MIFF 2012, Mhghdrfqxhzz! (part four)

Bleurghelblahrgelbleurgh. So ... tired. So ... many ... movies. After I finish writing this and post it up, I think I'm going to lie down for a while. But I made it through, God damn it. 28 movies in 17 days is the final reckoning (which honestly doesn't sound that impressive when you say it like that ... there's gotta be a way of making those numbers seem more epic).

My only animated film of the festival, Metropia is (I think) Swedish in origin, but it was kind of an international stew: it had cast members from all over the Northern Hemisphere (including Stellan and Alexander Skarsgaard, giving their performances in different accents!). In a dystopian future, every underground rail system in Europe has been joined together, and super-fast trains make continent-wide travel a possibility. There's also a conspiracy involving mind-control dandruff shampoo. And ... and ... yeah, okay, I've been trying for twenty minutes to write a plot summary, but I don't think I can, because it made no God-damn sense. It was super stylish, and great to look at if you can handle a movie that's 95% different shades of dank grey. I don't even really know how to describe the animation style: it was kind of flat, like South Park or something, but photo-real at the same time. Unfortunately it was pretty much incomprehensible, and thus pretty boring.

From Senegal, The Pirogue tells the story of a fisherman coerced into captaining a frail vessel filled with immigrants up the coast of Africa and across the mouth of the Mediterranean to Spain. The voyage doesn't go well: inclement weather, in-fighting amongst the various factions of passengers, and the crappiness of the boat itself, all combine to cast them adrift in the Atlantic. It's obviously a really dramatic subject, and certain scenes in the movie were jaw-dropping in their horribleness. Unfortunately it was too episodic and too simplistic to have the emotional punch it should have. And while some of the actors were great, others were pitching their performances well over the top. Interesting moments, but not a good film.

Okay, I made the point in one of my other MIFF round-up posts that FILM-MAKERS NEED TO KNOW HOW LONG THEIR MOVIE OUGHT TO BE. The guy that made In The Fog, a WWII drama from Belarus, had no friggin' idea. In Nazi-held territory, two partisans sneak up to a house in the forest, determined to mete out justice to the suspected collaborator who lives there. When the execution doesn't go according to plan, the three men have to journey through the forest together, and at the same time we get a series of extended flashbacks, explaining how each of them has arrived at this moment in time. There's plenty of meaty drama there (and the flashback explaining why the guy is suspected of being a collaborator is gut-wrenching) but it's kinda ruined by the glacial pace, the insistence on lengthy 'walking through forest' shots that add nothing to the story, and the way the two other flashbacks don't illuminate anything about the main thread of the story. Like The Pirogue, there were moments that suggested a much better movie lurking beneath the surface, but it was buried in pretentious twaddle.

And then here it was, two days from the end, that the best film of the festival showed up. From Denmark, Thomas Vinterberg's searing, horrifying, The Hunt is about a kindergarten teacher who is falsely accused of paedophilia. As an entire town gets caught up in the hysteria that the accusations cause, lifelong relationships are destroyed and previously unbreakable trusts are shattered. There is nothing about this film that wasn't brilliant: every single actor is remarkable, giving everybody in the enormous ensemble the depth of a fully fleshed out interior life; the direction is clear and graceful, telling the story with perfect elegance but without ever intruding on the audience's notice; the cinematography is equally good, dancing on the line between being beautiful and being unstudied; and the script is almost miraculous in the way that it combines air-tight cause and effect storytelling, a rigorous dedication to 'realness', and an ability to find symbolic meaning in everyday life. This film was basically perfect, and I'm sure I'll be talking about it again when the time comes to write about the best movies of 2012. The Hunt is a bonafide masterpiece, and I urge everyone to see it if you can.

Last year I saw and very much enjoyed a Korean gangster movie called The Yellow Sea (though to be fair, it ran off the rails a bit towards the end), so I thought I'd give Nameless Gangster: Rules of the Time a crack this year, in the hope it might be just as entertaining. Unfortunately, this one felt really tonally scattered, never quite sure if it ought to be a broad farce, or high melodrama, or something in between. After getting fired, an inept loudmouth of a customs officer decides to try and use some of his family connections to become a gangster. As crap as he is at basically everything, he still manages to worm his way into a position of power in the gang of his great nephew, from which point he starts fucking everything up. The film was at its best when it was a comedy: the protagonist's wimpiness offered plenty of laughs as he tried and failed to adapt to the gangster lifestyle. When it reached for drama, though, it was hard to give a damn. Having treated the whole story as mere comedy, it suddenly seemed a bit unfair when bombastic music came on and I was expected to care deeply about this bumbling prat's fate. Also hampering the film was the fact that the crime story, with double and triple and quadruple crosses aplenty, just didn't make a lick of damn sense!

The writer and actor Brit Marling was one of the people behind Another Earth, one of my favourite films at MIFF 2011. She was back again this year, co-writing and starring in Sound of my Voice, about two dating quasi-journalists infiltrating a cult that is led by a young woman who claims to have time-travelled from the future. Like Another Earth, Voice is a low-budget indie drama with a bit of a sic-fi bent, and it's just as good (if not better) than the first film. The scenes inside the cult are filled with genuine mystery and a real sense of unease, and the further the journalists (and the audience) go, the more questions get raised. Apart from Marling, who played the cult leader with an eerie stillness, I don't know any of the other actors but they're all uniformly fantastic (especially Christopher Denham as the guy who starts out the more cynical of the two journos, but doesn't end that way). As things get weirder and the stakes get higher, the central couple's relationship fractures under the strain, and for about the last half an hour I was watching with my hand over my mouth. It's a stifling, sad, almost unbearably tense little film, and well worth a look.

Christos Tsiolkas' Dead Europe is a magnificent novel, but I already told you that months ago. When I heard there was going to be an adaptation, I was filled with equal parts anticipation and dread: I knew if they got it right, it could be brilliant, but if they got it wrong, it could very easily be a disaster of cosmic proportions. How did they go in the end? Honestly, Dead Europe pretty much splits the middle between those two extremes. It only took about five minutes for me to understand that they'd taken a chainsaw to the plot of the book (which isn't necessarily a bad thing), so I was able to let go of my expectations. And for the most part, their new, slimmed down version of the story worked quite well. It was a wonderfully atmospheric film, the music and cinematography combining to make us feel like the main character's doom was haunting him from the moment he stepped off his plane in Greece. Though episodic, the film doled out just enough information, and made just enough sense, for me to hang with it for most of its running time ... then unfortunately they blew the ending in spectacular fashion. Just as everything's coming to a head, and the plot and themes demand some kind of resolution, the film just cops out in the most infuriating way. I don't want to go into more detail, because that would spoil the ending, but it's flat-out disastrous. If the projector had broken down five minutes from the end, I'd have rated it a pretty good film; as is, I can only consider it a missed opportunity.

And that, mhghdrfqxhzz, is that. This was a pretty fantastic MIFF for me, I'd rate about half the films I saw as sitting somewhere between 'good' and 'great' on John's Scale Of Movie's Worth. Trust me when I tell you that proportion is pretty extraordinary. The Hunt and War Witch were the stand-outs, but there are heaps of films tied for third place. Guessing a film's quality based on the tiny blurb in the festival guide is a fool's game, but this year I got a lot of stuff right (umm ... does that make me a fool?). Anyways, thanks for reading, I'm off to bed.

Cheers, JC.

MIFF 2012, Mudhaphuqazz! (part three)

Entering week two, I'd come down with my usual case of the MIFF sniffles. Spending hour after hour sharing a room with five hundred strangers at the tail end of winter, it's pretty much guaranteed that you're gonna get sick at some point. So far it hasn't stopped me seeing any movies (which means I'm passing the germs on to others in my turn ...) but the reviews are probably going to get more negative, because I feel like shit!

Speaking of shit, Faust was a massive mis-fire on every level. This bizarre, nonsensical, almost slapstick re-telling of the Faust legend just made no sense whatsoever, and was excruciating to sit through. The plot swung between being non-existent or being incoherent, the acting was horribly over the top (it was like they thought they were in a panto or something), the changes to the original story were brazen betrayals of the material, and the director made some ridiculous stylistic choices which were horribly intrusive. Absolutely nothing worked. If you ever get a chance to see this film, run really hard in the opposite direction.

Beyond the Hills was a hard film to categorise: so much about it was so good, yet there were a handful of things that just didn't work at all. A woman in her early twenties travels to a church in the remote Romanian countryside to convince her best friend, who's now a novice nun, to leave with her. The collision between the modern world and the unyielding faith of the nuns is fascinating, and handled with an elegant touch. Unfortunately the film (which has a fairly slight story, in the end) is way too long. Through the middle section, as the visiting girl and the local priest push each other further and further in their conflicting ideals, it gets super repetitive. The bleak Romanian landscapes are beautifully shot, but man, I wish I'd seen less of them. Take out maybe half an hour, and this would have been one of the films of the festival. As is, I think it's a wasted opportunity.

My second Takashi Miike film of the festival (he made Ace Attorney as well; apparently he makes three or four movies a year) was called Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai. (Guess how it ends ...) A period film, it's about a wandering samurai who, finding himself with no useful work in a time of peace, visits a lord's castle to ask permission to commit an honourable suicide. As the samurai and the lord talk through his request, it becomes clear there's a whole lot more to his mission than meets the eye, and a series of extended flashbacks fill us in on what's actually going on. Everything we see in the castle itself is fascinating, as these strong-willed men explore the very edges of their rigid honour codes. It's also gorgeous to look at: whoever does his production design needs kudos in a big way (though the 3D they shot in was completely useless). Unfortunately, the flashback sequences (one of them in particular) are much too long, and they stop the narrative momentum of the story dead. I can see why they're there: some of the info disclosed in them is absolutely vital to our understanding of the story. They just needed to be much more economical in giving us that info, so we could get back to the castle and the main story without the film losing its drive. It's such a shame, because there was so much to like about this movie, but (like Beyond the Hills) it was much longer than it should have been. If there's one lesson for film-makers from my experiences at this festival so far, it'd be that you've gotta know how long your film should be.

On the other hand, Sleepless Night, a French thriller set almost entirely in a huge nightclub, was a real find. A deceptively complicated little film, it gets great mileage out of putting a bunch of well-defined characters into a situation, then using the ways their motivations come into conflict to drive the film from one action set-piece to the next. The script was brilliantly structured, one scene leading inexorably to the next as the good guys bad guys, and sorta-kinda-both guys put their plans and counter-plans into action. The fights were brilliantly directed as well (unlike the vast majority of contemporary action movies), one showdown in an industrial kitchen having an incredible visceral punch to it. A brutal, well-directed, brilliantly structured, self-contained action thriller, leavened with moments of organic humour ... honestly, it kinda reminded me of Die Hard, and that's very high praise, because Die Hard is basically the king of 'brilliantly structured self-contained thrillers'. Obviously it's not going to be to everyone's taste, but if you dig action movies, give this one a try. It won't disappoint.

A fascinating Iranian buddy movie, Facing Mirrors is a devastating critique of the inflexible moral codes that rule that country. Rana is driving her husband's cab while he's in prison; one day she picks up Adineh (or Eddie), a pre-op transsexual trying to flee the country to escape an arranged marriage. As the two overcome their initial distrust and open up to each other, the sexual politics underpinning Iranian society are laid bare, and held up for analysis. Two great performances from the leads (particularly from Shayesteh Irani, fucking fearless and totally convincing as Adineh/Eddie) and a subtle, slow-burn to their burgeoning friendship made this one a real highlight.

The word 'quirky', when used to describe a film, usually leads to either awesomeness or disaster, and rarely to anything in between. Although 'awesome' might be over-stating things a bit, Safety Not Guaranteed definitely fell on the right side of the ledger. An indie sci-fi romantic drama comedy thing (man, is that a mash-up of every single genre? If it had somehow managed to also be a sword 'n' sandals western, I think they could have made history...), the film-makers had the good sense to base their bizarre, fantastical plot elements on a grounding of sympathetic, believably damaged characters (okay, it's not that believable that Aubrey Plaza, who's basically my dream woman, is playing a friendless loser, but I'll forgive it that one flaw). Each of the four main characters has their own personal journey of discovery, and it's in the way those stories collide and lend each other deeper meaning that the film really shines. It's more than the sum of its parts ... and it's also very funny, which helps a lot. This one will definitely be hitting cinemas at some point I reckon (code for: it's American), see it if you get a chance. It was lovely.

From Hong Kong, Vulgaria was silly and funny and, yes, vulgar, and left most of the cinema in stitches. Those who didn't like it, though, took great pleasure in walking out in an ostentatious huff: it's that kind of a film. During a Q&A at a university, a bumbling, inept film producer recounts the many disasters that dogged the making of his latest film. The wild story includes bestiality-obsessed gangsters, vain elderly former porn stars, an eye-popping oral sex technique, exploding body parts, a videogame that simulates masturbation, and a sexual harassment case based on an unfortunately misheard word. It's pretty much batshit crazy, but it's also a whole heap of raucous fun.

21 films down, 7 to go. I can make it! Oh God, can I make it? The MIFF sniffles are turning into something worse, and (like last year) I suspect there'll be at least one day when I just have to stay in bed and let the movies carry on without me. Hope not, though, there's still a few films left that are among my most anticipated flicks of the whole festival. Wish me luck! And if you sat/sit next to me and I give you a cold, I'm really sorry.

Cheers, JC.

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.

MIFF 2012, Motherfuckers! (part one)

The two and a half weeks of the Melbourne International Film Festival are pretty much my favourite time of the year. In case it wasn't obvious already, I love going to the movies, and MIFF gives you the chance to catch a whole bunch of stuff that you'd never get to see otherwise. There are strange, surreal Japanese films (lots of these) and moody, elegaic pieces from Eastern Europe, and lush Chinese movies, and visceral Mexican movies, and movies, and movies, and movies. Seriously, it's awesome.

Unfortunately, because I took time off work to shoot Apartmentality in June, I wasn't able to also take time off work in August to wallow in MIFF in quite the way I'd like to. Still, despite working full time, I'm booked in to see 28 films over the course of 17 days. And right now, as I type, I'm seven films down and MIFF '12 is shaping up to be a barn-burner. It's always kinda pot-luck whether the films you see at a festival are any good or not, because you're choosing them based on nothing more than a tiny picture and three or four sentences in the festival guide. But this year, for the most part, I'm guessing really well.

I also try as much as possible to steer away from movies that I know are going to get a release soon enough anyway (Sorry, Wes Anderson, I love you to bits but I can wait three more weeks to see Moonrise Kingdom). It's not always easy to predict what will and won't turn up in cinemas (though you can usually assume that U.S. movies will), and in the past I've got it disastrously wrong and missed films that looked fascinating. I think I'm getting better at picking it though.

So, to business: I started the fest on Friday night with Ace Attorney, a brilliant and hilarious Japanese legal thriller by director Takashi Miike. Based on a videogame, it's set in a weird alternate universe where trial lawyers are a mixture of sportsmen and warriors, and their debates are like battles (they also have outrageous fashion sense). It's lots of fun. I don't know if the twists and turns of the legal mysteries at the heart of the film would stand up to a second viewing (Japanese movie logic works in bizarre ways...), but the tone of the film was perfect: a deft and funny mixture of absurdism and high melodrama. I had a blast. (It's also probably the first ever good movie based on a videogame.)

Things slowed down for my second film, Carre Blanc, a dystopian French flick set in a blank, cheerless city. The movie presents a Kafka-esque nightmare of bureacracy, humiliation, sudden bursts of violence, and croquet(!), a dog-eat-dog world in which anybody can do what they want, if they have the strength to get away with it. The seemingly heartless main character has risen far, but at the expense of his humanity, and his wife makes it her mission to reawaken his soul. Slow, dreamlike, and wilfully obtuse, Carre Blanc had a hypnotic quality that is hard to describe. It was beautifully shot, and made incredible use of some startlingly brutal architecture, and seemed to delight in only explaining the absolute bare minimum about its world. I'd highly recommend it, but only for people who are okay with having to fill in a lot of blanks for themselves.

Flicker, a Swedish comedy, was another great little movie. It's a sprawling ensemble piece, all about the last week in the life of an ineptly run telecommunications company. Everybody involved, from the CEO down to the cleaners, has a story, and the real joy of the film was in the way those stories collided and combined, bouncing off each other and shooting off in bizarre directions. Flicker manages a really difficult trick: all the characters seem realistic, and have recognisably human motivations, yet the events portrayed are completely batshit crazy. Making all the characters so believable really sells the drama as the plot gets more and more absurd. Really worth catching if you get a chance.

Monsieur Lazhar was also really good (did I have a good run to start MIFF with, or what?). An Algerian immigrant in Canada takes over a primary school class after their teacher kills herself, and from that beginning it's exactly the film you might expect: the kids learn lessons, the teacher confronts his tragic past, the school as a whole manages to move on. So far, so schmaltzy, except it's so well-made that the fact that it's predictable doesn't really matter. The performances are top-notch all round, and given how many child roles there are, getting that many great performances out of ten year olds is pretty miraculous. It's a small tale, and an unsurprising one, but it's told with real skill and penetrating insight. (On a side note, I was really annoyed when, having just booked all my MIFF tickets,  I went to see a movie and saw the Monsieur Lazhar trailer, meaning it's coming out soon. Can't win 'em all, I guess ...)

And that was the end of my magical every-movie-kicks-arse run: the next two films I saw were disappointments. Modest Reception, an Iranian movie about a couple who drive around rural Iran handing out bags of cash to strangers, started out as a pitch-black comedy, and was very weird and very funny. Unfortunately, as the characters' bizarre quest takes a toll on them, they start acting completely illogically and the film loses steam. The deeper and darker it tries to get, the less interesting it becomes. And the explanation for their behaviour, when it comes, is so half-arsed, so tossed-off, that it would have been a much better film without it.

Le Grand Soir, a French black comedy about a middle-aged punk teaching his straight-laced, just-been-fired brother to stick it to the man, was too aimless and unfocused. Occasional scenes were thrilling (usually when the film was being its most satirical), but too much of its running time was spent on things that seemed inessential to the plot. I got some laughs out of it, but they were pretty far and few between, and in between times I was just bored.

I got back on track, though, with War Witch, a stunning film about an African girl stolen from her family and forced into being a child soldier. Beautifully written, acted (by non-professionals), and shot, and filled with incredible, transfixing scenes, this is a film I'll be thinking about for a long time to come. The plot seems kind of aimless for a big chunk of its running time but when, with twenty minutes to go, the arc of the film becomes clear, it suddenly makes perfect sense: we only understand where the film's been heading all along when the main character, Komona, finally understands what she needs to do. It's a great example of a film's structure serving the story it wants to tell. War Witch is also fascinating for the way it blends its visceral horrors with an ever-present spirituality. Magic, ghosts and witches are as everyday occurences for these characters as executions and rape. That combination makes War Witch an incredibly unsettling experience, but it was pretty friggin' amazing. See it if you can. (Also, the proper copy of the film didn't arrive in Melbourne in time for my screening, so we watched a version with a time code superimposed at the top of the screen. It's a mark of the film's brilliance that after the first minute or so, I hardly noticed it was there.)

Seven films down ... twenty-one to go. I'll be back with more mini-reviews in a couple of days.

Cheers, JC.

I Can't Stay MIFFed at You (part four)

Well, I nearly made it through the Film Festival without getting sick ... but not quite. In the end the lack of sleep and lack of vegetables got to me (when you're thinking of Nando's as 'the healthy option' you know you're in trouble ...) and I finally stumbled as I rounded the last bend. While I coughed and hacked my way through my sessions on Friday and Sunday (no doubt infecting many of my fellow film-goers --- sorry!), Saturday was a complete write-off and I had to skip the three movies I had booked. The silver lining was that I got to lie on my couch, under my quilt, with my heater on, watching the Demons ... get thumped. Hmmm, maybe it wasn't such a silver lining after all.

Maybe it's the illness talking, but my two Friday films, My Wedding and Other Secrets and Sleeping Sickness, were both pretty dreadful.

My Wedding and Other Secrets was a "wacky" New Zealand dramedy about a girl who keeps her wedding secret from her traditional Chinese parents. If anybody ever puts the word wacky in between quotation marks, you should start getting worried. The film was all over the shop, with every character having to behave in utterly ridiculous ways in order for the contrived plotline to lurch forward another step. Many of the performances were dire (I'll exempt Michelle Ang, the lead, who worked her arse off with tired, cliched material), the script was shallow as an evaporating puddle of piss, and the direction was clunky like my falling-apart couch. The nicest thing I can say about it was that it was better than The Silence of Joan.

Sleeping Sickness, on the other hand, was yet another of those 'Interesting Idea, Mis-handled' movies that have been the story of MIFF 2011 for me, though admittedly this one was more mis-handled than most. A German running a health program in Cameroon is nearing the end of his time in Africa. His daughter comes back from her European boarding school for a visit, his wife counts down the days until they're leaving, and a sleazy French friend (played by Hippolyte Girardot, who was also in Top Floor Left Wing) tries to convince him to stay, so the two of them can embark on some unspecified 'project.' Though meandering and slow, it's actually pretty good up until its halfway point, when it suddenly jumps forward a few years and we get introduced to a completely new protagonist. The tension is lost, all the questions we had about the German family are dropped completely, and the film never recovers, eventually petering out into a wilfully obtuse cop-out of an ending. It was a really annoying film.

On Sunday I had much better luck, seeing two films that ended up being among the highlights of my festival: Martha Marcy May Marlene and Another Earth.

Martha Marcy May Marlene tells the story of a girl being ensnared by a cult (albeit a cult of a pretty low-key variety), and then attempting to escape the stranglehold it has put on her psyche. The film begins with the girl (who has several names throughout --- hence the title) fleeing from the isolated farmhouse that is the cult's home, and from that point we move back and forth in time, witnessing her indoctrination at the farmhouse play out in parallel with her attempts to readjust to everyday life as a guest at her wealthy sister's holiday home. This back and forth structure is one of the film's key strengths: at certain points it is left deliberately ambiguous 'when' we are, highlighting the way that Martha's past is continually bleeding into, and altering her reactions to, her present. Physically escaping is one thing, but the psychological trauma cannot be left behind.

The cast are uniformly excellent, with particular props going to Elizabeth Olsen (Mary-Kate and Ashley's younger sister) for her curious mix of steel and vulnerability and John Hawkes for the low-key, sinuous charisma he brings to the leader of the cult. The film is gorgeous to look at, and director Sean Durkin keeps a firm grip on material that could easily have felt exploitative or simplistic. He's a name to watch.

Two more names to keep an eye out for are Mike Cahill and Brit Marling, who co-wrote Another Earth; he directed it, and she starred. A sci-fi concept plays out through the course of Another Earth: a planet appears in our solar system and begins to drift towards us. As it approaches, it becomes apparent that it is a perfect replica of Earth, right down to its inhabitants. Every person alive has an exact doppelganger up there on 'Earth Two.'

All of that happens in the background of the movie, though, and is touched on only briefly here and there (until the final act, anyway). The majority of the film concerns two people whose lives are brought together by a tragic accident, and who subsequently form an unlikely bond. I really liked Another Earth, though I've spoken to many who didn't. I thought the odd, tender little story that played out was  quite lovely, and though it took one too many unlikely turns, I thought the two leads were good enough to make it work. Newcomer Marling was very good, nearly good enough for me to buy her as a moody frump (when she's obviously beautiful). Playing opposite her was a guy named William Mapother, who's one of those actors that you've seen a bunch of times playing Henchman #3 type characters in big movies, but who here proves that he can actually act when he has to, and act pretty darn well.

I can understand why others didn't, but I liked it a lot. And heck, add half a star because it's got the most beautiful use of a musical saw in the history of cinema (Andy, you must see it, for that scene alone!).

And that, as they say in the classics, is that. MIFF is gone for another year, and I'll be resuming my usual round of multiplex mind-melters (Rise of the Planet of the Apes, anyone? Anyone?).

Given that I've seen less than 10% of the films playing at the festival, and given that I've been chatting to as many people as possible in the queues, I thought I'd leave you with a few recommendations for movies that I haven't seen. I've heard that these are great from several different sources, and maybe, just maybe, they'll sneak into cinemas sometime soon (or, failing that, they'll show on SBS2 at four in the morning in three years time): A Separation, an Iranian drama about a disentegrating marriage; Surviving Life, a mad Czech animation about psychoanalysis; How to Die in Oregon, a doco about euthanasia; and Michael, a harrowing Austrian drama about the bond between a man and the kidnapped child he has chained in his basement. In case my synopsis didn't give it away, that last one is not a comedy.

Cheers, JC.


currently reading: The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
books to go: 99

Now I'm Really Getting MIFFed (part three)

It's been a bit of a slower second week to the Film Festival, with a couple of (gasp!) movie-less days while I made a swift trip back to Wangaratta for a mate's 30th.

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

Getting more than a tad MIFFed (part two)

I continued on my merry, MIFFy way with four more movies spread over Monday and Tuesday.

Give Up Tomorrow is a stunning documentary about a horrifying miscarriage of justice in the Phillipines. When two girls go missing and are presumed dead, seven kids are accused of the crime, including a teenager named Paco Larrañega who can prove he was 350 miles away at the time. There are his school enrolment records, more than two dozen eye-witnesses, and even photographs! The twists and turns of his increasingly desperate attempts to win his freedom from the hopelessly corrupt Fillipino justice system form the substance of this amazing movie.

I can't say much about Give Up Tomorrow, except this: see it, if you get the chance. About twenty minutes into the film, the filmmaker had already set up Paco's obvious innocence and the conspiracy to frame him, and I found myself wondering where else the movie could possibly go? The answer, horrifyingly, is further. And further, until each new revelation is like a fresh stab in the gut. It's an incredible story, and a truly remarkable film.

Another doco, Armadillo, is just as remarkable in its own way. Portraying the six month tour of duty of a Danish squad in Afghanistan, Armadillo does a great job of getting inside the heads of the young soldiers. They must have become incredibly comfortable with the presence of the camera, because they let their guards down completely: to the point where, in one disturbing moment, a couple of the more boorish among them make jokes about (what seems to me to be) a war crime they've just committed. It's truly amazing footage, and I'd be fascinated to know what became of these guys once the film was shown in Denmark.

 

On the whole, Armadillo didn't quite live up to its best moments. There were a number of strange choices the filmmakers had made (including structuring the whole film in such a way as to infer a very particular 'something' about one of the soldiers, but never in any way confirming that it was true ... so the whole unspoken 'accusation' felt unjust) which held it back from being sublime. Still, being pretty great is still pretty great, know what I mean?

Veteran Japanese provocateur Takashi Miike returns to MIFF with 13 Assassins, which is easily the most accessible film of his that I've ever seen. Essentially a stock-standard Dirty Dozen-style story --- the head samurai dispatches his protege to take out an evil lord in a clandestine operation, said protege gathers a small team, they train for a while, then they go kick arse --- there's not a lot about 13 Assassins that isn't pretty predictable. But it doesn't matter a whit, because it's done with such assured style, and with such blood-spattering, flaming-bison-stampeding, severed-head-rolling zeal. It's a "Check your mind at the door and just have a friggin' blast" movie, and on those terms, it succeeds perfectly.

The muted Korean end of the world flick End of Animal was another film that had some really interesting elements, but wasn't able to maximise them. After a great first scene (in which a cabbie and his fare, a pregnant university student, pick up a psychic hitchhiker who informs them the world will end in five minutes time ... and it does), the film tailed off, its deadly slow pace quashing our interest in the post-apocalyptic setting and the random plot slipping out of the directors grasp and never adding up to any cohesive whole.

I've got a bunch more films tomorrow and on Friday, but before then I should give a shout out to Josh Nelson and Thomas Caldwell. They're both acquaintances from my Uni days (Josh took one of my film studies tutes, and Thomas and I acted together in an amateur stage production of Catch-22 --- it was awesome), neither of whom I've seen in about ten years, until suddenly at MIFF 2011 we seem to be sitting together and chatting in every single session. I can't quite figure out if I'm stalking them or they're stalking me. Regardless, they both write about movies in a far more considered, intelligent way than I do, Josh at Philmology and Thomas at Cinema Autopsy, where he's taking part in MIFF's blog-a-thon ... and, I suspect, swiftly going mad.

Cheers, JC.


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

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