MIFF Session 2: IN FABRIC

A divorcee re-enters the dating scene in a dress that kills. I'm not being figurative, the garment attacks people and you should see what it does to washing machines. Through a series of spoilable events it ends up in the possession of a washing machine repairman whose droning technical summaries send the people he's talking to into subsexual trances. The sales staff speak like vocal installation art. One says, when sensing a customer's reluctance: "The hesitation in your voice is soon to be an echo in the recesses of the sphere of retail."

Peter Strickland's new film is a clear progressive step on from the creepy world of Berberian Sound Studio and the severe one of The Duke of Burgundy. It's a progressive step because there's more and stranger. Just as we might think we have his M.O. down he gives us something else set in a familiar bed of absurdity and sensuality. Sometimes the dress's malevolence is funny but at other times, suspended in the dark above a sleeper, it's genuinely eerie. The coven-like sales women seem to animate the shop's mannequins (in one instance with functioning organs) but can also freeze into inanimate stupors themselves. Blended into this are many moments of perfectly credible workaday moments like the closeted meetings with the duo of middle managers and -- and far too much else. Oh, one thing I need to report is the ASMR aspect. The scenes in the boutique have an extraordinary sound mix or murmuring shoppers that is only just loud enough to be noticeable. At first I thought it was people in the audience.

After all that cramming the screen with big artsy worthiness, is there much else? Well, that's it but it's also one of the most thoroughly entertaining films I've seen for years. One thing Strickland never forgets is the spoonful of sugar. It's necessary. One aspect of this is the beautiful partially electronic score by Cavern of Antimatter which recalls Morricone's '70s thriller music. Another is the mix of performance styles from kitchen sink to stylised. And somehow it all works.

Strickland introduced the screening which began with a short film he had made as part of an anthology. Cobbler's Lot is an adaptation of a Hungarian folktale which, while not silent, has intertitled dialogue and a look somewhere between Powell and Pressburger's early technicolor and Guy Maddin's antique cinema that never was.

I also went along to an interview/Q&A session with him in which he managed to illuminate a few shadows. While the interviewer (an esteemed Melbourne cinema academic) often obstructed the flow of his responses, the questions from the audience seemed to animate him and his replies took on a lot more warmth and enthusiasm and without the audience members interrupting him his accounts of things like actor preparation and stylistic choices were at last lucid and rounded. A lovely appendix to what might well be my pick of the Fest.

MIFF Session #1: THE DUKE OF BURGUNDY

A young woman rides her bicycle through lush European countryside. She arrives at an impressively ancient manse and rings the bell. After a brief pause an older woman answers and says: "you're late." She leads her visitor into the study and forbids her to sit, commanding her instead to clean. Later, the maid presents herself in front of her mistress who is busily typing but pauses to tell her that she hasn't finished everything, there is still her underwear to wash by hand. This sequence ends in a way that disspells all notion of employment agreements and soon proves a ritual. The body of this film examines that ritual, the agreement at its centre and the effects upon it and the women of change and stress.

Writer/director Peter Strickland who gave us the extraordinary Berberian Sound Studio and (for the explorers among us) Katalin Varga now presents us with something we think we are going to comfortably predict. His devotion to the transgressive cinema or Europe's 1970s is delivered to us like a creamy Brandy Alexander in a vintage glass; as we clear the enigmatic lingering tableau and the unctuous Rome 72 song whispers and gleams we are treated to a series of beautiful motion into freeze frame and collage images that hint at what is to come. Even the font used for this credit sequence makes us feel warm and loved.

But Strickland is not a Tarrantino. His retrospective eye is less attracted to the cuteness of the past than its continued powerful utility. The look and feel of 70s Eurosploitation is strong and flavoursome but it also calls attention to what we are seeing without more distraction than this comfort will allow. Even the fact that the whole town seems populated by intense female entomologists, suggests a heightened level of control (it's also intentionally funny). Neither the lesbianism nor the bondage and discipline are offered to titilate or alienate. We are here to watch what happens in a closed system in much the same way that its characters observe their insects on slides and in display cases.

But if that were the sole point of this piece it would rapidly lose its puff. There is far more here being said about intimacy and boundary. This aligns it far more strongly with the severity of Persona, the spookiness of Three Women or the hard verbal pugilism of Butley than the playful confrontation of Vampyros Lesbos or Lizard in a Woman's Skin. We follow these women because their story compels us, even as it seems to be composed almost entirely of a single routine. At the final shot you will already feel the resonance and it will follow you home.

Katalin Varga gave us a revenge film that focused on the act's quandries rather than acknowledged them by regulation. Berberian Sound Studio invited us in to a man's complete absorption into something that disgusted him. The Duke of Burgundy shows a filmmaker whose strengths transcend his aesthetic festishes to allow him to make such things that both give succour and unsettle. Strickland's retro stylings aren't like Tarrantinos. Where QT comes on like a tribute band, Strickland is more like someone who loves old Merseybeat bands but floods it in electronica because it feels better that way. Strickland, the musician, has commissioned a beautiful score that while eclectic also feels bespoke. I'll be Googling Cat's Eyes after I sign off on this review. Yum!

Next, please, Mr S.