it if films felt like there was something approaching consistency in the tone that they were aiming for, or at the very least if there was some sense that the variation in tone serve the purpose. I see nothing like that here. Red does not feel like the same person he was in the first half of the film, and much of that change does not feel motivated by the traumatic experiences he goes through, but just a screenwriting contrivance because if you hire Nicolas Cage, you want him to do the full Nicolas Cage.
I can't overstate how extraordinarily lethargic and aimless the film actually feels. For every minute of a "my chainsaw is longer than your chainsaw" fight, we get 10 minutes of speechifying, with characters delivering endless monologues so extended that you would lose track of what they were actually talking about, and all the while the film is adopting a frustrating hallucinatory approach. And even when they do something interesting, they seemed determined to kill it - witness, for instance, a remarkably creepy scene where Mandy's face morphs into the face of the cult leader while he delivers a speech, with the faces eventually landing on a middle ground that is neither Mandy's face nor the cult leader. It's an impressively unsettling image, but the speech and the scene goes on for many minutes longer than necessary to get the point, and so it just becomes a dull viewing experience. I do not check my watch when I'm watching a movie, I haven't done so for years, but with Mandy I couldn't help myself, checking the time six times during this two-hour film. The first time I checked it, I was astonished to discovered that half an hour had already passed, which really didn't seem possible. The film felt like it had been going for so much longer, but at the same time it seemed impossible that the film could have been going on for as short as 30 minutes, given how little of any substance that actually taken place in the film. The entire film just felt like it was a test of endurance.
Do not let the write-ups, promising some kind of bonkers midnight film, fool you. This is a dull and bad film, and I can find nothing in this film worth recommending it for.
Madeline’s Madeline had me absolutely fascinated and disoriented right from the opening moments. We see Madeline, a 16-year-old girl, being a cat, purring, lying in the sun, having her mother pet her. And then she picks up a hot clothes iron, and slowly walks up on her oblivious mother. Two minutes in, and I’m completely sold. The film then jumps to a few months later, with Madeline having returned home from her latest stay in the psych ward. She joins an experimental theatre group, one of those groups where they do acting exercises like “be a turtle” and where they don’t start with an actual script but just workshop the production, with everyone throwing in their own ideas and letting the piece develop. But the group’s director, Evangeline, is just fascinated by this young girl and so, as they endlessly workshop, the theatre piece starts to change until it becomes a piece about Madeline and her troubled relationship with her mother.
Much like the theatre group’s work, there’s a deliberately experimental feel to the film that I think many would find off-putting, but that is very carefully considered and skilfully executed – director Josephine Decker always feels in complete control of the work. That experimental tone seems to be born out of Madeline’s mental illness, almost as though it’s an attempt to communicate the way she experiences the world. It feels distorted, drifting, disorienting, at times the film feels almost garish, as though we’re in this world that we don’t understand or focus on.
I’ve seen a lot of strong performances so far in this festival, but I can’t imagine there being another performance as incredible as Helena Howard’s work as Madeline. We’re told throughout the film what a talent Madeline is, and while we’re never really certain to what degree that is true of Madeline – there are moments where it seems as though her incredible acting is just letting go of her mental health – it’s undeniably true of Howard. She provides the anchor for the film, and influences the entire tone of the movie. She is appealing and sweet and charming but always feels like there’s something unsettling and genuinely dangerous underpinning this girl. And then on top of that we need to deal with the simple rush of hormones that comes with being a teenager, and this is all mixed up into this toxic cocktail of a performance. There are moments that feel as intense as any thriller simply because there’s a line that should not be crossed and we really do feel as though we really cannot be certain that she knows where that line is. And the challenge of the performance is that all the way through we have Evangeline standing on the sidelines declaring what an unbelievable acting talent Madeline is, and so we’re constantly having our attention drawn to actively consider whether Howard’s performance is so good that Evangeline would say that of Madeline, and it’s seamless. The climax of the film comes where Madeline gives an improvised piece that is just every moment we’ve seen of her relationship with her mother, and it feels exhausting going through this journey with her, but it’s also a moment of perfect performance for Howard. I hope that we’ll see more of Helena Howard.
But the other performances are great. I’ve never really cared for Miranda July in the past, as she often seems very indulgent in her personal work, but working for another director she’s forced to suppress that and instead brings a nice vulnerability and sense of being utterly overwhelmed. There’s certainly a love for Madeline, but it’s tempered by an utter exhaustion with having to deal with this child who is so much more work than most kids, and she has the trauma of having been violently attacked by her own daughter, and then there’s the grief at whatever it was that happened that led to her having to deal with all this on her own.
And Molly Parker’s Evangeline is similarly wonderful. There’s something weird and uncomfortable about Evangeline’s relationship with Madeline, and we understand that it’s probably because Evangeline is pregnant and she sees Madeline as a possible future for her daughter. And so this unhealthy pseudo-parental relationship builds up between the two, and she tells herself that she understands who Madeline is but she only knows who Madeline presents herself as. And this blinds her to the degree of dependency that she has formed with Madeline, and to the degree that she is taking on this mother role without knowing what her mother has to deal with.
It’s a consciously disorienting and uncomfortable viewing experience, but I found it a fascinating and rewarding experience.
In 1980, a guy called Bobby goes to college; it’s his first time there, but everyone acts as though they know him. Then he discovers he looks exactly like Eddy, a guy who went there the previous year; after learning that they were both adopted from the same adoption agency and share the same birthday, they’re overjoyed to realise that they’re reunited identical twins. The story makes the news, where it’s read by a third guy, David, who also looks identical to these two, who was adopted from the same adoption agency, and who shared the same birthday. Reunited identical triplets. The three become inseparable, doing news interviews (the number of interview clips the film can draw on is surprising), living together in New York in the 80s, sex, drugs, rock and roll. And that's about all I really want to say about the events of the film – sadly, I went into the film having heard more about where the story would go, and I wish I could have gone in completely fresh. Suffice it to say, this may start off seeming like some nice heartwarming story – and that’s how this story played out in the media for a long time - but it heads into some dark and upsetting territory, complete with moments and revelations that play in the film like a twist ending.
Fairly fundamental to the film is the question of nature vs nurture – after all, it’s one of the most essential questions about who we are as humans, and here we have what seems to be a perfect case study for the question. And the film seems, at least initially, to fall very much on the nature side. After all, when you see them together it’s uncanny; the way they sit or smile, or just instinctively have the identical response to a question. And they talk about how they all have the same interests, such as being on the wrestling team. Even our thoughts seem to be dictated by our genes – there’s one point where they discuss having “an original thought”, only to discover their brother just had the same thought. The film even makes jokes about it; there’s a very funny sequence where we get their wives discussing how they got the real catch of the triplets – I got the best looking one; I got the funniest – and we’re invited to laugh at this because it seems so absurd to try to identify the cutest one or the funny one.
Except that it’s not. The film ultimately argues that we as humans, when watching this story, are hardwired to look for similarities and connections between these people. And those similarities are certainly there, but they’re also being played up by the brothers who know that people are looking for these similarities. But just because they all smoke Marlboros or have the same taste in women doesn’t mean that they’re the same person, these are all surface-level similarities, and as the film unfolds it becomes clear that the people these guys became is governed just as much, if not more so, by the influence of their parents; putting aside the superficial connections, it’s ultimately nurture that can really affect who a person is at their core. Part of the question of the film comes down to free will – if these guys are so similar because of their genetics then is our life set before we’re born? – and what the film does is come down against free will, but in a different way. We aren’t necessarily destined to follow a fate that is laid out in our genes, but there is an inevitability in our actions that may be influenced by our genetics but is ultimately shaped and governed by our experiences. (Admittedly, I am someone who is personally sceptical about the possibility of free will, so I might just be seeing the film confirming my own personal views.)
A friend of mine had a bit of a complaint about the film's approach to its events - his big problem was about the film initially hiding a case of teenage mental illness until later in the film - but I thought it was perfectly acceptable. The film is very carefully structured so that it gives you that sense of initial heartwarming joy and optimism, and the darker and more sinister elements are only introduced later on. But what that means is that there are elements that chronologically take place very early, but are only revealed much later in the film because they would detract from that early optimistic tone. The film doesn't portray its events with a strict "and then this happened" approach, instead telling its events like a storyteller with as much focus on the ebb and flow of the story. And I think that's why the film is so successful.
There are so many more things that I want to say about the film, but I won't because I want people to see it and be surprised by. This has probably been the most popular film of the festival, with every regular screening sold out, and the three screenings added to the programme to meet demand either sold out or selling well. And there’s a reason for that success. It is an excellently constructed, impressively cinematic documentary, that plays as well as any top Hollywood thriller. It's a great film to watch with a packed audience, where you can feel the communal gasps of shock as the story develops. Highly recommended.
(Also, just 20 minutes after the movie, I was walking past a second-hand bookshop when I noticed a book outside in the cheap box called Identical Strangers; surprised by the title, I looks at it, and realise it was written by some twin sisters separated at birth who had been prominently featured in the film. So, that's a weird coincidence.)
Jon Hamm stars as Mason, an American diplomat working in Beirut in 1972. The city is a confusion of different cultures and ethnicities and factions, but Mason has managed to navigate these and build a comfortable life for himself, with a beautiful wife and a nice home. But after an attack on his house mortally wounds his wife, Mason decides to leave the country. Ten years later, he's an alcoholic and working as a labour dispute negotiator when he's asked to return to Lebanon to help negotiate the release of a hostage, who happens to be his closest friend from his time in the country. He finds a city devastated, fiercely divided between all of the factions, and completely corrupt in the highest levels of government.
Beirut is just an impressively strong and compelling piece of filmmaking. As a friend of mine observed after the screening, it's the type of film that used to be made all the time and that would be a big blockbuster. Look, I do enjoy a lot of the modern big-budget superhero films and the like, but it's nice to watch something that isn't a film with a great big beam of light piercing the sky that needs to be stopped, this isn't a film about stopping some massive world world-ending catastrophe, this is just a film about one man trying to save another person and he's completely overwhelmed. There are genuine stakes to the story, it's literally life or death, but it's not so over-the-top that it loses all meaning. Instead, because we're sold by the character and by the situation, we're therefore completely caught up in everything that happens in the film.
One of the things that's really fascinating about the film is the interaction between the different cultures in this country. Mason finds himself needing to move between the various forces at play, trying to locate a person who went missing 10 years and who is probably being held as a secret prisoner and it's just absolutely enthralling to watch. He's got the Israelis on one hand, he's got the PLO, he's got the Christians, and he's got these terrorists who don't seem to be entirely connected to anyone, and he's trying to negotiate with all of them to elicit information that he needs to locate this missing person. And there's a constant suspicion, because you never know whether the person that they're talking to really has what they need, or whether they're just trying to string them along to see if they can gain some advantage, because all of the communications are undertaken in a form of doublespeak. And there are all the tensions that come into play as well; the Israelis needing access to better satellite information to identify fake PLO outposts, while the PLO are highly motivated to help in order to avoid encouraging an Israeli incursion. And in the middle, you just have Jon Hamm fighting this fight using only his negotiation skill to pressure people into undertaking actions that they don't want to, that might not even be in their best interest, just because he was able to convince them that it was a good idea. And it's enthralling. This is an action thriller that manages to be intense and utterly compelling, despite the fact that I don't remember its main character ever picking up a gun.
It's not the best movie of the year, but it is a strong work that reminds you just how effective simple, good storytelling can still be in modern cinema.
Well, it certainly doesn't lack for ambition.
The King is a documentary that is, at least in theory, focused on a Rolls Royce owned by Elvis Presley in the mid-60s. The makers of this documentary fill the car with a ton of cameras and recording equipment, essentially turning the car into their own mini-studio, and then take it on a tour of America, picking up recording artists who offer their own performances from the back of the van, picking up cultural commentators to talk about the place that Elvis holds in popular culture, or just picking up celebrities to talk about the experience that Elvis must have had living as one of the most famous people in the world. You get some fantastic musical performances throughout the film –obviously there are snippets of Elvis performing, and they are great, but I mostly enjoyed the performances by the artists playing in the back-seat of this car. There’s a jaw-dropping performance by country band EmiSunshine and the Rain; there’s a gospel choir performing Chain of Fools; there’s a wonderfully sensual performance of Fever when Elvis goes to Vegas.
But that’s not what this film is about. At the end of The King, Ethan Hawke essentially sums up the premise of the film by observing that Elvis Presley, at every stage of his life, was offered a choice between something that would be creatively satisfying or something that would make the most money ever, whether it's his decision to sign the largest movie contract ever to make a bunch of rubbish movies, or his decision to take the biggest paycheck ever and locate himself in Vegas for the last years of his life when he really wanted to tour and see the world, and every time he took the money. And what the film is trying to say is that Elvis's life and career is essentially symbolic of the entirety of American culture since the 1950's. It's basically a massive cultural commentary on the place that America is at now.
So the film charts Elvis’s life, from a poor family in Tupelo, attending a black church and discovering a love for black music, being discovered by Sam Phillips as a face that white people will accept to bring black music into their homes, the massive celebrity, his falling under the control of huckster Colonel Tom Parker, his overseas service as Private Elvis Presley, his career as an unconvincing actor making generally poor movies, and finally becoming embedded into Vegas. And he uses that to talk about the American dream, the rise in poverty, segregation, American interventionism, cultural appropriation, civil rights, the decline of American agriculture and manufacturing, the rise of entertainment as America’s chief export, addiction, and Trump vs Hilary, as well as everything else. It culminates in an extraordinary sequence from his final TV special where Elvis performs an astonishing impassioned performance of Unchained Melody while the editors try to throw on screen every single significant cultural moment onto the screen, up to and including an appearance by Barney the Dinosaur. It’s a feat of editing the like of which I don’t know that I’ve ever seen before. But...
There’s a point in the film where the car breaks down; sitting in the cab of the tow truck, the director has obviously been describing the film that he’s making, and when he asks the tow truck driver if he understands his vision for the film, the driver observes that he doesn’t think the director even knows the film he’s trying to make. And that’s pretty much where I came down on the film. There’s too much packed into the film, and it’s all packed around this car as a metaphor for America. The film even takes time to speak to David Simon, creator of The Wire, who starts to argue that the metaphor doesn’t really work because Rolls Royce cars were never made in America, and you really need to use one of Elvis’s Cadillacs for the metaphor to hold. Which means that, in addition to trying to be a documentary about Elvis’s life, a concert documentary, and a commentary on 70 years of American culture and history, the film’s now starting to offer criticism on itself. And it’s all interesting and fascinating, and I was always engaged, but it’s too much. There are limits to the amount of information and the number of ideas you can pack into a single 2 hour film before you just lose the audience because they’re simply not capable of keeping track. This felt like the director had so many ideas for the film and he wanted to force everything into the one piece. But there’s a lot of really good material in here, and I wouldn’t want to cut anything. My ideal form for this documentary would be a four- or six-part TV documentary. In each episode you could start with Elvis at a new stage of his life, and from there spread out and explore a small number of discrete topics relevant to this point in his life, but with enough screen time that you can actually devote a solid chunk of time to really dig into the ideas being argued.
I would absolutely recommend the film. It’s a lot of fun, and I really do admire the ambition of the film. But it really is an example of a film that exceeds the practical limits of the 2-hour documentary movie.
One of the things I do when I'm planning my festival schedule is to read the programme several times, making note of the films I'm interested in, and then that's it. Once I have my schedule I don't re-read the film descriptions. And if there's a film I decide on my first read through that I'm interested in seeing, I don't re-read those write-ups when I re-read the programme. Which means that I often have the experience I had with Transit, where I find myself watching a film with no memory of which, of the 150 films I read about, this film actually is, and just trying to discover it without any expectations. And so I was not prepared for what the film was.
It opens in France, which has been occupied by German soldiers who are rounding up Jews to put them in camps. Every person you meet could betray you at any moment. Our main hero, Georg, is tasked with delivering a letter to a writer from the man’s wife, but when he tries to do so he discovers that the writer has committed suicide. So he jumps on a train with a wounded friend, and escapes to Marseille; on arrival, the friend has died, and so he hides away in the masses of people trying to get letters of transit that will allow him to leave Marseille and head for Mexico or America or wherever will take them. But while he waits he connects with the wife and child of his dead friend as they wait for an opportunity to leave the city. And as he visits the American Embassy every day, he finds himself meeting the wife of the dead writer, who is refusing to leave Marseille in anticipation that her husband will arrive and leave with her.
Here’s the thing: if this film seems like a World War II film, you’re absolutely right. It feels very much like Casablanca, if that film were focused less on Rick and Ilsa and more on the teeming throngs of people in that city dreaming of being on the plane to America. And indeed, I see that the film is based on a novel written during World War II, and it feels like it. But it’s not, because we can see the cars, the trains, the coffee machines used by the baristas, and the black-clad German forces, and we can see that it notably takes place in modern day. Except that there are no cellphones, none of the technology that we’re used to, they’re still communicating entirely by letters passed from person to person, and the documents granting permission to leave look like something from the 1940s. I spent the first few minutes just trying to work out what year this took place in, and once I realised what the film was actually doing, I spent a lot of the rest of the film just baffled by this choice.
What I think Christian Petzold was aiming for with the film was to tell a story about the modern refugee crisis, and he found this World War II novel that he thought could work, but he was worried that the setting might hide his point, so he tried to tell this story, more or less keep it in World War II, but also give it this modern context so that we can all draw parallels. And it’s a bizarre choice; I think this story would make that point regardless of when the film actually took place. A skilfully-made film (and I do think Petzold is a good filmmaker) should be able to draw those parallels between historical events and the modern day world. After all, I’ve seen Casablanca twice this year, and both times I found it was impossible to watch any of the scenes about the people trying to leave this city and not think about modern-day refugees. Or if you’re genuinely worried people will miss your comparison then there’s a different approach; try to actually update the novel and tell a version of this story that is about refugees in a modern-day context – you’d need to make a lot of changes to the plot, but it could work. But this weird halfway point for me doesn’t work at all.
Making the film even more frustrating: the plotting of the film is very dependent on people simply not communicating. It just feels infuriating when you have two characters talking, and the woman is all excited because she thinks that her husband is going to be coming on the boat and escaping with them, and the man knows that her husband is dead and he’s been pretending to be her husband in order to secure passage out of the country for both of them, and he doesn’t say a single word about it. It’s another example of the kind of frustrating rubbish where the characters behave in idiotic ways that no human would behave simply because there’s no story if they actually talked to each other.
This was my second film by Christian Petzold. My first experience with him was Phoenix, a film that was extremely well-made but reliant on an utterly absurd plot element about 1940s plastic surgery and a husband not recognising his wife. I think in selecting this film I was hoping to see how well Petzold would work with a better story. But instead Petzold makes this utterly distancing creative decision to merge the past and present into one, and that didn’t work for me either. And yet I like the actual filmmaking on display, the way Petzold shoots these scenes, even if I’m not convinced by the creative decisions that went into creating the scenes to begin with. So I feel like I might continue with Petzold, hoping that one day he’ll give me something I genuinely unreservedly like. Because I’m sure he has it in him.
Shoplifters was the fifth film I've seen by Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda, and while they've all being excellent and beautiful pieces of filmmaking, I think this might possibly be my favourite of the five. The film tells the story of a family of five - a father, a mother, a teenage girl, a young boy, and a grandmother all living together in a tiny little house. Living in severe poverty, they really only survive on the grandmother's tiny pension, the income from whatever low-wage job the parents can find, and whatever earnings the teenager shares from her work in a teasing peepshow. They mainly survive by stealing from the local shops, a skill that the father takes great delight in teaching his son. One day they notice a young girl hiding from her abusive family outside her home; out of concern for her well-being on this cold night, they take her in and feed her, but when they realise that her parents don't seem particularly bothered by her disappearance, they decide to keep her and welcome her into the family.
The thing that really marks Kore-eda's work is this complete fascination with family and the way we relate to those closest to us. And his families are never as simple as a basic nuclear family: there's always either a degree of separation or some artificial construction in the family. Whether it be the families separated by divorce or the families who discover a relative they never knew existed, he always seems fascinated ultimately with the way people choose to form and to hold their family together. This is probably the most united a family I've seen in any of his work, held together by this incredibly strong bond, but even here we have a family that has, at least in part, expanded itself by kidnapping a young girl and taking her away from her real family. And while the motivation for this is entirely sympathetic - there's an absolutely heartbreaking moment where the mother talks to the girl about the abuse that she's suffered and we're never in doubt that the girl will be loved and treated much better in her new family, as long as we're comfortable with her being inducted into the family art of shoplifting - we are certainly aware that there is an artifice holding this family together that they actively choose to overcome.
The thing I find most charming and fascinating about Kore-eda is his attention to the little moments of interaction. His films tend not to be filled with big moments or significant drama, they work best when we're just spending time with his characters. So here we get to just sit and watch the characters as they gaze up into the sky at some fireworks that we never see because we just get to enjoy the bonding that they share over this spectacle. The film has a fascination with eating - I don't know how many scenes there are in this film where we're just watching these characters sit as a family around a table, dunking their noodles in their soup, and eating, all the while just talking and enjoying their time together. There's a wonderfully funny scene where the father and mother, eating dinner alone, suddenly realise that they have the house to themselves for the first time in who knows how long, and the film just takes great joy in watching these two sitting around laughing and enjoying each other's company in the afterglow of their intimacy. And, in probably the best sequence in the film, the family take the train out to the seaside for a day at the beach; while they're out there, the father notices his young son's attention being distracted by the girls in their swimsuits, and recognising his son's growing discovery of his sexuality the father bonds with his son over their mutual love of boobs. No, really, it's sweeter than it sounds.
I'll be really interested to revisit this film, because I'm currently not sure how I feel about the third act, and that's all due to circumstances outside of the actual movie. My seat in the cinema was more cramped then I would usually like, and around the time that the film starts to reach its conclusion, my leg started to really ache and I found myself desperate for the film to end so that I could stretch. And so it was in that context that I found myself feeling that the film's resolution seemed to drag a bit. But the rest of the film had been so perfectly executed that I'm pretty certain if I was to rewatch the film in more comfortable circumstances it would work much better for me. And the ending is really fantastic, drawing together a multitude of tiny little plotlines, some of which we never really realised had been seeded until they became important, to bring the story of this family to the only conclusion that could have made sense. I just wish I could have enjoyed it without distraction.
It took me a long time to get around to watching Kore-eda, and that's something I really do regret. He really is a master of simple character-based drama and I'm at a point where I can't imagine ever not being excited by his work. I cannot overstate how wonderful this film is.
An excellent Danish thriller, The Guilty focuses on disgraced police officer Asger, who has been demoted to the emergency call centre while waiting for his trial over an incident on the job. One day he receives a call from a woman, Iben, who pretends to talk to her daughter. Realising that he's speaking to someone who has been kidnapped, he has to work desperately, occasionally through less than legal means, to find a way to find out who this woman is, and where her abductor is taking her.
Hitchcock used to be a great fan of making movies where he would isolate the events to a single location, testing his ingenuity to find ways to have the action play out within this deliberately limited area. And that's really what happens in this film as well, only more so. By setting the film in a call centre, and never leaving that location, director Gustav Möller is effectively creating a thriller where the entire film plays out in a room that is miles away from any of the action. We never see the faces of any of the players in this kidnapping, we never see what's going on, we are just forced to imagine the film's events through the soundscape that is created by the audio of the phone call. But it all proves astonishingly effective and absolutely gripping.
One thing that the film does very well is communicate the frustration that comes with having to deal with this type of situation remotely. There's nothing that Asger can do directly to help Iben, he can't try to comfort the scared daughter, he just needs to try to direct the events remotely, and you can feel his frustration when people don't respond to the situation in the way that he feels as required. And in the meantime he just has to sit and wait, and there are significant parts of the film where we are just sitting and waiting in a long silence with him for whatever will come next. Or there's the frustration that comes with phone calls not being picked up, and there are points in the film where a phone goes to voicemail and you feel like you want to scream because you're so frustrated and desperate to know what's going on.
One of the challenges that comes with filming a movie in a single location is just the need to keep the film visually interesting, and Möller does well in creating variation in the location and communicating Asger's frame of mind through his environment. He starts the film in a wide-open call centre surrounded by colleagues, but as he desperately tries to take control of the situation (and hide some of his less-than-legal actions from his colleagues), he increasingly isolates himself until by the end he's caught in a room all alone, with blinds blocking out everything that's not this rescue, in a room lit only by the harsh red light that shows he's on a call.
The performance by Jakob Cedergren as Asger is impressive. He is effectively the only person we see on screen to any substantial degree, and so he has to carry the entire film on his face. And so much of his performance is not being big and dramatic, it's all about reacting to this situation and finding the right way to respond to the developing situation. And it's a masterful effort.
I was completely caught up in this film, completely sold by its various twists and turns, and absolutely horrified at points by some of its shocking developments. I love its inventiveness, and Möller's confidence in his ability to achieve this changing work. I see this is his first film, and I'm very interested in seeing where his career takes him.
A fascinating and at times difficult character drama, Lean On Pete focuses on Charlie, a 15 year old boy stuck living with his father and a constantly changing flow of girlfriends. One day while out running, Charlie comes across a horse training track that he never knew existed, and when he's asked to help the grumpy horse owner, played by Steve Buscemi, he recognises an opportunity to get a permanent job and earn some money. Although he's warned not to treat the horses as pets, he quickly becomes attached to Lean On Pete, an ageing horse whose best days are behind him and who the owner is dragging out to get every last race out of him before being sent to Mexico for slaughter. And so when the day comes for the horse to be sold to the slaughterhouse, Charlie impulsively declares that he wants to buy Lean On Pete.
One thing that I really loved about the film was the filmmaking style that Andrew Haigh brings to his work here. This is not a film that's constructed in the editing room; most of the scenes play out in a single long shot, with barely any cuts or reverse shots. There's a wonderful confidence that comes in Haigh's approach; he has a clear vision for what the film is going to be, and he understands exactly how he will achieve it before he ever sets foot on the set.
Part of his vision for the film involves the centrality of Charlie Plummer's performance in the lead role. What that means in practice is that Charlie is on screen in some way, whether in close up or off in the distance, in almost every single shot of the film. This was something that I registered fairly early on in the film, and found myself keeping an eye on, and there was only one shot in the film that I noticed didn't seem to feature Charlie. (In fact, it was so unusual to the scheme of the film that there would be this single shot that didn't feature our main character that I'm almost more inclined to assume that he was in the shot and I just didn't notice him.) But that singular focus on Charlie is fairly fundamental to the way the film works. Charlie is taken on a frankly astonishing journey throughout the course of the film, and the advantage of this approach that focuses so completely on our lead is that it means that we never get space away from him, we never get any moment where we can pause to think. We get as totally swept up in these events as Charlie does.
The performances in the film are great. Obviously Charlie Plummer needs to carry the entire film, and he does so with a beautiful and heartbreaking performance. He gives us a lead character who is compassionate and loving, profusely determined, and it's this mix of characteristics that allows him to make the journey that he does in the second half of the film. Possibly his most defining characteristic is his determination to not allow himself to become embittered, a clear response to Steve Buscemi as the horse trainer, who came into this field because he did love horses once, but who has spent so long around these animals that he wishes he could never see another horse again in his life, and who sees these creatures not as living creatures worthy of respect but as a tool to be exploited and then cast away. Chloe Sevigny makes a brief appearance in the film as a jockey, and she fairly firmly seems to fall in the middle ground between the two: while the harshness of her experiences have definitely pushed her more towards the cynical and exploitive end of the industry, she's not so far away from the young horse lover that she was that she can't appreciate and even admire the passion that Charlie brings to the work.
It's a beautiful piece of cinema, with some unexpected plot developments that send the story spiralling off in directions I never would have expected. There's a point late in the third act where it almost seems impossible that this could be the same film as the one we started several hours earlier, but the consistency of development in the lead character means that this direction feels almost inevitable. It's a fantastic film, and I really did love it.
Capharnaüm has a pretty impressive opening - Zain, a young 12 year old boy in Lebanon, sits in court opposite his parents, who don't understand why they've been summoned. Zain, who we learn is currently serving 5 years in prison for stabbing someone he describes as a son-of-a-bitch, has decided to sue his parents for giving him life. The film then flashes back about 12 months to show us the course of events and the unending stream of misery that would lead to this outcome. We watch his home life, in a family so neglectful that they just tie a chain around the leg of the youngest baby to keep him still, while Zain has to help his parents smuggle drugs into prison. One day his 11 year old sister has her first period, which absolutely terrifies him since he knows this will mean that his parents will marry her off to the local shopkeeper who keeps plying her with sweets. His efforts to keep secret his sister's physical development are unsuccessful and, after she leaves the family for her new husband, Zain decides to run away from home. He then encounters Rahil, an undocumented immigrant who has to smuggle her one-year-old child into work in a carry case. Zain finds himself tasked with taking care of the baby while Rahil goes out to work to make the money she needs to buy forged documentation, fighting to avoid selling her son to child-traffickers, but after Rahil goes missing, Zain finds himself alone and struggling to take care of this young baby.
The film is quite an intense experience, and not exactly enjoyable. It’s a story of complete squalor and misery and struggle and is utterly brutal. But I don’t know that I buy that the film stays true to that opening scene. Zain doesn’t feel like someone who genuinely believes that it would be better had he himself never existed – in reality he’s making the point that his parents should never have another child, but that’s a less attention-grabbing start for the film. The conviction that underpins his action, his anger at people who have children without the ability to care for them, makes sense, but how far is that supposed to go? Yes, his parents are awful, evil people who should not be having children, but if we are talking about people who shouldn’t have children, what does that mean? How do you stop that? Forced abortion? Forced sterilisation? And how do you decide who should and should not have children? Sure, I might be horrified at the thought of his parents having kids, but what about Rahil, who does seem like a genuinely good mother and who is fiercely protective of her child despite her circumstances making it difficult for her to care for him? It would undoubtedly be better for her and her kids if she doesn’t have any more, but do we actually stop her from having kids? How? Because the film is framed around this argument by Zain, who is so sweet and likable and so forceful in his arguments, and because it never really presents any opposing arguments, the film seems to buy into what he is saying without ever posing the next question. So how are we supposed to view this as an audience? Are we supposed to uncritically accept Zain’s argument as the viewpoint of the film, or are we supposed to recognise for ourselves that this is the simplistic view of a young boy who doesn’t really understand the realities of a world and who thinks it’s easy enough to just point and say “You don’t get to have children.” And if it is the latter, why is that not in the film?
Zain Alrafeea’s work in the lead role is impressive, a mix of youthful naiveté and cynicism brought on by the brutality of his experiences. He’s a smart and inventive kid, with the toughness necessary to fight to get what he needs. He is also impressively foul-mouthed, in particular in one scene where he uses a mirror to reflect a neighbour’s screening of Winnie the Pooh for his young one-year-old ward but then provides obscene dialogue for the characters that more closely resembles the conversation at an orgy. Yordanos Shifera’s role as the immigrant mother Rahil is similarly excellent, all heartbreak and desperate agony as she tries to keep the child-traffickers away. And then there’s young Treasure Bankole as the infant Yonas – obviously at such a young age he’s not really giving a performance so much as just living and responding naturally to stimuli, but he is sweet and charming and affectionate and what happens to him is devastating. I would be really curious to see the behind-the-scenes of this film, because there are some points where the production seems actually dangerous for young Bankole as an actor, with moments where we see Alrafeea carrying Bankole as they walk down a side of a busy street where a single stumble could be disastrous, or leaving him free to run around disconcertingly close to the street – I would hope, would assume that there were off-screen measures to keep him safe, but I did have moments where I wondered if it was even okay to watch this, if merely watching the film was somehow encouraging child endangerment.
Ultimately it’s a strong film when it comes to its portrayal of life for the poorest and most disadvantaged people in Lebanon, which is what most of the film is, but it’s wrapped around a premise that does seem as though it was written for impact and shock value rather than being fully fleshed out as an underpinning of the film.
Mads Mikkelsen stars as Overgard, the only survivor of a plane crash in the middle of the Arctic. When the film opens, he’s clearly been there for a while, and has worked up his daily routines precisely – clearing away that day’s snow from his giant SOS sign; retrieving any fish caught on his lines and storing them to cure for eating; spending a few hours with his hand-grinder battery powering his radio signals; and then sleeping inside the plane. One day his radio attracts the attention of a helicopter in the middle of a snowstorm, which then crashes, leaving the only survivor a Thai woman without the ability to speak English. Overgard discovers a detailed map in the wreckage, including the location of a seasonal station that is a long, but achievable, distance away. With the woman badly injured, and the injury slowly becoming infected, he decides he has no option but to put her on a sled and pull her to survival.
When the film ended, there was a very noticeable collective sigh in the audience, as though everyone watching the film had just spent the past 90 minutes holding our breaths in. It’s an understandable response, as Arctic is an impressively suspenseful and intense experience. Mikkelsen is, as usual, a marvel here. While he is technically not performing alone, having this young woman to work opposite, the nature of her role is basically just to exist without ever any real interaction; her dialogue essentially consists almost entirely of breaths and coughs. And so, with such a limited partner to engage with, he's largely carrying the entire film, and much of the film's limited dialogue consists of muttered calculations or the occasional exasperated response to the latest frustration. For all intents and purposes it might as well be a silent film, with Mikkelsen communicating his entire experience in his weary, exhausted face.
The film is also worth seeing on a purely visual basis. It was shot on location in Iceland, and should be seen on the big screen if for no other reason than as a pure celebration of the utter beauty of that country. I would never want to visit there - it looks really cold - but one of the great advantages of cinema is that it allows you to enjoy the wonder of the world without the inconvenience of travel.
One thing I do find frustrating about these types of “survival of the human spirit” stories is that I’m often unsure how convinced I am by the events. There’s a part of me that looks at what happens in this film and naturally just asks “Could anyone really survive all of that? Could that really happen?” It would be one thing if it was a true story – the obvious example is Touching the Void, an insane story about a guy surviving on a mountain despite a broken leg, being dropped off a cliff, and being left for dead; I wouldn’t believe that if I didn’t know it was true – but in fiction films like this, when you have people surviving against impossible odds, it can often feel that the only way they could ever actually survive is by convincing the screenplay writer to let them survive, and that makes it feel a bit less genuine.
My main problem, however, comes down to the last five seconds of the film. The film is clearly building up to one particular ending, and I was really engaged by this ending. And then in the last few seconds it pulls the rug out from under us and has the story end in a completely different way. And that did disappoint me; I felt cheated out of the ending that this story, this journey, really deserved. That was a shame. Still, it’s an intense and engaging film that I enjoyed greatly, regardless of some minor disappointment about the ending.
Back when I saw the Hedy Lamarr documentary, I observed that her story was so fascinating and full of surprises that all you really needed to do to make a good documentary was just tell the story straight and not get in the way. Ian McKellen is not Hedy Lamarr; if you were to ask someone to imagine what McKellen's life story was like, they would probably get pretty close - there's no real surprise to his story. And so, in making a documentary about McKellen's life, they really did need to work a lot more to ensure that the documentary would remain engaging.
The documentary is structured essentially around McKellen sitting in a comfortable chair and talking about his life to camera. There's presumably someone asking him questions, but that entire part of the process is invisible. The film is essentially just McKellen looking into the camera and reflecting on his life, his career, and his experiences. We hear him talk about his first efforts to entertain his family by mimicking Charlie Chaplin. We hear him talk about how the theatre became an outlet for someone who otherwise felt isolated at school because of his homosexuality. We hear him talk about the early stages of his career, as people were discovering his name for the first time - in one case quite literally, when the reviewer apparently didn't know his name and so had a review headline that literally asked what the name of this new actor was. We hear him explain how in the theatre acting is not about the face, but how instead it's all about the actions, the silhouette, the way the figure moves, and it's all about trying to very simply communicate vital information to an audience that might be too far away to observe his face. We hear how he was invited to join the Old Vic, one of the most important theatrical institutions in the world, and how he decided to turn it down because there would be too much competition for the important parts, instead joining a new theatre troupe that would give him opportunities to play the big roles that he wanted to play. We hear about his early efforts on television, and even get to watch a small sampling to see how genuinely bad his on-screen work was at that time, and how it only improved once he started playing Shakespeare in tiny, more intimate theatres and realised he could apply those skills to television. We hear about him moving to America, and winning the Tony Award for his work in Amadeus, which I had no idea he was ever in. We hear about him deciding to come out in the context of the AIDS crisis and the passage of anti-gay legislation, and how this provoked him into becoming a prominent gay activist. We hear how, at least in the context of his film career, he categorises it as either before Richard III or after Richard III. He talks about his Oscar nomination for Gods and Monsters, and how demoralising all the self-promotion to try to secure votes can be. And he talks about what it's like to be one of the stars in two of the largest movie franchises in recent history, what appealed to him about the X-Men movies, his efforts to more closely resemble the imposing figure that Magneto is in the comics, his joy at filming The Lord of the Rings in a real world environment, and how depressing it was to have to shoot huge parts of The Hobbit completely on green screen.
Because McKellen sitting in a chair talking for extended amount of time is not the most engaging or cinematic documentary, the film makes great use of a wide variety of archival material showing McKellen is a younger (or not so young) man. Sometimes these clips are intended to simply illustrate the point that McKellen is making, other times it seems as though these clips are simply approaching this event with an ironic eye. It's not the most original way to tell a story in the circumstances, but it is skilfully put together and always engaging for the audience. But when it comes down to it, the film is Ian McKellen. McKellen is an engaging conversationalist, with a dry wet that is frequently laugh out loud funny. And so, while the film may not be groundbreaking or important cinema, it is always an entertaining and fascinating experience.
The movie begins in 2001, with Qiao the girlfriend to a low-level gangster called Bin living in a small Chinese mining town. But the fortunes of the town, and the influence of the gang, are declining, and there's an increasing confidence by others to attack members of the gang. This culminates in a massive attack on Bin, which is only stopped when Qiao fires a couple of warning shots using Bin's gun. She saves his life, but is sent to prison for 5 years for possession of an illegal firearm, and on coming out of prison she is distressed to discover that her boyfriend has moved on and is now in a relationship with someone else. The film then follows the changing relationship between Qiao and Bin over the years until we're brought up to date in 2018, all the while observing the technological changes and increasing westernisation of China.
Just before things start to go wrong for Qiao, there's a moment where she is out in the countryside with Bin, looking at a volcanic peak. And they have this conversation about how the heat from the volcano is so intense that it destroys any impurity in anything it burns, and so the ash that comes from the volcano is as white as possible. It's an annoyingly obvious metaphor for the journey that she will undertake during the rest of the film. And this is the type of film where you can tell that it is about to end because there is a bookend scene with the two of them return to that volcano, even though that scene could actually take place anywhere. And I feel like that almost says it all about this film. It's a film that I think, had I seen it at another time of the year, I might have had more of an appreciation for it as being something different to the standard Hollywood movie. But in the context of the film festival, where I am seeing so many fascinating and intriguing movies, it just didn't grab me. It's just too obvious, too ordinary, and there were points in the film where I was even a little bored, since it's not the most dynamic of movies. I did rather enjoy Zhao Tao's work as Qiao, and the way she charted her character's change from a youthful, almost arrogant confidence into a woman who has a certainty that is informed by experience. But ultimately I just wasn't grabbed by this one to the degree that I would want.
[EDIT: This is actually one of the films screening in the 2019 Wellington Film Society schedule, and I'm rather looking forward to it. Obviously I initially didn't respond too positively to the film, but I have seen so many critics I respect express a love for the film that I'm rather excited to have a chance to revisit it separate from the festival. Hopefully it will come across differently on second viewing.]
So this was easily one of my most enjoyable films of the festival, but I don't know how much there is to say about it because so much of the joy of the film is purely about experiencing it.
Every year in the Mexican town of Tultepec, a town apparently known primarily for fireworks manufacture, they celebrate a festival in honour of the patron saint of fireworks makers, a man who rescued people from a hospital in flames without receiving a single burn himself. The festival is apparently broken up into two main parts: in the first they build massive towers of fireworks, while in the second they build massive decorative bulls lined with fireworks that they run with.
I was a bit uncertain about seeing this one. To me, fireworks displays on screen never really feel like much. When you're actually there, and can feel the power of the explosion, fireworks are absolutely incredible, but when you're watching television and they set off some massive fireworks display in honour of some big event, the experience doesn't translate. And I was afraid that this would be a very similar experience. What I forgot was that I wasn't watching this at home on my television, I was watching it on the big screen, and that makes a big difference. The other big difference is that with many of those big public fireworks displays, the television footage is shot from a great distance, whereas in this film it's all shot from very close up to the action.
This is one film where you don't need to worry about when we're going to get to the fireworks factory, since we get there almost immediately. It is disconcerting, however, to watch the manufacture of these fireworks. For a start, there's no factory; this almost seems to be just people manufacturing things in their backyard, pounding away at the fireworks while using an old wooden crate for a seat. We see how many of the people making these products are just children, and at one point we hear from a grandmother who lost her son to a mistake while making fireworks, and her distress now that her young grandson has gone into the business. We see the people carefully constructing the fireworks one part at a time, and we can't help but notice the one person with an arm that ends in a stump. And then there are the preparations for the actual festival, which are their own level of insanity. In one absolutely terrifying moment we watch scenes shot by a GoPro attached to someone's head as he climbs I don't know how high, without a harness or any safety gear, to help set up the fireworks at the top of this massive tower - I don't have a fear of heights, but I felt like I was hyperventilating through much of this scene, and others around me were audibly freaked out. The towers are so tall that in one moment one of the towers actually acts as a lightning rod, setting off all of the fireworks earlier than expected, requiring the workers to frantically try to climb the tower and stop the burning fireworks from up close.
And then we come to the actual festival. This film loves the fireworks, and it's so incredibly beautiful that I struggle to describe. In slow motion, the film allows you to really just marvel at the intricacies of the chemical reactions, the different colours and shapes that are created, the billowing smoke and the way it's illuminated by the sparks and flames behind it, until it almost looks like footage from space of a cloudy nebula. Or it's shot in real time, allowing you to experience the sheer awesome power of these massive explosives. And then nothing can prepare you for the incredible experience that is the running with the bulls, where these giant bull figures are just in flame, with more fireworks than you can imagine going off, it seems completely out of control, and people are literally a couple of feet away from these explosions raining down all around them, and they're dancing and they're cheering and they're singing and they're having a phenomenal time with this utter chaos surrounding them. I can think of nothing that terrifies me more than being at this festival in the middle of this chaos, and I can think of nothing I want more than to be as joyous as those people at this festival in the middle of this chaos.
I've seen a lot of films this festival that I've really loved, but this felt different, this felt special.
Ethan Hawke plays Reverend Toller, the minister of a tiny Protestant church celebrating its 250th anniversary, kept alive mainly through the largesse and support of a nearby mega-church. Already going through a crisis of faith, one day Toller is approached by one of his church members, Mary, asking if he will speak to her husband, an environmental activist pressuring Mary to have an abortion because it's wrong to bring children into this world. His conversations with Mary's husband, and his own reflections and investigations into the matters they discuss, deepens his crisis of faith as he grapples with the role of the church in protecting God's creation, especially as he realises much of the restoration of the church for its anniversary celebration has been paid for by a man whose business is responsible for significant environmental damage in the area.
Ethan Hawke is just a marvel here. We learn very early that he is extremely sick, but he's taking the common masculine approach of just acting as though if he doesn't actually know about what's wrong then he can pretend that nothing is wrong, and we learn that that's clearly the way he deals with everything in his life. There's a point where we learn about Toller's backstory, which involves a dead son and an ended marriage, and his entire character just suddenly makes complete sense. This is a person who seems to be using the ministry almost as a way to escape from his world, to avoid having to deal with the unbearable grief that he's experiencing. And in his interaction with Mary's husband and with the ideas discussed we see the two of them almost feeding off each other, unwittingly pushing each other deeper into depression. It's an extremely vulnerable performance that he gives, although the character himself is struggling with his own pride, with his willingness to accept the need for help. He has this wonderful relationship with the choir director from the mega-church, and I found it fascinating to watch how resistant he was to that connection, because she reminded him how much he did need assistance to deal with everything in his life and he couldn't let himself accept that. I particularly appreciated that the film doesn't resort to the typical crisis of faith issue - where the character is struggling with whether or not to believe in the existence of God - instead being about a character who's really trying to find his place in relation to God, moving from a more intellectual understanding of who He is into a deeper confidence about what it means to believe in God and what our role is as custodians of His creation. His struggle is illuminated in the film by the notes that he makes in his private journal, and Hawke makes these long stretches of voice over feel real and personal and intimate, filled with agony and conflict. It's a marvellous and nuanced performance that is easily one of the best this year.
I also really appreciated the work of Cedric Kyles (also known as Cedric the Entertainer) as Pastor Jeffers, the pastor of the nearby mega-church. It's a role that would have been very easy to almost turn into a villain - after all I think criticism could legitimately be made that many such churches have become almost more focused on the pastor's status rather than being oriented towards Christ - but Jeffers is portrayed both as a strong figure who might believably come to lead such a church but also as a supportive figure who might have differences of opinion with Toller, and who might have slowly allowed the influence of money to be more of a consideration then it should, but who always seems very genuine and heartfelt in his desire to support and care for those under his charge. If it had been a typical type of mega-church pastor, then the film might have felt more like a condemnation of Christianity, but as it is it feels much more like an honest exploration of ideas and challenges through these characters.
This was my first experience of a film directed by Paul Schrader, and I'm regretting that it has taken me this long to get around him. Obviously, I'm a big fan of his work writing for Martin Scorsese, having written the script for four of Scorsese's greatest films, but I never really felt an urgent need to look beyond into his own work. This was wrong. He has a wonderful command of turn, giving the film an eerie quiet, emphasising the sense of isolation that Toller experiences as he shuts everyone else, forcing us to just sit and linger in this increasing desperation. One thing I found particularly fascinating about Schrader's direction is his decision to use the academy ratio of 1.37:1, which was the ratio historically used by movies before widescreen was developed. The more-square screen shape is a perfect fit for the film - it's a shape that emphasises height over width, so perfectly fits the church with its spire, but doesn't give a lot of room for the characters to move around, emphasising the degree to which people feel constrained by their circumstances. Indeed, there are many points where the characters actually do walk off screen for a moment or two, leaving the image empty for a moment, but they're always drawn back into the image frame - emotionally it feels almost as though they have tried to escape from their environment but been forced back into the place they were trying to escape from.
My only frustration with seeing the film doesn't actually come from the film itself, but rather the conversation about the film. Pretty much every time I hear anyone discussing First Reformed, without fail they always wind up comparing the film to a particular well-known classic movie, a movie so absorbed into modern culture that even if you've never seen it you still know about it. And I will be honest, I was intrigued by the comparison, because this other film would at least initially appear to have little in common with First Reformed. But once you hear that comparison, it's so accurate that it's almost impossible to not think about. And so I found that disappointing, because I feel like that advanced knowledge put me in a space where I was waiting for the film to arrive at a particular place rather than being led on the journey to this ultimate end. But that's just my fault for reading too much about the film before seeing it and judging it for myself. But that might also have shaped my viewing of the film. A friend of mine commented that he didn't really believe the journey that led Toller to that end, whereas I completely bought it, possibly because I went in expecting to see that kind of story. But then I think this is definitely a film where everyone will see different things in the film. A different friend made a comment on Facebook about being amused by the people shamefacedly throwing away their garbage at the end of this film about environmentalism and the need to save the planet, when it never really occurred to me to see it as a film about that. For me it seemed entirely about the character and his emotional journey, and the save-the-planet concern was just the hook that motivated his personal story. The key thing is, whatever story you do find in here, you'll find it in the context of a beautiful, powerful, and challenging work of cinema. It has been a couple of days since I saw the film, and I'm still grappling with it, still dealing with it, just trying to work out what it all means and is saying. The one thing I do know is that I adored it.
When the festival programme listed two films by Hirokazu Kore-eda, I was very excited, especially since one of the films won the Palme d'Or at Cannes - and Shoplifters really was great - but at the same time I was surprised to see that his other film was a legal drama, since it's not the type of film that he's really known for.
The film opens with two middle-aged men walking together when one of them suddenly hits the other on the back of the head with a wrench. We then see him pouring fuel over the body and sitting it alight. We jump to find the man, Misumi, in prison, having already admitted to murdering his boss. It seems that he's only recently out of prison, having served 30 years for the murder of two loan sharks, and Misumi's lawyer calls for extra assistance from a noted defence lawyer, the son of the judge who presided over his trial on the first two murders.
So the film is fine, but not much more. Here's the problem - Kore-eda tends to do his best work when he's dealing primarily with characters. For me, the first thing I think of when I think about him is the scene in Our Little Sister where the four sisters are just together pickling plums - a small scene that is just about enjoying the company of these characters and their connection. But that's not something that really works too well in a legal drama. There needs to be a strong narrative drive forcing the story forward, and that's not really what he does. Part of the frustration is that we don't have a clear alternative narrative. The film throws out lots of theories about why the murder might have taken place, but Misumi changes his story about what happened so often that you never feel like you have anything solid to rely on. It even culminates in one theory that even suggests that it might not have been Misumi who committed the crime in the first place and that the opening scene might have been misleading. Or perhaps not; who knows. The problem is that, because there is so much uncertainty around the story being told, it just becomes about trying to untangle the story being told and solve the mystery, and so we don't really get the time to focus on the character work that is his real strength. The film does make minor indications towards those character beats, particularly looking at the lawyer's relationship with his daughter, but it's never has the time available to really expand or explore these. And that just makes it a disappointment.
I still really do like Kore-eda, so while this was a disappointment, it hasn't cause me to lose faith in his work. I went into this knowing this was an aberration from the material he's best at, and I also know that he bounced back from this with one of his best films, because I've already seen it. And this is not a bad film by any means - it's beautifully shot and has very strong performances - but it just lacks the forward momentum that the story needs. But as a friend of mine observed, it must be hard to have your career built around making one type of film, and so it's very possible that this was an opportunity for him to stretch his muscles and do something different that interested him. And I don't blame him for exercising that need for variety. I'm just hoping for more great films from him, rather than just-fine films.
When you're seeing as many festival films as I am, it's quite common to walk into a film knowing the title of the film but not really remembering what the film was about. What tends to happen is that, as the film plays, something will happen that will spark a memory and you'll remember something about the write-up of the film that made you want to see it. Border was a strange experience for me, because I spent the entire film thinking that nothing about this film seemed at all familiar from the description in the programme. It wasn't until the end credits when I recognised the name of John Ajvide Lindqvist, author of the original novel that Let the Right One In was based on, that I realised why I probably decided to see this. It seems the film is based on a short story by Lindqvist, but this film falls short of that earlier film.
Tina works as a customs officer in border control. There's something visibly different about her: she almost seems like a modern day neanderthal, with a prominent forehead and a big jutting overbite. But there's also something almost animalistic about her, particularly the way she sniffs intently, as though she's able to smell people's guilt and sin. She's successful at it, such as when she smells out the memory card filled with images of child sexual abuse hidden inside the case of someone's phone. But then one day a man, Vore, comes through customs who has a very similar neanderthal look, and it seems that they both share similar markings, including an odd scar on their back, and Tina becomes fascinated with him.
So it was an interesting film. I don't know that I disliked it, but at the same time I'd struggle to say that I liked it. It establishes a slow, uncomfortable, unsettling world, and is shot with a gloomy tone that settles over the film. The story is engaging enough, but I never really felt caught up in it. I really liked Eva Melander’s sympathetic performance as Tina; she’s completely consumed by makeup, but she manages to work through those restrictions to give a sad and emotional performance as someone who has been either rejected or exploited her entire life because of her looks, and who is suddenly overjoyed to be seen as someone worth of affection. I was less won over by Eero Milonoff as Vore; he’s basically a big hulking brute with very little nuance. I’m assuming the central idea underpinning the movie is the idea of “the other”, that when we mistreat others because of our differences then we wind up creating our own enemies, and that’s fine, but it’s fairly obvious in its execution, and as the backstory for the two main characters becomes more convoluted I think the metaphor possibly breaks down. (It’s probably also worth noting that, as with Let the Right One In, there’s an unexpected moment of revelation involving characters’ genitals that largely left the audience audibly reacting, in a what-the-hell-are-we-seeing kind of way. I wouldn’t ordinarily comment on this, but since I’ve only seen two films based on Lindqvist works and both of them featured such moments, I figure it’s worth highlighting as a somewhat unusual connection between the two.)
Ultimately, it was fine, but unmemorable. I had been hoping for something similar to Let The Right One In, and it definitely wasn’t that – I think there’s something just primal and universal about the vampire myth and particularly tragic about the story that earlier film told, and that’s not really here in this film. But I’m curious to read Lindqvist’s original story. It was apparently a short story that was expanded by Lindqvist for the movie, and it might be interesting to see what material was added for the movie (I have my suspicions). When I read Let The Right One In, I was surprised to find that the story itself was essentially the same, but that he provided some extra background information that completely changed my conception of who these characters were and how they related to each other, and ultimately changed the story that was being told. In this case I’ll be interested to see what was essential to the story and what was extra shading introduced into the movie, and whether the story also offers additional context for the story. But at the same time, I don’t feel like I need to go out of my way to seek out the original story; I’m curious to read it, but not particularly excited. Which pretty much sums up my feelings on the film as a whole.
I've been familiar with the name of Leon Vitali for many years at this point - it's difficult to take an active interest in the work of Stanley Kubrick without coming across Vitali's name. And I knew the broad one-sentence summary of his story: that he was an actor who, after working with Kubrick on Barry Lyndon, decided to leave his profession and work as Kubrick's assistant for the rest of the director's life, and who has since Kubrick passed away become almost the most prominent voice for what he would have wanted with his work. Filmworker is a fascinating documentary that explores the professional life of Leon Vitali and his relationship with the great director.
Vitali was seemingly an actor on the rise when he was cast as Barry Lyndon's sullen stepson, where he apparently impressed Kubrick sufficiently that the role was expanded. At that time, Vitali first became fascinated by all of the behind-the-scenes workers all endeavouring to achieve the singular vision of the director, and after demonstrating some interest in that area, by working unpaid in the edit suite on a Frankenstein film that Vitali starred in, Kubrick offered Vitali a job as his assistant, a job he would fulfill for over 20 years. During that time he did everything imaginable, from casting to acting coach to sound effect work to research to scrutiny of film prints to managing the paperwork to advertising to keeping track of film trims to cleaning his house and even the occasional bit of acting. (There's a fantastic story about filming Eyes Wide Shut, where Vitali played eight different roles in the masked orgy scene, including the red cloaked Master of Ceremonies, and how in between takes Vitali would have to run up and down the stairs while wearing six-inch platform boots to hunt out some piece of film that Kubrick wanted.)
I was really impressed with the number of people who offered their voice to the film. The biggest surprise to me was the appearance of Danny Lloyd, who I'm not sure discusses his experiences on The Shining very often. But Danny famously worked most closely with Vitali, who was able to use his experience and understanding as an actor to bring that incredible performance out of the young child. On the other end of the spectrum, he was also the person who really helped shape the real-life drill sergeant R Lee Ermey into the actor who was able to give one of the most memorable performances in cinema history: the late Ermey gives an enjoyable interview where he discusses being the technical advisor to the film, and deliberately trying to use that as an opening to get the role, and thus create his entire acting career. (We also hear from Tim Colceri, who was famously originally cast as Hartman before being replaced, and how angry he was at Kubrick for just sending Vitali to fire him.)
One of the most significant things about Kubrick was his refusal to compromise, and his expectation that everyone would be fully on top of their game. (They even had to cast three different actors as George III for Barry Lyndon because the first two weren't ready.) So the pressure working for Kubrick was absolutely intense, and the man had an incredible temper when you fell short, but at the same time the satisfaction that came with being commended for a good job was incredibly meaningful. And you get an insight into just how important every detail was. Vitali talks about how he would review every print that was send out to theatres wanting to have revival screenings of Kubrick's old films and how, in the release of Eyes Wide Shut, Vitali personally viewed every fifth print in its entirety, just to make sure it's what Kubrick would have wanted. I remember when Warner Brothers rushed out a DVD box set immediately after Kubrick's death, and the general outcry that occurred at the poor quality of the release, and when you know how protective Kubrick was over the quality of his back catalogue, it's easy to understand just what an outrage that release really was.
There's really too much to talk about with this film. It's just story after story after story of who Kubrick was and what it was like to have to support such a demanding and exacting person. It seems exhausting, and almost everyone comments on how hollow and sunken Vitali often seemed, worn down by the constant demands. But this isn't some damning portrayal of Kubrick as a monstrous figure, although they acknowledge the famous stories about his temper or his demanding hundreds of takes. When you hear Vitali talk about Kubrick, it's clear that his work was motivated out of a deep love for the man. Indeed, curiously for a person whose background is in acting, Vitali seems uncomfortable with the attention that comes with being the central figure of a documentary, and seems to have agreed to make the film solely as a way of trying to celebrate this person who he genuinely admired, and as a way of putting on record the man that he knew.
For me the most shocking thing was to learn how shut out Vitali apparently became after Kubrick died, seemingly almost resented for his attempts to protect the work of Kubrick. I can't imagine that there's anyone else more knowledgeable about Kubrick and his work then Vitali, and yet we hear stories of him having to borrow money from his children while having to volunteer to inspect film prints in the way Kubrick would have expected. It was a relief to note in the film's postscript that Vitali was involved in the recent 70mm release of 2001, and has now been hired to catalogue Kubrick's paperwork.
Above all, this is a fascinating story about a man who chooses to effectively give up his own life in order to serve and assist another to achieve their own goals. It's an extremely entertaining film, and I recommend it.
(It was also a useful reminder that it has been years since I last saw Barry Lyndon and Eyes Wide Shut, and I really need to rectify that as soon as possible.)
Francois is a French gangster who has decided to leave the criminal life and pursue an honest income as the owner of the Mr Freeze ice block North African franchise. But to acquire the franchise, he needs his €80,000 savings, which he had entrusted to his mother, who it seems has gambled the money away. So, in order to make the money he needs, he has to approach the young impulsive upstart who has taken over his former boss's business, and agree to help him in a hashish smuggling operation. To help him with the operation, he invites along a young woman who he is infatuated with, who is really not interested in him at all but is keen on a free trip to Barcelona, along with a couple of young Brit-hating thugs who livestream their assaults, and a longtime criminal who is terrified of the lizard people who rule the world. The meeting with the Scottish drug lord who is supplying the hashish, and who is terrified that his criminal operations might lead to him inadvertently been caught up as a party to terrorism, does not go well, and Francois finds himself conned out of the €200,000 he had been given for the exchange. So, out of desperation, he has to call on his con artist mother for help. And it's at this point that the entire situation just starts to spiral out of control, leading to a massive operation involving luxury resorts, kidnapping, a pirate raid on a ship, a grenade in a young girls backpack, and the synchronised intervention of people across multiple countries to make everything work perfectly.
This was just an utter delight to see. I love the film festival, it's a fantastic opportunity to see some of the best films being made today, but sometimes it can start to feel a little wearying. So many of these films are serious and dramatic and thought-provoking, so after two weeks of such serious cinema it was such a refreshing experience to see a film that is so completely focused being a pure entertainment above all else. It's not trying to make any particularly deep arguments, it's not trying to expose you to new ideas or new points of view, it just wants to be please as many people as possible, but to achieve that without dumbing itself down or aiming for lowest common denominator thrills. And it is extremely effective in achieving that goal. It's a glorious piece of Tarantino-esque tomfoolery, light as a feather, laugh out loud funny, but never so silly that it undercuts the seriousness of its drama. The characters all get their own eccentricities and enjoyable comic set pieces, but at the same time the audience was so sold on the characters that at certain moments where certain people were asked to make a choice and took the wrong option, you could hear the audience audibly disappointed with the direction the person chose. The cast was a delight, with Vincent Cassell in particular having a great deal of fun playing a man who obsessively watches conspiracy theory videos and is increasingly terrified by the number of triangles the Illuminati have scattered through the world. I also enjoyed Oulaya Amamra as the impossibly sexy Lamya - her character is in many ways the most difficult to play, being someone who is at all points unreliable and liable to double cross whoever she's with, yet at the same time being someone we can all be so infatuated with that we can understand someone actively trying to trust her despite all evidence to the contrary. The set pieces are great - there's a brilliant sequence early on where Francois' mother leads a team of females on a heist to steal thousands of euros of goods from a high-end department store, and the sequence is shot with such confidence and verve that you instantly realise that you can rely on this director to guide you through this fantastically entertaining film. If only all movies could be this effortlessly fun.
About 15 years ago, the festival showed a fantastic crowd-pleasing documentary called Spellbound, about a number of children competing in the finals of the national spelling bee. It's a surprise to realise that it's taken so long since that film to apply the same format to students competing at the top level in one of the other iconic aspects of American education, the science fair, as we focus on a number of different students travelling from across the US and internationally to compete in the International Science and Engineering Fair. A good result for these students could be a ticket into a top tier university or into a great job opportunity.
As with the earlier film, much of the first part of the film is taken up with introducing us to our main characters. It's fascinating to watch how wildly the cultures in different schools vary. Some schools really seem to focus intently on science fair, with one school having a reputation as a powerhouse - from here we meet a 14 year old girl developing a test for arsenic in groundwater to help prevent cancer in third world countries, and a team of three seniors, including an amusingly frat-boy surfer type, working to develop an electronic stethoscope. But other schools seem to have a shocking lack of interest in fuelling interest in this area - we visit a school in the South that primarily focuses on its sporting achievements, despite the football team not having won in a year, while not even the science teachers are interested in supporting one young Muslim girl wanting to study brain wave patterns to understand risk-taking impulses. (She eventually gets sponsored for the science fair by the football coach, who quite openly admits to having no idea what her work even means.) We meet a kid who nearly failed maths class because he had so little interest in the assigned lessons, but at the same time who is completely fascinated by number theory and the potential of artificial intelligence. There's one school where the documentary focuses more on the teacher then the students, because she has incredibly managed to help nine different teams reach this year's science fair. And the fair is international as well. We meet a kid from Germany who has taken the old Flying Wing airplane design from the 20s, which failed because it was horribly unstable, and has managed to make the design function. And we meet a girl from an underfunded school in Brazil who has managed to develop a medication that inhibits the growth of the Zika virus.
Since this film is so obviously drawing on the Spellbound film for inspiration, it's interesting to reflect on the differences in the competitions being portrayed and the impact that this has on the film cinematically. The spelling bee is inherently dramatic, in that every time a person steps up to the mic, there is an intense tension over whether they will get this next word right or wrong. Plus there's also a nice clear criteria: you either spell it correctly or you're out. With science fair, it's all about the process of setting everything up, with practicing your presentation, with making sure that the people are able to present their ideas in the best way possible. But the actual judging is behind closed doors, and all we get is an announcement about which people came top in their field or not. I understand why there's no point where the judge's explain their choices, why they chose to reward some exhibits over others, but I do wish we could have had some clearer explanation of the results. There were some projects that I found quite extraordinary, and was shocked to discover that they didn't even place, and I would love to know why they didn't do as well as it seemed as though they should.
But there's another big difference between Spellbound and this film. What the kids do in the spelling bee is genuinely impressive, being able to hear an insanely complicated word and being able to instantly identify how to spell it by understanding the functioning of the different language roots. But at the same time, as impressive as it is, it is just spelling really well. What's exciting about the work being done in science fair is that it feels like it could genuinely change lives, change the way our world functions. There's a point where there's an observation about how we live in a world that is increasingly intellectually less curious, and so events (and films) like science fair are important to celebrate and encourage the people who are creating our future. These kids have the ability to take an idea and pursue it until it becomes something that is world-changing. There is genuinely innovative work being done in the science fair, and someone comments that the reason for this is that kids have not yet developed their full expectation of the way the world will work, and this frees them up to genuinely think in an unexpected or innovative manner and find new solutions to problems that plague us.
In case you haven't picked up on this yet, the film does feel somewhat derivative of Spellbound. That's fine - Spellbound is a great template to follow for this type of film, and I struggle to think of a better way to tell this story. But it does mean that this film isn't breaking new ground or doing anything particularly innovative with the documentary form. I do find myself wondering what is involved in making a film like this, and just how much they had to film to produce it. After all, they are filming the one kid who ultimately wins Best in Show, and the likelihood of them just happening to cover the final winner by chance seems fairly remote. I wouldn't be surprised if there weren't dozens of kids filmed just in case they won, and who weren't included once they fell short.
Ultimately, this film is a celebration of the insane work of these kids, and it's a delight to watch. Strongly recommended.
What is there to say about Wim Wenders Wings of Desire that hasn't already been said? It's one of Wenders' most loved films, and one of the most essential works of 80s cinema. Everything that can be said about this film must surely have been said, and if there is anything new to say then I'm not the one to say it because I'm still pretty new to the film - this was only my second viewing, my first viewing being a number of years ago when it had a random screening at the Film Archive. But it was a delight to see it at the Embassy, on that large screen, with an achingly beautiful restoration, and it reinforced for me that this is a film I need to revisit much more often.
Bruno Ganz stars as Damiel, an angel who, along with his friend Cassiel, spend their days wandering around West Berlin during the era of the Wall, observing the people, hearing their thoughts, watching them at their most spiritual and at their lowest points. Damiel becomes frustrated at the limitations of being an immortal being, always observing life and its joys but without the ability to experience pleasure at even the most simple things. Then one day he finds himself at a circus about to close down for the year, where he is entranced by the beautiful trapeze artist Marion and he longs to make himself known to her.
One thing I found fascinating by the film was perfectly paced the film is. Which seems like an odd thing to praise in the film, since it is over two hours long and I'm not sure you could say that there's two hours’ worth of events in the film. But it feels perfectly measured, and the film therefore feels much, much shorter than it actually is. Part of that is just the constant delight in discovering what this film is; it never sits still, but moves around in a fascinating way. One minute we are wandering through a house and observing a young family, the next we're with a prostitute bemoaning her choice of street corner, then suddenly we are flying through the air with our trapeze artist, then we're in a club dancing amid the swarm of humanity, and then we're wandering around the deserted public library. The film might be setting this slow, contemplative tone but it's never lingers in a way that might otherwise make the film drag.
Bruno Ganz is fantastic here. The nature of the role is such that he's seldom called on to actually speak, but he's a constant presence in the film, and he brings such an air of desperation to his performance that is devastating. One of my favourite moments in the film has him attending a circus performance, and he has a giddiness to him that is quite infectious. Now, part of that might be that he's about to see his beloved Marion perform, but it also seems that part of his excitement was with the fact that the circus was filled with kids, since children are the only people who can see angels, and so it felt as though Ganz was almost delirious with excitement at the prospect of being seen and recognised and acknowledged in his own existence.
I also adored Solveig Dommartin as Marion. She gives a gloriously mournful, lonely performance as the trapeze artist trying to find something that will fill this aching hole in her soul. There's a fantastic sequence where she sits in her trailer and just sings along with a Nick Cave song, and the pain and sadness of her life seems almost to overwhelm her. It's remarkable work.
Peter Falk has a small but wonderful role in the film. He plays Peter Falk, the star of Colombo, who has come to Berlin to work on a film and who becomes a figure of fascination for Damiel. For much of the film it seems like just an odd quirk of the film to have such a recognisable actor playing himself - it seems like a way of quickly establishing this film has taken place in our reality - and it's amusing the number of people who see him and respond with Columbo jokes, but he proves to be an absolutely vital figure in the film. And he gets one of the best scenes in the movie, where he find himself effectively monologuing about the joys of being human, of getting to enjoy the simple pleasures, things like rubbing your hands together when it's cold, or enjoying a nice hot cup of coffee, or a cigarette, or combining the coffee and smoke into one wonderful experience. There's a wit and a charm to his performance, and I struggle to think of anyone who could have been more perfectly matched to this material.
I adored the cinematography and visual flair that was brought to this film. There's a note attached to the start of this restoration that explains that, because of technical limitations at the time, every print that had previously been made of the film was many, many generations away from the original camera negative - which is upsetting because there is such a striking and bold and beautiful sensibility to the film that it's a shame to think that for three decades all anyone could watch was a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy. The film is shot with this striking rich black and white cinematography that makes Berlin look like the most beautiful city imaginable, and feel less grounded, as though this really is a world in which angels wander and observe our behaviour. There is also a moment in which the film makes a transition into colour for a while, and it is beautiful, but the colour also makes the film feels grounded and real in a way that the black and white never does, and it almost feels like a relief when the screen returns to black and white, because it gives the film that overarching beauty that it demands. But if I had to criticize the film on any point, it would probably be on the scheme around that transition into colour. Before the big central moment that changes the film, there are a few random points throughout the first part of the film where the film does transition into colour very briefly. I think that's the one point where Wenders does make a mistake; I feel that that transition into colour would be so much more effective if we hadn't already seen at multiple points the film go, however briefly, into colour. I'm also not entirely positive that the logic underpinning that transition into colour really holds with some of the earlier scenes. In particular, there's a moment where we see footage apparently from the concentration camp, while we later on see film footage of people rebuilding the city, and while the concentration camp footage is in black and white, the rebuilding scenes are in colour. And I'm not sure I can parse the logic for these two scenes being treated differently, other than just the fact that they were able to get colour footage of the one moment but not of the other. But it is a moment that might possibly undercut the film in a way that I don't think is intended. But to be clear, that is an extremely minor quibble in an otherwise fantastic piece of cinema.
The film prominently features the music of Nick Cave, not just in the previously mentioned scene where Marian sings along to his album, but also in multiple scenes where characters go to a nightclub where Cave is performing. It's not a musical style that particularly appeals to me, but the way Wenders presents the music makes it feel vital and gloriously alive.
One thing I'm excited to do is look into whether there has been any commentary written about the role of the Berlin Wall in this film. The wall is extremely prominently featured in multiple scenes, including one pivotal moment that takes place in the No Man's Land between the two sides, and I'm very curious to see why the wall was such a big part of the film. It could be that the wall was just a big part of West Berlin, as possibly the thing Berlin was best known for at the time, and it would be hard to make a film set in that city without featuring the wall. But it feels as though we're supposed to see the separation between the angelic and the human realms as symbolic of the division that existed in the city at that time, where everyone exists as a resident of this one great city but yet there's an inability for people on one side to truly connect with the other. No doubt there's a lot that has been written on the topic by many people with more considered insight then I could offer on the topic, and I'm looking forward to seeing what has been said on this.
It's a vital, fantastic, glorious work of cinema, and it was such a joy to get to revisit it.
My first film of the (official) final day of the festival was the new film from Jafar Panahi. There are few things that's fascinate me more than the state of Jafar Panahi's current career. The Iranian director is close to half way through his 20-year ban on making movies, and he seems to have reached the point where he doesn't even try to hide that he is still making movies. In his earlier films he was at least playfully coy about whether he was making a movie - in This Is Not A Film, he's on-screen describing the film that he would make if he was able to make a movie, while I believe that Taxi has no credits, so technically no one knows who directed that film. But 3 Faces opens with a very clear on-screen credit, a film by Jafar Panahi, so I guess he's just being open about this now.
3 Faces opens with a video selfie being shot by a tearful young woman, Marziyeh, walking through a cave as she addresses actress Behnaz Jafari. Marziyeh talks about her aspiration to become an actress, her family's refusal to let her leave the village to study acting because it will bring dishonour on them, her repeated failed efforts to contact Jafari and get her to come to the village and convince Marziyeh's family to let her leave. And then Marziyeh hangs herself. Jafari (who plays herself) is understandably concerned by this video, but is uncertain whether it's real or not, especially as she knows nothing about Marziyeh's claimed efforts to contact her. And so she drives with her friend Jafar Panahi to try to find the village where this girl lived in hope of understanding what is going on. And when they do find the village, they are concerned to discover that Marziyeh has not been seen for three days.
The focus of the film is very much centred on the female experience of living in Iran, and what it's like to have your life dictated by those around, with limited ability to define who you are as a person. One of the scariest moments in the film comes when they visit Marziyeh's family, and we encounter her brother, who is all uncontrollable rage at this awful girl who has dishonoured us with her desires for something better than the life offered by this tiny village. The very fact that suicide seems like a credible and understandable response to her inability to escape her home shows just how hard this life really could be for her, and for many like her.
There’s this road that leads up to the central village which is long and windy and too narrow for two cars to pass, and so the village has developed this complicated process where cars approaching the road will honk their horns to see whether anyone is on the road, and then there’s an increasing process of honks as people try to signal whether their need to drive down the road is more urgent than the car coming the other way – the scene in which this process is described really is very funny. But it feels like it’s a nice commentary on a country that is too wedded to the way it has always done things. There’s a moment where we hear about Marziyeh in frustration just deciding to grab some tools and try to expand the road until they took her tools away, not because it couldn’t be done (which it obviously couldn’t be, not by one person), but because that’s not work for women. There’s no obvious reason why the road couldn’t be expanded; it’s just that the whole honking system has worked well for them in the past and they have no motivation to change it, much like a country that sees no reason to allow women to take an increasing part in society just because things have been fine without female involvement in the past.
I really do enjoy Panahi’s filming style. He’s very minimalistic in his work, often simply framing the film and then letting the scenes play out in these beautiful extended takes in front of the camera. And it’s a wonderfully flexible approach: there are points where we are deliberately not shown what is happening, where we hear characters arguing or yelling behind closed doors but we are deliberately kept at a distance away from what is going on. At other points it’s actively funny; in one moment a character is seen standing near Panahi’s car while picking up a large rock; when the next shot proves to be to a shot through the windscreen, the audience couldn’t help laughing as we noticed the smashed glass.
As always, it’s really interesting to view the film through the lens of Panahi’s current circumstances. While Panahi is a character in the film (and is definitely becoming more comfortable on screen) he’s very much a hanger-on, an observer in the events rather than an active participant. It’s almost as though the Panahi stand-in is actually the young girl Marizyeh, who does after all start and end the film – she is someone who is creative and talented, bursting with ideas that she wants to express, but she feels oppressed in this world that is trying to silence her, that is trying to force her to be quiet, to know her place, and to not push for a better world. The film is obviously directly about the place of women in Iranian society, but I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to find an interpretation that also discusses Panahi’s situation. (The film is also rather playful about Panahi’s situation; he’s asked multiple times if he’s travelling to this village in order to make a new film, a question he always answers with a firm No.)
One thing I found interesting was the involvement of a minor character (I don’t believe she’s ever seen except in long-distance) called Sherazad, a woman who had been an actress before the Islamic Revolution. There was a long period after the revolution where Iranian cinema was famous for telling these incredible stories about children, and I remember reading that this was because the authorities imposed so many restrictions on movies with men and women together that the only practical way you could have male and female characters together was to have them be pre-pubescent children. But that obviously has an impact on the people who were previously working in the industry, and in Sherazad we see someone who in a very real way was a victim of that change, someone who previously had a happy life but who has now been forced into a very insular and withdrawn life away from the world that she had previously enjoyed. It's a small but tragic indictment on a government that would seek to control the expressions of its artists and the impact that this has on real people.
Watching this film, I found myself realising that, although I really do enjoy Panahi’s post-ban films, for some reason I’ve never really gone back to look at his earlier films. I have seen his beautiful debut film The White Balloon, which screened at Film Society back in 2010 and which remains one of my favourite Film Society discoveries, but I’ve never dug beyond that into his other early work. And I really need to change that.
I have no doubt that there is a lot in this film that I completely failed to comprehend. Panahi is a smart and informed filmmaker who is able to use his work to cut at the problems in Iranian culture and its political system without ever coming out and baldly stating what his message is. But what that does mean is that his works can feel as though there are elements and messages that are invisible and impossible to understand by someone who isn't completely ingrained in the culture. But there's also a degree to which it doesn't matter, because his films are so entertaining and intriguing that, even if you don't know what point the film is trying to make, you can just enjoy them as an interesting story well told. And this was really enjoyable.
A fantastic and intriguing South Korean drama, Burning focuses on Jongsoo, a young man living in the city who is forced to move back home to take care of his father’s farm after his father is arrested for assaulting a public official. At the same time, he runs into Haemi, a young woman he knew as a child, and the two start dating. She even asks him to take care of her pet cat while she's in Africa for a few weeks to find herself. But there are some weird things about Haemi, like the fact that her cat is never seen despite being kept in a tiny one-room apartment with nowhere to escape to, or the fact that she has memories of events from their childhood that no-one else remembers. She returns from Africa with a friend, Ben, a slightly older and much wealthier man who she became close to on the trip, and the two increasingly hang out together, which distresses an increasingly possessive Jongsoo. Then one day the two visit him out at his father's farm and, while high, Ben confesses that his hobby is to burn down disused greenhouses, and he’s in the area scouting out a greenhouse to destroy. And it's at this point that the film changes from being a small drama about a troubled relationship into a mystery that increasingly consumes the entire film.
Director Lee Chang-dong displays an impressive control of tone throughout the entire film. I didn’t remember anything that the write-up said about the film, so had no idea it would become a mystery, and so for the first half of the film I was just watching this intriguing story about a troubled relationship between these two ultimately likable but flawed people. And it’s engaging and fun, and Jongsoo is so completely out of his depth and earnest that he’s a sympathetic figure despite his fairly significant flaws. And then the turn comes, and it comes so quietly that you don’t instantly realise that the film has become a mystery, but once you do there’s an unbearable level of suspense and tension maintained right through to its ultimately inevitable conclusion.
One thing I really appreciated was that the film’s almost stubborn refusal to answer questions, or to be clear about which questions we should be asking, or even whether we should be asking questions in the first place. Yes, it’s a mystery, but part of the mystery is deliberately about whether there is a mystery at all. And so we’re sent into this utterly disorienting spiral as we’re trying to get a grasp on anything firm at all. There’s a host of questions all around, with different people behaving in ways that create different suspicions, but I struggle to find a single unifying explanation that makes sense of everything.
Here’s an example: During the last half of the film, we find ourselves following Ben quite a lot as Jongsoo tries to understand his involvement in the mystery, and the tension in these sequences is unbearable. In my favourite sequence, Jongsoo is trying to follow Ben in a fairly conspicuous truck that Ben should recognise but doesn’t seem to. Ben turns down a country road, Jongsoo follows, but then Ben seems to vanish when he goes around a bend. Then a minute later Ben is behind him – did he just pull off the road for a minute and Jongsoo missed it, or did he know that Jongsoo was following him and is he trying to trap him? But Jongsoo pulls off the road and Ben drives past, parking on top of a nearby hill. So Jongsoo climbs the hill and hides behind Ben’s car, maybe two metres away from Ben, who’s looking out at the view with an unusual look. Is he just innocently enjoying the view oblivious to Jongsoo’s presence? Or is he guilty, and so focused on his thoughts about his actions that he has genuinely not noticed Jongsoo? Or is he guilty and deliberately toying with this person he knows is there but is pretending not to? All three seem like credible explanations. Another credible explanation is that this whole scene is all a dream, since the next scene opens with Jongsoo waking up, but it doesn’t play that way, especially as it’s not markedly different from the rest of the film and there’s no obvious indication that the wider film might be his imaginings or delusions.
All of which makes the film sound as though it could be an unsatisfying unknowable experience, like an inferior Lynchian experience that throws out mysterious elements without ever resolving them. On the contrary, it’s immensely satisfying and intriguing, largely because this is all focused on putting us all in the mindset of Jongsoo; it’s not about us solving the mystery, it’s about us understanding the journey that leads him to his endpoint. He never knows the answers, he never actually grasps what might be happening, he just has to act on his limited information. And it’s a gripping journey that he goes on and that we are carried along with.
I also have to note that the film is beautifully shot and took a particular delight in the use of silhouettes, with a couple of scenes that are probably my absolute favourite moments of cinematography in the festival. In one, we watch a figure looking at a greenhouse in flames, and the way they shot the waves of flames consuming the structure was strikingly beautiful. In another, a (somewhat high) Haemi stands topless, her back to the audience, watching the setting sun and offering her profound observations while the film delighted in the shape of her silhouetted body as a pitch black contrast against the changing colours of the sky. It was just an extraordinarily beautiful and memorable shot, and a great use of cinematography as storytelling, because this proves to be an unexpectedly significant moment, and the cinematography fixed this moment in the audience's mind.
This is one of those films that just gets better in your mind. I really enjoyed the film while I watched it, but as I reflect on the experience and the way the film worked my appreciation and love for it grows. It's just so good.
The official Closing Night film of this year's festival was this sweet, charming, tragic Polish musical charting 15 years in the lives of a young couple. The film opens in 1950, with pianist Wiktor putting together a group of singers who he can build up as a touring choir performing a celebration of Polish folk songs; he soon starts a relationship with one of the girls in the group, a woman named Zula. The choir is successful, and starts to come under pressure from the communist government to supplement the folk music with songs that will communicate certain socialist ideals, until they ultimately find themselves singing hymns to the glory of Stalin. While on tour, Wiktor and Zula make plans to escape to the West, but in the last minute Zula doesn't come and Wiktor has to leave for Paris alone. And so the film follows the two of them through to the mid-60s, as they enter and exit each other's lives, with their tempestuous relationship waxing and waning repeatedly over time.
The main appeal in the film is as a musical, as we explore the couple’s work together and apart as musical artists. There’s a wonderful variation in the musical styles being explored here, from folk to 50s-rock to lounge, even a mock B-movie score, and it’s always a delight. There are some fabulous sequences set to popular music, but the real highlight is in the lesser-known (to our ears) songs. The moments where we just sit and listen to the choir singing these traditional Polish songs really are delightful. In the case of one song, as the film progresses we hear it repeatedly as it is reinterpreted into different musical styles and even into different languages, and it’s fascinating to hear how much such a simple musical idea with a particularly distinctive hook can be so completely transformed while retaining its essence.
I adored the central performances. Joanna Kulig as Zulia is utterly radiant, someone who demands the attention of the audience, while Tomasz Kot as Wiktor carries a nice sense of weary resignation to his composer character. What I found particularly surprising was just how strong they were as musical performers, particularly Kot’s work as a piano player. I’m not sure whether he previously played piano or whether he learned it for the movie, but there are moments where the film takes care to highlight the fact that there is no fakery involved as he’s playing some exceptionally intricate and complex pieces. It’s nice when a movie that is so focused on musical ability takes care to convince its audience that its characters really do have the talent to survive in this world.
The film is shot with this beautiful black and white cinematography. I often find that there can be something unsatisfying about modern black and white movies. It's almost as though people have lost the skills to do it well, and so images often come across as murky and indistinct, until the image feels like it's composed of subtle variations in grey. That's not what this film is like. There's a clear understanding of how to use the contrast between light and dark to make the image pop, where every subtle variation in the image is clear and distinct, and where every image, no matter how unimportant, feels like it demands your attention. Stunning work.
One thing I found fascinating was how honest the film was about the burdens of leaving your home for another country. To us, it seems like the most obvious choice to leave the repression and control of communist Poland for the freedom of Paris, and the characters agree that it’s the right choice, but yet Poland becomes somewhere they just cannot leave behind. It means a lot to have to abandon your home, your country, this place you’ve grown up, and even when they do leave, they’re left with a hole in their heart, a longing to return to a home that means so much. It’s extremely effective in communicating the reality and complexity of these emotions. I read that in creating the central characters, director Pawel Pawlikowski was inspired by his parents, who in addition to seemingly having a turbulent relationship did also leave the country for a number of years, and you get the sense that the film is very much influenced by Pawlikowski hearing from his parents exactly what the emotional experience of leaving you’re your home really is like.
This is a complex emotional film. It’s not a feel-good film by any means – there’s a definite darkness and sadness in the shape of the story and in the bitterness that exists between our leads at certain points – but at the same time there’s a genuine joy in the transformative power of music. Ultimately it was a real delight, and a pleasing way for the film festival to officially close.
The film festival officially runs for 17 days, from the opening Friday until the closing Sunday. Every year, they always add a few extra screenings of particularly popular films in the week after the official end of the festival, but when I have attended these additional screenings I've never counted them as part of my festival count, because they're outside the 17 days. This year is an exception, for two reasons. Firstly, the Prince concert film Sign O The Times was not originally part of the programme, and as a late addition had its one and only festival screening on the Tuesday after the festival ended, so it was never possible to see the film during the official festival time period. Secondly, counting the film as part of my official festival count means that I had 40 films this yeah, and I like round numbers.
I'm not really much of a music fan, much less a Prince fan. When I think of his music, I know 1999, I probably would recognise Purple Rain, I'm familiar with those of his songs that are able to be heard in the 1989 Batman, and I know When Doves Cry from the cover of the song that features in Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet. But I was still interested in seeing the film, particularly since it does have a very strong reputation as one of the best concert films ever made. And I have enjoyed concert films in the past, even when I'm not much of a fan of the artist. I thought Talking Heads' Stop Making Sense was fantastic, I really enjoyed the Rolling Stones concert film Shine a Light that Scorsese directed, and more recently I had a great deal of fun with the Justin Timberlake + The Tennessee Kids concert film directed by Jonathan Demme. But what I realise is that with each of these films, even if I'm not a fan of the artist, I've absorbed enough about their work through cultural osmosis that I can recognise the occasional song, which gives me a way in to the artist. But in the case of Prince and this film, I have never heard any of these songs before, and so I didn't have a way in to the film. They were well performed, but I just didn't feel that these songs were all that memorable. I guess the ultimate test for me is whether or not the film engaged me enough that I would want to dig deeper into discovering the artist's work; those earlier films had that exact effect on me, and this did not.
I was uncertain about many of the design choices adopted during the film. Why is the concert stage setup to look like a mock red light district? Why is that keyboard player dressed as a doctor? Why is that guitar player wearing what can only be described as a tassel blindfold? In fact, there's a weird erratic visual approach to the costume meaning of everyone on stage that just felt incoherent; I'm sure that Prince could have explained what all of the design choices were supposed to mean, but as a viewer it wasn't communicated and just felt random.
The film also has these incredibly irritating vignettes, short scenes that are presumably supposed to illustrate some point or other. But I never felt like I could grasp what the point of those moments was supposed to be, especially since there was a wild variation in the scenes. Why are some vignettes played out on stage in front of the concert audience, while others played on backstage set away from the concert audience, and still more scenes are seemingly filmed separately from the concert, without any obvious rationale. I assume we're supposed to take something away from the vignettes, and they're supposed to be important judging by the choice to feature short glimpses of these scenes in one of the final songs, but I couldn't see any obvious structure or purpose to the moments. They just felt like pretensions of an artist who seems to be convinced of his own genius, and who wants to be seen to be giving his work more significance that is perhaps would hold.
And yet, as little as I cared for the songs in the film, and Prince's artistic pretensions, the fact is that guy was a born entertainer. He's a good singer, and fine as a composer, but watching him dance was an utter delight. And he surrounds himself with fellow performers who really are operating at the top level. I don't know that I've ever heard of a concert film where the most memorable thing was the dancing, but there is one dancer in particular who just brings such energy and power to her movement that it is stunning. Then there's a blistering drum solo that is difficult to comprehend how the drummer is even playing that thing. And there's a backing vocalist who gets one moment to shine, but when she does her voice just feels like it batters you.
The fact is, for all that I didn't really care about Prince's music, I was still thoroughly entertained by an impressive display of performing talents. And I did really enjoy it.
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