MIFF Play #9: WHETHER THE WEATHER IS FINE

A weather report animation of a typhoon gives way to a satellite image of it which gives way to a scene of the devastation it left. A teenaged boy is sleeping on the splinters and rubble of a house. Around him are corpses already going grey. He rouses and gets his bearings, visibly disgusted by some prayers droning nearby. He wanders to his old place where his girlfriend catches up to him before they both wander off, he's concerned about his mother and Andrea, girlfriend, just wants to get one of the evacuation ships that will take them to safety in Manila. They track down Norma, Miguel's mother, and find she's happy to get to the boat but must first connect with her estranged husband. Together then very much apart, the trio wends its way through a landscape of natural disaster, beset by thieving children, religious groups whose worship ranges from the quietly dignified to the crassly showbiz, and masses of screaming pain and need.

Writer/director Carlo Francisco Manatad lived through the super typhoon Yolanda when it hit Tacloban where this story is set. He had wanted to make a film about his experience immediately but circumstances forbade the production until 2021. I would bet that the time in between gave him hourly opportunities to think about what he had lived through and how he might best paint it on to a cinema screen. What we see here is a strangely mellow surface given to the cataclysm's aftermath in which the people act almost as they might if it hadn't happened but are making their way around its damage. It also suggests Manatad had the time to develop an approach that remained light enough to allow tints of satire here, magical realism there, and an overall compassion for the people who lived through the same.

Daniel Padilla as Miguel gives us an everyman who understands the extremity of the situation and the measures that survival might demand but stops short of Andrea's impulsive violence and self entitlement. He sees her amorality and eventual bizarre elevation with equal bewilderment. Charo Santos-Concio brings the weight of the world to Norma whose determination to mend the breach between her and her husband transcends thoughts of her own survival and even present wellbeing, the results of which are quietly poignant. Around them, this film plays and rolls like a gentle, warm dream where the violence hurts but the will to live levitates. An odd and oddly moving piece. 

MIFF play #8: DOMINGO AND THE MIST

Domingo wanders through his days in his small Costa Rican village, tending to his dairy cows and talking to the others about whether they will sell their land to the developers who are building a highway through the district. One by one, the villagers succumb, taking the money and leaving, persuaded by a gang of thugs hired to help negotiations with nocturnal violence. Domingo plans to stand his ground, regardless of the apparent futility of it, and turns to his own firepower for help. Throughout these events, he is visited at night by a mist that crawls through the door or seeps between the wooden slats of his house which he talks to as his deceased wife and who sometimes talks herself.

This solid example of slow cinema takes more than a leaf out of the book of retired Hungarian master Bela Tarr in using long takes of characters walking, sitting or working as the audience is implicitly invited to project thoughts on to them. Domingo knows his reckoning will come and hears the gunshots and explosions happen around him like footfalls coming his way. Through an insistence on the limits of this enclosed small world with its fresh green jungles and plain but clean houses we are left with the choice the characters face as the sole question of their lives and that the world beyond this one will be a step downward. Domingo's wife, her voice increasingly dour as the mist, offers no comfort beyond the invitation for him to join her.

If you were to expect a raging plot of David vs a corporate Goliath with a big final showdown, this approach would drag but this film is all about the days that stretch and the approach of their end, whether it be through taking the package or giving into an accelerated mortality. And if we feel frustration at Domingo's stubborn stance, if we think it's the nightly spirits he barters from the local moonshiner, or more plainly, the life he has made his own here in the mountains, spare, simple, arduous but satisfying his situation has proven impossible to resolve without force. This is how the even pacing works so well, here, the days, the work and the natural beauty offer no acceptable alternative. The movie, beautiful to see and terrible to contemplate, is the message.

MIFF Play #7: HIT THE ROAD

A small family goes on a cross country drive. Middle aged parents, the man with a leg in a cast in the back, a young adult brother and a pre-teen one, and a dog making his way through his last days. It's Iran so when the wife turns around to her husband and says, "I think we're being followed," it might be something more than a road trip. So, while each one of them has different ideas about what they are doing they are more or less united but that doesn't mean it is going to run smooth. Each relationship within the four has its quirks and when numbers are added to cross each of those lines there are more nuances, rules to break or maintain, and communication to celebrate. The occasion is a sobering one but there's a lot of life just in this care to get in the way of that.

Road movies are dialogue and character and, though a series of pared back mini two-handers we are given the narrative arc and the family history. The mother has a photo album of her eldest son's urine stains from his infancy but the attempt at jollity by her only has him quietly weep at the wheel. The manic little boy's imagination is explosive but he has to be restrained from kissing the ground at each stop. Has the father's time in a leg cast gone beyond its real usefulness? The opening shot is of the younger boy playing the little keyboard someone has drawn on the cast, the correct notes of the piano piece that is playing on the score. There are frequent sudden songs, deliberately mimed in appearance a la Pennies from Heaven. What there isn't, to any dangerous degree, is the kind of sentimentalist whimsy of something like Little Miss Sunshine, even though the film does get very quirky. There is the sense that it has what it needs.

By no means a simple or simplistic tale, Hit the Road's leanness shines brightest when it does attempt something closer to cosmic like the father and son dialogue that morphs into a spacewalk. We know that most of it has stayed closer to a verite style family outing in the dust of the road or the mist of the mountains. And when loss and mortality take the stage it feels quietly inevitable rather than sudden and grasping. This was taken off the menu from last year's festival so it was wonderful to see it appear here. As it happens, it's out in select cinemas this week. Do yourself a favour.

MIFF Play #6: Petrol

Eva, a film student, is recording some seaside sound at a rocky beach and comes across a group of young folk performing a vampiric looking ritual. Unseen, she retreats, intrigued by the central figure, a woman, who utters something that might be profound. Eva encounters the mystery woman again, back in town and has opportunity to introduce herself (via returning a dropped necklace) to Mia and the two start a friendship. Eva's life is happy enough but she craves the intrigue of Mia's demi-monde and infiltrates it, encountering a number of carboard bohemians moving around in a quantum vortex of the finest hooey.

The problem this film faces has less to do with its attempt at introducing a lot of ideas about coincidence and attraction than it has to do with the fact that the centre of narrative gravity is played by such a black hole of charisma. Mia, intended to be darkly intriguing, occasionally looks interesting but mostly murmurs deepities as though she's trying to remember what was on a lost shopping list. Eva is played with conviction but it only exposes how little it must take to fascinate her.

The film is beautifully shot and gives Melbourne a gorgeous turn but when you're noticing that more than caring about the tale you're probably also checking the time on your phone. The title, I think, refers to how petroleum looks like multicoloured shimmers when seen in a puddle. If that's the way Eva sees Mia we don't get to share the vision. There is a twist that is deliberately telescoped but, as low as I regard this film, I will not spoil it. That's it. Not for me.

MIFF Play #5: THE LONELY SPIRITS VARIETY HOUR

Neville Umbrellaman is starting his cool vibe home broadcast show, playing all the cues himself and cooing smooth DJ style into a microphone, introducing guests and philosophising. Then we see in an early scene that he is actually in a coma. The rest is more of both.

There is very little in the way of universal humour. You could point to the natural humour of the real world where ironic mistakes are made or physical falls taken. When it comes to more conceptual fare, one person's gold is the next person's grind. We might know perfectly well it's meant to be funny but we simply don't laugh, at or with. That's the case here; it took minutes for me to fear that I was in for a feature length movie of try-hard grind. Spoiler: I was right.

I kept thinking, even for a whimsical style like this there has to be a moment of conflict, something to prevent it from levitating out the window in a waft of invisible vapour. Then came the scenes at the hospital which are well played. Two other well performed moments happen with the radio show guests who talk about bread (works because, despite the goofy accent it's delivered seriously) and the dance with signing (works because its motive feels sincere). Everything else depends on how well you get along with the protagonist who is on screen for over 90% of the running time, relaying a never ending series of piffling cutesy drivel. If you could wrest a speck of charm from his performance you would like this movie. For my part I have seldom experienced seventy-seven minutes as three hours as I did with this.

Then, at some point, I realised as all this repeatedly fell flat on its face on screen, it probably would work really well live on stage. The energy of the performers and the shifting bubble between them and the audience would lift this immensely. That is the origin of this piece. But on film it just feels contrived and indulgence-begging and the physicality of the performances is marred constantly by overperformance. You won't see mugging and gurning like this outside of an old I Love Lucy episode. I do imagine there are people out there who would warm and even thrill to this but for me it ground into my wince.

MIFF Play #4: 2000 WEEKS

Will is thirty, married with child, and a professional writer. He's doing ok except the twenty-something woman he's having an affair with, his berating father, and the old university chum back from success in the U.K. are all reminding him that he really only has about two thousand weeks left of his life to do something more than exist. Time to do some thinking. For the next ninety or so Chabrol-like monochrome minutes we tag along with him and discover the difference between what is important to him and what he just claims is important while challenges from those quarters mentioned earlier move in.

Tim Burstall's debut feature has long been considered a lost gem of Australian cinema, a late sixties personal, urban story surrounded by a scattered few backward-looking moving postcards. I only knew it as a couple of stills in a film history book back at Griffith Uni. I encountered a very few others who were aware of it and the question of whether any of us had actually clapped eyes on it was one of those queries that you'd try like randomly buying a scratch lotto ticket (and always drew a blank). In the early eighties when the first stirrings of Australian movies with contemporary urban settings were appearing as a standard after half a decade of period dramas, and classic novel adaptations, the notion of an Ur film was enticing. But it was nowhere to be found.

And now, finally part of a MIFF lineup, how does it stand up? The first thing to note is its dating. The shooting style of high contrast black and white, post synched dialogue spoken with plummy accents and overstated drama put it one notch above the tv drama of the time. The Don Burrows flutey jazz score could be from any melancholy late swinging London tale of soft disillusionment. However, the central notion of realising one's youth before its gone is always with us and as an account of that it works a treat.

Mark McManus as Will gives us a character delighted and disturbed by his privileges and challenges. David Turnbull as the overbearing Noel Oakshot is a type Burstall would have known well, back from mighty Blighty to lord it over all the colonial commoners with a little success and borrowed sophistication. He's here to disrupt for fun and appears later in Burstall's career in the form of a chiding by a working class figure to the aging lefties in Don's Party where his type and ambitions are exposed as vanity. Jeanie Dryan as Jackie Lewis, Will's extra marital love interest plays a woman looking further than the void of being the affair of a man with only a few promises galloping toward a grey midlife. Eileen Chapman as Will's wife gives a tolerant but wising up middle class woman. Michael Duffield as Will's father overacts his angry patriarch from his hospital bed and from fraught flashbacks, but even this does the job.

At other moments we can see where the sympathy for the aging angry young man is given one too many breaks by his creator when in more recent fare he would more rightly be left ashamed. But that is key to understanding this character piece; it is of its time and unapologetically so. You'll find the same in the early plays of David Williamson (who collaborated serially with Burstall in the seventies. If it is a young urbanite's story then at least it admits it. The glimpses into the freedom of others that the central figure's selfishness would stifle prevent this from being the kind of rallying cry for young men that was still in the offing on stages and screens at the time. So, while not the great Ur text the younger version of me hoped for but neither the washout it might have been. Glad to have finally seen it. 

MIFF Play #3: THE LOST CITY OF MELBOURNE

Melbourne was built up from its rustic start to a gold rush opulence with city streets that buzzed with life overseen by magnificent architecture that matched ornate Victorian style with the best stone of the local quarries. The city boasted a thriving theatre scene that was housed in splendour and then extended it to the early and enthusiastic adoption of cinema (a map has them dotting the landscape like 7/11s do now). But everything changes all the time. At the approach of major events like the 1956 Olympics the Victorian era look was considered cringeworthy against the kind of steel and glass towered metropolises of the U.S.A. and elsewhere. By contrast ol' Marvellous was getting daggy. Enter the nemesis of dag that was the wrecking industry and money to pour into skyscrapers and decades of destruction were gone before the thought of preservation sparked up. From then the path was trod with care between two screaming forces.

This love letter to the history of a city is rich with archival imagery and anecdotes. Ken Burns slides share the screen with animated sketches, talking head experts and moments from the film record. If you live in Melbourne (as I do) you will marvel and perhaps be virtually slapped by what was and what was lost. And there are the characters like E.W. Cole (of the funny picture book fame whose mission was the spread of literacy, not just making a pound) the Whelan wrecking business whose workers put on shows of bravura high rise risk for lunchtime oglers. A sobering interview between Whelan Jr. and a young Barry Humphries gives way to the gradual momentum of the notion of preservation which seems to be the only reason why we still have landmarks like The Astor or The Windsor.

The pace is maintained and the tone kept light but there is a real depth being delivered here. By the final montage of the old and new with some bow-tying narration we feel we have peered into daily lives, witnessed visions in stone, gasped at their demolition and thought about the toll of time. And that's from a documentary about buildings. The cinema screenings for this were sold out and I wasn't going to risk going into a viral wonderland so saw it at home. But, boy would this be a treat at one of the remaining Melburnian picture palaces.