MIFF Session 5: Blackbird: Suffer the little Goths....

There are a few scenes in the middle of this film which show its protagonist, Sean, reading Franz Kafka's The Trial. I normally dislike obvious references like this but this time it works well by being poignant rather than merely clever. Sean, 16 year old schoolboy in provincial Canada, wakes one morning like Joseph K to find himself arrested.

He was bullied at school by the hockey team alphas and worked out his vengeance by posting it on his blog, the whole scenario. Scenario means plan to the cops and the legals who shine atomically in their community for preventing another Columbine. Faced with copping a  plea and a slap on the wrist or going to trial and clearing himself, Sean goes hard with the latter. In juvenile detention where he reads Kafka he is bullied with greater force and less hope of protection. When the trail date is postponed and he looks at months more of this he follows his hotshot lawyer's advice and cops a plea. Slapped on the wrist and given a restraining order for twenty-seven people, he is freed. That's when his trouble starts.

Out in the free world he must navigate his legitimate path carefully or risk either more prison or less official and less limited retribution. He only wrote a blog post. There was an arsenal of weapons in his house but they belonged to his father. Out hunting in an early flashback he aims a rifle at a deer who suddenly looks like an unkillable pet. He has no trouble iphone-ing the gutting and the resulting viral video is everywhere. He's a goth, self-described, spiked leather jacket with an inverted red pentagram painted on to look like it was drawn with blood. No one is going to believe he would leave it at a blog post.

I say the trouble starts after prison because something happened early on that lifted this film from a paranoia fest or a copy of Gus Van Sant's Elephant. In the midst of this grim naturalism comes a Romeo and Juliet story that defies belief and its suspension, making us shut up until we see it working. Sean, social leper, is the infatuation of Deanna, GF to the hockey team captain. Through the roll call of extreme differences between them is an effortless intelligence that they are not seeing anywhere else. As I say, this takes a bit of doing but that it does comes down to this film's primary strength: performance.

Alexia Fast makes Deanna and her attraction to Sean believable by showing how difficult it is for her to express it. She easily snubs him in front of friends after they have communed in private, knowing the agony it will cause him. Her arc is a very subtle quest for her own strength. She really does have to give up her popularity if she pursues him and the pain of that is there in her playing. It's a fragile but impressive turn.

Connor Jessup (who could be Scarlet Johansen's twin brother) is the centre of gravity here. This is a film about suffering. Jessup takes his victim from its awkward imbalance of anger and fear into the coldest corners of isolation, never more than a teenager, never less than intelligent. You know that Sean is not going to reverse his fortunes in a single explosive act like an American hero, he's going to have to work it. It's telling that the climax of this film involves him delivering a single short line into a courtroom microphone. There is a quaver in his voice but it is the surrender of fear rather than an expression of it. There is no sudden uproar in the court. He's made his decision and the rest is process and data entry but the moment is a proof.

Blackbird is a quiet piece but that is possibly the most efficient way of showing suffering as a first world phenomenon. It's not without it mainstream concessions but that it can transcend them with such restraint while keeping a firm hand on solid narrative and compelling action is testament to its worth. If you look up Connor Jessup at the imdb you'll find a dizzying rap sheet of achievement for an under twenty. Are we looking at another Brit Marling? Maybe. By the time he utters Sean's (and the film's) final line we know he's earned something.

MIFF Session 4: Rhino Season.

Missed it. Ill.

MIFF Session 3: THE EAST: Infiltration

The voice of a confident young woman recites a litany of balance to the 1%'s muscle, the corporations. "If you pollute our lives we'll pollute yours. If you spy on us we'll spy on you," and so on. A unit of balaclava-ed activists scale the walls of a modern mansion and pour sludgy oil retrieved from a dumping site in the ocean into the ducts of the house. CCTV footage shows it oozing through the vents of the luxurious rooms. This is the work of The East, an anti-corporate terrorist group.

In a decidedly clean and corporate office complex, Jane Owen heads through security barriers and clouds of coffee-clutching office lifers to her interview with the boss, the woman who plucked her from her nascent career in the FBI to work for this private corporate black ops company. Jane's got the job. Bye bye, hubby, it's off to live as a wandering freegan and infiltrate. Her moment comes up and she allows circumstance to work for her and by hook and crook she's in.

From this point on the film splits between its mainstream duties as a genre piece and the deeper themes this filmmaking team have already proved ready for in previous work. Infiltration movies like Donnie Brasco or The Departed depend on the lead's ability to render their acceptance by a sub-society hostile to them. We've seen so many of these on screens great and small that it takes a lot for a character to do this. They have to get past us before any crypto group has their turn. If this isn't dealt with then there has to be something else on the film's mind that can allow too easy an entrance. So how does The East do?

Not bad, as it happens but keeps some cards close to its chest until the end. While there is real work put into the infiltration scenes we move on to the realm of acceptance a little too swiftly. And then there is the issue of Jane (undercover name Sarah) reappearing at the right time to take part in each new action (called jams) and being absorbed without question. There is extra work applied to the sustenance of this trust but no one seems to twig. This is twisted in the final act and makes sense but creates a distracting tension before that moment.

Now I'm going to do something I loathe when others do it and question consistency of character. The dinner scene at the The East's headquarters involves a test. We have already seen Jane praying with her crucifix necklace in her hand and listening to Christian radio in the car. I knew the story that the test is based on, it's a common modern parable used by holy rolling preachers and muffin-fattened Roman bishops alike. There is no way she wouldn't have known it. Is her puzzlement at the setup good acting on the character's part or are we really meant to accept that her response is ingenuous? She does use her reaction creatively in the following scene which leads to think the filmmakers just liked the test scene's reveal and the opportunity for Jane's further ingratiation. Anyway...

So, Jane as Sarah infiltrates the East and we meet the gang and hear their ideas and travel with them on a jam. There's a lot of plot covered in that but the more I think about this film its thematic work over its narrative. The latter is clear and constant, this is not a slow film and it keeps the political thriller aspects visible but what it does more seriously is examine the thinking of one of the oppressor's agents and how it changes and develops and to what extent (that's for the third act so no details here). And this is where I have to talk about these mysterious "filmmakers" I've been mentioning. First, Brit Marling.

Brit Marling's story is a good one. She emerged from acting school with the notion of creating good roles for herself through writing and selling the scripts along with herself. Armed with an aristocratic beauty that would grace any Hollywood screen and a clear intelligence that seems unmaskable and would prevent her taking the lead in any rom com, she already had assets. But her scripts had ideas and, working closely with the directors she interested in the projects, managed to weave those in with a kind of cinema that looked indy but had plot and characterisation that wouldn't threaten the hardest lined mainstream adherent.

Another Earth takes an old sci-fi proposition and wraps it around a strong story of redemption. The Sound of My Voice took time travel and used it for an elaborate trust tale (it's also an infiltration movie). There's a spookiness to those pieces that is carried into The East quite effortlessly and it's also subject to its own premise: this entire film is an act of infiltration. With a cast that includes James Franco (here with big specs and beard that makes him look like a young Coppola), Alexander Skarsgard as a quietly tortured founder, and a firey Ellen Page whose extra zeal is explained in a few scenes both angering and heartrending. Patricia Clarkson is a terrifying iceberg as the private enterprise spy queen. Dig? Marling and director Zac Batmangli are getting high proilfe casts now.

The mainstream is accepting their perfomance in tests. There is little if anything new about the aesthetics of their films or anything to challenge Hollywood the way Blair Witch did. But with a 70s movie brat's confidence with narrative and the warm swelling anger of a young Jane Fonda, they are making their way into the big room. Jane (or is she Sarah) stares out at us in the final frame of the film as though she has emerged from a freshly landed independent pod. She has more to offer. Are we ready?

I am

MIFF Session 2: JIN: Babe in the Cradle of Civilisation

The most beautiful vision you have seen of a vast cloud bank pouring over a mountain range in a cascade slow enough and so easy on the eye that it feels like a dose of codeine when you need one. A stag in a field, the camera recording the glorious complexity of its coat. A forest. A lizard on a bough. A snake winding about its life. A turtle grinding through another day. Through the rich green leaves of a bush we see a red bandana and a human eye peering through the foliage. An explosion. Tearing blasts of automatic weaponry batter the trees. The story of Earth in about ten minutes. We are witnessing nature, even the bullets.

In one of the many caves you'l  see on screen beautiful 17 year old Jin listens to a fellow Kurdish guerilla sing a haiunting song about a mother wanting her daughter to come home. Jin hugs her colleague and desserts the camp.

Out of this needle edge of civilisation Jin plunges into nature. The life on the mountain runs the gamut and adds mineral to the vegetable and animal with sloping fields hazardous with shin shattering rocks. In her little red riding bandana she negotiates wildlife both lo and hi tech: a silent deal with an eagle wins her an egg for lunch, a shepherd recognises her military status and easily parts with half his bread, she crosses a field targeted by snipers and takes shelter against a bombing run with a bear with whom she shares an apple, chancing on a farm house she steals provisions and money but tends to the  sick old woman of the house.

But if she is a Red Riding Hood she is a seasoned veteran version, not needing no lines about what big eyes or teeth possessed of the predators ursine, reptilian or human and sexual she meets. She has no trouble recognising the need for compassion when it arises and applies her skills of healing and nurture as easily as she handles the Kalashnikov she toted before burying it in a cave.

So, she is young and schooled in the world. So what? Well that's for us to discover as we go, observing her simple but certain quest to escape the war and return to her mother. To do this she must consolidate her departure from the endless hours of war. Her first transformation is made after she visits the farmhouse and steals clothes as well as food. Burying her camouflaging drabs and weapon, changes and in her new rich colour she stands out from the landscape like a civilian. From here she looks like an innocent and knows it which works haere and fails there.

What I'm describing will seem quite ho hum but for all the broadness of the brush but there is such depth of feeling and seriousness in the telling here. Deniz Hasguler's effortless charisma is the chief delivery but the often breathtaking nature photography is presented as an equal in this film of extremely spare dialogue but constant communication. There is simply no easy way to look away from the plain but solid plea to consider the continuum of nature from earth to explosive. No better setting for this tale than here in the cradle of civilisation. From earth to Ur to Byzantium to here...

Reha Erdem's previous MIFF film, Kosmos, was a complicated fable of morality and faith. It's power was undercut by the uneasy blend of hard edge and whimsy. Here, he has honed an appreciation for an elegantly spare canvas.

Jin's final transformation will not be revealed here but it is both a gut punch and unsurprising. It results in her most powerful acts of compassion and leads to a tableau so shiveringly confronting it will either drive you to derisive rejection or riddle you with emotion. I kept myself one shudder short of tears.

MIFF Session 1: THE DAUGHTER: A date with the new business model.

A sunny afternoon in Athens. A teenage girl waits at the school gates to pick up her brother. In the back of the car he asks where they're going and she sighs and tells him they have to go and do something first and then he can do what he likes. The pair climb into a lumber storehouse the back way, familiar with it, aware of a need to be sneaky.

Time shifts: the girl finds father's flat with new locks on the door and a carpet of unpaid bills on the welcome mat: she tries her father's accountant who hasn't seen the man for days: at the flat she shares with her mother and mother's boyfriend she picks up a few things and flees: she settles the little boy back at the lumber yard and tells him he should never leave and that he is safe there: she heads through the streets which ring deafeningly with the shouting of protest rallies: she visits her father's business partner who asks if she has seen their son.  She tells them no. The boy is not her brother. He is her captive. In a line of dialogue The Daughter has gone from a De Sica style neo-realist film to a thriller.

Except that it does something strange. We have begun so compellingly that it would seem natural for the girl, Myrto, to play a taut and frightening mind game with the boy's, Angelos', parents. Oh, we get a look at the loaded gun rule prop early: a massive power saw. And we see that Myrto means business. But what we get instead of an assembly-line thriller is a study in sustained intensity and a fable for the Greek collapse that does not let up. If you look at Salvina Alimani in the titular role and think of a young olive Sandra Bullock you should know that she not only doesn't smile once throughout the entire running time but only gets more fierce.

The backstory to Myrto's mortal anger is kept lean and presented in easily digested further time shifts. Her relationship to the boy is the sole point of genuine character development in the film. While the mis en scene makes such skilful use of the many prison-bar like lines in the lumber store, frequent isolation of light to a small area of the 2.35:1 screen, and some contextually odd extreme high and low shots, it holds its realism tightly.

But it also keeps its eye on fable. Myrto reads Angelos dictionary definitions of words like debt and responsibility while he draws monsters. The nest she has made of the lumber store with it Dr Caligari angles and combustibility is spider like and maternal at once. Her response to their parents' betrayal of both of them is adolescent - enough personal power to act but not enough experience to know if she can - can be seen without a big stretch as a creepy portent of the new world business model: do-or-die, vengeful and self-preserving. The world has changed and the betrayed want the kind of redress that teenagers don't think twice about before turning to action. At one point the storeroom is invaded by theives who make off with a ute full of saleable timber and we remind ourselves that all this stock must now be owned by the bank.

Alimani's hard performance might strike us as monotonous but the consciousness she allows through her stern visage eventually show us that we are witnessing control, not limitation. Her expression in the film's final image takes this to another level.

I can imagine many sniffing at the mechanics of the climactic scene and the heavy handedness of its symbolism but while those things registered with me I also felt the anger in the imagery. The Daughter takes this anger and packs a lot of it into a laudable 87 minutes of screen time, letting us know just how it feels. And we who are or have been teenagers ourselves, have no trouble feeling the same.


PS - I added this on top of my annual mini pass as I realised I wanted to commemorate something: at the time of the screening last year I was being wheeled from the operating theatre with a plate newly drilled into my left fibula. I wouldn't walk again for months and had to skip last year's festival. The stroll into town this afternoon and the return walk were the sweetest I have known.

Catchup review: RED ROAD

A woman locks herself in a toilet, unzips, takes a used condom out of her bag and squeezes the semen out of it on to her fingers which she then inserts into her vagina. This is suggested rather than graphic but the stark white light of the scene. There is a clumsy rush to the action. She has planned this but is surprised by the mechanics of it. This substance she is more than familiar with doesn't play nice. Soon it's over her jeans and the bathroom towels. Then she does something that I won't spoil that seals her actions. She has just come from a scene of strongly consensual sex (which a moment's exception which she has planted).

This is Jackie. She earns a living monitoring the mass of CCTV camera feeds around a huge Glasgow housing estate. Her job uses this safe distance to adjudge appropriate action over the great dispossessed mass that she mostly knows only as a chequerboard of gluggy video tones.Her home is much nicer, a bungalow in the middle class neighbourhoods with a garden she has elected to ruin naturally.We learn that she is in conflict with her in laws but not why. Otherwise her leisure is divided between publicly served pleasures and privately stolen thumping trysts with a married coworker in the back of his SUV.

One pleasure she finds in her job but keeps to herself is the opportunity to follow the patchworked narratives of the people on the estate. One middle aged man is going through the slow decline of his obviously well loved dog. At one point she ventures between the screened veneer and the third dimension, following the man to a point where she stands beside him in a minor frenzy, deciding on action. She retreats from the potential point of touch and walks off, tingling.

But then she sees a face that freezes her. We don't know why but we do know that the man she has been spooked by is out of prison before time. This time the reach of the screen takes on the gravity of a mission. Her technological and official privilege arm her with his living circumstances and she infiltrates his nest, having already watched him with friends rowdily drunk and venal. By the time she tricks her way past security to get to a party at his flat we know no better than she does how much of this is a revenge we are not fully informed of and how much sheer fascination. She encourages his eye across the room  and they dance close. She begs off and vomits in the lift down.

Her dangerous game begins to spin out of control until, oddly, she is saved from crashing by her quarry whose threatening presence is dependent on a sexual charm too strong to ignore. This leads us to one of the strangest sex scenes I have seen on screen. It is both genuinely erotic and unnervingly brutal yet contains neither soft light nor violence. This brings us to where I began.

Finding out what she has against him is a narrative bloodknot and at the final meeting of the central pair where we witness both redemption and the exposure of unhealable emotional scars is a gut punch.

So why does this film feel so light? I still can't answer that question but I can say that any film that finds such awesome beauty in the normally monstrous architecture of British housing towerblocks has my vote for its sheer powers of observation. This should play like Loach or some old Play for Today but uses its danger and melodrama to create an enviable balance. Goldilocks would like this film. But then that's a Goldilocks I would very much like to talk to.

Rock On Film 16: Oil City Confidential

For a while I'd hear a new TISM song and wonder when they were going to twig that sending up disco didn't even have a retro effect. At some point prompted by a friend's suggestion, I started realising that that had just become their style and I should just live with it. Similarly, when a new Julien Temple music documentary appears and the a/v mashups start I no longer think, "oh, again?" but, "oh, new Julien Temple movie". The other trait he's been using is to weave a setting in throughout the story to give it place or mood.

In Filth and the Fury that was the gluggy 70s tv ads and youth shows as well as the backlit interview subjects whose visible aging would not distract from their testimony. In The Future is Unwritten Joe Strummer's friends and colleagues traded tales around the kind of campfires Stummer was promoting as a kind of cultural folk remedy. In this film about pub rockers Dr Feelgood we follow a guided stroll around Canvey Island where the band grew up and met. And weaving through that is a series of AV bites from British post-war noir, including some newly created by Temple. Julien loves his music and his friends and when his friends make music loved by millions he builds a richly textured record of it to stand against the weather of time.

Time and its erosion bothered him so much in Filth that he presented his main players in silhouette. Not so here where the surviving players seem so happy to continue living decades past the fade of their fame. Chief among them is guitarist Wilco Johnson whose current baldness provides a helpful temporal ruler against the many images of the luxuriant dark mop of his youth. There is no Vegas plastic surgery nor Hollywood hairpiece in this unashamed ex rock star. His glottal stop speech sounds as vital quoting Wordsworth as it does recounting infamies from a U.S. tour. He speaks to us directly from his home or a pub or sings outside the local pokie joint with his Fender Tele plugged straight into what looks like an old tweed Bassman. Not a moment of this drags and his live to camera al fresco renditions of standards like John Hardy feel as comfortable as they would played in the Delta by an old bluesman. Temple and his subjects avoid self-embarrassment.

Is this damning with faint praise? Almost. I remember Dr. Feelgood from the 70s but only slightly. For me they were completely eclipsed by punk which emerged soon after they did and for me they were one of the acts that never quite convinced when they were put into the same sentence as The Clash or The Damned. What Dr. Feelgood played was what used to be called R&B. Their's was a freshly aggressive guitar and growled vocals approach but it was also being called pub rock which term I had no trouble imagining as the pubs around Townsville rang with ginger-froed hippies playing flavourless versions of Mustang Sally. By comparision Dr. Feelgood rebooted the genre and sounded leaner and meaner and looked a lot better.

Wilco on stage had the weirdest look I've ever seen in a rock guitarist. Under a mop that seems too big for him he stares out like a psyche patient and glides back and forth. One witness of the early shows describes him as being on rails and that's exactly what it looks like. The fluidity of the motion and the magnetism of his stare provide a kind of sleight of hand that keeps our eyes away from how he's moving like that. Lee Brilleaux (Frenched up spelling of Brillo, as in the cleaning pads) hulks centre, unmoving growling out to Roxette in the dark. There's a Riot in Cell Block Number Nine? Wilco plays his machine gun riff holding his Tele like an Armalite. No light show and only the vaguest concession to costumes. This was music played as hard as its English winter garden bed and crawled up out of the concreted earth among the refinery silos like worms and oil.

That's what makes this a good music documentary. That's what brings it to the same high shelf as the London of Filth and the Fury and the spare Texan spaces of The Real Buddy Holly Story or the Melbourne of Autoluminescent: PLACE! We're as weary as the wanderers in the walking tour of Canvey Island at the end when they finally get to their pub but happy to sip and watch Wilco's last few words from in front of the silos. By that stage I don't care if I don't like the music. I've been somewhere. I've met someone.