
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.