Defending the Block

Seeing a "youth-orientated" film at a big chain cinema made for a different trailer viewing experience to the one I've grown accustomed to. On one hand I avoided the enervating promo for The Woman on the Sixth Floor, on the other hand I was bombarded with the sheer cynicism with which teen marketers approach their task. It seems they feel kids are easy prey for generic fantasies, so long as they throw in some shaky-cam to make it all feel real; either that or they think that by doing this, removing the titles and credits and inserting a link they can build “viral buzz”.  

BIFF Reviews: Who Said Class Was Dead?

Even the Rain: This film can best be likened to using a blunt instrument: it gets the job done but using a finer tool might have resulted in a better finish. This problem is compounded by its over-ambitious set-up, in which a film crew arrives to tell the story of Columbus’s oppression of the Indians and the priest who set himself against this colonialism. The historical context of the story is established as a parallel, not only to the film crews’ heedless exploitation of the present day Indians, but also to the government’s privatisation of the water supply.*

BIFF Reviews: The Running Away Edition

Good Bye: People often say they’d pay to watch their favourite comedians read the phonebook. Well it turns out that I’ll gladly pay one of my favourite auteurs to make a political thriller comprised largely of people sitting around in waiting rooms. I had been afraid that, without an Iron Island or the White Meadows to lean on, Rasolouf might struggle to create the breathtaking and pointed pictorial beauty of his earlier films. This is not at all the case, in fact in he has, without changing his master shot style at all, made the most powerful images of his career.*

BIFF Reviews: Kawaii Edition

I Wish:

“What does “Indie” mean?”

“I think it means you have to try harder.”

Fans of Kore-eda may fear that his latest, a narrative about kids attempting to reunite their split family by the power of a wish granted by a bullet train, may represent an avowal of the above sentiment. It has, after all, been payed for largely by a bullet train company and both the tone of the advertising and its early reception have hinted that it might be something of a “sell out” film.

BIFF Reviews: My Persona is a Tyrannosaur

Tyrannosaur: This is the kind of film which I quite enjoy while watching it but which doesn’t tend to stick with me or demand that I write about it. It’s a well observed, superbly acted slice of lower class, kitchen sink drama. The kind of film that tugs relentlessly at your heartstrings but, despite a surfeit of anguish and hard won deliverance shot in close-up, is well enough balanced by a believable milieu and rounded characters to avoid being shamelessly manipulative. Still, one can’t help but feel that while all three stories in Tyrannosaur might be believable enough on their own they feel a little forced when taken together.

BIFF Reviews: Policing Israel

Policeman: Hot on the heels of my current festival low point comes a new contender for my BIFF favourite. Policeman, structured like a diptych­­­­, contains my two favourite things in film: bold, nuanced politics and strong direction tailored to the subject matter at hand.

BIFF Reviews: Taking Shelter under Las Acacias

Take Shelter: Serious spoilers to follow; you really don’t want to read this if you have any intention whatsoever of seeing Take Shelter. Spoilers can really suck, I know, but this is one of those films which is simply impossible to discuss without talking about the ending.

BIFF Reviews: The New Batch

Mysteries of Lisbon: I went into Mysteries excitedly anticipating a gorgeously mounted, twist-filled melodrama and that’s exactly what I got. Yet even as you cheer for me – you are cheering for me, right? – shed a few tears for the poor soul who didn’t realise he was making a four hour commitment. Still he didn’t have it so bad: Mysteries is an entrancing film.

An Architecture of Loss: Liverpool

I went into Liverpool fearing an "unmediated slab of quotidian reality"* and hoping for an Uncle Boonmee-like revelatory experience. What I actually experienced was something that, while not reaching (or to be fair even grasping) for Boonmee's intense mysticism, imparted a not dissimilar sense of a regrettable past embedded in the present. Unlike Boonme the loss is etched in run down, occasionally skeletal, buildings and faces. Lisandro Alonso finds a great deal of pathos in simply placing his prodigal son in what were clearly once familiar surrounds and people, or in quietly evoking the wider world outside of the small, isolated village.

Despite this I didn't find it an entirely gratifying experience. Alonso's use of non professionals ensures some very restrained performances which occasionally become flat. It's probable that this hyper-naturalism is exactly what Alonso was hoping to achieve but for me, raised on traditional acting, the ability to read the tiniest flickers of emotion in the actor's faces was missing and I couldn't stop thinking about how the film might have played with someone like Samantha Moreton in the lead.

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*This wonderful phrase is stolen from Shane Danielsen who deployed it in his critique of Joe Swanberg. His piece is here.

A Short Note on Incendies

Incendies has the one thing I prize in cinema above all else: a director with a strong personal style who can tailor it to the subject matter at hand.  Unfortunately Denis Villeneuve's style is deployed in the service of a pot-boiler of a story. At first it's merely forgettable stuff: a mechanistic cycle of violence told through the prism of a straightforward detective story in which neither the detective nor her quarry emerge as anything more than plot tokens. But by the time it piles on its last lurid, contrived twist it becomes truly risible: an art house exploitation film in which the most painful, improbable scenario its makers could contrive is made palatable through an ostensibly laudable, yet astonishingly wrong-headed, paean to forgiveness.

French Double Feature

There are innumerable features built around the coming of age story of a teen-aged protagonist. A substantial portion of them are centred around protagonists with separated parents. Love Like Poison stands out by virtue of its unusual emphasis on pubescent body anxiety, and its intersection with relationships (romantic, friendly and familial) and religious faith. I don't think I've ever seen a more honest or probing examination of this part of adolescence: too often film-makers focus entirely on the emotional difficulties of negotiating new relationships and forming an adult identity.

Youth, Speed, Trouble, Film*

Wasted on the Young, for all its deliberately overblown genre conceits, is the best observed high school set film I've seen in a long time. It's also a rare example of a piece of modern commercial cinema with a highly distinctive visual language devised with more ambitious intentions than simply creating pretty pictures. If it stumbles occasionally it is nonetheless a worthy attempt to blend "social commentary" with "genre sensationalism".

Capsule: Tokyo Sonata

Tokyo Sonata is nothing if not ambitious. In following the travails of a middle class family it aims to paint a portrait of modern Japan. It sets out to encompass the plight of middle managers who are the first to go in difficult times and the least qualified to find other work, the nature of family affairs in which social expectations about gender roles and duties stifle both men and women, the United States - Japan alliance and what it means for young people and many other similarly weighty social matters.

Unfortunately in doing so it's bitten off more than it can chew - while some thematic elements find themselves well serviced others fall by the wayside and the average scripting is not up to the task of coping with some of the more esoteric strands. Similarly, while the family's secrets and multiple falls from grace are fairly well plotted, their final bottoming out and eventual acceptance of their new roles is clumsily handled via some unnecessary and tonally jarring plot mechanics.

Still, Kurosawa's direction of his ultimately awkward scenario is never any less than assured. Astutely chosen framing and lighting turn otherwise unremarkable office blocks and bus stations in to cut-rate versions of purgatory and many of the confrontations at home are choreographed elegantly; employing depth staging to quiet effect.

Capsule: The King's Speech

A surprisingly amiable film as many of the biopic/period clichés are effectively underplayed or absent entirely. As noted elsewhere Tom Hooper attempts more than the kind of paint-by-numbers approach usually found in such projects. He is committed to finding some visual interest in his frame - the initial therapy session with Rush's character is shot in such a way that there is an uncomfortable amount of negative space in the frame, effectively putting the viewer on edge. However there are moments when he bows to cliché. For example the way the final speech is shot, with its cutaways to every character who is even remotely important - and several that aren't - is tiresome. Surely it might have been more effective, and more in keeping with the film's low key tone, to stay locked on Rush and Firth and emphasis the constant personal  struggle of giving the speech?

The aforementioned low key tone is a great relief. Rather than the usual portentous declarations of importance the film generally downplays whatever negligible impact the speeches of King George VI might have had. Of course this approach also means that what we're left with is the story of a friendship between two loving family men but the performances and dialogue make it a fairly charming affair. If there's nothing particularly refreshing in the story of the eccentric who helps his new uptight friend live a little there's nothing particularly objectionable about it either.

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind

This is very much early Miyazaki. Early in the sense that he seems to have difficulty trusting the audience, instead ensuring that characters tell us what they are seeing and explain it - twice if necessary - so that there is little room for misinterpreting the potentially confusing scenario. Miyazaki in the sense that it is fully committed to its environmental message in a way that manages to be simple without being simplistic.

Like many environmentally concious films it's about being able to live in harmony with nature and respect it rather than struggling against it. Unlike many such films its message is never presented in such direct, cliched tones and the destructive impulse to be struggled against is not as simple as the commonly trotted out sin of greed. Rather than a parable of avaricious humans destroying the natural world out a myopic desire to enrich themselves it's about people trying to make life comfortable for themselves without understanding the environment they're manipulating. It's harder to boo and hiss at the bad guy while remaining confident of one's own good nature when everyone is acting out of recognisably common impulses.

It's also a pacifist film - as has been noted elsewhere much of the narrative is driven by Nausicaä's desire to atone for her early killings by attempting to resolve conflict without bloodshed. As with the environmental message Miyazaki avoids the easier strategies of polemic. While the hero is (of course) triumphant, the narrative is not naive about the possible consequences of attempting to face up to armed soldiers with bare hands and honest words.

The earlier noted combination of early difficulties and precocious assurance is repeated with the visuals. The animation, in keeping with the lower budgeted productions of Japan at the time, is often minimal and occaisionally awkward. However the art is as lush as ever and one can see, in the design of creatures, people and craft, many of the same aesthetic ideas pursued in later Ghibli films.

While uneven it's the strengths of Nausicaä that linger longer than the weaknesses. Once the audience is comfortably orientated in his world Miyazaki does let the story flow more smoothly with less intrusive hand holding and the story's strengths and even some of his humour emerge.

Somewhere

Somewhere is a fairly restrained, if not exactly subtle, study of a man who - by personal temperament and because of impersonal structures - is pathologically incapable of forming relationships. Much of the film is given over to showing us the professional cocoon that surrounds Johnny and the personal routines he's built. The former's ever present, ever sycophantic but never personal presence is largely anonymous even when it is present in person. The latter's stultifying sameness and its lack of fulfilment is conveyed largely through visual metaphor: the endless parade of identical hotel rooms and buxom blonds, the car that races around and around and around.

This visual language remains consistent with the narrative of the film right up until the final shot. For example the stylish suite that breaks up the monotony of endless hotel rooms serves both its metaphoric function; the monotony of his routine having been broken by Cleo, and its plot function; a place for them to stay while they're in Italy. However this harmony breaks down at the end. While the final shot provides a neat counterpart to the opening one - instead of driving around and around he's leaving the safety of his cocoon and walking somewhere with purpose - it makes zero sense on a story level. He's decided his life is hollow but has been utterly at a loss as to how to fix it. The last shot suggests he's found a sense of direction but the narrative is at a complete loss as to what it might be. It's a cheat that somewhat sours the rest of the film's modest achievements

On the positive side it is at least as not relentlessly editorialising or as nakedly ideological as its spiritual partner Up in the Air. Unlike Ryan, Johnny lacks self awareness. As such he doesn't feel the need to develop a coherent philosophy to explain himself to others. This results in a film that feels less concerned with argument and debate and more concerned with the emotions of its protagonists. It's the difference between someone who decided that there is a trend of depersonalisation in modern society which needs to be exposed through popular entertainment and someone making a picture about a person in trouble.

Heaven

I picked up Heaven largely because of its status as the final script from the two Krzysztofs. So it's somewhat surprising that I ultimately found the direction to be more rewarding (if one can really separate the two).

The script has a straightforward quality, very much reminiscent of White. Phillipa proves to be an unusually decisive protagonist, navigating the moral and practical quandaries she finds herself in with a high degree of confidence and surety. Furthermore Filippo proves to be so devoted that he does not question her decisions in any way. The result is that the moral issues surrounding them are, for the most part, kept simple. If the audience wishes to probe or complicate them they must do so on their own - and the film hardly encourages them to.

Tykwer's direction, on the other hand, reminded me why I love film as a medium. There are, of course, those two stunning, show-offy shots at the end which had me gasping in awe. But there are also many smaller touches throughout the film. My personal favourite being the scene in the church where the camera circles the protaganists - changing our perspective so that the distance between their faces is shortened and lengthened at just the right moments.

Arguably the cinematography and mise-en-scene are a little on the nose. The number of aerial and crane shots, the number of times characters stand in dark rooms with beams of light coming in from windows or in which a bright outside is shot from a dark inside, makes it difficult to forget that one is watching a film called Heaven. But for whatever reason I didn't feel that way about them - perhaps because the script is strong , even if it doesn't give me exactly what I wanted/was expecting.

Red Hill

Red Hill is, in many ways, a very assured piece of pulp filmmaking. Hughs is totally in control of his tone and the result is a strong realisation of a throwback, modern day comic book which understands its audience is hip to the conventions, and thus is happy to give a wink and a nod every now and then, but is also keen to deliver lurid thrills and spills. (Not too lurid though. It doesn't set out to shock: this is strictly entertainment and it has to be sold at the newsagent after all.)

Unfortunately it tries to marry this pulp sensibility to some very real issues and in doing so proves that you really can't have your cake and eat it too. The convention which requires Kwanten's character be a man alone in a small town with a dirty secret also turns its entire (and I do mean entire) onscreen male population into a bunch of racist thugs, leaving the city boy as the only decent man. Granted it's not quite as simple as that: the film does briefly raise the tension between rural development and respect for culture and the environment. However the characters don't feel this tension - they know what they want and they're going to get what they want in as lurid a manner as possible.

Similarly its sympathy for Indigenous Australia is built on broad cliches, including that of the noble savage. On one hand there are moments in the film which seem to poke fun at the stereotype, as when Lewis' character pauses to use the jukebox or when he stops by the tourist office and sees its appropriated display. But his near absolute silence is more than a little troubling and by the time he's raided the tourist display and is killing his foes with traditional weapons ( I know, I know it's so the killings are silent but seriously a spear and a boomerang?) it's clear that the filmmakers put little effort into making him something other than yet another stereotyped Aboriginal victim. The less said about the muddied symbolism of the panther the better (I initially thought it was a symbol of a cruel, foreign transplant but that last shot seems to indicate it's a manifestation of the noble, misunderstood savage.)

Unfortunately the serviceable dialogue suggests that, while Hughs is gifted with his images, this is likely to be as good as he'll get when working from his own scripts. Still,  it is possible that next time out he might jettison the ham-fisted social commentary and just go for pure, pulp pleasure.

The Social Network

The most striking part of the film is undeniably the Facemash sequence. With Reznor and Rose's music gently goosing the moment well timed edits flash between Zuckerberg's drunken invention and the culture it interacts with (which handily, and more importantly, doubles as the reason he's doing it). It's a masterful piece of film making in every way and, aside from its technical virtuosity, the reason it is is because it's one of the few moments when the scripted dialogue isn't telling us exactly, with little subtlety, what to think about the characters.

Unfortunately this is exactly what the rest of the film is doing. The opening scene at the bar doesn't lay out the film's thesis in microcosm: it lays out the film's thesis in its entirety. Zuckerberg is presented as a man driven by exactly two concerns: (1) The desire to be loved by Erica Albrecht and (2) the desire to compensate for his insecurity by standing out from the rest. That's it. As far as scriptwriter Aaron Sorkin is concerned these two desires are the sum total of Zuckerberg's character and his chutzpah in summing up a human being with these two elements and then judging him on that basis (and this is a very judgmental film) is the element the makes The Social Network every bit as arrogant a film as it thinks the Winkelwii are people.

However this reductionist approach to characterization (which no one in the film can escape) is not the only reason why The Social Network is such a deeply flawed work. As alluded to above Sorkin can't keep his judgements to himself. Characters get little moments when they are able to make pronouncements about what drives other characters and, in the context of the film, they're always exactly right. Sorkin isn't content to let us make up our own minds about the people he's presenting - thus Zuckerberg gets to proclaim of the Winkelwii (I do love this pluralisation) that the reason they're suing him is that "for the first time in their lives things didn't turn out as planned", Saverin is able to explain to us exactly who Sean Parker is and why Zuckerberg falls for him and the helpful legal officer at the end sums up Zuckerberg by telling him he isn't an asshole - he's just trying to be one (the need to stand out to cover up his insecurity).

In making such pronouncements and aligning them so carefully with the character's behavior in the film Sorkin marginalises his audience. They do not get to interpret his work, rather they are reduced to admirers of his careful architecture. We can observe how clever his repetition of the "You'd do that for me?" line is, how marvelous its function, but we don't get to wonder at what it means. It's all there on the surface.

My BIFF Favourites

In no real order they are:

1. Uncle Boonme Who Can Recall His Past Lives
2. Leap Year
3. Marwencol
4. I Killed My Mother: Much rawer and more deeply felt than Heartbeats this portrait of a difficult home relationship enjoys the benefits of autobiography while avoiding some of the obvious pitfalls. The closeness of the material to Dolan's own lived experience means that Hubert is not the perpetually whiny and angry teenager found in films like The Human Resources Manager and Dolan's preparedness to critique his younger self means that the narcissism of teenagers is not neglected. The nature of the disputes also rings true: The way petty things annoy us when we're already annoyed with a person, the way we pick a particular fight as a way of expressing anger about a totally different issue.

But veracity was something that Heartbeats had too. If I Killed My Mother is the stronger film, as I think it is, than it's also because its relationship has more depth than the (deliberately) shallow ones at the heart of Heartbeats. In Heartbeats the communication is amongst characters who are holding back - fearful of revealing their full intentions, of leaving themselves vulnerable to the heartbreak they ultimately experience. This hesitancy often means that the film is unable to delve beyond the characters' protective boundaries. The relationships plumbed are also new ones (the friendship between the central characters is generally taken for granted) without any history.

In comparison the characters in I Killed My Mother are not afraid of what their conversations might reveal - their relationships are negotiated in the open with all their dreams and aspirations on full display. Furthermore this negotiation occurs in the context of how their relationship used to be. The difference between the past and the future is tackled by the characters and the fact that they are bewildered by how one turned into other makes it no less interesting.

Another feature of the central relationships in Heartbeats is that they are hermetic. We are never given any clue as to how the other people in the character's lives view their quixotic pursuit of the young Adonis and the faux interview segments in between offer only oblique commentary. In I Killed My Mother both the portrayal of another mother-son relationship, as well as others' commentary on the central relationship, makes for welcome contrast and exploration.

5. Reign of Assassins
6. Kaboom
7. Lourdes: The thematic content will probably not be new to anyone whose spent as much of their lives growing up in a church as I have. Questions regarding the difficulty of believing in a good, all powerful, interventionist God in such a clearly imperfect world are not new and neither are the answers and debates within the film.

Yet despite this Lourdes succeeded for me. It represents the points of views of both the sceptics and believers accurately and doesn't demean either, even as it gently questions the latter. It also narrows the big questions down by placing them specifically within the context of Lourdes. The dynamics of a group who are actively courting miracles; whether through bloody-minded persistence, a search for formulae, or an attempt to cultivate a humble spirituality, means that the questions seem more urgent and personal. It's because of this that the characters never feel like mere mouthpieces for the writer. Indeed Hausner gets a lot of mileage out her actors by allowing them to build their characters through body language and facial expression rather than relying on her dialogue to do the heavy lifting.