The highlight of my last few days was an utterly charming Belgian film called On the Sly. Cathy, maybe six or seven years old, is the neglected only child of a wealthy Parisian professional couple with a magnificent holiday home in the country. After a weekend trip in which her parents have basically left her to fend for herself, Cathy gives up on them; when the family's getting in the car to leave, she opens the back door and closes it again without hopping in. Her parents don't notice, and Cathy's left watching them drive away. The majority of the film then follows Cathy as she tries to survive in the woods on the estate and avoid the eventual search parties that come looking for her.
Though there's very little dialogue between characters, a voice-over narration of Cathy's thoughts runs across basically the entire film. It's a striking stylistic decision and a brave one: it meant that the whole film would succeed or fail on the basis of a child actor's performance. Luckily Wynona Ringer (the director's daughter) is so winning in the lead role that the film just clicks. She manages to be precocious without being annoying and sweet without being saccharine, and the script nails a pretty authentic child's eye view of the world.
Also a lot of fun was Submarine, a quirky British indie coming-of-age tale. I've heard people criticise it for being a lot like other quirky indie coming-of-age movies, and it's true that at times it was a bit self-conscious (a wacky neighbour who's a sad, slightly mad, motivational speaker is a weak point) and the main character is perhaps just one step too detached and ironic. However, those minor quibbles can be easily brushed aside when a film makes me laugh as heartily (and as regularly) as this one does. Yeah, it's like a lot of other films but, y'know, I like all those other films. I'll be keeping an eye out for it on DVD ... and not just to use the subtitles to figure out some of the more impenetrable Welsh accents.
Top Floor Left Wing and The Yellow Sea were both action movies shot through with strong elements of farce, both of which came close to excellence but narrowly missed the mark.
Top Floor Left Wing chronicles an escalating hostage situation in a flat in a French housing estate as an Algerian father and son barricade their door for very different reasons. The son is a petty hood who is babysitting some cocaine for a local dealer; the father has been running for years from a dark secret. Their hostage turns from comic relief (for the first part of the film he continually says exactly the wrong thing) to sympathiser, to radical; he ends the film trying to lead the apartment block's other residents in a riot against his own police force. The first half of the film had a lot of promise, but ultimately the points that it made were fairly simplistic and (common problem at this year's festival) it ended ten minutes too soon. The Yellow Sea is incredibly violent. In this grungy gangster flick Gunam, a Joseonjok (an ethnic Korean living in China), is indebted to some gangsters. To pay off what he owes, he's smuggled into Seoul to do a hit for them.
Interesting fact: Korean gangsters don't use guns ... well, not according to this movie anyway. There are a lot of killings in this film, but they're all done with knives and hatchets, which gives them a visceral immediacy that is missing from a lot of action movies these days. Blood goes ... everywhere. And it's kind of awesome.
Killer violence aside, The Yellow Sea also takes the time during its intricate set-up to make us really care about Gunam: the reason he's in debt is that he borrowed money to send his wife to South Korea to find work. She was supposed to be sending money back to him but it never came, so at the same time as he's figuring out the details of the hit, he's also trying to track her down. When everything turns sour, we really really want things to work out for the guy.
After showing such restraint during the build-up, however, the director Hong-jin Na loses control of the film during the last third. Too many action sequences pile on top of one another, too many times Gunam is able to miraculously escape from seemingly impossible situations and, after a rigidly realist approach for most of the film, suddenly Na begins to resort to trite, absurdist gags. While it's still way better than most of the computer generated shit sandwiches Hollywood serves up, The Yellow Sea could have been one of the truly great action movies if it had just held its nerve.
And lastly comes the trippy Canadian You Are Here, a positively infuriating experience. Taking five great short films and five 'meh' short films and throwing them in a blender does not a great feature film make, but that's seemingly what the makers of this pretentious dud believe. Disconnected and surreal events happen to a bunch of people, and then ... the film ends. I'm probably so annoyed by this film because it showed so much promise. Many of the ideas it contains are lovely, and the whole thing was put together with such assurance that I really believed that there was going to be a clear purpose to all the random goings on. But there wasn't. It was a bummer.
I'm going to be finishing MIFF with a bang --- seven films in three days! Wish me luck, and I'll see you on the flipside ...
Cheers, JC.
currently reading: Marie Antoinette by Antonia Fraser
books to go: 100
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