Getting a tad MIFFed (part one)

Well, it's that time of year again. Open your eyes, gird your loins, trawl through the program and stock up on emergency jelly beans (more on these later), it's the Melbourne International Film Festival.

As I do every year, I had the vague thought months ago that I should take time off from The Avenue while the festival's on, and then never got around to organising it. So I'm left fitting in as many movies as I can around work, cheering on Cadel in the Tour de France (done and dusted after tonight, thank God), fitful bursts of sleep, bi-daily showers and reading Marie Antoinette. Rather than clutter up my by-now-kinda-traditional Itty-Bitty Film Reviews with meditative Finnish documentaries about goats (joking, joking ... but only just), I thought I'd review my MIFF experience as a whole.

Easily the highlight of my cluttered first couple of days (I saw six films on Friday and Saturday) was Jean Cocteau's classic Beauty and the Beast. This being the sixieth anniversary of MIFF, they're showing a select group of films from earlier editions of the festival, and I jumped at the chance to see Cocteau's gothic romance on the big screen. I saw his version of Orpheus back at Uni but, being the diligent student I am not, all I remember about it is being stunned by the visuals. I was probably half asleep in the screening: that tended to happen a lot.

I don't particularly want to use the word 'ravishing' to describe Beauty and the Beast, but I don't think anything else will do. The sets, costumes, make-up and photography are magnificent in every detail, and together they spirit us into the heightened world of Cocteau's macabre dream. We never question the magic that is present in the plot, because we can see that magic at work in every sumptuous detail. As often happens with old movies, there are elements that will seem twee to a modern viewer (Beauty faints dead away when she first spies the Beast, a moment that is almost its own parody), but if you're willing to go with it, you'll come away utterly enchanted. It's a classic for a reason. And look, any film that includes the line 'May the Devil spatter you with dung' is just fine by me.

Finisterrae is a completely bonkers Spanish film and, though it has grave faults, it's the kind of movie that makes me love MIFF: you'll never get another chance to see it, and you'll never see anything like it. Two doleful Russian ghosts (played by men under sheets) decide that they don't like being dead, and want to be re-animated. An oracle (who is a circle of flame) sends them on the famous pilgrimage across Spain to the Santiago de Compostela. Along the way they befriend some reindeer, consult a sarcastic owl, look into a knot on a tree and discover some Catalan video art from the late 1980's, and kill a histrionic hippie. When they reach their destination, one of them wimps out and stays a ghost, while the other turns into a frog.

That brief synopsis sounds brilliant to me, and Finisterrae was so close to being awesome but unfortunately, when it's not making use of its bizarre tone of deadpan surrealism, it's knitted together by long, boring sequences of the ghosts trudging across the landscape. From one side of a very wide shot to the other. Slowly. It's a hopelessly dual-natured film: just when I was falling asleep, something hilarious would happen. Then they'd start walking again, and I'd start nodding off. If only they'd cut the great stuff into a twenty minute short, it could have been a hilarious and, at times, weirdly moving little movie --- the coda, in which an adult reindeer with amazing antlers wanders around an empty mansion, is beguiling, haunting and beautiful. There's just not enough there for a feature-length film.

That last sentence could apply to three of the other films I've seen as well. Footnote, a dark Israeli dramedy about a father and son who are rival scholars working in an obscure branch of Jewish history, Pink Saris, a documentary about the leader of a militant feminist group in the far north of India, and Boxing Gym, a fly-on-the-wall style doco that paints a multi-faceted portrait of a working class gym in Texas all contain great elements. It's just ... none of them are great films. Footnote suffers from pointless arty affectations and mysterious plot threads that lead nowhere. Pink Saris is undeniably fascinating, but is a bit episodic and repetitive. Boxing Gym is even moreso; large swathes of the film pass by with no dialogue at all, and there's only so much 'watching random amaeur boxers train' that I can take.

Which has brought me, in descending order, to the first (and please God, the only) fucking terrible film of my 2011 MIFF watching. If you ever get the chance to watch The Silence of Joan, run screaming in the opposite direction. It's appalling. To sum up, it's a version of the story of Joan of Arc that doesn't tell her story from her point of view, instead choosing to swap between a bunch of random men who briefly enter her story in positions of power, project their own bullshit onto her (for most of the film Joan is giving the whole world the silent treatment), then bugger off again. Shot through with stilted performances, ridiculous trying-to-be-meaningful slo-mo, and static shots of poorly-photographed nature, there's really nothing to recommend this movie. At least in Finisterrae there were ghost wandering around the over-long landscape shots; in The Silence of Joan there's nothing at all.

I've learned from previous MIFF experiences to always have on hand a bag of lollies to crack open for a jolt of energy, for use in those films when I'm truly in danger of falling asleep. The Silence of Joan forced me to delve into my bag of emergency jelly beans. At four in the afternoon. Of the first day. Seriously, it was that boring.

Ah well, onward and upward. I've got two movies tomorrow ...

Cheers, JC.


currently reading: Marie Antoinette by Antonia Fraser
books to go: 100