Wednesday, August 16, 2017

I'm Too Miffty

I saw seventeen films at MIFF and I liked a lot of them but I'm lazy and so I only managed to write up four of them. On the Beach at Night Alone, A Man of Integrity, The Death and Life of Marsha P Johnson and High Tide come highly recommended. The Idea of a Lake, A Skin So Soft, The Wound, Lover for a Day and Sami Blood are all worth a look.

Axolotl Overkill: Its detractors are right insofar as we probably didn't need another trawl through the Berlin drug/club scene but seeing as we got one anyway I'm happy to have Axolotl Overkill. It cuts from scene to scene with little regard for connecting tissue yet somehow this produces a hazy rhythm rather than an abrupt one. Also setting it apart from its peers is an eye for the absurd (where did that penguin come from?) and a willingness to pause all forward momentum for flights of fancy like an out of nowhere contemporary dance performance set to Me and the Devil.

Bright Sunshine In/Let the Sunshine In: Claire Denis is the greatest living director so calling this a major disappointment for me is something of an understatement. All the pieces are in place save for a script which approaches romance as an intellectual pursuit apart from the rest of life and a collection of characters (very deliberately) designed as caricatures of masculinity complete with unbearable tics. It is very much what it intends to be so if that description appeals to your sensibilities by all means have at it. I'll be over here exchanging sad high fives with the disappointed. (That is an actual thing that happened. Film festivals are strange.)

Floating Life: The sad truth of films is that for every widely hailed masterpiece that enters the canon and is forever available on a million different formats there are at least three other worthy films condemned to obscurity. The nice thing about film festivals is that such gems are occasionally dug up. Floating Life is definitely a gem. It starts out as a broad fish-out-of-water comedy set in the overexposed Australian sun but before it's done it cycles through a dozen different tones (lowkey realist drama, heartrending tragedy, sexy romance...) at least three different continents and all manner of compositions (flat with loads of negative space, deep focus, striking bird's eyes...) and yet all of it feels of a piece and contributes to its kaleidoscopic take on the immigrant experience.

Nocturama: Ostensibly this film is about terrorism and consumerism but it methodically, deliberately strips away almost all of the familiar context and rhetoric used to explain such things. Even physical space is violated in its finale as the action is viewed through banks of security screens which make it difficult - if not impossible - to know where people are in relation to one another. The cumulative effect of these choices is disconcerting, almost terrifying. There are no explanations to be found for its protagonists' deeds, no potential cures suggested for the sickness at its heart; just a headlong fall into a (richly aestheticized) void.