We're less than two months from the start of the 2017 film festival, so it's about time I get around to posting my comments on the 2016 films. As usual, these were posts that I wrote on Facebook very shortly after seeing the films, and never more than a day or two after the screenings, so my responses are still very fresh and in some cases still unformed. They're mostly just about trying to capture my immediate response to these films.
First film of the festival was a brilliantly entertaining documentary portrait of Anthony Weiner, the well-regarded New York congressman who resigned from Congress in 2011 after it was revealed that he had been sending sexual pictures of himself to a number of women. Two years later, things having died down, Weiner tried to restart his political career by running for New York mayor. And his campaign was working quite well; he managed to overcome his damaged reputation to become the frontrunner in the Democratic primary. And then it was discovered that he was still sending even-more-explicit photos of himself to women, this time under the hilarious pseudonym of Carlos Danger. His reputation was well and truly savaged at this point, the campaign collapsed into a fiasco as the media focused on his indiscretions, and while he remained in the campaign it quickly became clear he was going to fall far short of his goal.
But it seems that, long before the scandal broke, Weiner had actually allowed a couple of documentary-makers to follow him during his mayoral campaign, presumably hoping at first that the resulting documentary might help salvage his reputation. The film doesn't say this but, based on interviews I've heard with the filmmakers, one of them had previously worked for Weiner (I believe as his chief of staff), which explains how the filmmakers were able to get surprisingly close to the politician. The film had a clear affection for the man, who does come across as very charismatic and likeable, and which makes the sense of hurt and betrayal at his actions quite palpable. But it's also quite honest about his failings (behind the obvious) in the way that those are closest to us also know our every bad point. The early firebrand figure yelling with righteous anger at the underhanded dealings of his rivals may be impressive, but when he turns that same fury into indignation during a television interview about his mistakes he comes across extraordinarily badly. (Indeed it's surprising when in the following scene we find him watching the interview taking pride in how well he destroyed the interviewer, suggesting a level of narcissism that made him blind to how he was presenting himself.) He may take pride in being a New Yorker, and New Yorkers don't quit, but there comes a point where it's clear that Weiner has destroyed all of his capital as a political figure, and his sheer unwillingness to step back (whether it off pride, blindness, or sheer bloody-mindedness) winds up damaging him completely. By the end of the film, he's being chased through a McDonald's on his way to his election night party, a figure of absolute absurdity.
There’s also a clear sense that what destroyed him may not have been the actual scandal, but the fact that he lied about it. There’s a brilliant moment in the film where one of his aides, trying to get in front of the problem, asks how many women there that could come forward, just so that she can prepare a plan for how best to handle the situation, and he’s just lying and obfuscating; he’s trying to justify why we could argue that this person is already covered by that confession, he’s refusing to say anything other than “there may be more than one”, because if he gives an actual number and it’s too low then he can be caught out in a lie, but if he gives the true number then it’s embarrassing and he looks bad. So he gives vague answers but it’s obvious that he’s trying to give vague answers, and so the media starts to hound him trying to get a straight truthful answer, until the whole thing spirals out of control. You get a real sense that if he had just told the truth, it would have been humiliating and might have cost him the election, but voters might also have respected him for telling the embarrassing truth, it would definitely have taken the wind out of the media’s sails, and he could get back to campaigning on the issues. But because he never gives an answer to the question, it becomes the only question he’s ever asked. And his compulsion to lie is completely understandable; we all have things we would hate for people to learn about us, and to have those secrets exposed in front of the world media is just awful. But what happened to Anthony Weiner is a clear example of how lying does not solve anything.
The star of the film has to be Weiner's wife Huma. Her early scenes with her husband are a lot of fun, and they do seem like a couple who have been through a lot and come out much stronger. And then the revelations come out, and it’s awful for her (the long silence between Weiner and Huma in their first meeting after the news breaks is one of the most uncomfortable scenes I've seen in a while), and she finds herself drawn into this mess, with the media surprisingly brutal towards her, and it just hurts to see the betrayal and hurt and frustration on her face. She's often a silent figure in much of the film, but it feels as though words would lessen what she says with her face.
At the end of the film, the filmmaker asks Weiner why he let them film all of this. And it's a good question. All you can think is that Weiner thought this would all blow over, that he would get past all of this fiasco, that this film could still become the story of redemption he probably imagined it being. And perhaps it says something about our leaders, that the compulsion and confidence that leads someone to say "I am the one person who can change this city", knowing that a million obstacles will be put in their way, can make them blind to the realities of the obstacles put in front of us. Or maybe that’s just Weiner’s personality, another one of his failings. In any case, it’s an engaging, at times uncomfortable and painful, but never less than entertaining film.
In 2000, acclaimed cellist Yo-Yo Ma brought together a collection of top musicians from a variety of musical traditions, some from the European classical world, others expert in traditional musical forms and instruments from Asia, the Middle East, and elsewhere, looking to merge their ideas together in the quest for something new musically, a search for a kind of musical universal language. In the wake of 9/11, the need for this connection seemed particularly pressing, and so the group continues to this day.
The Music of Strangers is an interesting, genial, feel-good documentary about the ensemble that is never less than enjoyable, but that suffers from a distinct lack of focus. Early on in the film, it's suggested that the Silk Road Ensemble might have been Ma's attempt to find new inspiration and passion in an art that he has long mastered; an interesting idea that is never mentioned again until the final scene of the film. In the meantime, we get a brief history of the group, we watch its early experiments, we spend a lot of time just listening to its music and seeing how these traditions are brought together, and we spend a lot of time with four particular members of the ensemble, getting to know them well. And the film raises lots of interesting issues: where is the line between cultural inspiration and cultural appropriation, what happens when art and culture conflict with politics, what is the value and role of music in a world where people are suffering and dying in war zones right now, can culture and traditions survive in a modern world. And there's a lot of interesting characters, whether it be the Iranian kamancheh player living effectively in exile away from his wife or the Spanish bagpiper who seemingly was rather well-known in her teenage years as a kind of punk bagpiper.
The problem is that because all of these elements are in a film running less than 100 minutes, there's simply not the time to develop any of them. Instead, it instead becomes a rambling collection of thoughts raised by the ensemble, without any follow-through because we've always got to move on to the next thing. The whole thing feels utterly formless. A sequence towards the end of the film where the Syrian clarinettist travels to a refugee camp to teach music to the children could form an entire film by itself, but here it's dispensed with in about five minutes, and it feels like a distraction, included because it's interesting and we have the footage. When the film ends, it feels less like it has finished saying what it wanted to say, and more that they had reached their contacted length so just had to end. This would have worked much better as a multi-part TV documentary series, where there was time to explore what it was saying, but as it is, it felt incredibly surface-level.
But the music; oh the music. There were points where I realised I was just holding my breath, literally breathtaken at the incredible music. I am definitely seeking out some of the group's albums. If for nothing else, it was worth seeing for that.
My first disappointment of the festival. Which is not to say it's a bad film; it's definitely not. But I remember walking out of Our Little Sister, the previous film from Kore-eda Hirokazu, completely charmed by this simple story, feeling that I just wanted to spend more time with those characters; I would have been happy watching an entire movie of them just preserving plums. After the Storm did not have that effect on me.
A large part of that is possibly that I just couldn't connect to its main character Ryoto. Abe Hiroshi plays the role well and brings a great deal of charm, but he felt like a stereotypical deadbeat divorced dad; supposedly a talented novelist, he instead spends his time working as a private investigator, occasionally following his ex-wife and her new boyfriend, raiding his mother's house looking for his late father's possessions to pawn, and gambling away any money he gets while he falls further behind in his child support.
And the film keeps promising the titular storm, the 23rd typhoon of the year we're told. But it just felt like it was never getting there. By the time it finally did arrive, trapping Ryoto at his mother's house with his ex-wife and their son, I genuinely felt sorry for the ex-wife and child for having to deal with this guy, while the best I felt I could hope for in this story was for him to realise he needed to stop being such an asshole.
I don't want to misrepresent the film; it is a good film. Kore-eda is a skilled observer of human behaviour and family relationships, both functional and dysfunctional, and I loved watching how these different family members engage with Ryoto. His relationship with his sister was particularly enjoyable, especially in the way she responded to seeing the worst aspects of their father in him. It was fascinating watching Kore-eda capture very real human impulses, like the way parents will do things with their kids to give them the same experiences that they had with their parents. And it is a consistently laugh-out-loud funny film, not in a sitcom-joke-delivery way, but in a more natural honest way, the way people sometimes just can be funny. I love the little realistic domestic touches Kore-eda brings; the way the mother's home is so small and cramped that the sister sitting at the table has to lean forward to avoid being hit every time the fridge is opened, or the iced dessert treat that's frozen solid and freezer-burnt. It feels like a genuine portrayal of these characters in these circumstances.
So it's worth seeing, and I'm glad to have spent the time watching it. But I can't help comparing it to Our Little Sister, which had a delicate beauty to it, and just the memory of that film had brought me so much joy over the past year. I don't think this will have that kind of lingering effect on me, and sadly that makes it a disappointment.
A fascinating documentary about the life of a young schoolgirl named Zin-Mi, an example of a perfectly normal everyday child living in North Korea, who is about to become a citizen by joining the Children’s Union. And the state is very helpful to the filmmakers; indeed, they are even so generous as to provide an adviser for the film, just to make sure that no mistakes are made in accurately presenting the truth of life for an average young girl growing up in the best country in the world. All of which means this manages to also be one of the most horrifying films I’ve seen in a while.
The influence of the propaganda machine is fascinating to watch. Because the filmmaker kept the cameras filming while the state’s advisers are coaching the subjects on the exact things to say, we get see people awkwardly and repeatedly congratulating Zin-Mi or her parents on her becoming a citizen, or parroting lines about the miraculous powers of kimchi (which is able to stop cancer and aging). Just a scene of our people eating dinner scene is itself astonishing; Zin-Mi and her parents, all three of them, sit at a table covered in more food than ten people could hope to eat, while the advisers correct the way people are sitting, how they’re positioned around the table, trying to get everything they can think of absolutely perfect; meanwhile the house has so little sense of personal touch it’s weirdly almost as if these people don’t actually live there.
In one of the most astonishing scenes of the film, we learn that the state has decided Zin-Mi’s father’s work as a journalist isn’t good for the film, as they think it’s important the film explore the importance of manufacturing, so suddenly he’s an engineer at a garment factory. This leads to a scene where he has to ask a couple of workers to explain what different types of detail may be added to a garment, before confidently announcing that their detailing work is okay but he can make a change to the machines that..., oh I’m sorry, their work is excellent but he can make it even better with a change to the machines. In the next scene we learn that the factory production was so good that they exceeded their targets by 150 percent; the oldest factory worker was a vital contributor to this and is given flowers, but she doesn’t feel she deserves them and gives them instead to the factory engineer since he was so essential in making the change to the machine and showing her how to use the machine to allow them to improve their production, and also his daughter just joined the Children’s Union. But it’s necessary to reshoot the scene, and in the second take the factory somehow has managed to improve production even more; it now produced at 200 percent of target. Wow! Good work everyone!
The filmmakers are invisible in the movie, only inserting themselves through on-screen captions, occasionally ironically parroting the ra-ra propaganda line, but often just barely containing their anger at the events they see. There’s one moment that sent an audible chill through the audience, where we learn that during filming the only time they ever saw children entering or leaving school was when the script called for it, suggesting that (despite the happy home life we’re shown) the parents probably live in barracks at their workplace, while the children board at school to more effectively spend time on their studies. And what excellent studies they’re given. We sit in a classroom where the teacher gives her children a history lesson about the time that the Great Leader and Generalissimo Kim Il-Sung became so angry at the Japanese oppressors and the traitorous landowners that he picked up and hurled a boulder at their boats, scaring them away; the teacher being very careful to repeatedly ensure the children know the exact words the Great Leader and Generalissimo Kim Il-Sung used to describe the landowners.
Yet peeking through the heavy control of the state propaganda figures, you get glimpses of these children naturally being children that are absolutely delightful. During a scene where an elderly general (whose jacket is hilariously covered in so many oversized medals that he jingles when he moves) comes to visit the school and tell a lengthy story about how the Great Leader and Generalissimo Kim Il-Sung taught them to shoot down planes with a machine gun, we see an exhausted Zin-Mi struggling and completely failing to keep her eyes open. In one scene Zin-Mi’s school friend (who has supposedly injured her ankle) is visited at a world-class hospital by Zin-Mi, her teacher, and friends; as they’re being directed how to play the news of her “miraculous recovery thanks to the skilled doctors”, we can’t help noticing the schoolgirls eagerly eating and enjoying an orange before being told off. But it’s surprising how sparse these moments of genuine humanity are under complete control of the state.
The most disturbing moment comes at the very end of the film, where Zin-Mi starts crying and cannot stop; eventually to cheer her up she’s asked if there’s a happy piece of poetry that she enjoys and could recite. Immediately and instinctively, she knows what she has to say; she starts reciting the oath of dedication to Kim Jong-Il she had to deliver when she joined the Children’s Union. No nursery rhymes, no silly songs, just a pledge to dedicate her life to her leader, so completely has the influence of this totalitarian regime been driven into her. And then the film ends, because after that there is nothing more to say.
As the film finishes there was one thought that was running through my mind; “I hope all those people are all okay.” I really liked Zin-Mi, and her parents, and her teacher, and I hope they’re not under any punishment because of their (no doubt compulsory) participation in a film that makes the North Korean Government look bad. And I wasn’t the only person thinking that; as we left the cinema I heard the woman in the row behind me express the exact same concern. It’s easy to watch a film like this; you can’t help but laugh at the absurd lines the propaganda machine is trying to force into the film. But we’re laughing from a place of security and safety, while these people have to spend the rest of their lives living under this regime, and that is genuinely upsetting.
I will confess to having never heard of this Taiwanese wuxia film, although it is evidentially well regarded; it was a prize winner at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival, and has clearly had an unmistakable influence on films I have seen. So I thought seeing this new restoration of the film should be fun. And it was, on the whole.
Ku, a somewhat aimless painter, is living a quiet life in a tiny village in the far end of the kingdom. His mother is always criticising him trying to pressure him to improve his life; he’s over 30, he should take the officials exam, get a better paid job, and find himself a wife. Then one day he discovers a young woman named Yang living in the abandoned fort by his house. Eventually he learns that Yang is a princess on the run; her father had tried to warn the Emperor about a corrupt adviser, an action that led to her father and family being executed. Now people have found her and are coming to take her back to be killed. Fortunately she has previously spent a couple of years living in a monastery with Zen Buddhist monks, and they taught her all the martial arts skills she needs to survive.
The thing is, the film is long. Over three hours long. And it’s slow; there are a few fight scenes early on, but for the most part we’re probably into the second half of the movie before the big set-piece action sequences take place. But I didn’t mind, because I enjoyed the film. I loved Ku, and found his constant conflict with his mother to be a reliable source of comedy; there was a great sense of location around the village, with the (supposedly haunted) abandoned fort always creepy to explore; and I enjoyed the mystery around this young woman and these other strangers who have suddenly arrived with a particular interest in the fort. So I didn’t really notice how long the film was running. And then the fights started, and the fights were phenomenal. If you think of the fights in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, and how those elegant aerial moves were achieved through wires; they achieve a similar effect here through the use of trampolines, and often it’s really rather effective. There’s a great physicality to the fights, and some nice long lingering shots allowing you to enjoy the artistry in the performers’ movements as the conflicts continue. It all culminates in a massive fight at the abandoned fort against overwhelming numbers, and it’s a brilliant end to the film.
Except the film goes on, at a guess I’d say for half an hour after that ending. And that was the point where the film lost me. It’s not that nothing happens in these scenes; there are a couple more massive action setpieces that are genuinely entertaining and thrilling (including one scene in a bamboo forest that clearly inspired Crouching Tiger). But I found myself distracted because I didn’t understand why this film was still playing. And then Ku, our main character and our entry point into the world, literally runs away and out of the film with maybe 20 minutes to go; after that point he only appears in one single dialogue-free shot at the very end. Instead we’re focused entirely on Yang and (more significantly) a monk who had only been a minor character until that point. And I didn’t understand what they were trying to achieve. There is clearly something in that final sequence that has some kind of connection to Zen Buddhism; the presence of the monk, the role he takes in the fight, and the way he’s presented at the end makes it impossible not to see. But because I don’t have some deep understanding about that philosophy, I therefore felt that I didn’t know what they could be trying to say. And so, after really enjoying the film for much of its running time, I found myself disconnecting from it at the end, which was a shame. And maybe that’s on me; that’s my shortcomings revealing themselves in my response to the film. But when the last thing the film leaves you with is a tone that really does not work for you, it unfortunately colours how you view the entire film. And that’s where I am.
This is a documentary film about the internet directed by Werner Herzog. If you know who Werner Herzog is, then you know exactly what this film is. If you don’t know who Herzog is, just reflect on the fact that this is a film about the internet called Lo and Behold: Reveries of a Connected World, and I think you can probably figure out what the film is.
It’s less a single unified documentary, more a collection of ten short pieces musing on aspects of the internet and ideas about how we engage with it. The film starts with the birth of the internet in 1969, when the first message sent online, “LOG”, was interrupted by a crashed computer after only two characters were set (the resulting message, “LO”, inspired the film’s title). From there we travel all around the internet, its past, its present, and its future. You get incredible stories of humanity at their greatest; the scientists trying to understand how molecules fold themselves up who create an online game that allows ordinary people without any scientific knowledge to solve a problem that stumped supercomputers. You get the evil of humanity; the horrifying story of a family whose daughter died in a car crash, and how people would anonymously email to her father accident scene photos of her decapitated body. We travel to resorts in the middle of nowhere for people with electromagnetic sensitivity or for people dealing with internet addictions. There are stories about how we got the internet; how when the internet was first developed everyone knew who everyone on the internet was (there was literally a printed directory with everyone’s email and home address), so there was never seen to be any need for people to prove who they are. We could have had a 100 percent identity-verified internet, but that would be a gift to totalitarian governments; instead we have a completely free unrestricted internet, which would be great were it not for the way it empowers our most vile behaviours without consequence. There are stories of hackers and stories of agents trying to stop hackers. There’s an interview with Elon Musk discussing his plans to build a colony on Mars, discussing how we would maintain a flow of communication between the planets, and a competing view from one person who quite reasonably asks how we can be so certain that Mars will be the salvation of humanity when we can’t help ourselves from destroying a planet that’s perfectly suited to our needs. There’s even a scene of robots playing football that is just brilliant, and when one of the engineers admits that he loves Robot #8 you completely understand.
And as always with a Herzog documentary, you get Herzog’s narration. I’ve only watched a small number of Herzog’s films, but every time I do see his documentary work in particular I’m reminded how much I enjoy what he does; the weird way he mixes gleeful humour and love of life with oblique philosophising works in a way I don’t understand. So the film ends with his narration posing a question of whether the internet can dream (a question his interview subjects struggle to answer). But at other times he’s just having fun; at one point he volunteers with complete and seemingly genuine excitement for a one-way trip to Mars, while at another point he’s very clear and firm in his position that any film made by a movie-making robot would never be as good as any of his films. The fascinating thing about Herzog is that his work always feels personal. In the end this isn’t a documentary about the internet; it’s a glimpse into the mind of Werner Herzog and an insight into the way he thinks about the internet. It’s fun and fascinating, horrible and hopeful, and above all, it’s a very intimate human work. And I loved it.
An engaging Danish war drama, A War focuses on Claus, a sympathetic military commander in Afghanistan who is acutely aware of the burden he carries in the lives of his men. He’s clearly well-respected by his men, and he’s someone they see going out onto the battlefield rather than choosing to remain behind in safety. Already unsettled by having lost one of his men to a landmine, he makes a decision that leads an Afghan family to be murdered by the Taliban, and then finds himself trapped with his men under heavy enemy fire. With another man severely injured, and wanting to avoid yet another death on his conscience, he makes the desperate decision to call in an attack on the compound he thinks is firing on them, lying that he knows definitively who is in the location. This leads him to return to Denmark to face trial for the murder of the innocent civilians that were inside the compound.
The thing that really leapt out to me was the way the film captured the sense of what it must be like to be an active soldier, and particularly as someone in command. It manages to effectively communicate the sense of boredom and everyday routine, coupled with a constant tension that things can transform themselves in an instant and the need to be alert to all threats from every side. I had been concerned that the film could become a judgemental all-soldiers-are-war-criminals story, but it remained completely sympathetic to Claus, even as it is unambiguous in recognising that what he did was wrong. It’s a tough task to show someone making one wrong decision after another, have it very clearly be the wrong decision, and yet the audience genuinely feel that we would make the same call in those circumstances, and I was impressed with the way the film managed to expertly achieve that balance.
Possibly less effective were the moments where we cut back to Claus’ wife in Denmark. I like the idea of exploring what life is like for the spouses of soldiers: the problem of never knowing what’s happening in the war zone; the fear that comes when the phone call home is late; the struggles of taking care of a family without the support of the other person. I do think there’s a good film in that issue. But I did feel like those scenes were a distraction, a way of taking up time until the film’s key conflict comes forward. And in some ways the intercutting of the stories distracted from what those scenes could have achieved; a film focused on the wife left at home could be very effective in watching her wait for a phone call that’s hours late, her imagination going wild with what might have happened to her loved one, but because we’re intercutting with what’s going on in Afghanistan it separates us from her emotion, because we understand why he’s late in calling, and so we become less invested in her emotions. It changed for me as the film went on; when Claus returned home, I found I was glad the film had put the effort into spending time with the wife, as it really added to the intensity of the emotions between the characters, but it’s a shame the film wasn’t able to find a way to give those scenes urgency at the time they were playing out.
The other issue was that the climactic trial of Claus felt very surface-level. It really was the bare minimum needed to get across the sense of any trial taking place; a couple of short snippets of testimony, a motion or two that gets dismissed, before the final witness steps forward to give the testimony that decisively sets the verdict in place. I understand that this is not a legal drama, but the court case felt only slightly less perfunctory than the trial in an average episode of Law & Order. To me it felt as if the film needed to be longer, to allow time to really wrangle with the moral and legal complexities of warfare in a way that it just doesn’t have time for at the moment.
Still, I was glad to watch a film that was trying to offer a nuanced, sympathetic view of the men who fight our wars in the modern era, exploring how even the best of intentions can create human catastrophes. It’s by no means a perfect film, but it is a solid piece of filmmaking.
I had never heard of the Slenderman until earlier this year, when I was listening to a podcast where the origins of this creature was discussed. A long thin suited figure with pale white skin, no face, and tentacles, the creature was first created as part of a Photoshop contest in 2009, and quickly grew to have his own mythology as different people would contribute their own ideas to the characters. He is, in effect, the first internet-era boogeyman, and an interesting example of how rapidly these stories can grow in an era where everyone can connect and contribute; rather than having urban legends grow over decades of retellings around the camp fire, instead we have this legend that exploded as the mythology was in effect crowdsourced, with lots of people taking inspiration from the ideas of everyone else to feed in their own thoughts. And in some ways he grew to become, not this ominous threatening figure, but a weirdly comforting, protective figure for children who might feel bullied or excluded.
In 2014 two 12-year-old girls, Morgan and Anissa, both fans of the Slenderman stories, decided to kill a friend of theirs in an attempt to become proxies or servants of the creature and prove its existence. They went to the woods, supposedly as part of a game of hide-and-seek, and stabbed their victim 19 times before leaving to walk to the Slenderman’s mansion in a nearby national park. (Miraculously and fortunately the victim survived.) And this provides the framework on which the film hangs; as the court hears arguments over whether these children should be tried as adults or sent to the youth court, the film tries to explain what led to this horrific crime, and why someone would try to murder her best friend for years to appease some fictional creation.
It’s a solid, astonishing, disturbing piece of documentary filmmaking that fascinated me. But unfortunately there’s a fundamental problem in the film that I don’t think the filmmaker managed to overcome. On the one hand you’ve got this story of this intensely creepy figure that left me feeling like I might have nightmares after the film. There are points in the film that are genuinely scary. And the film amplifies that impact, with over-the-top horror film editing and effects. There were points where I was reminded of Rodney Ascher’s film The Nightmare, an excellent documentary about sleep paralysis that presents the stories it’s telling as a horror film; Beware the Slenderman is not as good as The Nightmare, but in its sequences telling the story of the Slenderman it’s working in a comparable spectrum. The problem is that it’s also telling this story about young girls attempting to commit murder, and you can’t treat that with the same degree of horror effect; it’s one thing to throw a staticky screen in when you’re talking about some fictional monster, and another to do it in the middle of a shot of a mother crying over her daughter’s evil actions. So much of the film is very staid, very traditionally edited, ujntiol we geyt gto thwe SlenDrerman roriginss and then aiTs aal ACR5AZTY CRAZXY CRAXzY, and we’re back with the family and it’s quiet and sympathetic. The problem is that you can’t tell the story of this case without telling the story of the Slenderman, but the ways the film tries to tell these two stories fundamentally conflict with each other. And so every time it cuts from the murder story to the actual legend it feels like we’ve been thrown from one film to a completely different film and it was not comfortable to watch. Ideally they probably should have adopted a less-stylised approach to the Slenderman mythology, adopting a more academic and thoughtful, less emotional, presentation of how the character came to have such an impact. If they had done that, the film might have held together as a whole better.
Because the material with the families really is incredibly effective. The film was shot reasonably close in time to the crime – the court case presented in the film isn’t even the actual trial, just a pre-trial decision – and there’s a clear sense of these families still just trying to process and understand what’s happening, and what they could have done to stop it from happening. And the story brings in all kinds of issues, asking how those of us who grew up in a pre-internet environment can protect the next generation when we genuinely can’t imagine what it’s like to be a child in an internet world. One of the mothers talks about having heard her daughter discussing the Slenderman and thinking there wasn’t much difference between the stories of the creature and her own enjoyment of Stephen King novels at her age, never considering the difference between a clearly fictional story and something where much of the power of the character comes from a community that seeks to insist on his reality. In one of the film’s most effective moments, after one of the girls is diagnosed with schizophrenia, her father describes his experiences with his own schizophrenia, having taught himself that the giant demon he sees everywhere isn’t real. There's the pain of having passed his illness onto his daughter, and the growing realisation he could maybe have helped her had he known what she was dealing with. It's also a stunning insight into both how he sees the world, and how his daughter's actions may have been influenced by how she sees things.
Ultimately I liked the film. It really was a fascinating insight into an aspect of internet life that I had no idea about. (The final shots of the film, showing fan art pieces presenting Morgan and Anissa as the Slenderman’s proxies that they wanted to be, was a shocking reinforcement of the utterly incomprehensible nature of some in this culture.) Unfortunately the film is derailed by editing choices that conflict too heavily with each other, but still, a very interesting movie.
A middle-aged couple decide to spend a few months sailing, leaving their life behind, including their teenaged children who they're sure are able to take care of themselves. But then their younger son, freed of parental oversight, decides to start skipping school, which brings their uncle in to provide some adult influence. Then the parents just vanish one day, never responding to any efforts to contact them.
Sometimes after a festival film I find myself rereading the programme, just to see what it was that interested me about the movie. The programme promised a bone-dry domestic drama laced with subtle irony and black humour that it compared to the brilliant Force Majeure. That sounds great; it's not the experience I had. The film seemed divorced from any kind of connection to, well, anything. There's no sense of narrative urgency; even when it seems like the parents might be dead I never felt anything more than mild concern from the characters. And there wasn't any real shape to the film. Characters are in the film, and then they're not, and often I'm not sure what purpose they really served in the film other than filling time. And while each scene flows logically to the next, reflecting on the film in hindsight makes it seem weirdly disjointed. So when I think about, say, the early scenes of the youths daring each other to ride the elevator naked, I don't have a clear picture of how those scenes exist in the same film as the organ transplant that drives the end-of-film conflict. Not that there's much of a sense of conflict in those scenes; even when the film introduces life-catastrophic events, the film just drifts along, barely aware of what's going on.
Most egregious is what happens with the dog. We first learn that something happened to the parents when we see their dog swimming alone onto an island, and we occasionally briefly return to the dog trying to survive. Until we reach the end of the film and find ourselves watching this animal roaming the island for five, maybe even ten, minutes, in a sequence that just left me staggered. As the film cut from one scene of the dog to the next, it felt like a film trying to pad out its running length. When a film is barely over 90 minutes and has such potentially big dramatic material, they really shouldn't need to pad the film out. A definite disappointment.
In the early 20th century, a gambler and reputed gunslinger named McCabe arrives in a mining town named Presbyterian Church, and seeing an opportunity to make money decides to open a saloon/whorehouse. But then he’s visited by Mrs Miller, an experienced madam who points out the low quality of his current service and his lack of knowledge about how to run a whoring business (“the entire town’ll have the clap within a week, if they don’t already”), and who suggests they work together. And it all works well, until McCabe receives an offer to sell the business to someone with a reputation for killing people who decline his offers.
I’ve been meaning to see McCabe and Mrs Miller for a few years now (it’s one of the big Robert Altman titles that I hadn’t seen), so I was thrilled to see it appearing in the festival schedule. And it absolutely lived up to my expectations. It’s not a film that I would necessarily recommend everyone see (it’s mostly a film of small moments, and it’s definitely focused subverting everything about the western genre that people like), but if you’re someone who connects with the way Altman works as a filmmaker, this is him working at the absolute peak of his skills.
The key thing that’s fascinating about the film is this sense of realism that runs throughout the movie. Often objects or costumes can really feel like some designer put a lot of effort into getting every aspect of every object exactly right, but in this film it feels as though the entire town was put together by people focused on just putting things together as fast as possible. Nothing feels designed for look; it’s all solely functional. The bridge that crosses the frozen river is ugly, but it’s solid enough to function as a bridge and who cares about anything else. When he goes outside McCabe wears this comically massive fur coat that doubles his bulk; no-one designing clothes for a Warren Beatty character would ever have him wearing something like that, but a person like McCabe in this bitter cold would absolutely wear that coat to stay warm. There’s none of the glamour to the girls working in the whorehouse that you get in many western films, and there’s a brutal reality to the fact that if you’re a woman in this town and you don’t have a husband then there’s only one thing you can do to survive. Everywhere is dark and dingy and dirty; when McCabe first arrives in town and stops off in the town’s only drinking establishment he even has to pull out his own red tablecloth to provide a suitable surface for the gambling to take place. Often in westerns there can be a conflict between the good God-fearing folk in the town and those who’ll drink and whore and kill; here the town might be called Presbyterian Church but no-one has stepped foot in the church in many years. Our images of movie gunfights involve two men in the middle of a street in the desert in a fight with regulated rules; this film climaxes with our hero avoiding being shot by running and slipping and falling and hiding while in the middle of a snow-storm. Everything in the film is about demythologising the West, and it’s fascinating to watch.
Altman added to the sense of reality to the film with his filming approach. During filming he deliberately exposed the film stock to the light, in effect damaging the stock to a degree to give the film a unique rough degraded visual sensibility. (As I remember the story it was an effect that could have been achieved in post-production, but Altman decided to do this to the actual negative to ensure the studio never had the option to release the film with a pristine image.) He also deliberately muddied the audio (a fact that festival staff felt the need to defensively warn us about before the film; “it’s not a problem with the cinema sound system, it’s supposed to sound that way”.) Couple that with Altman’s regular approach using overlapping dialogue, and the movie winds up looking and feeling messy. Which is exactly right for a film that’s trying to do a western in this way; even the very presentation of the film feels out of time, as though it’s an artefact of the era portrayed. Were it not for the fact that the film is in colour and has sound, you might think you were actually watching something that was shot in 1902.
There are a lot of other things I could praise about the film, whether it be Warren Beatty doing career-best work, Julie Christie’s sharp wit and deep personal pain, or how utterly heartbreaking I found Shelley Duvall. I could talk about the many times I laughed at the film, or how perfectly I thought the Leonard Cohen songs that scored the film worked. I could talk about the moments of joy littered through the film, particularly the character dancing on the slippery ice. I could talk about the panic I felt when one character met a killer and they have a pleasant conversation where everyone knows how it would end. And I could talk about just how f***ing freezing cold this film is. But when I left the film my main reflection was just that I felt like Presbyterian Church was a real functional town; I could have visited there and seen everything exactly as it was. It’s a tricky thing to get to that sense of realism, and it was a real achievement that Altman reached it.
A poignant and moving documentary telling the story of Owen Suskind, who at the age of 3 lost the ability to speak. He was diagnosed with autism, his mind had stopped making the connections between words, and for years it looked like that might never speak again. And all that time he would watch Disney movies. And then slowly he started to speak again, initially mimicking film dialogue, eventually finding ways to express complex ideas by relating them to situations in these films. He would have different films that he would watch to help him face this problem or deal with that emotion. And providing the structure for the film around which his story is told, we find Owen in his early 20s about to finish school, move out of his parents' home, and into an assisted living facility to live by himself for the first time.
I realised the film was getting to me early on, when Owen's father Ron tells the story of the first time he had a conversation with his son, using a puppet of Iago the Parrot as a proxy to get his son to open up; I didn't cry (I want to be clear about that), but I wasn’t completely dry-eyed either. And this repeated itself through the film: a beautiful scene of Owen lying on his bed with Ron on moving day watching Dumbo, because that's what HE would watch when he faced a big challenge; or a powerful moment where his older brother Walt discusses his own feelings about his responsibility once their parents can't take care of Owen. There's one scene in particular when Owen goes through a significant life experience and we initially hear about it second-hand from Walt; when that happened an audible Oh No response went through the audience because we were all so connected to Owen and invested in his journey that the thought of what this experience would mean for him was instantly painful.
Which is not to say that the film is some kind of tough emotional roller-coaster. Owen seems like a nice, naturally funny kid, and it’s a great joy spending time with him. At the same time, it’s instantly recognisable that Owen has issues, and it could have been easy for the film to just fall into making fun of him, especially in certain moments where the humour comes from the innocence of his reactions to things around him. But there is always a clear affection in the film and pride in his accomplishments that keeps the film well away from becoming mean.
There are some fascinating insights in the film. We hear how animation made it easier for him to understand the emotional responses of the movie characters because the faces and the reactions were so large and expressive, as opposed to the subtlety that comes with actual people. There's also this nice idea I found laced through the film that this reflects how we all come to understand the world and see how it works. Stories help us to take the randomness of the world and our lives and give them meaning, give them a structure. It's something we’ve all gone through; maybe not quite as obviously as happened in Owen's case, but it is true for us all. At the same time, while these films have offered an incredible tool that allows Owen to function in the world, they can also lead to significant limitations for someone who needs to function in the world as an adult; one of the funniest moments comes when Walt muses how you can possibly explain sex to someone whose entire worldview is based on Disney films.
This is not a world-changing or hard-hitting documentary; it really is just a feel-good story. But it is a remarkable celebration of humanity and the power of creativity to literally change a person’s life. I found myself think about the Nine Old Men, all of whom are long gone now, who effectively created and developed Disney animation in the 1930s, surely never imagining just what an effect their work would continue to have decades after they left us. Earlier in the festival I saw The Music of Strangers, in which one person expressed his feelings about being a musician, asking what value his art has in a world of suffering; this film answers that concern as clearly as you could ever hope for.
In a retro-future world, Dr Robert Laing moves into a brand new high-rise tower with all of the facilities you can imagine; from pool and gymnasium to a school and supermarket. The only reason people ever need to leave the tower is to go to work; otherwise their every need can be met within the confines of the tower. A reasonably well-off single man, Laing lives on the 25th floor of the 40-storey tower, firmly wedged in the middle tier of the deeply-stratified tower, but he’s able to develop relationships throughout the building, particularly with both a lower-floor documentary maker and the top-floor architect who designed the building. Despite the apparent luxury of the tower, all is clearly not well; garbage chutes are blocked, while power and water cuts are common for those on the lower levels (although they never seem to affect those at the top of the building, who live their lives in utter indulgence). Then one day a children’s party goes out of control, and the entire society starts to collapse in a chaos of violence, destruction, sex, and murder.
Firstly, I will say this: I liked the film, really liked it. I don’t know if I’d say I had fun in the film, but I didn’t not have fun. But I had some issues. Now, I’m not familiar with the original JG Ballard novel on which the film is based, and I’m more than happy to allow for the fact that the idea of using science fiction to present a microcosm of society as a vehicle for presenting class struggle may have been original back in the 1970s, but presenting this film in a more modern context does make its ideas feel very outdated. And to me the metaphor didn’t really work; yes, we do have the sense that for the residents the tower is their world, but the film establishes early on that there are other places people can live, so if people are so unhappy with where they’re living or can’t afford to live where they’re living, what is stopping them from leaving? We don’t have a choice whether or not to live in society, we just do, so any metaphor for society that doesn’t totally trap people inside the system is starting from a flawed position. (I had issues with the similar metaphor in the otherwise-wonderful Snowpiercer, but at least in that film everyone was trapped inside that train.) It’s also made more complicated by the fact that it’s not a full reflection of society. These people aren’t absolutely poverty-struck; the lowest of the film’s characters is a filmmaker for crying out loud! This is a film about the middle class being angry that it’s not upper class and burning the whole thing down as a result.
The worst part of the film comes in the last minute of the film, where we hear a radio laying a Margaret Thatcher speech about capitalism. It’s an utterly unnecessary moment that in effect comes out and says “by the way, in case you missed it, this film is about the evils of capitalism.” I didn’t miss that, I completely understood what the film was saying, and I was trying to enjoy the film despite disagreeing with the entire premise of the film, but thank you for forcing me to leave the film thinking about how wrong-headed it was. Look, I recognise that capitalism is not a perfect system, and I firmly believe that it is necessary to put in place protections to prevent some of the horrific abuses of the system that have been able to take place. But it’s also a system that has allowed for massive improvement in our lifestyles, and the inequality that this film is railing against is absolutely inherent to the system; it’s a system that’s driven by the possibility that you can significantly improve your life. And really, having a movie in which a bunch of wealthy movie stars try to present the evils of inequality means that the movie winds up feeling like a meeting of the People’s Front of Judea asking what has capitalism ever done for us.
And it’s a shame that the film annoyed me so much, because there was a lot to like about it. Firstly, the design was incredible; rather than updating the film to a more modern view of the future, the film retained a 70s aesthetic in the design of the film, reflecting the era that the novel worked in. I have heard this was a practical approach to avoid having to rework the story to reflect developments like the internet, but it also allows the film to look visually and feel utterly unique. I really liked the tone the film set, almost like a stark cross between Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange and Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, with the surreal nightmare of the latter escalated to a hysterical pitch. And I loved how the film reached a point where it just seemed to almost dispense with conventional narrative approaches and just became a disconnected orgy of chaos. Now, I don’t know how to what degree that’s deliberate – it could be an accurate reflection of what’s the book is like at that point, or it could be a conscious choice to make the film more impressionistic and less narrative-driven, or it could just as easily be an actual flaw in the storytelling where they just tried to keep too much of the book while trimming too much of the connective tissue – but the sense of having no clear idea how one moment connected to the next completely worked for me (although I can understand other people having issues with it). And the cast was great, with people like Tom Hiddleston, Jeremy Irons, Elizabeth Moss, and Luke Evans all gleefully embracing the complete indulgence and utter insanity of the film. So I found it a funny, bonkers film that I totally enjoyed. It’s just a shame that that they felt the need to be so ham-fisted in making sure we’d all learned something at the end of it all.
Easily my favourite film of the festival so far (indeed, probably of the year thus far), Green Room introduces us to a young punk band on tour. Finding their finances completely drained, they take a last-minute gig, only discovering when they arrive that they’re playing for a bunch of white supremacists. The performance itself goes pretty well (despite their decision to deliberately antagonise an audience they hate), but after the show they find themselves witnesses to a murder, and are forced to barricade themselves in the green room until they can find a way past the people outside who now want to kill them in order to cover the crime.
I never saw Jeremy Saulnier’s earlier film Blue Ruin, although I’ve heard nothing but good reports about it as a real-world riff on the Death Wish movies. If it’s anywhere near as good as Green Room then I’m really regretting taking so long to see it, because Saulnier is clearly a master of genre filmmaking. Here he’s clearly taking inspiration from siege movies like Assault on Precinct 13, and it’s an incredible piece of work. After seeing the film I described the film as nasty, brutal, and stomach-churningly violent, and it is absolutely that. But it’s not excessively so. Instead Saulnier just builds the tension and builds the tension and builds the tension, and then he maintains the tension throughout the rest of film at a level where it feels like things could explode at any moment. And then when he throws in the violence it is shocking and graphic; limbs are mutilated, people are shot in the head, one person is even gutted. And Saulnier goes to great effort to make these events look real, which means they look gory. But he generally doesn’t linger on these events any longer than he needs to in order to establish what actually happened; we’re not supposed to be impressed by the gore on display, we’re supposed to be shocked and horrified, and when you’ve built the tension up to fever pitch you don’t need to show much for the film to have an impact. There’s really only three moments in the film where I felt it was lingering on a moment of violence or gore, and each of them was unusual and deliberate. One was the disembowelling I mentioned before, which is supposed to have a “What the?” effect on the audience; one is an act of indignity done to a long-dead corpse; and the most shocking moment comes, long after the actual violence, when the character tries to duct-tape up their wounds. For the most part the violence isn’t in there because on-screen violence is cool, it’s there because you can’t soften the violence without lessening the impact of the threat.
What was really impressive was how realistic I found everyone’s behaviour. We’re all familiar with the idea of the film that only functions because everyone’s an idiot; the victim in the slasher film who runs upstairs when they should go out the front door. But here I found everyone’s reactions completely convincing. Much of the time I realised I would do the exact same thing if I was in those circumstances, and where I disagreed with their choices I think that was often out of the fact that I know the type of film I’m watching and therefore had more information than the characters. And they don’t make decisions impulsively. There are points in the film where people are faced with tough decisions to make and the film just lingers, watching these people as they try to size up the situation, try to figure out what the advantages and disadvantages of each possible choice are, and try to reason out how best to respond in that situation. Which ultimately means that it’s not their fault that they’re caught in this no-win situation. It’s nice to watch a film, feel that you’re watching smart people, and not think you would do better in those circumstances.
The other thing I loved about the film was just how insanely good the performances were from everyone. I will admit that I feel bad that the three performances I particularly loved were those of the three most recognisable actors, because everyone in the film was operating at such a high level. But when you have Patrick Stewart playing a white supremacist leader, how can you not be completely focused on him? I particularly appreciated how small his acting choices are; it would be an easy temptation to go big in a role like that, but this was so understated. In essence he was giving a very similar performance to those he would give as Captain Picard or Professor X, and while it sounds odd to have such wildly different characters be so similar, it makes sense. His character of Darcy is someone who clearly has a lot of history, who has no doubt murdered many people in the past, and who is as a result feared and respected those in his community. And so he’s not someone who has to rant and rave like every stereotypical white supremacist; he’s someone who speaks with authority and people listen, much like a Starfleet captain or a superhero leader. And it also means he can seem entirely reasonable in his interactions with the band, which might allow them to trust him in a way that a vile hate-speech-spewing cliché wouldn’t. Instead of being a loud performance of villainy, it becomes a performance in the eyes, the flashes of rage that flash whenever things go badly for him being our mean indicator of just how evil this man is.
And in the band, I had a great deal of fun seeing Alia Shawkat, best known as Maeby in Arrested Development. I loved the choice to make her a female and never once acknowledge it. But it’s not inconsequential that she’s female; she’s someone who’s very focussed on the way she presents herself, as though the fact that she’s a female has made her feel like she has to justify herself as having a place in a very-male-centric music style, so she’s pushed away everything that detracts from the punk aesthetic. Her entire performance feels like an act of bluster and fear of being found out, and it’s great.
But the real heartbreak of the film was Anton Yelchin. I’d seen Yelchin in things other than the recent Star Trek films, but for me when he died recently the first thing I thought of was that he was Chekov, and while he’s a lot of fun in that role it’s definitely one of the more minor supporting performances in those films. But this really drove home what a talent we lost. As Pat, Yelchin is bold and confident when it comes to his music, but timid and indecisive otherwise, and he goes through this wonderful arc as the film progresses. I loved what he did here, and it makes me think that I need to go back and really look at his other work, because there’s definitely some greatness I’d previously not noticed.
Based on a novel that is apparently much loved in Scotland, Sunset Song is the story of Chris, a young woman in the early part of the 20th century, who grows up working the family farm. The film takes her all the way from her early teen years through to her time as a wife and a mother. People are born, people die, people fall in love, people hate, people work and marry and are joyful and experience pain. It’s basically life.
Introducing the film, director and screenwriter Terence Davies talked about how he discovered the novel when the BBC screened a six-part adaptation when he was young. And I can believe it. The problem I had with the film was that it felt like it needed more time (say, the amount of time involved in a six-part television adaptation) to tell the story. Two-and-a-bit hours was not enough for this story. It felt as though Davies couldn’t bring himself to lose any part of the story, and so he just squeezed and squeezed the story until he could force it into a movie running time. I seldom felt that the film was able to live in the moment, because they had to hit the key plot point of the scene and move on. There are devastating moments in the film, tragic events that occur, and the emotional ramifications of these events vanish from the film two minutes later. And in the rush from scene to scene I completely lost any sense of the passage of time; at one time I was shocked to realise that a good five years must have passed in the last few minutes because that child on screen is definitely significantly older than the baby we just saw being born.
There are points where this quick movement from scene to scene really affected the film; for example, there’s one scene where I thought (and still think) that she loses her virginity (they show her stocking being removed and her bare leg being kissed, before cutting to a scene of her looking at her body in the mirror as though she’s seeing herself as a sexual being for the first time). But I’m not actually sure about what happened, because the scene is so elided that it’s never clear how far they went, and later scenes (in particular going to great pains to establish that she’s not going to sleep with the man who will become her husband until their wedding) made me think that it was possible it might not have happened. The scene is probably not cut short out of an sense of prudishness (several scenes, including the scene that immediately follows, establish that), so the only reason I can think of for only showing what they what they showed is out of a sense of “have to keep moving, have to keep moving, can’t stop, can’t stop”, and the leg-kissing is possibly the best-known part of the moment in the book. I completely expect to discover that there was some key point in that scene that I completely missed, but as it stands, if I’m watching a coming-of-age film, and I can’t be definitive about such a defining coming-of-age point, something has gone wrong.
The other frustration for me was the film’s use of narration. There’s not a lot of narration in the film, but there’s a little bit of it. Occasionally it provided a bit of explanation that I found useful, but usually it was just a single line providing a particularly poetic way of describing something that was already very clear just in the performances and how it was shot. Much in the way that the film felt like it was trying to keep every moment from the book, this felt like the film trying to keep a particularly beloved or beautiful piece of prose that could otherwise not be included. And it almost always took me out of the film because it felt like it didn’t trust me to get the emotion of what is happening.
But all of my criticism of the film is essentially with it as a screenplay; what was on the screen was stunning. The film was beautiful, lush, and atmospheric, and there was a wonderfully physical earthiness to the film that I did enjoy. Best of all, Agyness Deyn’s performance as Chris is just phenomenal. In a film like this, where many of what should be some of the hardest emotional beats in this film are passed over with scarcely an acknowledgement, it falls on Deyn to carry the weight of these moments, and I felt she was remarkable in shaping the growth of this woman and filling the gaps that the screenplay left. If there’s one thing I’ll take away from the film, it’s that hers is a name to look out for.
Suburra opens with an on-screen card, “5 November 2011: 7 days until the Apocalypse”. Which is quite a dramatic way to open this Italian crime drama. From there we proceed to meet a high-profile politician who is in the middle of a prolonged session with two escorts when one of the girls dies of an overdose, a problem made even worse for the politician since the dead girl was underage. The other escort has a friend from a local crime family come to help dispose of the body, but that solves nothing since the next day the friend comes to the politician and blackmails him. The politician approaches someone he knows can help arrange for the friend to be taught a lesson, wanting him to be scared off; instead the friend gets murdered, which angers the head of the local crime family. Meanwhile, a different friend of the second escort is being pursued by the same crime lord after discovering his father (who just committed suicide) owed significant debts to the crime lord. The whole thing spirals out of control, especially as the perilous near-collapse state of the governing party is forcing everyone to hurriedly push through a major real estate development that will greatly benefit a different crime family, as well as the Vatican and anyone else who manages to get into the deal.
I enjoyed Suburra. It had a phenomenal sense of kineticism running through the film, with some great action setpieces; one major shootout in a shopping mall in particular left me breathless. And I was liked with how carefully the film navigated the storylines; with so many pieces and characters coming into conflict, it was impressive how clear the film was in keeping everything in focus.
Where I struggle with the film is its efforts to give the story a wider meaning. As the film progressed and I started to see where the film was going, I drew on my vague memory of world events and made a guess as to what had happened on 12 November 2011, the date of the apocalypse the opening card warned of. And I was right: that was the date that Berlusconi resigned after losing his parliamentary majority, which sets the entire political aspect of the film in a very real context. And that also provides an interesting colour to the film; Berlusconi is not in the film (and indeed his name is never even mentioned that I noticed), but the fact that the entire plot revolves around an underage escort and drugs means that the film has undertones of Berlusconi’s notorious “bunga bunga” parties. Which is interesting. And it’s also interesting watching the scenes of people realising that they’re likely to lose their positions of power once the government collapses, and trying while they can to put in place measures that will secure them a solid income from this real estate deal. But to me it felt contrived, as though the writers wanted to talk about the corruption of the political environment in Italy but were worried that it might bore people, so they grafted that aspect onto a more conventional crime thriller. And that can be done (look at something like The Wire for the absolute best example of something using a crime story to talk about wider societal issues), but it has to be done carefully in order for the scenes of people negotiating for a future board position to feel as vital as the scene of the junkie girlfriend hiding from the killers. It gets even more contrived when you get to the Vatican storyline, because it’s such a minor part of the storyline. Essentially the sole contribution of the Vatican scenes to me was to say “there’s corruption in the Vatican as well”.
Yes, we know. Even the attempt to fold actual Vatican events into this story fails, largely because they tried to work in the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI , when even as a non-Catholic I knew off the top of my head that this was too early and that the resignation took place a year or two later. As a result all they could do was have a line of dialogue that he’s “thinking” about resigning (but presumably did nothing about it for 15 months).
Still, it was very fun. According to the festival programme, there’s a television series version being made for Netflix, and I can see it working pretty well in that context.
Well I certainly wasn't bored.
I approached this film with definite wariness. Its screening at Sundance famously had a lot of walkouts, and the audience was completely polarised; many hating it and just as many living it. Judging by every description I’d read of the film, I suspected I wouldn't care for it, but since I had a space in my schedule, sure, I'll give it a chance.
Paul Dano stars as Hank, a man trapped on a tiny rock in the middle of the ocean. Having given up hope, he's about to commit suicide when he finds a dead body washed up on the beach. The body, played by Daniel Radcliffe, is farting. A lot. So much so that the opening credits play over Hank riding the farting body like a jet ski to reach new land. Soon the body starts talking, although he's still dead. This is how we learn that the body is called Manny. We learn that it's not just his farts that have magical powers. He produces drinking water from his mouth; his fingers can spark a fire; his lungs allow him to be used as a compressed air gun; and his erection functions as a compass. And there are many other things this human Swiss Army Knife can do. And as they try to survive, they talk a lot, about life and love and friendship.
So I'm really rather conflicted about the film. I hated and loved the film in equal measure. First to the hate: it will come as no surprise to anyone that knows me how much I hated the juvenile body humour with the film. There was So. Much. Farting. To the point where I was shocked that after 90 minutes the film was still finding it funny; I get that people find this stuff funny, but doesn’t the joke get old at some point? It was never-ending. I saw Radcliffe's butt pulled out of his pants (to increase the effectiveness of his gas) much more often than I really needed. And I've spent more time watching his crotch twitching than I would ever want to. And the juvenile approach eventually infects everything. By the time that Manny questions whether Hank is really his friend because how can you really know or trust someone who hides his farts, I had just had enough of all this. This is a film made by adults; it should not feel like it was written by 8-year-olds.
And that's a shame, because when you look past all of that, there's a lot to really love in the film. For a start, Radcliffe's performance is one of the most extraordinary physical pieces of acting I have seen. He's playing a corpse, and no matter how much he talks or moves he's always convincingly dead. Sure, he's helped by makeup and effects, but he's always feels like a body without any control of his physical being. To be clear, this like isn't a zombie performance: as a performance, zombies are alive monsters that used to be dead humans. This is a performance as a dead person, and somehow no amount of increasingly eloquent speeches detract from that effect. It is remarkable work, and it's nice to see someone who could easily have rested after the Harry Potter films ended instead working to push himself and find new acting challenges.
Paul Dano also does fine work; he's called on to carry a lot of weight in the film, figuratively and literally, and he's a fun comedic presence who at times is heartbreaking and desperate. To me the film was about the pain of loneliness and our need for connection, and that is something that oozed through every pore of the performance; there’s a desperation in the character for someone to be friends with and a joy that comes from their relationship. And there’s an aching regret in the character; one of the film’s best moments comes when Hank starts teaching Manny about love and in so doing he recreates moments from his memory, moments involving this one girl, with Hank playing the girl. And it’s weird to say, but there’s a scene in this film of Daniel Radcliffe as a corpse falling in love with a woman who is represented by Paul Dano in drag made from trash, and it’s one of the most beautifully romantic film moments I’ve seen in a while.
The film is incredibly beautiful and striking. The film was written and directed by filmmaking duo Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan (they’re credited on-screen as Daniels), and looking the two up I see that they’ve done a lot of work in music videos. And it shows; there’s a lushness to the film that is incredible. One of the film’s big locations is a trash heap piled up with the waste of human existence, and I never would have imagined a trash heap could look that amazing. But we’re seeing it through the eyes of Manny, for whom it’s like he’s seeing everything for the first time, and so everything just looks wonderful. I just wanted to sit and marvel at how stunning this movie was
But every time I would start to get lost in the film, start to think “I’m really enjoying this”, the farting would start up again, and the film would lose me. And that was frustrating. Because I genuinely can’t say that I loved the film or I hated the film; I could take the average and say I liked the film, but that’s not true either. All I can say is that I saw the film, and my reaction was what it was.
Ben Cash, along with his wife and their six children, have been living off-the-grid in the middle of the forest for many, many years. The kids are home-schooled, proficient in everything from great literature to politics to quantum theory. They run miles every day, they’re skilled mountain-climbers, and every one of the children can kill and prepare their meat. When the capitalist society that this world relies on inevitably comes to an end these people will survive. But the mother has bipolar disorder, and when the film begins she’s been away seeking treatment for several months. And then they get the news that she’s committed suicide, her funeral is in five days, and her parents (which disapproved of her unconventional lifestyle and beliefs) insist that Ben cannot attend the funeral. So he piles the kids into the family bus for a road trip down south, to ensure her final wishes are honoured.
So there’s this one point where Ben announces that today they’re celebrating Noam Chomsky Day! The kids all cheer, they all sing their Noam Chomsky song as Ben pulls out the Noam Chomsky picture, and then he hands out their Noam Chomsky Day gifts, mostly impressively brutal-looking knives. See, they don’t celebrate Christmas, because why celebrate the birth of an imaginary sky fairy; instead, they celebrate the birthday of a great living American thinker. This was the point where I felt “No more. I have had enough of this film.” To me it felt like it was a film that had no courage of its convictions, it wasn’t trying to be about anything other than a quirky crowd-pleasing comedy. It’s as though at every moment in the film, writer/director Matt Ross looked at the screenplay, threw out anything that remotely seemed conventional, and tried to think of the most out-there idea he could put into the film, because these characters march to the beat of their own block of wood that they hit rhythmically while sitting on it. So when we’re not watching them scale absurdly high cliff-faces, we’re watching them argue over the appropriate name for their particular form of communism, we’re discovering their apparent impulse towards casual nudity, we’re learning that they’ve actually had to implement a rule banning people from speaking Esperanto, and so on. It just felt like we reached a point where these were no living characters to me; they were just machines whose entire existence and behaviour is driven by the question of what the most absurd thing is they could be doing at that point in time. Now, my friend eT argues that this is deliberate, that Ross is being deliberately satirical in his portrayal of Cash and his family and their lifestyle. And that may be so; I didn’t see it, but it’s certainly possible. But to me that just shifts the problem, it doesn’t solve it. I was approaching the characters somewhat seriously because that seemed to me to be how the film wanted me to approach them in their more human moments. I enjoy a lot of satires; I struggle to think of one that was simultaneously satirical and demanded a genuine emotional reaction to the satirical figures. The entire climax of the film is built on the audience having a sincere emotional response to the events on screen. But if the defining character traits of these people are genuinely intended to be daft and wacky, then what are we holding on to when we’re supposed to take them seriously?
And it’s a shame, because the acting is all very good. Viggo Mortensen is completely convincing as a character who is driven by the force of his convictions and who (for all his claims of a belief in complete freedom and in preparing his kids for the world) is blind to how restrictive he himself is to his family and how narrow-viewed he is. I was delighted to discover that the in-laws were played by Frank Langella and Ann Dowd; it was particularly fun watching Langella’s complete contempt for Ben while simultaneously experiencing the joy of reconnecting with grandchildren he hasn’t seen in years. And the children are all impressive; the nature of their roles (basically, being children who have been given an education well beyond their years) means that they’re given some complicated material, and I found them all quite convincing. (Although the film did rely far, far too much on the joke of having the six-year-old girl saying cute things indicative either of youthful innocence or excessive knowledge, depending on the particular joke being made at the time.)
It was a shame I had such a negative reaction. I like Matt Ross, at least as a comedic actor (his work in Silicon Valley is one of my favourite parts of an excellent show), so I was certainly open to like the film. And everyone else really enjoyed the film; there was a lot of laughter in the cinema, and walking out I heard two different sets of people enthusing “That was great.” But to me this felt like paint-by-numbers crowd-pleasing indie film; it felt generic and strained, and it did not work for me. Most people will probably love it; hell, I might have loved it had I watched it at any other time of the year. But I watched it during the festival, in the context of seeing a lot of films, many of which are aiming much higher than this film. And in that light, it just felt ordinary.
One of my favourite experiences during the film festival is when I find myself watching a film with no idea what I’m about to see. These are the films where I just read the description in the festival programme, thought it sounded interesting, added it to my schedule, and now a month has passed and I find myself walking into a film called Graduation with no idea what it even is. Sometimes the films don’t work for you, and that’s a shame. But sometimes the films just wow you.
One morning a young Romanian woman, in her final year before college, is assaulted. The experience affects her, and the next day when she sits one of her big end-of-year exams she doesn’t perform as well as usual. The problem is, she’s a talented student with a scholarship to travel to England and study at Cambridge, but that is dependent on her maintaining her exam average, and with her performance that day she needs essentially perfect marks for the two remaining exams. Her father, a doctor, has attached a great deal of significance to this scholarship, seeing it as his daughter’s opportunity to leave Romania for a better life elsewhere. So he approaches a patient and promises him an organ transplant if he can just do what he can to ensure that she gets the perfect mark she needs.
This was a fascinating exploration of the casual way corruption seeps its way into everyday life. After all, the father’s actions are entirely understandable. His daughter has the knowledge and ability, and she would have achieved the result she needed without any assistance at all were it not for her assault, and that wasn’t her fault. This isn’t giving a C student an A mark; this is ensuring an A student doesn’t get a B. So he’s not doing anything “wrong”, he’s just undoing the effect of something that should never have happened. And it’s not even for himself; he’s trying to make things right for his daughter. And the Romania portrayed in the film is an awful place - our main character is a doctor, presumably well-off, but his neighbourhood is run-down and dangerous, somewhere I would never want to live - so of course he wants his daughter to leave. What could be more natural than that?
There’s almost an assumption that corruption is part of this world, and everyone just accepts it. In one scene our main character is meeting with someone at their opulent house, and the person reflexively has to make clear that he earned his money honestly, not through bribery. (Of course, he says this in the context of explaining why he’s comfortable helping this person cheat in this one case.) But there are always reasons why we can justify doing the wrong thing, be it cheating in an exam, or cheating on our wife, or looking the other way when someone is attacked; if we couldn’t justify our actions, at least to ourselves, then no-one would ever do anything wrong. The thing is, yes, it’s terrible and wrong that this attack happened and that this poor girl may lose her scholarship as a result, but what of the person should have received an organ transplant but doesn’t because the organ is given to the person who is most useful to the doctor? It’s easy to justify these actions as being victimless as long as you focus entirely on the narrow and specific events being addressed without considering the wider ramifications. And I found the exploration of that issue extremely entertaining and suspenseful. I really need to dig out some of the earlier works of director Cristian Mungiu; I’ve heard very good things about those other films, and if they’re anything like Graduation then I will feel my time will be well spent.
I was so excited to see Tokyo Story listed in the programme. I’d never seen any films by Yasujiro Ozu, which I realise is a big cinematic blindspot to have, and Tokyo Story in particular is often cited as one of the greatest films ever made. When you hear something like that you set your expectations impossibly high, and it’s remarkable when a film still manages to far exceed what you thought.
The plot, such as it is, is very simple: an elderly couple living in a small town in the south of Japan travel up to Tokyo and Osaka to visit their children. But the children are busy people, and the visit really is an inconvenience for them; they’re not able to find the time to show them around. They even try booking the parents into a seaside resort, just to get them out of the way for a few days. It’s not out of a sense of nastiness or resentment; they’re just busy people with commitments that get in the way. The one person who is able to spend time with them is their daughter-in-law whose husband (the couple’s son) died years earlier in the war. And for the most part, that’s about it.
And it was wonderful. What I loved about the film was just how beautifully understated it is. There are joyful moments, but those are tinged with sorrow. There are moments of sadness and regret, but there’s never a sense of pain. There’s a resignation to it, a sense that this is the way of the world and we need to accept it. Even during some of the third act developments, where other films might have broken into more histrionic reactions, this just remains simple, certainly sad, but never over the top. The relationships between the characters feel very honest and real. I particularly enjoyed spending time with the mother and the widowed daughter-in-law; there was a genuine sense of love between these two women, and one of my favourite moments came when the mother was expressing her concern that the daughter-in-law was holding on too much to the memory of her late husband and needed to be moving on in her life. This was a powerful scene between a mother who had welcomed this woman into the family, who sincerely loved her, and who needs her to understand that she wants her to live a happy life, and a woman who is so grateful for that love and who feels shame at the fact that she’s not grieving every day over her husband. It was a beautiful, powerful moment.
There’s a lot of thematic richness to the film; quiet meditations on the passage of time, on the way the world changes. A big theme to me was the impact that the war had on Japan. The film was made eight years after the end of the war, and the film carries those scars, not in a heavy-handed way, but just in acknowledging the ongoing damage that the experience had. (This theme was highlighted even more when I discovered the town the parents live in, Onomichi, is actually in the Hiroshima Prefecture. It’s never acknowledged in the film, but at the time it probably didn’t need to be; it’s entirely possible that Japanese audiences would have been very aware of just how close that town was to the location of the atomic bombing, and what it meant for the film to put the parents there.) And above all it’s a heartbreaking reflection on family, on the way that relationships between parents and children grow and change, and how you can make a choice to be a family or not. It was devastating, and I found myself walking away reflecting on what type of son I would be. I would hope I would be willing to do whatever I can to help and support my parents; I fear that I would be the son who’ll put up with them to the degree that it’s convenient. And that troubles me.
I’m frustrated that I don’t have much else to say. Ozu’s film is utterly unique, I cannot think of another film that works quite like it, it affected me profoundly and I don’t know how to express it. I feel like I need more time to process it, I need more viewings of the film, I need to spend time watching other Ozu’s films and just living in his filmmaking, I need to read some of the wealth of analysis written by people much more knowledgeable that I ever could be, and then maybe I’ll develop the tools to express what I feel as I reflect on the film. “Awesome” is not a word I ever use; its meaning has been too debased by popular usage, and it’s now miles away from the concept of being something that genuinely inspires an overwhelming sense of wonder. But that’s the only word I can think of to describe this film. Tokyo Story is awesome.
It was a surprise to see a new Studio Ghibli film in the festival, since there had been so many reports that the great Japanese animation studio was effectively closing down following the retirement of legendary co-founder Miyazaki. It turns out that this is actually a coproduction between Ghibli and several European studios, and the director himself is Dutch; the studio's other co-founder, the great Isao Takahata, is credited as artistic producer. The result is a film that looks completely different to every other Ghibli, but that in theme and worldview suits perfectly with their work.
A man is shipwrecked and washes up on an isolated island. Twice he builds a raft, only to have it destroyed by some unseen creature underneath. Finally, when his third raft is destroyed, he sees the thing preventing him from leaving; a massive red turtle. Returning to the shore, he sees the turtle crawling up the beach. Enraged at this creature for preventing him from escaping, he runs up, beats it with a stick, flips it onto its back, jumps up and down on its underside, and then leaves the turtle to die. Which it does. And then... I'm reluctant to say too much more for fear of spoiling the delights of this remarkable film.
The film is this beautiful tale of love, forgiveness, loss, and learning to find joy in your circumstances. It's not surprising that Studio Ghibli were involved in the film, as it is a film that is deeply magical and deeply fascinated with nature, two elements common to many of the great Ghibli movies. There's a careful observation to the animation of the island wildlife, with the appearances of the crabs in particular proving utterly doubtful. And the animation is phenomenal; there's a granularity to the image that I've never seen in animation before and which I found quite striking.
One of the most impressive creative decisions was the choice to have the film being entirely wordless; the closest thing to dialogue in the film was an occasional exclamation of "Hey!" or "Aargh!". There's a careful discipline in the approach; it never feels like a gimmick, and instead it becomes invisible, an organic part of the world.
The Red Turtle was a wonderful, joyous movie. Not something I would recommend for young children - the death of the turtle in particular was tough even for me to watch - but for older audiences it really works. If this points to a new direction for Ghibli, I'm excited; it promises an opportunity to hear from new voices while infused with the quality the studio promises.
A great little drama, Truman opens with a middle-aged man, Tomas, flying from Canada to Spain to reconnect with his close friend Julian, who has terminal cancer and has decided to end treatment. Tomas is intending to try to talk Julian out of his decision, but when it becomes clear that won’t change, they just spend the next four days together. Much of the time is spent trying to make arrangements for Julian’s dog, the titular Truman, once he passes on.
So I loved almost everything about the film. It’s a wonderful portrait of male friendships, and the way we relate to each other. Everything is unspoken, because at those times when they might actually be honest with each other about how deeply they feel for each other it’s too uncomfortable to let those words out. So they cover over the discomfort with jokes and bravado, and try to move on as fast as possible. The one point in the film where they really are honest with each other comes late at night; Tomas is in his hotel room asleep when he gets a cellphone call from Julian, who can’t sleep. And the conversation they have is genuine and emotional, because as men it’s easier for them to be honest with each other if you don’t have to look the other person in the eyes.
It’s also a wonderful portrait of the way we approach our impending death. Julian is someone who has lived life with vigour and joy, and now he knows that’s coming to an end and that scares him. But again, it’s too much for him to admit his thought and his fears about dying, and so he offloads them onto his dog Truman. It’s not just whether he’ll find someone who’s willing to take care of Truman once he dies (although that’s a major issue of focus for him); early on in the film he goes to Truman’s vet to ask about what the grieving process is like for Truman, and later on he going to a bookstore looking for books on animal psychology trying to understand what Truman will go through once he dies. Julian doesn’t really have family; he has an ex-wife who he’s on good terms with, a son who lives in Amsterdam and who he barely speaks to, and the person he’s probably closest to is his cousin Paula. He has friends, but his closest friends are people like Tomas who have moved away and are no longer around. So for Julian, Truman is the living being he’s closest to, and so he needs to believe that it will matter to Truman when he goes.
There’s also some nice consideration given to the way we all respond to people who are dying. This is most prominent in a pair of scenes where the two men are sitting in restaurants when they see people who are friends with Julian. In the one case, the friends pretend to not see Julian, because it’s just easier to not have to interact with him when you don’t know how to react, and we see how Julian is used to that reaction, how it’s something he’s dealt with a lot, and how it hurts him every time to be treated as invisible by people you care about. Then there’s the other friend, who Julian initially tries to hide from because it’s someone who he had betrayed in the past, and when that person actually comes up and expresses his sorrow at the news, Julian is extremely grateful that the friend was able to overcome their past bad blood and treat him as a human being. And there are all the little interactions we have that are coloured by this issue: there’s the local neighbourhood dope dealer who noticed that she hadn’t seen Julian for a few days and is therefore concerned when she saw someone else walking Truman, or there’s the people they meet about taking Truman who Julian has to lie to about his reason for needing to get rid of the dog in order to avoid uncomfortable conversations with people he doesn’t know.
One thing I did find frustrating, given how smart and honest the film had been about the relationships that form between males, was that it couldn’t be the same in its portrayal of male/female friendships. We learn early on that Tomas is also friends with Paula, and she spends several evenings out with the two. And then, on his last night, Paula and Tomas just decide to sleep together, seemingly just for the sake of it, which I found incredibly frustrating. Now, perhaps it’s just that I assumed there was nothing between the characters because Tomas was so firmly established as being married and I’m always going to be in favour of people not cheating, but I never saw any indication of any attraction between the two in the rest of the film; they really did just appear to be good friends. So in doing so, it felt like the film was just adopting a position that men and women cannot simply be friends. Which is an assumption I think many movies make, and which is patently wrong, and so it’s disappointing to see a film that had been so smart in looking at male friendship being so stupid about the other main relationship in the film.
Still, that was a minor flaw in an otherwise engaging and emotionally honest film.
Winfried, a music teacher for whom all life is one big comedy routine, is fond of jokes, silly characters, and especially his gag false teeth. When his daughter Ines, a corporate consultant working in Romania, comes for a brief visit he's concerned by how stressed she appears to be. So he impulsively decides to visit her for a few days, right at the worst possible time given her work for a big contract. Even worse, he finds his way into every event in her calendar posting as Toni Erdmann, a man with a ghastly wig and horrific teeth. He seems to hope this will cheer her up. It does not.
Here's the thing: Toni Erdmann is a funny 2 hour movie; unfortunately it's 2 hours 42 minutes long, and that's just too long for a comedy. For comparison, it’s the same length as the regular cut of It's A Mad Mad Mad Mad World, which is also a film that is too long, and that film had every comedy star in Hollywood doing every joke they could think of. Toni Erdmann is 2:42 of variations on the theme of “guy walks around in bad disguise being annoying”. I’m impressed with the amount of humour they got from such a basic premise (certainly early on whenever he would appear out of nowhere it was a reliable laugh) and there were some very smart scripting choices that I enjoyed (early in the film Ines refers to Winfried using a whoopee cushion, but he indignantly insists he doesn’t have one; in his next appearance he’s acquired a whoopie cushion and is clearly delighted by it) but it did not justify that running time.
Part of the frustrating thing is that it felt like the core conflict could have been resolved so easily. He must be incredibly annoying to have as a father, but he’s genuine in his concern for his daughter, and I’m sure that had she ever stopped to explain clearly and bluntly to him “I need you to not do this for these reasons” he would understand. She never does that. Instead, she actually plays along, repeatedly introducing him as a life coach that the company is working with, in a way that just makes her look bad. Even after he accidentally handcuffs himself to her shortly before a pivotal site visit he doesn’t seem to learn anything. It wound up being a situation where, as frustrating as I found Winfried/Toni, I was more annoyed with Ines for taking no steps to remedy this. But that’s ultimately a problem with the fact that the film just does a really poor job explaining the motivations that drive the characters’ actions.
My frustration with the film is best exemplified by one of its big climactic moments, where Ines is holding a birthday celebration with her work colleagues. Just before they arrive, she has some problem with her shoe; I’m not sure what. But for some reason this shoe problem necessitates her removing her dress; I don’t know why, and neither did a friend who also saw the film. So she’s removing her dress when the zipper gets stuck, and right then the doorbell rings; Oh No! She just pulls the dress off, checks the peephole, it’s a female colleague, so she opens the door even though she’s half naked. She then wanders around being a host to this clearly uncomfortable woman, even reacting with confusion when her colleague suggests she might want to get dressed. Instead, when the next doorbell rings, she pulls off her underwear and answers it, announcing that it’s now a naked party and if you’re not willing to join in then you can just leave. Why is she behaving like this? In what possible way does this make sense? I genuinely do not understand what was going on through the character’s mind. Now, I’m not saying it’s not funny – every time someone turns up having embraced the new party theme, it got a laugh – but the humour in it was cheap and was entirely founded on false and unrealistic behaviour, and that made the scene impossible to enjoy. (And that’s before we get to Winfried’s bizarre costume that he wears to the party, or the weird over-long sequence where the camera just follows him after the party with no payoff that I could see.) And there are so many scenes like that, where people behave ways less motivated by coherent behaviour and more by “that’s what the script says”, that it detracted from the film.
In the end, the film just feels indulgent. It’s as though the filmmaker loves these characters and assumes we’ll love them as much as she did. But I couldn’t, because she didn’t allow me to get to know the characters well enough to love them. And so as the film just dragged on and on with no sign the film was building to any kind of resolution, I just lost patience with the film. It was a shame, because I really did like the film for much of its running time, but had completely turned against it by its conclusion.
A western directed by and starring Marlon Brando, One-Eyed Jacks focuses on Rio, a bank robber who is abandoned and left for capture by his friend Dad Longworth. Five years later, Rio escapes from his Mexican prison and crosses the border into the States, where he learns that Longworth (played by Karl Malden) is now the respected sheriff in a small town. He meets up with Longworth and starts a relationship with Longworth’s stepdaughter Louisa, all the while planning to rob the town’s bank and kill his former friend.
Firstly, I should admit that I’m not a western fan. There are westerns that I do enjoy (a good film is a good film, even if it’s a genre I don’t ordinarily connect with), but it’s never been a type of film that I’ve ever held any great interest in. So that could have coloured my response to the film. But I really did not like the movie.
The problem to me was that, while Brando is a great actor, I did not feel him to be particularly strong as a storyteller. There were numerous points where I wasn’t clear on exactly who this character is or how they’re connected to the person they’re with; in some cases it was eventually clarified, but in other cases I still don’t know who that character was or how they came to be with that person. There were point where people seemed to forget information that they knew; in one scene Rio is telling Louisa that he works for the railways, then after they sleep together he reveals that “actually I’m a bank robber” and she’s horrified to learn this, which makes no sense since she was at the dinner when the fact that Rio is a bank robber was discussed. Someone with a stronger focus on storytelling could have fixed this; Brando does not.
There were also parts where I wondered whether Brando needed the distance of having someone else assess his performance, because at times his character’s motivation in particular was not clear to me. A key example: early on in the film, Rio and Dad are under attack and need to decide who will remain and who will ride off to get new horses. (It’s this moment that allows the betrayal that the entire film rests on.) They decide to use “guess the hand the bullet is in” to decide who will go, but Rio surreptitiously puts bullets in both hands, in effect guaranteeing that Dad will leave with all of the gold that they have just stolen and apparently just trusting Dad to return. But I don’t understand why Rio rigged the result in favour of Dad. Why didn’t they just have it be a fair game that Dad won by chance, since the betrayal is just as great either way? I have no doubt that Brando has some reason for why Rio made that choice, and when he watched the film he saw that motivation in his performance, but a different director might have been able to see that it wasn’t clear and have made changes to clarify that.
In fact, there are plenty of points where characters’ actions are driven by the needs of the plot, rather than logical behaviour. For instance, when Rio is first approached about this bank robbery, he questions why he’s needed, since they already have two people and that’s all you really need. The answer he’s given is that it’s the bank in the town where Dad is sheriff, which is a great motivation for revenge-seeking Rio to get involved, but still doesn’t explain why the people putting the bank job together feel the need to include Rio. And then, having put the robbery together, they’re prepared to delay for literally months waiting until Rio can be involved, even though we’re told in the film itself that he’s not actually needed. Why is everyone so prepared to give up all of their plans to allow Rio to seek his revenge, other than “because the film requires it”?
If the film is worth watching, it’s for the performances. Brando is generally solid, but then he’s been better, and in much better films. Karl Malden is great, easily the highlight of the film, but again he was also great working with Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire and On The Waterfront. I enjoyed Katy Jurado and Pina Pellicer as Longworth’s wife and stepdaughter respectively; Pellicer in particular was a real delight. And Slim Pickens, as a sinister deputy sheriff, was decidedly fun. So I did find a lot to enjoy in the film, but I generally want more from a film than just good acting.
So I really didn’t care for the film. The problem was that when the film ended, the credits for the film’s restoration effort came on-screen, and Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg were expressly thanked for their contributions. This gave me pause. Scorsese and Spielberg know more about cinema than I could even imagine knowing, and if they saw this film, out of all the hundreds of thousands of movies ever made, as being specifically worthy of restoration then I feel that there must be something to it that I’m not seeing. I do not know what, but I do feel that my response to the film is probably less a reflection on the film and more a reflection on me.
A small Australian town is hit by the news that the local mill, the town’s major employer, is closing down. In the midst of the turmoil in the community the mill owner is preparing to marry his young thirty-something housekeeper. The mill owner’s son Christian, having lived overseas since before his mother committed suicide, returns to town for the wedding, and in reconnecting with his old friend Oliver meets his wife Charlotte and their gifted daughter Hedvig. But Christian knows a lot of secrets, and in the middle of the wedding party those secrets are revealed to the devastation of everyone involved.
The film is inspired by an Ibsen play called The Wild Duck, although it has been radically reworked in order to cast it in the modern Australian setting. I’m not familiar with the play, so one of the first things I did after getting home was to look up the play itself. And it appears to have largely held close to the play, at times even taking aspects that I have difficulty imagining working on the stage and changing the location to give it the space that the events need. The core of the story is changed from a dinner party to a wedding, but that change feels natural and otherwise that story is pretty much the same; the mill closure appears to be new, but adds a sense of depression and loss to the film that works well with the material. The key thing is that, if you didn’t know that this was inspired by a 19th century play, I doubt you would know until the end credit appears; it feels like a modern story that speaks to the place that Australia is right now.
And the drama is utterly gripping. It’s not that there are big twist reveals; the film does take its time sharing out the core secrets (whereas the play seems to largely reveal the key secret in its opening scene), but it didn’t matter that we all could guess what the big revelation would be because the story was being driven by the question of what the consequences of the revelation would be. So the film could afford to build to the reveals naturally because it would strengthen the impact on the characters.
It’s not perfect. Thinking about the film afterwards, I found myself realising that the timeframe of the film doesn’t really make much sense; the wedding storyline seems to only cover a week or two, but the decline in the town as everyone leaves must surely cover a few months. (It makes sense to discover that the mill closure was not part of the original play.) But the important thing is, I was realised that after the film; as the film was playing it never occurred to me. More distracting is the decision to have the titular daughter retain the name of the character in the play, Hedvig. Given how firmly the film is located in Australia, giving the one character a noticeably Norwegian name would pull me out of the film at times, reminding me that this is based on earlier material, and at times causing me to wonder about how the film and the play correlate when I should have been caught up in the film.
The film ends on an unresolved note, and there’s always a degree of frustration that runs through the audience when that happens. I personally was fine with it. The issue is, if you were to have a definitive ending with this story, it would either have to be the happy ending or the sad ending. I wanted the happy ending, but that would have been too optimistic and would not have fit with the film tonally; I definitely did not want the sad ending, but if I was honest that would probably have been the right ending (indeed the play itself is definitive in having the sad ending). But to me the unresolved ending felt right. By the end of the film lives have been destroyed, relationships may be broken, things have been said that cannot be unsaid, and to then end on that sad note would have been brutal. But that lack of resolution leaves us with hope that things might be fixed, that they might be remedied, that maybe things could in time get better. It’s like how the mill closing seems like a devastating, our-lives-have-ended experience to the people who have lost their work, but it can also be the vehicle for a better life elsewhere. Who knows if the characters will make it past the end of the film, but if they can avoid the finality of an ending there is the hope for a better, stronger relationship together. I was really impressed with The Daughter; it’s a film that I’ve found myself mulling over quite a bit over the past day since I saw it.
I really like Phil Keoghan. I remember watching him at the start of his career on children’s television, Spot On or 3:45 Live. I remember when he started hosting The Amazing Race, and being surprised to realise this unmistakably Kiwi presenter was the host of a major American show. And I’m a fan of the Race; the show may have declined in amazingness of late, but still I have watched every episode of the show. So I wanted Le Ride, his documentary tribute to Kiwi cyclist Harry Watson to be good. Unfortunately, eh, it’s fine.
Harry Watson is a largely forgotten cyclist from Canterbury who in 1928 teamed up with three Australians to ride the 3000 mile Tour de France. At the time, the race was very different, less a race and more a question of endurance, with three-quarters of the people in the race dropping out before the final leg. Competing against much larger teams, terribly disadvantaged, and largely dismissed, they ultimately held out against much stronger racers, with three in the team managing to complete the race.
Keoghan was apparently amazed to read about Watson, who he had never heard about, and he wanted to share his story and what a major figure in New Zealand sporting history this man was. And so he decided to make this movie to tell the story. Here’s the problem he encountered: everyone involved in the story is long passed away, so there’s no-one to interview, nor are there any existing interviews; apparently there isn’t any film footage of Watson, just some still photographs; and the amount of material about the actual race from the perspective of the Australasian team is pretty sparse, limited to a newspaper’s reporting and one team member’s diary. And that’s not enough material to base an entire film around.
So he found a unique solution. He found some authentic racing bikes from the era, mapped out as close as possible the route the race took, and along with his friend Ben they set out to ride the 1928 Tour de France, following the same race schedule, as a way of trying to illustrate the ordeals that Watson and the team went through. Now, I have absolutely no doubt that his heart was in the right place. He had to do something to get enough material to make a feature film, and this was interesting and different. But unfortunately it made the film less about Watson, and more about Keoghan, to the degree that the moments where they do talk about the 1928 race start to feel like a distraction, and that’s not what I think he intended. To what degree does watching his team trying to navigate their way around a radically different Paris or inadvertently getting on the freeway actually reflect the experience of Watson? And Keoghan is incredibly fit, but he is also twice as old as Watson and he’s not a professional cyclist, so his experience of the race will probably be a lot harder than Watson found it. There’s one day where he has to ride for 23 hours to complete a 200 mile mountain leg. That’s a brutal experience, harrowing to watch, and when at the end of the day he’s literally unable to speak comprehensibly you feel sympathy for him; it’s also not what Watson went through.
But there is some interesting material in the film. It’s fascinating to see just how primitive the cycle technology was in that era. The cycles weighed twice as much as a modern bike (largely due to the steel frame), the braking mechanism was seemingly barely functional, and the only way to shift gears was to get off your bike and manually shift the chain from one gear to the next. So these were nasty machines to have to ride on, and it was genuinely fascinating to see. (That said, in an attempt to find anything to talk about from day to day of the ride, they did keep reminding us how heavy these authentic 1928 steel-framed bikes were, and it did get tiring to hear.) There’s some beautiful scenery in the film; there are moments in the film where I found myself looking at some image on the screen thinking I had never seen any environment that looked like that, and the film was almost worth seeing just for that. I also enjoyed some of the reflections on how much France had changed over the last 90 years, how tiny villages had become major cities, seeing how landmarks change or remain the same over time. The prevalence of war memorials in the country provokes some nice reflections, and particularly the story of a town liberated by New Zealand soldiers in WWI, although again this feels like a distraction to pad time, given that the Great War was a decade before the race the film is ostensibly about.
It also, I think, suffers a bit from Keoghan’s experience on reality TV. I love reality TV, particularly the competitive shows like The Amazing Race or Survivor. The thing is, those shows look like they owe a lot to documentary, but they are their own thing, and the way the film is edited often feels very much like the editing on reality TV. It’s particularly noticeable in the use of talking-head interviews; in a movie documentary talking-head interviews will often play out as the person tells a story or develops a point, whereas on reality TV they don’t have time for that so they tend to rely on the pithy one-line summary comment. That’s how the editing on this film feels, and it took me out of the film whenever it happened because that’s not film editing, that’s TV editing.
So the film is very seriously flawed. But it also has Phil Keoghan, and he’s such a likable, enthusiastic on-screen presence that he alone almost manages to carry the film through its flaws. I can throw out a million criticisms of the film; I would also happily watch it tomorrow given the chance.
I genuinely do not know what they were going for with this. Kristen Stewart stars as Maureen, a young American working in Paris as a personal shopper buying clothing and jewellery for a major celebrity. She’s also dealing with the recent death of her twin brother, spending a lot of time at his house trying to connect with a spirit that definitely resides at that property in the hope that it’s her brother. And then she starts getting weird, vaguely menacing txt messages from an unknown number that seems to know all about her and wants to goad her into doing things she knows she shouldn’t do.
So when the film started, I was rather enjoying it. The haunting scenes were enjoyably subtle and spooky, and while there’s a noticeable tonal shift between those scenes and her scenes at work, I thought thematically they worked quite well. As a personal shopper she’s someone who is very comfortable walking around high-end stores, just telling people “I want this and that”, spending incredible amounts of money, but it’s not for herself; she leaves work and going to her tiny cramped apartment. It’s like she constantly has this window into this world of wealth that she wants to live in but she can only ever glimpse. Similarly the ghost sequences hint at her having an ability to get glimpses of an afterlife that she’s desperately trying to reach, but again they’re glimpses of a world that she does not live in. So I found that pairing, as tonally awkward as they might seem, quite effective thematically.
But then the txt messages came, and the film started to lose all effectiveness. It can be hard to maintain any sense of spookiness when you’re just looking at an iPhone screen for a prolonged time. And those txt sequences are LOOOONG, and they’re trying to make them creepy and ominous, but I just disengaged. What those scenes do do is point the story in very interesting potential directions; the txt message winds up goading Maureen into doing incredibly stupid things, going to hotel rooms in an attempt to meet this mysterious person, sleeping at her employer’s house, even taking clothes from her employer and taking photographs of herself wearing them knowing this would get her fired, just because this anonymous person is telling her to do so. There were so many points in the film where I wanted to yell at her “Don’t do this!” because it was so obviously a bad idea, would so obviously come back to damage her. And then it looks like it really will come back on her, when she becomes the chief suspect in a crime that was committed right at the time when she was behaving strangely. Except after a couple of scenes we’re basically told that the police had now determined that she was innocent and that the criminal was that person there and we’re now not interested in looking into anything else despite her unusual behaviour making her look highly suspicious and worthy of further consideration. Which means that there is no follow-through with many of these big plot elements that could really escalated the story.
But through all of this, the ghost sequences remain incredibly effective. Even after I’d long lost patience in the film, there’s a scene towards the end where you can actually see the brother’s ghost, far in the background when the camera focused completely on Stewart’s face, and I found myself holding my breath completely overwhelmed in anticipation of whatever was going to happen. The final scene in the film is absolutely unbearable, so strong is the tension built up. And one thing I really liked was that there was a degree of suspicion in the film towards the spirits; there are times in films involving ghosts where it’s as though people are overly credulous and willing to just believe anything the spirit might say, so I was pleased to see her trying to grapple with questions of how much she could rely on this thing she’s speaking to.
My big problem is that I don’t know what the answer to many of the film’s questions are. Who was the ghost? Were there multiple ghosts? Who was the mysterious txter? What were they trying to achieve? How did the bags get into her apartment? Now, often that’s fine – I’m okay if a film sets up lots of mysteries and never answers them (I mean, David Lynch built his entire career on making films like that) – but you need to feel that the filmmakers have some answer or idea in their mind to what is going on, even if they never share them. And I walked out of the film without any confidence that this was the case; it felt as though they had thrown in every creepy idea they had without considering how they fit together. And that makes the film particularly dissatisfying.
“Faith is 24 hours of doubt and one moment of hope” comments one of the nuns at the centre of The Innocents, a fantastic film that that is easily my favourite new film of the festival. Based on a true story, the film focuses on a nurse working with the French Red Cross in Poland in the months immediately after WWII. One day she’s approached in secret by a nun who asks her to come to the convent; there she discovers that the liberating Soviet forces invaded the convent several months, raped the nuns, and now there are seven nuns close to giving birth. The Abbess is desperately trying to keep the news of this scandal secret, believing that if word gets out the church will close the convent and the nuns will be thrown out to fend for themselves, but reluctantly agrees to allow this nurse to help them.
There are so many things you could talk about with the film. The festival programme talks about the film as exploring “women’s experiences of war”, how it upholds “the common humanity of those who foster renewal”. And that’s all true. I think this is a film that would have a powerful impact regardless of the personal religious conviction of the viewer. Before I write what I will write next I want to be really clear that this is not a Christian film; I mean, the hero of the story is an atheist communist for crying out loud.
But for me personally I found myself responding to the film not as a film viewer but as a Christian. I’m not Catholic, I don’t hold to much of their particular dogma, but I really connected to the story of these nuns struggling to deal with their faith, whose belief in a good and almighty God has been shaken by their experiences and who are trying to find what their beliefs are in their new reality. Some people are completely thrown and are looking for a way to leave. Some find themselves drawing deeper into their dedication to their religion to block out the realities of the world; in one of the film’s more incredible sequences some of the nuns cling even tighter to their vows, refusing to be examined or even touched by this female nurse out of a fear of damnation because they worry about breaking their vow of chastity. And some develop a deeper faith, understanding that we cannot hope to understand all, and trying to understand God’s love in the midst of this pain.
Probably my only disappointment with the film was the way it portrayed the Soviet soldiers. We never see the initial incident that sparked the story, since the film takes place months later, but the story does feature the Soviets on two occasions, both times in the context of new rape attempts. For a film that was otherwise so subtle and soft, it seemed a very one-dimensional way to present these figures. I’m not saying the film had to make us feel sorry for the poor rapists, but if they were just going to be portrayed as animals I felt it would have been better to just exclude them altogether. The treatment of the Soviets feels very much out of place, particularly when you compare it to the way another character who also commits terrible acts during the course of the film is treated. There’s this beautiful scene at the end, really little more than a moment, where this character is approached by one of the nuns. There’s nothing significant to the scene; all she’s doing is giving that person food. And the scene is nearly wordless; from memory there’s maybe a couple of words but no more. But the way this person is approached, after everything that has happened, is one of astonishing forgiveness. One of the core tenets of Christianity is the concept of forgiveness of sins and that because of that forgiveness we are supposed to show that forgiveness to others; “Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.” And that’s what I saw in that moment. But at the same time there’s this principle that forgiveness needs to be accepted; when I look at that character I see someone who can’t accept the forgiveness that they’re shown, who cannot allow themselves to be forgiven because in their mind they deserve punishment. I found myself wanting to yell at the screen at this character to turn around, to take the food, to allow the solace the solace of being comforted. Which is an astonishing reaction for me to have given all that came before, but it’s a clear indication of just how powerful and perfectly the film dealt with this issue that I felt genuine sympathy for this person.
One of the common challenges that people use when they question the existence of God is the question of why God allows evil to exist. And frankly the answers to this question (of which there are many) can seem glib and utterly unsatisfying, particularly to people when they’re going through horrific circumstances. And then I watch a film like this, and I feel like this film answers that question in a genuine and powerful way. There is undeniable evil taking place in this film; unspeakable atrocities are committed. And it is painful to watch. And yet you get to the end of the story, and there is no evil that remains. These characters have taken a painful circumstance and have redeemed it; in trying to find a way to address this problem they manage to bring an actual positive change, not just to their own circumstances but to the world around. Before these events happened there was a lot of good in the convent, a lot of very sincere people serving Christ, and the impression you get is that there was very little that changed around them; terrible evil and horrific atrocities may have caused unspeakable suffering but the world is a better, more joyful place as a result.
I’ve found it really hard to write my response to the film. I’m been writing and struggling to find the words to say because I feel like my expression needs to be perfect and nothing is coming. All I can say is that the film is completely devastating. I will somewhat defensively make clear that I did not cry during the film, definitely did not cry, but my eyes were certainly tearing up, and I did need the entirety of the end credits before I was sufficiently composed to think about facing the world. And speaking as someone who does not respond emotionally to movies; this destroyed me. It was frustrating to me that I had another film that night; twenty minutes after the film ended I was watching a different film and I simply wasn’t ready for it, I needed more time to mull over this film, to process everything I was dealing with. I found The Innocents to be a beautiful, powerful, challenging movie, and I loved it.
Certain Women takes three short stories by author Maile Meloy and draws them together into a single film. Laura Dern plays a lawyer representing a man who was seriously injured at work and who cannot accept that he has no legal options remaining. Michelle Williams plays a woman who wants the house her husband is building for her to be made from local sandstone, and so approaches an old man to buy the pile of stone from the old school that sits on his property. Lily Gladstone plays a horse handler who one night wanders into a random adult education class, forms a friendship with the out-of-her-element teacher (Kristen Stewart), then realises that she has deeper feelings for the teacher. Each story is told straight through; other than the end of film epilogues, we’re essentially watching three short films, and while it’s established that the stories all take place in the same world the stories never actually mix.
I’m not really sure that I have a clear idea what these three stories have that made Kelly Reichardt decide to connect them together in this film. Obviously they’re all stories that are strongly focused on females, but every time I find myself developing a possible connecting theme I wind up coming up against one of the stories that doesn’t fit. Are they stories about women who are not respected by men because they’re women? Perhaps, but the horse handler’s story doesn’t fit. That story also doesn’t fit with an exploration of the ways we hurt people in our attempts to do the right thing. You could maybe stretch the second and third stories into an examination of the pains of being in love and realising you don’t know what the other person wants, but the lawyer’s story doesn’t easily go into that. The closest I can come to a connection is the fact that all three stories end with their main character looking sadly at another person through a window feeling as though they’ve done something to hurt that person, but I don’t know that I can find anything deeper than that. In the end I’m forced to land on the possibility that maybe there is no big overarching theme, that maybe Reichardt just connected with these particular stories, wanted to tell them, and decided to bring them together in order to form a movie.
What I loved about the movie is how understated it is. Even the first story, which culminates in the lawyer’s client taking a security guard hostage in an attempt to force the situation, feels weirdly unthreatening. There are no big dramatic moments in this film, just people trying to live their lives and navigate the pains that come. And the big emotional connection that we find with the characters all comes through the subtleties of the performances. Michelle Williams has done great work with Reichardt in the past, and the two seem to work exceptionally well together; her story is probably the slightest of the three, but when she gives her sad little wave at the end it just killed me. I enjoyed Laura Dern’s mix of exasperation, regret, and affection; she clearly cares for her client and desperately wishes she could help him, but she has also reached a point of utter frustration in her dealings with him. And Kristen Stewart is weirdly charming as the exhausted teacher so caught up in her own challenges that she’s oblivious to the impact that she has on people. But the performance I really took away was Lily Gladstone. Looking at her IMDB page, it looks like she only has a small number of supporting performances to her name; this is certainly her first time as a co-lead, and she is phenomenal. It’s a quiet, uncomfortable performance; she’s someone who isn’t comfortable around people (this may be why she’s chosen to work with horses), but who does yearn to connect with people, and the way she communicates her experience of falling in love and coming to terms with what that means was incredibly moving.
This really is a wonderful subtle film. It’s not something I’d necessarily recommend to people (it’s not a film of big drama, but rather of small melancholic observations), but I really appreciated it.
Of my three films on the final Friday of the festival, two of them featured Adam Driver. In the first film, Driver stars as Paterson, a bus driver in the city of Paterson, New Jersey. Every day he drives his bus around the same route, his black-and-white-obsessed artist girlfriend stays home finding new ways to express herself, he comes home and fixes the lop-sided mailbox, he spends time with his girlfriend, he walks their dog down to his local bar where he has a few drinks and spends time with his friends. In the weekend he’ll travel around his city looking for inspiration. And in whatever moments he can grab he’ll pull out his secret notebook and write poetry; a love poem inspired by a box of matches, or a reflection about the nature of existence and coming to understand the concept of dimensions beyond what we can see and feel.
It’s difficult to describe the delights of Paterson (the film, as opposed to the man or the city). The strong repetition to each of his days gives a comforting reliable structure to the film on which its small-scale drama can play out. Many films have portrayed a life like this, following the same pattern of existence day after day, as dull and repetitive, but Jarmusch find real joy in the moment. The overheard conversations between the people on the bus; the ever-present complaints from his supervisor; the domestic dramas of his fellow bar regulars; the teasing affection between Paterson and his girlfriend; all small moments, easily overlooked, but that come together to form the picture of this man’s life. There are no big life-changing moments (even the one moment that initially seems like it could turn into a big life-changing incident is quickly diffused and becomes a joke), just life carrying on.
I hadn’t realised how effective the film had been until a point in the film where something significant happened; again, it was nothing terribly big or dramatic in the usual sense, but it was something we knew would be deeply upsetting to Paterson. The film gave a very clear indication what would happen well in advance, and as the scenes that followed took place I found myself wanting to will the characters to stop what they were doing and go to stop this thing from happening. Then I found myself trying to rationalise; it’s probably too late to stop from happening, but maybe the problem can be fixed, maybe it’s not too bad. And then comes the point where the characters learn what has happened, and it’s so much worse than I had expected, and at that moment there was an audible reaction of shock and horror that came from the audience. And I’m honestly surprised at having that reaction; if you had told me twenty minutes into the film that I would be responding like this to that incident it would seem absurd, but the film and the characters really affected me.
The one real problem that I have with the film comes towards the end. Earlier on Paterson meets a young girl waiting for her mother, and talking to her he discovers that she too has a passion for poetry. She even shows him her book for writing poems, which she also calls her “secret notebook”. And that exchange seemed a bit coincidental, but that’s fine; we do sometimes randomly meet people who share our passions, and given how personal poetry can be I can understand that different people might land on the idea of the “secret notebook”. So I could accept that. But at the end of the film, Paterson is approached by a Japanese man reading a book of poems by his favourite poet, who then starts a conversation with him about poetry even though there’s seemingly no reason for the man to believe that this random person sitting on a bench would have any interest in poetry. And the scene culminates in the man giving Paterson a gift, which happens to be the perfect gift for Paterson to receive right at this very moment. That was the one moment where I felt the hand of the scriptwriter forcing the story to go in a particular direction, and it was disappointing, especially because it seemed to me that there was a much easier and more natural way for that conversation to have taken place.
But that’s really just a minor quibble in a film that offers many, many surprising delights. A wonderful film.
Firstly, at the risk of seeming petty, my viewing of The Salesman was not ideal. About halfway through the film I was completely caught up in the film’s spell, and all of a sudden a woman at the back of the cinema started screaming “AAAAHHH!!! GET OFF! GET OFF!” Then there was the sound of a glass smashing, general commotion, people yelling for the house lights, someone call an ambulance, is there a doctor. So the film was paused and every head was turned to the back. I don’t know exactly what was happening, but it was pretty scary; from what I could hear there were one or two points where people seemed genuinely concerned that someone might actually have died. But apparently not; eventually the person recovered, and was helped down the stairs and out of the cinema, where he no doubt received the care he needed and hopefully was okay. After that happened the film restarted, but inevitably after an event like that you’re shaken, your mind is wandering, and you’re completely pulled out of the enveloping atmosphere of the film, and it took me a long time to get back into the headspace to enjoy the film. But I did eventually, and by the end was really enjoying the film, right until the climax where one of the characters collapses and has a major health scare. Which obviously led my mind back to the person who had had the incident earlier, oh gosh I hope he’s okay, and that again pulled me from the film right at the point where I should have been most caught up in it. I’m not complaining; this is just an acknowledgement about how the particular circumstances of the screening affected my experience of the film. Because I was really looking forward to the film; Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation and The Past were highlights of previous festivals, and I was eagerly anticipating his new film. And the film is very good, but it didn’t quite have the same gut impact that those earlier films had. That reaction may possibly be because the film is not quite as good, but I know how well the film had been working for me, so I think it’s likely that my muted reaction is mostly due to the events around the screening.
Emad is a literature teacher in Tehran, who at night acts in the lead role in a production of Death of a Salesman alongside his wife Rana. Forced to hurriedly move from their collapsing building, they find a new apartment with a mysterious former tenant who has left her possessions in a locked room. One day Rana is in the shower when someone calls to come up; assuming it’s her husband she buzzes him up and leaves the front door open. Sometime later, the husband returns home to find bloodied footprints on the stairs, bloodstains in the bathroom, and his wife in the hospital, her head cut up and her face bruised. It’s then that they learn that the previous tenant was notorious in the building for being promiscuous, probably a prostitute, and perhaps the perpetrator of this crime was one of her “visitors”. Filled with fury at what happened to his wife, Emad becomes determined to discover for himself who the criminal was.
One of Farhadi’s smartest moves in the film is to keep the exact nature of the events unclear. I don’t believe we ever learn what actually happened; we get to hear Rana’s memories of the events, but there are also prominent moments where it appears that she remembers things that she chooses not to tell us. That ambiguity drives the film; because Emad feels that he doesn’t know what really happened, the events then become the worst thing he came possibly imagine, fuelling his anger. At the same time, there’s a real suspicion and possessiveness that’s also in control of him; why did she allow a strange man into the building and leave the door open? She says she thought he was her husband, but really, can we believe that? This all boils up to a point where it seems that Emad is angrier than Rana is, as though he as her husband is as much a victim as his wife, because the person may have taken what was his and so he wants to destroy that man. What’s particularly surprising is how likeable and charming Emad is through much of the film. We often imagine the possessive husband as being someone abusive and obviously evil, but Farhadi seems to be suggesting that there is something of that inclination potentially within all of us that could come out under the right circumstances.
As with almost any art from modern Iran, there’s always going to be some expressions of outrage against the governing machine that aims to control its population. It’s not so prominent in this film (which does have other things on its mind), but there is a definite protest here against government control over the arts: we learn that the play, which has already been subject to censorship, is likely to have more passages cut from the text; the play features the character of a prostitute, who in one scene is supposed to be naked except for her coat, but in a deeply Islamic country she’s noticeably wearing a lot more; and in another moment we learn that the box of books provided as a gift to the school library by Emad (who is after all a literature teacher) is being rejected because the books are deemed injurious to the well-being of the youths who would read them.
I really did enjoy the film a lot. In an ideal circumstance I think I would have felt about it the same way I felt about A Separation or The Past. Farhadi is a master at constructing his dramas, slowly putting each piece together until the tension reaches breaking point, and I could feel that happening here. This is one film I’ll be very interested to revisit.
Michael Shannon stars as Roy, a man on the run with his best friend after seemingly kidnapping a young boy, Alton. It is quickly revealed that Roy is Alton’s birth father, and that Alton has some unique powers, including the ability to receive encrypted messages from government satellites. The messages Alton has been receiving has been interpreted by his adoptive father, the leader of a doomsday cult, as indications of the imminent end of the world. So when Roy takes his son to bring him to a place where he can discover his destiny, he’s pursued by several members of the cult, as well as the full power of the US Government leg by security agent Adam Driver (who wants to understand how a young boy could access this secret information).
I’ve admired Jeff Nichols’ work in the past; both Take Shelter and Mud was fascinating, intimate character portraits. I was therefore curious about Midnight Special, because the idea of him making a science fiction road trip movie sounded to me like a significant step away from his past work. The result is a film that I liked overall, but that is wildly flawed in a way that his smaller works aren’t.
One thing I did appreciate was the tone. We live in a time where 70s/80s nostalgia is predominant, and Midnight Special definitely feeds into that pattern. The film at points is noticeably influenced by the early works of Spielberg (most unmistakably Close Encounters and ET) and other key 80s genre filmmakers (the ending felt very reminiscent of The Abyss to me), but fed through Nichols’ own sensibility to create something that feels like a film from the 80s but that isn’t beholden to those films. My friend eT made the obvious comparison to Super 8, which is definitely a fair comparison as a film influenced by the classic Amblin works, but where he felt Super 8 to be the more better film, I preferred Midnight Special. I like Super 8, and it was more successful at what it was trying to do, but all it was really trying to do was just to be a Spielberg clone; Midnight Special falls short of its aim, but it was also a much more ambitious project that to me is more interesting in its failure than Super 8 was in its success.
The problem with Midnight Special is that it’s just too damned busy. It’s really the third act of this massive story, as though it’s the final few episodes in a season-long TV show. There are all sorts of competing sides each out to find and capture Alton, and while we get enough backstory to more-or-less piece together what is going on in the story, it leaves the audience feeling on the back foot and trying to catch up for the entire film. I walked out of the film with a million questions about what happened where and when and how. When I commented on the film Personal Shopper, I observed that I was okay if a film sets up lots of mysteries and never answers them as long as I feel the filmmaker has some idea what is going on. I think Midnight Special proved me wrong. I have no doubt at all that Nichols can tell me exactly what happened before the film, exactly what was going on during the film, what happened afterwards, what was motivating everyone’s actions. The problem was, there was just too much going on, and so the storytelling had to be cut down to the bare minimum to drive the narrative. (This is most egregious in one scene where Adam Driver, looking at a whiteboard covered in numbers delivered by Alton, starts circling some random numbers, and then just announces I’ve cracked the code; in the next scene they’re travelling to the location indicated by the numbers without ever trying to explain to us what “the code” was, without ever giving us a chance to see how smart the character is.) I found myself thinking they needed to cut the film down somehow, pick one element to remove from the film, and use that time to more clearly develop the other plot threads. (Personally, I think there’s probably a way to remove the entire cult subplot that would streamline the entire story without detracting from what Nichols is trying to say with the film.)
Because the film is most effective, not in its narrative, but in its thematic exploration. When we first meet Roy, he’s already on the run, branded a wanted criminal. (Indeed the character’s first appearance onscreen is as a photograph on the television during an Amber Alert warning.) And through everything that happens, there’s only one thing driving him: he has to get his son to where he needs to be in order to achieve whatever purpose he has. He may not know what will happen once they get there, but this is the single most important thing to him; he is literally willing to give his life in order to protect his son and get where he wants to go. And thematically it could not be any clearer in what it is saying. The entire film is talking about the experience of parenthood, talking about the way that once you become a parent everything revolves around your child, how there is nothing more important than them, and how parents are often willing to sacrifice everything in order to ensure that their child can grow to achieve great things and live a happy fulfilled life. And then the reward for your years of sacrificing everything is that the child grows up and leaves you, and you just have to hope that what you’ve given up for your child was worth it. That’s what the film is about. I’m not a parent, so I couldn’t really connect with Michael Shannon on that thematic level; instead I found myself thinking about the film through the view of the young boy Alton, thinking about everything my parents gave to me, gave up for me, things that I never really appreciated at the time because the nature of childhood is that you don’t really appreciate your parents, things that I regret not understanding. It’s a massively flawed film, but it’s also a film that left me much more contemplative than many “better” films. I don’t promise that you’d have a great time at the time watching Midnight Special, it is horribly messy, but I found it a rich and entertaining film.
It was a nice surprise to see Orson Welles’ Shakespearean film Chimes at Midnight listed in the festival programme. I’ve been meaning to see the film for years, and to have my first viewing be a new restoration of the film screening at the Embassy was a delight. Welles plays Sir John Falstaff, an obese cowardly knight who spends his life at the Boar's Head Tavern, drinking, whoring, and occasionally robbing passing travellers. His closest friend is Prince Hal (destined to one day become King Henry V), who joins him in his revelries. But when Hotspur leads a rebellion against King Henry IV, Hal must command the King’s forces, and Falstaff reluctantly finds himself drawn into the battle.
The thing that’s particularly notable about the film is that it’s a Shakespeare film based on a play that doesn’t exist. Instead, it’s an adaptation primarily of the two Henry IV plays, but also drawing from three other plays, to construct a narrative that centres on the character of Falstaff, a supporting character in the Henry IV plays. I can’t speak to the film as a piece of adaptation (of the five plays used in constructing the script, I’ve only ever seen Henry V, which takes place after Falstaff’s death), but as a narrative I thought it was quite exceptional. In particular, I was surprised by how seamless the work felt; the film only ever felt cobbled together at the couple of moments where they needed narration to clarify plotting. Otherwise the movement between the different plays is completely invisible and there’s a clear and focused narrative that works completely in and of itself.
Welles’ performance as Falstaff is an absolute delight. He’s wonderfully pathetic, he’s utterly amoral, and his role in the battle scenes is laugh-out-loud funny. And yet Welles clearly has a lot of sympathy for the character, bringing a surprising amount of pride to the usually comic role. In an early scene, the drunken Falstaff describes being robbed by mysterious assailants, and the number of people involved in the incident increases with literally each sentence spoken by the character; the way Welles plays it it’s clear that the man is lying because he feels that he should have been able to stand up to the people who robbed him and so he has to make the forces against him overwhelming for his own sense of self-worth. At the end of the battle, when Falstaff foolishly decides to claim credit for killing someone he did not, it feels an action borne out of shame at his cowardice on the battlefield (the man spends the entire battle trying to find any place to hide, and even playing dead at points) and out of a desire to convince others of his value. And when the film reaches its culmination, Welles plays every note of his hurt and sense of betrayal perfectly.
One thing that I was not expecting was just how big the film was. Watching the film I was surprised how the film didn’t seem to have been hampered by budgetary restrictions in the way that many of Welles’ other works were. (Reading about the project afterwards, it seems that there were some budgetary issues that led to a two-month delay mid-filming, but for the most part it doesn’t seem to have had the years-long problems of other Welles projects.) Now, admittedly it doesn’t feel like it had a massive budget (it’s certainly not working on a Lawrence of Arabia scale) but it felt big in a way I wasn’t expecting. The battle scenes must have had fifty horses, a hundred men or more; perhaps not on the scale of a film like Braveheart, but enough that I was impressed by the ambition of those scenes. They also had the use of some spectacular locations to provide the king’s castle setting, and a remarkable tavern set filled with a wealth of nooks and crannies that the camera loved exploring. Couple all this with Welles’ talent for inventive visual storytelling and some excellent performances and it becomes an impressive film where any challenges in making the work are hidden from the audience. The only flaw that I could point to in the entire movie is the soundtrack; the audio was clearly dubbed in later, and the obvious disparity between the sound we were hearing and the words we seeing being formed could at times be distracting. But other than that, it was just a remarkable film, and a delight to have finally seen.
The third of the Westerns in the “classic” section of this year’s festival was a film I had previously never heard of. Joan Crawford plays Vienna, a no-nonsense bar owner who built her bar in the middle of nowhere knowing she’ll make a lot of money when the railroad comes through. Local woman Emma Small views Vienna as a rival, and so leads the McIvers (a local family that owns much of the land in the area and that wants to take the profit from the railroad) to war with Vienna, falsely accusing her and a gang that frequents her business of being involved in a hold-up that led to the death of Emma’s brother. Fortunately Vienna has hired her ex-lover and retired gunfighter Johnny Guitar (played by Sterling Hayden) to work as protection for her.
As I have mentioned before, I’ve generally never really connected with western films, and this does have much of the genre trappings that for whatever reason instinctively take me out of such movies. But there is some interesting work being done that distances the film from most westerns. In particular, there’s an interesting tone of melodrama running through the film that I’ve never seen in a western and that was quite effective. (My friend eT perceptively compared the film to the works of Douglas Sirk.) One of the big reasons for that difference in tone is the fact that the film’s hero and villain are both women. And they’re not your typical female film characters, all meek and mild and constantly needing rescue; in the west, for a woman to survive and thrive by herself she had to be tough, smart, and ruthless, and so that’s who these characters are. Crawford in particular has an icy glare that is terrifying to see, although when necessary the charm come through and you can understand why she’s the object of desire for so many men. In one of her best scenes she confronts a mob wearing a pretty dress and playing the piano, and the way she manipulates the emotions in the rabble to defuse the situation was a delight to watch. Similarly Mercedes McCambridge (who I previously knew only as the voice of the demon in The Exorcist) is great as a hardened cynical woman who makes a conscious choice to use everything she can, up to and including the death of her own brother, to destroy her enemy. It’s a wonderful pairing that works exceptionally well.
Meanwhile the men in the film are on the whole complete rubbish, just filled with machismo and aggression that expresses itself at the worst time and in the worst way. Even the titular Johnny Guitar, while helpful at times, is largely irrelevant and is frequently chided for his instinctive need to solve his problems with a gun. There was a point early in the film where Sterling Hayden was in a brawl with Ernest Borgnine and I couldn’t for the life of me tell you why they were even fighting. And that was the point; I don’t think the characters could have really articulated why they were so angry with a person they had literally just met. That’s just the way they live: if you don’t like someone, you try to kill them. And so all this misplaced aggression pours out in rash decisions or in impulsive reactions, which constantly results in making the situation worse.
In the end, it is a western, and I don’t really like westerns. But this was a pretty good one, and had some interesting aspects to the film that kept me engaged in a way that other such films might have lost my interest. Definitely worth seeking out.
One of the highlights of the festival is always the Live Cinema screening, where a silent film is screened with a live musical accompaniment. This year's selection was Variety, a German film that I had never previously heard of, with a new chamber orchestra score by New Zealand composer Johannes Contag. I was particularly looking forward to this one because one of my coworkers was one of the ensemble musicians, and he was very excited about the work. And he was right to be.
The film itself is an entertaining little melodrama centred on the character of Boss, a former trapeze artist who now hosts a fairground sideshow of exotic dancers. He falls in love with his newest dancer, the mysterious Berta-Marie, and abandons his wife and child to live a happy life with his new lover. Several years later they're working together as fairground trapeze artists when an opportunity to perform with the famous Artinelli troupe is offered to him. But then Artinelli starts to fall in love with Berta-Marie, and things go badly wrong.
The film itself is not subtle, in the way that silent films often are not, but it is brilliantly entertaining. The trapeze scenes in particular, seemingly performed high above a crowd and without a net, are intense and thrilling; some 90 years after they were shot, I'm sitting in the screening holding my breath in anticipation and fear.
I was rather impressed with the direction by E A Dupont, who I'm unfamiliar with. People often talk about how the introduction of sound set cinema back twenty years, as creative camerawork was replaced by simple shots driven primarily by the needs of the technology to capture sound. This film is a perfect example. The camerawork is pleasingly inventive and impressionistic, again particularly in capturing the dizzying experience of being on the trapeze. I was also rather surprised by how well the film portrayed the exotic allure of Berta-Marie in her early scenes; glimpses of a bare leg or bared back seem quaint for a modern audience, but it was still extremely effective in communicating the erotic allure the woman had over Boss.
The only point where I found myself taken out of the film was the initial seduction of Berta-Marie by Artinelli. At least, I think it was intended to be a seduction scene; it was shot in an extremely predatory way that left me convinced it was rape until the later scenes revealed Berta-Marie now deeply in love with Artinelli. I always try to approach a film bearing in mind the context of the original era and allowing for the fact that things that might have been okay at the time may hold different meaning today, but nevertheless, ooph, that was a tough scene to watch, and extremely troubling as the start of a love story.
As for the score, I found it extremely effective, increasing the thrill of the trapeze act, embracing the lush romanticism, and amplifying the tension as everything moves towards the inevitable tragic ending. One of the fun things about live accompaniment is that it feels as much like a high-wire act as that of the people on screen. Not only is there the tension of needing to perfectly time the music to match the action, there's also the experience of being able to hear instantly if the music doesn't work. (I have seen live performances that didn't work and detracted from the movie they were accompanying.) Thankfully all was perfectly matched here. An excellent experience.
An enjoyable Italian comedy, Perfect Strangers takes place at a dinner party where seven good friends (three married couples and an unmarried friend) start discussing the way our entire lives are governed by our cellphones. Eventually they wind up goading each other into agreeing to put their phones on the table: every txt message received is read aloud, every phone call is taken on speakerphone. And of course everyone agrees, because if you don’t agree that means you have something to hide. And since this is a movie, it is inevitable that the rest of the evening becomes one long stream of messages and phone calls that expose every deep dark secret.
It’s a great premise for a film: it’s nice and clear, with instantly recognisable opportunities for chaos to occur. And they did well in finding a decent variation in secrets for the characters to be hiding; inevitably the most damaging secrets are around various infidelities, but there are also problems arising from surgery plans, arrangements to put people in rest homes, and even exposing different approaches to parenting. It also gets a great deal of entertainment from people employing various efforts to be seen to be playing the game while protecting themselves; one of the funniest plot threads comes from one person trying to swap their phone with another’s and the chaos that occurs when the other’s secrets are unexpectedly revealed and forced onto the wrong person. So it is an extremely entertaining film, and one that is talking about something really rather interesting: not just the way our lives are effectively controlled by these tools, but also how exposed our lives would become if the contents of our phone were ever exposed to public view.
But the other thing I found really interesting was in the way it looks at how close friends relate. I think about my close friends, and how often much of that interaction can be rather cruel. We will pounce on any opportunity to mock or belittle each other. And it is all done with genuine affection and a great degree of humour. But at the same time, at one point one person’s deepest secret is revealed, and the level of cruelty that is thrown around as a result of the revelation feels genuinely nasty. We often feel that we know every detail of our closest friends’ lives, but it’s always possible that someone might be dealing with a situation that no-one knows about, and we never really know what effect our actions and our words might have on them.
The film’s real problem was that they didn’t know how to end it. Everything builds up and escalates until a point where multiple marriages seem on the verge of collapse, people are storming out of the apartment and then… we see one of the couples walking out of the building holding hands. They apparently resolved a seriously damaged relationship and completely made up in the time it took to walk from the apartment to the building’s exit, as apparently did the other couples. Everyone seemed to be behaving as though the revelations of the day never took place. It was so disorienting that I started to wonder whether this was some kind of flashback to the last time these friends gathered, except that the film seems to go out of its way to definitively establish that this was the same day. Perhaps I missed something, but it felt to me that ending the film with everyone’s marriage in crisis was too gloomy an ending for a film that’s supposed to be a comedy. So they just gave it a happy ending that just did not make sense to me given the previous 90 minutes, and that potentially leaves them doomed in an unhappy situation. Hell, one of the characters is even revealed to be gay, yet the ending very pointedly pushes that person into the closet in a way that made no sense to me. It’s a bizarre, utterly unsatisfying ending to an otherwise engaging and entertaining movie.
The festival’s official closing night film was the new film from Paul Verhoeven. I have never really cared for Verhoeven in the small number of his films that I’ve seen; even Robocop (which most people love) never connected for me. So I would normally never have seen the film, and the write-up in the programme didn’t really appeal, but I decided that if the festival organisers felt it worthy of closing out the festival then I should give it a go. And what I found was a film that troubles me.
The film opens with our lead character Michele (played by Isabelle Huppert) being violently, brutally raped by a masked man. She’s reluctant to report the crime, largely due to an experience she had with the police as a child, so instead she tries to distract herself with every other part of her life. She pours herself into her work running a videogame company; she continues her affair with her best friend’s husband; she fantasises over her neighbour; she worries about her son, whose insane girlfriend is close to giving birth; she’s frustrated about her mother, who has taken on a new much-younger lover; she very carefully has nothing to do with her imprisoned father; and she meets her ex-husband’s hot young yoga-instructor girlfriend. But through all this her rapist seems to be taunting her: she receives txt messages indicating he’s watching her; a video is circulated repurposing a fantasy-rape scene from her company’s videogame with her as the victim; he leaves messages inside her house; and then he attacks her again.
Yes, yes; it’s very well-made, excellent acting, well-directed, extremely tense, yet often laugh-out-loud funny. But here the thing: I don’t know what the hell I’m supposed to make of this film. I don’t know how I’m supposed to react. I don’t understand what Verhoeven is trying to say here. The film is kind of a weird mess; it’s a melange of scenes all thrown together until I felt that I didn’t have a clear picture of what the story of the film is. The film even seems at times to forget about the crime that is supposed to be driving the story. It’s just: she lives her life, and occasionally she gets raped. But the film really started to trouble me about halfway through, when Michele discovers who her rapist is. And he knows that she knows who he is. And her reactions to this character don’t seem to change at all. In fact, if anything she starts actively increasing her interactions with him, openly flirting with him in scenes that are shot with pure eroticism, even (and this is where I want to be clear that I describing what the film itself seems to be doing here) even implying that the rapes are welcomed and actively putting herself in positions where she knows what will happen as though she is inviting them. At one point she’s at the rapist’s house with her son, and when her son falls asleep she asks to go to the basement with the rapist because she wants to see the underfloor heating system he has set up. And the rapist makes clear that “it will be how it was previously”, and she continues. And then she is raped, and the rape is violent and brutal - at one point her head is bashed against a brick wall multiple times. And then she gets up, wakes her son, and thanks her attacker for a wonderful evening. I’m not saying that she consented to what’s happening (I will point out I’ve repeatedly used the word “rape” for that reason), but she’s also playing a game with the rapist where it’s hard to say that she didn’t consent. And not only is that weird and twisted; I also don’t understand why she’s reacting like this. Now, I could buy her behaviour if it had any suggestion of “I’m planning to lure you so that I can take some revenge”, but that never feels like what she’s doing. The closest I’ve come to finding a possible explanation is that she’s openly inviting herself to be punished because of her guilt over certain things that happened when she was a child. But I don’t find that explanation satisfactory (if only because I feel that it would require there to be more to the story of her childhood than we are ever given), and if that is the explanation I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with that.
And here’s the most troubling thing. The film is very well-made. It has excellent acting. It is very well-directed. It’s extremely tense, yet it often manages to be laugh-out-loud funny. I do not care for much of what actually happens in the film, but it is a brilliantly well-made film in which these horribly things happen. And as when I find myself pondering about my reaction to the film, all I can say is, I didn’t not like the film. That doesn’t mean I liked the film, because I don’t know that I did. But what I do know is that I would find it harder to say that I didn’t like the film than that I did like the film. And I don’t like that.
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