MIFF Session 16: ASAKO I & II

Have you been in love? What did you love about the other? Looks? Personal qualities? If you've been in love once or more, was any time love at first sight? Did that endure past the speedbump of physical attraction?

Asako is at a photography exhibition but can't take her eyes of a tall shaggy haired boy who breezes past the prints as though they're ads. She follows him out to the street. He turns and looks. There are actual fireworks going off but they don't need to as the metaphorical ones are cracking and flashing inside the two nervous systems that encounter each other on the street. After only an exchange of names and what the Kenji characters refer to the pair are kissing like long lost lovers. They are now inseparable, forming an embrace even on a road where their motorcycle accident has thrown them. Their more level headed friends enjoy the spectacle of the lovers and the adventurous cuteness they radiate. One night, he, Baku, says he's going to the shop, leaves and never returns.

Asako eventually leaves this scene in Osaka and travels to Tokyo, working in a coffee shop which delivers to clients that include a Sake label whose new recruit is Baku's doppelganger. Asako, retrieving the coffee jug is struck silent at the sight of this apparition, insisting on calling him Baku though he has clearly introduced himself as Ryohei. He is easy in his business suit and cleaner cut hair but her strange fascination with him throws him. Catching up with her on the street at a later occasion he is able to demonstrate so quick thinking charm to invert a negative situation and also allow him into her company.

He is not the bad boy Baku but he looks just like him and might well do as far as life partners go. They shack up and all seems well. You know this is doomed, don't you? Ok, but it's done well. An old friend from the Osaka days lunches with Asako and brings her up to date on what she's been up to but also, seeing with wide eyes, Asako's new love, can't help but fill her in on the fact that Baku has not just popped up again but famously. A rotating ad screen outside the restaurant obliges with the credit card commercial that Baku has become famous by starring in. So, the Baku/Ryohei thing is not just in her head, it's something that everyone else can see. This is not magical realism.

We wait for the moment when both doppelgangers are in the same moving picture. What will happen? The third act addresses this and it is not everything we might expect. The good news is that the characters themselves also appear genuinely surprised by it.

If overlong, Asako I & II does what it says on the tin. We are given a young and beautiful woman, her self-surprise at finding herself in love and a massive complication to deal with that. We are also given a beautifully crafted scene between an aspirant actor and a failed one on what acting ought to be. In a film whose riches are given in a generally lean degustation we are treated to a course too many or so it feels. This is writing rather than a young, beautiful and ready cast. And it is writing rather than a light hand on the beige aesthetics of the near-hipster Tokyo young.

What saves it is the commitment to the fairy tale purity of true love and the verite denial of such an ideal. Between them we have an antidote to the 500 Days of Summer but something that can't quite match Eternal Sunshine. If nothing else, it has piqued my interest in new Japanese cinema and its reliable ability to absorb, evolve and freshen.

MIFF Session 15: THAT SUMMER

Peter Beard, photographer, socialite and interesting person begins by showing us through a book of his photos, remembering this or that detail as he turns the pages. It's engaging. Whether it's the biggest rhino he'd ever seen or Mick Jagger and family visiting Beard's Long Island beach house. It wasn't until he shut the book that I realised I'd just been watching someone describe the pages of a book. But there is more.

Beard's friend from the New England aristocracy, Lee Radziwill, sister of Jackie Kennedy, had an idea to make a film about two of her relatives Edith and her daughter Edie who were living in a rundown mansion in the Hamptons in a weird kind of royal hillbilly existence. Mother and daughter eccentric to the nines, surrounded by cats who appear to infected the humans into servitude, sit in rooms, reminisce, opine in Katherine Hepburn style lost accents about anything that comes up as the weeds grow over the windows.

We get four reels edited to the extent of whole sequences and sound matching as we sit through a dollied up dvd extra. That's not being mean. The project was abandoned because the footage we see is very samey, never breaking through the promise that the true life eccentrics seem to radiate. It's as though some travellers came across a field of gold nuggets, thought they were pretty and moved on.

The pair had hired two brothers to help them with the filming, Albert and David Maysles. These two had earned some serious stripes in the '60s with the likes of The Beatles First U.S. Visit, Salesman and the mighty rock/true crime/end of '60s nightmare concert film Gimme Shelter. They turned up and saw the gold on the ground, came back and made the incomparable Grey Gardens which allowed the Edies to bloom into their full identities and appear in a portrait of a ghostly remnant of the old one percent.

The only thing this brief show reel adds is that the interesting people who got there first didn't quite know that they need to store all that interesting-ness into batteries of observation. It's not a bad proof and it shows the working but it will find no credible place on the documentary shelf without its greater context. Would Criterion be interested in a special edition of Grey Gardens, perhaps? It's that or festivals until exhaustion.

MIFF Session 14: THE KING

It took me a long time to find out about Elvis. By the time I discovered rock music in the 70s (I'd been classical only until 13) he was a naff old square with slicked back short hair. And then I saw the movies before I heard the music, the real music, the music from before them. Until then he might as well have been Fred Astaire. Strangely, when punk landed and took me with it and Johnny Rotten had some vitriol to spit at the news of Elvis' death I started seeing clips played in tribute from the earlier days. It was a different figure; young, slim and wild. I wondered why that had been kept under tarpaulins of Vegas ballads, deep fried sandwiches and reclusion. That's not a long wonder.So, a day after the 41st anniversary of his death at 42 I went to see this.

Documentarian Eugene Jarecki has created a dense essay that embeds Presley's lifestory into an account of the state of the Union then and now. Rather than wheel out a cast of old stagers to reminisce (though there is that) Jarecki is interested in people's take on the phenomenon and how to place it in America's idea of itself.

In the Tupelo birthplace two old ladies from the 99% praise the figure but lament that the country and its ideals are strangers. A long line of contemporary musicians (particularly delighted to see the Handsome Family among them) joins him in a road trip in Elvis' own Rolls Royce as they travel north, south and west to the big bright green-room mirror of a city where the Elvis of the tearing energy softened into his own tribute act.

Everyone has something to say and mostly the needle of their concerns wavers freely between the culture of screens and endless money and the pure vs the neon Elvis. The best, as always, comes from the dissenters. Chuck D. reminds us that Elvis was just one of the origin points of rock and roll, that he promotes the cultural appreciation that Presley used so joyously, but that the playing field should surely be levelled by now. Will it, though. The fluid montage behind the chat and the testimony is increasingly coloured by imagery from the 2016 federal election and the towering pumpkin coloured freakshow who won stands tall as a clip from the near-death King has him at the piano singing in his pitch perfect velvetine passion the old standard Unchained Melody. Near naked dancers cavort in rains of money on game shows, swat teams shatter doors with rams, the towers fall and there is even a glimpse of the blinding mushroom of Los Alamos as Trump is announced to the throne room.

At one point Jarecki asks his father, driving in the car with him, what the latter thinks the film is about. His father bats the question back. Jarecki looks away but seems to think himself a memo to include this in the film.

MIFF Session 13: THE INSULT

Tony is watering the plants on his balcony. The water drains straight on to the street and splashes a building inspector and his crew. They knock on Tony's door and politely inform him that they will replace his illegal drain with a standard one and he slams the door on them. When they fix it up in what seems like record time Tony smashes the new drain. The building inspector calls him a "fucking prick". Oh, Tony is part of a far right Christian political party. The inspector, Yasser, is a Palestinian living in a refugee camp. They are in Beirut.

What begins as a spat about Tony expecting Yasser to apologise escalates, through various mistakes and bad turns into a major trial fomenting a national explosion point ready for a detonator. If it were only about the escalation this might be a satire fuelled by the touchy and dangerous politics of the middle east. But this is a tale of reconciliation and its often ill fitting components.

As the initial riotous hearing deflates both parties and they ready themselves for ever tougher combat we do get to know them and also that, as each is meticulous in stating the disadvantages of his adversary, both are acutely aware that the avowed basis of all of this is a verbal exchange on a street. The problem is that it does not stay there and broken ribs and a premature birth result. And there is the problem of the origins of the pain which precede the insult by generations and greater conflicts. The insult really is just a spark.

The cast have a field day with their roles, particularly the two combatants at the centre (a wide eyed and intense Adel Karam as Tony and a self possessed but pained Yasser played by Kamel El Basha) and the legal adversaries who render the central spat into the international incident it threatens to become Camille Salameh and Diamande Bou Abboud as the lawyers.

If there is a problem it is overstatement. The writing and performances carry us along without the potential awkward moments that might mar such a tale by giving in to easy emotionalism but there is just too much reinforcement of the rising stakes that the centre can get lost. What only just saves it is the infrequent off stage encounters between Yasser and Tony that add a refreshing complexity to their competition. More of this might have allowed it its own gravity. It works as it is but a taste more of the personal might have strengthened the momentum of the bigger picture.

MIFF Session 12: HAPPY AS LAZZARO

Lazzaro is the village gopher. Some might call him idiot but if he jumps to anything that anyone else tells him to do it is not with incomprehension. With his beatific glow and awkward gait he's a kind of Charlie Chaplin imagined by Raphael. He doesn't know who either of his parents are but has a grandmother (who is probably just the old lady that everyone calls Nona). Scene by scene we learn that these modern day farm workers are more like feudal serfs, bound to their land and tobacco crop by the local Maquisa and her family.

But even corrupt rustic idylls have a limit. The young Marquis stages his own kidnapping with the aid of Lazzaro which is cut short when an accident befalls the latter. When the police arrive to investigate the kidnapping they find the necker cube moving away from them: the peasant life is actually the horrific enslavement we were seeing.

When Lazzaro wakes from his unconsciousness it is decades later but he hasn't aged a day. We have already seen local religious postcards of saints and we have heard Lazzaro and the young Marquis call the wolves in their mountain isolation. When Lazzaro rises and goes looking for the people of his former life he finds things have changed beyond recognition but also that even the corruption of time and bitter experience need not mean the end of life. If he is a saint he is one tied to a landscape from millennia before, an Etruscan line, perhaps. In any case he seems destined for either of the ends that await the saintly: apotheosis or martyrdom.

This curious magical realist tale is given to us with heavy serves of both elements but, damn me, if it doesn't also feel as light as a feather. It's a kind of Bela Tarr homily rendered in the colours of Breughel and the daydreams of Cervantes. It is exactly what the bungled Jupiter's Moon from last year: a credible and acceptable tale of the power of simple goodness indebted to no particular religious party. Is there a faith based on the transference of human venality to the plain survivalism of the wolf? If there isn't I think it might have a case with this tale.

MIFF Session 11: THOROUGHBREDS

A billionaire belt of a Connecticut town. A teenaged girl stares down a horse. Her expression is unnervingly blank. A Gladstone bag from which she draws a large knife.

The same girl is admitted to a palatial home on a bright afternoon for private tuition with the daughter of the house, also a teenager, Lily. The lesson falls flat as the first girl, Amanda, reveals that she has no feelings and has spent her life faking joy, sadness etc. to get by until her deed with the horse and psychiatry caught up with her. The two establish (strike up is far too jolly) a friendship or rather rekindle one as it is revealed they had been friends at primary school. We are left to guess what changed that until adolescence. The girls' budding acquaintance is interrupted by Lily's stepfather Mark who is in his buff and managerial forties and looks upon both girls before him with something neither they nor we find easy. Add a local drug dealer too slow for girls like this and you have a plot ... about a plot.

Wait, haven't we already seen this in Tragedy Girls or Mean Girls or Heathers or even Ginger Snaps? Of course we have but each one that works (and this one does) sets its own table. Tragedy Girls added the manipulable narcissism of the screen-addicted generation, Mean Girls played like Restoration comedy in the Valley, Heathers was meant to be Kubrick's high school movie. What Thoroughbreds adds is a depiction of a generation so planned and eugenic and protected that symptoms of sociopathy look like chapter titles from a self help management book (the chapter cards, though not titled, that divide this film are not merely cute). These are the inheritors of the dot com me -first one percent whose endless houses (the scene of Lily searching for her mother is a long Scorsese-like tracking shot through rooms of so many decorative themes they look like a sample living installation) hold the future corporate monsters, capital pirates and pirates in the Capitol.

The deftly written dialogue between the girls could be by Harold Pinter and the flat perfection of its delivery plugs straight into the greatness of Heathers and its inheritors with performances from Anya Taylor-Joy with her terrifyingly too young face and the more earthy but unsettlingly deadpan Olivia Cooke as Amanda. The late Anton Yelchin contributes great comic pathos with his Tim the dealer and Paul Sparks (whose versatility has taken him from the giggling psycho in Boardwalk Empire to the tragic figure of House of Cards) is both intimidating and unironically hilarious as Mark.

Add a score made or parts of the orchestra misbehaving rather than an orchestral score (which it is but only technically) and you have a deadly black comedy more Trump-era ready than Tragedy Girls, and that's saying something. I hope that, unlike that undersung gem, that Thoroughbreds gets a proper post-festival release and reaches out to what is left of the cultists of cinema who have been starving around  the feeble braziers of Irreversible or Fight Club for too long. This is great cinema, lean and hungry. Offer yourselves, the joy is in the eating.

Oh, sorry, almost forgot: ;)


Screening notes: I don't have a problem with Comedy Theatre seating but that's because I like the front row and had only two companions-by-default to enjoy it with. I was able to nab a choc top from the anesthetic kiosk just before the screening and enjoyed the holy living hell out of the film. Tomorrow's session is on standby. Weep for me.

MIFF Session 10: NICO 1988

Not everybody gets famous. Of those who do, not everyone wants it. Of those not all of them get to choose what they are famous for. This story of the final years of an artist who is best known by a tiny fraction of her output from her earliest years. This is dealt with quickly as Nico, on the verge of a career reviving tour is seen fending off a persistent British radio interviewer's questions about the Velvet Underground. Imagine Cher still being asked about Sonny Bono.

Nico was in the Velvet Underground for one album and a few shows, imposed upon the extant group by their manager Andy Warhol. It's true that the three songs she sang on that record are classics and she put them in her sets to the end but she swiftly proved herself capable of highly individual and strong material of her own. Records like Desert Shore and The Marble Index are so different from even the first solo album made of songs by the likes of Lou Reed and Jackson Browne that it sounds like a different person making them. And twenty years after that it was still: so, tell me about the Velvet Underground. This film addresses the rest.

Nico or, as she is increasingly insisting, Christa Paffgen is introduced in middle age attempting to divest herself of a past she was only barely part of looking forward to playing live with a new band. She has her own continued opiate addiction and that of some of the band, as well as the awkward attentions of her road manager and the dodgy collaborators that resuming a live career on the bottom necessitates. But she is enjoying the freedom of this and the chance to perhaps remove the shackles of a cult notoriety she didn't pursue. We see her in serious rehearsal and live performance and what we see is the power of that lure of freedom. We might also know that the year 1988 is the year of her death, an everyday accident that might befall the humblest and plainest of us.

Front and centre Danish actor Trina Dyrholm gives us a Nico as much in control of her minute to minute life, noting the warm and cold spots in the rooms and crowds around her, who records the sounds of hot water services as well as the crashing tide as all sounds can be music and the elusive one she is chasing is from a memory and probably more a whole experience. Dyrholm's intensity doesn't omit humour and it is the humour of one who knows she can say anything abruptly and have it received as wit and observe the difference in that reception from person to person. She also, crucially, assumes all the vocal duties, sounding perfectly like Nico as she would have sounded off record, wailing iron high notes in Janitor of Lunacy and losing the low notes of All Tomorrow's Parties at a sound check. With a performance as committed as hers this can send real shivers.

This is a good point to praise the film for its realisation of a very authentic live sound. As the droning arrangements proceed we hear this bit of guitar and that of violin and the vocals come and go with the singer's microphone technique and the overall effect is that of slightly articulated mud which is the way every single gig (especially smaller venue ones) until advances in audio reproduction in the decades that came after the setting. With the camera often kept at punter-level the sense of being there is very strong. I would have to think hard of another movie that did that so well.

The notion of authenticity that drives the theme and chief character is extended to the use of the hard square of old video (a lot of it looks like it was shot on VHS or at least undressed hidef digital) where everything looks a little more real than is comfortable, just short of being ugly. And that's the point of it. Maybe now that the comfort zone of three more more decades catches up with artists who preferred to deliver their music with a minimum of contrivance and a contempt of legend, the punks, post punks and those who were always on the lonelier side of the margins. Don't get me wrong, we can learn from legends but we'll remember more profoundly the sudden revelations that can come from a conversation at a kitchen table. That's where this film is sitting. Come on in. Kettle's on.

MIFF Session 9: THE GREEN FOG

I discovered Guy Maddin through MIFF when I went via a hooky program synopsis to a showcase of his short films. If I hadn't let the cinema going fever slacken in the early '90s I might have caught his feature Careful at the Carlton Movie House (may she rest in peace), the only feature film of Maddin's to have got a cinema run of any length in Melbourne. Nevertheless, Maddin's dizzy blend of early cinema and his own take on magical realism and a goofy comedy style that strangely never got in the way of the graver aspects won me. I even survived the serious but pointless ballet Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary and made it all the way to the winning and wonderful The Saddest Music in the World. Since then it's been hit and near miss with me and Maddin with wonders like My Winnipeg but lengthy absurdist things like Keyhole that allow no handholds.

With 2015's The Forbidden Room a return to form I was very ready to see The Green Fog and did so this morning at the Forum. It's an approximation of Vertigo done via a quilt work of  other movies and tv shows set in San Fransico, passing through motifs like falling, kissing, surveillance, wire tapping etc. with an extra element of the fog of the title creeping into scenes at crucial moments.

A technique which at first seems a gimmick, removing the dialogue from scenes so that the shot reverse shot facial expressions seem to respond to each other becomes a visual motif rather than a joke but retains its comedy because it's funny every single time. When dialogue is used it's little more than an extension of this and serves to stretch things out. A lot of expert editing and matching allows us to disregard screen shape (from 1:37 to 2.35:1) and colour vs black and white.

So, it's a clip show heightened by a serious attempt at commenting on a cinema classic that made so much of its setting. Well, yes, but it's also a constantly funny exercise in juxtaposition. It's no accident that Guy Maddin's recent delving into installation art should make its way to his screens. I'm happy to wait for the next one. Perhaps missing the narrative era is best left to nostalgia and I should heed my own lessons about wanting favourite artists to be new but traditional at the same time.

MIFF Session 8: TIGERS ARE NOT AFRAID

Under the credits we hear a teacher asking her students about characters in fairytales. The answers come brightly: princes, witches, tigers, wolves .... The teacher then tells the class to use those characters to write their own fairy tale. Estrella writes hers about a prince who wants to be a tiger. As she narrates it we are taken to our second major character, Shine, a boy of about ten with a burn mark on the side of his face creeps up behind a gangster urinating in an alley. Shine quietly takes the man's phone which has fallen to the ground and is deft enough to also side the thug's pistol from its holster without alarm. The drunken man staggers off into the night. We return to Estrella as she is finishing her tale in the classroom just as gunfire shatters the peace. The kids hit the floor like they've been trained.

The class is dismissed for the day. Estrella walks calmly around the gangland corpse on the footpath that the police have covered with a carpet. As she crosses the road two rivulets of his blood stream on to the concrete, fuse and follow Estrella home like a worm which crosses her house's threshold and traces along the walls of the living room and rests at one of her mothers dresses hanging there where it spreads into a butterfly shaped bloodstain.

Estrella, still in fairytale mode, wishes her mother back with her. A shadowy figure crosses a doorway and a decaying hand reaches the girl from behind, a small swarm of flies passes over her head. Estrella flees the scene. She finds Shine's boy gang who jibe at her but Shine recognises her as the same kind of cartel created orphan that they are. Estrella, believer in the power of wishes even though hers all seem to turn disastrous, has net the prince who wants to be a tiger but must first remember to be a prince. This is a Mexico City with an underworld of orphans, living on pointless anger and survivalism amongst themselves let alone the thing that Shine and Estrella have  that brings the gang down upon them. Really, the only warmth will be found in the fairytale morality that the kids themselves must define and defend.

This brutal film maintains a constant balance between our unease at seeing children in such unsettling danger and our own wishes of miraculous delivery. The magical realist trope of the blood thread, newly murdered people appearing to Estrella as though still living (even to the extent of a plush toy given a kind of life) helps here but it is so resolutely uncute, so strongly ugly that Shine's mini manifesto that tigers are not afraid as they have already been through the worst actually feels comforting even when Estrella counters that the tigers themselves lost parents and their jungle home.

The gangster McGuffin does carry a little more than a plot driver and the tension lies in the convergence of it and the inner conflicts within the children's gang. Finally, when we witness the cataclysm we are less inclined to relief than a kind of mitigation of shock. We are at least given a kind of apotheosis in the closing sequence but we also know that however beautiful this might appear that the world that created it is savage, dark and endless. Can't look can't look away: a fascinating film,

MIFF Session 7: LOS SILENCIOS

As the murky dark is here and there revealed to be a rowboat approaching a jetty by night we might fancifully think of the River Styx. We should keep that thought. Although La Isla de la Fantasia is a real place, hanging between nationalities and statelessness near Columbia and Brazil, what we are about to see will be a strange mix of slice of life veracity and gently eerie supernature.

Amparo and her two children have fled the conflict in their native Columbia for refugee status on Fantasia and to lodge a reparation application for the loss of her husband and daughter in the war. The bureaucratic day-to-day seems disturbingly out of sorts with the warmth of her aunt's welcome and the steady progress she makes getting her son and daughter to the local school and a job for herself. As time progresses and her son Fabio takes up with the local drug thugs and her daughter Nuria is befriended by the daughter of the island's leader and is told by her that the dead might still be with them and can play tricks. Is the appearance of Nuria's father who meets her armed with a finger to his lips, real and if so what kind of real?

The suspension of the lives of the Islanders whose stilted houses put them only a little above the water suggests that the sense of some greater state, a kind of spreading irresolution between the urge to survive and the need to grieve is at work. One scene seems to bring the two sides together with people giving accounts of how the warfare has left them adrift from normal life, losing definition, half dead. Finally, it is a ceremony of departure that ties the threads into something workable with the dead marked from the living joining each other in a lament that brings us to the point of what has been a gentle but often perplexing hour and a half.

As much Werckmeister Harmonies as Uncle Boonmee, Los Silencios will, if you can find yourself in front of it, haunt you.

MIFF Session 6: OUR HOUSE

This is going to sound like a spoiler but it isn't. At one point about half way through this film a young girl Seri plants a plastic Christmas tree in the clay near a river, plunges a plug into the soil and the tree lights up. It didn't work at home. The thing is when you see it you are not surprised. This film is a measured feed of strange information in morsels so manageable that something like this feels natural, not dreamlike or surreal, natural.

We first meet Seri (around twelve years old) dancing with her friends at home. At one point she breaks away and kills the mood by turning on a light and asking if any of them heard the door opening. They hadn't. She shrugs and reignites the conversation about her upcoming birthday party.

We see her interact with her mother. They have been emotionally distant  since the loss of the father/husband and coexist in a kind of ongoing truce. The mother is seeing a man and it is getting serious. Seri has a child's resentment of this and her youthful spirit cannot be easily contained.

Then we enter what might be a different timeline or even a parallel universe as a woman wakes on a ferry in confusion. She gets up, with a few bags and walks aimlessly to the deck where she interrupts a younger woman who is on the phone. The latter, Toko, is concerned about the older woman who reveals that apart from her name, Sana, she has no memory of who she is or how she got there. Toko takes pity on Sana and invites her to stay at her house which we soon know is the same house as Seri and her mother live in.

The two women strike up an easy companionship. Sana goes out looking for work and tries to work out how to establish her identity and whether the gift wrapped box she's been carrying is for her or she bought it for someone else. We get strange information about Toko who might be involved in a kind of militant activism, belying the gentle demeanour we have already observed (there is the impression that the cause is benign, though).

Through a series of near collisions between the information spaces and the timelines/worlds we are kept constantly engaged, wondering how this will resolve. This might have been the stuff of an overextended short, the type that often plays at the Forum in the early afternoon at MIFF. However, the touch is so featherlight and yet so confident that we willingly let it guide us.

The director Yui Kiyohara comes with a pedigree that reached out and grabbed me when I read it in the program. She studied under the intriguing contemporary master Kyoshi Kurosawa whose strange career led him from pinku sex films to Yakuza dramas to some of the strangest horror cinema I've ever seen (concurrent with but not part of J-horror) to the odd social fables he's more recently been making. A title card announces this film is from the Graduate School of Film and New Media, Tokyo University of the Arts, where Kurosawa teaches. There were two ways to take that. I took the shut and and watch path and was rewarded. A lean eighty minutes of real depth and masterful handling of material that might either crash though the floorboards or blow away into the ether. More please.

Screening notes: a very happy nothing to report. Perfect seat at a perfect screening. I do wish the festival club were open for afternoon screenings but you can't have everything. This, at about half way might well be my pick of the fest.

MIFF Session 5: HERE TO BE HEARD - THE STORY OF THE SLITS

The origins of bands are messy. One of the things that documentaries about British punk bands repeatedly demonstrate is that they form like algae clusters on a microscope slide gathering and fraying in a tiny soup that looks just like them. The Slits have in their family tree associations with Sid Vicious, Joe Strummer, Mick Jones, Keith Levene, Budgie and well, everyone else who huddled around in that place at that time when the gigs were composed of whoever was playing and a crowd that looked just like them and ended up on stage however briefly themselves with the same lot out front. The Slits were the same except they were all female and shut everyone up by sounding just the same. It's when they developed and started recording (particularly the first two albums) that they were a band that sounded only like themselves.

This documentary, restless with film and video footage which flashes up in fragments between present day interviews with all original surviving members, fulfills all of the above. It's messy, knows it and knows it must be but it's also disciplined and, for all its constant motion, quite spare. When you've seen a few rock doccos you will know the last two words in the last sentence can only be a compliment.

The arc is described by the current day interviews which are not quite a long baton pass but come close and should. The players and their intimates tell the story and it forms as an emotional progression the way few rockumentaries really commit to (Right Here about the Go-Betweens is a marked exception). There is no real stardom to report beyond the recalled joy or admiration of those at the centre.

What am I trying to say? Well, maybe I should compare this to the significant films about the Sex Pistols or Joe Strummer. Most of those were done by Julien Temple whose record stands without need of further praise but they tend to give in to the frayed romanticism that the press both sympatico and hostile gave that band. The Slits generally got short shrift by comparison and it is telling that Tessa points out the ripped jeans she's wearing in one photo which were created by an unfan brandishing a blade while Ari Up was in the pants, who said: "Here's a slit for you." That's the difference. This is not a tale of infamy on the high seas of naughtiness, it's a report of violence. No cuteness, no laddish kudos, just hostility. That's the difference.

I loved The Slits when I heard Cut because I didn't get it. Like all music I eventually surrendered to after initially trying to reject it (like PiL, when younger, Revolution #9, Steve Reich, Adrian Sherwood, or early Swans) it both disturbed and intrigued me. That's what fascination is: can't look, can't look away. Emerging from the buzzsaw guitar three chord slogans the band made a scary and atmospheric album more by dub than Stooges with its own beats and language. All of that is here on screen. For that celebration and the final words of unaccredited band member exuberance I declare this to be an essential music documentary.


Screening notes: I winced at seeing that this session was on standby. I envisaged endless queues and a bad seat to one side of the front. Well, the line was already in by the time I got there (Regent crowd control take note) a little before screening time. I flashed my ticket with the app and strode through and found a pretty much prefect spot to one side of front row centre. Even the yapping folk behind me shut up as soon as the production badges showed up and there was no seat kicking. A near perfect screening which I almost dipped out from in despair. A lovely time had by all. Actually, that's true, such a united response. Can't get better than that, given the subject matter.

MIFF Session 4: THE EYES OF ORSON WELLES

Most documentaries about figures form cinema history are strangely boring, a lot of murmuring talk with clips to represent a medium that lives on its image engaging audience. That's why I was excited to see the Mark Cousins was helming this study of Orson Welles. Cousins, who made the mesmerising Story of Film a few years back, knows how to make a talk fest engaging: making the talk essential to a parade of images both on point and peculiar.

With a trove of Welles's own art from travel sketches, home made Christmas cards, film and stage production ideas, personal caricatures, and so much more, Cousins traces Welles's career by timelines as they loosely fit into chapters with the names of chess pieces, pawn, knight and king, and then a coda with a quote from Kenneth Tynan. As we see the development of the artist from his early travels, through his precocious radio and theatre production to Citizen Kane and beyond on film we are given Cousins' insights into the man and his art. From the grandeur of Kane's set pieces to the intimacy of his changing Santas on cards a Welles emerges that we might well have imagined but is here more fully realised than I've seen before.

Cousins, of course, knows his cinema and his use of motif is astute, if sometimes imposing. We return persistently to the photo I've included here; a young man thinking, head resting in a hand, accepting the projection of whatever conceit the filmmaker using the image wants. It's a touchpoint and we see it variously in detail in full, reminding us that we are being presented with an image and an idea as Cousins' narration in the second person addresses Welles himself.

More than any figure in 20th century cinema, Welles demands a broader canvas in his biography or critical appreciation if only to emphasise that this flawed master of the form considered it only one of the things he did and wrote in the 1960s that he thought film was a "dying, dying art". Cousins is determined to show us the need for examining the Welleses of the world and bids us in his gentle Ulsterman lilt to explore for ourselves. So, if you see this one don't go getting the blu-ray of Citizen Kane until you go foraging for something old and forgotten (there are many starting points in this film) and something new and unknown. You are part of the art you witness. So, if you smoke have a cigar and if you drink have a sip of cognac. You are you're own movie and should seek the company of others.



Screening notes: My first session at the Forum. It was packed at 1.30 pm on a week day! I sauntered in and my jaw dropped at the sight of the first two rows almost completely filled. I found a seat third from and had a fine old time. I like to exit left at the Forum as it allows a quick flyover of the lovely interior but even though the doors opened I was told by a teenaged vollie that they were um only letting people out the other door today. Miffed but philosophical I did as bade and filed out with the rest to the footpath on Russell where the wind was biting and the sky was grey. I got over my privation on the walk. There was a lot to ponder.

MIFF Session 3: GOOD MANNERS

Clara, poor, serious and skilled, wins the audition to be a rich woman's nanny when the latter's baby comes along. Meantime, would she mind hanging around to cook, shop and bear with? She moves in, finds her new employer a lot less privileged than she seemed, getting shunned by friends in boutiques and drinking alone like a teenager heading for a crash. Also, Ana, the rich one, sleepwalks. Not just to the fridge at midnight but into town to hunt for blood. Also, the two of them spark up a physical bond that soon turns to solid love. So, when the baby starts coming out - which might not be a baby at all according to Ana (who had consensual sex with what she doesn't realise was a werewolf) - Ana, Clara and we are in for a shock.

This tale of love across the barrier of death, and of a commitment to responsibility makes pointed use of the blend of a motherhood story and outright horror. Pointed because we are left in no doubt of Clara's sense of duty until the inevitable challenge to it forces her either way. If anything the mixing of media works well towards this. Ana's story of the conception is narrated over picture book illustrations that go beyond the childhood aura they suggest (which reminds us of her crudeness and oddly her innocence). There are two musical numbers which rise from the onscreen action rather than get presented as out of world set-pieces. It reminded me of nothing so much as magical realist stories which act like fairy tales here but break into violence there, adopting literary styles to match.

The presenter who introduced the screening name-checked Jacques Torneur (though, his boss Val Lewton would have been more accurate) but I was more reminded of the 1941 Wolf Man with its appeal to the central character's pathos. Also, one of the finest goes at the sub genre Ginger Snaps with its collision of high school and werewolf. In both of those cases we arrive at the tightened third act expecting violence but receiving tragedy. Here we get a potential reconciliation but it's just as loaded as those examples.

At two and a quarter hours the middle act could use a lot of trimming to avoid overstatement and repetition but what we do get is still a strong fable of finding the right thing to do when that is the hardest thing to do.



Screening notes: Got to ACMI in good time to just swan in and take a good seat centre of the third row. Not more than about half capacity and most of them packed into the back. The presenter read out a well written introduction to the film addressing the queer, genre, race and class elements and invoked the name of Jacques Torneur which was pleasing if not entirely satisfying a comparison. And then, having read it out, fled to the exit to our light applause. Some annoying titters at moments by people who seem sociopathically detached from the emotional weight of what they were seeing broke out a few times but didn't decline into a chain of guffaws. Overheard among the crowd as we filed out, a man to his companion: "That bit where (deleted) happened it just lost me." Well, what the hell were you doing there, goose, the synopsis was pretty clear that that might be on the cards. Anyway...

MIFF Session 2: WILDLIFE

1960. Young family the Brinsons, Jerry Jeanette and young Joe, move into a small Montana town following Jerry's next job, a country club gopher/groundskeeper. He's well liked by the club's guests but his boss catches him fraternising a little too closely for comfort (Jerry has joined a bet with two of them) and he's fired. Jeanette is restless and needs something to do beyond the housewife role. Joe is slow to fit in at school and isn't enthusiastic about having to be in the football team. Things tighten in the house as Jerry keeps drawing blanks at job hunting. There are fires in the nearby mountains and they are approaching. Finally, Jerry signs on as part of the firefighting team and leaves town. Jeanette, already on edge, gets a job as a swimming instructor where she takes one client's progress and attentions too far and has an affair. All this is watched with increasing frustration by Joe who tries like an antibody to shape himself around the increasingly dark and disappointing acts of grownups.

So, it's Joe's story. He gets the fewest lines but his huge absorbent gaze fills him with the world and his powerlessness to change it. This is also a story of waiting. The fires hang low over the town's daily thoughts. Perhaps they'll be quenched by the coming winter's snow or rage beyond human control and raze the town and all of its venal and venereal squalor. Jeanette takes Joe on a trip to the fire front and he looks at a burning hillside in awe that might be fear of the devastation or a plea for it to get on with it.

The literary film is as old as cinema and this one joins a long and ragged line, with outstanding literal examples like The Tin Drum or bizarre companion pieces like Naked Lunch. Between those two points there are many, many, many growing up stories and most of them are slow and affectless. A very few like To Kill A Mockingbird hit bullseye targets with every scene and carry the weight of a great read. Wildlife almost makes it to the border of Mockingbird country.

Ed Oxenbould's Joe has an arc that occurs entirely in his head. It's his understanding of what he sees and his binding dependence we see pushing him to acts of escape. Dano has wisely chosen against the device of narration, choosing instead to let the young actor establish a dialogue with the audience. Considering how tightly he frames the actors in this film of characters that's a big job but Oxenbould brings it home. Then, when you have the strength of Carrie Mulligan and Jake Gyllenhaal to create the torment and strain, young Ed had better make sure his face is readable. Not a moment of performance feels wrong here.

That's the next thing. This is the directorial debut of an actor. These can work ( Charles Laughton's Night of the Hunter) or they can be over performative (Robert Duvall's The Apostle) or they can be a showcase for every movie trick in the book to show how cinematic the actor really is (George Clooney's abysmal Suburbicon). Wildlife mercifully introduces and maintains a straightforward plainness of style, admitting the great beauty of the plain and mountain setting but really concentrating on the interplay of performances in settings. A pity then that the repetitive nature of much of the narrative results in an outstayed welcome, a film whose power is left to fend for itself against a dourness unrelieved by humour. Its hundred and four minutes felt like two hours or more.



Screening Notes: Once again into the magnificence of the Regent Theatre for the second (and final) time this fest. The queue curled just around Russell St but was moving so briskly by the time I reached it that I as well joined it as walk beside it. I found a front and centre seat easily with no one behind me and only one other on the row. Ed Oxenbould was present and introduced the film and took questions for twenty minutes afterwards, revealing some fun facts and interesting choices by Dano (who, rightly cut all scenes of Jerry at the fire, allowing the sense of waitingmore strength) and proved himself an admirably articulate and effortlessly charming seventeen year old (God, that makes me sound ancient but it comes from my own memory of being that age). What had been a shining and cool morning had become a steel grey, damp and freezing afternoon. Well, Melbourne, winter, MIFF :)

MIFF Session 1: COLD WAR

Right, so you're in Poland just after WWII and you're driving around the farmlands recruiting young and beautiful peasant folk for a morale boosting song and dance review to tour the land and help the big rebuild. It's not the first audition but it's the only one that day that breaks though and it's given by a luminously beautiful girl who claims her song came from a Soviet musical. She also seems a touch too urban for the brief but love at first sight can find a way and does.

If anything the affair only fuels the passion on stage and the show is a strong success. It's not love that gets in the way it's the great overarching mediocrity of officialdom. How about a few songs on collectivised agriculture and maybe a reel or a ditty about Comrade Stalin might be thoughtful. The guy, Wiktor, plans an escape when the troupe play Berlin. He goes to the rendezvous and waits  while she steels herself at an afterparty and drinks through it. He drags himself through the pre-wall checkpoint and heads for Paris. He swings it up at jazz clubs and composes for horror movies while she high kicks it back home with the chorus from Stalin! The Musical. 

This fable of life decisions might be seven hues of dire if it weren't for the increasing complexity that renders each subsequent reunion of the lovers as they variously marry or shack up with the almost yous to hand. The song from the audition was a post war standard in Poland and plays as a plaintive motif of longing and regret throughout the film, surviving Soviet choruses, folky solos, slinky smoky jazz renditions or ad hoc a capellas. You might be reminded of Scorsese's criminally overlooked New York New York. The characters claim a famous song which serves as their own personal theme.

Pawel Pawilkowski who gave us the quietly powerful Ida shoots again in deep black and white, the near-square frame of academy ratio and gives us the sound in mono or damn near mono. Moments of official punishment or the world's torments that typified the time are entered but noticed rather than dwelt on. The focus is kept strongly on the two players and how their love endures through some difficult changes of character often enforced by the lovers themselves. While this might have collapsed into lightness the insistence on intimacy prevents this. The Cold War of the title is, of course, a personal one.

Just as Ida looked and behaved like it was made in the same post war era, coming across like an Eastern Bloc new wave, but expressed a sharp hindsight, Cold War wants us to walk around in the days of style and oppression but not to live there. He has something more timeless on his mind.  

Screening notes: The Regent is most welcome back to MIFF. The queue reached the Russell St intersection. I waited near the entrance until it was almost all in and happily found a front left row seat after everyone else had shuffled in. The screen did look a tad skewed but one advantage of 4:3 ratio is that this is far less a problem than it would be if the film had been in 'scope (I wonder if contemporary cinema seating schemes are still based on that ratio with some very recently designed cinemas have seats absurdly close to the screen but ridiculously far to either side). Audience was well behaved (though the odd shouter at the back had some issues of which I remain happily ignorant) but coughing was choral. An early precaution to pick up a hand sanitiser will continue to pay off. Good God, am I really that old now?