MIFF ‘08 – Ballast

BALLAST

Lance Hammer, 2008

There’s something wonderfully grand about even the humblest and littlest of overtures, and this U.S. Dardennes re-up opens, grandly, with a humble and indeed little overture: a boy, walking through a field, sets in flight an armada of birds with a few steps; this minute-long single-shot verily this austere work’s central thesis made symbolic - from the merest of action comes all manner of reaction.

Ostensibly a majorly affected tone piece, first-time helmer Hammer’s visual style is imported close to wholly, his take on the Dardennes’ “2.35 Realism” straight-up replicated, though actually finding a closer thematic and idiomatic relative in Sandrine Veysset’s transcendental realist works, principally her 2001 ’consolation’ paean Martha…Martha. However, Hammer’s understanding of ‘minimalist’ seemingly reads ’stifling’, and the excruciatingly spare aural landscape he maps - little dialogue and no music, of course, but overcompensated with a somewhat staccato montage of room-tone hiss and canal-shattering wind - seems to signify a directorial timidity rather than a bleak conjecture, architecture grad Hammer’s rationale for inclusion often chokingly spartan and, at times, the overwhelming restraint rings a little inauthentic.

Structurally, though, Hammer’s rejection of easy redemption in favour of messier and less resolved arcs is to the work’s betterment, and ultimately this decentralised three-hander about a family’s inability to reconcile could so easily have become so much miserablist bourgeois fare, but its own meek hope is actually its truest quality, and its saving grace.

Also, finally: the overture’s perfect dramatic complement is, perhaps, the neatly razored coda, and, again, this work comes fully equipped; its almost surprisingly sudden and, again, overly restrained final image speaking generously (though not generously) to the need for forgiveness and reconciliation.

MIFF ‘08 – Night And Day

NIGHT AND DAY

Hong Sang-soo, 2008

SCENE: Male, nowhere near his home, is slightly drunk. His ex-girlfriend, who he is drinking with, may or may not be slightly drunker than he is. They might be standing too close to each other. How long ago did they break up? It’s unclear, but of less importance than what they are saying. What are they saying? Not much, but it’s of less importance than what their complicated and intimate dialogue increasingly infers. What does their dialogue infer? That the universe is fucking infinite.

For Hong Sang-soo, this verbal inner/outer interrelationship is key; his attempts at cultivating the kernels of emotional minutiae encased within everything we say, here, again, forming his ongoing inquiry into our universe of perceptions and reactions. It’s a diary, a daydream, and a dialogue between the interiority and the ever-expanding exteriors that come with environmental unfamiliarity.

In this, his seventh fully auteured feature, he drizzles a Parisian rain-shower of forced absence and discontented vacancy over the episodic narrative of self-exiled Sung-nam – a painter temporarily couched in Paris’ community of Korean artists - and in the process Sang-soo finds in it a structural harmony that eclipses his previous works’ attempts at formatting; the inherently quotidian nature of this diagrammatic daily diary wringing myriad meaningful moments from a wealth of uneventful events and microscopic mannerisms.

Approaching something like a mastery of his ubiquitous usage of scripted/improvised scenario’s (often dictated by the available locations at his disposal) involving his typically temporally complex web of interpersonal relationships, Sang-soo’s work largely differs from Hou Hsiaou-hsien’s seemingly similar The Flight Of The Red Balloon; where that work attempts to engage with a decidedly precise cultural lineage (Lamorisse, Musée d’Orsay, Paris as iconic city/entity, etc…), Sang-soo’s Paris is an anti-context, an empty shell-like conduit for Sung-nam’s displacement that is as alienating for him as it is liberating, and as culturally relevant (”I figured, being a painter, that I should see Paris at least once”) as it is geographically untranslatable and meaningless (the previous quote a lie Sung-nam tells his Korean ‘uncle’). However, whilst his re-imagining of Paris itself is seemingly a comment on the fluidic interchangeability of concrete cities and the concrete certainty of the human heart, his use of the city’s spaces is subtler, and perhaps best exemplified during Sung-nam’s walking fight with semi-love-interest Yoo-jeung: as they cross the Pont Royal and bicker over the imbalance in affection they share and the existence of Sung-nam’s wife, Sang-soo’s camera, lagging, pans after them, stopping intermittently to take in the view; Sang-soo suggesting, for the briefest of moments, that whilst one will always verily live within, sometimes one cannot ignore one’s complementary outer; least not Paris; least not he.

Up The Mountain…

With MIFF ‘08 now halfway over, there is much to be said and not nearly enough time to say it. Oh!, the things one would say if one could avoid seeing yet more films! Alas, one cannot avoid such things, and nor should one try.

As such, below be the skinny skeletons of some future features; their fuller flesh forthcoming.

SHALL WE KISS– A kinda creepy kiss-obsessed quasi-sex-romp, this awfully sountracked and dumbly told storyteller’s contrivance is straight masturbation fantasy, and an epic one at that; its ‘art scene’ settings and ’art scene’ characters as though crafted by teenagers obsessed with (and indeed confused about) kissing/fucking ’art scene’ chicks.

I JUST DIDN’T DO IT– Who foresaw in Masayuki Suo - a filmmaker whose lightly comedic work includes 1996’s slight Shall We Dance? - this controlled and intense and pure procedural document? The best kind of sprawling, this dynamic work’s detailed script nails each scene’s narrative micro-centre and each arc’s emotional truths, ultimately leaving only one loitering question: is this dense 143-minute work’s single point really that Japan’s judicial system can be unjust? The answer is “not really…”, but not really definitively “no”.

NIGHT AND DAY– Say what you will about Hong Sang-soo’s repeatedly revisited scenarios, no other writer of dialogue working in cinema today can boast his mastery of the achingly honest and the universally personal, of the verbal interplay between interior and exterior, and, here, the pairing of this work’s faux-diary-entry structure with his ongoing interest in the kernels of emotional minutiae encased within everything we say results in a wonderfully harmonious fusion; his infusing of the smallest of gestures with the richest of meaning not merely an economic method for dramatisation but, indeed, his goal.

40×15: 40 YEARS OF THE DIRECTOR’S FORTNIGHT– For all that this TV documentary’s first half lacks, its complement’s near-sole focus is almost worthy of admission alone: following the Quinzane’s core team around for the entire of 2006 as they stand around small televisions watching dvd after dvd (only stopping to discuss the films over their credits), after which they try to woo the films they like the best away from Competition and into a prize-less Quinzaine.

THE PAPER WILL BE BLUE– An early-ish work of the New Romanian canon, this tragicomic portrait of the miscommunication borne of Ceaucescu’s fall is intimate and sprawling; its humanity and its warmly drawn politics themselves borne directly of the need for healing within the nation/community.

PLOY– Perhaps the most hostile reception for any film at MIFF in years, Pen-Ek Ratanaruang’s mega-cryptic portrait of the various interior states of a crumbling relationship (or is it?) practically demands re-visitations and re-interpretations; its polymorphous meaning/s rather the opposite of concrete, and its suffocating near-silence at once endlessly suggestive and entirely foreboding.

OTTO; OR, UP WITH DEAD PEOPLE– Both a sexless porno and a decidedly unfunny comedy, LaBruce’s newest ‘work’ boasts one thing and one thing alone: a cutely crafted central character. That this is of almost no consequence to the film’s unstoppable failings communicates those failings twice.

BIRDSONG — Albert Serra, with all of two features to his name, is the most interesting filmmaker working today. I said it. His wonderful and prodigious 2006 debut Honor De Cavalleria signalling a great new talent’s arrival, this, his second, is somehow a poetical quantum leap in craft and, personally, THE work of 2008 so far; his singular re-take on the minimalism of Lisandro Alonso and Bela Tarr the best thing going in contemporary cinema. Def more on this to come…

INSIDE — Much like The Cell, this fascinatingly repulsive and absurd post-horror fluid festival deals in the pure viscera of horror’s imagery, but without that work’s attention to ego and pop-psychology. Instead, in royally fucking with the very existence of narrative conventions and comforts and even sheer visibility at times, it often limits itself to sheer symbolic effect, one’s sensory perception of proceedings reduced to that of a foetus in the womb – dulled noise and flashes of dulled red light.

UNRELATED– Whilst one could feasibly complain of this work’s small blemishes – chief, nonetheless, among them: the overwraught playing of this otherwise moving work’s sighing revelation - shouldn’t one praise its praiseworthiness? Ostensibly a richly symbolic portrait of aging, its emphasis on character and nuance juxtaposed against a perfectly/quietly photogenic and metaphorical landscape allows it the freedom to be generous with its humanity and compelling in its breezy unhurried arcs.

MIFF ‘08 – The Silence Before Bach

THE SILENCE BEFORE BACH

Pere Portabella, 2007

Nestled somewhere between playful art-film form-fuck and Bach-dork fan-piece lay this, Portugese politician Portabella’s lengthy and sketchy rumination on the meaning and legacy of one J. S. Bach. Ostensibly a series of skits and bits with no real thread to link them, Portabella’s greatest asset here is his ability to interpret the various ages’ methods of absorbing various aspects of Bach’s works; his images filled with instruments and performances and spaces that quite literally reverberate with the evergreen omnipresence of Bach’s dynamic compositions.

The stretch, though, is more that its central conceit is rather singular, and while Portabella comes close to running it out for 102 minutes it is perhaps too big an ask that each vignette set the same table in the same manner as the previous table’s setters, minus the repetition.

 

Off-topic: It started all those moons ago, but I am now officially slightly in love with Àlex Brendemühl. He has a face that makes me want to move to Barcelona and start a fan-site dedicated to sightings and rumours and awkward photos of me standing with him outside MACBA.

MIFF ‘ 08 – The English Surgeon

THE ENGLISH SURGEON

Geoffrey Smith, 2007

In some ways, MIFF is absolutely the place where documentaries that defy easy categorisation should be seen; the festival context providing viewers with external “it’s art!” signifiers, and the cinema arena furnishing the art itself its due environment.

This is not one of those documentaries.

Which is not to say it isn’t a wonderful and hopeful and warmly funny story. It most certainly is; its true tale of two men striving to change an entire quasi-government’s approach to national health only half the story here, with titular neurosurgeon Henry Marsh’s digressions on mortality and ethics the overarching story’s rather philosophical complement. However, BBC man Smith treats this tale as so much television. Which, of course, it is, and one can only wonder what Wiseman or Morris would do with this compelling man’s quest, as all we have here – sporadic use of genius Warren Ellis’ typically east/west score included - is merely the relative artlessness of the true tale told truly.

And since it’s THE hot-button topic of the festival queues this year: does a work like this even belong on MIFF’s already-clogged radar? With so many of its documentaries televisual in either nature or actuality, this work is perhaps emblematic of the kind of programming the oft-cried-for culling may/should affect.

MIFF ‘08 – Momma’s Man

MOMMA’S MAN

Azazel Jacobs, 2008

Clearly, it is tough being Ken Jacobs’ son. Ken Jacobs’ son Azazel Jacobs says so himself – however obliquely – in this, his first major work. A radical departure from his father’s pioneering avant-garde work (but, like, of course), this somewhat solipsistic navel-gaze is actually far simpler and a little more universal than its narrative stasis belies: ‘Mikey’ visits his parents (actually played by Ken and Flo Jacobs, actually in the Jacobs’ family home) and decides to stay indefinitely, much to the incremental bewilderment of his wife in LA and his subsequently concerned parents.

Speaking in some ways to the listlessness of fat and aged teenage angst, its plotlessness kinda begins a melancholic though repetitious display of dullish developmental arrest – new parent Mikey gorging himself on all manner of teenage ephemera and losing himself amongst his parents’ various gadgets and materialist practices – but soon becomes a dullish portrait of nostalgia gone retarded, only subsequently lifting its head out of this mire to occasionally inject fleeting moments of dull dramatic contrivance into what could only loosely be called ‘proceedings’, capped by an hilariously literal and visually redundant Battle With The Stairs.

With Mikey’s stagnancy and its ultimate entropic denouement this work’s sole tenet, Azazel’s approach reaches its symbolic apex with Mikey ‘shaving’: the protagonist/proxy standing in front of the mirror lathering his face, only to become waylaid by the idiotic sensory pleasure found in his endless fondling of the lather’s texture; the subsequent finale – facing his child - a questionably one-dimensional summation of these themes. Sometimes ‘simple’ and ‘unresolved’ is merely a simplistic void of resolution.

*bashfully toes the floorboards with the toe of his boot*

So, um, MIFF coverage starts now. Blame an hilariously lo-fi tech issue (crippling, nonetheless) for whatever you feel you need to. Whoever “you” are.

THE INFINITY LESSONS – A Brighter Summer Day

“ALTERED STATES”

There is something vaguely and perhaps misguidedly nostalgic about The American Independent Cinema; that term evoking a wealth of early-mid 90’s art ethics and hoary filmbiz/anti-filmbiz notions. However, the movement’s small moves away from actually being an ascribed ”movement” in recent years is reflected in MIFF ’08’s micro-photo detail of the current US indie pulse, with seemingly naught but low budgets to link these peasants to each other.

BALLAST – It is indeed worrying that everyone is mentioning that everyone is mentioning this work’s indebtedness to The Dardennes, and some rather unfavourably. Ed Gonzalez at Slant warns that we’ll be doing all the hard work ourselves, and whilst some are scrambling for superlatives, a question: is there anything as frighteningly hollow as a film whose tone and style are “clearly the film’s primary pursuit“?

GARDENS OF THE NIGHT — Journeyman director Damian Harris’ last film was a porno. Not a fun porno, or even a real porno, but a fucking erotic thriller. In that light, one may well wonder/fear what Harris’ newest – a tale of child abduction and sexual abuse - may illuminate, and perhaps ”fatally unbalanced by an ingrained Hollywood desire for closure” is the summation of that fear.

THE GUITAR – Whilst being Robert Redford’s daughter renders a director somewhat less indie than almost everyone else alive, NYC-punk-dude/no-wave-film-dude/writer Amos Poe is/was about as fuck-off-DIY as one can/could be. What any of this means for this film is a lil moot; life is indeed short, perhaps too short for another contrivance about life being short.

IN SEARCH OF A MIDNIGHT KISS — Sounding suspiciously ‘audience-friendly’, this, uh, “cult romcom” has everyone throwing around words like ‘misanthrope’, ‘monochrome’, and “sub-Tarantino/Larry David rip-off“, and if ‘indie’ isn’t enough this typically LA B&W no-budgeter has “hipster charm” too. Christ.

MOMMA’S MAN — Azazel Jacob’s new work may be the most self-reflexive work at MIFF this year. “Implicitly nostalgic“, his tale of ‘Mikey’ refusing to leave his parent’s home (the parent’s played by Jacob’s own, in the home Jacob actually grew up in) has been boxed up into NY’s Mumblecore scene, which some people fucking love. Also: if yr dad has to be famous, don’t be Robert Redford’s child, be avant-garde icon Ken Jacob’s.

PADRE NUESTRO — Being “one of the more visceral movies pondering the new globalization” won’t necessarily win you a bunch of new friends, but this this quasi-double-fugue downer was the surprise winner of Sundance’s Grand Jury Prize in 2007. That it ”lives down to the dubious nature…of that so-called honor” however? Ouch. And ouch.

THE PLEASURE OF BEING ROBBED — Perhaps the no-budget-est (and, thus, indie-est) of this fistful of low-b whimsies - this work’s reception all smitten cinephilia and nuevelle vague comparisons - Joshua Safdie’s debut feature will seemingly act as a litmus test for the oldest protagonist argument: Sympathetic or Compelling? Also: being both “too precious” and “too articulate” makes this sound like a Joanna Newsom song, and you know how I feel about Anthony “Dreamboat” Carew.

THE WACKNESS — A “standard issue coming-of-age story” window-dressed in NY Summer of ‘94 kicks, ain’t nobody really love this wackness ‘cept the Sundance audience that saw it and saw fit to give it a death kiss.

WENDY AND LUCY – After 2007’s most surprising theatrical run – the surprise that writer/director Kelly Reichardt’s wonderful though definitively understated Old Joy actually enjoyed a run at all – Reichardt re-ups with a work of “incredible emotional genuineness” whose “sadness is natural“, and whose Cannes 2008 inclusion had a lot of people almost pleased to be so subtly devastated. Maybe the closest thing to a neck-and-neck in the annual ‘Will It Get A Local Release?™’ MIFF parlour game (and more on that later).

WHITE LIES, BLACK SHEEP — Sounding very much like quintessential ‘Important To Me’ personal cinema, it comes bearing some of the critical hallmarks of such work: “undernourished” writing (borne of a writer’s purely internal visions staying put; its hailing as largely “a scripted documentary” pouring concrete on this kid’s fear) voiced by - even according to writer/director James Spooner himself - surrogate mouthpieces that are author stand-ins, and all direct to the audience.

THE INFINITY LESSONS – All Up In Your Area

“ROMANIAN WAVES”

Can a ‘new wave’ find validation solely within the confines of a single film festival? MIFF says: yes! But so do lots of people. A whole slate of recent Cannes-award-winning Ceausescu-dominated works here, and a couple ancillaries. Get awakened, Melbourne.

12:08 EAST OF BUCHAREST — This, along with The Death Of Mr. Lazarescu, is where the success began (and indeed the ‘new wave’). Awarded the Camera D’Or in 2006 (by The Brothers Dardennes, no less), writer/director Corneliu Porumboiu has yet to follow up on this; a common feature within this Romanian surge and a key aspect to some of the criticism of it.

BOOGIE – Working with co-writer Razvan Radulescu – also co-writer of Lazarescu, The Paper Will Be Blue (below) and a handful of others, and one of the few key creatives amassing something resembling a body of work amongst this movement – “hard-working” director Radu Muntean’s portrait of a ”regular” relationship is the newest work on display here. Could its primary concern – one of contemporary happiness juxtaposed against a history of nefariousness and personal irresponsibility- be accounted for as metaphorical? Would one be wrong in doing so?

CALIFORNIA DREAMIN’ (ENDLESS) – With what could only be described as a tragic history, the much-discussed (Endless) version of the late Cristian Nemescu’s only feature California Dreamin’ arrives at last. It’s a black comedy, of course. There will also be a separate session comprised of three of Nemescu’s early shorts: C Block Story, Mihai And Cristina, and Marilena From P7.

THE DEATH OF MR. LAZARESCU – Epic, absurdist, “nothing if not visceral“ and indeed a “methodically driven temporal expansion of a man’s last few hours“, Cristi Puiu’s epically celebrated ode to mortality truly begat this new wave’s renown; its 2005 Cannes reception the genuine tipping point between mere geographically bordered film output and a collective and centrally anchored body of work.

OCCIDENT — 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days writer/director Christian Mungiu’s blackly funny and “socially perspicacious” debut feature is “too carefully written by half“, but has been compared to Nae Caranfil’s watershed post-Ceausescu comedy Don’t Lean Out The Window, a chief inspiration for this generation of post-Ceausescu comedians.

THE PAPER WILL BE BLUE – Radu Muntean’s second feature – a street-level perspective of the night of Ceausescu’s fall and the breakdown in communication that was borne of the rioting - precedes his later Boogie by two years. I don’t want to read the words ‘black’ and ‘comedy’ for a little while.

THE INFINITY LESSONS – We Be Forecasting

The 2008 MIFF Preview continues, unabated, here, with another new strand in this year’s program.

“NIGHT SHIFT”

In an attempt to curate some kind of “midnight movie” neo-horror program MIFF have sought monster-ey tales, weirdo freaky madness, and craaaazy wack-a-doodle cockamamie nonsense. Apparently midnight is the hour of silly words.

DAI-NIPPONJIN — In what could be the breakout film of the festival, Japanese TV star Hitoshi Matsumoto has fashioned that rarest of work: one that no one can actually talk about properly. Ostensibly a melancholic mock/comedy about a bored/boring superhero, it actually sounds (when words meet cohesion) funny AND moving. Get excited, Melbourne.

DEAD DAUGHTERS — “Sweaty” performances? An “oppressive” 119 minutes? “The most distracting, show-offy cinematography yet in a modern cinema landscape that’s way too full of it“? It’s almost difficult to find any evidence of the hype that led to this Russian ghost film’s US remake rights being bought, but I guess we’ll see it here soon enough.

DONKEY PUNCH — Taking a definitively hackneyed plotline – a bunch of up-for-it lads in Spain, a boat and a dead girl – and fashioning a hackneyed-sounding film, this “slick commercial genre” horror is slowly winning some over, while others continue to ask “where was the yacht rock?“, whatever the fuck that means.

THE HORSEMAN — Are we actually enjoying a post-Wolf Creek outback-horror renaissance? And I mean that both ways: is it actually happening? If so, are we happier for it? Very little advance word on this very recently completed Australian vengeance piece, but its opening scene is already award-winning.

INSIDE — Already called “a neo-horror near-masterpiece” and “the beginning of a longer conversation about the poetic potentials of the visceral“, I’m already upset at having to see this fascinating-sounding nightmare. Don’t get me wrong – I’m looking forward to another Béatrice Dalle menacing, but I’m upset that I’m going to be so upset again. Maybe I shouldn’t go…*smirk*…oh, you…

JACK BROOKS: MONSTER SLAYER — The use of “campy” as an adjective always concerns me. It’s vague, is often somewhat derisive praise, and usually warns of sophomoric and under-crafted ‘Troma-esque’ humour somewhere in your near future. Also: “If Jack Brooks was made in the 80’s, it would be a cult classic by now” goes the MIFF program blogbite, and I genuinely can’t tell if that’s a good thing to say about a film or an awful awful thing to say about a film.

SPIDER BABY – Jack Hill, that old man of xploitation, never really experienced any real success in his creative life, but his legacy of heralded works – among them an awesome pair of sub-genre-defining works - is kinda singular amongst his generation of Roger-Corman-trained hatchetmen; Hill really the only one to achieve any later success within his original discipline, to use that term kinda loosely. Spider Baby, his culty-est, screens here all re-everything-ed, courtesy of Tarantino’s constant championing. It’s being remade, you know. And apparently it was a very off-Broadway musical indeed. Once.

SUKIYAKI WESTERN DJANGO – Takashi Miike is the Grant Morrison of the cinema: a character-driven genre-obsessed style-drenched genius, a genuine idea factory. He’s the kind of filmmaker whose awesomest misfires are still filled with the flaming madness of a creative wildfire, and being the most prolific filmmaker IN THE WORLD has got to count for something. “Fun you will have“? See y’all there.

SURVEILLANCE — I used to know this girl in high school who would defend Boxing Helena a lot. She also liked that dead fairy picture book, too. I kinda hated both. With the familiar sound of deafening criticism raining down on the other littler Lynch – this newest all “heavily strained, discordant dialogue“ and “inanity“ - she just hopes you don’t get distracted by her direction.