Which is to say films took over my life, in not an entirely positive manner. A lady told me she didn't know what was going on in Egypt and it occurred to me I didn't know what was going on in my life. Plus, Egypt didn't have any films in PIFF this year. Egypt's Garbage Dreams was one of three amazing documentaries at the festival last year.
I'm bound to compare this year and last year, as I'm bound to compare the films to each other; hence, the last post, with films ranked by a count of stars. Which is silly and vague, overall.
So I wanted to say a little more about some films I wanted to say a little more about. For example, I nearly walked out of Poland's All That I Love during its first half, but several good writing choices and two sexy scenes (even middle-brow dramas have sex scenes in European films) made me glad I stayed. The relationship between the band singer and housewife was depicted in tender but brutal tones, and fully developed might have turned into something resembling Fassbinder. Conversely, Sweden's Behind Blue Skies began with several strong dramatic decisions and a sexy scene, but its narrative suffered from diminishing inspiration. A scene with Martin's (Bill Skarsgård) cock in a girlfriend's mouth, as she attempts to persuade him to spend the night with her, was very well done.
At the beginning of The Housemaid, a South Korean remake, a girl stands on a ledge overlooking a neon city block and the camera is over-the-shoulder. My friend says "Enter the Void" enthusiastically. The rest of the movie disappoints, and by the end just goes up in flames. Thankfully, real flames. The Revenant was the worst of the midnight screenings, but somehow charming, like its writer/director D. Kerry Prior, who proudly brags about beginning his career in the special effects department of Don Coscarelli's movies. His film quivers with life but never bursts.
Good Morning to the World was an encounter with a micro-budget Japanese art house film, probably made by a young filmmaker. The way Hirohara Satoru wanted to use his camera to express the interior loneliness of his character made me less lonely, and I hope the filmmaker finds a path that leads to fully realized films. The Woods was this type of movie: everything I didn't like about the movie could perhaps be used as a reason to like the movie. But I don't buy it. Films like Milestones and Symbiopsychotaxiplasm show you can have hippie idealism and also create an interesting film. The Woods dresses a formless, hollow narrative in clothes of innocent rebellion, and if you can buy that you can buy the whole thing. I'll buy Gas-s-s-s. No one could decide if The Woods was more self-indulgent than Heartbeats, but Heartbeats won me sometimes with its sincerity, because sincere self-indulgence is still sincerity.
In Italy's The Double Hour the dream was real (and in The Last Circus the dream is very, very real), but I could hardly care because its double-cross story is entirely lifeless. Just like the art design and attention to period detail don't elevate the predictable, cheap dramatics of Spain's Black Bread or Lope. France's The Princess of Montpensier, directed by Bertrand Tavernier, is better because it treats period detail with a light, minimalist touch, and the characters feel greater in importance than the settings.
Human Resources Manager was the second best movie at PIFF about the transportation of a dead person, as La Pivellina was the third best movie involving a circus performance (the latter suffered from a low-quality source material, which was too bad). Cameraman was illuminating and sometimes inspiring, but clearly preaches to the choir (the same choir was better preached to in Clouzot's Inferno).
As it began I was afraid I was going to like New Zealand's Boy too much. It begins with a great montage over the audio of Boy's class presentation. The montage and presentation provide the audience with knowledge of Boy and his environment, and though the technique was familiar, I loved everything, all the small touches, like the notebook paper animation, dead-pan Michael Jackson admiration, and other curious details. Unfortunately, the experience was for me more curious than emotional, which is how some felt about the opening night film, François Ozon's Potiche. They could be right - but as with other things, if you want to be that thing, be it all the way. And I thought Potiche was curious, playful, and charming for its duration. It's sort of like if Scott Pilgrim was shown on a television in a Douglas Sirk movie, if that makes sense to you.
Japan's Mutant Girls Squad was Scott Pilgrim shown on a television in a Shinya Tsukamoto movie, if that makes sense to you. It sometimes murdered me with novelty and exuberance, and its commitment to cinematic insanity impressed me. It's better than Potiche which I gave a half-star more. I hope that demonstrates the faultiness of the star system, and also the absurdity and energy of Mutant Girls Squad, which I recommend to anyone wanting a cinematic freak out.
Real life conversation: from a friend's point of view, I should care more about the humanitarianism side of Spain's Even the Rain. I tried to make it clear my disappointment was with the dramatic shortcuts and easy answers (which Aftershock and The Whistleblower suffered from to even greater degrees). I appreciate that Even the Rain internally addresses several innate hypocrisies and contradictions in its film type, but I wanted more from the character design, not the ideas. It's possible to do both, as Costa-Gavras and Pontecorvo demonstrate.
The same could be said about Denmark's A Family and In a Better World, both of which I think begin with a promise of emotional honesty they ultimately betray in the interest of dramatic form. On the one hand these movies create a full-size portrait of an issue, on the other hand they neither trust their characters nor the film viewing audience with a component of imagination or mystery. They illuminate all the shadows - thus missing the point of shadows. Isn't that the error of so many films? They want to be films - the popular, widely accepted concept of films - so dearly they willingly seek comfort over challenge. The end of Germany's When We Leave, good or bad, designates it as a movie. A good movie ending brings a question or answer to both the character and audience, and in this case it's hard not to think mainly about the end in terms of dramatic structure, thus stripping the preceding moments of some of their grace. The difference between my appreciation for France's Illegal (how many mother/son relationship films were there this year?) and When We Leave, which both both use dramatic form to expresses emotional intensity, may be a result of Illegal's slightly less definitive ending.
Austria's The Robber is like character contrivance as religious, spiritual, and cinematic worship. The film is all speed and grace. This is sort of fucking brilliant: he's a bank robber who is also a marathon runner, and after each robbery there's a kind-of marathon in which he flees the scene(s) of crime. He's Mann's professional criminal developed to a logical absurdity. The narrative is a polished version of the blank-faced criminal odyssey.
The more I watch and like yakuza films, the more I like Takeshi Kitano. Outrage's deadpan brutality is occasionally softened by environmental flourishes or incredible consequence, and sometimes a scene has both intensity and density. But I never feel like it accumulates dramatic urgency, and I don't feel any closer to the movie by the end. This may also have been my problem with Great Britain's The Arbor, a much different movie, a documentary about British working-class playwright Andrea Dunbar and her family. Dunbar was a mother, and the movie develops beyond the story of Dunbar by entering the story of her children, who recount their stories in taped sessions that are played while actors lip-synch the recordings. I admire its formal inventiveness and narrative nakedness, but sometimes the technique interfered with my emotional investment, and I struggled with the distance between the actual person's voice, and the actor's body and moving mouth.
If you're going to be contrived, you can be contrived all the way, as Spain's The Last Circus demonstrates. The movie makes a thrill ride out of contrivance, and pushes the viewer further into the insanity of its concept as the film progresses. It's a crazy movie, in a completely safe way, and I admire it for its sometimes lavish detours into narrative incredibility. The mania is directed, by Alex de la Iglesia, sometimes with cinematic and visual grace, and sometimes for gaudy fun; if you begin to lose sight of the difference the film works. I did hear one lady say "What kind of person would like this film?".
USA's Cold Weather wants to create the contrived out of natural materials (it's from the city of Portland). Writer/director Aaron Katz attempts to translate a personal, naturalistic style into compact, genre form, and the result sometimes exposes the limits of each. I would say it makes the sides bulge, in a good way, as Katz continues to ask important questions about film nature, and its relationship with the natural, and succeeds in pulling off a meta-genre film without violating filmmaking principles previously demonstrated. It's a growth film for Katz, and might be a film that grows on me.
How to Die in Oregon made tears swell in my eyes three times, and I took a break from the movie after its first twenty minutes. I went into the lobby for a moment, because everything was so heavy for me, and then returned to the movie. It's truly hard for me to separate my feelings about the film from the intense feelings the stories produced in me. I can't imagine making this film, I can't imagine spending hundreds of hours pursuing this and editing it and living with it all the time. I liked the film and I can't imagine watching it again. The film's own clear headedness is a testament to the documentary skills of its maker.
Chile's Nostalgia for the Light brought the universal and personal together through two narrative strands of equal interest and philosophic weight: astronomers, and women who seek remains of the disappeared; both in the Atacama Desert. The complimentary aspects of the narratives are skillfully developed and explored. Mexico's Circo wasn't a documentary version of Geek Love, but a sadder, realer story of circus life and family, less sideshow and more acrobatic. It follows the Ponces as they struggle to find an audience and grow as performers, and investigates the shared traits of real life and circus life. Like the family members, I wasn't sure which I preferred.
Italy's The Four Times was a big surprise, and the second biggest discovery after My Joy. In The Four Times, it feels like Michelangelo Frammartino directs nature. Four narrative strands are given equal emphasis and attention (one of the strands is a baby goat, and another strand is a single tree). The Four Times is an amazing movie of amazing natural and narrative simplicity, fully realized by a sophisticated film design.
Ukraine's My Joy vividly draws the viewer into a miserable world through a perspective of utter bleakness - a message about the transference and perpetuation of hate and fear. It's an icy, cruel film, haunted by violence, that manages both to depict malevolence and conjure it as well. Its overall lack of redemption emboldens several of its core tenets, denying the audience the same escape from harsh reality impossible for its characters. Sergei Loznitsa demonstrates an extraordinary talent for cinematic craft, and his skill in creating fully realized sequences allows the film to work.
In Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, every element of the film's design works in harmony, creating a lush sensory experience. The movie is a steamy love session with cinema. Weerasethakul creates rich, dense sequences, which work because of their intensity, sincerity, and mystery. The film builds and expands several themes and environments introduced in Weerasethakul's earlier films, and continues to enlarge the meanings of his films, which work well together when seeking sometimes subterranean themes. His actors are given or seem to be given total freedom, and sometimes encounter fantasy elements in a realistic but cinematically surprising state of nonplus (and then a kind of tonal, philosophical fusion; a spiritual condition of perpetual awe).
Lee Chang-dong's Poetry must have been my favorite movie, because I think of it as having everything all the good films had. I admire it for its penetration of both character and cinematic form. Chang-dong makes the interior of Mija (Yun Jeong-hie, who radiates, seriously count her mysterious smiles) the stuff of cinematic dimensions. He creates a fantastic fabric out of personal emotions; he deconstructs filmic types in a way that's intensely specific and dramatically engaging.
The tapestry of emotions is clearer in the second viewing, and more rewarding. Chang-dong quietly insists everything has an importance and dramatic depth, but feels free to leave dangling narrative strands and obscure structural departures. The point seems to be it's important because it happens in Mija's life, and like all narratives of self, Mija is her own main character and seeker of meaning; this is beautifully magnified by Mija's search for poetic voice. Like Saul Bellow, Chang-dong believes each person carries a batch of poems.
I've heard it said the scenes run too long, which is what they always say about the films I like. I think these people aren't asking themselves the questions Chang-dong is giving you the freedom to ask, or experiencing the moments Chang-dong is asking you to experience. If you don't shrink from the emotional freedom and mystery that's being offered, it's a film of pervasive and endless beauty. I also believe the film sticks its landing, and succeeds in other important narrative moves.
*Including Endless Love, The Taking of Power by Louis XIV, Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl, French Cancan, Spring in a Small Town, Diary of a Lost Girl, The Devil's Sword, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, Who Are You Polly Maggoo?, Perfect Blue, and Ghost in the Shell!
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