So here's the thing,
With the 2021 film festival starting tonight (with a screening of The Power of the Dog that I couldn't get tickets for), I find myself reflecting on last year's festival, and how that was a strange anticlimax of a festival. While New Zealand was fully open by the time the 2020 festival took place (certainly much more so then we are now at the time of the 2021 festival), the festival organisers did not know that when they had to put in place the plans for a Covid-affected festival. Which is why, rather than the massive number of screenings in packed cinemas, we instead had a festival that was largely driven by online screenings at home, with only a small number of cinema screenings at (with one exception) a single cinema, the Roxy. And I love the Roxy, I'm there at least once every weekend, but there is something special about the big screen at the Embassy and sitting in a packed crowd of 700 people in that cinema. And so it was disappointing that I wouldn't be able to have that experience at last year's festival.
The thing is, I get excited about the festival as an event. I love spending the weekend before tickets go on sale constructing spreadsheets to track all of my films and figure out the best way to maximise my viewings. I get excited by the experience of buying tickets, whether it's queuing in the cold for hours on end (as I used to do), or the frustration of fighting with the festival website to get the tickets I want - that's all part of the thrill knowing that the festival is about to happen. It makes it feel like an event.
But there was no sense of the event in the festival last year. For those films that I was seeing in cinema, the screenings just dropped on the cinema's website like any other movie - no mad rush to get my seats. And even with the smaller cinema size (200 seats at the Roxy vs 700 at the Embassy), I don't think any of the films I attended were sold out, not even the "big event" films that always sell out quickly. And for those screenings that weren't in cinema and were only available online - well, there was no need for haste to secure tickets; I just rented the movies online as they became available. And my film numbers this year were well down on usual - only 21 films, when most festivals I'd be doing over 30, up to 40 films.
My waning enthusiasm even fed through to the usual Facebook posts where I reflect on each film. I found it a struggle motivating myself to write about each film, and indeed I eventually gave up without ever recording my responses to my final two films of the festival. But, for what it's worth, here are the posts that I wrote responding to almost all of the films I saw at last year's festival.
[Comments on a number of the 2020 film festival movies, after the jump.]
The Truth (in cinema)
The new film from Japanese master filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda finds him leaving Japan to tell a story that feels distinctly European. The legendary Catherine Deneuve stars as Fabienne, a celebrated French actress whose newly published memoir presents a rosy and idyllic portrait of her life and her family - a view not shared by Juliette Binoche as her screenwriter daughter (who comes to stay with her second-rate-actor husband and their young girl), who remembers a mother who openly expressed a preference for being a great actor and a terrible mother then the other way around, who ignored her daughter's needs, and who callously hurt even her closest friends.
There's often a tendency for filmmakers with experience working in a particular culture to lose something distinctive when they leave to make a film in a different country and a different culture. So when I heard about Kore-eda making a film with Deneuve, Binoche, and Ethan Hawke, while I was excited to see that cast working together with a great director, I was inevitably concerned that the film might lose some of what makes Kore-eda's work so fantastic. His films are marked by richly defined characters, a lack of incident, and an affectionate observational tone, and I was delighted to realise that this was carried over. It feels like a genuine Kore-eda film, with rich, lived-in characters that have history and shared understanding, and while we learn enough to comprehend the events, we're let in slowly and naturally, and even when the film ends there are significant gaps in our understanding, as though we really were just observing a family that don't feel the need to provide expository dialogue to explain everything they've ever done.
As expected, the performances are uniformly excellent. Deneuve is wonderful, portraying a character who could be genuinely nasty - she's constantly on the attack and undercutting her daughter with passive-aggressive barbs - but she clearly communicates the pain and regret that underlies her actions, and as a result, we feel genuine sympathy for her. Similarly, Binoche carries a lifetime of understandable frustration and resentment, but this never overwhelms her love for her mother, and the real joy of the film is just in watching these two women work and act together, portraying the developing connection as they work to overcome their history and build a new relationship.
I do feel that this is a lesser Kore-eda film - which is not a criticism, even a lesser work of his is pretty great. But one of the things that I think marks his work is a sense of authentic experience, where you feel that Kore-eda is digging into his own past for experiences that he can mine for his work - I always come back to the moment in Our Little Sister where the sisters make plum wine. But here, he's working with a European culture that is very different then the one he's used to, and so he doesn't feel like he has those same memories to draw on. I also felt that the script at times felt somewhat on-the-nose, as though he wrote the script in Japanese, and it lost some of his usual subtlety as it was translated into French. But that said, whether he had made this film in Japanese or French, we are inevitably at the mercy of the subtitle translators, so it's difficult to know where the fault lies in this. It's not a major problem with the film, just an observation about something that occasionally disappointed me. Also, the films I've seen of his have otherwise always had a down-to-earth cast of characters (his last film was about a poverty-stricken family of shoplifters), so it's disorienting to watch a film that's focused on such an immensely wealthy and high profile family. But these are comparatively minor quibbles.
The film is another reliably beautiful and compassionate portrait of the complexities of family life, and it was an absolute delight to be so captivated by it. I'll be interested to see where Kore-eda takes his career, whether he returns to Japan or continues to tell his stories in other countries. And if it is the latter, I'll be excited to see how his work grows and changes as he becomes more used to working in languages and cultures other than his own.
Inspired by the story of Ned Kelly, True History of the Kelly Gang introduces us to Ned in his youth, the son of a drunken wastrel and a withholding mother who prostitutes herself. And we follow him as he's taught to be a bush ranger, sent to prison, comes out trying to prove that he's different to his disreputable family, until he finds himself inevitably forced into a life of crime, leading inevitably to a violent standoff and his eventual hanging.
I don't know much about Ned Kelly, beyond the obvious bullet-proof armour, and I'm not sure I know that much more about him now. The film opens with a title card that warns us "Nothing you are about to see is true," so I don't know whether I can take anything in the film as an accurate representation of his story - especially as the film seems to actively veer away from expectations and iconography of the story. I don't know whether it's true that the gang wore dresses as a psychological trick to make their enemies think they're insane - we spend more time with Ned wearing a sheer see-through lace dress than we do with him wearing the armour - but it's certainly an interesting story. And the film really takes advantage of the freedom that opening title card gives it to do whatever it wants to do, without needing to be bound by "the real story". So we get a film that feels much more expressionistic and surreal, feeling less like a story than a collection of moments that just feel disorientating and bizarre, with a filmed image that at times actually draws attention to how constructed the elements in the frame are, and a movie soundtrack that is frequently period-inappropriate (electric guitars wailing) while accurately reflecting the mood and sensibility of the film. The film culminates in an incredible presentation of Ned Kelly's final standoff against the authorities, filmed with a shocking strobe lighting effect that actively assaults you and makes it hard to watch, even as the authorities are presented wearing cloaks that glow in the dark. It's a stunning moment that almost certainly has nothing in common with how you would portray the actual events, but that convincingly communicates the experience of being a man trapped and forced into making one last stand.
At the same time, there's real emotion and richness to the film. Ned is presented as someone who is constantly trying to prove himself to his mother, from the moment where as a young child he somehow kills a cow and brings it home to prove to his mother that he can provide for the family in a way his father cannot, to the sadness of their final interaction before Ned's execution. And is there something uncomfortably Oedipal in their connection? Well, you couldn't say it's not there. But you never feel like you know where his mother will be - one minute she's refusing an offer to give Ned an education because she needs him around her, the next she's selling him off to work as a servant to a criminal. And so many of his actions are driven by this emotional insecurity which we absolutely understand and connect with.
George Mackay is just a revelation here, physically imposing while somehow gangly and uncomfortable, and with a pronounced glower in his eyes. And his work with Essie Davis, the way he reverts back to a young boy in her presence, is just remarkable. Davis is herself impressive, with a cool and determined impassiveness that communicates the sense of a woman who understands what it takes to survive in this barren land. And the supporting cast is filled with excellent actors doing enjoyable work. Nicholas Hoult is continuing this bizarre career he's built of playing complete assholes with such delight that you find yourself wanting to like them. Thomasin McKenzie brings real tenderness and sadness to the role of a young mother and prostitute that Ned falls in love with. And even in the small roles, the film is packed with notable performances - I wasn't expecting Charlie Hunnam or Russell Crowe to turn up for 5 or 10 minutes and then leave the film, but I was glad they did, with Russell Crowe's work in particular being a real spark of life that comes to define the person that Ned becomes.
Ultimately, it's a fascinating movie that explores the slow progress and inevitability that can lead a person inexorably towards a path of destruction, but it does so with such energy and lightness of touch that it never feels like a burden. I really enjoyed this one.
When her elderly mother goes missing, Kay (played by Emily Mortimer) travels with her twentysomething daughter to her mother's house in the hope of finding her. But after three days missing, the mother just turns up, making a cup of tea, and claiming to be unaware of having gone missing at all. Kay is convinced that her mother has dementia, and starts looking into care options - but does dementia really explain all of her mother's strange actions, or the ominous shadows that intrude in the house, or the growing mould patch and the mysterious banging noises that can be heard behind it?
Relic is a really clear example of the strengths of the horror genre. We're all afraid of getting old, of our bodies ageing and decaying, to say nothing of the absolute terror that comes with the prospect of dementia, of losing your mind - and possibly the only thing worse than that, having to care for someone you love as they are transformed by dementia. It only takes a few slight tweaks to turn that idea into a horror film, and then use that to explore real ideas and questions about the nature of our existence. And the film is extremely effective as it explores that idea. And it's a metaphor that allows a great deal of flexibility in its horror exploration - one moment it's an unsettling psychological thriller, the next the decaying body of the grandmother pushes the film into pure body horror, or suddenly it's like she's someone or something else and it's a monster movie.
I also really appreciated the film's bravery in never really explaining what was going on. Sure, it hints at different things, we get little elements of backstory, but it's only ever snippets, we never get all the pieces, so it just all seems incomprehensible. And that's part of the effectiveness of the metaphor, because from my understanding the type of transformation that a person undergoes as they deal with dementia can seem impossible to explain or comprehend. Similar films will usually reach a point where they stop the story to drop a lot of exposition, explaining every detail about who the monster is and what it's doing, and I admired the film's bravery in leaving all that so ambiguous.
Which is not to say that I think the filmmakers haven't done the work in establishing their film's mythology - it's pretty clear they have a clear understanding of everything that is going on in this house. In some ways, that's the reason for the one part of the film that I think doesn't work - there's an extended sequence where one character gets trapped in an impossible space that is shifting and changing around her, and while it's a very effective sequence viewed in isolation, it's the one part of the film where I found it lost track of the dementia metaphor, because this felt too separated from it. It seemed to me that in developing the mythology they developed the idea of this impossible space as part of the background to understand what's going on, and then kept the scene without ever considering whether it truly connected to what the film was about.
But to avoid ending on a small criticism, I will say that I loved the ending. You expect your typical horror film to climax with some massive horror sequence, with our main characters being chased through the house by whatever monster the grandmother has become. And that is indeed what the film does, until it stops, and become something very different, something emotional and moving. The film still remains a horror film - there's an extended piece of body horror in that final scene - but it also becomes a rich and beautiful moment with these characters, three generations of women from a single family, being united in their shared love and connection for each other. But it's not just some heart-warming ending - there's a nice bite to it as we are reminded that we all grow old, that having gone through all of this with her grandmother, at some time the daughter will go through this again with her mother, and then at some point she will be the person transformed and her future children and grandchildren will be the ones having to deal with her. It's a fantastic ending to what is overall a very strong film.
A rather sharp crime drama from Iran, Just 6.5 follows a group of drug cops in their efforts to stem the rising numbers of crack addicts in the country by taking down one of the main drug kingpins. We follow them as they arrest and interrogate everyone they come across (the jail cells become absurdly overpacked during the course of the film) in an attempt to find a hook that will allow them to catch their guy. And then, about halfway through the film, they catch the target, and the film becomes just as much his film as the cops, as we watch him pull every trick he has to try to manoeuvre his way out of being executed for his crimes.
I was surprised by how little the film felt like it came from Iran - the only real indication that it came from the notoriously strict religious regime is a brief conversation where one of the cops discusses his reconciliation with his estranged wife, and he's asked if that reconciliation took place to help secure a promotion, since being married is apparently a prerequisite of the job. But beyond that, this just feels like a really strong entry in a film genre that could have been made almost anywhere. I've seen comparisons to films like The French Connection, and that's not a bad point of reference, with a cast of obsessed cops ferociously doing everything necessary to catch the target, and a number of genuinely thrilling and suspenseful action sequences. In particular, I loved the foot chase that opens the film, which ends in frustration for the cops who lose their target, never to find him again (it's a recurring point of frustration through the rest of the film) - although the audience knows where the guy went, in a moment I've kept thinking about over the past few days.
But it's not all about being an exciting crime film. There is some interesting and challenging discussion about drug policies and the approach to fighting addiction. The title comes from an end-of-film discussion about how, when the main cop characters started their job, Iran had 1 million drug addicts, and now that's blown out to 6.5 million. But it is also "just" 6.5 million, and without their efforts it could have been 20 million. The entire film feels like an exercise in futility, and for all they talk about how "this guy is the guy to take down", there's always someone higher up that they can't catch, there's always someone else ready to fill the space. And then there's frustration over the harshness of the penalty for being found to be dealing drugs, execution for comparatively minor quantities, which results in perverse incentives for people to increase the quantity of drugs they deal - if you're just as likely to be killed for a small amount as a massive amount, there's no reason not to go big and enjoy it while it lasts. (There's also a nice moment where the drug lord, who had to be saved from a suicide attempt when he was arrested, realises that he could be executed, and expresses bafflement that they stopped him from dying for the sole purpose of killing him.)
It's a strong, solid piece of cinema. It's a shame this year's mostly-at-home streaming film festival meant I never got to watch it on the big screen, because I feel it would have played well with an audience, but I'm glad I had the chance to see it.
A group of people living in a dying town in Argentina form a co-op to purchase and operate a granary, in order to help secure the town's future. They pool their money, and all looks like it's going well, until a caption appears on screen to tell us that this is taking place in August 2001 - which the Argentine audience will recognise means a massive banking crisis is about to hit, with massive restrictions on the amount of money that can be withdrawn. Suddenly their hundreds of thousands of dollars are inaccessible, and then they learn that a local lawyer (who knew this crisis was coming) bribed the bank manager to help him take all the money held by the bank (including their money), and all that cash is now in a heavily-alarmed secret vault hidden in a field in the middle of nowhere. So our heroes must come together to hatch a plan to break into the vault and steal back their money.
So yes, it's basically a heist film, a low level Ocean's 11. And that's really all there is to the film. To my mind, it doesn't really go any deeper - it has a few lines of dialogue that touch on the impact that the 2001 crisis had on ordinary citizens, but it doesn't really go any deeper than that, doesn't go into the causes of the crisis, because the crisis is really just a vehicle for getting the film's story started. So there's not really all that much depth to the film.
But that said, it is an extremely enjoyable crowd-pleasing film, and once again I wish I had seen it in a cinema, because it would have been fun to experience this with an audience, laughing at the jokes, getting caught up in the suspense as the plan seems like it's failing, cheering when things work out - just the general joy of experiencing a well-made film with an audience. There's a wide cast of appealing and distinctive characters, and while inevitably only a handful get the time to develop beyond two-dimensions, they're all fun to be around, and they all play a valuable role in the story coming together. The comedy is broad, but not annoyingly so - there's a very funny plot line about one character infiltrating the lawyer's house by posing as a gardener, despite knowing literally nothing about plants, that I have to admit made me laugh. (He also has a sweet flirtation with the lawyer's assistant, which is fun.) And they even managed to do the standard heist film trick where there's one element of the plot that's kept hidden from the audience, but while I often feel those surprise reveals can play as a cheat, here I thought the film played straight with the audience.
It's not a great film, but oh my gosh is it a fun film.
We come into this film immediately meeting our main character, an unnamed thief driving in the Moroccan desert on the run from the cops. Desperate to protect his bag of stolen money, he runs to the top of a nearby hill and buries the bag, marking the spot by making it look like a grave, before being arrested. Several years later, he returns to the once isolated location to find a new village has been built nearby, while the "grave" has been mistaken for the grave of of an unknown saint and has had a mausoleum built around it where people come to worship, preventing the from digging up his bag of stolen money.
So the film is really rather fun. It's an intriguing set up, it has some genuinely laugh out loud sequences, and the nearby village offers a solid cast of characters that you do enjoy spending time with. But I did feel that the film held me at a distance. When the film finished, I honestly don't know that I knew anything about that central thief character. He stole the money, he wants it back, and he's generally good at conning people - and that's about all you get about the main character in the film. You get slightly better characterisation with a couple of the supporting characters - the doctor who is new to the village and doesn't understand why his sole function seems to be to provide the neighbourhood hangout location, and the male nurse who is resentful towards the Mausoleum of the Unknown Saint for drawing people away from seeking medical help in favour of seeking a miracle - but the most part everyone seems like a stock character.
My big issue with the film comes back to a very simple question - how does this happen? How do you come across a grave of a person you don't know, and come to the conclusion that it is the grave of a saint? And how is it that the people in the village are so convinced that the saint has healing powers, leading them to think they just need to visit the mausoleum to receive a miracle? The film almost seems to have been conceived with the image of the bare empty hill contrasted with the image of that same hill with a mausoleum on it, and it certainly is a very funny point of comparison the first time you see it. But I struggle to believe the fundamental premise of the film. I simply don't understand how this belief in the unknown saint becomes a thing, and there's very little detail provided to us on this point - we just have to accept that it happened. But I do think the film could be much stronger if it better accommodated that fundamental question and gave a better justification for its fundamental premise.
Beyond that, the film is fine. I had fun watching it, but it really hasn't stayed with me.
To be honest, I had no interest in seeing Instinct. Given the subject matter, it seemed like it would be a really rough film to watch, and I didn't really want to put myself through that. But then they announced a special screening at the Embassy in connection with the Film Society, which I'm a member of, and so I decided to go - especially since this would be the only time this year that a film festival film screened in the festival's traditional cinema home.
The film follows Nicoline, a prison therapist who takes up a new job, and is immediately drawn to Idris, a young man with a history of sexual assault. His casefile is filled with stories of woman who he befriended, spent time with, won over, seduced, and then, after winning their trust and their willingness to share a bed, he instead violently assaults and rapes the women. But he's been in prison for a number of years, and the prison workers see a lot of growth in him - they see him as genuinely reformed, as someone who could even be eligible for unsupervised day release. Nicoline is unconvinced, seeing signs in him that make her think he's not yet fully reformed. But as the two repeatedly interact, it becomes clear that Idris has developed some kind of intense emotional hold over Nicoline, and they start an extremely inappropriate emotional relationship.
Unsurprisingly, it's not a fun film. You find yourself on the edge the entire time just waiting for the other shoe to drop. Every scene plays as intimidation, with Idris standing much too close to Nicoline and towering over her, so we are constantly uncomfortable. And perhaps it's just that we are coming to this film knowing what it's about, and we're so in Nicoline's head and her experiences that we're not really conscious about what is noticeable to the other staff, but he feels so blatantly threatening that you wonder what the other staff, so certain that he's reformed, are thinking.
This is a female-led project - the screenwriter is a woman, the director is a woman, and Carice Van Houten (who plays Nicoline) executive produced, and so I'm assuming that the purpose of the film was to tell this type of story, where a woman becomes the victim of a terrible crime, from a more understanding and nuanced point of view than many such stories have been told in the past. And certainly I did appreciate the more interesting character that Nicoline was - neither a timid shrinking violet for whom victimisation was almost inevitable, nor an overly confident and strong woman who we can't believe would let herself get in this situation. Instead, Nicoline is a smart and capable woman, but also someone who is insecure and somewhat aimless - even in her 30s, she seems to not really know what direction she wants her life to take, she deliberately takes this job on as a temporary job, and when the idea of making the job permanent is raised, she refuses, lying that she hopes to travel. She is presented as having very little personal life, and while she has some slight flirtation with another staff member teaching basketball to the prisoners, she never really seems all that engaged with him, or indeed anything else outside of her work. This all means that it feels like it was understandable that someone who presented some risk and danger might be able to get under her skin and take hold of her.
And now we come to the crux of the film, and this was something I found extremely frustrating - and I hesitate to mention it for fear of being accused of victim-blaming, so I'll make my point by analogy. We should live in a world where we are able to leave our doors unlocked without needing to worry about being burgled. That's not the world we live in, and so we lock our doors. If we leave our door unlocked, and someone comes in and burgles the house, that's their choice and responsibility, but they were probably always going to burgle someone, and you just made it more likely that you would be the victim. But what happens in this film is not leaving the door unlocked, it's like leaving the door wide open when you know there is a burglar standing 10 feet outside your door waiting to burgle you. And in the case of this film, I'm talking about a literal door. There is a moment where she has the choice to close and lock a door, and she will be safe. She knows she should close the door. She actually says she's going to close the door. And she has a good 10 seconds where she has the opportunity to close and lock the door, and all will be right. Instead she makes a conscious choice to leave the door wide open, and that choice directly leads to her becoming a victim. And I think that's the point where the film lost me, because I felt I didn't understand her choice in that moment given that the consequences of her choice were so obvious and so terrible. The most generous interpretation I could give that scene would be to say that maybe she chose to become a victim in order to prevent others from becoming victims, but that's a spurious explanation for something that just doesn't make sense - there are many different actions she could have taken based on things that had already occurred that should have been enough to keep him locked away, but she doesn't. And unfortunately, that one scene is the entire crux of the film, and when you don't understand the main character's motivation for her actions in that scene, it does undercut the rest of the film.
It's a well-made film, and I do like that it has really forced me to revisit and reflect on it over the past week, but I do struggle to get past that key choice that she makes in the film's climax, and it is certainly not an enjoyable viewing experience. I wouldn't recommend the film, but I also wouldn't discourage anyone who's interested in it from watching it.
At a casual glance, Corpus Christi looks like it might be rather a fun film. The premise (former convict masquerades as local priest), or variations on it, has been the basis for a number of successful comedy films. And the photo used in the poster as the key image to represent the film makes it look rather fun - the priest standing, his arms outstretched, a joyous look on his face, and in the background lots of parishioners also looking like they're happy and smiling. So I entered the film not really remembering the website's description of the film terribly well, and expecting something fairly light and fun. But when the film starts, and the first scene has a character bullied by having his penis put inside a workshop vice, you quickly realise this is not a fun film.
Daniel is a young man looking to be released from juvenile detention. During his time locked up, he did develop an interest in Catholicism, and was even interested in joining the seminary, but the prison chaplain told him that he would not be an acceptable candidate given his background and his crime. But after release, he finds himself in a small village church where he is mistaken for a visiting priest, and when the local priest has a health issue that incapacitates him, Daniel is asked to take over. He quickly learns that the community has been torn apart by the death of six young people in a crash involving a drunk driver, and he has to guide his parishioners through this issue.
It's a really interesting portrait about the place of the church in the context of a wider community. Leaving aside the basic question about whether a person has faith or holds to in the fundamental tenets of the religious belief, the film seems to argue that the church has a vital role in simply providing moral leadership and guidance for the community - and possibly that the church has, in its actions and it's inactions, failed to provide that. This is a community that has turned genuinely toxic as a result of the loss of these young people - people are sending anonymous poison pen letters to the grieving widow of the drunk driver who caused the accident, she's being openly shunned in the community, and when they put up a photo board to remember the people who died in this crash, they pointedly exclude the driver. And those in leadership at the church knew about all of this and apparently did nothing to stop this, and by their inaction seemingly made things worse. But when Daniel comes to the position, because he so totally understands his own need for forgiveness and redemption, he's able and willing to push people to find forgiveness for the person they blame for their loss, and in so doing create space for healing to come to the town.
At the centre of the film is a stellar performance by Bartosz Bielenia as Daniel, who really is remarkable. Again, this is a role with a number of beats that could easily tip the film into comedy - there's the moment where he has to Google how to take a confession while he's in the booth taking confession, or several scenes where he has to deliver a message from the pulpit or a prayer in a public setting, and his approach and style is wildly outside of expectation. But Bielenia is able to avoid pushing the film into humour simply by the power of his performance - he's always someone who is weighed down by his past, you always feel his need for redemption in all his actions, and so he provides that anchor that keeps us in a place where we have to take the drama seriously.
This is not a casual piece of entertainment. This is not a film that you turn on to pass time. This is a film that challenges you, that engages you, and that honestly moves you. And I was so impressed by it. Strongly recommended.
Maryam is a female doctor in a small hospital/clinic in Saudi Arabia, a country that is so restrictive in its attitudes towards women that she regularly has male patients who choose to be diagnosed and treated by male nurses rather than a female doctor. She's also frustrated that the road outside her clinic is unpaved, which means the trolleys carrying emergency patients must be dragged through a literal mud swamp to reach the building. So, when she has an opportunity to run as a candidate for local council, she decides to do so, running on the platform of getting a proper road outside the clinic.
I really liked Haifaa Al-Mansour's previous film Wadjda, about a young girl transgressing against expectations for woman by wanting to ride a bike, and so was excited for another thoughtful exploration of what it's like to be a woman in this society and the strictures that are imposed on them. And everything about Maryam's efforts to run and the barriers she encounters is fantastic. There's the way she's not allowed to even be in the same room as men while she's campaigning, which forces her to sit in a back room trying to campaign through videoconferencing - and in one moment where she desperately has to get into the room with the men, she has to hurriedly put on her head covering as she runs. There's the scene where she films her video announcing her candidacy, and she winds up wearing a full head covering, with not even her eyes visible, so that she's just this black shape on screen. There's the casual way she's dismissed as a candidate - when she goes on a TV interview to talk about the need for paving this road, the interviewer just wants to talk to her about increasing public gardens, because that's all a woman candidate could be interested in. There's the women who seem to buy into her campaign, but then say they can't vote for her because their husbands wouldn't like it. Or there are just the general restrictions around everyday life - the need for her to have signed approval from her father before she can travel abroad, or the wedding parties where the women are all having fun until they announce the men are on their way, at which point they all grab their head coverings and subdue themselves. Or the absurd fact that as a doctor she apparently has to diagnose and treat people while wearing a full burka. All this is fantastic.
Unfortunately Al-Mansour makes a number of decisions that I do not understand. Firstly, there's the decision to make her decision to run an accident - she doesn't intend to run for local council, but there's someone she needs to speak to, and the only way she can get in to see him is by lodging an application to run. While she does quickly decide to genuinely run for council, the contrivance in getting her to that place seems really unnecessary - why do you need this complicated process when all you need is for her to be annoyed at the council for not fixing the problem (which she is), and then decide the only way to fix it is to run herself. Sure, the contrived process presented in the film does allow a chance to highlight another restriction imposed on women, but I feel the film is significantly impaired by seemingly removing the ability of its main character to deliberately make this massive decision.
There's also a strange creative choice to split the focus of the film to also include Maryam's father, a performer in a wedding band, who has an opportunity to go on a tour, including into some areas where extremists are opposed to the idea of playing music. And that's really interesting, and you could make an excellent film exploring that idea, but this film already has a fantastic premise, and so all the material with the father just feels like a diversion or extra padding in this film. I didn't really care about him or his story, so every time we went to him I just wanted to go back to see what Maryam is doing. The only point when her father's story actually seemed relevant to the main plot was at the start, when her father's absence is a key part of the contrivance that leads to her accidentally running for council. But as I've already said, that was a bad idea, and so the father's subplot is just another negative consequence of that poor decision.
Which is a shame, because this is 75 percent a fantastic movie that I loved, and so I'm disappointed to find there's 25 percent that I really didn't care about. It's not enough to actually just like the film, or even caution people from watching the film - it's just a disappointing bit of blah in an otherwise great film.
I was really excited to see Lauren Greenfield's new film, The Kingmaker, in the festival listing. Greenfield made a fantastic documentary a few years ago, The Queen of Versailles, about a wealthy couple building a massive mansion as a replica of the Palace of Versailles when the 2008 financial crisis hit. So I was intrigued to discover her new film was about Imelda Marcos, former first lady of the Philippines, another woman famous for conspicuous extravagance and consumption, complete with extensive interviews with the woman herself.
I really liked the way the film unfolds. You get the sense that Imelda Marcos must have felt this film would be an opportunity to rehabilitate her reputation internationally, and early on the film seems like it actually is the film that she's expected. The film introduces us to Imelda the saint, generous to a fault, handing out money to children as she is driven along the road, or going to visit the cancer ward she funded where she is so moved by the sick children that she starts handing them money. So right from the start, you can see the film being pointedly critical - she's someone who made her wealth stealing untold amounts of money from the people of the Philippines, and she feels her conscience is cleared by handing out a few token notes of cash. She's enjoying her largesse, but shows no interest in engaging with the people she's shoving money at - she barely even looks at then. The film spends a lot of time in interview with her, and she seems to have spent so long in self-justification that she has convinced herself that anything she says will be accepted - that we will, for instance, just admire her impressive art collection without ever thinking about how it was funded, or that we would feel great sympathy for someone who is unjustly kept from accessing her (millions upon millions of dollars of allegedly stolen) money being kept across 170 different banks. But as the film goes on, as it explores the history of the Marcos regime and the control that Imelda had over her husband's reign, as we learn about all the corruption, the imposition of martial law, the human rights violations, the torture, the violence, you're drawn down into the depths until emotionally it almost feels like a horror film. There's the assassination of Benigno Aquino Jr, Marcos' chief political rival, which Imelda claims to have played no part in and which she almost seems to believe (although it's a claim that doesn't seem to have much credibility), which ultimately lead to the downfall of her husband's regime.
But even after they flee the Philippines, the film feels like it's getting darker and darker. That's because earlier in the film we were also introduced to her son, Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos Jr, who is running for vice-president - and again it initially seems like a possibly positive portrait of a likeable man, but as the film goes on it becomes more and more a story about a woman who has groomed her children to feel an entitlement, a destiny to rule. We see sequences where Imelda is treated almost as a celebrity by her adoring public, which is absolutely chilling given the stories that we've heard by this point. This is a woman who talks casually about her friendship with Mao Tse-tung, Gaddafi, and Saddam Hussein, being treated almost as a messiah. It all culminates in a sequence set around the election night, and the question of whether Bongbong wins or loses the election for vice president. But it's also the night that the infamous President Duterte won on the back of promising to execute people for even minor drug crimes. And so there's a discussion about how this was inevitable - that the Marcos family left the country in such dire straits that it really pushed the country into economic decline, and that people in such desperate situations often find themselves clinging to strongmen like Duterte who promise that there's a simple solution to their economic woes. And then we learn that Duterte was funded by the Marcos family fortune as part of Imelda's efforts to secure her family's political position and influence, which means it doesn't matter whether Bongbong won or lost, because their influence is getting ever stronger.
There's a story told very early on in the film, presented as an amusing little anecdote, about how they decided to build a safari in the Philippines, so they had to have wild animals brought over from Africa and left to live on an island. Then we meet one of the people that had previously lived on this island, but who was forced to leave her home in order to make way for the wild animals, and suddenly we're aware of how completely separated from the consequences of her actions Marcos is. They wanted a safari, so they got a safari, and they don't need to think about the little people who were displaced in order to indulge their fancies. It's a story the film returns to repeatedly, and every time the story gets darker and darker as the full implications are revealed. We hear how, after the removal of Marcos, the displaced people returned to their historic home, but now they constantly have to fight to protect what they have from being consumed by animals that are out of control. Ultimately, we hear how horrifically sick and uncared for these animals are, or how they are terribly stunted due to multiple generations of inbreeding. It's a fascinating story that the film uses to great effect as being symbolic of the influence of the Marcos family as a whole.
It's a fine piece of documentary filmmaking, and I particularly appreciated the way the film was structured, taking it away from a strictly linear chronological retelling, and more into a decline from puff piece promotional material to something much more chilling and shocking. I recommend it.
Over the past few years, Chilean director Pablo Larrain - who made films such as Tony Manero, No, and Jackie - has apparently become someone whose name alone is enough to make me interested in a film. So when I saw his credit in the festival programme, I didn't even bother reading the description - I knew I wanted to see it and I didn't want to know what to expect.
The film has a deliberately fragmentary and disorienting opening that I loved. The first image we see has a hanging street lamp in flames. We then watch intercut sequences of dancer Ema giving a striking performance with her dance troupe, of her visiting someone at hospital, and of her visiting an official pleading for her son and being told that she's not a good mother. Gradually we come to understand that twentysomething Ema was married to Gaston, her (significantly older) choreographer, and when the couple were unable to have children they decided to adopt a 12 year old boy. But the boy was troubled and had behavioural issues, including a pyromania that culminated in setting Ema's sister on fire, leading to Gaston insisting on returning the young boy, who is adopted out to another family. But Ema struggles with the loss of her son, which also leads to the breakdown of her marriage, and she begins to vent her grief by acting out in a variety of ways - whether it be stalking her son, bedding any person (man or woman) she chooses, or indulging her own pyromania.
The film is quite extraordinary. The character of Ema specialises in a dance style called reggaeton, which is kind of earthy and impulsive and fluid, and filled with a vibrant edgy energy, and her dance sequences really are impressive (I was particularly glad this was one of my in-cinema festival films, because the sound presentation of the music was so strong in a way that almost no home audio system could reproduce). And indeed, that's much like how the film itself is presented to us. It feels like it's constantly moving, spiralling in this direction or that direction, leaving us struggling to catch up. I particularly enjoyed the way Larrain uses montages to present many of the experiences that she has in the film. It seems to be saying that the individual experiences she has really aren't all that important, and to linger on them would give too much weight to one particular event all the other. What matters is the totality of her experience, and how they shape her and move her into the place she finds herself.
In that title role, Mariana Di Girolamo is exceptional. It's a compelling and intriguing character, a person who is very pointedly not dealing with the pain of her loss, and so that needs to be ever-present, even if pushed aside. It's also a wonderfully physical performance - as a dancer, Ema is always connected to, and very comfortable in, her body, and the film just loves to sit and watch her move. She also has something of the child in her - at times she's impulsive and acts without thinking, at other times she thinks too much, developing schemes and plans with too little consideration given to those affected by her actions. It could easily be a character that is offputting, but Di Girolamo brings a natural life and excitement to the character and makes her feel feel very real and understandable. No matter how badly she's behaving at the moment, she always has our sympathy and we're always rooting for her.
As her husband Gaston, Gael Garcia Bernal gives an intriguingly subdued performance. He's someone who feels warn down and exhausted - if his wife is avoiding the loss of this son, he's almost overburdened by it, especially as it was his choice to give this child back and because he's the one responsible for them being unable to have their own children in the first place. It's also a very uncertain role - he doesn't really know where he stands with Ema, and so he has to navigate around her.
I did find myself troubled by the way the film ended. Without going into specifics, Ema manages to find a way to get what she thinks she wants, and she does so in a way that she seems to think is perfectly fine (and no, her ultimate solution is not what you're thinking). At the same time, as an audience, we're very aware of the damage that has been done, and that will be done, as a result of her actions. And it was for that reason that I found myself looking at the credits to see who wrote the film. And it looks to me like the film was written by three men. And that does bother me somewhat. There's an irrationality and a delusionment to that ending that I think runs the risk of seeming to be promoting a "women are crazy" narrative. I don't think that's what they were trying to do, but I am curious how the story would change if they had a female involved in writing the story. Still, overall I found it an impressive piece of filmmaking that I really enjoyed.
In his autobiography, Sir Edmund Hillary referred to his fellow climber, Earle Riddiford, who he'd climbed with on several key expeditions in the Himalayas prior to the ascent of Everest, saying "I didn't much like him, none of us did. I never had to share a rope with him, and I would never want to" - which to a climber is a terrible insult. These comments confused and upset Riddiford's wife and children, who had always understood Hillary to be a good friend of their father's, and so they made this documentary as an attempt to correct the record on their father.
It's not a good documentary, on a number of levels. Part of the problem is is that there's the germ of several interesting films in here, but there's a basic failure to decide what the story is that's being told. You could make something interesting from the idea of what it's like to be someone whose father was publicly criticised by an untouchable hero - it would be tricky to do, but done well I think that would be a fascinating film. Or you could just go the conventional route and tell the story of the less well-known early expeditions that paved the way for the story we all know. You could easily make an excellent film out of that. This tries to tell both those stories, along with the rather boring story of a family trip to Nepal to visit the mountain their father climbed, and as a result it's a film that does nothing well.
The fact is, when they're dealing with Hillary's comments about their father, they just come across as sulky. "He said a mean thing about my dad, Wah!" They don't really go into any further depth than that. They never get any answer about why Hillary might have made that comment, so it just becomes a question the film asks at the start of the film and never answers. But if the Riddifords really want to know why Hillary might have said that he didn't like their father, perhaps they could have started by asking themselves. After all, we learn that the director Richard was for many years estranged from his father, as was his sister Anna, while the marriage between their parents was described as troubled. So when they leap to the defence of their father, who they didn't get along with, to argue over the comments by someone else who said he also didn't get along with their father, it rings hollow. Perhaps you don't need some mysterious event to have taken place on the expedition in order to explain Hillary's comment; all you need is for someone to be irritable and unpleasant to be around, and then to be trapped on a mountain with that person. Mystery solved.
But here's the thing: I also don't understand the choice to frame the film in that way. We're talking about two sentences in an entire book; even if it's a really popular book, which I believe it was, how many people will really remember this side comment about Riddiford? So if you want to make a film that will correct the record about your father, just make a film about your father and the impressive things he did. "This is my father, Earle Riddiford. He organised the first New Zealand climbing expedition to the Himalayas. He climbed Mukat Parbat, an achievement which led to Ed Hillary and him being invited on the initial expedition to survey Mount Everest, which in turn led to Hillary's incredible achievement a couple of years later." There you are - record corrected. And if that had been the film that had been made, I would have walked out of that film thinking about what an impressive person Riddiford must have been - after all, I never read Hillary's autobiography, so would have had no idea what he thought of Riddiford had they not spent the entire film sulking about it. Instead, I walked out of the film thinking about how, as impressive as his achievements were, he must have been a bastard to be around. The film actually amplifies Hillary's comment. And I'm not sure that's what they wanted from the film.
And leave aside the counterproductive framing of the story - it's a bafflingly poorly made movie. I was surprised something this amateurish had made into the festival. Almost nothing in the film feels professional. Interviews and conversations feature moments where we hear the initial setup conversation between the filmmakers and the interviewees, which give us no new information, just recap things we already know, and which should have been cut from the film. Some of the camera work is frustratingly bad - most bizarrely, a shot of someone setting up a kitchen table before a gathering where the shot was filmed through an open window from outside the house, and distractingly we can see the reflection of the film-maker in the window through the entire shot. There is also some beautiful footage flying over the Himalayas, which is impeded somewhat by the fact that it has a slightly murky quality that lets us know this footage has been shot through the glass window of the plane - so suddenly I'm not thinking about the beauty of this mountain range, but instead I'm wondering how difficult it would actually have been to have the camera outside the plane, the way most other filmmakers filming this type of material seem to manage to achieve. Or there is some strangely amateurish editing - in one sequence a grand and spectacular music cue is cut short instantly with a hard cut to a new subject, with no effort to blend the music away. Even the on-screen titles and captions looks like the type of generic titles available in off-the-shelf basic video editing software. To be honest, I walked out of the film convinced that this was the work of a first-time filmmaker, someone who is enthusiastic about cameras and filming video, but who had never before made a movie. And so I was shocked to discover the filmmaker is someone with 30 or 40 years of filmmaking experience, both documentary and narrative. This does not feel like the work of an experienced filmmaker.
What's disappointing is that I genuinely think there is the potential for an excellent documentary to be made from this material. Perhaps the director was simply too close to the material to get the necessary distance, but for whatever reason, almost every decision made in the film was the wrong decision. And that just leaves us with a bad film.
There are a handful of legendary interview books with famous directors, where someone just sat down and interviewed some great film figure for an extended period, and turned that interview into the definitive record of the director's view of their own work. Hitchcock/Truffaut is the most celebrated example of this, and is an essential read for all film lovers, while another key text is Cameron Crowe's interview with Billy Wilder, Conversations with Wilder. I'd never heard of Kubrick by French film critic Michel Ciment, but after watching this documentary drawing on audio recordings of Ciment's series of interviews with Stanley Kubrick, I immediately went and ordered a second-hand copy of this out-of-print book, and I'm excited to read it. Kubrick was famously reluctant to speak to the press about his work, and if this documentary is any indication it will be fascinating to dig deeper and see what he has to say.
The film has the expected conventional start, running through his early life, his initial work as a photographer for Look magazine, his entry into filmmaking with his documentary shorts, culminating in his first narrative feature film, Fear and Desire, which he famously hated and withdrew from circulation - it's amusing to hear him describe the film as "pompous". (The film has really only been widely available in the last 10 years, and speaking as someone who now owns a copy of the film, it's pretty bloody terrible, albeit with flashes of the filmmaker he would become. And it's definitely pompous.)
After that reasonably conventional entry into the film, I really appreciated that it stopped being a strictly chronological run through his films, instead adopting more of a thematic approach to the material, following a train of thought that connects one film to another. This does mean that some films get short shrift - of his early films, only Paths of Glory gets much attention, in a segment where it's discussed in context of his other war films, Dr Strangelove and Full Metal Jacket, while I was surprised that Lolita, the first of the "canonical" Kubrick films, is almost ignored. But despite that, it felt like a really strong way to approach this material - we're not examining a collection of films, we're looking at a body of work as a whole, and looking for connections and commonalities between these seemingly disparate movies. For instance, I'm not sure that I ever would have thought to draw a connection between Pvte. Joker (who wears both a peace symbol and a helmet that says Born To Kill as a Jungian thing) and Alex (a young man whose interests are rape, ultra-violence, and Beethoven), so it's intriguing to hear Kubrick talk about them as the same character - in both cases he's trying to create a figure for audience identification that will force us to really examine our own human darkness.
One thing I was rather pleased about was how well-represented Eyes Wide Shut was. I had been prepared for the film to be completely ignored - after all, Kubrick died a matter of days after finishing his initial cut, so when would he have discussed the film? What I had forgotten was that Kubrick had been working on the film on and off for over 30 years, so while his discussions about the film might not necessarily be reflective of the film he made - perhaps when he made this comment or that comment he was talking about the comedy version with Steve Martin he was working on at one point - it still gives a strong insight into Kubrick's thoughts on the material and what it was about the project that spoke to him.
It's also fascinating when he starts to talk about things that touch on the legend of Stanley Kubrick. So, for instance, it's well-known that Kubrick was prone to almost over-researching in preparation for a project, and it's therefore interesting to hear him describe the hundreds of boxes that contained 18th-century paintings torn out of art books in an attempt to find genuine period clothing designs for the costumes of Barry Lyndon, because for Kubrick realism was his ultimate aspiration - that same focus on realism was what prompted him to shoot the film entirely by candlelight.
There is of course the very strong perception of Kubrick as a genius planner who would have every aspect of the film planned out in advance, no mistakes ever allowed, but that's a notion that gets easily dismissed, as we hear him talk about his need to constantly improvise to work around the unexpected issues on-set that always arise.
And then there are the stories about his taking an excessive number of takes - driven in a large part by a need for everything to be perfect. You get Shelley Duvall, probably the person most notoriously subjected to Kubrick's excessive number of takes, talking about how the more times you go through a scene, the more you start to reach a place as an actor where you're not even conscious of performing, you're just naturally existing in this space and this scene. But, as another contributor tells us, the quest for perfect is impossible and could easily become an actual impediment. What's the point of having a perfect acting performance if you take so long and shoot the scene so often that now the hastily put-up wallpaper is now peeling off the wall?
But that actually brings me to probably my main problem with the film. The film has a lot of archival interviews with actors and other filmworkers discussing the experience of working with Kubrick. But while I enjoyed watching those interviews, and it was interesting hearing these people reflect on that experience, you do feel that this is a distraction from what the film could have been. I would have loved nothing better then a full-length feature film documentary that was just Stanley Kubrick speaking about his work, so whenever we go to hear what Tom Cruise or R Lee Ermey have to say about him, as great as they are, it just feels like the film is moving away from what made it special.
The film ends with a really nice quote by Kubrick that really does summarise his work, why it works so well, and why I always leave a Kubrick film feeling enriched:
"How disappointing you make the end of a film is a matter of taste or artistic preference, but you are always faced with the problem of, are you going to try to reinforce this illusion, which melodrama fosters, or are you going to try to reflect what one sees about life? Melodrama uses all the problems of the world, and all the disasters which befall the main characters, to finally show you that the world is a fair and benevolent place, and all the tests and trials and seeming misfortunes which occur in the end just reinforce this belief. But tragedy, or honesty or an attempt at presenting life in a way that seems closer to reality than melodrama, can leave you with a feeling of desolation. But certainly the formula approach, which presents the world in a way other than it is, doesn't seem to have a great deal of merit unless you're just making entertainment."
Ultimately it was a fascinating and enlightening documentary about one of cinema's great artists. While I personally would have liked the film to have used even more of the interviews with the man himself, that's probably a consequence of the film's title - when you call your film Kubrick by Kubrick, you set up expectations that the film deviates from at times. But regardless, it's still a well constructed documentary that I thoroughly enjoyed.
A socially awkward, gawky young woman called Patty, constantly the subject of taunts calling her the R-word, spends her days cleaning the cages in a pet store, and her nights taking intimate photos of her pleasuring herself to the music of her favourite punk band and sending the photos to the band's mysterious leader. One day she helps Simon, a pyromaniac drug dealer, hide from the police, and then suggests that he could hide out in her family's house, where they discover they share an interest in punk music.
I think the first thing that drew my attention about Dinner in America was the cast. In one of the two lead roles, you have Kyle Gallner, who I remembered playing the introverted and troubled Beaver on Veronica Mars 15 years ago, and I was interested to see him playing such a different role - and he does give an extremely entertaining performance, as a kind of extreme figure who follows his initial impulse, which is always excessive, but it's such a strongly combative performance that it's unclear why people even want to be around him. I was also attracted the film by the supporting cast, with actors like Pat Healy, Lea Thompson, and Mary Lynn Rajskub. Thompson has a very fun scene early on as Simon's soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend's extremely horny mother, but it's a single scene cameo, while Healy and Rajskub, as Patty's protective and conservatives parents, have more significant roles but (other than one cliche scene where they accidentally get stoned) don't really get too much to do. I came away from the film mostly being impressed with Emily Skeggs as Patty, who I had never seen before and who really is delightful. The film ultimately is her story, and I felt she and the film had a good grasp on who this character was. It can be easy for films that have a character who comes out of their shell to make the difference so significant that the character is almost unrecognisable, so I like that the Patty of the end of the film is clearly the same Patty as at the start, but just slightly more free and confident.
Unfortunately, I didn't really like the film. The opening 10 or 15 minutes are almost aggressively unpleasant - the filmmakers seemed to hold to the idea that having people yelling a lot is automatically funny, while the filmmaking felt hyperactive and unstable. The film does ease quite a bit, but then it just starts to feel aimless - it takes about half an hour for our two main characters to even meet, and (unless I missed something) another 15 minutes before the main hook of the film is revealed, by which point the film is nearly half over. From that point, it doesn't actually soften (after all, when the corpse of a dead cat is a pivotal element in your revenge scheme, there's something excessive going on), but it does become something that I didn't hate myself for watching. That said, I still wouldn't actually say that I enjoyed it.
My favourite film from the festival, Driveways is the story of a friendship between an eight-year-old Asian American boy and an elderly Korean War veteran. After Cody's aunt dies, his mother brings him to stay in this small town while she prepares her sister's house for sale. But the two sisters had been estranged, and his mother Kathy discovers her sister was a hoarder and she is facing months of work to tidy the house. Meanwhile Cody wanders next door where he meets Del, who seems to spend his day sitting out on a porch or going to the VFW to play bingo. And the two become really close friends despite the eight decades that separate them.
And that's really all there is to the film. It's not a film of great dramatic event, it's not a film where you're on the edge waiting to see where this story will go, it's just a film about spending time with these characters. It's a slow, observational film in which none of the actual events really matter, and the weight of the film come from the often unexpressed emotion that underlies everyone's actions. And when the film does have the opportunity to really exploit events for some real pathos - say, the birthday party that doesn't turn out as expected, or Del's friend who's developing dementia - it determinedly undercuts that impulse in favour of a more subtle and understated emotion. And I really loved that.
When I heard that Brian Dennehy had died, I was surprised by how much that news affected me. Dennehy really had his heyday in the 80s and 90s, right at the time when I was growing up and becoming passionate about movies and TV, and he was one of those figures who it seemed was always on TV. I hadn't really thought about him much lately until the news came out, so this was a wonderful opportunity to really engage with his work and appreciate just how talented he was. It's a wonderfully taciturn performance, in which everything is unstated and understated, and yet there is such a wealth of emotion running through everything. Del is someone who failed to be the parent he should have been to his own child, and who therefore sees in Cody a chance to be the supportive father that he should have been for his daughter.
I have enjoyed Hong Chau as an actress ever since encountering her on Treme, and especially after having had a great year with her work on Watchmen and Homecoming, I was excited to see her here. And that was a slight disappointment for me - as the person with the lead acting credit in the film, I was expecting her to be a more prominent role than she had - it is definitely a supporting performance behind Dennehy and Lucas Jaye as her son. But she does do excellent work here, as a woman who is coming to terms with the loss of her sister, and with the discovery that she simply didn't know her sister at all and now can never recover that relationship, while simultaneously having the parental concern over her son, trying to protect him and help him discover who he is without over-mothering.
And as Cody, Lucas Jaye is just an absolute delight. Director Andrew Ahn manages to get a performance out of the young boy that is absolutely natural and believable. There's something about the way his eyes light up with excitement whenever he sees Del that makes the rest of the film work - you fully believe the friendship and genuine love between these two people. If there had been any sense of artifice in the performance, it would have rendered that central relationship unbelievable and destroyed the entire film, but because it's such a genuine performance it really lifts the film.
It's really is a hard film to put into words just how and why it is so good. It's just a film that gets every note and beat exactly right. There are terms like "feel-good movie" or "heartwarming", and ordinarily I would run a mile from any film that described itself like that - such films often come by their emotion cheaply - but that's the only way I can describe what this film does. It's a film that presents its characters with honesty and true warmth, so that even when the film's events become rough - and the film does climax with a scene that is a real punch to the gut - that warmth and love still radiates through the film. It's a beautiful piece of filmmaking, and I loved it.
Although I still had a few films to watch at home, The County was my final in-cinema screening of the festival. And it was pretty strong. Inga works with her husband on their dairy farm in a remote part of Iceland. Members of a local farming co-op, they're forced not only to sell their milk to the co-op, but also to buy all of their (massively overpriced) farming supplies from it, and they're also massively in debt to the co-op after being pressured to take out massive loans to fund mechanisation of the milking process. It seems that almost everything in their life is governed by the co-op, and if anyone tries to step out of its control, the organisation will destroy them. But after her husband dies, Inga, blaming the pressures of the co-op for his death, decides to fight and take down the corrupt organisation.
I was initially a little bit thrown by the tone of the film - I was expecting the film to be much funnier, I think largely because of the comparison the festival programme made to Woman at War, a film that was undoubtedly a comedy. Instead, it's rather an effective piece of polemic, attacking these structures that are apparently quite common in Iceland. There's a real anger that runs through the film, outraged at the way these organisations, which were established to help provide support for their farmers, can instead grow to take a destructive position in the community, taking advantage of the vulnerability and the reliance of the people they are supposed to service to cement the power of the organisation itself and those in control of it. Which I realise is making the film sound extremely heavy - it's not. It may not be especially comedic, but it does have a lightness of touch and a constant focus on being entertaining. And they even managed to have one genuinely funny, laugh-out-loud moment, a great scene in which Inga decides to dispose of her excess milk in a way that makes her feelings about the co-op very public. But part of what makes that scene so fun is that we've spent so much time caught in the web of the co-op, existing in the same frustrated emotional space as Inga, that in that moment we feel the exact same release that Inga feels - and it's so freeing.
I really did enjoy the work of Arndís Hrönn Egilsdóttir in the central role of Inga. I could be wrong about this, but I think this is one of those instances where the main character is the focal point of literally every scene in the film, and I suspect these types of performances could be tough on the actor - you need someone who is abrasive enough that she antagonises all around her, while being appealing enough that we are happy to spend all that time with her, because there's no respite if we don't like her. Egilsdóttir is absolutely perfect in the role - her introductory scene, literally wrapping a half-born calf in chains to wrench it out of its mother with every ounce of strength she has, was particularly successful in instantly communicating exactly who this character was, her strength and determination, and by the end of this wordless scene, I felt I had an absolute understanding of whom Inga was. And one thing I particularly enjoyed was the way the film would often step away from the main plot, the conflict with the co-op, instead simply allowing us the space to observe Inga as she navigates her way around the farm, constantly in command of its operations, never allowing the loss of her husband or the stresses of the conflict get in the way of her effective management of her business. It's a wonderfully physical performance, at some points I believe almost wordless, relying on a sly stare or a physical posture to communicate much about the character. And it's extremely effective.
One thing that really impressed me about the film was how perfectly executed its ending was. And I'm going to avoid spoilers, but I will say that the film culminates in a scene in which a decision has to be made, and I found myself really curious how the film would resolve itself. If the decision goes one way, then the film becomes downbeat and overly depressing; if the decision goes the other way, the film becomes overly happy and optimistic. The film seems to be aware of the possibility of this conflict - the moment of decision is shot in a way that almost seems as though they wanted to leave the outcome ambiguous, never answering which way the decision went. But it turns out the film manages to thread the needle perfectly, simultaneously giving us an ending that is both hopeful and defeated, or defeated and hopeful, whichever way you look at it. It's not a happy ending, it's not a sad ending, it's not an ambiguous ending, it's all of them and none of them. And it's a brilliant, perfectly satisfying ending.
I found it a particularly enjoyable film, and the communal experience of watching such an entertaining film was a particular reminder about the value of the cinema experience. I obviously understand the reasons for the decision to go with a primarily online film festival this year, but there is no experience like watching an excellent film with an engaged audience, and The County really emphasised that. I just hope that next year we can get back to the cinema experience for the festival.
We first meet our lead character Xhafer, an immigrant from Kosovo now living in Germany, when he returns home to find a dead rat hanging on his gate. It's an obvious and open attack on a man who already feels like an outsider because of his status as an immigrant, but it's also an attack that is very specifically targeted at him, touching on a particular point of sensitivity for him. Meanwhile the attacks keep coming - he's left out of work emails communicating vital information, he's misidentified as Croatian at meetings, and he's constantly undercut by one co-worker who he starts to suspect was responsible for leaving the rat. Meanwhile his wife is slowly separating from him, casually dismissing his feelings of being persecuted while seemingly having an affair.
It's a fascinating and very personal portrait about the experience of being an outsider in a community - I note that writer/director Visas Morina is himself a Kosovan-born immigrant - and I appreciated its nuanced approach to the subject. Xhafer is very willing to attribute whatever attacks he comes under to racism, but while the film doesn't dismiss that as a motivation for certain actions, it's very much about the facts that race is just one thing that defines who we are, that our interpersonal relationships are formed by the unique cocktail of all of our characteristics, and it can be easy to use those characteristics that we have no control over as a way of avoiding trying to address those things that we can change. Xhafer is so busy focusing on his victimhood that he's blinded to the fact that he's also kind of an arsehole, and that he makes himself into someone that people simply don't want to have to deal with. And as for the person who he suspects of specifically targeting him - it turns out that that person has very particular personal reasons for resenting him which also have nothing to do with race. But that's not to dismiss the place of racism in the attacks he experiences; more that his sensitivity about being different in this society causes him not to consider how his actions have contributed to his experiences.
I really was impressed with Mišel Matičević as Xhafer. We spend the entire film with him, caught up in his worldview, unable to see anything else. We're almost trapped with him, and he could be a very difficult character to have to spend time with - he's increasingly paranoid, frustrated, angry, and all this is just stewing and building, and this is the space that we called on to dwell in. But Matičević gives a sympathetic performance, which allows us to engage with and root for him despite all his frustrations.
A big part of the film's success is also due to the understanding brought by Morina's direction, which manages to throw the audience into this unsettled headspace, as he roams his sickly and claustrophobic workplace (great production design work). It's a filming approach that I wasn't initially prepared for - the festival programme compared the film to the work of Michael Haneke and Ruben Östlund, and there definitely is a thematic similarity between their work and this film, but while both those two have a cooly static and observational style, Morina's camera is much more active - but once my expectations were adjusted I was able to settle in and appreciate the skill on display. It really is an excellent and gripping film, and I recommend it.
A pretty great British coming-of-age film Perfect 10 follows Leigh, a young teenage girl whose only apparent interest is gymnastics, something she had shown a talent and a passion for, which her coach tries to nurture despite her recent decline in performance. One day she comes home to find an older teen boy, Joe, in her house - he explains that he's her previously unknown half-brother, and they start to hang out and build a new relationship. But Joe is also involved in some petty and not-so-petty crime, and he starts to draw Leigh into his lifestyle.
I was just utterly charmed by this film. I loved how completely true the portrayal of her life was - I was never a teenage girl, never did gymnastics, and my criminal activities have been limited, but the film was filled with moments that had me flashing back to my own experiences, and it hurts me to recall them just as much as it hurt Leigh to go through them. In particular, the way it portrayed the social anxiety of teenage life, the way that bullying, embarrassment, and insecurity can act against a person and cause them to abandon something that they love, felt very real. I also thought it was fascinating how the film explores the idea of a reconstructed family, of the emotional confusion that must come with suddenly finding this person in your life and needing to discover who you are in relation to this other person. The film culminates in a great sequence in which Leigh's two worlds, and the only two people who really show her any love in the film, come into collision, and it's fantastic and suspenseful.
In the main role, Frankie Box is just perfect. She's a typical teenager, sullen and uncommunicative, at times stubbornly so, and because she says so little she has to rely on her physicality and her expressions to communicate the mental space in which she exists, and it's impressively clear. And then there are the moments where she actually gets to be happy or proud of herself, and she just lights up the screen with a radiating joy that was infectious. I believe this was her first film, and I differently hope to see more from her.
I also really enjoyed Sharlene Whyte as Gemma, the woman who runs and teaches at the gym. She has a really challenged relationship with Leigh, constantly trying to reach her and engage with her, and there's a clear pride that she takes in who work and the influence she has on girls who otherwise may not have the outlet to explore their talents, a palpable affection that Gemma clearly has for Leigh, and a determination to create a connection what's her. It's a nicely appealing performance.
I really appreciated the simplicity of the film's direction. It sits very much in the tradition of British social realism, but whereas such films often to me feel positively miserablist and disheartening, there's a lightness of touch that keeps Perfect 10 from getting too weighed down or hopeless. Which was a relief, because I liked Leigh so much that the film would have been unbearable had it taken a more pessimistic stance. Instead you finish the film with a sense of real hope, which was not what I was expecting from a film of this type. It's a beautifully understated gem of a film, and I very much enjoyed it.
Director Alexandre O Phillippe has developed a real reputation in recent years for insightful and probing documentaries about significant films that take a different approach than just a standard "making of". I sadly missed Memory, his documentary about the movie Alien, but I was extremely impressed by 78/52, in which he made a entire documentary exploring and examining a single movie scene, the shower scene from Psycho, in order to illuminate the scene and the movie in a way I don't think has ever been done before. So I was intrigued by the idea that Phillippe just spent 6 days talking to William Friedkin about The Exorcist, in order to get really deep into examining his thought process in trying to create some of the most shocking and terrifying scenes in movie history.
Earlier when I saw Kubrick on Kubrick, I expressed frustration that the film was constantly cutting away from interview with the director to get comment and reflections from other collaborators. Leap of Faith is pretty much exactly the film that I wanted the Kubrick to be - it's all William Friedkin (even the interviewer is entirely omitted saved for one moment where his comment is necessary to understand Friedkin's response). And there's never any sense that the film is padding out the runtime by using film clips; what clips are used are carefully chosen to illustrate a specific point and no more. The entire film really is an opportunity to sit and listen to William Friedkin discuss his work for 105 minutes.
He talks about how focused he is on setting the mood of the piece, rather than focusing on the beat-by-beat storytelling - an art which he laments has been lost. After all, if you're just telling the story of Regan's possession, you could very easily cut the introductory scenes in Iraq which at first glance can feel irrelevant - but those scenes are so vital to establishing the ominous tone of the piece, in a film that does take its time, and making clear that the film is not just focused on the modern day world, but is about a battle that has taken place for thousands of years. Similarly, those early scenes of Chris and Regan could certainly be trimmed, but they're absolutely essential for establishing the warmth of the relationship between mother and daughter, and to firmly establish the degree of change that Regan experiences once she is possessed, shocking the audience and allowing in the possession scenes to build in intensity.
He discusses his inspiration as a film-maker - the cinema, literature, and art, that feed into his work. I was particularly intrigued to learn that the iconic image from the movie, the shot of Father Merrin approaching the house, the moment that was the basis for the movie poster, was actually inspired by a painting by René Magritte. But he talked about how you always need to be open as a director to finding those grace notes that lift the film - the unexpected beam of light, or the way the nun's gowns catch in the wind - capturing these moments that are inconsequential, that don't push the story forward, but that reflect those images that linger in the memory and that enrich both the film and life.
Understandably, the film spends a lot of time on the movie's music, which was an entire saga by itself. I had previously heard the story about him approaching the legendary Bernard Herrmann to do the score, where the famously difficult composer declared that the film was a "piece of shit" and insisted that the score needed a church organ, a shockingly cliched idea from a man who was often so inventive. I love Herrmann, and would have be fascinated to see what he would have done with The Exorcist, but those ideas do sound very wrong for the film. I had not heard the story about how Friedkin had approached his friend Lalo Schifrin, composer of the Mission: Impossible theme, to do the film, only to be disappointed when the score delivered was loud and bombastic, not the quiet and unsettling work requested, and how his decision to reject that score actually ended their friendship. He also discussed digging through hundreds of recordings trying to find the right piece before he found "Tubular Bells", the beautiful but rhythmically unsettling piece that became irrevocably tied to the movie.
I just found the film fascinating and illuminating. Friedkin is reflective and thoughtful, philosophical and intelligent, and even though he must have spoken about this film hundreds of times, he still discusses it with passion and excitement. If you know and enjoy The Exorcist, it's an obvious must-see, but even if you've never seen that film, his insights and reflections about the art of cinema as a whole make this film worth seeking out. I really loved it.
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And then there were the last two films I watched in the festival, the ones I never got around to writing about. And nearly 1 1/2 years later, my detailed memories of the films have pretty much gone, at all I'm left with are moments, images, and impressions.
And that's it for my 2020 festival. My 2021 festival starts tomorrow, and hopefully will go well.
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