So here's the thing,
I genuinely did not think I'd be able to write this post. Even as I bought my film festival tickets, I was thinking what a pointless exercise it was, that there's almost certainly be a Covid outbreak and the festival would be cancelled. Every day, I'd look at the announcement of new infection numbers with anxiety over whether they would affect the festival. Auckland had already been cancelled, then Christchurch was postponed a week after a case emerged in that city, and then a couple of days into our festival the Hamilton leg was cancelled. But while we had a short scare with one case that had travelled to Wellington, we made it through the festival unaffected.
One of the defining elements of the film festival experience is the fact that it's in the middle of winter - you're used to walking out of a cinema in the late hours into a bitterly cold and miserable night - and so the idea of a festival in November, in late spring, just a handful of weeks away from the start of summer, seemed wrong. But apparently it's the festival that brings that weather out - as soon as the festival began, we started getting really harsh winds, we started getting frequent rain, and in the last few days it even started being stormy. And then the festival ended, and the weather went back to normal.
It was a weird festival experience - with social distancing requirements, I'd find myself sitting in the Embassy, a cinema that normally holds 700 people, in a "sold out" session of 270. But still, after the let-down of last year's mostly-online festival, which (except for the small number of cinema screenings) didn't feel any different to any other night watching streaming movies, it was exciting to get back to the cinema for a proper experience of 2 1/2 weeks of intense and engaging movie viewing.
So, as always, here are my reactions, my responses to the films I saw, taken from my Facebook posts. These are not reviews, these are just attempts to record my thoughts about the films, and sometimes even just to try to process what I feel about them, in the immediate aftermath of watching something. And that's a big part of why I write these - the festival is so overwhelming that otherwise it would be too easy to just forget about most of these films, so this is a way of capturing that initial response. That means they're written mainly for myself, although they're also written with an awareness that others may read them, so I generally try to avoid giving too many spoilers. They were all written within two days of watching a film, so the films were all still very fresh in my memory. But that also means they're written in a rush, so the writing is often quite rough; I also use voice recognition to prepare them (I speak faster than I type), and while I try to catch all of the misinterpreted text, it's very possible the odd word may have slipped through that voice recognition incorrectly identified.
So here we are - Film Festival 2021:
[Comments on some 34 films, after the jump]
Riders of Justice
Mads Mikkelsen stars as Markus, a skilled army officer who is forced to end his tour of duty after his wife is killed in a train crash. One day he's approached by two data analysts, one a survivor of the train crash, who believe that the crash was a deliberate effort by the Riders of Justice bike gang to kill the lead witness in the trial against the gang leader. And once they find evidence that the leader's brother left the train moments before the crash, they decide to seek revenge, drawing the attention of the gang in their direction.
The festival program made the film seem like it was going to be a Danish take on John Wick, but while it certainly has moments that are reminiscent of those films - in several scenes Markus shows a practiced skill and speed in taking out his disorganised targets that comes from his military experience - it does feel very different. The film is much more reflective and contemplative then you might have expected - the main theme running through the film is the question about coincidence and how different events and circumstances, many outside our control or even our knowledge, can feed into the experiences that define us. (After all, none of this film would have happened had a random unconnected grandfather not decided to buy his granddaughter the bike that she wants for Christmas from a dodgy supplier - this leads to Markus' daughter's bike being stolen, which leads to them being in the train that crashed, which leads to all this chaos and death.) The film spends an unexpected amount of time talking about these type of questions, but it's presented in an engaging and visual way that really connects the audience to the idea, and that is just fascinating to watch.
It's also unexpectedly funny - there is a constant stream of sharp jokes and genuine wit that for the most part lifts the tone of the film and prevents it from becoming dry. Not all of the jokes are successful - I was particularly uncomfortable with the running jokes the film made at the expense of the young man who had been kept by the gang as a sex slave. But for the most part, the film just works and achieves an impressive unity of tone, expertly balancing the humour, reflectiveness, and violence into a film that has a clear sense of its identity.
As we would expect, Mads Mikkelsen again proves what a phenomenal actor he is. Here he's someone completely consumed by grief and rage - he's come straight out of his tour of duty into this terrible situation, and he's someone who feels like he's so constantly coiled up, it's like he never had a chance to decompress after his time in the conflict zone, and so he's still walking around expecting a threat to come from behind every corner. But there's also an element where he is actively trying to avoid dealing with the grieving process, which frustrates his daughter who sees her father trying to escape the experience they've had and go forward with just killing people because he's more comfortable with that. It's a compelling acting performance, and one I really took delight in.
It's not a film I see myself remembering with great detail in coming years, but it's an extremely entertaining movie, and hopefully marks the start of a successful festival.
Censor
I approached Censor with high expectations, having heard very good things about it from critics in the UK. And I was pleased that, for the most part, the film really lived up to my hopes.
Enid is a young woman still traumatised by the mysterious disappearance of her young sister while the two of them were playing together as children. Now working as a film censor in Britain during the 1980s, the era of the "video nasties", she is disturbed to watch a particularly gory horror that is eerily reminiscent of her sister's disappearance. Digging into the director's other films, she stumbles across an actress who may be her missing sister, and so she has to investigate to find out who this woman is.
My experience of the video nasties is extremely limited. I'm not a big horror person, and certainly wouldn't want to seek out the more extreme works so, looking at the official list, the only ones I've seen are the more conventional titles - The Evil Dead, Night of the Living Dead, Friday the 13th, Suspiria, and a film called The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith that I saw at Film Society. So I can't really comment about the film's accuracy as a representation of a video nasty. I do know that the reputation for many of these films is that they're often very slow, punctuated by moments of extreme (and extremely fake-looking) violence - and if so, the film does effectively replicate that style. I was bracing myself for something much more visceral, and was pleased by how much the film focused instead on a tone of insidious dread creeping through every moment - you feel yourself spiralling with the character as she becomes obsessed with trying to rescue her sister from this evil filmmaker. The moments of violence, when they come, are quite absurd - they're extreme in the way that leaves the audience laughing with shock at what they're watching, but they're also deliberately unconvincing, using 1980s technology like obvious dummies to achieve an effect. The film also has a lurid use of colour that felt very appropriate - at times it put me in mind of the original Suspiria. (The other main point of reference I found myself reflecting on was the more recent Berberian Sound Studio - a very different film, but they're both works of extreme style that explore the emotional impact that cinema can have on the viewer.)
One thing I was surprised by was how the film approached the role of the censor. For a film made by horror fans, I had half-expected the person insisting on cuts and banning films to almost be the villain, but instead the job of the censor is sympathetically presented. They're working under legislation that forces them to take certain actions, and you can debate or criticise that law as much as you want, but you can still see these people trying to work to preserve the artistic integrity of the films they are cutting, while aware that they need to make the right call every time because the consequences of passing something they shouldn't can be great. I do wonder whether that's a consequence of the passage of time - back in the 80s, the film censor probably would have been seen as a villain, but these days the BBFC is much more transparent and open, and as a result their work is generally seen in a more positive light.
One thing I did find fascinating was the analogy the film made between the work of a censor protecting the public from images they shouldn't see, and the way the mind can work to censor memories and protect us from traumatic experiences. Enid can't remember what happened to her sister because whatever happened was so distressing, it became a blank void in the centre of her life. And when you get to the film's ending (and I'll avoid specific plot spoilers), the ending we see is not the ending as it actually happens, but is instead given an artificial presentation that Enid is imagining to protect herself from the horrific events that have occurred. It's a smart idea that does tie the story and the theme of the story together in a cogent manner.
My only complaint is that not all the film holds together so tightly. In particular, there's a random story thread involving a killing that was seemingly inspired by a movie that Enid passed, and the film goes to the effort of establishing mysteries - how did the media know which censor passed the film? - that it never attempts to resolve. But it's a minor plot thread that never factors into the main story, so I always forgot that it was part of the film until it would briefly reinsert itself into the narrative. And the ultimate resolution was so obvious that I had assumed it from the moment the storyline was introduced (you could probably guess it just from my description). It's not a bad idea to include that element - a big part of the video nasties controversy was the media campaign against these films - but it does feel extraneous to the film. With another couple of drafts, it should have been possible to either incorporate that storyline into the main plot, or at least expand it so that it becomes a fully-fledged supporting plotline. As it is, it just feels like a distraction.
But all in all, it's a stunning and confident piece of work from first-time director Prano Bailey-Bond. I'm definitely excited to see what she does next.
After Love
After Love was something of a margin call for me - I kept adding and removing the film from my list. But I was so glad that I ultimately saw it, because this is such a beautiful piece of filmmaking.
Mary, a recently widowed middle-aged woman who converted to Islam as a teenager to be with her husband, is stunned when she learns that her husband had a second family, a partner and a teenage son, across the Channel in France. She travels over to confront the other woman, Genevieve, but can't bring herself to say the words, and when she is mistaken for a cleaner, she becomes close to this other family without them knowing who she really is.
The thing that really hits you about the film is just how still it is. Despite the potentially melodramatic scenario and the potential for explosive confrontation, it's extremely small and intimate. As Mary, Joanna Scanlan is called on to give most of her performance with her face. She spends much of the film either alone with her thoughts, or silently observing other people, and so for long stretches she has no dialogue - instead we're called on to read her thoughts in every subtle muscle movement. The grief of losing her husband, the pain of knowing that he betrayed her, the shock of realising how little she knew him, the confusion over how to relate to this other woman, the struggle of knowing her place in the Muslim world once the reason she chose that life has gone, are all expressed by her without a line of dialogue. When she decides not to clear up the confusion and instead work for Genevieve, you get the sense that it's not so much motivated by curiosity and a desire to pry into their life, but almost primarily as an act of service. As much as she is hurt by her husband's actions, she still intensely misses and loves him, and so the choice to work for these people feels like she's trying to do something good for him through these other people that he clearly cared for. In particular, the relationship between her and the son becomes rather close, and the tender portrayal of that relationship is a beautiful thing. (The best moment in the film occurs when she offers to make a meal for the son, and the love and care she pours into that meal shines through the screen.)
As easy as it is to focus on Joanna Scanlan, Nathalie Richard as Genevieve is fascinating. She's an intensely likeable character - we can see why Ahmed fell for her - which sets up a real tension in her performance, because we have no idea how much she knows about Ahmed and his other life, but if she knew she was the other woman, do we have to judge her for that? And then there's the pain that she's going through, which is different to Mary - she doesn't know that Ahmed is dead, so she thinks his failure to respond to her phone calls may be a sign that he's leaving her. And while she's used to not seeing her partner for weeks at a time, and is capable of living her life alone, that fear of abandonment is still palpable.
The direction by first time writer-director Aleem Khan is impressively measured. The film is apparently inspired by his own Muslim-convert mother, and that love is palpable in every moment. He's not trying to impose his own personality and flourishes on to the story, he just wants to sit and inobtrusively spend time with, in effect, his mother. And it works beautifully. Because he tends not to do a lot of cutting, each scene feels like a mini play, where we can watch the characters interact and engage with each other, which is an effective trick in building the tension of the piece. And if the film occasionally becomes a little obvious in its metaphors - a shot of the White Cliffs of Dover crumbling reflecting the collapsing of her own world, in a moment that is called back to in the final shot - well, such is life. Overall, this is a confident and beautiful work by a talented young filmmaker who will hopefully go on to give us many more great films.
Beau Travail
This year, the "classic" section of the festival is a tribute to the late Bill Gosden, who was the festival director for 40 years, and who passed away one year ago. All of the films are movies that Bill loved and programmed during his time with the festival.
Beau Travail, from 1999, opens with our central character Galoup writing his memoir. A former officer in the French Foreign Legion in an outpost in Djibouti, the entire film is framed as a flashback as Galoup reflects on the events that led to his discharge from the Legion. Life in the Legion is not easy, with long, punishing, and brutal training exercises, but at least they get to break free by going to the clubs and dancing, maybe more, with the girls. Galoup is extremely proud of the work he has done in building his unit, but he's frustrated that he doesn't command the respect that his commander does. One day the unit gets a new member, Sentain, and Galoup is immediately threatened. Sentain is young, attractive, likeable and popular, and skilled as a soldier, and Galoup comes to see him as a threat. Whether out of envy or some repressed desire, Galoup decides that he needs to destroy his rival before he threatens Galoup's position. This does not go well.
So I was really looking forward to this. The film has been on my list to watch for a while, and to see it in a restored version on the big screen was about as perfect and experience as you could hope for. And I know how near-universal the rapturous praise is for the film. And so I feel that I must have been missing something, because the film simply did not grab me. It started with the voice-over, which is so long and so intrusive that there was a significant period where I wondered whether there would be any dialogue in the film at all that wasn't a voice over. And it just remains everpresent throughout pretty much the entire film, this constant presence that never let you fall into the film because you're always aware that this is going to end badly - but not too badly because Galoup does seem essentially okay if he's able to write his memoirs.
And then there's just the fact that the film feels aimless. It was only in the last half hour that the film even crystalised for me around what the plot actually was - before then, it's just seemed largely like a collection of individual scenes that don't really hang together. Now, this isn't a criticism of those scenes, which stand alone as effective moments that do have an effect on the viewer. Director Claire Denis does have a nice eye for a compelling image, and some of the training sequences are fascinating and beautiful to watch, and you really can feel Denis' admiring gaze through the camera. But I simply felt that, until the third act, none of it really held together as a single work of art. And by the time it did all coalesce, I felt that the damage had already been done. I was simply out of the film.
Now, I do feel that I need to give the film another chance sometime. The film has such a great reputation that I feel it's on me that I didn't engage with the film. Perhaps I simply wasn't in the right headspace at the time, and maybe I'll respond better next time. Maybe now that I have a clearer picture about what the film is doing and where it's going, I'll pick up those threads through the a film, and hopefully it will feel like more of a cohesive whole. But for the moment, I'm very disappointed by the film.
The French Dispatch
The new film from Wes Anderson, the film presents itself as the final issue of "The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun", essentially a New Yorker-style journalism magazine published from the town of Ennui, France, following the death of its editor. After a brief history of the magazine, and a short cycling tour through Ennui and its peculiarities, the film settles on to its main substance, presenting three of the best articles written during the lifetime of the magazine. In the Arts section, we get the story of a condemned psychopath in an insane asylum whose art, inspired by his prison-guard muse, prompts an entire artistic movement. In the Politics section, we get the story of the student "chessboard revolution" that breaks out, and how the journalist became too involved in the movement. And in the Food section, we get the story of a police officer/chef who is an expert in the distinctive art of "police cooking", and how his skill becomes pivotal to the rescue of the kidnapped son of the Police Commissaire.
So I've been looking forward to this film for a long time. I've been a fan of Wes Anderson since Rushmore, and his films are always an essential event for me. It's been three years since his last film, Isle of Dogs, and seven years since his last live-action film, The Grand Budapest Hotel, one of his best works. Add to that the frustration of the year-long Covid delay, and there is a lot of anticipation and weight being put on the film.
And unfortunately I don't know that the film holds up. It's not a bad film, it's actually pretty good, and as a piece of pure entertainment, it works well. It's very funny, with a lot of genuinely laugh-out-loud moments. And as you would expect, it's gorgeous to look at - Anderson has constructed a beautiful world that is almost frustrating to watch on the big screen, because you want to have the ability to pause and examine every frame and detail. I really did enjoy watching it, and look forward to watching it many times in the future.
But it's too busy, almost too self-indulgent. The idea of a New Yorker pastiche almost sounds like something you'd do in a parody of the filmmaker. And while the criticism of Wes Anderson has always been that his films are all style over substance, an unfair criticism in my view, it's certainly accurate in this case. The movie is essentially three short films joined together, and each story is so packed with incident and characters that there is simply no space to develop anyone. Take a look at the poster. There are 28 name actors listed, almost all recognisable actors, many whose names can sell a movie. But you simply can't fit that many people into a 100 minute film - they mostly wind up being glorified cameos. And while it's nice that Wes Anderson has this cast of people who he can call on to play any part no matter how small, it's a shame when you looked at that list and realise there are great actors in roles so minor you don't even remember them being in the film. Think of The Grand Budapest Hotel - that's a film that takes place in a very Wes Anderson world, it's a very artificial world, nothing in that film feels real and everything feels absurd, but I believe in Gustave, Zero, and Agatha, and I'm genuinely invested in and moved by their relationships. I didn't walk out of The French Dispatch thinking about any of the characters, because even the most significant figures are only given two-dimensional sketches before we're off telling a different story.
There's also a self-indulgence to the filmmaking. Again, going back to The Grand Budapest Hotel - think about how the shifts in aspect ratio (the shape of the screen) actually communicated information, namely the time period that the scene was taking place in. Here, the film shifts aspect ratio and between black-and-white and colour almost randomly. There is mostly a scheme - the film tends to use black-and-white and a 4x3 aspect ratio for the stories being reported - except for the moments where they will randomly cut to a moment in colour, or unexpectedly shift aspect ratio without obvious reason. It does wind up feeling like Anderson is just doing whatever he wants shot-by-shot. There's even a point in the film where it's suddenly becomes an animated movie for a minute, for no obvious reason other than as a way of acknowledging the cartoons for which The New Yorker is celebrated.
Now, to be clear, I did genuinely enjoy the film. I anticipate rewatching the film many times - in fact, it feels like a film that demands many viewings. But this is the first time that I've felt Anderson become the film-maker that his critics say he is. It is a film that is so focused on being witty and colourful that it forgets about depth. And so it winds feeling a mere trifle. But that's fine - hopefully we'll get more depth from his next work. In the meantime, this is fun.
The Innocents
A nicely creepy low-level horror film from Norway, The Innocents focuses on two sisters: Ida, a nine-year-old who is resentful of her older non-verbal autistic sister, Anna, who she tortures - even putting broken glass in her shoe. The two become friends with a couple of other kids in the tower block: Aisha, who has vitiligo and a strongly empathic psychic connection to Anna, and Ben, a budding psychopath who likes to kill stray cats and is developing telekinetic powers. As the four hang out together, they find that they help each other's psychic powers grow, but Ben's growing powers are an uncomfortable mix with his uncontrollable rage.
It's a fascinating film that to me was an effective exploration of the capacity for children to be unbelievably cruel. Very early on, the kids pair off - Anna with Aisha, the two girls who share this strong psychic connection, and Ida with Ben, the two kids who so easily fall into cruelty against others. It initially seemed like the film was creating a conscious distinction between the cruel kids and the kind kids. But it soon becomes clear that the reason why Ida is so terrible to Anna is simply that she doesn't understand that Anna can feel pain - she doesn't cry or even respond after all - and her cruelty is born out of a lack of understanding and a genuine fascination. And while Ben is a terrible and troubled child, we also understand that he's a person who's frustrated by bullying, and who is excited to realise he has a weapon that he can wield in attack. The film in the essence was about what it means for children to develop empathy, and the consequences that can come if you don't develop away from a wholly self-centered worldview.
For much of the film, it feels much more like a coming of age film, a story about kids discovering friendship and realising the person they are - albeit with psychic powers. It's not really until the last third that the film truly becomes a horror, and I was impressed with how skilled that transition is. It's never feels like the film transforms into something else, instead the change feels like an inevitability, so that when the characters find themselves trapped in a nightmare world pursued by this horrific creature, the film has done the ground work to ensure this feels part of a coherent whole.
Unfortunately the film does fall down in the last 15 minutes. It reaches a point where there is a very clear resolution, where characters are forced to take terrible action against a massive threat, they take that action, but rather than having that resolve the story, the film undoes the impact of that scene, and then carries on for another quarter of an hour, with multiple moments that you think will mark the end of the film but that do not. It's almost as though the filmmaker couldn't decide which of three possible endings he wanted to use for the film, and so he tried to use them all, and it doesn't work. The climax of the film just becomes baggy, and I felt a lot of my investment in that ending fade away. Which is a shame, because if they had just chosen a single ending and stayed with it, this may have been one of my favourite films of the year. As it is, it's just a very good but flawed movie.
Mass
This I loved. The impressive first film from writer-director Fran Kranz, who I previously associated with being the comic relief in Joss Whedon projects, Mass is entirely unlike anything I would have expected him to make. It's not a film I see myself revisiting on any regular basis - it's just too emotionally raw - but I found it to be spectacular.
In a small meeting room at the back of a church, two couples gather for a conversation. One couple are the parents of a child who perpetrated a high school shooting; the other couple are the parents of one of the victims. And after years of dealing with each other through letters, through lawyers, through the media, they've agreed to sit down in a room and try to find reconciliation with each other.
The film is essentially a four-hander, in which the rest of the world is shut out and we're just trapped with these people and their emotions - and for that you need genuinely great actors to carry the film. For that reason, I was excited for the film just to see Jason Isaacs and Ann Dowd deal with this type of material. I have less association with Martha Plimpton, and none with Reed Birney, but they all prove themselves up to the task. These are four people who are distinctly-drawn characters, who each are trying to cope with different reactions to the events, but who are all individually taking their own approaches to keeping their emotions in check. Martha Plimpton locks her jaw and is a barely contained ball of emotion, Jason Isaacs keeps her in control and tries to rationalise what happened through research and citing facts and figures, Ann Dowd is needy and just wants to be liked, and Reed Birney is just drained and exhausted. And we're reminded that these couples really are tied together by this experience; if anything it's harder for the parents of the boy who was the shooter - they don't get the relief and the public sympathy that comes with being a victim, they have to mourn their loss while the rest of the world ignores them and hates their child, and they have to grapple with guilt and wondering whether there was anything they could have done to prevent this from happening.
One thing I really appreciated about the film was how sparse it was in delivering information. If you started the film not knowing what it was about, it would be a very long time before you discover what the cause of the tension between the characters even is - and even if you know what the film is about, it's a while before it becomes clear which set of parents relates to killer or victim. We're all familiar with films where characters tell each other things they already know just so that the audience can be informed, and I loved that the film avoided that approach. There's a lot of history between the characters that is alluded to, but never detailed. And when there is information that is communicated to the audience, it's typically not given as some extraneous exposition, but is more likely to be thrown at the other party as part of an emotional outburst, or used as a weapon to challenge a statement by the other side. Which made the film feel very real. There's no point where I didn't believe the conversation, where I didn't believe that this is exactly what that character would say in response. And when we get to the end of the film, there's no finality, it's very clear that this is not the end of the story, but instead a new stage in their relationship with each other. It's an admirable piece of writing.
I was fascinated by the opening of the film, in which a member of the church staff nervously tries to set up the room for the meeting. It's an unusual tone to start the film with, because it's almost comedic in a very serious film, it communicates little or no information about the meeting that's about to take place, and other than setting up the very final moment of the film it's entirely extraneous and could easily be cut. But instead it lends extra weight to the film. You realise that this isn't someone who's nervous and awkward; her experience in the church has meant that she is experienced in dealing with AA meetings and similar sensitive events all the time. And so when you see how nervous she is in preparing the room, how desperate she is to ensure the space is right for the meeting, it instantly lets the audience know just how major the discussion is going to be. If a person found themselves watching the film without any idea of the subject-matter, that one scene would tell them just what a big deal this meeting actually is - all without ever letting the audience know what the conversation actually will be. It's a smart bit of writing that I don't think many writers would think of taking.
My only criticism of the film essentially comes with the fact that Fran Kranz is a first-time director. I find myself thinking of Twelve Angry Men, a film that similarly finds people trapped in a room having an intense conversation. One of the things that Sidney Lumet did in that film was adjust the framing, the camera angle, even the lenses on the camera, throughout the film to make the room feel more and more claustrophobic as the tensions rose. With Mass, there's a point where the characters reach a cathartic release, and it becomes clear that there is now space for them to move on. Unfortunately Kranz decides to illustrate this by opening up the frame, expanding the film out to a full scope widescreen image. Now firstly, just from a purely practical point of view, that decision is going to cause havoc with the version of the film that people watch at home. But more than that, it's a very obvious choice - opening up the frame gives characters more space, gives them opportunity to breathe, and after the tension of much of the film, it gives the film an emotional release. Suddenly I'm thinking how things changed when that character made those comments, not because I'm feeling that there was a genuine relief that happened as a result of those comments, but because the film told me that a change happened by just changing the picture shape. And I think it could be argued that the change comes too early, that not everyone has yet reached the catharsis that change signifies. It would have been better had they taken the reverse of the Twelve Angry Men approach, where the shooting style starts in a highlighted place and subtly shifts into a more comfortable space. But that would require a more experienced and skilled director in a way that Fran Kranz simply is not yet. Instead he understandably takes the easier and "artier" approach, but one that I do unfortunately feel was wrong.
But that misstep aside, it is remarkable how assured and strong this film is. This will be one of my highlights of the festival.
(Also, as the film reached its intense emotional high point, an absolutely devastating moment, there was a strange rattling sound in the film. Which seemed weird - it didn't seem motivated by anything in the scene, and it was quite obtrusive. It was about 30 seconds before it became clear that the rattling wasn't part of the film, it was actually in the cinema, we felt the room shaking, and we realised there was an earthquake. Of course, I responded to the earthquake as any good Wellingtonian would - noted it, decided it wasn't too serious, and ignored it.)
The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant
It's not a good sign when the title of your film refers to the "bitter tears" of your main character.
The official screening to mark the 50th film festival in Wellington was one of the major titles from the filmography of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the famously prolific German filmmaker from the 70s and 80s. I have only a slight familiarity with the man's work, having seen a handful of his titles, so it was good to have the opportunity to enjoy this stunning film on the big screen. It's a visually beautiful film, and it was a delight to luxuriate in the richness of the film.
Petra von Kant is a fashion designer on the rise, with her work in demand by people who once rejected her. One day she meets and falls in love with Karin, a young woman who is new in town and who she suggests stay with her rather than wasting money on a hotel. But as she increasingly becomes infatuated with Karin, who regards the relationship as much more transactional, the distance between the two grows. And all the time Petra's long-suffering assistant Marlene is a constant presence, silently in love with the woman who mistreats her so casually.
The film plays out over five extended scenes in Petra's bedroom, essentially individual episodes in the story, and it gives a nice structure to the film. The film feels very intimate and raw, but the choice to focus on just these moments means that it gives extra size and scope to the scenes. Conflicts arise and play out, and there's time for them to build and escalate until they explode. Meanwhile because these scenes all play out in one room, even though it's a massive room with multiple levels, we begin to feel very trapped in this space.
In essence, each scene is its own mini-play, and with Fassbinder's filming style emphasizing long observational takes that focus on the engagement of the characters, there's nowhere to hide a bad performance. Fortunately everyone does an incredible job. Margit Carstensen as Petra is remarkable - at her height, she's imperious and in complete control, at her worst she's a pathetic shell of a person, and her portrayal of this characters decline is powerful and sympatheticly drawn. Hanna Schygulla's work as Karin demonstrates why she was an actor that Fassbinder returned to time after time - you can easily understand why someone would become so infatuated with her, and she manages to express a genuine sense of affection for Petra but also a sense that she fell into this relationship impulsively and has become trapped. And as Marlene, Irm Hermann is a stone-faced marvel, ever-present, largely silent, but with eyes that express everything you need to know about the character.
I know that Fassbinder made a few films that specifically dealt with his homosexuality, but I don't think this has been a major element in the handful of films I've seen of his to date. So one thing I immediately noted was that the film opened with a statement that said that the film was dedicated to "him who was Marlene". What was fascinating was not just the dedication itself, but also the choice to put that so prominently at the start of the film. As a result, I found myself paying close attention to the character of Marlene, who really is mistreated through the film. I haven't looked into whether anything is known about this man the film is dedicated to, but the film starts to feel very much like an apology to whoever he was. You get the sense that perhaps Fassbinder had this figure in his life who he was able to exploit and take advantage of because of an infatuation, and this film is him reflecting with regret on that treatment. (It's significant that Marlene gets the triumphant final moment of the film.) Certainly, if Fassbinder is the Petra von Kant figure, it's not a pleasing self-portrait - the woman is narcissistic, impulsive, cruel, and completely blind to anyone who doesn't exactly serve her needs at that moment. This all adds an extra layer of fascination to a movie that is already exceptionally well-made.
The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant is an expert piece of filmmaking, and a reminder that Fassbinder was a genuine master of the art. (It's also staggering that he was able to produce works at this level of quality at the speed that he was working - this was one of three films and a 5 episode TV series Fassbinder released in 1972.) It was a delight to finally be able to enjoy this film.
Hit the Road
We follow an Iranian family as they go on a road trip. To anyone who asks, they claim that they're taking their adult son to be married. But there's something about this trip that doesn't seem right. There's no joy or excitement in the car about the impending marriage, and the groom-to-be is almost completely silent, just watching the road ahead. They're paranoid about being followed. The mother massively over-reacts when discovering the young son has brought his cellphone, even hiding it on the side of the road for them to collect on the return trip. It's clear that the family have spent a lot of money, more money then they can actually afford, on this trip. And they discuss how they will explain to the young son where his brother will be after the trip.
Hit the Road is the first film from Panah Panahi, the son of Jafar Panahi, one of the most significant figures in Iranian cinema. Some context: in 2010 Jafar Panahi was arrested for making anti-government propaganda, and ultimately he was banned from leaving the country and from making movies. This hasn't actually stopped him - he's made four films since then, and while they may not be specifically political works, they're also not non-political works. It's into this environment that his son Panah starts with this film. And again, the film is not directly against the government, we're never given any explicit background information about the events that lead to this trip, but when the family are worried about surveillance tracking them through their SIM card, it's hard not to recognise the threat they are concerned about.
But as with the work of his father, that's all in the subtext of the film, because primarily he's wanting to tell a story about people. The film is a marvelous story about a family, with some wonderful richly-drawn characters. For obvious reasons, the adult son remains something of a cypher through the film - he has a lot on his mind, and spends little time communicating. But the rest of the family are given very strong and clear personality and are just a delight to spend time with. The young child has the typical excitability of a kid that can become wearying on a long trip. The mother seems in control of the trip, but she's also a bundle of nerves who seems on the verge of crying. And the father, his leg in a cast for reasons left unexplained, is a warm figure who is just trying to keep the whole thing together.
The high point of the film, both emotionally and cinematically, comes with an extended scene that plays out in extreme long shot. We just sit and observe while the scene plays out, with the characters so far away that they're tiny figures at the bottom of the screen - so tiny in fact that the subtitles are moved to the top of the screen because you literally would not be able to see what was happening if the subtitles remained at the bottom. It's a fantastic moment, partly because it gives the characters space when they are at their emotional low, but also because the disappointment of the scene plays into the effect of the moment - we're frustrated to be held at a distance from the scene occurring, much as the characters are frustrated to be held at a distance from what they are after.
It's not a perfect film, with a couple of missteps towards the end that did not work for me - a star field sequence that seemed inspired by 2001, and a moment of lip-syncing in the final scene, both left me baffled by what those moments were intended to achieve. But for the most part, this was an extremely strong film, and promises that the Panahi name will continue to be a marker of great drama for years to come.
The Drover's Wife: The Legend of Molly Johnson
Living in a remote hut with her four children (and very pregnant with her fifth) in the Snowy Mountains in Australia, some distance away from the nearest tiny township, Molly Johnson is fiercely independent and used to fending for herself and caring for her family while her husband is off working for months at a time. But one day, an escaped Aboriginal convict arrives, and she shelters him after he gives her some assistance. But he's wanted for the murder of a prominent local family, and this brings the authorities to her door.
In the pre-film introduction talk, the producer discussed how the film was based on the short story "The Drover's Wife" by Henry Lawson, a story that apparently writer-director-star Leah Purcell used to love as a child. So after seeing the film, I immediately had to look up the short story, because there is no way this is a story a child should be reading. According to Wikipedia, the plot of the short story is basically that a snake goes under the home of the titular drover's wife, so she waits all night to kill it when it comes out, which is apparently illustrative of the "struggle of a lone woman against nature". I don't even remember there being a snake in the film - the most prominent appearance by an animal in the film is a massive bull who gets killed in the first scene. Based on what I can glean, and I have never read the story, it does seem that this is an entirely original story, drawing only on the setting and the characters from the original, but adding an extra layer of murder and abuse on top.
Unfortunately I didn't care for the film, and I'm really struggling to put my finger on why. There's nothing major that I can point to, just lots of little minor issues that overall stopped me from connecting to the film. Numerous moments where Purcell's inexperience as a director felt evident, with awkward shot selection that had me uncertain what she was trying to communicate, or that seemed to actively obscure key information. Plot threads that the film seemed to forget about (the escaped convict is accused of a major murder, but the film never engages with whether he did it or why he did it, and eventually the film seems to completely forget about the crime), or revelations that the film seems to want to treat as a surprise but that are obvious from early on. A screenplay that just feels anachronistic and heavy handed in the way it raises and talks about issues. Some of the most intrusive and insistent music I've seen in a film in a while - the use of period and modern instruments can work, but here it just distracted me, while the choice to end the film with a montage over a sickly modern version of a folk song is just baffling. None of these issues by themselves would necessarily be enough for me to discount the film, but when taken as a whole, they simply meant that I was held at arms-length, was constantly bothered by one thing or another, and could never engage with the film. The film does have great cinematography, and I did enjoy the moments where the characters stayed out of the frame and allowed us to simply enjoy the natural beauty of the area, but when your favourite parts are the moments where nothing is happening in the film, that's a problem. This was a real disappointment.
Bergman Island
Tim Roth and Vicky Krieps play Tony and Chris, married filmmakers who decide to go on a working retreat to the island of Faro, where legendary director Ingmar Bergman lived. Tony is a director with many years of experience who's trying to finalise the script for his new film, while Chris is still developing her career and is trying to start her new project. When they're not working, they're touring the island, trying to get inspiration from the place that so inspired one of the great filmmakers. And the inspiration works - Chris eventually develops a story about a pair of former young lovers (played by Mia Wasikowska and Anders Danielsen Lee) who reunite while attending a wedding. The problem is that Chris doesn't know whether there's a movie in her idea, and she is also not sure how the story should end.
I will confess to being initially put off by the title of the film. In the past whenever I've tried to give Ingmar Bergman a go, something about it just hasn't connected with me. Now that's all on me, and it has been many years since the last time I tried Bergman, so I should definitely give him another chance. But I was worried that, if the film is so inspired by Bergman, I might not connect to it in the same way - or at least, might be held at a distance by the film making references I didn't recognise. That didn't happen - I was always engaged with the film, even the story within the story (which is a device I usually hate). Mia Hansen-Løve is a filmmaker whose name I have heard for a number of years now, and I was sufficiently impressed by her work here that I'm keen to dig into her back catalogue. The film is beautiful, and characters are richly drawn, with complex and detailed relationships. There's a lot to really take hold of in the film.
The thing I find myself struggling with is that I don't know what the film amounts to. The film leaps around from moment-to-moment, and I never could get my footing with what it was trying to say. Is the extended sequence on the Bergman Safari bus tour a reflection on the way art becomes commercialised and packaged up? Perhaps, but to what end? The film drops in little questions but never really engages with them for any length of time - how should we engage with a filmmaker whose personal life we disagree with? How are Bergman's religious beliefs reflected in his art? And as much as I was engaged by and enjoyed the film, I find myself uncertain what the story within a story was supposed to add, beyond simply being an extra story - perhaps I'm just being obtuse but it didn't seem to have any obvious connection or offer any illumination on the main story. The ultimate revelation about that story in the form that we're watching is a nice trick, but to what purpose?
And then there's the point halfway through the film where Chris starts telling Tony the story she's working on, and that becomes the focus of most of the rest of the film. From that point on, we pretty much only get the odd little interruption scene with Chris and Tony, almost solely as a reminder that this is a story being told by Chris. But those scenes felt like they were intentionally presenting Tony in a negative manner - he's not particularly engaged in the story, he's distracted, he takes phone calls, and worst of all, when Chris expresses her difficulty finding the ending to the story, he offers her very little help. But I felt that was an unfair presentation, as not only are his actions understandable - he's dealing with his own issues on a production about to start shooting - but I also felt that he was clearly listening, he offered good useful comments to address her concerns, and that when she asked for help with the ending she was looking for something that he shouldn't give her. After all, this is her story, this is something that was personal to her, and it would lessen the project if she took an ending that was given to her, rather than finding the ending herself.
Ultimately, the prime joy of the film is just in getting to watch some fantastic actors working. Tim Roth is reliably good, although he gets the least material to work with. It was a delight to see Vicky Krieps again - her work in Phantom Thread pointed to a remarkable talent, but unfortunately she hasn't become as prominent a figure as I think she deserves, and here as the central character she's positively radiant. (My friend Ethan pointed out the 22-year age gap between the two, which is a fair point, but there's a comfort and ease in the relationship between them that made the couple feel right to me.) And I'm always going to be excited to see Mia Wasikowska in a film. Her character is by necessity thinly drawn - she exist almost as an idea, a sketch of a character who is almost a placeholder in this story, but she brings such life and light to the film that you can clearly feel why Chris would be drawn to create this person
It's a beautifully made film - it's sweet and funny, romantic and sexy, thoughtful and reflective. I really enjoyed the experience of watching the film, I just don't know what Mia Hansen-Løve was trying to express with the film. But I'll take an enjoyable film any day.
John and the Hole
13-year-old John seems to be largely disconnected from the world. He's doing badly at school, is getting coaching in tennis that he doesn't seem to care about, and spends his evenings playing video games. One day, while testing his new drone, he comes across an unfinished underground bunker, essentially a massive concrete hole. So he slips his medication into his parents and his sister, and while they are drugged he takes them out and traps them in the bunker. And now he is able to live life exactly as he chooses.
What's so fascinating about the film is how sympathetic I found John to be. In the abstract, you would expect a character who acts in this way to be almost some sort of sociopath completely devoid of any emotion. But that's not how he feels. There's a fundamental stage of human development where children grow from seeing the world as completely revolving around them to comprehending they hold one place in a larger society. But this is a kid who has never been challenged, never really had to grow up, has always had everything he could ever want - the film goes out of its way to let the audience know just how wealthy this family is, to the point of even putting their bank balance on screen, just so we can understand how easy it would be for them to indulge his every whim - and so it's never even dawned on John that he's not the centre of the world. It's almost that understanding that pushes him into this place of crisis, and the film is about him coming to terms with his position in existence. He needs to get his entire family out of the way because if he doesn't then he will never be pushed to grow. And so we're almost supporting John, obviously hoping that he grows up enough to let his family out of the hole, but also recognising that this is something he needs to do in order to grow.
The film is a great example of the power that experienced actors can bring to a film. On the page, there's really very little to the characters of the family members - they go in the hole, they're frustrated and angry about it. But casting strong actors like Michael C Hall, Jennifer Ehle, and Taissa Farmiga gives them the space to create engaging characters from scratch. I especially enjoyed watching the relationship between brother and sister run through the film - it's significant that she's the first member of the family to recognise that John had deliberately put them in the hole, probably because as a sibling she's used to fighting with him and thinking the worst of him. At the same time, there are moments where Taissa Farmiga is able to communicate a sense of genuine pride and her brother and how he is changing.
But the film belongs to Charlie Shotwell in the titular role. Having to maintain that level of audience sympathy in the wake of such terrible behaviour would challenge any actor, but he lives up to the task. The conflict between what he knows he should do and what he feels he must do is such a key part of the story, and it's fascinating to watch him play with this idea. There's a great deal of sadness to the role also, and I was pleased by how subtly he explores that characteristic without ever overplaying it. I was particularly intrigued by the moment where he tests whether he can drug his family by drugging their gardener. Once he's lying sprawled on the lawn, having proven the drugging works, John feels the need to slip some money into the gardener's pocket - he knows he shouldn't have done what he did, but he feels he can redeem that action by paying, even if only surreptitiously, as an act of apology. It's an interesting reflection of how we as people will often treat complete strangers better than we treat our closest loved ones.
I also loved the shooting style of the movie. Admittedly I'm always a sucker for a locked-off shot, but it brought me genuine delight when I realised the film was going to have very few close-up shots, and was mostly constructed out of medium and long shots where the camera just stands still and watches the action. Much in the way that John seems almost separated from the world around, we are forced to sit and observe events without getting in close and engaging with the world. It's an effective approach to filming this story, and it brought me great pleasure.
There was one thing about the film that left me completely baffled - dotted through the film, starting about half an hour in, there are three separate scenes featuring a mother and 12-year-old daughter that are completely isolated from everything else in the film. The characters never feature in the main story of the film, the shooting style is completely different (it's all hand-held camera work rather than static locked-off shots), and they only amount to maybe 2 minutes of the film's runtime. The first scene seems to suggest that the film's story might actually be a story being told to this girl - which would explain why these scenes were in the film, were it not for the later scenes in which the mother says and does things that are wholly and frankly unrealistic, to the point where I believe the story about a boy trapping his family in a hole more than I believe these mother-daughter scenes. The frustrating thing is that I'm not sure what those scenes were supposed to accomplish. After the film I even grabbed someone I vaguely knew just to see if they could shed any light on the matter, but we were both equally baffled buy them. It's a very strange touch, but fortunately those scenes are so minor in the context of the film that it's easy to simply ignore them, and focus on how much I enjoyed the rest of the film. Which I greatly did.
Sun Children
There's this thing that happens every year at the film festival - there are the films you are already familiar with, the titles you recognise because you've been desperate to see these films for a while now, and then there are the films that you're seeing just because the write-up sounded interesting. So you reach the time of the screening for one of these films, and you see from your ticket that you're watching a film called Sun Children, and you have no idea what that is, you have no expectations. And then it blows your socks off.
12 year old Ali is the leader of a gang of kids from the Iranian underclass, spending their time stealing tyres from parked cars. One day he's approached by a local crime lord - there's a great treasure hidden underneath a graveyard, but there's no way to access it directly. Instead, the nearest and easiest location to get to it is through the local charitable school. So, imagining boxes filled with gold coins, the gang of kids enrol in the school and begin the hard work of digging a tunnel to the treasure.
The film is essentially like a heist or a prison break film with kids - they have this goal that they need to achieve, it involves lots of scheming and distractions, things go right for them, things go wrong for them and they need to innovate, it's all very familiar. But there's an extra layer of tension that comes with the fact that these are kids who are literally putting their lives at risk in pursuit of this dream.
Because that's the essential point that's being illustrated by the film. The film opens with the statistic that there are 150 million children in the world today who are forced to work to support their families. While the premise of the film makes it a more fanciful and irregular version of this issue that makes for a fun movie, at it's core the movie is absolutely about the effects of child exploitation. Children become an easy tool for criminals to make use of to achieve their own purposes, an ever-renewing resource to use and abandon. And it's not just criminals forcing these children to spend their days in work. One of my favourite parts of the film was this headstrong young girl, an Afghan refugee and sister to one of Ali's gang, who when we first meet her can't come with them to play because she has a pile of items that she has to sell on the train before she's allowed to do anything. Such sales are illegal, and the consequences if caught can be devastating, but her family need her to make these sales, because it's simply an essential part of how they survive.
And it's significant that the choice was made to focus the film on a school. It's not just that the story needed somewhere that only kids could do the work; the choice was made to focus on a specifically charitable school. I don't know anything about the education system in Iran, but the film seems to argue that there is this entire class of children who are falling through the cracks, essentially abandoned by the government, and who never get the support they need to achieve a better life - and into this massive gap comes this school, which takes great pride in the opportunities it can offer these children. But it's a pointed plot point that the school is on the verge of closure, they get no state support, and that they have to beg money from donors to keep the lights on, because these kids really have been abandoned by the government.
I don't believe I've ever seen any films by Majid Majidi before, although his name is familiar as a significant figure in New Iranian Cinema - he directed Children of Heaven, the first Iranian film to be nominated for the foreign language Oscar. And now I feel I should dig into his work more. Here he demonstrates a remarkable talent for working with children - I believe all of the children are local street kids, but they have a confidence and ease in front of the camera that is quite charming.
It's a smart, socially conscious film that skillfully uses genre trappings to bring the audience into a discussion about serious issues in society. I strongly recommend it.
Zola
Back in 2015, a stripper named A’Ziah "Zola" King wrote a 150-tweet Twitter thread that went viral, all about a working weekend trip that went very wrong. I tend not to spend much time in Stripper Twitter, so I only heard about the story when the news hit Film Twitter that a movie was being made out of the story. The general tone of excitement about the announcement had me curious, so I read the story - and I get it. It is a fascinating story, and despite the restrictions of the medium its clear that Zola is a natural storyteller, from an opening line that grabs you, through some evocative turns of phrase and blunt openness, to the way she gives a detailed sense of a world I couldn't even have imagined. Once the film was a massive success at Sundance in 2020, this became an immediate must-see - which means I've been waiting to see it for nearly two years. It was worth the wait.
One day, Zola meets and bonds with fellow stripper Stefani, and impulsively decides to go with her down to Florida for a few days for some quick money. She's surprised to find she's traveling, not only with Stefani, but also her insecure idiot boyfriend Derrek (who they plan to just leave in a dump of a hotel room) and her "roommate"(/pimp) X. And when stripping doesn't generate the expected income, Stefani decides to start turning tricks, and things spiral out of control. Seriously, you would not predict where this thing goes.
I remember reading an interview with Zola, and I'm very loosely paraphrasing from memory here, where she talked about how if she started by announcing that she was going to tell a story about sex trafficking in America today, no one would ever read that story. But if you adjust the framing of the story and make it entertaining, people will eat it up. And that's the challenge that the filmmakers faced here also. As detailed as she is in the tweet thread, she's telling this entire story in maybe a few thousand words. That's a lot of words for telling a story on Twitter, but by necessity there is still a lot that is elided. There's a ton of violence and threatened violence hanging over the story, but there's so much to the story and so few words to highlight it that much of that violence doesn't leave an impact. But in the film, you're actually watching these violent moments play out, while threats just hang in the air like a weight, and so there's a real risk that the film could very easily become the miserable experience that Zola was trying to avoid. So the film has to work to keep it light, keep it funny, without ever diminishing the impact and the horror of the events on screen. Which it does successfully - the film either focuses on some absurd detail or cuts to Zola for a sharp remark that cuts through the tension. It's absolutely a comedy; a pitch-black comedy perhaps, but a comedy none-the-less. (I was interested that the decision was made to cut one of the most memorable moments from the Twitter thread, where Derrek is forced to watch his girlfriend have sex with X solely as a power move. It's probably emotionally the hardest part of the story to read, and I can see it would be tough to make funny, so you get the sense that they probably decided it was easier to cut that incident rather than having to really dwell in that moment.)
It seems obvious in retrospect, but the choice to so completely embrace the story's origins in social media feels like a brave choice. After all, it's rare for films adapting an existing source to forcefully remind the audience that they're watching an adaptation, and since the story is just an outline of actual events, you could justifiably simply portray those events as they happened. But the filmmakers were smart to remember that what made the story go viral was not the story itself, but Zola's unique voice in telling it. And they do everything they can to preserve that. So we get Zola in the moment addressing the audience with hindsight of everything to come. And every time she says something that is a quote from the Twitter thread, we get the little Twitter notification sound, as an active and constant reminder that this is not being made up, that this is her voice. Now, in the aftermath of the original thread, there was some criticism thrown at Zola for inaccuracies in her storytelling, and the film is very aware that we're watching a single perspective on the events. This leads to the funniest moment in the film, where Stefani gets to tell her side of the story, apparently taken directly from a Reddit post she wrote in response. It's an interesting perspective, but if that really is what she wrote, then it is staggeringly unconvincing. But the Twitter story did end with a suggestion that she may have got her life together, and if so I do feel genuinely bad for her that all this has been dredged up against her will, and in that context, the extreme self-justification makes sense as an effort in deflecting attention. It obviously didn't succeed, but still, I like that the film acknowledged the competing perspectives.
The performances in the film are fantastic. Obviously there's Taylour Paige as Zola, and while her character is understandably frequently ready with some sharp-tongued jab, I found her almost more effective when she said nothing at all. She expresses so much with the "I'm over this" shading in her eyes, or the way you can see her constantly making the mental calculation of how she can protect herself as things get worse. (She also has a way of putting a casually disgusted spin on the phrase "It was gross" that is a thing of beauty.) I'm a fan of Riley Keough, so her casting as Stefani was another reason for me to be excited by the film, and she did not disappoint the playing most fascinating character in the film. It's a performance that's unlike anything I've ever seen from her - she's almost ludicrous in this "white woman trying to be black" role, but while it's a frequently funny performance, there's a lot of nuance to what Keough is doing. Stefani is undeniably a victim in this story, and you can feel the tragedy of every decision that has led her to this place, but she's also equally a villain in the piece, and Keough seems to understand and embrace these contradictory elements in the character, even if the character doesn't understand how bad she is. You'll recognise Nicholas Braun as Cousin Greg from Succession, and his casting as the boyfriend Derrek is perfect. He's almost playing white-trash Greg, but as a complete doofus along with added impulsiveness. In many ways he is the most sympathetic figure in the film - he's had the misfortune of falling in love with a girl, and all he wants is for her to stop lying to him and stop having sex with other men. But he's completely unable to control his emotions, and so when he gets himself into trouble it's often because he's exploding with frustration at this place he's in.
My only real frustration with the film comes right at the end. Firstly, I think the effort to remain so true to the story actually affects the energy of the ending. Once the main story ends, there's a final beat that needs to happen with Derrek - and it's a memorable beat that needs to be in the film. But it just stays as an extra scene that gets tagged on after the climax of the film. I almost wonder whether it would have been better to deviate slightly from the order of the actual events, and move that beat earlier in the film. You can still get the effect and the point of the moment, but without it deflating the film as it comes to its end. My other, minor, issue is probably something that wouldn't bother a casual viewer, but as someone who has read the Twitter thread, I remembered the brief epilogue that gets tagged on, where we get the final contact between Zola and Stefani a few days later, along with important extra context about what happened to X after the trip. Hell, all they needed was for Zola to do an address to camera, like she's been doing through the entire film, telling us what happened to them. Instead, here it just ends on the drive home with Zola coldly resolute that she wants never to see this woman again. Both of these factors meant that the very end of the film doesn't hit as well as I would have liked. But that's a very minor quibble in the face of an otherwise strong piece of filmmaking. This is a film that is every bit as excellent as I had been hoping.
Flowers of Shanghai
My third of this year's "classic" selection, this beautiful and evocative film from 1998 takes place in the late 19th century at the "flower houses" of Shanghai, pleasure houses where men come to eat, drink, play games, and "spend time" with one of the flower girls, who work in hope of finding a wealthy patron who will buy out their contract and marry them. It's an environment where everything on the surface is calm and elegant, but there are intense emotions lying beneath. We have the young couple who become infatuated with each other. We have the wealthy young man who becomes intensely jealous that the girl he loves is seeing other men. We have the girl whose active reluctance to be there and work is costing the house money. And we watch the negotiation process as one man tries to take his favourite girl away from here.
I've only ever seen one Hou Hsiao-hsien film before, The Assassin, which I hated largely because I was expecting a film with lots of period action sequences, and that film was all slow and reflective moments with maybe 90 seconds of action. With Flowers of Shanghai, my expectations were much more appropriately set, both by my earlier experience with Hou Hsiao-hsien and by the fact that the entire premise means I'm not expecting this to be some action spectacular. And as a result, I found it so much easier to fall into this world. It feels almost like a dream. I believe every scene plays out in a single shot, with the camera slowly floating around to follow the conversation as it takes place. It's a wonderful and delicate approach that gives the film an airy, almost drifting feel.
I was also struck by just how sumptuous the film was. The cinematography by Pin Bin Lee is just remarkable - it's a very dark location, but it never feels gloomy; instead it's almost opulent. But it feels like the darkness is essential, that the illusion presented by these places would not live up to the bright light of day. And so the cinematography becomes a vital collaborator in creating that deception. It also helps that he's shooting some gorgeous detailed costumes and wonderfully ornate environments. These need to feel glamorous, not just because they're catering to men who are used to having the finest in life, but also because they're a trap to draw girls in hoping to enjoy this lifestyle of comfort.
The thing I found fascinating was what wasn't in the film. These are places that project an image of elegance, of culture, of luxury, and the film embraces that projection. And sure, these are places where men go to pay for sex, but that brings the tone of the place down, so not only is that never portrayed, it's barely even alluded to. Yes, this is a world where the girls are essentially living in slavery, and are frequently abused by the aunties who run the houses, but even though the girls discuss the abuse among themselves, again it's never shown. The film is entirely about existing in the fantasies that these places project, in a way that almost emphasizes the artifice while it's in the margins that we can glimpse the reality.
I found the film utterly enchanting. It embeds itself in new in a way I was not expecting. It's a film of relatively little incident, instead filled with long conversations, but when things do happen it's remarkable how intense it can become. It's wonderful.
Quo Vadis, Aida?
I will confess that, as a teenager in the 90s, I never really followed the Bosnian war, probably the most prominent of the wars that broke out following the breakup of Yugoslavia. I remember it happening - it was such a big deal that it would be hard to have lived through that time and not have any recall of it - but I was never engaged with the conflict, never really understood what was going on. And when you hear about the number of victims in the war, the number of people outright murdered, it almost seems impossible to comprehend. Quo Vadis, Aida? works to counter this by bringing the impossibly large stakes down to a personal level, revolving around the safety of three people.
It's July 1995, five months away from the end of the conflict. Aida Selmanagić is a former school teacher now working as a translator for the UN peacekeeping forces. With the fall of Srebrenica, all around the UN compound are refugees as far as the eye can see, but the compound is full and can't take anyone else. But Aida's family, her husband and two sons, are not in the compound, and she knows that if they are left outside they will die. And so we spend the entire movie with Aida as she fights to find and save the men in her life.
At the core of this film is a powerful performance by Jasna Đuričić as Aida. There is an unrestrained desperation in every element of her performance - she's just a bulldog attacking everything until she gets her way. In some ways, yes they are right, they can't just let more people in or bend the rules to save this one person's family. But at the same time, you completely understand why she feels genuinely betrayed that, having spent so long serving and helping these troops, her family are now being simply abandoned. Fine, there are thousands of people out there and you can't save them all, but why can't you save these three people?
It's an intensely angry film, justifiably so, but what's surprising about the movie is that the anger isn't directed at the Serbian forces that are attacking them. Yes, their actions are outrageous and horrific (Ratko Mladić, who is a prominent character in the film, was later convicted of war crimes), but also, in a war, you almost expect these types of actions from the other side. The film saves its true anger for the ineffectual UN peacekeeping forces on the ground. Literally the first scene has the UN representative promising the mayor of Srebrenica an air strike if the Serbian forces try to take the city, only to be stunned to hear that the city has already fallen - the promised air strike never comes. At every point in the film, the UN capitulates to Mladić and his forces, and that's shocking. You get the impression that they know that the Serbian forces will use force if necessary to achieve what they want, and because the UN aren't there to fight, just to "keep the peace", they just agree to whatever demands are made, no matter how obviously insincere any promises are. So when armed Serbian soldiers demand to be allowed into the compound to search for soldiers, even though everyone on the ground knows how terrifying that will be for the refugees and how much of an intimidation move this is, the UN command agrees, just to keep the peace. When they're loading the ambulances with the sick and injured, with promises from the Serbians that the patients will be taken for care, they know none of the three previous trucks of patients made it to a hospital, but they still have to trust that maybe this will be the exception. And even though elaborate promises are being made that the refugees are all being taken to a new city to live, when the men are being loaded into separate trucks from the women and children, everyone knows what that means, but no one says it. Instead by inaction, they become complicit in allowing these massacres to take place.
One of the things that's fascinating about this conflict is that it really was all internal. This was not a conventional war, with people fighting people who lived thousands of miles away in other countries who you could easily demonize. These were literally friends and neighbours fighting each other. It's not a major part of the film, but it's one of those incomprehensible things about this conflict that the film takes care to emphasize. The woman on the negotiation team looks across the table and sees the face of an old university friend, now apparently an enemy. Aida is recognised by one of the enemy soldiers, who was once one of her students, but when this person asks after her son, she has to lie to this person because she understands that his goal in asking the question is to murder them.
It's a powerful and shocking film that stays with you. If you get a chance to watch it, do seek it out. It is well worth watching.
The Hand of God
The official "centerpiece" screening, marking the halfway point of the festival, was the new Paolo Sorrentino film, The Hand of God. The film focuses on Fabietto, a 16 year old boy growing up in 1980s Naples. It's not immediately clear that he is the central character of the film; when we first really meet him, it's probably almost 10 minutes into the film, and he's transfixed by the naked breast of his aunt (who has just been a victim of domestic abuse). It's an ignominious introduction to a character who almost immediately fades into the background, lost among the cast of eccentrics in his extended family (including one relative who eats an entire block of cheese while wearing a heavy fur coat in summer just to show it off, and the elderly boyfriend of another relative who speaks through an electronic voice at great length about the importance of sifting when making a sponge cake), and the similar weirdos who live in their apartment building (including the baroness who demands attendance to her every call). Amongst these people, Fabietto is almost invisible - his only defining characteristics are his intense desire for his (admittedly extremely sexy) aunt Patrizia, and his even more intense desire for Diego Maradona to join the Naples football team. The film doesn't really centre itself on Fabietto until halfway through, when a life-changing event occurs - an event where he attributes the impact on him to his Maradona fandom - and this leads him to ... decide to be a filmmaker, I guess, for some reason.
I approached the film with some wariness, since Sorrentino's last film, Loro, was to me such a catastrophic misfire. Fortunately, while the film is certainly flawed, it's at least enjoyable to watch. The first half is very big and silly, and constantly funny in a ribald way. It's a film that is filled with lust for life, and with just plain lust. But there's a massive tonal shift that occurs with the big event, where the film takes a much more serious turn; while the film is still funny at points in its second half, it does feel very much like a different film. It's still an engaging and entertaining film, but it's a different film.
I was talking to my friend Rebecca after the film, and she described the film as "bitsy". And to be honest I have no better description. That's the key problem that the film has. There is so much going on in the film, and there are so many distinctive and memorable characters throughout, that it becomes easy to feel at sea, uncertain whether this character or this story beat will prove significant or is simply a piece of colour that holds no ultimate greater purpose in the film. There's no way I was ever expecting the random cigarette smuggler that raced past them in a jet boat to become as significant a character as he did, but there you are. But it's the type of film where someone might be in a single scene, and not reappear for half an hour or more, so by the point they're back in the film, you're struggling to remember where we're supposed to know this person from. And there are so many incidents that do leave you feeling bemused and baffled by their place in the film, because they feel so from out of left field.
You can tell that the film is an intensely personal piece for Paolo Sorrentino - as soon as Fabietto says he wants to be a director, you know he's a proxy for Sorrentino. But what I didn't realise until literally right now, as I was writing this and had to double check how to spell that surname, was just how personal this film is. Because the big life-changing event actually happened to a young Sorrentino, apparently pretty much as it's portrayed, even down to the Maradona element. And you suddenly realise this is even more personal then you imagine. You start to wonder how much of this film is truly imagined, and how much is drawn from his memory of this time. There's a random scene where Fabietto finds himself in an empty town square in the middle of the night, when all of a sudden the richest man in the world and a famous supermodel happen to walk past him - is that there because it actually happened? Is the bizarre scene where Fabietto loses his virginity really as random as it seems, or is that actually how a young Sorrentino lost his virginity? In any case, I think it makes sense of the film's problems. If he actually is, as I suspect, trying to construct a narrative out of scraps of memories from his childhood, then you can understand why the film could become so bitsy, because it's challenging to have the self-discipline to see where the incidents in your life need to be reworked or cut. It doesn't make the film any better to understand this, but I think it makes the film easier to comprehend.
Now, to be clear, despite my criticism, the film is a delight to watch. I had a lot of fun, and was genuinely moved at times. The best part was having the chance to watch it at the Embassy. The film is being released by Netflix next month, so it will be very easy to watch very soon, but Sorrentino is such a visually rich director that it feels like the TV screen simply isn't enough to appreciate the beauty of his movie. I was therefore delighted to enjoy the film in a venue that could present and highlight his work in the best way possible. It was a fun experience.
Cryptozoo
A piece of adult animation, the film focuses on Lauren Grey, a veterinarian working at the titular Cryptozoo, a secret sanctuary for cryptids - mythological creatures like griffins, pegasi, and kraken. When she hears word that a Japanese Dream Eater has been brought to the US and is now on the loose, she teams up with a gorgon to try to catch it before it's found by the military, who dream of weaponizing its powers.
So I knew going into the film that it was a piece of animation that was not intended for children. I did not realise just how adult-oriented the film is. Literally the first scene features a hippie couple (the film takes place during the Vietnam War) stripping and having sex; the scene ends when the naked man is gored through the chest by a unicorn before the naked woman, angry at her lover's death, bashes the unicorn's head in with a rock. A few minutes later, our main characters go to meet someone who is at that moment hosting an orgy. The film does eventually decide to feature characters who are wearing clothes, but it does also go out of its way to establish multiple human-cryptid intimate pairings. You almost get the sense that the filmmakers' main purpose in making the film was to see just how much weird sex they can include. (By the way, the naked woman from the start of the film eventually reappears, still naked, and she remains naked all the way through the climax, only getting to wear clothes in the final scene.) Seriously, if this was a live-action film, it would feel exploitative.
Here's the thing: I hated this film so much. I try not to walk out of films, but this tested me so much. The story just felt empty and aimless, moving from scene to scene with no sense of direction or motivation. Even in the climax, where there is insane stuff going, kraken eating people and someone riding a pegasus to save people from a collapsing tower, there is weirdly little energy to the scene. I just felt completely disconnected from anything occurring on screen. I didn't care about why I was watching what I was watching. I was bored.
Normally when I'm not connecting to an animated film, I can at least enjoy the beauty of the animation. It therefore almost felt like an insult that they made the film as aggressively ugly as it is. Part of the problem is that it feels like individual characters and environments were designed and created by completely different teams without ever discussing their design approach. So some characters are given a basic black-and-white outline design, some are given a more detailed hand-drawn design that almost looks childish, and some (including many, but not all, of the cryptids) are given a more ornate painterly look. And there are moments where there are elements using each of these design approaches all on-screen simultaneously, and the end result is just garish and unpleasant to look at. Now, full credit to them - judging by the end credits it looks like the entire film may have been animated by only 20 people, and if so, it's impressive that so few people managed to make a complete feature length film. But just because the film was low budget and made by such a small team doesn't mean I have to like it. And I do not.
There's also the issue of framerate. An explanation: a typical live-action movie runs at 24 frames per second (fps), so you get 24 separate images in each second of film. It's common for animation to run at 12fps, with each image repeated twice, and it's not uncommon for some animation to even run at 8fps, repeating images three times. Judging by how jerky the movement in the film is, I would not be surprised if, in an effort to save money, it was animated at 6fps, or even slower - it genuinely feels like a fast slideshow rather than animation. And that means the characters lose any sense of life - it's hard to be invested in their battle to survive when you can literally see the individual still frames as they "move".
I hate this film, I resent this film for existing, I'm annoyed that I spent money on it. There is a part of me that wants to look up what other screenings were on at the time, so I can know what opportunities I passed up in order to see this thing - so far I've held off on this impulse, knowing from experience that way madness lies. But whatever I could have seen, it would not be worse than this.
A Hero
Ashgar Farhadi is a true master of taking small, personal dramas about conflicts and moral dilemmas and exploring them until they escalate to the level almost of an intense thriller. Here we meet Rahim, a genuinely likable guy who is unable to pay his debts after his former business partner steals the money from him, and who is forced into debtors' prison. One day, his girlfriend finds a lost bag containing 17 gold coins that could cover half of his debt, but Rahim, who is out on temporary release for a few days, decides it's important to do the right thing and return the money. The story attracts media attention, and for entirely understandable reasons around keeping his girlfriend secret, Rahim winds up claiming to have found the bag himself. And things look like they're going well; a charity gets involved, raising money to help Rahim, and the local council even offers him a job - but first they just need to investigate the story, just to make sure he's not pulling a scam. But problems emerge when the story doesn't hold up, and they can't trace the owner of the coins.
The film is just a mass of complex and uncomfortable questions where everyone is trying to navigate all of these awkward truths and motivations. Was Rahim's motivation for returning the money really to do the right thing, or was he hoping his actions would help him get out of prison? Why does the prison decide to push for the story to be known to create a feel-good story about its prisoner? Is the charity just leaping onto this story as a way of building its own profile for the work it does? Is Rahim's use of his son a genuine moment of a proud and loving father, or is he hoping to build public sympathy by highlighting his son's disability?
And the thing that makes the film challenging is that at no point does anyone actually behave in an unrealistic or unbelievable way. You can completely understand and sympathise with every decision anyone makes. Does it really matter who found the bag if it was returned? Does it really matter who confirms something if what they are confirming is the truth? But all of these little compromises, white lies, and inconsequential actions build up on each other, forcing further and further response until people are being pilloried for trying to do the right thing. You almost find yourself feeling it would have been better to keep the money.
And into all these messy motivations comes a criticism of social media and internet celebrity. Farhadi seems to be looking at the consequences of virality in the film. People try to promote popular stories as a way of distracting from other issues. People see a story gaining traction, and leap on to it as a way of building their own reputation, and just as quickly throw people to the wolves as soon as it seems there's more nuance to a situation or the person is not quite the ideal hero they held up. The film is so effective at putting you in this space where you feel this frustration and anxiety of this good character being established as a villain for no reason, so when the frustration builds up to a point of complete explosion, it's entirely relatable.
Hanging over the film as a whole is anger at the concept of debtors' prison, and the insanity that in Iran, for a purely private matter that involves no crime, you could force that person into prison, completely destroy their life, and deny them the opportunity to earn money to make good that debt. Debtors' prisons are one of those ideas that we've grown so accustomed to being in our past that you don't realise that there are corners in the world where this is still a thing. You can feel Farhadi's anger at the injustice that this system creates.
It's always exciting to have a new Ashgar Farhadi film, especially when it is as good as this. It's not a comfortable watch, there are never any easy answers, and you always walk away feeling uncomfortable and uncertain, questioning your ideas about what it takes to be a good person. But it's always a fantastic journey.
Blue Bayou
Antonio is a Korean American, having lived in America since he was adopted at the age of 3. He has a small criminal record, a few youthful indiscretions involving stolen motorbikes, but he's fundamentally a good person. Now living in New Orleans and working as a tattoo artist, he has a fantastic relationship as Daddy to his stepdaughter, and he and his wife are expecting a second. But one day he gets into a small altercation with his wife's cop ex, and after his arrest they discover his citizenship was never formally completed. So now, facing deportation, he desperately has to do whatever he can to fight to stay in the country with his family.
If there was any doubt that this film was conceived as a piece of advocacy, it's demolished by the final moments of film, in which we learn that there are hundreds of thousands of people who immigrated legally to the United States for adoption as children, and who are now liable for deportation because the adoption didn't finalise their citizenship. We're also confronted with the photos of a dozen or more people either currently facing deportation or who were recent deportees. You watch that ending and you know this is an angry film. The good thing about the film is that it's never didactic in presenting that argument. Instead, it understands that the best way to make your argument is to present it as a piece of great drama - if you can convince people of the injustice of this system through drama, the audience will mentally start making the arguments in favour of your position for you.
To be honest, going into the screening I had no memory of what the film was about. And the film takes a very long time, probably about half an hour, to reveal the conflict at the heart of the film. Part of the reason why I think the film is so effective is that choice to delay telling the audience what the film is about. It puts us in the same position as Antonio - in the same way that he's just living his life without any idea that his life is about to change in an instant, I spent those first 30 minutes convinced I was watching a different film, a story about a kind-hearted guy struggling to provide for his family but who is held back by society's judgement of him due to his youthful mistakes. And that story is a fantastic drama. I particularly enjoyed the scenes of him and his stepdaughter - the film is impressively efficient at establishing this truly loving and affectionate relationship between the two. And then the hammer drops, and you realise you're watching a completely different film, and it just feels like a gut punch.
And from this point, the film adopts a very clear focus on the unfairness of the situation, of treating people like this when they did come to the country legitimately through proper channels and who would have no reason to suspect any need to formalise their citizenship. But it's always looking at this through the lens of these characters and how they will react. There are points where I feel a different film would take a different turn - in a desperate effort to get money for the lawyer's retainer, Antonio makes a very bad decision that in many other films would become the story - but here it's just one extra complication, another example of the types of lengths that people can be pushed to because of this policy.
I left the film extremely impressed by the actor who played Antonio, a actor I had never seen before, and it wasn't until I looked him up that I realised it was Justin Chon, the film's writer and director, in the role. He's a skilled performer, giving some lovely delicate shading when it might have been easy to be bigger. Yes he is desperate, but it's quiet desperation that the character exudes, and there's a sadness buried deep in the character that is present throughout the film but that slowly comes to the surface in the course of the film. His relationship with Sydney Kowalske as his stepdaughter Jessie is easily the highlight of the film, with a natural ease and comfort between the two actors that really drew the attention. It was also nice to see Alicia Vikander - she's an actress I really enjoy, but I don't believe I've seen her in anything in about four years (although I believe she's in The Green Knight which I need to see). In many ways it is a fairly clichéd wife role for her, but I enjoyed the sense of determination that runs through her character. You can tell that she feels powerless against this massive system, but she is grabbing hold of everything possible to gain what power she can find in the situation.
The only thing that I find myself uncertain about is the ending. Narratively, it's the right ending, and I think the film gets to it in the right way. But I do feel that it's too overblown. There's a particular cliché in the movies that we've all seen many times, and this film adopts three different variations on that theme. And emotionally they all work, especially the third time which really becomes the defining emotional moment of the film. But you are very aware that the scene is so clichéd, and it's the type of scene that only plays like this in a movie because in reality the people around would react in a very different way. But still, it affected me, it moved me, and that's what it was supposed to do.
It's a beautiful film. Strongly recommended.
Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes
A delightful and innovative low-budget time-travel-ish comedy from Japan. One day cafe owner Kato is in his apartment when suddenly he appears on the TV, able to talk through the TV to himself. Somehow a connection has formed between his apartment TV and the TV in the cafe, so that the one is showing what will happen in front of the other two minutes into the future. He races downstairs, and shortly after repeats the conversation he just had from the other side. He and his friends are delighted by the discovery of this time TV - especially when they realise they can line the TVs up in front of each other and, like an infinite mirror, see not two minutes into the future, but four, six, eight, ten, twelve minutes into the future. All seems fun, although they do feel constrained to act in the exact way that they've already seen in the past. And then one of the TVs shows something very bad happening soon.
So the first thing that you need to know about the film is that it's presented as a single-take film, without cutting. Now, I'm sure it's not - there are definitely hidden cuts that I'm sure I caught - but it's certainly very long, extended takes. And that's essential to the effectiveness of the film, because it starts to feel like a magic trick. If you're watching a film, and they are constantly cutting between camera shots, then this doesn't feel impressive, because you know they only needed 30 seconds of footage to interact with. But because this was all shot with long takes, you're watching a video, and you know that video has been playing non-stop for 10 minutes, and you're watching the characters interact simultaneously with different levels and different points in time within the video, you find yourself struggling to comprehend how it's possible to make a film like this. You're just marveling at the inventiveness of this achievement. The filmmakers know that this is the effect they're going to have, so during the end credits they actually have some behind-the-scenes footage, where you can see the little iPhone camera rig they use, you can see the complicated charts plotting out everything that the different TVs are showing at each moment, you can see the stopwatch keeping track of precise timing. It's definitely a feat of careful and precise planning. But it's also an achievement of innovation and imagination.
Because all that careful planning and construction is nothing if the film is not entertaining. And it is completely charming. The characters are goofy and broad, but so much fun to be around - the type of people who will put towels over their heads to pretend to be mystical mages bringing wisdom from the future. There's a sweet little love story between Keto and the owner of the shop next door. And even when the big threat occurs that gives the film its climax, it's so silly and easily resolved that it doesn't really feel like it was anything to worry about at all. And at barely 70 minutes, it just feels like a bit of a lark, as though these friends got together and put together this bright and breezy film one day on a whim, and it's only when you really think about it that you appreciate just how much effort went into making.
Walking out of the cinema, I heard a couple of people comparing the film to Primer. And it's an understandable comparison; indeed it's a comparison that I'd briefly thought of myself - Primer is probably the definitive and most comprehensive representation of just how time travel and paradoxes would really work. But Primer is insanely complex - there's a point in that film where you just need to throw up your arms and accept that you don't have any idea what's happening. This is not that. The time mechanisms in this film are very clear, very straightforward, you know exactly where you are. The complexity in Primer revolves around the time travel logic underpinning that film; the complexity in this film revolves around how on earth they managed to film this. The logic of Primer, if you puzzle it out, actually makes sense; don't even try to find a logical explanation for how the characters in this film acquire some of the knowledge they discover because there is none.
But that doesn't matter, because this is just a pure piece of entertainment. It will have broken the people as they were trying to make the film, but the end result is so light and fun that there's no need to worry about the film breaking you. If you can seek it out, it's so worth it.
Nitram
A socially awkward figure lives with his parents in Tasmania, and is a constant struggle for them, setting off fireworks to annoy the neighbours, constantly demanding whatever he wants, refusing to ever concede to anyone else. He's only ever referred in the film as Nitram, a much-hated nickname because, seemingly in a dig at his backwards development, it's his actual name backwards. He's socially awkward, doesn't know how to behave, and is just generally obnoxious to be around. One day he meets an older wealthy woman named Helen living in a rundown house, they become friends, and he leaves home to live with her. But then Helen dies tragically. Meanwhile his father is heartbroken after his dream of running a bed and breakfast falls apart. One day Nitram decides to upgrade his air rifle to a real rifle, several firearms in fact. And then he buys more. He doesn't have a gun licence, but that's not a barrier to buying weapons. And then one day, Martin Bryant takes his weapons and murders 35 people in the Port Arthur massacre.
So I was really was not sure what the point of the film was. You might think that it's an exercise in trying to understand a killer and the motivations that lead to his actions. But it felt fairly generic - he's a weirdo with serious mental health issues and development problems and difficulty making human connections. This is every cliché of a killer you've ever seen, and it's saying nothing new or interesting. I finished the film, and felt that I had no more understanding of who he was then I would have had reading the Wikipedia article. Sure, I did learn things, but only because I had never before looked into who this guy was or what his story was. And the film seems to almost deliberately avoid including anything that might offer nuance. In the movie, he's an only child; in real life, he has a sister - what's that relationship like? According to Wikipedia, he had a girlfriend at the time - who was she? Instead these potentially significant relationships get thrown out because they possibly run counter to the idea of the lone weirdo that the film is focused on. Part of the reason I saw the film was because I had liked Justin Kurzel's previous film, True History of the Kelly Gang, for the way it did undercut the conventional narrative around Ned Kelly, and I was hoping for something similar here. No such luck.
I was genuinely watching the film unable to work out why it had been made. It only became clear in the final moments of the film, when a title card referenced the much discussed gun law reforms passed after Port Arthur - which I had always understood to be a success - saying that no state had ever fully implemented those measures and that there are more guns in Australia today than there were then. Okay, fine, I think this is therefore supposed to be a piece of advocacy about gun control. Now, I'm not someone who really feels strongly one way or the other about gun control - I've fired guns on two occasions, so I'm certainly not opposed to them, but nor am I particularly enthusiastic about them. But trying to make this film into an argument about the need for stronger gun control feels extremely artificial. The scenes of him acquiring the weapons feel almost incidental, necessary moments in the journey towards the final scene, not that they are the focal point of the film. And if you're trying to make an argument that the reforms after the massacre have failed, which is what the film seems to be saying, then you need to provide a lot more context for that statement then three sentences lacking nuance in a title card at the end of the film. You might be able to explore that issue if you made a film in which the failings of the gun control system in Australia are dramatised and are the core focus of the film; you don't make that point by telling a story that completely predates the current system and therefore tells me nothing about how things currently are.
I was also bothered by the fact that the film only ever referred to him as Nitram. I assume this is part of the new popular approach of never using the names of these people, to avoid giving them notoriety. And, full disclosure - it's an approach that I don't care for, and that frankly risks turning these people into boogeymen, figures who feel almost greater then human because they have no human identifier, they're Voldemort, He Who Must Not Be Named, they're figures of fear. But also, if you're trying to avoid notoriety, that doesn't work when you are literally making a movie about the person - it's hard to give a person more notoriety than that. But it also becomes frustratingly awkward - because the film instead uses a nickname that the character in the film hates, it's not a nickname that people who loved him, his parents or Helen, would ever use. And so that means in any scene involving those people, they can only refer to him as "he" or "him", in an often awkward manner. And so this entire structure of artifice is put around the film, and it's extremely irritating.
Look, is it terrible? No. But is it good? No. Its just annoyingly generic.
Unclenching the Fists
In a small Russian town, a teenage girl, Ada, is essentially trapped by her father. She's only allowed out of the house to go to work at the candy store, but otherwise is kept locked up at home by her father, who has the only key to the front door and who hides her passport, and who refuses to let her have anything that might attracts boys, whether it be forcing her to wear decidedly unsexy clothes or his insistence that she not wear perfume. His efforts haven't really worked - there is one boy who insists on hanging around awkwardly flirting with her. The only other males she's allowed to interact with are her two brothers - a younger brother who treats her as a mother and still sleeps in her bed when he has a scary dream, and an older brother who's left home and who she sees as presenting her best hope for escape.
The film won Un Certain Regard at the Cannes film festival, so I was expecting a film to be pretty special. There are a lot of things that I really enjoyed - the long scene where we watch through the car door as Ada's father tries to stop her leaving, the shock of the revelation about just how infantilized she is, or some of the awkward flirtations with Tamik (including a brilliant scene where we remain fully fixed on her face watching her reaction to what Tamik is doing). Or my favourite scene, the final interaction between Ada and her father, in which we're reminded that for all the problems in that relationship, he is still her father and she does love him. Unfortunately, something prevented me from connecting to the film, and I don't know what. To me it felt like a film where the individual pieces are more effective then the film as a whole. As wonderful as those scenes may have been, I just found that something didn't feel right about the film as a whole. This is the hardest film to respond to, a film in which my response is not passionate love and excitement to share everything that's great about the film, nor is it a bad film allowing me to rant and complain. It's just a film I feel largely indifferent to - and I'm frustrated that that is my response.
One thing I am really baffled by is the final scene of the film. The final moment of the film is barely even focused on our main characters. Instead it's presented as extremely shaky home video footage of a wedding party, in which the movie's characters happened to incidentally figure. It's so wildly out of step with the style of the rest of the film that I simply could not figure out what they were trying to achieve with the sequence. The characters in the wedding party are not significant to the rest of the film, and you almost wonder what the in-world justification is for the person making the video to focus so much on these random people, since he obviously doesn't know that these are the main characters of this film. It's an unsatisfying note to end on, which is probably a good description of the film as a whole.
Millie Lies Low
A charming New Zealand comedy drama about an architecture student who wins a chance to intern at a top architectural firm in New York. But Millie has a panic attack and needs to leave the plane, and now she has to hang out in Wellington for a few days until she can get the money for a new ticket. Unfortunately, she is an extremely proud person and cannot bear the thought of her friends thinking she's failed, so she has to fake her life in New York, posting photos on social media of her enjoying her exciting new life even as she's hiding out in a tent in the bush. And as the next few days pass, she also has to deal with her own insecurities and her feeling that her scholarship was undeserved.
It's very much a film where the entire plot could be resolved if the character just tried telling the truth, but that's really the entire point - she can't tell the truth because that would be too humiliating. And the thing that becomes clear is that the pride that holds her back from admitting her mistake is a defining characteristic. She's not immediately obviously proud, but she's someone who can't bear to have her failings exposed, and so whenever she encounters a situation where that is a risk, she'll jump to the first opportunity to escape. And that's one of the things that makes this experience so hard for her - because no one is expecting her to be around, she finds herself (admittedly rather improbably) able to discover what people say about her behind her back. And that becomes devastating for her as she discovers that no one has been fooled, and people really can see the person she is, both the good (we can understand why people are friends with her) and also the very bad.
I also found the relationship between Millie and her best friend Caroline fascinating. It's not uncommon to tell a story about bad friendship, a relationship between two people where one person is this toxic presence in the friendship. But in this film, we get to know Millie quite well, we like her a lot, but also it's fairly quickly established that Millie is the toxic person in the friendship, with her insecurities and her sense of being a fraud becoming this issue that almost defines the friendship; Caroline is constantly defending Millie, even as it's clear to everyone else that Millie does not deserve the defence and that Caroline is basically having to lie to herself in order to ignore the obvious truth. There's a moment where Caroline does something that is extremely selfish, something that is extremely hurtful to Millie, even if she thinks Millie will never learn about it. Ordinarily, if a person took this action in relation to a friend, you'd look at this person as a villain, but instead, although we retain sympathy for Millie for having to go through this experience, there's definitely a part of us that looks at the type of friend that Millie has been to Caroline, and feels that she probably deserves it.
It does have to be said that, as a Wellingtonian, it is an extremely distracting film to watch. Most of the time, when you're watching something filmed in Wellington, you might have a few scenes in recognisable locations, but for the most part there's still an anonymity to the filming locations. With this film, other than the scenes at her mother's house, every place she goes is instantly recognisable. I know that street. And I know that street. I've walked past that alleyway a hundred times. It does become a constant distraction, almost taking you out of the film. Now that's not necessarily a problem with the film, but next time it would help if maybe the struggling students could live somewhere other than the centre of the city.
All in all, it's a likeable comedy that centres on a fascinating main figure. I really did enjoy it a lot.
Memoria
One morning, Tilda Swinton, playing a flower distributor living in Colombia, is woken by the sound of a heavy THWOCK. It's not obvious what caused it - there's no building work or roadworks being undertaken nearby. She continues to hear the THWOCK - mostly just once, occasionally several times in succession. She doesn't know what the cause could be, and efforts to recreate the sound hold no solution. Eventually she goes on a journey into the Colombian jungle, where she may find some answers.
I'd never seen anything by Apichatpong Weerasethakul - the closest I'd come was the time I decided to miss a screening of Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives due to a headache. It turns out that was a wise choice - if this is representative of his work, then trying to watch one of his films while struggling with a headache would be impossible. Memoria is very much the type of film I'd imagined that he makes - it's very slow, very still, contemplative. This is a 2 hour 20 film that could easily be told in 1 hour or less. But that would run counter to the drifting, dreamlike atmosphere that Weerasethakul is working to achieve.
The film adopts a largely static observational approach where the camera will just sit and watch for minutes at a time. So Tilda will walk into a studio where a jazz band is recording, and we'll just spend several minutes watching her among the small group listening to the performance, and only after you're convinced that you'll be spending the entire performance watching the listeners does the camera turn to spend the second half of the song watching the band playing. The camera is so static that it could sometimes feel jarring when the film cut to a different angle in the same scene. Much of the time it plays out with scenes presented to us from a distance in longshot, and so it throws you when the film cuts even just to a mid shot - you grow so accustomed to watching from a distance that it feels uncomfortable to be sitting even just across a table from someone.
In a film that has so many long stretches of silence, you're really reliant on the work of your actors to carry the film. And here it helps that he has Tilda Swinton in the lead role, and present in pretty much every scene. In one moment that really stayed with me, she hears the sound several times in quick succession while at lunch with some relatives and for the first time realises that she's the only person who hears it - she almost has a nervous breakdown at that point, as she starts questioning whether this means that she's going crazy, and watching her silently go through all these emotions while trying to keep everything together in front of her family just blew me away.
The climax of the film revolves around a conversation that Tilda has with a middle-aged man (who may possibly be the reincarnation of a young man we met at the start of the film), who has never in his life left the tiny jungle village where he was born. And as they talk, he removes the scales from some fish. Then he lies on the ground, seemingly dead for an extended period, before he awakes from his "trip". And then they wander up to his home, where they continue to talk. But their conversation plays out with prolonged periods of silence, so long that at times I was startled when they started to speak again. But it's a scene that almost perfectly encapsulates the film. It's a sequence that runs 30 or 40 minutes, but not a lot can actually be said to happen in that time. And my reaction to the scene, much like my reaction to the film as a whole, fluctuated wildly. Initially, I was completely caught up in the scene, but it played on a bit and completely lost me, until the scene continued some more and completely enraptured me again - and my reaction to the scene cycled through this process several times during the runtime of this sequence. One moment I loved it; the next I hated it; then I loved it; and repeat.
Then comes the moment when we get the explanation for the THWOCK. And it is the most bizarre moment in the film. To be clear, this is a very spiritual movie, so when Tilda says that she has developed almost like a psychic antenna through which she can pick up the signals of pain in someone's life, I can accept that. That feels like an explanation that is consistent with everything we've seen in the film and the themes it's trying to explore. The problem comes when shortly after, we get a different explanation for this sound. A scene plays out involving something actually making this sound, and I think we're led to interpret this moment as being the true explanation for what's going on. And it's an unsatisfying explanation for many - especially the people in the row behind me who started sniggering at the scene. And I don't blame them. Certainly the transition from reflective spirituality to genre filmmaking for a single scene felt like an uncomfortable change that didn't fit the film. I simply don't understand what the film was trying to express in that moment, or how that explanation is supposed to tie in to the larger themes of the film.
I can see why some people like this film. I can see why some people have given it very strongly positive reviews. I can also see that most viewers would hate it. I'm somewhere in the middle. I rather liked moments in the film, moments where the film grabbed me and enchanted me, but much of the film held me at a distance and never let me in. As a result, I did find it a frustrating experience.
Shiva Baby
A delightful farce of a film. We're introduced to Danielle, an insecure and directionless student who insists to her parents that feminist studies do actually offer a career plan, while to anyone else she just lies about her entire academic career and goals. When she goes to attend the shiva of some distant relative (she's not even entirely certain who died), she is distressed to find her much more successful ex-girlfriend Maya is also present. Even more distressingly, her sugar daddy Max is also here for some reason, along with the wife and baby daughter that Danielle had no idea existed.
It's an expansion of the short film the director, Emma Seligman, made as her thesis film with the same star, Rachel Sennott. Out of curiosity, I watched the short film the morning after the movie, and it's a fascinating example of the process involved in expanding a 7-minute film to feature-length. Much of the dialogue from the short is reproduced nearly word for word in the feature (although it's a smart tweak to have Danielle be vegetarian rather than lactose-intolerant), but the tone is very different - the short is entirely focused on Danielle and Max, and without extra plot elements and with little time to develop, the short film becomes much more sad. You get a very real sense that, despite the commercial nature of their relationship, she's genuinely upset to realise there's no future in their relationship. In expanding the film, introducing the ex-girlfriend, making Max's wife an actual character, giving the baby real prominence as a focus of attention for everyone present, Seligman removes most of that sadness, and instead makes it just one more indicator of how much of a fuck-up Danielle is.
This is a film that dwells in the comedy of discomfort, as Danielle finds herself in this small house packed with people, trapped with all of her mistakes, and forced to confront them all. I was impressed by the control of tone Seligman demonstrates as a first-time director. Farce is a comedy style that can look very easy - just take a bunch of conflicting elements and stick them in a room together - but poorly executed farce can easily become overbroad and wearying. The film feels claustrophobic and chaotic, but it never feels crazy, and it's mainly effective in generating an overwhelming feeling of anxiety in the viewer. I was glad to watch it in cinema, because the sense of panic the film generated was at times so powerful that you're glad for the audience laughter to remind you that it's okay to find this funny. I think part of the reason why the film is effective is the fact that Danielle's lies are often unconvincing. Certainly Max's wife almost immediately registers the connection between the two, and this means that any scene between her and Danielle becomes loaded with a completely different tension to the rest of the film, tamping down on the temptation to make things go too broad - farce is often about trying to keep a dozen plates spinning, so when one of the most important plates immediately smashes, it brings a very different energy to the performance.
I had never seen Rachel Sennott before, but I definitely hope to again. She brings a delightful disaffection to her performance, and never overplays her panic as things start to go wrong - if anything she almost feels exhausted when she realises she has some problem to resolve. In the supporting cast, Danny Defarrari is fascinating as Max; he has a wonderfully sleazy charm that is just right for the character. I was excited to see Fred Melamed, perfectly playing an enthusiastically oblivious father. I also really enjoyed Dianna Agron, who I hadn't seen since I quit watching Glee, as Max's wife - she never makes a scene, never even acknowledges that she has realised her husband is sleeping with this girl, but in every scene you can watch her thinking, processing the information, and trying to decide how she wants to proceed with her life.
I do have to highlight the score by Ariel Marx. It's not a score I can imagine ever wanting to listen to outside of the film, but it's absolutely essential to the effectiveness of the film. The score is all discordance and awkward rhythms, and it forces you into a place of real discomfort, it never settles down, instead leaving you in a place of constant unease. It's a score that feels like it's tapping into Danielle's brain, and is just great.
I really did enjoy this one a great deal.
Midnight
Midnight focuses on Kyung-mi, a young deaf woman. One night, while meeting up with her also-deaf mother, she stumbles across the still-living latest victim of a serial killer, and makes herself his next target. But the killer is masked, so when she escapes and goes with her mother to the police station with a helpful young man, she has no idea that he is the killer. And things escalate when the brother of the previous victim also comes to the police station looking for help to find his sister.
An immediately obvious point of reference is clearly going to be Wait Until Dark, the Audrey Hepburn classic about a blind woman under attack. Like that film, ingrained into this intense thriller is an effective exploration of how people with disabilities make their way in a world that's fundamentally not built for them. I was intrigued by some of the adaptations on display here - the use of a soundmeter to alert her to risks when driving, the house lights that illuminate in response to noise. And yes we're also very aware of how vulnerable she is simply because she is missing this sense - she doesn't know how loud this handle really is as she's trying to slowly and silently open the door, she struggles with communicating with the police, and she has trouble being taken seriously solely because of her disability.
In the lead role, Kim Ki-joo is fascinating. She is a character who recognises the way she is perceived because of her disability, has come to terms with the way some people will treat her, but she's still approaches the world with a generosity of spirit. But the real highlight of the film is probably Wi Ha-joon as one of the coldest movie killers I've seen in a while. He has a superficial charm to him that makes it credible that these people would feel safe with him, but there's something about the way his face can turn when no one's looking that is quite chilling, and there are moments where he's threatening the women knowing they can't do anything about it, and there's a smirking confidence to his performance that is just terrifying.
There's this unusual idea that in filmmaking object permanence isn't a thing, that anything that isn't onscreen doesn't exist until it's onscreen - it's why people are always being hit by speeding buses that they should definitely have heard but that instead don't seem to have existed until they drive into shot. I therefore really enjoyed the way the film played around with this idea. Not only do you get the scene of nearly being run over by traffic that cannot be heard, but there is a intensely suspenseful sequence where Kyung-mi is alone in her house, the scene is silent, there's nothing actually threatening on-screen, and yet we are put into a place of great suspense simply because we can see the illumination of her sound-detecting lights warning us of a threat we neither see nor hear.
The only issue I had with the film was that it makes the mistake of having a fantastic ending, and then carrying on. The second-to-last sequence of the film is a brilliant three person chase through a maze of narrow paths and alleyways; it's one of the most gripping and intense sequences I've seen in a while, and you can feel that this is the climax of the film. And it has an absolutely devastating conclusion, as one of the characters is forced to make an impossible choice. But then, rather than ending the film at that point, the film proceeds to another chase, this time a wide open and busy downtown space that I found much less exciting and believable. While there is some very nice work in that final sequence (in particular they find a nice way to end the threat of the killer without any question of Kyung-mi's culpability), it's a disappointment for a film that had a fantastic conclusion sitting right there.
Still, it's a lot of fun.
About Endlessness
This was probably my most disappointing film of the festival. It's not that it's a bad film, it's not, and I have certainly seen much worse films this festival. But this film is not at all what I was hoping for or expecting.
As with Roy Andersson's other films, there's really no point in trying to give any kind of plot summary for the film, because there is no plot. It's just a collection of short little vignettes that play out. Some characters stop and talk to the camera about what they're thinking, others just live their lives as normal. In this film, we also have a narrator, who gives a brief little description or reflection, a couple of lines on the moment we're about to see or have just seen. There's one character who does recur throughout the film, a priest who is struggling with the realisation that he doesn't believe in God anymore, but except for him we pretty much just meet these individuals for a moment, and then they're gone. And it all plays out with drab grey people living in a drab grey world. So far, it sounds like a typical Roy Andersson film.
But in the past, the Roy Andersson films I've seen have been comedies. At times very sad comedies, at other times wonderfully absurd comedies, but they're always comedies with depth - to borrow from the title of his previous film, he's "reflecting on existence" with his films. But you're just watching these brief comic scenes play out in his work, just hanging for the moment when the joke will reveal itself. That's not this film. I believe I laughed twice in the film, once at a scene where a distracted waiter overfilled a glass and let the wine spill onto the table, and once when a dentist tries to work on a patient without anaesthesia. And there is also a wonderfully joyous scene where three girls passing by a cafe spontaneously decide to dance to the music playing. But beyond that, it's disorientingly humourless. There's nothing funny about watching a father crying as he holds his murdered daughter, the knife still in his hands, while the narrator tells us he killed her "to protect his family's honour", but now he regrets it. There's nothing funny about Adolf Hitler walking into the bunker as the war comes to an end. There's nothing funny about watching a captured soldier being tied to a post and abandoned.
Which is not to say that the film is all heavy moments. The film is in essence attempting to summarise all of human existence within its short running time. So yes, we do get the weighty moments, we also get the sweetness of a father tying his child's shoelaces in the rain, we get the pain of unrequited love, we get the relief of human connection, we get the irritation of a broken shoe, we get the dread that comes with questioning the existence of an afterlife, we get the delight of drinking champagne, we get the naivete that comes with looking at the world and declaring despite all evidence to the contrary that "everything is wonderful", we get the joy of simply dancing with complete abandon with your friends.
I didn't hate the film. I actually enjoyed my time watching the film. My only problem is that past experience with Andersson had left me watching this film expecting it to be something much, much more hilarious then it's actually trying to be. I'd be really curious to give the film a rewatch in a while, just to see how differently the film plays now my expectations have been appropriately set. But for the moment, because I had such high expectations and it was doing something so completely different what I'd hoped, About Endlessness is definitely a disappointment.
Undine
A fascinating movie that completely enthralled me, even as I'm unsure what to make of it. Undine is a historian who teaches about the architectural history of Berlin. One day she's left reeling after her longtime lover Johannes tells her that he is leaving her, and she issues him a threat - you have half an hour, and then you have to tell me that you love me, otherwise I will kill you. But that same day, she meets Christoph, an industrial diver who repairs underwater pipes, and they instantly fall in love. Until one day she sees Johannes on the street with his new partner, and shortly after Christoph has an accident and is left in a coma.
There's this weird tone of magical realism running through the film that initially left me rather baffled. Christoph finds Undine's name on some underwater ruins; when he takes her down to see them, she is carried away by a giant catfish. There's a strange phone call made by someone who definitely did not make the phone call. And there's the bizarre and beautiful conclusion, in which it's actually revealed (although I genuinely don't think it's intended to be a surprise) that Undine is not as human as she presents. Now, when I finished the film, I didn't understand what was going on, what the intent of the film was. It wasn't until I started writing this post and looked up the film to remind myself of Christoph's name that the film crystallized for me. The undine is apparently a type of water spirit from a well-known German legend, much like The Little Mermaid, in which the undine falls in love with a human but gives much the same warning to her beloved that Undine gives to Johannes. While I have no doubt that the film therefore makes complete sense to its original German viewers, who would bring all this background to the film, the issue, at least for me and for other non-German viewers, is that none of this context is on screen. Plus, we're seemingly starting at the end of the story - Johannes is presumably the person that Undine left her underwater life for, as he doesn't seem surprised or put out by the threat that she gives, as though he already knows what she is, knows that she did give that warning, and accepts it. The film feels like it's being subversive in the way it's using this legend, particularly in the way it almost allows Undine to remain human by transferring her love from Johannes to Christoph. But without establishing some sense of the rules and mythology that the film is playing with, it does become a barrier to many audiences. Now maybe that's fine, maybe he's genuinely trying to focus his attention on German viewers, in which case the choice to omit such explanation is reasonable. After all, if you were to make a movie for New Zealand viewers and only New Zealand viewers, it might be reasonable to have a scene where a character called Maui goes fishing, and not put in any explanation, because your audience will get it. But that decision then has wider impact on the film if it gets a more international release. And that's what Petzold has done here.
The thing is, there is something about Christian Petzold that I just find compelling. This is the third Petzold film I've seen, and I have real issues with each. With Phoenix, it's the dozen different plot contrivances and improbable actions that I can't believe. With Transit, it's the choice to take a story that's plainly set in WWII and to place it in modern times to make the metaphor painfully obvious. And here, it's the choice to simply omit so much vital context that unless the name Undine means something to you going in then you simply will not understand the film. And yet there's something about his work that lingers and compels. A couple of weeks ago I was listening to The Great American Pop Culture Quiz Show podcast, and in one of the questions they played a brief audio clip from Phoenix, and instantly I recognised the sound of this film that I saw once six years ago - that's a sign of how much his films stay with you. He has a care and restraint to his filmmaking that is striking and impactful. He's not showy, there's nothing particularly distinctive about his style or the way he makes films, but yet in a low-key way his films can just be devastatingly beautiful to look at. (There's a reason why they used the image of Undine in the pool as the art for one of the cards that played before every movie - it's simply a stunning image.) Even if his storytelling bothers me, I know I can rely on Petzold for sublime filmmaking.
One thing I found fascinating was the focus the film had on architecture. Undine's job involves delivering lectures about Berlin through the viewpoint of its architecture, and in particular what East Berlin looked like under the GDR, and how those spaces were transformed following reunification - and this is not a minor detail, this is not a token job; we get multiple scenes of her delivering her lectures, including a scene where she practices her lecture with Christoph in between their lovemaking, so Petzold clearly felt that this was important. His past films that I've seen have had a very strong thematic focus on the war and the way the wounds of that conflict resonate through time. Similarly, here we learn how 30 years on Berlin's physical existence is still shaped by the GDR era. Even when the previous buildings are torn down and replaced, the dimensions of those buildings define the space into which these new places will go. You can still look through the city as it currently is to see the city it once was. As to why this might be the chosen profession of a water spirit, that I'm not sure of, but I think it's about the interplay of modernity and history and mythology - at one point she talks about the initial founding of the settlement that would grow to become Berlin, and it feels very intimate, as though this was a place where mythology once reigned, but as the city grew the significance of these stories faded even as their power remained and could still be seen. So it becomes a metaphor for the lingering strength of these legends in a modern world.
So these are my initials thoughts about what the film is trying to get at. They're still very bare bones and undeveloped, but I feel like I'll be reflecting on this one for a while. Suffice it to say, I really enjoyed the film, and now that I have a better grasp of the legend that the film is engaging with, I feel my appreciation of the film is growing.
Paris, 13th District
In an apartment in Paris, Emilie is looking for a roommate. She's surprised to find the applicant Camille is male, but he's nice, and he's hot, and they casually fall into a roommates-with-benefits arrangement, until he decides to end the arrangement and things go south. Meanwhile, Nora is a 32 year old adult student going to law school; already distanced from the other students by her age, she becomes the subject of much taunting after being mistaken for a pornstar, and is forced to quit school. Instead she starts working at a real estate agency with Camille, and as the two start a relationship, she also seeks out the pornstar and starts chatting to her online.
So you can tell the type of film this will be pretty much from the opening scene, as we find Emilie sitting naked on her couch singing karaoke. And as the film progresses, it's confirmed that this is a film in which three of the four leads are attractive young women, one playing a literal pornstar, who are all willing to take their clothes off on camera, and so the film has them do it as often as possible. The film is interested in their sex lives, seemingly to the exclusion of all else - there's even an absurd scene where Emilie, having just matched with someone on some Tinder stand-in app while working as a waitress, asks a coworker to cover for her while she "runs an errand", so she can run home, have sex (multiple positions), before returning to work and literally dancing between the tables with real "just got laid" energy. The film genuinely starts to feel like there is someone off screen with a stopwatch tracking how long it has been since we last saw boobs; it feels exploitative, and the decision to shoot in black and white started to feel like a cynical exercise to justify the nudity by proclaiming that "It's art".
The sad thing is that there are some wonderful performances by excellent actors who are not well used by the material. Noémie Merlant as Nora is just a star, playing the role with the most subtlety and shading to her character. Depending on her circumstance, she's either confident or timid, forthright or completely closed off, consumed by desire or shrinking violet; she navigates those turns expertly, and is just a fascinating performer to watch. Lucie Zhang as Emilie has much less to play with, as her character is basically just trying to survive until her next lay, but she's an appealing and charismatic screen presence. And Jehnny Beth as the pornstar Amber Sweet really does have a nothing role, existing simply as a presence on a computer screen, but she's interesting enough that I wanted to see her enter into the film's narrative more.
The film is filled with strange choices and forgotten plot threads. They take great care to establish that Camille is a teacher, but we never see him teaching, and when we do see him at work he's suddenly a real estate agent for some reason; the film gives some hand-waving excuse about why he's no longer a teacher, but it's a lot of additional complication when the simplest thing would be to just have him be in real estate from the beginning. The film includes a scene where Nora encounters one of the students that taunted her, and out of nowhere Nora punches her in the face; it's in the middle of the street, there are witnesses, there will be no difficulty identifying her, she should definitely be facing some kind of assault charge, and yet the film forgets this happened the moment the scene ends. They have a subplot in which Camille's sister aspires to be a stand-up comedian; we hear about all the original material she's writing, but the only joke we actually hear her deliver is a very well-known joke I instantly recognised as being by Jerry Seinfeld - again they hand-wave it with a line about how she didn't write all of her material, but if the film's writers couldn't think of a single original joke (and it doesn't have to be a great joke - she is only starting, after all), why not have her aspire to something else?
There are also so many interesting story directions the film could take but just ignores. There's an occasionally recurring plot involving Emilie not visiting her Alzheimer's-afflicted grandmother in a rest home, and then once she does visit her she finds the experience too distressing. But later, when she takes in a new roommate, she offers to discount the rent if the roommate will pretend to be her and visit the grandmother regularly. That's the last we hear of this arrangement, but did that happen, and what was the experience like for the roommate? What about the younger sister, who struggles with a bad stutter that goes away whenever she is performing - that sounds like something I'd like to explore. Sure, the idea of her being a stand-up is bad, but you could easily achieve the same goal by her wanting to be an actor.
Most frustratingly, there's the story of Nora's friendship with pornstar Amber, which to me tells the story from the completely wrong point of view. I would imagine that people in that type of profession would have to be extremely protective of themselves, and create a clear delineation between their personal and their professional lives. There's a moment where Nora asks Amber what her real name is, and you can see Amber tense up, you can tell this is something she gets asked a lot and cannot answer for her protection. And so it threw me when Amber answers the question, and even gives Norah her private details so they can chat for hours outside of the expensive cam service. But they tell this entire story from the point of view of Nora, with Amber as just this fantasy figure on screen, when it's much more fascinating to see that friendship from Amber's point of view, explore that delineation between her public and private persona, and understand what it is that she needs that she gets from this friendship.
This was just frustrating. Whenever the filmmaker was given a choice about which direction to take the film, he always chooses the more prurient option. There's the germ of an interesting film in here, but this isn't it.
Written on the Wind
The last of this year's "classic" screenings was this melodrama by Douglas Sirk. My knowledge of Sirk is sadly fairly limited, having only seen a couple of his films at Film Society a number of years ago, so it was nice to finally see possibly his best-known title.
It's night, and Robert Stack is drunkenly racing his sports car down the road until he arrives at his mansion to angrily confront Rock Hudson and Lauren Bacall. Shots are fired, and Bacall collapses to the ground. Cut to a couple of years earlier, and Hudson is the best friend of Stack, portraying the playboy son of an oil magnate. Hudson meets executive secretary Bacall, fairly promptly falls for her, and is disappointed in her when she is fairly easily won over by Stack's incredible wealth and marries her. The relationship seems like a positive influence on Stack, until he starts drinking after learning that he cannot father children. Meanwhile Stack's sister, in an Oscar-winning performance by Dorothy Malone, is devastated that Hudson doesn't want to be with her, so quells that pain by going home with any guy she can.
It's probably the fact that the film was set among the oil wealthy, but the film this brought to mind was Giant, the James Dean film from the same year (also starting Rock Hudson) - which was odd for me because I really did not like Giant and haven't thought about it since watching the film 15 years ago. Now, I may be misremembering that film but in my memory, Giant took the grand settings and wide-open spaces to tell the American epic, a story of importance about how this country was made. It was nominated for a bunch of Oscars, won for Directing - and it's a film I never hear referenced. By contrast, certainly Sirk's films are painted today with a justified reputation of being classics, but there's something about Written on the Wind when compared to a film like Giant that feels almost disreputable, a bit trashy. There's so much sex and alcoholism and abuse and fighting and nymphomania and maybe even hints at homosexuality, but it's all done with glamour and beauty and some incredible use of Technicolor. This really does feel like the forerunner to the primetime soap operas of the 1980s (obviously the setting, with oil wells littering the country, calls to mind Dallas), with unimaginably wealthy people living impossibly glamorous lives of debauchery, with a sexual frankness that's surprising for a film made at a time when the Hays Code was still very much in control.
To be honest, the more I think about that, this feels like it broke my mind. I'm suddenly realising Douglas Sirk may be a different director to the person I'd imagined, and now I feel I really need to dig in to his work and see what he was really like as a filmmaker.
Apples
An intriguing and sad little comedy from Greece, Apples takes place in a world in which an epidemic of amnesia is taking control. Thousands of people are just forgetting who they are. The film focuses on one man who is on the bus when he forgets, and without any identification or idea where he was going or where he lives, he's just taken to the hospital. But then the doctors propose a new treatment - the patients take part in various common life activities, not as a way of trying to recover lost memories, but as a way to start to build a new identity. They have to take part in an activity - ride a bike, go clubbing, see a movie - and take a Polaroid picture of themselves doing this activity. The cameras eventually become a defining mark identifying those who have forgotten from those who have not. And then one day he meets a woman who has also forgotten, and they become friends, undertaking their individual activities together. And through all that, we get brief hints that perhaps his memories are coming back to him.
It's an absolutely terrifying concept, but it underpins a film that is sweet and gentle. The film is essentially contemplating what it is that defines the person we are - to what degree are our personalities ingrained, and to what degree are they developed through our experiences. Here, the people who have forgotten are genuine blank slates, entirely affectless - and that's the point of the experiment, to see whether they can create personalities through experiences. But because these people are essentially going through identical experiences, they're all essentially remaining identical people. Because it's not just the experiences that you have that define you, it's the context around you having that experience. It's not necessarily, say, that the experience of having your first drink of alcohol per se means anything; the more significant question is how old you were, why did you have that drink, and who were the others around. And we're also defined by the experiences we don't have - there's a scene where he has to go to a strip club and get a lap dance; that's an experience I've never had, and I think that fact in itself defines a lot about me. But when these people are going through these experiences in a rote manner, it actively works against the development of personality by denying people their choice of what to do.
There's a scene late in the movie that I think speaks to the core point of view of the film. The man has been tasked with visiting with an old man in hospital who's on his way out, and to just talk and spend time with him. And as they talk he discovers that the old man has a wife, but she's one of the people who have forgotten, and the man reflects that perhaps this is better. The pain of grief only afflicts us because we are able to remember what we lost. But is it really better to forget, or would that simply be replacing one pain with another, if we're aware of a gap in our mind with no idea what's supposed to do it? Inevitably, it forces one to think of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, certainly the best cinematic exploration about identity and memory and how our experiences define us. This is not as good as Eternal Sunshine, but it is intriguing and fascinating, and I really did enjoy it.
I don't know how easy it will be to see Apples, but if you do get a chance, it is well worth your time.
One Second
The new film from the great Chinese auteur Zhang Yimou. During the time of the Cultural Revolution in China, we see a man trekking across the desert desperate to get to a small town that is due to show a movie. Unfortunately he's too late - the screening has taken place, and the film reels are packed on a bike and ready to go to the next town. But then he sees a young girl steal one of the reels, and he chases her down, desperate to make sure that nothing will prevent the next screening from taking place. And so this antagonistic relationship develops between these two people with diametrically opposed goals. And even if they get all of the film reels to the next town, there are other problems that will emerge to prevent the screening. But still the man is desperate to ensure the screening proceeds, just so that he can watch one single second of footage.
It's been a long time coming for this film. The movie was originally supposed to screen in Berlin in 2019, until China withdrew it at the last second due to "technical problems" - which most people assume means it had some content that the Chinese censors needed to cut. And I can believe that there was material in this film that had to be removed - there is certainly some criticism, albeit soft criticism, about aspects of life in Mao's China that I can easily believe might initially have been stronger.
I really enjoyed One Second - a delightful reflection on the power of cinema. If there's one thing we've learnt over the past two years, it's the power of a communal experience, of sitting in the dark with an audience sharing this time together. Here we have this town that always comes together whenever there's a movie to watch - and these are not new movies, they've seen them all before and can even debate the merits of one title versus another, but they just love to gather in one place, watch a great story, enjoy singing the patriotic song, and have a wonderful shared time as a group. And there's this fantastic sequence, when it seems the screening may be cancelled, where the community excitedly comes together to work to ensure it can proceed, because that's how important this experience is for these people.
It's very easy for us in our world to become very blasé about the moving image. We are so used to carrying around these powerful movie cameras in our pockets that we've forgotten what a magic trick it really is. For almost the entirety of human existence, a moment is lost once it happens, and exists only in the memory. But 125 years ago this invention of the moving picture changed the world, and suddenly time could be preserved. And that's so incredibly important, so valuable to people. But also, it's such a fragile medium. Physical film is so vulnerable to scratches and damage, digital media has its own challenges and risks. But it's so important to protect, because there is such rich power in the moving image.
One thing I feel I haven't made clear is just how funny the movie is. Zhang Yi and Liu Haocun are a wonderful double act, and their repeated efforts to cross and double-cross, to trick and to catch each other were a total delight, and ensured that there was a constant bed of laughter rippling through the audience throughout the screening. And yet the respect and affection that develops between the two for each other still feels genuine and heartfelt - frankly I don't think the film would have worked had it not.
Ultimately it does feel like lesser Zhang Yimou. It's certainly moving at times, but it doesn't have the rich emotional underpinnings that many of his best films have; and while it's certainly a beautiful film (Dune is going to be hard-pressed to beat it for stunning shots of vast deserts), the more natural design doesn't blow you away in the way that his more visually extraordinary films do. But it's a sweet and charming story that at its core celebrates something I love.
Titane
Before the screening, we were reminded that this is only the second film from a female director to win the Palme d'Or at Cannes. The first woman to win the prize was Jane Campion. Well, The Piano this definitely is not.
I've been interested in this film for a while. I was really impressed by Julia Ducournau's first film, the cannibalism horror Raw, so was already interested to see where she would go next. I was certainly intrigued when she won the Palme d'Or, and even more so when every critic I saw gave some variation on the advice to "watch the film without reading about it in advance or having any idea where it's going". So that's what I did - and when you don't know where it's going: wow, what a ride.
(And I'm spoiling pretty much everything about the film now, because I just have to. You have been warned.)
Alexia is an exotic dancer who performs at car shows, doing incredible routines on the hoods of the vehicles. One night as she's leaving the show, she's confronted by a stalker, and stabs him in the head. While showering to clean herself up after the killing, she hears a noise which leads her out to a car that seems to be alive. So she gets into the backseat of the car and ... has sex with the car (?). And becomes pregnant (?) to the car. She then proceeds to murder a lot of people in a very short space of time. (It's at this point, about 30 minutes in, that we had our first walk-out from the cinema.) And so Alexia, trying to evade capture for her many murders, takes on the identity of Adrien, a long-missing teenage boy who is the son of the local fire chief. But if she's going to convince as a boy, she needs to hide the fact that she has a pregnant belly and breasts, along with hiding the fact that her belly is being ripped opened by the child(?) inside her and that her breasts are now lactating motor oil.
Yeah, so... that's a thing that happened.
I genuinely do not know how a film as insane as this won an award as prestigious as the Palme d'Or. All I can think is that the quality of the filmmaking is so undeniable that it had to win. There's such bravura confidence and talent running through every minute of the film that it just astonishes you. There is a control over the audience's response on display in every moment. Here's one example - there's a moment where Alexia is bashing someone in the head with a stool, and you can feel the audience cringing in pain. But then she flips the stool, and kills the person by ramming the stool leg down the person's throat - at which point the entire audience laughed in uncomfortable astonishment at what we just saw. But then, she's feeling exhausted, so needing a rest she sits down on the stool, which gets a genuine laugh because it's a genuine joke. And the film is constantly making that transition between shock horror, shocked laughter, and genuine laughter, and it always feels like at every moment Ducournau knows what response she's trying to get and is getting.
You can feel the director's confidence right from the start of the film. After a brief prologue involving Alexia as a young child, the film proper starts with a stunning shot (apparently a genuine single take) as Alexia walks through the crowded car show, navigating all the corners, until she reaches her car, and gives this elaborate performance with the car, almost giving it a lapdance. It's packed and chaotic, and almost completely overrides your senses with the garish artificial lighting and the overpowering chrome gleam everywhere. You admire the technical achievement in filming this sequence, but more than that it imparts a real sense of Alexia as being in control over this environment. We feel exhausted in this place, but she feels at home. It's an opening that makes a statement - that we're about to spend the next few hours in the hands of a genuine visionary.
The thing is, while the first half of the film is absolutely insane, it's really in the second half of the film that we get to the rich emotional core of the film. As the film was unfolding, I found myself remembering The Imposter, a documentary from a few years ago. That film was about a person who falsely claimed to be a long-missing child and went to live with this child's family. A big part of that documentary rested on the question of why this family was so willing to receive this imposter and were so easy to convince that he was the missing son. Titane basically rests its explanation in grief - there is an incomprehensible pain that comes with knowing your child has died, but it's even harder when your child is missing and you have no definitive answer as to whether they are alive or dead, and so it almost becomes an emotional release to have someone they can accept as their son. By the end of the film, no-one believes that this is Adrien, and yet everyone carries on as though it is, because it's easier to have Adrien back, even if he's not.
This is absolutely Agathe Rousselle's film - everything hangs on her. The first half goes to such extreme lengths to alienate us and present her as a monster that you almost can't imagine spending nearly 2 hours with her. And yet by the end, she so transforms the character that you feel genuine sympathy for her. The thing that makes it even more impressive is how little dialogue she has. Now, in the second half, that makes sense - she's pretending to be a teenage boy, and if she speaks that ruse will end quickly, so she pretends to be silenced by trauma. But even in the first half she's taciturn to an extreme. Instead the entire character is embodied in her physical performance - Alexia is a dancer, so her entire being is about physical expression, and this runs through the performance. Every movement, every look, every lip movement expresses the soul of this character. It's a stunning display.
But the film also has an excellent performance by Vincent Lindon as the father of Adrien. The film is very much engaged with ideas of masculinity, and it's in Vincent and his role as fire chief that these ideas get their fullest exploration. There's a machismo running through his scenes and those of the other firefighters that is almost overpowering - Vincent even resorts to taking steroids out of fear of aging and a perception that he needs to be able to dominate the other men. And when it comes to his scenes with his son "Adrien", it's fascinating to see his discomfort at how expressing any form of affection conflicts with his perception of being a man. And there's also a lot of regret in the performance - we never learn what happened to Adrien, but I had the impression that it's possible Adrien, at least initially, might have run away, perhaps in response to a father who was never comfortable being loving, and so the way he treats "Adrien" feels like he's trying to redeem his past actions and force himself to be different this time.
This is not a film I would recommend to many people. This is a film for people who watched David Cronenberg's Crash (not the one that won the Oscar; the one about the sexual appeal of car crashes) and decided that film wasn't extreme enough - something that has never before been said about Cronenberg. It's tough and provocative and uncomfortable, but it is also a masterful display of filmmaking talent that feels almost instinctive. I think I liked it.
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