MIFF 2012, Muthafuckas! (part two)

Onward, ever onward, I keep on charging headlong into challenging, beguiling (and occasionally frustrating) subtitled movies ...

From Chile, Bonsai is a slow, sad romance about a doomed relationship between two literature students. The film cuts between two moments in time: the burgeoning relationship itself, and then eight years later as the man (with a beard now) writing a novel to try and explain to himself what happened. I felt this movie was too snail-paced (attention arthouse film-makers: slowness DOES NOT equal profundity!), and the guy playing the lead gave a weirdly passive, expressionless performance in the 'young lovers' sections, so I didn't buy that this vivacious, awesome woman would date him at all. The ending was also a problem: the whole point of the movie kinda turned out to be that there is no point, that some things defy explanation. Okay, that's pretty much what life is like, but it doesn't necessarily make for great drama, y'know?

Caesar Must Die, on the other hand, was utterly peculiar, and utterly fascinating. (side note --- I totally overuse the word 'utterly' in this blog. Sorry, I'll try and thesaurus myself up some alternatives.) Not quite a documentary, not quite a narrative feature, and not quite a filmed version of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, it was sort of all those things at once. As part of a prison program, a theatre director puts on Julius Caesar with inmates as his cast. As the cons rehearse, we get massive long chunks of Shakespeare's text, played out in various locations in the prison, and it's cut in its proper order so we see the majority of the story. But during those rehearsal scenes, there's also moments where the prisoner-actors break from their Shakespearean characters, to talk about life on the inside, and how Shakespeare's play is relevant to their own lives. And if that's not self-reflexive enough, the movie was actually shot in a prison, with actual prisoners playing versions of themselves. Though obviously staged for the cameras, having real guys play themselves gives everything an intense immediacy. It's a weird little film, falling in between real and fake (and some may have moral problems with it making stars out of murderers and gangsters), but it's well worth a look, just for the Shakespeare stuff alone. Whatever else they've done in their lives, these guys can act, and the 'pure Shakespeare' scenes would comfortably grace any stage in the world. Definitely worth a look if you get a chance.

Miss Bala starts out with a pretty fascinating concept: a contestant in a Mexican beauty pageant gets sucked into a gangland war. Unfortunately, everything that might have worked about that idea gets ruined by having the main character be completely passive, uninteresting (and occasionally very stupid) throughout her entire ordeal. Couple that with a plot that swings between being incoherent and being filled with lazy coincidences, and you've got a film that doesn't hang together at all, and which was ultimately pretty dreadful.

Errors of the Human Body marked my first English-language film of the festival, which was a bit of a help as it's by this point that my eyes were beginning to get a bit sore. A break from reading subtitles didn't hurt, let me tell you. A sorta-Australian (most of the creatives are locals), sorta-German (it was shot over there), sorta-Everywhere (the cast are from all over the shop) medical sci-fi thriller, Errors played around with some intriguing concepts. One scientist's discovery of a miraculous gene which can help wounds heal almost instantly, coincides with another scientist's infant son dying from a wholly new, devastating virus. The first half of the film, dealing with a lot of internal politicking within their research facility, was slow but intriguing, but the further the film went the more the weakly drawn characters, lazy plotting and moribund pacing dragged it down. By the time one dude was infected and wandering around Dresden and the shit was really hitting the fan, I'd stopped caring. An interesting failure ... but a failure.

The mad, brave Danish journalist/comic Mads Brügger's brilliant documentary The Ambassador involves him purchasing an ambassadorship in Africa. After haggling with a couple of shady characters who deal in this sort of thing (a paranoid British fellow who lives in a castle in Portugal; a harassed Dutchman who reports to a mysterious "Mr Eastman", whom we never get to meet), he ends up being appointed as Liberia's consul to the Central African Republic. The CAR, we're told, is the end point for systemic corruption: you need to pay a bribe at the airport to even enter the place. Brügger, using a combination of hidden cameras and his various targets' breathtaking stupidity, paints a remarkable portrait of a society where everyone is on the take, everyone is one bad decision away from a bullet to the back of the head, and, consequently, everyone is paranoid as fuck. The movie is hilarious, but only because the only alternative to laughing is to weep bitter tears. Some of the footage he's captured is remarkable, (though I could wish for a few less scenes of him standing around talking on the phone) and there aren't many who come out looking good. One of the only men who does is a former member of the French Foreign Legion who is now the CAR's Head of State Security, and he's fantastic because he tells Brügger the straight up truth (unlike everybody else). And that guy ends up getting assassinated. Shocking, funny in its absurdities, and tragic, this is a film you really have to see.

What was that I said up the top about slowness not being synonymous with profundity? The Delay, a Uruguayan drama about a family fracturing under economic pressures, needs to take that advice to heart (though if it did, it'd only be about twenty minutes long). Three generations of a family share a cramped apartment in Montevideo, and the grandfather's increasing senility leads his adult daughter to contemplate desperate measures. The two leads were fantastic with what they had to work with, but the story was soooo slight (seriously, every inch of this ground got covered in the first ten minutes of the brilliant Iranian film A Separation) that no actor could save it. Leaden and dull.

It's funny how some nationalities just seem to have particular tones, or styles, that they can do to perfection, but that nobody else should ever dare try. In my last post I wrote about how Ace Attorney has a really peculiarly Japanese sense of humour, and Chicken With Plums is definitively 'French' in kinda the same way. It's operating within a framework of highly stylised whimsy that reminded me very much of Amélie (and other Jeunet movies) and nothing else. Apparently the French own that style now, or something. Anyway, Plums, though French, is actually set in Iran in the 1950's. It's the story of a celebrated violinist who, after his favourite violin gets smashed, lies down in bed and decides to die. The film carefully takes us through the eight days between that fateful decision, and the violinist's funeral. That sounds kinda depressing, but the film, filled with animated sequences, painted backdrops, and comic diversions into the past or the future, was actually tremendous fun (and often very very beautiful ... and not just because of Golshifteh Farahani, the Iranian actress who I suspect might be the most beautiful woman in the world). It's directed with wit and verve (and it's not slow! Woo!), and the fantastic cast, led by Mathieu Amalric, all hook into the playful tone. The only word I can use to describe it is 'delightful'.

And that takes me to the halfway mark. Fourteen films down, fourteen to go. At this point, honestly, I've seen enough really good films that MIFF 2012 is going to go down as one of my better years for picking movies, no matter what the next week serves up (I'm tempting fate by writing that, aren't I?). Either way, you better believe I'll keep you posted ...

Cheers, JC.