The Mule

You know Australian cinema isn’t having a good time at the box office when what is essentially a direct to video release is hailed as an innovative distribution strategy. Having said that it’s clear that The Mule wasn’t dumped; there was a considerable effort to promote the film through twitter and the like which suggests it was intended to attract an audience that simply doesn’t show up to poorly promoted, short run limited releases (www.theguardian.com/film/2014/oct/26/australian-film-australian-audiences?CMP=twt_gu).

As for the film itself The Mule begins on a less than innovative note by using the America’s Cup race of 1983 to establish its time period. However as the movie progresses the race is transformed from a banal indication of The Mule's period bona fides into a loopy simile for the battle of wills that drives the film. Ray Jenkins (Angus Sampson) is a drug mule who, when caught, refuses an examination that would reveal his wrongdoing. In response the police decide to hold him until he, uh, expels the evidence. Will Jenkins hold on or will the police be triumphant? It’s a bit like the America’s Cup race although I’m still not sure exactly how that's so...

Sampson has the perfect face for this role: with his large lips, weak chin and long forehead emphasised by a particularly awful haircut he genuinely looks like a regular, somewhat feckless, bloke drowning in 1980s Australian suburbia. There’s an obvious class difference between him and the clean cut, suit wearing Det. Les Paris (Ewen Leslie) although this is kept as subtext for most of the film until it’s brought sharply into focus in their final confrontation.

Not that the subtext is subtle. One scene plays as a parody of The Castle’s alternately condescending and celebratory portrayal of lower middle class Australia. Which is fitting because The Mule lands in a similar place: ultimately the rich assholes are vanquished, racism takes a literal beating and the middle class can relax in the knowledge that their moral balance is in the green, no matter how much money they’ve made from selling drugs or how poorly they’ve treated women. (Oh c’mon Glen, It’s all for a laugh.)

The comedy element of the film has been somewhat oversold in its marketing although Hugo Weaving finds the humour in Les Paris’ repulsive partner, Angus Sampson is particularly funny when woozily declaring victory in the rather unconventional contest and Georgina Haig, despite being underutilised, finds a kind of derangement in her crusading legal aid lawyer’s decision to ditch her values for the pleasure of putting one over the cops. For the most part though this is a low key suburban thriller with a jarring edge courtesy of co-writer Leigh Whannell’s horror past.

If I’ve made it sound like a film driven by its performances and script that’s because it is. That’s not to say its cinematography is inept or boring. For example there’s a neat series of rhyming two shots, a good use is found for a garish neon sign and John Noble is particularly menacing as a silhouette behind plastic drapes.

Such unremarkable competence is a good synecdoche for the film as a whole. Its attempt at social commentary is not thoughtless but it doesn’t really get off the ground, its attempt at humour is funny but comes and goes, and its attempt to be thrilling bears uneven results – sometimes uneasily threatening and sometimes jarringly violent.

Birdman

Birdman is so in your face that it makes a motif out of characters speaking directly to the camera. It's a manic, propulsive, eager little thing driven by a relentless drum score, a swooping camera and restless actors who talk as though they could burst into flames at any moment. It's populated by caricatures and filled with the kind of passionate nonsense that regularly fills columns exclaiming that Hollywood has run out of ideas, or that theater is a dying art, or that truth and authenticity fill playhouses, or that blockbusters are beautiful diversions, or something...

None of this really covers up the gaping hole at the center of it where there should be an authentic human being grappling with the value of his life. But maybe that's the point? Maybe it's a movie about the hollowness of art that is itself hollow? Maybe it's made a - wait for it - unexpected virtue out of ignorance? I'd like to believe that but it does grasp after emotional truth. You can see it strain when Keaton tells his jellyfish story or when the camera tries to climb into Stone's eyes. Unfortunately you can't magically transcend the bullshit; you do have to leave some flesh and blood in your film.

Linda, Linda, Linda

Linda, Linda, Linda starts with a scene that's intended to encapsulate the movie by way of three filmmakers who ineptly stumble their way towards "making an impact" as they shoot a piece about their school's festival. However it also serves to call attention to the process of film-making by laying bare their decision making process as they decide that a cut to a close-up will give their documentary more of a jolt than simply using one shot. From then on viewers can be expected to pay a little more attention to the film's visual grammar than they might have otherwise done.

Such simple but effective technique persists throughout the film. For example the next scene recalls the opening of Irma Verp or Serenity as the camera tracks to follow a single character in very long takes and in doing so introduces both the setting and most of the major characters in a concise, elegant manner. The film's narrative however is less tidy. Certain conflicts remain somewhat unresolved, back-story is hinted at but limited, "important" scenes are elided and the bass player suffers the indignity of bass players everywhere as she's mostly relegated to the background.

The result is something of a strange film. It's sweet and touching but subtly so - in stark contrast to contemporary Western teen films. Its tone can be summed up by its conclusion; it ends on a oddly melancholy note. Rather than finishing on the girls' triumphant performance of the title song it concludes on a montage of packed away festival equipment in the rain.

A Hard Day

I once read someone opining that the worst thing that can happen to a national cinema is for it to become a genre. I don't think there's any real danger of that happening to South Korean film (there are too many idiosyncratic voices working in the industry) but it's fair to say that even a filmgoer with only a passing knowledge of the nation's films could construct a bingo card for the typical commercial movie. A Hard Day would probably allow you to fill out that bingo card in under 30 minutes. All the boxes are covered: Wild tonal shifts, brutal violence and a soupçon of social commentary crop up relatively early.

Fortunately A Hard Day is a fairly accomplished version of Commercial South Korean Movie. It's stylishly, albeit somewhat anonymously, directed in a way that only occasionally starts to grate (check those dutch angles!) and is blessedly free of the super fast continuity editing that plagues the films of Na Hong-jin. It also does an excellent job of placing its protagonist, sympathetic dirty cop Go Geon-soo, in memorably tense and funny predicaments. It never really tops an early set piece involving a child's toy, a dead body, balloons and a shoe lace but that's to be expected.

A Hard Day does occasionally drift into excess. The score can best a described as overbearing and the climax is overextended (check your bingo card),  but for the most part it zips along and it will provide an excellent exemplar of what Korean film in the 00s was like.

We Are the Night

This is mostly just a bog standard "vampirism as unbridled hedonism" movie. It's marginally interesting in that it links social class with the ability and desire to be a pleasure seeking junkie but it never really explores that idea, or any idea, productively because it's too busy laying track for its bog standard "corrupted innocence" plot line.

It's never subtle either. When Lena (Karoline Herfurth, Passionand Errors of the Human Body) undergoes her transformation it physically strips away her class indicators (haircut and tattoos) and when she first tastes blood she orgasms. There's a marginally more clever scene in which the vampires' voracious capitalism is offhandedly underlined by a game in which the person who buys the least must pay for everyone else but mostly it's just very obvious in a rather dumb - if fitfully amusing - way.*

The shallow way it treats its supposed themes occasionally pushes it past simply being dumb and into potentially offensive territory. During Lena's initiation Louise explains that vampires are an all female society as all male vampires were killed off in order to preserve female autonomy. This idea is never directly explored and as a result it simply becomes another aspect of their hedonistic behaviour. Sure, the film seems to imply, it might be nice for women to be free and not dependant on men but it's really an unsustainable excess just like all the rest.

I'm not sure that the film's writers or director intended this interpretation (although the way in which the women's ultimately unfulfilling interactions are positioned against Lena's embryonic heterosexual romance suggests they might've) because despite its overwhelming bluntness it can be somewhat muddleheaded. Purportedly three endings were shot: one in which Lena decides to watch her crush die rather than turn him, one in which she turns him and the actual, trendily ambiguous ending. The choice of the third ending suggests that the director has no strong feelings about what his movie is about which is amusing given how on the nose so much of it is.

*Someone is killed by a page from For Whom the Bell Tolls. The audience knows which book it is because there's a quick close up of the book title right before it happens.

A Festival By Any Other Name Would Smell As Sweet

I've made it to Brisbane in time to catch the tail end of its new festival, the Brisbane Asia Pacific Film Festival (BAPFF). The BAPFF is replacing the more compressed (in terms of time frame) and more sprawling (in terms of films' origins and the number of films programmed) Brisbane International Film Festival. As usual I'm writing up some of the films and as usual I make no promises as regards the quality of the writing or its regularity.

Salt of the Earth: Let's get the obvious out of the way: Sebastiao Salgado's photographs are so astonishing it's hard to describe them without one's prose descending into a mess of superlatives and cliches. Somehow he manages to capture people instead of bodies using just... see what I mean? In any case with that dealt with the question becomes whether The Salt of the Earth's presentation of Salgado's work does it justice. Initially the answer seems to be yes. The film opens with an evocative description of the photographer's art and the subsequent use of Salgado's narration and sound effects to contextualise his work is effective, if hardly revelatory. Eventually though, the film founders. The constant narration laid over the images rarely leaves room to simply contemplate the images and Salgado's baffling incomprehension in the face of Europeans with high standards of living committing unimaginable war crimes "...at the end of the twentieth century..." (!) serves only to diminish the man and his work. Similarly the biographical segments are patchy at best, tend to gloss over strife and culminate in a rather on the nose final set of title cards. (I suppose that's the risk of having a family member as one of the work's primary authors.)

Lake August: My enthusiasm for this film (bolstered by the appreciation of several smart film people) was initially deflated by its style. The festival approved formulae of static, or near static, master shots combined with long, unbroken takes is rapidly becoming less of a signifier for artistic seriousness and more of an indication of laziness. However several elements of the film combined to jolt me out of my apathy. The first of these was the way in which the style complements the film's content. What better way to convey the ennui of young adults cast adrift then long stultifying takes and airless conversations in which every question or statement is followed by a long pause? To be fair though this hardly sets the film aside from its festival brethren. What really drew me in was the indications that the director was really thinking about his shots and edits. A long shot of the protagonist dazing in a boat is broken by a sudden edit to a new and disorienting camera angle combined with the loud intrusion of a passing train on the soundtrack. I was jolted into life in much the same way as the protagonist.

Also notable is the way in which sly humour or commentary is regularly present as details at the edges of frames. The restaurant/hotel in which most of the film takes place is festooned with signs forbidding spitting and a mundane scene of the protagonist washing himself on a roof slowly morphs into something much stranger and pointed by way of a wayward political banner (indeed political posturing is ever present in this film but never remarked upon or even really noticed by the characters). Sly humour is not always simply a detail in this film: there's extended drunken "dance" scene that gets across a sense of anomie without requiring the viewer to stare directly into the void.

The danger of a film about anomie is that the main character - here a disaffected young man who speaks and acts with a near total lack of affect in the wake of personal tragedy - will quickly lose the audience's interest. Wisely Lake August contrasts him with Ah Fang, a more vivid character who is constantly investing more in her relationships than she can ever hope to get out of them. While at times faintly ridiculous (she is forever wearing absurdly chunky platform shoes) the defeats she suffers are heartbreaking - if only because she's one of the few characters in the film who is palpably invested in their own life.

If anything the complete product seems very reminiscent of the films of Jia Zhangke in both its depiction of people left adrift in modern China and in the ways in which the realist atmosphere is punctured by oddities (for example the, um, rather mobile architecture of Still Life). However Yang Heng is clearly doing much more than blindly copying as evidenced by the way he makes slow pans right into a recurring, yet never mechanical, motif.

***

For reading through all that nonsense I once again present you with Glen's Super Awesome Double Bills: For complete disaffection I recommend pairing Lake August with Wasted Youth. Actually no, don't do that unless you want to feel really lousy.

A Most Excellent Review

When TV partisans declare that their medium has overtaken film in terms of quality this is exactly the kind of film they're imagining as a synecdoche: the subtle, adult genre film with a strong thematic through-line. If they were to pick out a TV series to favourably compare to A Most Wanted Man they could hardly do better than The Wire. After all, both concern themselves with institutions so thoroughly perverted that they end up perpetuating the very pathologies they're supposed to be treating.

Unlike The Wire, A Most Wanted Man only has two hours to do its job so it narrows its focus to one institution and one pathology: it's about how powerful intelligence agencies focus on punitive measures without stopping to consider the long term impacts of their methods. Like The Wire it primarily relies on dialogue and performance to convey its message. Perhaps its most strong, thematically focussed scene is the one in which the head of an American intelligence agency struggles to understand the benefit of cultivating assets to which her German counterpart can only ruefully quote her own words, "To make the world a safer place."

It also narrows its scope, focusing solely on the methods through which the spy agencies undermine their mission and leaving the consequences to the fertile imaginations of its audience. (Jamal may turn terrorist, activist or simply live quietly but one thing is for sure: he'll never trust the state again.) Whether that approach is more or less effective than The Wire's relentless and agonising accounting is a question I'll leave to the partisans who think that TV versus film is a debate that's worth more than a lazy hook for a review.

A Most Wanted Man does however expand beyond its thematic boundaries. For example it documents some sketched-in personal relationships (every possibility of which would be exhaustively explored on a tv show, to the benefit of some and the detriment of others) and, more interestingly, demonstrates an interest in the way in which people are turned into assets.

The most in-depth example of this is Annabel Richter's recruitment. It's accomplished through nothing more than a textbook good cop/bad cop routine. To the audience it feels completely scripted and artificial. We can almost guess the words that each actor is going to recite before they even leave their mouths. It's a feeling that, if anything, is enhanced by the way the scene frequently cuts to surveillance footage. This pattern repeats some time later when Richter turns Issa Karpov except, if anything, it feels even more artificial because it takes place in an apartment that looks exactly like a theatre set.

I don't think this is accidental. These interactions are made to feel creepily artificial (we're shown lights and cameras that the subjects of the scene don't see) because they are. Whatever genuine concern the characters feel for one another its consumed and directed by the institutional pressures bearing down on them.

***
For making it through all of that nonsense I'm going to leave you with GLEN'S SUPER AWESOME DOUBLE BILL SUGGESTION #1: Omar was also released in 2014 in Australian cinemas and its take on the pathology of intelligence agencies is similar and equally topical.