The film festival has blown through town, and two and a half weeks later, out of 135 films from 40 countries, here’s what stuck with me.
TEN BEST (reverse alphabetical order)
When the Waves Are Gone (Lav Diaz) – For so-called slow cinema, Lav Diaz sure packs a lot of story in. His latest cine-novel follows over three hours the parallel threads of a violent police lieutenant, Hermes, who has returned to his home town to try and recover from his psoriasis, and Supremo, his former mentor, a religious extremist fresh out of prison and out for revenge on the protégé who put him there. When they finally close in for the final confrontation, we get an amazing (slow, inconclusive) film-noir chase on rain-slicked night streets, and a showdown on a wharf at night where the characters are reduced to stark white figures in a void of black. This is a film that you live in rather than just watch.
The Tuba Thieves (Alison O’Daniel) – A hugely imaginative and accomplished feature set in the Los Angeles deaf community but also bouncing around in time and space to take in the first performance of John Cage’s
4’33” and punk shows at the San Francisco Deaf Club in the late 70s. Oh, and a rash of thefts from school marching bands. The film plays with ideas of sound and silence, signal and noise, and features extremely innovative sound design.
Smoke Sauna Sisterhood (Anna Hints) – Fantastic, unconventional documentary in which women talk about themselves in Estonian saunas. It’s joyous and sometimes harrowing, and the conversations encompass a full range of lived experience. Beautifully photographed and assembled.
Shackle (Ainslie Henderson) – An animation
tour-de-force combining puppet and object animation, filmed on location in a forest, so that the background trees and the light flutters and fluctuates with every frame. It’s ravishing to look at, but Henderson also manages other tricks, like expanding and contracting portals into another dimension (the forest at night). It’s a tiny little epic that outdoes most conventional good vs. evil features.
The Settlers (Felipe Galvez) – Probably the greatest western since
Jauja. Three men (two colonizers; one colonized) traverse a continent (and the Andes) looking for a safe route for livestock to the Atlantic. This movie shows just how great Academy ratio is for spectacular landscapes and action (one major scene depicts a massacre in heavy fog, from the perspective of a character who’s not participating in it). The compositions are painterly, with expressive, rather than realist, cinematic lighting, and it has a killer score, all heavy percussion and jangling wires.
Pacifiction (Albert Serra) – Serra’s most narratively dense film so far, but it’s also a trippy, disorienting mood piece, with some bracing set-pieces (e.g. the surfing sequence). These kind of stories tend to get labelled “post-colonial”, but there ain’t nothing “post-“ about what’s going on in this film. It’s always exciting to see an accomplished director take a step up to a new level.
No Bears (Jafar Panahi) – This might be my favourite of Panahi’s post-filmmaker films to date, a very clever self-reflexive film in which fiction turns out to be fact and vice versa, all while gently prodding his own privileged (if compromised) position. If it’s not quite as dizzyingly layered as classics like
Close-Up or
A Moment of Innocence, it’s nonetheless a pleasure seeing Iranian cinema get back to those qualities of 4-D bafflement.
L’Immensitá (Emanuele Crialese) – This is a big, entertaining movie-star movie, with Penelope Cruz giving a big, entertaining movie-star performance, but what I liked about it is how it used that glossy format to smuggle in a whole lot of powerful and subtle elements. For instance, it’s a film with a trans hero, even though it’s not a film about his trans struggle or trans triumph. That’s just who he is. Similarly, it deals seriously with domestic trauma (manifested in various ways) without being sensationalistic or miserabilist. The film at times escapes into musical numbers, including a table-setting scene at the outset that’s one of the most delightful sequences of the year. Cruz really is magnificent in the film, conveying an extremely complex character without histrionics. Her work is so subtle and sympathetic that
you’re halfway through the film before you realize that you’re watching a quasi-remake of A Woman Under the Influence. We’ve been so taken in by her portrayal of a joyous free spirit that we don’t want to acknowledge that she can only express that joy through her children and is desperate to escape the adult world.
(Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Verena Paravel) – The latest Sensory Ethnography Lab joint takes us inside the Paris public hospital system and the bodies of its patients. We follow people with dementia as they trek the corridors on obscure quests and eavesdrop on nurses complaining about conditions, but mostly this film is about surgery. You have been warned. The spectacle is astonishing, if occasionally stomach-churning. As a child I split my head open (21 stitches) and could feel the doctor moving my skull around under the skin to check nothing was too badly broken. The cornea transplant segment in this film was worse than that. It might as well have been titled “I’ll show you,
Un Chien Andalou.” The film concludes with a magnificent, totally unexpected swirling shot of a mural, set to New Order’s ‘Blue Monday’.
Fremont (Babak Jalali) – Deadpan comedy in very early Jarmusch mode about an Afghan refugee working in a fortune cookie factory. Beautifully rendered in black and white and genuinely warm and funny.
TEN SECOND-BEST (forwards alphabetic order)
Afire (Christian Petzold) – You know you’re going to get impeccable filmmaking with Petzold, but the surprise here is that this is by far his funniest film, about a grumpy writer struggling to complete (or not complete) his difficult second novel among people who are just too fucking cheerful. The film has its dark side, of course. The only thing that kept this out of the top tier for me was the predictability of the climax and denouement.
Does anybody watching this not expect somebody to get caught in the offscreen forest fire? And for that person to be whoever decides to finally go and rescue the (offscreen) car? And from the moment we learn of the presence of an interloper at the cabin, isn’t if obvious that the real second novel will be the story of this interlude?
(Alex Danielson / Maximilien Van Aertryck) – Very smart and very snappy essay film about the history of image making and faking.
Kokomo City (D. Smith) – Electrifying documentary, shot in sleek high-contrast black and white, about black trans sex workers in Georgia. Stylish as hell, and an emotional roller-coaster ride.
Lost Love (Ka Sing-Fung) – I went into to this expecting a simplistic tear-jerker (couple become foster parents, with all the reward and heartbreak that portends) and instead got a marvellously complex and graceful one.
On the Adamant (Nicolas Philibert) – Another sublime observational documentary from Philibert, this time about a facility for mental health patients on a barge on the Seine where the focus is on expressing creativity and forming a community.
Passages (Ira Sachs) – Sachs’ strongest film since
Forty Shades of Blue, with three very different actors acing their lead roles (Franz Rogowski, Ben Whishaw and Adele Exarchopoulos).
River (Junta Yamaguchi) – Awesome high-concept, no-budget science-fiction film set in a gorgeous ryokan in a gorgeous mountain valley. Everybody is going about the daily business when suddenly time starts looping every two minutes. The characters’ consciousnesses continue in linear fashion, so they are aware of the temporal glitch and try to get things done before the 120-second reset returns them physically to square one. The elaborations on the idea are ingenious, and though the tone never gets beyond whimsical despite a few existential feints (a couple of people find out what it’s like to die), it’s a formal delight, with most of the film unfolding in highly mobile two-minute sequence shots (as the main character rushes all over the ryokan and its environs trying to manage the chaos) that end on match-cuts back to Mikoto, standing by the riverside where it all begins again.
Showing Up (Kelly Reichardt) – Reichardt is a master of the demotic sublime, and it’s a delight to be able to sink into a film in which even the most glancing characters have a lived-in reality.
The Survival of Kindness (Rolf de Heer) – Spectacular, functionally wordless post-apocalyptic quest film, in which a black woman abandoned in a cage in the desert escapes and makes her way slowly to ‘civilization’ in order to fulfil a vision, while dodging a militia of white men in gas masks executing outsiders. Oh, and there’s a very nasty pandemic going on. It makes for an allegorical soup that’s all the better for not being reduced too far. Visionary filmmaking, a bit like Jodorowsky if he were less silly and egomaniacal.
War Pony (Gina Gammell, Riley Keough) – Native American drama (with poodles!) that got stronger and more confident as it went along.
TEN THIRD-BEST (alphabetical by last letter)
Casa Susanna (Sebastien Lifshitz) – Recovered history of a 1960s Catskills hideaway for cross-dressers (and their wives). A really lovely documentary that nobody went to see.
La Chimera (Alice Rohrwacher) – Less overtly magical realist than
Lazzaro Felice, but in the same ballpark. It’s an elusive tone that Rohrwacher can pull off better than almost anybody else working today.
Anatomy of a Fall (Justine Triet)
Totem (Lila Avilès) – Busy family drama from Mexico with verisimilitude to burn and the ability to change gears into the sublime for the denouement.
La Cienaga and
Neighbouring Sounds seem like good reference points and ample recommendation.
EO (Jerzy Skolimowski) – I had to admire the gumption of remaking
Au hazard, Balthazar in the least Bressonian manner imaginable. As such, this film stands or falls as defiantly its own thing.
May December (Todd Haynes) – Haynes does what he does best: queasily complicating the sensational.
Monster (Hirokazu Kore-eda) – Tricksy thriller with a
Rashomon structure that gets a little too tricksy for its own good (there are a number of contrivances that are just there to justify radically different readings of the same events by different participants). The film provides the solution, which doesn’t quite add up, but scene by scene and performance by performance this is great stuff.
Perfect Days (Wim Wenders)
Inshallah a Boy (Amjad Al Rasheed) – Adult drama with nasty Islamic complications, in the vein of Asgar Farhadi, but not so contrived.
Disco Boy (Giacomo Abbruzzese) – Hostile takeover in a French disco! This film owes a lot to
Beau Travail, but has lots of its own ideas buzzing around (including a great climactic fight shot with a heat-imaging camera). A very promising first fiction feature.
TEN MORE OF INTEREST
Only the River Flows (Wei Shujun)
Pictures of Ghosts (Kleber Mendonca Filho)
Music for Black Pigeons (Andreas Kofoed / Jorgen Leth)
Tiger Stripes (Amanda Nell Eu)
Saint Omer (Alice Diop)
Last Summer (Catherine Breillat)
Cat and Moth (India Barnardo)
Plan 75 (Chie Hayakawa)
Kidnapped (Marco Bellocchio)
Mami Wata (C.J. “Fiery” Obasi)
. . . AND SOME TO AVOID
Hello Dankness (Soda Jerk) – I enjoyed
Terror Nullius, but this film has none of its wit. It’s an impressive feat of editing, but its satire is brain-dead and obvious. Wouldn’t it be hilarious if the nasty neighbours from random 80s comedy number thirty-seven had a Trump flag on their lawn? This film has nothing of interest to say, and is merely satisfied with reassuring its hip target audience that they’re right to hate the Republicans and other obvious targets, and they’re awesome for knowing the same middlebrow Hollywood movies that Soda Jerk do. It’s like an agit-prop version of
Family Guy.
Carmen (Benjamin Millepied) – Lame, lame, lame Australian / French co-production parading as ‘edgy’ Latin American. A cliché-ridden script dressed up in third-hand “high style” (Lynch and Malick cops, basically – if all the slow-motion shots in the film ran at normal speed, it would be twenty minutes shorter) and punctuated by listless dance numbers. Rossy De Palma provides the jazz hands; Paul Mescal looks like he knows he’s taken a very wrong career turn.
Sisu (Jalmari Helander) – Big, craven wannabe action blockbuster (wiry Finnish gold miner destroys the Nazi war machine single-handedly, and entirely in English) that pulls absolutely no surprises. Strictly for fans of bad writing and cartoonish gore.
Banel & Adama (Ramata-Toulaye Sy) – Or should that be “Banal and Adama”? Shallow and predictable fable with wafty, whispery Malickisms. The moral of the story: God don’t like those uppity women.
Shin Ultraman (Shinji Higuchi) – Or should that be “Shit Ultraman”? At first I was intrigued by the Fukusakuan compression of the exposition: the film literally crams six movies into the first five minutes. A little later on, I became morbidly fascinated by just how visually incoherent the film was: sequences entirely constructed of show-offy camera angles (looking up at a character’s face from his crotch, peeping out from behind computer monitors or spying from the far corner of a room) with no logic to motivate or connect them. Then I realized this wasn’t avant-garde, but rather inept, and the film was just staler-than-stale action movie crap where all the action was in the expository dialogue and the big set-pieces were weightless and bland CGI tableaux of monsters shooting beams at each other. The most boring film I’ve seen so far this year.
My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock (Mark Cousins) – There are some decent insights scattered throughout the film, but the framing conceit (that this is narrated by a present-day Alfred Hitchcock) is so irritating (yes, I
really needed to know what Mark Cousins thinks Alfred Hitchcock would think of iPhones) and pretentious that any points it scores are immediately deducted. And the Hitchcock impersonator was iffy at best.
