Hey ballers…
I’m gonna go ahead and do something I didn’t want to: address “the readership”.
Why? Number of reasons, but mainly: I just moved from Blogger to WordPress, where everything seemingly runs much more smoothly. Yay WordPress! My last blog’s origins were an attempt to collate my ‘07 MIFF experience (and begin an ongoing reportage on Melbourne’s cinematic landscape[s]), but Blogger’s various layout bugs were miring me in aesthetic paralysis. Paralysis, I say!
The end result was a hideously bare blog that had way more posts in Edit than were published, mainly because I’d been trying to “get on top of” the growing backlog of drafts and layout difficulties. Not happening. Instead, I was sitting around and forgetting a bunch of stuff about recently seen works, and it was all very very annoying.
So: The Cleanout - here, after the jump, is the rest of MIFF ‘07, albeit in the most concise edited-for-progression fashion:
THE HOTTEST STATE: Ethan Hawke’s lazily crafted romantic affair about a boy and his girlfriend/s, and his estranged father’s presence-void. Trite and repetitive, and almost unbelievably overlong, though strangest of all – with its numerous guy/girl break-ups and make-ups - would have benefited massively from an increased examination of the undervalued father/son relationship (the father played by Hawke himself; he seeming both capable enough to direct himself, yet unable to gauge his own character’s importance).
ALEXANDRA: Sokurov’s treatise on the Chechnyan ’situation’ told via the revisited prism of mothers and sons; his trademark’d elegiac pacing and ambience all adding up to about as much as his elegiac ambience ever does.
DREAMS OF DUST: a languid expose of Burkina Faso’s variously exploited wealth/s, and it benefits from its simplicity. Incorporating men-and-their-inner-ghosts, strange tea-pouring, and the nefarious interaction ’tween nations and peasants, this Blue Collar-like working men’s tale is as oddly affecting as it is quietly successful (something that cannot be said of Blue Collar).
HOW IS YOUR FISH TODAY?: easily the most pointlessly self-indulgent silliness to have screened this year, Xiaolu Guo’s mediocre vlog of a film found even this champion of self-indulgent navel-gazing fascinatingly bored.
I DON’T WANT TO SLEEP ALONE: in an era of endless cinematic nostalgia, it often seems increasingly difficult to truly elevate anything/anyone to The Canon. Alas, the one contemporary to buck this trend is the seemingly-only-spoken-of-in-hushed-reverence Tsai Ming-Liang. Possibly the most transcendental film-maker alive, this serene work is most certainly not going to be his fall from grace; its awesomely composed “tale” of unrequited love an absolute masterclass in direction, and one of the most moving and cinematic experiences of the decade.
GRACE IS GONE: well-written, moderately successful John-Cusack-starring Sundance-bait, this nonetheless interesting examination of the death of an American family’s Iraq-War-fighting matriarch suffers from being both entirely too indebted to the wealth of cinema’s history of dead soldiers and entirely too interested in that most over-examined milieu: American mid-west suburbia.
WOMAN ON THE BEACH: a counterpoint of-sorts to Xiaolu Guo’s exceedingly personal mirror-diary (see above), this wonderfully engaging and revealing personal journal manages to pull off some of the trickiest tricks in scriptwriting: being soul-baring without being tortured, being both writerly and structured and amazingly naturalistic, and – perhaps most amazingly in 2007 – being about contemporary sex/romance without being a horrid “examination” of simplistic sex-politic ideologies; Sang-soo Hong’s wonderful film instead taking a simpler and more difficult path: merely observing the horrible ways people come apart after coming together.
NIGHT: a dreary, messy, pointless and above-all disappointing film “about” the emotional, psychological, and poetic qualities of the night’s endless darkness. Employing a barrage of talking heads, odd time-lapse photography (of course!) and endless reels of silly long-lens’d voyeurism, Lawrence Johnston’s Melbourne-made pseudo-documentary is a long-ass 80 minutes.
DOG BITE DOG: neither “terrifyingly intense” nor “the Hong Kong action film of the year”, but in fact the worst film I saw this year, and the clearest single example yet of the quality-drop in Asian action cinema this decade (and yes: Johnny To = exception).
YOUR MOMMY KILLS ANIMALS: feet firmly planted in the “entertainment documentary” sub-genre, this TV-style expose of the machinations of the animal rights movement will be very revealing to some, annoying to others. Devoutly pro-vegan/animal rights, it is perhaps surprising – but also, really, not so - that it largely steers clear of the reels of documented video footage of corporate/agricultural animal cruelty that often are the catalysts for activists and vegans/vegetarians, instead – its televisual roots here apparent - opting for lots of homeless puppies and eccentric oldies caring for ten cats.
YOU, THE LIVING: Roy Andersson’s follow up to 2000’s Songs From The Second Floor finds him in near-identical form, and bless for that. Managing an almost magical balance ‘tween absurdly funny and unbearably moving at seemingly every moment, this becomes an even more difficult task than normal here, with scant recurring characters spread across a menagerie of one-shot non-sequiteurs and logistical nightmares. Often cited as the heir to Tati, this melancholic comedy moved me to tears twice, and each time immediately tried to make me feel better; its laughs as though coming from a friend’s consolation.
IN THE COMPANY OF ACTORS: a rare behind-the-stage peek into the goings-on of the rehearsals for a major play, in this case Hedda Gabler starring Cate Blanchett and Hugo Weaving. Interesting: with nought but actors, writers and directors to fill the screen with, it is also an opportunity to evaluate the often-discussed effect of cameras on the “performances” of a documentary’s subjects.
BRAND UPON THE BRAIN!: much of Guy Maddin’s unique talents lay in his love for/understanding of the conventions of cinema, the actual mechanical stuff of it, and much like much of his earlier work this tech-riff on the Soviet cinema of the silent age succeeds on these qualities alone. However, as is often the case with Maddin, it transcends mere aesthetic imitation to become a hypnotically personal looking-glass of hyper-real montage, and – perhaps most amazingly - all while remembering to be perfectly hilariously camp.
DRY SEASON: much like the similarly affecting Dreams of Dust, this African (Chad, specifically) redemption song works as poetically as its narrative austerity will allow. A disarmingly simple portrait of the choices faced by a nation drowning in revenge killings, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s tale of cathartic non-violence could function as an elegy for many of Africa’s ravaged people, and in his treatment of the truly liberating possibilities found in his own backyard has fashioned something both starkly real and entirely optimistic…
SHOTGUN STORIES: …none of which can be said for this dreary idiotic tale of man-violence and the unavoidablility of said violence amongst po’ clans of stoopid brothers; a tale which would be ok, I guess, if it weren’t so caught up in the awesome dramatic possibilities of said idiot brothers’ inability to swallow they pride and back down from a good ol’ fight…Oh, and “Produced by David Gordon Green” is the least indicative thing about this film’s misleading marketing; Green’s melancholy being as removed from this fucking boy’s movie as I was from praising it.
LAKE OF FIRE: it’s not for naught that Tony Kaye’s sprawling and ambitious but near-ridiculous examination of abortion runs on-and-on for the better part of 150 minutes: while it is unflinching in its B&W depiction of THE talking heads of our half of last century, it also doesn’t think you fucking get how epic the issue is, as if it’s running time alone cannot enable it to possibly say enough, and through mere documentary presentation not nearly as fucking emphatically. Thus, scenes of already extremely moving real-life scenes are set to symphony concertos, talking heads on all kinds of sides o’ the fence speak of a variety of absolutes over footage of death, tears and ”corpses”, and Kaye even interviews himself, as if to suggest that not even Chomsky has illuminated the issue in all its horrific complicated truth.
HONOR DE CAVALLERIA: by far the most demanding and rewarding of this year’s festival, debut feature director Albert Serra’s completely abstract “interpretation” of Don Quixote takes the minimalistic cinema of Lisandro Alonso and re-ups like a motherfucker. Reading almost behind the lines, it portrays the daily goings-on of Quixote and Sancho sans quixotics, leaving us with the opportunity to witness some of the most insightful and trancendental commentary on the psychology of these characters, and all via the subtlest mise-en-scene: an almost whimsical magic-hour tone-poem of sitting, sleeping and ocassionally talking.
AFR: its title alone signifying its intent on being recognised as a Danish JFK, this interesting agit-prop-esque doc/mockumentary about the assassination of the prime minister wisely values its surprising twists; its rationing of these likely an annoying approach amongst anyone with anything resembling a background understanding of this topical tale of the personal intruding on the political.
HARDCORE CHAMBERMUSIC: a largely frustrating effort, this (for this boy, anyway) almost unbelievably excitingly titled music documentary spends far too much time listening to the tipsy post-gig ramblings of some 45-year-old jazz musicians, when it already has far too much trouble with the admittedly difficult problem of condensing 30 nights of music into 72 minutes.
PAPRIKA: somehow crafting a entire film from almost nothing but the dream sequence interior logic of, say, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Satoshi Kon’s eye-popping animated headtrip/puzzle is - tho undoubtedly, at times, amazing - the final straw. Entire films of dream sequences? Where to now? How about: entire films without dream sequences…
DIRTY THREE: the antithesis of Lake of Fire, this straight-up traditional music documentary of certainly the greatest band to ever come out of music only possesses two things that elevate the footage above standard: the sheer array of talking heads and the great things they say about said musical geniuses, and footage of THAT Meredith show.
LAGERFELD CONFIDENTIAL: the best of this year’s documentaries, this revealing and insightful observational piece rides shotgun with the creative head of Chanel, ignoring the myriad opportunities to condemn the [insert appropriate insult here] fashion industry in search of the human behind the barbs: a lively and hilarious subject, and as engaging and intelligent as Rodolphe Marconi’s film.
SCOTT WALKER – 30TH CENTURY MAN: just because Walker is one of the most interesting humans working in any creative field today unfortunately doesn’t automatically make this admittedly exhaustive feature documentary any less middling. Beginning with his teen-idol youth and moving forward towards the making of his masterpiece The Drift (easily the most praised/least heard album of 2006), the talking heads are all awed by him, as indeed should we all be, but this film too often plays like a YouTube-linked Wikipedia page.
MISTER LONELY: a new Harmony Korine film is indeed a reason to BE: his 1997 Gummo is one of the most important and revolutionary films of last century; his 1999 follow-up Julien Donkey-Boy is one of the same century’s worst, a misguided and untamed curiosity; and now Mister Lonely, falling squarely in the middle. A thematic companion piece of-sorts to the recent Marie Antionette, this totally Korine-esque experimental tale of celebrity impersonators and the iconography of our pop-culture-obsessed age takes its name from the fucking Akon song, which alone says reams about both Korine and this absurdly compelling film.
and…
THE MAN FROM LONDON: for the record, I believe that Werckmeister Harmonies is the best film of this century thus far, and I am at times almost worried about my intense love for it. A film about the bleakest of truths, director Bela Tarr is one of the most influential art-film-makers in the world, and with Tsai-Ming Liang possibly the only director truly deserving of his current status amongst both film-makers and -viewers.
However, on my first viewing of this, his newest, I hated it. A dull quasi-noir. Gone was the focused intensity, the shattering insight, the jaw-dropping composition. What was transcendental, here plodded, and where once stood the most cinematic of techniques now lay inert and seemingly vacant tracking shots, so calling attention to their emptiness. Tilda Swinton is horrible (and distractingly dubbed), and both hers and other performances seemed excessively overwrought. Later, I found out that I was not alone – indeed not a Melbournian soul could say they found “the truth”, as so many did in 2000.
Had I missed something? Had working within the confines of something akin to genre affected his approach to the film? Producer extraordinnaire Humbert Balsan’s mid-production suicide had a shattering effect on both Tarr and the shoot, and is an event whose ramifications and repurcussions I had nothing but the deepest of sympathy for. Feeling that it warranted such sympathy, I ran to the MIFF box office to grab one of the last tickets to the near-sold-out second screening, on the last day.
At the subsequent screening I saw much more: the tracking shots, while not functioning on as pure and interior a level as in either Satantango or Werckmeister Harmonies, do effect a claustrophobic noir-ish quality, in one final movement creating a level of tension befitting the tale’s climax (albeit without a slavish sense of genre duty), and when the camera stops moving the compositions are, oddly, often filled with the spatial metaphor of later Fassbinder; the images seeming to convey subtle information reflecting both interior and exterior.
But a lot remained as it did inititally, much of which could simply be lain at the feet of Balsan’s death and, as such, we will never really know. I found myself wondering if the treatment of the grand themes of Tarr’s most celebrated works - films which were at their core the result of an extremely close relationship between himself and Laszlo Krasznahorkai - were at odds with Georges Simenon’s microcosm of those very themes. Where Werckmeister’s depiction of the hair’s breadth separating civility from barbarism focused on a small town’s descent, or Satantango on its commune, here The Man From London’s Maloin is our sole focus, and seemingly Tarr’s undoing; it illuminating Tarr’s genius for analogy, a talent seemingly unfit for one man’s odyssey.
