MIFF 68 1/2: Festival of Ether

In a world where celebration was life one festival stood up...

They were falling like dominos. Performance feasts like Melbourne Comedy, crowd magnets like the Grand Prix all tumbled before the microscopic player COVID-19. When I read that my beloved MIFF, too, was plummeting from the sky. And then toward July the wreckage stirred, dust blustered out and the thing rose to its feet and declared it would be going ahead, it would be a little different, given the times, but it would be there for us. It even gave itself a cinephilic joke as a name: MIFF 68 1/2.

The program was up by mid-July. It was expectably slimmer than normal and the pricing was acceptable (mostly). You couldn't do anything with the information on the handsomely refurbished website. Members were given earlybird benefits and were the first to be let loose on the fare but, really, apart from the festival itself that reaped some extra lolly, who really got anything out of membership this year?

I wasn't caring a deal about that as I was trying to work out how ticketing was being handled. Minipasses? Single Tickets. What delivery were we looking at? It had to be streaming but what was the platform would they take advantage of the flexibility? Finally, we'd see an end of the sold-out session or the issue of popular titles being uncomfortably full (when it's a physical event, I have switched tickets away from too full sessions). All of that would, however temporarily, be a thing of the past. Right? Later....

PROGRAM
At first glance it looked bland and unadventurous: documentaries, contemporary auteurs, verite. Then I noticed Dau. Natasha a product of the infamous Ilya Khrzanovsky's Dau. project (Google it) but then I recalled the film 4 from a few years back and passed. The plain packaging of Women Make Film almost had me passing on it, too until I realised how massive and compelling it might be (and was) A few more picks later and I had a modest five or so which was enough to take a week off work from home and feel like I was part of an event. The second week brought new titles and I added three.

What's Happening?
It was hard to find out how it was going to work until a breath before the festival itself. This made it difficult to plan. Were they going to replicate the effect of physical screenings by limiting their availability. Would there be a bulk deal like a minipass? What platform were they going to use and would I be able to plug into it? And so on. Without knowing most of these I decided to play it safe and take the second week off work from home (yes, that means something). It meant that, worst come to worst, I'd have a work free week off. The shape of the festival and access to it were to remain mysteries until the big launch on YouTube. It felt like an attempt to juice up the sense of event but it just felt like a grasp at the old normal.

The Website
The website was redesigned from the ground up and was an attractive and useful thing, eventually. I failed to get in until I asked on the FB group and was told that the redesign required new account creation from everyone which should have been on the landing page. Ok, done but I used to be able to go back and check previous years' activity which could come in  handy. That's gone forever.

If you used Chrome on Windows 10 it was anyone's guess where to click on the thumbnail to get to a given film's page. It really did seem randomised. On other platforms it was more consistent.

Ticketing
The main thing was the admission that there was no control to be had as to the numbers of viewers per household. Indeed, the sole means of policing was the silence in the streets after curfew (for Melburnians, at least).

There were bundles offered of like films for any who wished for a more controlled experience and these were well priced. While there was an adjusted membership pricing and benefit list it held no better lure than under the old circumstances. I could still have done with a minipass but as the pricing was acceptable I went with a list about the same size as a mini.

Pricing was in two tiers: $14 (most of them) and $20 (spotlights) which is more or less on par with services like Apple Movies. Exceptions included the epic Women Make Film series which was $20 for the lot (viewing windows per episode, a relief for a 14 hour series).

Delivery
When it was unveiled the delivery method was via the website with a number of recommendations. I chose plugging a laptop into my tv via HDMI which mostly worked a treat (problems I had with this were pretty much due to which device I was using). Once started, punters were given a decent 30 hour window to complete the film which allowed a rewatch if needed (see below for issues with this).

Anyone puzzled by this or without the means was stuck with watching on a computer or smaller screen device.

If you needed to pause a film for a later resumption within the window you were faced with the entire introductory slideshow and ads again, you couldn't just pick it up. So what? Well, the slides for sponsors etc., while I understand why they're there, are on screen forever as the ridiculously high volume background music throbs. Then you get a few commercials. Normal fare and then an age restriction warning and any notes about the screening itself (captions etc.). Is there no way at all to allow that to be bypassed for a resumed screening? I timed it a few times and was able to potter about getting food or drinks ready while it blared away.

Films designated "Spotlight" were unable to be played until a given timeframe on a single date. This struck me as an idea to inject a sense of moment to highlighted features, to add a feeling of communal festival going. Wouldn't that be most effective if the after chat (or the simultaneous chat) were allowed by agreement between friends who'd organise it anyway? A complete absence of popular participation in available forums (Twitter and FB were crammed with publicity posts which caught a very few responses by comparison with previous fests. I used to enjoy seeing the live Twitter wall at MIFF venues; it really gave out a sense of community. I can't, then, quite comprehend the decision to limit particular titles to such constrained windows when the advantage of having a VoD platform is that it frees the punters of that entirely.

And what's with limited ticketing? Is that really a licencing restriction? A technical one; is there a limit to the amount of connections? Any of these might be true but because they are so constricting it would be useful to know why this is so as it makes it a lot easier to deal with and plan by. If anything like this form of MIFF happens again, just tell us why you are constrained to limit certain films. It will be a lot less annoying knowing that it isn't just someone's futile attempt at creating buzz.

What I Saw Ranked

Women Make Film: A New Road Movie Through Cinema - An encyclopedic epic of how cinema works using only the output of women filmmakers. Mesmerising and ocean deep.

Shirley - Good stab at biographical film that uses the themes of the subject over a timeline of significant events and creates a film that would be interesting if it were about anyone.

She Dies Tomorrow - The thought of mortality as a virus plays out among some ten percenter Californians. More effective for its subtlety.

Prayer for a Lost Mitten - A cinematic poem of charm and quiet power.

The Tango of the Widower and its Distorting Mirror - A puzzle rewarding the adventurous.

The Go-Gos - A good rockumentary tells of how an act works, for better and worse

Black Bear - A serpent of invention eating its tail.

La Llorona - Sombre and deep felt magical realism about the resonance of tyranny.

Anne at 13,00 Ft - Effectively difficult. Too effectively difficult.

So...

I had gripes about the teasing approach which felt tiresome rather than exciting and the delivery method could stand a lot of work and a few other whinges but, look, after all the other major events had to cancel, MIFF found a way of forging ahead and provided a decent generalist program that still shied form the mainstream. They delivered.

SHADOWS Contactless: Friday August 28 9 pm SBS on Demand + Messenger: THE DEATH OF STALIN

After a final act of negative influence, a kind of accidental bullying, the great leader and teacher of all the Russias and peoples of the greater Soviet metropolitan area dies. A few localised fumbles later and the party cogs roll into the room and try to work out what to do while watching what they say because they don't know who's listening but they also know who they are talking to. And that's the top people.

Armando Iannucci's hard satire swings between gallows humour and the real gallows as the fallout from the death of Stalin hurtles downward through the ranks. Why bother doing this now? Couldn't someone have come up with it in the '50s when it was a fresher story? Political muscling, whether self avowed or not, doesn't easily regenerate without a contest of people near the top who want themselves to be where the boss was. You can extend that to the bizarre state of information bending and bullet dodging of elected officials here and now. Stalin and his crew set themselves to reality redefinition as though it were Sunday lunch and everyone knew what happened to anyone who might cry: "but you said...!"

The mind who gave us Veep, The Thick of It, and In the loop knows that there are times when satire need only be applied as a thin sheen over reality. With the event of the title of this film Ianucci has, if anything, only to restrain himself until the emergent truth of its chaos appears. The Stalin story is particularly poignant as it brought up the confusion that occurs when succession raises its head after the death of an autocrat. Who goes next? The party light or the relative? Did this roll the sequence from Tsar a full circle to a replacing autocrat?

In the end, after all the brutality and paranoia, Ianucci delivers us from gut punch to belly laugh without ever having to err into cuteness or over-earnestness. That along with a dream cast and some great comic timing, gets us here to where the lampoon meets the wall.

Join me, won't you?

MIFF Session 10: WOMEN MAKE FILM: A NEW ROAD MOVIE THROUGH CINEMA

The title of this does more than simply describe the contents of this massive documentary series, it expresses its approach. How to present cinema directed by women without potentially alienating audiences through politics? You make the entire thing a primer in cinema itself from focal length, editing to representing the meaning of life but you only use films directed by women. If you come out of this thinking "not all male directors" this experience has left you on the side of the road. This is a celebration and everyone's invited.

The framing device is also in the title. The various narrators are seen driving cars or unseen as the dashcam takes down winding roads while the story of cinema and how it is created is told by voices such as Tilda Swinton or Jane Fonda. That established we are given 40 chapters that inform us of what cinema is, how it is constructed and how its part of the essential bargain with the audience.

The size of the instalments is daunting (all but the last are three hours long) but the focus on the issues is kept so focused and accessible that viewing becomes a question of how to interrupt it rather than how much more you can take. This would work better in a tv on demand setting when the resumption of a paused episode was not prefaced with the masses of sponsor messages and advertising that every screening in the MIFF context was given. There are around eight chapters to an episode so the lines are pretty clearly drawn for the time-poor viewer. This would be essential on ABC or SBS on demand services.

This is a Mark Cousins project and features his writing. This is usually lucid and informative but can stretch into hyperbole and go spinning out of control in the space of a single sentence. It can also at times crawl under the viewer's radar when the thing it is meant to define is proving elusive and the accompanying footage presents a question that is not answered. These moments are not frequent but I can recall them and when you're talking a fourteen hour stretch that's something. Cousins' own voice on other series like The Story of Film has a Northern Irish lilt that stays on the right side of monotonous or grating but here, putting his commitment where his creativity is he employs some of the most sonorous voices he could find to tell the tale.

So, fourteen hours of cinema instruction and history that highlights the contribution of women film directors later and I'm ready to follow up on a mass of titles (listed here: https://www.womenmakefilm.net/) And I have a strong sense I have just experienced a marvel. This series starts at its title to tell you what it intends but, outside of a few lines in the opening credits of each episode, it is free of political agenda, concentrating on cinema that, increasingly sensed throughout, demonstrates that good films are good films. The potential for a kind of monument to tokenism quashed, we are given the key and the movies beyond the door are waiting.

MIFF Session 9: SHIRLEY

Rose and Fred are newlyweds who turn up at the household of celebrated writer Shirley Jackson and her husband Stanley, college professor and literary critic. The couple move in until they can find their own home and Fred's academic career can get a good start. What follows is a version of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf for depressives as the blocked writer stirs to find amusement and then inspiration in manipulating the young couple. Stanley parades and philanders, stifling the ambition of his own protege, Fred. Rose becomes fascinated by Shirley and begins her own invasion.

Fiction based on historical events should not serve the timeline. I don't mean that it should not be true (truth, however abstract, must be its purpose). I do mean that it should not admit events into its own timeline just because they happened. Most biopics ignore this notion and play out like pageants, leaving the interrogation of the life in question behind the mask of worth. Exceptions are rare but telling. Amadeus plays out as mythology, pitting one figure against another, each representing something about their art and creativity in general, ending in a showdown of the worldly and divine. This is not the place to begin a biographical study of the composer but it offers great insight into the mind and motives of a skilled mediocrity (its narrator, Salieri). Nowhere Boy about a teenage John Lennon takes care to omit the name of the band he is forming by the end of the story: that he became famous despite and/or because of the emotional torment of his youth is what lives on the screen and the images of the fame serve an end credit sequence.

Shirley comes from this kind of place. Her famous short story The Lottery is mentioned in several scenes (including the opening where it's spoiled) but she, as yet has not written a novel. More intriguingly, she is on the trail of a missing student from the local college from a few years before. In a moment of communion Rose offers an insight into the case that lights the moribund Shirley's eyes. These are characters in a story first and foremost. We are given no signposts to particular works from Jackson's output (no scenes where she is served by a timid clerk named Nell or meets a bestial college wife called Theo) as the idea of a writer crawling from the slough of despond through the opportunity to exercise power over another after years of dominance by her husband (which sent her to the slough to begin with).

These are the things that give this tale of sustained powerplay its darkened mood and near Gothic atmosphere. As such it performs a far better ground to approach an understanding of the writer of such iconic horror tales. Elizabeth Moss, the world's go to character actor, brings the light of rage into Shirley Jackson, one who knew the deadliest blows are dealt in embraces.

MIFF Session 8: SHE DIES TOMORROW

Amy is convinced she will die the next day. After an opening scene in which she is farewelling a character we don't see (unless it's the guy we see through a doorway who appears to be ranting) she returns to her house, puts the Lachrimosa from Mozart's Requiem on loop (well, it's vinyl so she just keeps putting it back to the start of the track) and does stuff while getting progressively drunk. She tries calling a friend who doesn't seem to hear her that well but says that she'll ignore her family commitments and come and visit Amy. Amy gives up on the call and keeps doing stuff.

Jan does turn up, lets herself in and talks Amy down from a wall (not suicidally high). Amy tells Jane about dying the next day. Jane observes Amy's falling off the wagon and cautions her against rash decisions but Amy isn't talking about taking her own life. Then what? She's just convinced she has less than a day to live. Assured that Amy is essentially fine, Jane leaves and goes to her sister in law's birthday drinks, interrupting a bizarre conversation about dolphin sex (which the other two guests are not comfortable with) with her own conviction that she, too, will die tomorrow. She's already tried to call Amy with this but got no answer. It got into her head and it won't leave. Eventually she does, going back to her strange home studio. We hear a conversation between the two guests who have also caught the thought and then back at the brother's house the couple both get infected. They go to their daughter's room and cuddle paternally.

The spread of the thought is then assumed to make its way throughout the city. Jane, wandering aimlessly, later comes upon two young women who are having a stunned but quite happy conversation about it. And then at one point we see the end of the chain that brought it to Amy and, while it answers no further question than that we understand that it is an ongoing malaise.

This feels less like a simple outbreak of meditations on mortality than an epidemic of existentialism. It bears the same message to everyone it touches but they respond differently. Against this the baubles of the old normal as activities, possessions and the trappings of reproduction and nesting are on display in a presentation that swings from video-verite to purple psychedelia. Once the nagging bug of an idea gets in everyone is changed, regardless of whether they will die or not, bodily or not.

Kate Lynn Sheil redeems herself from the winceable mess that was Kate Plays Christine and provides a strong central or starting figure of sliding chaos that will envelope the rest of the cast. The ever welcome Jane Adams brings her dependable convicted fragility to Jane. The scene with the doctor that morphs into a sex scene but doesn't is powered by her wonder, eagerness and barely concealed disappointment. Tunde Adebimpe whose role becomes more profound that we might expect shows us great subtlety in his polite uninterest in the party conversation which expands into the strong but quiet conviction in the subsequent conversation.

She Dies Tomorrow flirts with a kind of indy mumblecore drama but refuses to give in to it. There is pretty much nothing cute about it (which immediately tears it from those conventions) but there are stretches of warmth and authentic concern. I almost gasped to see the main production credit go to Benson and Morehead, a team whose films as writers and directors have built a growing cosmic horror realm including the adjacent After Midnight/Something Else (2018). This film bears little of their stamp but rather doesn't disagree with their branded Lovecraftoverse. It would be an apt entry into a B&M marathon. On its own, it stands as a creditable absurdist what-if. Points!

MIFF Session 7: ANNE AT 13000 FT

Anne goes skydiving and loves it. She misses it so much that even on playground duty at her work as a teacher's aide, she asks a colleague to lift her as she closes her eyes. She's good with the kids, enabling their bright imaginations, and well liked by the other staff. But all is not well.

In fact almost all of the seventy-five minutes of running time that feel like about three hours, things start at barely controllable and progressively disintegrate for the rest of the time. Anne has an undisclosed mental illness which drives her into combative episodes, leaves her confused most of the time and takes her further and further away from the euphoria of the gloriously controlled fall in the opening sequence.

While there is no condescension or judgement levelled at Anne at any time by the film itself we are kept both aloof and taken to physical intimacy. Almost the entirety of this film is shot in close-up, giving it a breathless, inescapable feel. It's hard to empathise with Anne as all of the conflicts we see are the result of her hitting out against her own lack of control. In one sequence a teacher confronted with a particularly hostile response repeatedly asks Anne if she needs assistance and the most forbidding of exchanges is: "I don't know how to help you."

Deragh Campbell in the title role brings a solid commitment to the task and we are not given a moment's break from Anne's state, from her lashing out, a helplessly drunken episode or the teetering wedding speech she gives for her colleague. All of the performances around her follow in the verite documentary style and none fail to convince.

However, without a space for the audience to assess if there is any hope to be had for this woman, there is little for us to do but witness the torment of her life. The potential for her engagement at the beginning is never fulfilled here and the sole hint that she might find some is packed into the final sequence which involves a moment's hesitation before a certain decision. Even there, as it is hard to judge where this happens on the timeline, we are still none the wiser. Perhaps that's the point, distressing as that is: we stand and walk to the exit as the late '60s sounding song groans over the end credits of this late '60s feeling film and leave her there mid-air.

SHADOWS Contactless: Friday August 21 2020 SBS on Demand + Messenger: THE CONVERSATION

You remember the song Torn Between Two Lovers? An MOR hit by Coloradan Mary McGregor way back in 1976. Well, this is the same thing except that it's more Caught Between Two Godfathers. Yep, Francis Ford Coppola was riding high on the breakthrough success of The Godfather and was only a year away from the equally celebrated sequel when he found the time to get a lot grittier, recall his indy roots and tell this tale of a man burdened with a secret.

Harry Caul (whose name sounds like a beard mask if you have an American accent) knows one thing more than anything else and that's surveillance. His pre-chic industrial digs are an impenetrable fortress against prying attention as he is the embodiment of such stealthy invasion. One of the best in the business he records a conversation between two lovers that sounds like a murder plot. He's been there before and let it happen. Does he break his professionalism or give himself another lifelong sack of rocks to haul uphill.

Gene Hackman gives his intense best, here, containing chain reactions behind his sober, knowing face. And he's just one. If you know your New Hollywood movies (and you should) most of this cast will feel like old friends. With everything so served up these days, especially in lockdown, it's easy to forget how the intention behind this work is the thing that hasn't changed: it's just got easier to do.

Join me, as I'll know if you don't.

MIFF Session 6: THE TANGO OF THE WIDOWER AND ITS DISTORTING MIRROR

Fixation. A middle aged man is confronted with his wife's suicide. He attempts to normalise his social and private lives but circles back repeatedly to the question of why she did it. A kind of haunting occurs in his apartment as her figure appears or just her wigs that course around the floor like pets or pests. Old memories recur: he shuts down her singing of Frere Jacques but this only brings back the tolling bells of judgement (or at least the church), conversations are resolved in different ways from their originals. At one point he seems to take his own life but this only results in the film reversing in a different edit until a conclusion emerges from the eerie doom of backwards motion and speech and a brilliantly resourceful use of verite lighting to convey a demonic figure in the close.

Raul Riuz abandoned this film through the necessity of having to leave his native Chile suddenly but it was reconstructed through lip readers nailing the dialogue and his widow's edit (taken in part through her dream dialogues with her deceased husband). The original intention was to have this examination of plea and guilt to be presented as blocks of images, like the movments of a piece of music or verses in a poem. As soon as you let go of an expectation of conventional narrative cinema this film is a delight of textures and moments of genuine emotion. The animate wigs on the floor (shown to be driven by toy cars) can be funny and eerie in the same sequence. The sight of a pair of feet disappearing under a bed is doubly disturbing in reverse. And so on. And so much more on.

This is anything but an hour of randomly spliced images or intentionally obscure scenes as the sense of purpose and statement develop before you can get restless and look somewhere else. IF you do start to shift a little in the second section where everything is running backwards in a different sequence than in the first half just run with it. You really will get somewhere soon. And you'll be glad you did.

MIFF Session 5: PRAYER FOR A LOST MITTEN

What have you lost that you wish you could find again. We begin at the lost property office of the Montreal Metro as faces appear at the service window and ask for personal belongings, sometimes fruitfully but mostly not. Through the snow swept streets of the city we enter the homes of people at, dinner or just enjoying a gathering with drinks and this question is addressed. Soon we hearing of lost love, the death of a parent, time, a family's warmth and further, intercut with scenes of the wintry nightscape of the northern city.

This beautiful piece about the many faces of loss, from the tiny to the life-changing, belies the lightness of its presentation. A family dinner seems to be going so amiably that we're happy enough to just go with the flow but soon we are hearing of a death scene told so plainly that its poignancy stings. It would be dismissive to describe it as an impressionist film as, beneath its gorgeously deep black and white cinematography and almost fetishistic celebration of winter nights, there beats a blood red heart. This film about loss is, as it must be, also a film about discovery, what has been found in the state of loss and where it has led. A choir sings outside on the footpath. When the conductor points to a singer, she or he sings of what they have lost. The harmony rises and builds to a tall, wide wave as one woman takes a lead and sings to an impassioned close. She's lost a binder but everyone around her knows it's more.

Finally, we hear from a teenager whose answer to the question is an impossible wish. We watch as he and his freinds stroll off into the shadows and the snow shovelling bulldozer pushes the frozen white drifts to the sides of the roads as the new snow falls. The only reason I wouldn't see it again is that it has worked so well the first time. I pegged this as a perfect 11 a.m. screening at the Forum film which is at least when I watched it.

MIFF Session 4: THE GO-GOS

 It's 1981, I'm almost out of my teens, and The Go-Gos are important to me. Why? That's a year of epoch making records like Primary, Spellbound, Everything's Gone Green and Release the Bats, why would I waste time on some Californian popsters who look like the wet dream of a major label executive? Well, because I'm standing in Rockinghourse records in Brisbane, poring through the new imports and a drum beat has burst out from the shop sound system. Hard four on the floor and swinging. A low piano note, guitar and bass thud a root note. The bass breaks free with a bluesy riff, doubled on the piano. A high female vocal, crisp and solid, sings four chanting lines before the chorus breaks through and everything explodes into wide screen. The power chords plummet as the vocals soar above in tight harmony: "They got the beat, they got the beat they got the beat YEEEEAH! They got the beat!" I'm almost welling up as I remember it. Second verse same as the first and then a riff on the riff as the guitars extend the pattern, rising to a keychange you feel before you understand it's happened. I bought the album before the song was over. "Who's this?" "The Go-Gos" G. There! Now! Bus home. Play the whole album in headphones.  Cover art was a group of young women in towels and faces obscured by moisturiser against a polarised colour background. The back cover was the glamour shots of each of them in a bathtub. First look: well, that's exploitative. Second look: it's ironic and funny. The kind of bird-flip to the mainstream typical of the era. Oh, they're all girls, that's great.

Dig? They could have been anyone from anywhere, putting out a sound like that. It was a perfect blend of punk energy with late sixties songcraft, it was exciting and it was the sound of the summer that year as I headed  back up home from Uni and settled in for the lazing and the pool and the parties. They toured the next year and a bunch of us went to Festival Hall for the gig (we didn't get the bill with Sunnyboys which would blown my head off but ...) and it was non stop.

And then Vacation came out and I didn't even bother listening to the whole album, let alone buy it. The title song led as a single and felt like the lighter cuts on the first one. I only heard about the third one years after it was released. Shrug: not everyone has ten great albums in them and there's still the wonder that is Beauty and the Beat. So, what happened? That's the reason for this film.

The Go-Gos formed in the late '70s punk scene in LA and built a following. Buoyed(see what I did there) by what felt like the fizzer that was the Pistols last gig (Winterland). Because things are always loose at that level they go through a few lineup changes and find a manager who hocks her car to get them on tours with The Specials and Madness in the UK. They come out from the wall of spit from the skinheads who want to ska and they're stronger and tougher. Back in LA the songs get better and, after a lot of knock backs from A&R men who don't think all girl bands can cut it, they get picked up by Miles Copeland's Indy offshoot IRS and get added to a Police tour. Bye bye bass player who thinks they are selling out. Hello to Blondie producer who turns their set into one of the finest crafted slabs of vinyl of the era: Beauty and the Beat. And a big shout out to the mixed-font neon-clad publicity machine that was the 1980s.

And then decline forms like the picture when the jigsaw puzzle starts making sense. Drug problem here (with the main songwriter), resentment of internal inequality there, songwriter denied a lead vocal on an album there. And then it crumbles. If you saw The Go-Betweens: Right Here and winced at the bit where Forster and McLennan dictate the end of the band to everyone else, regardless of their standing or commitment, you'll wince again when Belinda Carlisle and Charlotte Caffey dissolve the band and move on. 

From there it's the story of the reunions and the who-knows-where of the present. The difference between this documentary when it gets to this and comparable ones is that everything still feels balanced after the major fame and fortune chapters are over. The PiL documentary covered every single lineup, way beyond the point of the band producing anything compelling and felt like three hours. A Wanda Jackson doc a few years back started feeling like a promo to petition the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. This film doesn't. Mostly, because the full complement of members past and present (the reformed band is the lineup from Beauty and the Beat) get more than a word in and manage to salt the nostalgia away with frankness. It also doesn't hurt that the newly released Club Zero (plays over the end credits) has ALL of the push and tangy vocals of anything from the debut album from 1981.

Rock docs should never just celebrate. Because of the associated pitfalls and ego disasters that fame in the genre bids all who enter, the opportunities for life lessons abound. The aforementioned Go-Betweens movie is a great telling of how a persistent lack of success can both show resilience and caution against hubris. The Go-Gos' story is like that except with a phase of gigantic fame. We are given time to gauge old sound against that of the fame period, decisions that now look incomprehensibly rash and self-annhiliating (the story of the dispatch of their first manager will give you serious cringes) and simply how much mess can be created with the best or, more usually, no real intentions. For me there is no better encapsulation than this: while on tour at the crest of the wave, drunk, young and happy in their hotel, the band took polaroids of a few of them on their beds pretending to give birth to Kathy Valentine. Towards the end of the movie the band sit around a table, looking at the photos, riffing and laughing. It's completely infectious.

Review: THE BEACH HOUSE

Young couple, Emily and Randall, turn up at Randall's parents' beach house for a weekend away. The neighbourhood is deserted but they like it that way. Then, at one point a strange older woman appears in the house as though she owns the place. She, Jane, is soon joined by her husband, Mitch, who recognises Randall as his friend's son. Inconvenient but what can you do, the house is big enough for the four of them. They get acquainted at dinner and when the wine runs out Randall suggests some pot chocolate which everyone gets into. One enchanted evening later and everyone gets a little psychedelic, not least Jane who goes wandering into a garden of luminous watery pods hanging from the foliage. There's a weird smell and a rising fog. And that's before you get to the frilly pink jellyfish and the wormlike infections.

This film presents a kind of Lovecraftian eco horror in which either the ancient ones have come to reclaim the human empire of wastepackaging or alien ones. It matters little to the infected as their bodies get increasingly colonised. And it matters to us as an intriguing sci-horror plot unfolds in a setting that is sending the cinematographer into a natural ecstasy. Performances are decent all round. So what's missing? Once we establish the big bad and it has its wicked way things get stodgy in the plot and we get a lot of overdrawn sequences that should be short and sharp. I noticed the same with the unsatisfying recent Color Out of Space which went in circles in act two and only barely recovered. The crsip finale of The Beach House is brought down by this as it is allowed to come across as unimpressive.

That said you could do a lot worse on a warm spring night with a bottle of something to go with those oysters.


Available on Shudder.

MIFF Session 3: WENDY

A diner in America. It's busy but happy, run just the right side of chaos. A few kids at the counter chow down and talk about what they want to be. One of the co owners overhears one say he wants to be a pirate and she jovially shuts him down by telling him he'll just be a bucket and mop guy. The boy reacts against this hard but the mockery ends in a faux sword fight between the two owners (a pair of sisters) and things seem to settle. That night one of the girls, Wendy wakes as another train passes by and rattles the walls of the house. She goes to the window and sees a strange little boy with dreadlocks running on the roofs of the cars. She wakes her brothers. They chase the train and join the boy, Peter, get pushed into a river, climb aboard a rowboat and reach a volcanic island where no one gets old.

This magical realist take on Peter Pan pushes forward the refulgent wonder of childhood imagination, adding a Lord of the Flies overlay to it so to avoid cuteness. Most of the cast are under twelve. The kids have a great time at first, even meeting the glowing light-squid Peter calls Mother in one of the most beautiful scenes I've witnessed in a new film for a fair few years. But things, as they must, sour. Coming upon an old man with a donkey, she watches as he makes his way across a barren landscape. He is revealed to be Buzzo, a young boy only a short time before. Other signs and manifestations appear that tell the kids they won't be young forever and they set out to correct it.

Behn Zeitlin's first feature Beasts of the Southern Wild delighted with the same expert expression of a child's mind and the way the world appears to them. At one point the six year old Hushpuppy sees her father collapse in a seizure. Storm clouds roar with thunder and a thick gale rises. It's a convincing explanation of how a child might take such a catastrophic sight. This continues in Wendy but more constantly as even the parental figures are erased from the scene and the kids must cope within the limits of their understanding but the scope of their imagination.

As with Beasts, despite some extraordinary setpieces in the bookending acts, the middle act gets draggy and repetitive. Roles and motivations blur and what might be an engaging adventure plot that still served the aesthetic and mood is lost in what feels like fading definition. Devin France in the title role glows at the centre of her every scene and newcomer Yashua Jack adds great force as Peter and it does wrap into a conclusion and final sequence that are very hearty but I still felt like I'd missed out on the fun.


Another in the set of limited window viewings that this online MIFF is featuring. This still annoys me.

MIFF Session 2: BLACK BEAR

A woman in a red one piece swimsuit sits crosslegged on a floating jetty on a lake. Cut to a close up as she stares right into us. She rises, wraps the towel around her and walks to the shore.

Young indy filmmaker, Allison (the woman in the first shot), is met by her bnb host Gabe and they stroll through the forest to the lake house, chatting. When asked where her husband is Allison evades the question before shutting it down. She also shuts down the compliments he has started with, claiming to hate flattery. They meet Gabe's wife, the heavily pregnant Blair. Later at dinner tension develops between the trio, at first soothed and then heightened by wine (Blair is drinking way beyond the medical recommendation). We move into the living room and everything heats up to the point where Blair accuses Gabe of adultery in the heart. A cataclysm later and ....

That would be a spoiler. What isn't really a spoiler is to say that, after an intertitle, we return to the opening scene of Allison on the jetty. This time she walks all the way to the house and on to an outdoor staircase where a young man arrives to give her a cigarette. "CUT!" She backtracks and we see a camera crew on a barge. Gabe, the director and her husband, wants her to do the take again. She protests that he's always wanting too much and that co-star Blair never gets this treatment. He berates her in front of everyone and storms off. The A.D. does the retake. Gabe is inside directing it with a tablet and an earpiece as Blair watches. These two then conspire to appear as though they've bee intimate before dinner to ruffle Allison to get a heightened performance from her.

And so on. This film doesn't just shift identities but claims of identity. Is the opening exchange where Gabe is played by Gabe the reality that inspired the film within the film? Blair is his wife there and Allison the usurper. In the film being made Blair is the threat and neither is pregnant. A great many claims of fealty and infidelity are made between these players (there's an actor playing Gabe in the movie section) which is the central maypole they're dancing around. What of Allison's choice at the end of that? What of the return again to the opening sequence?

We are looking at performance and performance within performance. The central trio hold their positions well over some very slippery ground. Aubrey Plaza goes from the kind of understated millennial snark of her schtick to way beyond it into heavy anger. Sarah Gadon almost travels the opposite journey by way of balance (I've never seen her so animated). Christopher Abbot is the steadiest presence but then he goes from manipulated to manipulating so smoothly it's not initially obvious. The scene at the beginning where they are all getting increasingly drunk and emtionally loose is a masterclass of ensemble acting (with drunkenness thrown in as a curve ball).

We are also looking at the imagining of fiction to confront difficult truths. For all the claims of virtue made by these people there is an everpresent likelihood that they are lying to get through the moment. Claims of strong commitment begin to sound like manipulation. Is that not the point of cinema, at least fictive cinema? To make wishes and heroics solid but through manipulation? There is no attempt to laud the cinematic production process as a particularly noble endeavour as the barely controlled chaos of wardrobe, coffees, internally political bitchiness, subversion and predation bashes around the roving handheld camera that pretends it isn't there. Done before? But like fourth wall breaks, multimedia, reflexivity, maybe we just need to remember some things to remember what cinema is, can be, and why it's still good for us.




I'll rant about this in the eventual summary of the Festival but this film was available for a five hour window on one night only. Is that licencing restriction? A clunking sense of event imposed on punters? Either way, I hate it: if you've got the tech to roll things out to the benefit of people who might still have time constraints (determined by kid management or whatnot) make all of it float on the whole timeline. Anyway....

SHADOWS Contactless: Friday August 14 9pm SBS on Demand and Messenger: TIME BANDITS

Ok, been saving this one for a while now and now's the time. I have been covering this plague since March and now that the virtual MIFF is here, I need at least a week off (that's official, btw, applied for and received). So, I felt like revisiting this one which I've only ever seen once. For me, at least, it will have the feel of the kind of retro screening I'd often pick just so I can see an old favourite in a cinema.

Terry Gilliam was to have the spectre of his old team, Monty Python, follow him around right up to the film where he jettisoned it (Brazil). Not only did he hop back into the chair for Meaning of Life a few years later, he had few problems presenting the kind of high adventure he liked within the absurdist mood of the Pythons. The thing about Time Bandits that gets me is how hard he is working to tear himself free: there are plenty of loopy scenes like John Cleese as a kind of Tory candidate version of Robin Hood or the timid lovers whose personal problem follows them through centuries of recurrent moments but the overall arc of the boy and the bandits is stronger and clearer than even the most articulate Python outing (Life of Brian)

So, decades after watching a knock-off VHS with muddy audio, will I like it as much? Will that strange ending feel better earned that it did the first time? Will Ian Holm as Napoleon be as funny as I remember him? All to be seen in a film meant to be seen.

Come with me.

Review: HOST

Have you seen Unfriended? Well, you've seen this ... almost

Instead of comparing Host to too much more I'm going to put it into another context. Bocaccio's The Decameron is a book of tales which range from bawdy to ethical set in a castle high above the common herd who are dying of the plague. Haley and her friends host a zoom meeting on what was once a weekend night but this time with a medium. No one particularly believes; there's even a strong suggestion that it's all for laughs. One of them coughs which leads to a good joking observation. This is not a group of chums Skype-ing on a lazy school night. However lightly they are taking the notion of an online seance (and what better means to address a plague) a misstep by one of them builds, element by element, into a kind of Zoomed Walpurgisnacht.

So, the we're ok, we're still us despite the virus blowing around outside the window, all that assumption of the old normal is attacked from within. The pieces of traditional horror are on clear display (sometimes too much as a series of tedious references to other found footage icons fill the bank of screens) and given good room to play. There is more than a little commentary on the casualness of the attitude to the technology which has its own consequences.

Does it go much deeper than a series of kills? Not really but the trouble starts when someone doesn't take the occasion seriously enough and resorts to a lie about it. If you've so far avoided the efforts of shit stirrers, mask-refusing cretins babbling about imagined legal charters, COVID-19 deniers and more and worse then count yourself and lucky as well as uninformed. The victims here are not necessarily part of those tribes and some simply don't deserve their fate. You could say exactly the same about those infected by the negligence of others. That's why this is not just a retread of Unfriended. That film is similarly unaffected by this as it remains a solid fable of interpersonal atrocity and the currency of gossip. Host reminds us of our time of plague using its chief tool of social interaction. It does this so powerfully that the inventiveness of that might be left assumed.

It is a story of, from and still in our times. It's also bloody scary when it has to be and that's always a boon. At fifty-seven minutes, what are you waiting for?

Showing on Shudder. Hey, Shudder. we need our
apps!

MIFF Session 1: LA LLORONA

Far from the Conjureverse jump-scare-filled waste of time this Guatemalan piece keeps its folkloric roots at a good arm's length as it has recent history to consider. It's far better for it.

A general from a deposed dictatorship is on trial for war crimes. He is besieged in his mansion by protestors who grow in number outside. Inside, his family cope around him, his wife guarded against his convictions that he can hear the monstrous figure of the title (who he hunts in the house with a pistol), his daughter who looks to his failing health with her medical qualifications, her daughter, and a security guard. If the old regime had grown demented the fragile balance in this beleaguered home is drying to dust.

One morning the new maid appears in the crowd as a young native woman with a haunting stare. She takes immediately to the child of the house and provides her with companionship and the kind of fun that suggests survival training. The general's wife has recurring nightmares of being a native woman under the genocidal oppression of the dictatorship. Her daughter is re-examining her position in the family and the crimes associated with the name. When the general's appeal reverses the previous conviction of genocide the crowds outside grow partially in protest partially in celebration of the end of the general's life. Faces from the files of missing persons from the time appear among the throngs.

This film, while it has a narrative arc, does not play out like a political thriller or even film directly about its politics. The figure of the Weeping Woman is kept ambiguous. Is she the new maid? Is she the spirit of the crowd outside who eventually seem to enter the grounds without force? Is she the times themselves come to take revenge?

La Llorona mythically drowned her sons and then herself but was refused the afterlife for her sins and condemned to walk the earth, taking more children. Alma, the native maid, the closest thing the film has to a physicalised Llorona is certainly accusing but her underwater games with the child feel more like training. It is only the past and its atrocities she seeks. Perhaps, she too, has transcended her folkloric role.

Jayro Bustamante's film of his country's living memory does little to retread the crimes but rather allow those who will know of them a kind of requiem. If the old man is to die it will not be an easy death, it will not be in peace. A patient, quiet gem.

SHADOWS Contactless: Friday August 7 9pm: COLD WAR

This couldn't have happened better. As I was mulching over which of my short list to program next SBS came to save the day. Remember Ida, that quiet but powerful tale of complicated identity following disaster? Well, Pawel Pawlikowski's follow up has appeared on SBS on Demand. And it has demanded that I screen it as the next Shadows. Cold War was one of my favourites from MIFF 2018 and remains a strong recollection of that festival.

A couple meet in post war Poland as they travel the countryside seeking authentic Polish singers to promote the brave new submission to the Soviet giant. Their careers lift and take wing which flies them to the hot spot Berlin. They have to defect, of course. Now's their chance. You can probably predict the next move but I won't tell you which goes and which stays. But it doesn't end there as these soul mates are compelled to each other through the ranging alterations to life in Europe in the fifties and sixties. Their paths just keep crossing. This can be a tricky business punishable by Soviet retribution. Will there be a solution? How will it leave them?

Sounds dour? Some of it is. But it's also funny, thought provoking and always compelling. Telling his tale again in t rich deep black and white, Pawlikowski takes us back to his parents' epoque of big politics and even bigger music and sculpts an epic love story into less than ninety minutes.

With me? Let's go!