Sunday, June 22, 2008

Lorna's Silence

Tense, discomfort-making drama-thriller from France about a young woman's involvement with a criminal ring which assists illegal immigrants by arranging citizenships for them through sham marriages and other means. The film is carried by Arta Dobroshi as Lorna, who is in every single scene, and considering the film's predilections for naturalism and the eliding of anything at all expositional, she's got a hell of a lot to carry. It's also a major feat that you relate to her so differently during different stretches of the film. She seems by turns unkind, morally concerned, resourceful, foolish, brave, naive, righteous, etc.

The principal situation concerns the ring's exploitation of a heroin junkie for arranged marriage purposes, as they know that he won't run off on Lorna. But when he decides one night that he's going to get clean, the threat of his independance spooks the crims. Things turn ugly and Lorna enters into a series of ongoing moral and practical perils.

The film's demanding style probably obscures important plot points more than it should. I was able to follow 99% of it, but in a post-film conversation I discovered that one thing I hadn't understood at the time had been very important. In common with No Country For Old Men, this is a largely excellent film, but perhaps one with a streak of unnecessary unhelpfulness about it.

Helen

Helen is a vier for my favourite film from the 2008 festival. Steadfast in mystery, atmosphere, weirdness and emotional bleakness, the film follows the slow-growing obsession of the eponymous heroine with the former life of another girl, Joy, who disappeared in the local park one day, and whom Helen is 'playing' in a police reconstruction of the event.

The film has a beautiful cryptic quality, not in any conventional kind of whodunnit sense, but as regards both the elusive character of Helen and the nature of the film itself. The long, unbroken takes, great silences and restrained, almost self-effacing interactions amongst the characters generate fascination and curiosity. Is it some kind of hyper-naturalism? Or the opposite of naturalism? The players are often facing away from each other, or off the screen, or shot from behind, or just so that you can't see their faces. When a creepily patronising policewoman arrives to brief Joy's schoolmates about the reconstruction of the disappearance, half the scene is viewed via its reflection in a mirror.

Some of the dialogue is bizarre in its expositional nature, enough to prompt amusement, yet at others times it is completely evasive. Helen feels such a great hollow within herself (she has been raised in care, and her past and parentage are shrouded in mystery) that her vocalisation mostly consists of dull murmured statements. The strongest indication that some of the weirdness is in droll taste is an amusing scene in which a morose-looking teacher appears to do the worst job in the world in trying inspire the students with talk of 'blue skies thinking'.

The film is framed by metronomically perfect editing, fades to black, abstraction-making shots of dappled light filtering through park trees and a glacial ambient score. It reminded me at times of David Lynch in its poetic design. It offers a unique vision of a situation which opens onto multiple mysteries, most importantly the mystery of what is inside Helen, played with supernatural understatement by Annie Townsend. And it is emotionally confronting, with some moments that are very difficult to bear. This is beautiful cinema.

Son of Rambow

It's the eighties, and an isolated kid with a stellar imagination, whose family situation is religiously oppressive, teams up with / is bullied by the school miscreant into shooting a version of First Blood using a stolen video camera, in hopes of winning a young filmmakers competition.

Son Of Rambow's aims are big, conspicuous audience rousing and uplift, and comedy, and emotional heft. (The festival volunteer coordinator said he 'bawled and bawled'. At least I think that's what he said. It was at a party and things were very loud.) On the way, the film's got everything in it but the kitchen sink; an animated fantasy sequence, socially realistic grit, cartoon humour, shades of 'Oliver', a never-any-question-that-it's-bad religious cul... I mean order, and plenty of montage of First Blood. And a meant-to-be-cool French exchange student character who is so dully performed that he sucks all life and energy out of any scene he's in.

The first half of the film is outlandish and winning. It's also a bit discomforting. Lee, the miscreant, is a charming but totally heedless blagger, with zilch parental guidance and a criminal older brother. He's thieving from someone in nearly every scene he's in, and he basically threatens Will (the sensitive kid) into helping him with the film. Will is heavily removed from reality and it's not easy to watch him being driven to do stuff by someone who's unaware of his mental state, like fall out of tall trees for stunt purposes. The film switches to cartoon mode at such times so that nobody's actually harmed. Later on, when characters need to be harmed, the cartoon delivery is no longer in evidence. It's this kind of veering about with its style and logic that I didn't like in Son of Rambow. It's a particularly relevant issue for the second half of the film, where things become more emotionally heavy. That, plus the sheer amount of stuff the film tries to address, plus the increasing presence of the scene-deadening exchange student, started to make me antsy. But the film does rally for a rousing ending of the type you almost demand in the 'filmmaking kids come good' genre (?).

If I say for argument's sake that Son is a kids film, it's one with a lot of edge and non-surface complexity. There's no doubting its humour and warmth overall, but there are things that don't work, and things that are downright murky. And there's that bloody French exchange student.

Friday, June 20, 2008

Fear(s) of the Dark

From France, Fear(s) of the Dark is a black and white compendium of animated horror and ghost tales. Its structure is very satisfying. Some stories are broken into segments spread over the film's length while others are one-offs, and each has its own animation style. The stories are further studded by monologue episodes in which a woman describes her social and intellectual fears, to the accompaniment of expressionistic geometrical animations onscreen. These monologues certainly have the taste of French preoccupations about them, with significant talk of the bourgeois and a particular slant on political conundrums, but they are the minor part of the whole.

The first story is a fun/gross EC horror comic-like affair about the sexually ravenous girlfriend who turns out to be no girl. The best story in terms of generating a real sense of horror is the one about the hideous old gentleman taking three vicious dogs for a walk. In each segment he releases the reins of one dog so that it can graphically tear someone apart. Each mauling is depicted in all its bloody ragdoll glory, and the closeup of the man's hideous face lighting up conveys his warped delight.

The last story is the most accomplished artistically. A man seeks shelter from a snowstorm in an abandoned, powerless house. Entirely white outside, it's almost entirely black within, with the darkness concealing evidence of the building's violent history. Brilliantly designed outlines pick out just tiny slivers and pools of light as the man searches the house, leaving most of the frame completely black and creating excellent fascination and suspense in the process.

The combination of earthy pencil and ink textures and smooth, Flash-like animation work generates a beautiful aesthetic for this film. It's not as scary as I'd hope for a film explicitly addressing fear (and horror films are my favourites), but it definitely has periods of creepiness, of horror and of humour. And it flows very well as a whole.

Jar City

The English title for this film, 'Jar City', is kind of ugly. I'd have preferred they stuck with the Icelandic title 'Myrin', which apparently means 'swamp'. Whatever you call it, the film is a tough and grisly police procedural set in Iceland, though with some dark humour and a lot of juxtaposition of gastronomic action (policeman eats donut, policeman eats sheep's head, morgue guy eats something unidentifiable) and putrefying organs and corpses.

Oh yeah, the sheep's head. I probably should discuss this now. Interrupting traditional review trajectory in this way will reflect the way the audience's attention to the plot was distracted by the relative prominence of sheep heads in the film.

The lead cop, Erlendur, is an unflappably brutal character, though with the face of a bearded intellectual. In one scene he rolls up to some stall and asks the young lady there for a sheep's head. She hands him a tub and tells him 'Enjoy', McDonalds style. He takes the tub home, opens it up to reveal a sheep's head, and while he's thinking, starts by plucking out an eye and eating that. Then he pulls apart the skull and eats what's in there. This scene raised a lot of very surprised gullets in the audience.

A bit later came a cafeteria scene in which similarly prepared and clingwrapped sheep's head meals were all over the counter for the taking.

As usual, IMDB answers all questions. The sheep's head is an Icelandic delicacy and tastes a lot like lamb, they say. Though the stall at which Erlendur bought that first one is apparently the only one offering them for takeaway in the country, so relatively speaking this may have misrepresented the prevalence of sheep heads in Iceland by suggesting to us foreigners that you would typically rock up to a takeaway stall for a sheep's head.

Away from all the gastronomy, what I dug about this film was the harsh delivery of some rigorous police investigation in an environment completely unlike my own. Myrin reminds me why I broadly prefer genre films as a type. The demonstration of pure creativity is easier to effect in genre, and is achieved more rapidly, because fewer bridges have to be built from scratch. Myrin's methods are familiar but the specifics are unique. Erlendur is a captivating central figure of the kind you fantasise you could be when you don't feel like tolerating fools at all. Or when you do feel like throwing some jerk down a staircase.

Thursday, June 19, 2008

Boy A

Exceptional UK drama about a young man released from prison for a grave childhood crime and his attempts to live a good life under a new identity. Performances are excellent all around here, especially from Andrew Garfield in the lead. The flashback editing structure used to gradually reveal the childhood incident is one of the best examples of this kind of thing I've seen. Perhaps most surprising is that a film which uses so many extreme closeups in combination with over the shoulder shots succeeds with the style, being incredibly candid and engaging, and not irritating me once – because I traditionally associate the use of endless extreme closups in drama with being irritated. A transparently great, tense, affecting and though-provoking film.

Glass Lips

This Polish film is a weird, confronting series of impress/express-ionistic tableaux depicting the past and present (and maybe future) times of a poet, whose adulthood is spent in a mental institution and whose childhood at the hands of forbidding parents was cruelled. At least this is the synopsis I venture. I don't know that a group of people would ever agree entirely because it's a symbol-ridden film with no regular narrative.

Glass Lips polarised the audience. I say this with authority because I watched the film with them, handed out ballots at the end and counted the votes. The people who hated it staggered out as soon as the credits started. One lady was cursing as well as staggering, and wrote curse words on her ballot. Someone else swore on their ballot, but only one of the two swearers had the presence of mind to remember to tear their ballot as well as swear, and thus register their perturbment officially.

If you really don't like this kind of film, there's a possibility that you never will grow to like it. The only moderately accurate comparison which comes to my mind is with Matt Barney's Cremaster Cycle. I loved Cremaster, but I was cool overall on Glass Lips. It's gentle on trajectory, long on repetition (especially where the character of the father is concerned) and in the area of sound design, irritating as often as it is beautiful. Knowing that the film was constructed from thirty-three shorts which originally worked as gallery installations might help to explain these factors. There is less to worry about re: repetition when an audience doesn't have to experience all the parts back to back.

The film is also long on symbolism. It's hard for me personally to be much interested in Christian symbology (crucifictions and Jesus Christ poses are huge in Glass Lips), and when symbolism is the main mode overall, of course it's going to be hard for an audience. The director himself described the film after the screening as being a narrative of inner life, which is an idea I love, but my engagement levels were all over the place at different times.

Glass Lips is certainly pretentious, but it has the chops to be that way. If you attribute validity to pretension, is it not actually pretension anyway? If a poet falls in a forest of ice, is there any accompanying dialogue? (NB - there is no dialogue in Glass Lips.) I might try watching this again someday. I didn't really like it, but I am still thinking about it, so that's probably good, but... AUGH!

Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Casting A Glance

In advance of seeeing James Benning's Casting A Glance, I erroneously told my friend who was coming along to it that it was going to be an arty documentary about a bridge in Utah, with footage shot over thirty-something years. In retrospect I don't know where I got the bridge part from. A doublecheck of the description afterwards revealed that the word 'bridge' didn't occur anywhere in it. But I was right about Utah and the thirty-something years of footage, and even the 'arty', after a fashion. And those turned out to be the important things. This is not to imply that I thought this was a good film, however, because I did not.

Casting A Glance is a series of held shots of a vast stone spiral jetty sculpture and surrounding environs on Utah's Great Salt Lake, taken during different seasons and weathers. It transpires in this manner: A date will glumly flash onto the screen, the first in 1970, the last in 2007, to be followed by a series of long static shots of stones, water, foam and hills, accompanied by a cacophony of wind and surf roar on the soundtrack. Then it's time for the next date, then the next series of shots. Such is the delivery of the film's eighty minutes.

If the terrain had changed more (or even a bit?) in a macroscopic fashion across nearly four decades, that might have seemed to be the best argument for the film's existence. But it didn't. The only changes I perceived were the expected seasonal ones. The result was extremely dull, visually, conceptually, sonically – whichever way you care to rotate the experience. The images prompted very little contemplation within me, except occasionally about the nature of this film, and were only rarely of much aesthetic engagement.

I can report that the 1980s on the salt flat were a time of water and boredom. 2002 was a time of painfully distorted recording of wind noise. I'm sure I heard other people in the cinema muttering about the assault on their ears at this point. Benning skipped showing us any footage of the site during the nineties, but if he'd had the idea that it was time to quit the project at this point, he obviously didn't stick with it.

To have recorded the material over the long time period was the principal feat here, but the resultant film needs to stand as a successful construction in its own right, and it is a weak and boring one. Something else should have been done with this material, though I accept it's easy for me to say that without thinking about what that something else might have been.

Up The Yangtze!

For the festival's doco strand, it's again with the high quality and again with the tearjerking emotional factors as Up The Yangtze! (exclamation mark built in to the title, ala Mamma Mia!) takes/took to the screen this afternoon at Dendy Opera Quays.

The introduction of dams and the hydro-electric scheme to China's famous river meant the enforced displacement of great numbers of farmers, peasants and their families. Yangtze looks at how this situation affects one family who eke out their living right on the bank, and follows the progress of their daughter Shui Yu when she takes up work on a tourist boat on the river. The film also keeps watch over a cocky young man from a much wealthier family, Bo Yu Chen, who joins the boat's hospitality crew at the same time as Shui Yu.

There's an incredible amount to be learnt from this film about the nuances of modern Chinese culture, and the impersonal-seeming forces within it which bulldoze the entire population future-ward, even as the situation of the poorest citizens remains completely ignored. For the featured family, this means that even though they helped build the banks of the soon to be flooded river, they have to carry all of their furniture and belongings up that bank on their own backs when it's relocation time. The scenes of the rising water ebbing over their old home, finally timelapsed into complete submergence, wrench at the heartstrings. A poetic shot of lights winking into view at night along the newly built canal is similarly powerful cinema.

The daughter's adventures on the boat and her prospects for various kinds of improvement are the most inspiring element of the film, though they also show up the weakest area, which is the portrayal of rich kid Bo Yu Chen. His family are conspicuously absent from the film, which hurts his story, and when things don't work out for him on the boat, it's not specifically apparent from the footage why that is. This contrasts strongly with the almost too-assured delivery of everything else. I've seen very few documentaries where the filmmakers seemed to have as much feature-like coverage of various angles, shot sizes, subjects, etc. as they do in this one. The explanation could be brilliant direction, multiple cameras, luck, great foresight, or the asking the subjects to repeat certain actions or wait until the camera was appropriately located before carrying them out. Or perhaps a bit of all of the above; I can't know as a viewer. Because of Yangtze's greater than average veneer of beauty and transparency, it made me consider anew the nature of documentary. What do we expect from the genre? What rules do we apply to it concerning its relationship to reality, and how just or unjust are they in different contexts?

So I don't think Up The Yangtze! is 'perfect filmmaking', as someone at IMDB described it, but I think it is an excellent documentary, showing you much that you'd never see or learn of otherwise, with honest emotions and a poetic eye for the bigger picture.

Monday, June 16, 2008

Mutum

I missed the very beginning of Mutum, and perhaps wasn't in a sufficiently un-restless mood that evening to be able to appreciate the film properly anyway (IE - it's slow). Mutum has a bit of the Italian neorealism about it, except that it's set in Brazil and about sixty years after the heyday of Italian neorealism. The story concerns Thiago, a dreamy kid living with his family in a quiet rural area, and who's lumbered with an explosvely tempered, abusive father. None of the kids go to school, a point I felt quite stupid to have missed until it came up in the narrative. Their days are filled with play, a suite of domesticated animals and a niggling sense of discomfort. This is all lucidly filmed, and there are moments of great charm, but it's so incredibly natural and anti-dramatic for the most part that I found it hard to maintain my engagement with it. Maybe it was just the wrong day and time for me to see this.

Saturday, June 14, 2008

Let The Right One In

Unique horror-thriller-teen romance from Sweden about a misfit boy's relationship with the girl next door, who happens to be a vampire immortally frozen in the body of a twelve year old. A lot of the vampire material may be familiar to folks schooled up on their vampire lore or films, but Let The Right One In is never predictable and always tense. Some gory moments are slaveringly delivered, and the onscreen mix of blood, snow and the adolescent snot that seems to be gooey on all the kids' lips in the Swedish winter, is more than a little queasy-making. Both the lead kids give fine performances. Lina Leandersson is perfectly cast as the vampire who has to look young-yet-old for her teen age, and then almost worn on another level as a creature who's been alive for a lot longer than that.

The film deals honestly with bullying, friendships and the fallibility of adults as perceived by teens. A few extraordinary vampire-related events start to jump out in plain view of the townspeople as the film goes on, and I started to wonder why nobody was investigating this stuff (EG - Vampiric fireball in hospital bed.) Fortunately the film is set over sufficiently brief a period of time as to be able to pave over the credibility issues – they can all be dealt with after the credits roll. Speaking of the credits, the penultimate scene of the film is hugely rousing in a positive way, but the ultimate scene is pretty bleak. I had a feeling a lot of the audience I was part of switched off after the highs of the penultimate scene, because anyone who considered the implications of the last scene for a second would have sobered up a little more than was evident.

Buddha Collapsed Out Of Shame

Massively affecting Iranian film, mixing the cute and the harrowing to unique effect. The story concerns Baktay, a tenacious little girl who lives with her family in the Bamyan caves, near where the Taliban dynamited the Buddha statues in 2001. Her friend Abbas is being showy about his learning at school one day, and Baktay decides on the spot that she wants to go too. She needs a notebook and something to write with for starters, but she can't find her mum to get any money for these things. So she ties her baby sibling in the cave to prevent its wandering, grabs a few eggs for bartering purposes and sets out on what must, for a small kid, be an exceedingly arduous day of schoolbound adventure.

The turns of this story are strong and clear in a way that reminds me of the dynamics of a children's storybook. The film is shot intimately on video, and the little heroine's performance and dialogue are extremely charming, and inevitably natural and unpredictable, too. I imagine there were very few actors by profession in this film, if any. Many of the obstacles Baktay faces are cute – 'Don't eat me,' she instructs a big dog who's in her way. In another scene, she shoves through a herd of goats while brandishing a loaf of bread. Other obstacles are incredibly ugly, like the ongoing harassment she suffers at the hands of kids playing 'Taliban', who hold her hostage, put a bag over her head and threaten to stone her.

Baktay's homeland is so barren and blasted, and her thwarted needs so relatively simple, that as a Westerner, part of me was always pained to be watching this film. But the charms of the little girl's persistence and the humour of her interaction with everything that gets in her way create real joy. Whenever this joy is blotted out by the shadows of the Taliban's influence on the region, the film can turn and become upsetting within an instant. It's the inseparability of these two modes which makes Buddha such an emotionally wrenching, or even complicated, film. Yet its story is very beautiful and simple. The film will definitely stay with me.

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Tokyo Sonata

The first time I went to the Sydney Film Festival was in 1998. I saw an awesome Japanese horror film called Cure, about an amnesiac hypnotist who (almost accidentally, it seems) turns random strangers he meets into programmed killers. I voted for this as the best film on some voting slip. The audience disagreed, instead opting for the French lovey-dovery of Marius Et Jeanette.

Anyway, Cure was directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, whose Tokyo Sonata is playing in the festival's competition strand this year, and which I saw at the State this evening. What was even cooler was that the director was there, and to be in the room with the creator of Cure made me happy.

Tokyo Sonata could broadly be described as a portrait of a dysfunctional family in the title city. The businessman father loses his job, hides the fact, and fails to connect with either his would-be itinerant older son, or the younger one who's actually a musical prodigy, yet whom dad has forbidden to play the piano. Amidst all this, the mother's looking pretty good, but she's kind of stuck in the loop made up by the rest of them.

Kurosawa's style is apparent anew from shot one. His held perspectives, long takes and deliberately dreamy rhythms, and the natural performances he elicits from all his actors, work together to impart a distinct feel. My friend commented that the film was perhaps too dreamy to have much impact at the times when you'd expect it to, for instance when the dad wallops his son, and I suppose I broadly agree with him. What can assuredly be said about Tokyo Sonata is that you can't predict what's going to happen in it at any point, no matter how slow things seem to be moving. The final shot (one long take) is also quite moving. A good film, and definitely not one suffering from any kind of overstatement.

Circus School

If listening to great blasts of hypocritical, draconian invective directed at small kids is your cup of tea, then you'll love Circus School! This documentary follows the trials and tribulations of students and teachers at the Shanghai Circus School, where most of the kids work their butts off day and night, improving in their scary-making acrobatics in spite of having unhelpful stuff screamed at them constantly. EG 'You just don't want to be successful, do you?'

Time and time again they crunch into safety nets, the floor, or the odd iron pole. There's never one word of encouragement or praise, just wall to wall negative reinforcement, and the kids seem so numb from concentration and exhaustion that they never speak.

I wondered if it was just the school itself that's like this, but when the parents show up, they seem to espouse the same 'You're number one or you're nothing' line as the staff. Moments later, it's the staff's turn to berate the parents. Then the principal's turn to berate the staff. He reduces the triple handstand instructor to tears, using a combination of king-hitting insults like 'The only thing you don't fear is your lack of responsibility!'

Between the nakedly dysfunctional hectoring and the amazing feats the kids pull off, this is galvanising viewing. Still, the macroscopic arrangement of the material is about as loose as can be. Captions explaining the fate of certain kids appear without much rhyme or reason, or even without making it very clear whether said events occurred in the past, present or future. It's still a good film made up of great kids, great feats and some appalling teaching.

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Hold Me Tight, Let Me Go

Definitely one of the best documentaries I've ever seen. Hold Me Tight, Let Me Go details the interactions between kids, teachers and parents at Mulbery Bush, a specialised boarding school in Oxford for kids from precarious backgrounds or with extreme behavioural issues. From the first scene in which a hyperactive eight year old is required to admit responsibility for his recent action of kicking J____ in the crotch (he uses the other C word) to a pair of stern but reasoning teachers, you know you're in for some intense exchanges. Some of the kids in the school need to hold an adult's hand all day to keep them from losing control. There are multiple scenes in which kids who've completely lost it need to be physically restrained 'til they've calmed down, thrashing, spitting on people and cursing like sailors, even as two adults hold them until their energy is spent. There's a lot of shock and despair involved in watching this kind of thing at length, yet what never ceases to amaze is the infinite patience of the teachers, who hold themselves in check even while on the receiving end of some pretty wild abuse.

The film is brilliantly edited to show many facets of each situation, and also avoids ever once saying, 'Here is an easy fix.' A child who outwardly seems completely uncontrollable, even vile, to the outside viewer at first, may be seen to go on to gain in confidence and maturity over the course of the film, and that such an impossible-seeming transformation is possible can't help but bring hope. You can actually see how the teachers painstakingly achieve such changes over time, with their repetitive, almost relentless enforcement of open communication with each child. But before you can grab at any kind of happy ending feeling as you watch one child graduate in an emotional ceremony, another cursing, hyperactively troubled youngster immediately takes their place.

So much extreme behaviour makes for a very confronting film, but you can often see the toughest moments transform into humour or optimism before your eyes here. This is an exceptional and very moving film.

Teak Leaves At The Temple

Teak Leaves At The Temple is, frankly, a pretty weird documentary proposition. A Swiss free jazz trio descend upon Indonesia's Borubudur temple, where they engage in various impro performances with local musicians. Cultural exchange is all well and good, but what was this film really about? Two of the three impro artists never speak on camera. Their leader, Guerino Mazzola, occasionally says some nebulous spiritual stuff direct to camera from atop the temple. What he does say almost sounds cool, but upon closer scrutiny is probably just goobledegook. This chap also strikes me as being as uncomfortably dorky a presence in Indonesia as The Eurhythmics' Dave Stewart was in America when he wandered around looking really pale in that documentary about the blues.

Teak Leaves is filled with sensorily lush content, both in terms of the brilliantly photographed musical performances by all participants, and of authentic Indonesian ethnography for a Western audience, and these qualities make it unavoidably enjoyable from start to finish. But at the same time, conceptually and intellectually, the film just seems to get more and more painful as it progresses.

The number one problem is that the broadest context for the film's existence is never described. Who set this film up? The Swiss musicians? The Indonesians? The director? And when the Swiss guys are there, why do they have the mysterious privilege of never having to speak, or of getting to be the narrators of their own musical journey – using relatively pretentious language to boot – while the locals just sit around saying how cool it is to have Swiss musicians visiting? The ravings of the wonderfully ebullient local guy who carves stone buddhas and hangs out in the river, and also runs around in a superman costume at times just to demonstrate how good he feels, are the charmingest part of the film. When montages of local custom and industry are edited to a backdrop of Swiss free jazz, that's considerably less charming. All in all, the whole thing just seems pretty self-serving for the Swiss.

Another thing that sucks is that when three jazz musos go rabid on their instruments, freestyle, the result always tends to sound the same. But that's the least of your worries in this bizarre, ill thought-out, yet incredibly easy to watch 'documentary'.

Monday, June 9, 2008

Wonderful Town

This Thai existential drama moves along with a great, slow peacefulness that will test the patience of many, but its effectiveness creeps up on you. The wonderful town in question has been ravaged by the 2004 Tsunami. In this poor country area, the architect Ton is overseeing the construction of a beach resort. He stays in a near-deserted beach hotel and seeks to romance the simple but elusive Na, a cleaner who seems to come with the building through her family history. That history will turn out to have drastic consequences for the couple.

The performances are restrained and natural, dialogue extremely sparse, and the quiet long-held scenes resonate with beauty and tranquility. The film is reluctant to offer much guidance as to where it may be headed, holding viewers in an atmosphere of subtle uncertainty, but for folks like myself who do favour the transpiring of at least one event of more obvious consequence, know that the film's trajectory is gradually in that direction. The soundtrack is also exceptional, a mixture of detailed natural soundscapes and, less frequently, ominous non-diegetic drones. The film's incredible restraint of development is demanding, but the complete experience is a rich one.

Saturday, June 7, 2008

Aleksandra

I wasn't in great shape for this film from the director of Russian Ark (day one of volunteering, second film of the day, less than five hours of sleep), but I still feel secure in my assessment of it as thoroughly dull.

Alexandra Nilolaevna is an elderly Russian woman visiting her grandson at a Chechen army base. She's played by a Russian opera star about whom the director has previousy made a documentary, but this doesn't prevent her from being extremely uninteresting. This is a problem in a film named for her, and in which we spend the majority of the running time watching her partake of profoundly slow, uneventful exchanges with bored soldiers around the base. She makes many plain observations along the lines of, 'There's movement over there,' when there's movement over there, and it takes her ten minutes to be helped into a tank. Her weary sighs fill the long ninety minutes.

Certainly there's a broad sense conveyed that old people are tired and might have regrets, and that warmaking is pointless, but that's not much of an outcome for this great expanse of dusty, repetitive slowness. The film gains nothing from its geographical/political setting, either – though it seems pretty plain it had no interest in doing so in the first place. Also, brief discussion with folks after the film confirmed I wasn't the only one who found the plaiting-her-hair, 'You're beautiful grandma,' and kisses scene to be a bit odd, really.

So, Aleksandra. I wasn't a fan.

All White In Barking

Before, I'd even seen All White In Barking, it proved hard not to accidentally say 'All Mad In Barking' to queueing festival patrons when mentioning the film. An audible pause preceded each such encounter while my brain's vocal centre did its careful treading.

All White In Barking is a documentary from the UK about racism in the charmingly named town of Barking, east of Java... I mean, London. Director Mark Isaacs interviews several longtime locals about their attitudes to the changing demographics of the area, amongst them a working class granddad involved with the right-wing British National Party, a middle-aged white couple who are unsure about their Albanian and African neighbours, and a Holocaust survivor.

My feeling is that the appalling-ness of workaday racism is probably too easy to laugh at when filmed at length, and the first half of All White made it look like it might not get away from this angle. But the director, who just pops questions unemphatically to his subjects while filming them, eventually nudges some of them to try 'stuff' - EG - The white couple are prompted to go have dinner with their African neighbours. Predictably this goes quite well, even if the couple aren't mad about some of the authentic African cuisine they're served, and an even more genial lunch follows with both their neighbours. It's hard to assess how light or heavy is the semi-invisible hand of the filmmaker in proceedings, but he gives us a clear demonstration of the basic antidote to racism, which is that if you go talk one-on-one with the people you don't understand, you'll find out how much you actually have in common with them in about ten to twenty minutes.