MIFF Session #14: DALMAS

A beefy ex-cop barges through the early 70s underground scene in Melbourne, looking for clues to find a Mr Big and investigate Plastic Man who is seeding seedy acid into the realm of corruptable youth. His encounters take him to a philosophy-spouting ex-cop current junkie (nice turn by a young Max Gillies), into the fists and boots of his old colleagues on the narc squad and a crew he meets in psychedelic clubland who are making a film about the counter culture. Soon after this, the quite solid private eye in edge-land has worked with real muscles, despite the stiff dialogue.

Everyone flees to the country where they try to keep the film going as the director and crew and cast of the film we are watching pull at the strands of the conventional cinema it started with and draw out, by group agreement, any theme or method that anyone can think of. That's not my criticism, it's what happens on screen.

So, before the film is half its running time old we have moved from cop land to late 60s Godard territory (which by this film's production was populated by anyone but Godard) and are presented with a mishmash of recorded meetings, avant theatre, satire, reconstructed anecdotes, campfire chats, and anything else that the people we have seen in the kitchen can think up. That's really it. So, why did I find this constantly diverting and thoroughly enjoyable?

It's before my time for nostalgia (my yoof movement was punk, a few seemingly long years later) but it did remind me of some of the friends some of my older siblings attracted in the early 70s, fabulous furry and freakish dreamers who proposed anything from the influence of alien races on local politics to plans for building flying saucer engines, the resurrection of the lost arts of tarot, organic farming and whatever was frowned upon by the straight world. I liked these familiar people from my glimpse of them from the sidelines of my childhood and who later appeared abundantly in Peter Carey's stories and novels.

The too frigidly dated anti-Viet politics are almost entirely absent in preference for resistance to Hollywood film convention. It took me a few scenes but the time capsule value on screen here is far less the wearisome hippydom of Godard and Antonioni fetishists (the characters here are happy to distinguish themselves from the "middle class" hippies they see). This is less film in revolt. This is 1973; it's an apotheosis of the big gleaming optimism of the Whitlam years. We were out of Vietnam, the White Australia policy and weren't even official colonialists with the return of the admin to New Guinea's people. This is less Billy Jack than Man With a Movie Camera, life, love and movies are going DIY and BYO. Life is free if you want it.

Still, worthiness doesn't cut it for even five minutes of directionless lens-pointing. What's left is the character of the people in front of the camera. These are fresh faced folk, rambled minded but charming with it. Their endless fraying of the points and arguments are neither naive nor particularly profound and most of them, without the restlessly changing visuals. The moment of violence I was hoping for came pretty much when it needed to and the looping self-reflexive finale, while predictable felt welcome rather than trite. I was expecting to be exhausted by this one and feared I might walk out but I easily settled into it on its terms, knowing that the director would heed his own lessons for his more famous Pure Shit a few years later. So, I met this with the enjoyment that it was made to combat and can't think of a finer outcome for a film that deserves a continued screen life.

MIFF Session #13: THE WITCH

A family of religious zealots are thrown out of a community of religious zealots for being too ... zealous. As they are leaving with their goods and chattles we notice a pair of native Americans walking unresisted into the village. The pilgrim fathers therein are clearly pragmatic enough to trust the heathen locals to help them get by. It also clues us in to what we are about to receive.

The family stop at some lush scenery near a forest and a stream. In the time it takes to build a decent farmhouse out of local materials, eldest daughter Thomasin is playing hide and boo with the family's newest, Samuel. "Oh where am I? ... Boo!" which she has the patience to repeat until she opens her eyes to say boo and the bairn is gone, only a shaking shrub at the edge of the forest to bear witness to the abduction.

Then we get a brief sequence which tells us that we are not going to see a film where the witchcraft is all in the mind of the iggrant god-botherers but actually happening. So, this throws out the Blair Witch in corsets, Crucible and Black Sunday scenarios because nothing is quite behaving the way we expect. That keeps up.

We then follow the sinking fortunes of a family who are discovering the history of farming all over again and the disappearance of one of their own even serves as local legend of sorts (was it witch or wolf that did the deed?) which compounds their already nutso Christianity. Eldest boy Caleb is having to work out his own burgeoning sexual development by himself, gazing at his nubile sister with an intensity that he both enjoys and is deeply ashamed of. The parents have a number of conflicts left unresolved while the business of survival rolls on. But they are no readier to dissolve than the fears of the witch in the woods and will soon find explosive venting of their own.

That's not quite it but to say more of the events unfolding on screen would become exhausting for their sheer linearity. And linear it is. And this is where this film earns its points. This is far less the wild freedom vs constrained civilisation of The Woman than the grinding depth of Kes. Uh huh, this is the horror film that Ken Loach would make if make a horror film he would. As such, we bear the daily drudge of life the slow-as-corn-growing lane at the same time as we receive glimpses into what seems like a literal manifestation of a witch in the woods.

But is this waht we are seeing or the product of religious minds so extreme they were thrown out of sawdust breakfast central? Is the scene where Caleb's teenaged horniness finds fulfillment as blackly magic as it plays for us or something more private and personally explosive? But even this plays strangely with our expectations. We are given the strange comfort of seeing a monstrosity in pleasingly ghastly detail, draw our own conclusions from the incantations of the younger two children playing with the local ram, Black Phillip, and the appearance of the hare whose wrangler deserves all the grass that is edible for giving us such a projectible creature.

The Witch quite simply eats its cake and has it. We get the undeniable but it happens to people committed to denial, fighting the environment in a place where they do not belong. So, we get a horror movie that is short on scares but gigantic on unease and its causes which lie firmly in the familiar territory of the kind of belief that seeks to conquer at all costs, the kind of belief that can scarcely distinguish between childrens' songs, infernal chanting and the language of the psalms. I can hear Ken enviously grinding his teeth in the auditorium from here.

Liked it. Didn't love but like is a high score for a contemporary horror film in a field so bereft of them.

MIFF Session #12: ANGELS OF REVOLUTION

It's easy to assume that the Russian revolution spread like electricity. It happened in Petersburg and the switch was thrown painting all ten time zones red. The proliferation took years as the agents of change went out in expeditionary teams to integrate the babel of local cultures with the rising Soviet force. This was harder the further away they went from the industrial and agrarian areas more familiar to them. This is the story of one such.

I say story but in effect that should read magic lantern show. After an introductory scene that serves to both tell us about the local resistance to the Soviet team and shake hands with the tableau approach that will make this film. We are then introduced to the team one by one as they are selected from the aspects of progress which will be used to lure the natives from their subsistence into the blinding light of the new. So, in addition to the cinegenic Polina we get a filmmaker, a doctor, a photographer, an industrial designer, a composer etc who head off to the wilds several time zones away to convert the people and vanquish their gods.

While not strictly non or anti narrative, Angels of Revolution takes its time to establish depth rather than sequence in its first half as we follow the team's recruitment and preparation. The sense of their mission being a non-returnable grows as we watch them training and playing like cosmonauts. Indeed, I was reminded more than once of Alexei German's sprawling Hard to be a God as the team set about bring the Inuit-like peoples into the modern world. We already know this will end well for them and here we witness why.

A sumptuous pallette, a great feeling for landscape and a strongly managed demonstration of the differences in culture either side of the divide, the bursting, assisted colour of the pre-Stalin Soviet world and the frosty primeval rites of the forest and lake peoples whose god-invested effigies might as well control the seasons and the yields of the land.

The home made hot air balloon is straight out of Andrei Rublev and there are many reminders of Dziga Vertov and Eisenstein all of which can only fail to win the Khanty and Nenet from their wooden magic. Only one thing might have done this and the sight of it dazzles with its elegant power: a film the team have made is projected on the smoke of a bonfire.

This is not an easy film to approach if your preferences run more to Dr Zhivago than Man With a Movie Camera. It is, nevertheless, made in the spirit of the thing it depicts, in ruminant recognition of its adventure and naivete. As such it is a fitting eulogy for the effort and a solid reminder of its built in disaster.

MIFF Session #11: HILL OF FREEDOM

Mori returns to Seoul where he taught Japanese to get back with the girl he fell in love with then. We see her pick up his letter to her about this and then we see Mori as his voiceover reads the letter. He has found a guest house close to where he remembers her living and knocks on her door, leaving notes when it doesn't open. We see her reading the letter with an expression that tells us it isn't welcome. Meanwhile, Mori gets busy acquainting himself with the other guests and the girl at the local cafe and from an early point we see that the progress of his visit is delivered in reverse. Well, kind of. When his correspondent opened the letter the pages spilled out and she read them in the order she put the unnumbered pages together. So, the events sometimes play in the right order but mostly they're backwards.

Mori doesn't speak Korean and the Koreans he meets don't speak Japanese. The dialogue is almost entirely in the third language of English. This means that not only does Mori face commicating with a lack of precision but the Koreans have to speak like tourists in their home town. Even when the conversation is warm or intimate it must pass through this filter. No one is saying quite what they mean and, even if their English is fluent, what they say is constantly compromised.

Just as he did with information deficit in last year's wonderful Our Sun Hi, Sang-Soo Hong plays with the fullness and clarity of meaning in the speech of his conversants. A subtle warning might emerge as a pleasantry, a compliment patronising. Through all of this the characters work on saying what they mean but the cheaper shot of farcical misunderstanding is not on the menu.

Instead, we get a deceptively gentle meditation on the constant problems of communication which scrubs up beautifully as comedy. It's easy to lose sight of Mori's trouble with love but that is the thing that informs almost every frame. Hong continues his great trust in his actors by keeping most of the scenes single shots and the focal length medium and the angle a profile while never feeling stagey.

This was shown with the Claire Denis short Voila l'enchainement which also used static close shots to describe a couple's disintegration in dialogue and monologue. It made its point and continued to do so, growing weighty and oppressive very quickly. Its thirty minutes on screen felt like Hill of Freedom's sixty-six and the reverse is damningly as true. Long live Sang-Soo Hong!

MIFF Session #10: THE NIGHTMARE: No credit refused

A disparate group of people ranging from twenties to forties in America and the UK describe their experiences with sleep paralysis. The accounts vary from a very simple but clearly haunting child's encounter with a tv news broadcast that didn't behave as it should to seeing aliens made of static peering over the narrator's crib. The format starts with to camera one-on-ones and, when necessary, branches out into effective cinematic realisations using an array of now familiar but still potent audio visual cues.

We follow the chain of accounts from the first experiences with these terrors through to their victims' discovery of the documented phenomenon of sleep paralysis and delve further into the nature of the condition and in some cases it's even more fearsome developments. The cast of interviewees is appealing and the sense of cinema extends to the notion of cultural feedback from horror cinema which, while diverting, is not investigated. Some fourth-wall breakage here and there adds stylistic texture and an arc of sorts is established. This is never less than enjoyable and engaging to watch and doesn't outstay its welcome at a tidy ninety minutes.

But there's a problem which starts early and doesn't go away. I and the documentarians have no problem believing that the accounts of the sufferers are accurate reports of their perceptions in this state. However, there are signs quite early on that we are not going to get any commentary from science or the medical profession as to the nature of the condition which would expand the account and render it even more fascinating.

Instead, we are given frequent testimony that the sufferers have gone to medicine only to be dismissed. Their own dismissal of science and the breadth of that dismissal across the cast lets the sense of investigation slowly and quietly collapse and soon enough the film itself assumes the ambience of ghost stories at a sleepover. When one of them mentions that one particularly powerful encounter with the monsters of his paralysis he was no longer an atheist. When another claims that she banished her demon by evoking Jesus' name the game is up. She goes on to attest that not only had she been scornful of the notion of marrying a Christian but that her time with the night terrors drove her into the arms of such an one.

After this, any further accounts start looking like actors' show reels for X-Files auditions. And is the notion that horror movie feedback is informing the accounts is the same thing that is giving this film its look and feel too obvious?

We end with a series of the sufferers refuting science with a babel of wishful thinking and it is like watching a group of mentally ill people swearing allegiance to their own delusions. Simply, this film can only be entertainment without the moderation of science and without taking its meds is left lost and pretty. As the banker in Bedlam cries by night: come all, come all, no credit refused.

MIFF Session #9: TEHERAN TAXI

A film director hangs up his megaphone and gets in a taxi only he installs some Black Magic cameras in the dash and drives around to see what happens. He picks up a few people - cab sharing is normal in Teheran - and listens to them muse and argue. One guy recognises him and gets a lift to deliver bootleg movies on dvd banned in Iran. This takes them to a film student who picks up some discs and advice from the director. Then he picks up his niece who complains that she boasted about him to the friends waiting for her at the party they're going to and starts filming him with a point and shoot while talking about "unscreenable" films and the type of thing you can put into films as prescribed by her teacher.

The acting is naturalistic but pushed a little and you might start thinking, "so what?" Anyone can do that. I didn't care who knew and who didn't out of the pickups in Under The Skin, why should I care about this? Well, there's a reason for the teenage girl being so interested in what constitutes an acceptable film. The director we see at the wheel and whose work is on the screen was banned from making films for twenty years in Iran. What he's doing is illegal and could send him to prison. He made two in the confines of his house arrest and now he is making another about the world on the streets, morality, hope and the almost constant theme of crime and punishment.

While this might come across as a tad precious and forced it's worth remembering that the stakes here are high enough to have prevented him from including a title and cast sequence: naming names could put those people in jail, too. So, this is a severe diatribe against political oppression made watchable through worthiness? Actually, it's a fun ride with a near constant stream of real humour that allows a lot of the sadness, anger and injustice visibility. The wife of the accident victim at the beginning calls to secure a copy of the iphone footage he shot of the victim's spoken will and testament, it's a record of him and it's a will, just in case. The niece's shooting finds a wedding scene in which a street waif pockets some fallen money. She asks him to return it, less for the rectitude of the act than the appearance of it in the film she is shooting. His neighbour shows him CC footage of an attack by muggers as much to suggest film ideas as to share witness. We are in cinema as well as a cinema.

What that means is that this is still worth doing, not just worthy. Whether it's projected or played online the power of the wish of cinema remains. That's as true for a Michael Bay blockbuster as it is for this, I suppose, but, for all its contrivance, for all the pleading that knowing of its production circumstances must do, this still feels better.

There's almost too much to say about this. I'll leave it here and continue the absorption, knowing it will still be playing here behind my eyes days hence.

MIFF Session #8: TWO SHOTS FIRED

A guy boogies at a club. The next morning is one of the hottest that year in his city, Buenos Aries, so he takes a dip in the pool and then does the mowing. It's a plug-in and he runs over the cord. In the shed he finds the tools to repair the cord but when putting the tin with assorted tools back he finds a pistol on the shelf behind it. He examines it in idle curiosity before going up to his room and shooting himself in the head and then stomach.

All of these things are keys to this strange fable of admonishment. As we continue watching people pass things on rather than deal with them, regardless of consequence. When asked why he shot himself  Mariano tells the shrink what we all know already: no reason. When the doctor suggests some Rosarch testing Mariano tells him he did those after a previous incident and would just give the appropriate answers. His mother gathers the gun and the rest of the weapons but, as Mariano tells his brother at the burger joint, she needn't bother.

Meanwhile Mariano goes back to playing recorder in his early music quartet but the others wince at the wolf notes he's getting. He explains them away as a consequence of one of the bullets remaining in his body (though the xrays show nothing and the doctors aren't bothered to pursue it) and they let it slide in the hope that it will go away.

Mariano's brother has a kind of fling with the girl at the burger place who's forever breaking up with her boyfriend (who turns up on double dates as thought serving out his notice). There's a lot more of this and it seems like nothing is going to change until Susana, Mariano's mother, and ex-recorder quartet partner take a holiday from the apparent main characters and go to the beach. But they've picked up a divorcee friend of theirs (amid a lot of talk about mistaking cordless handsets for mobile phones). When the divorcee can't get into her intended beach house she goes to Susana's place and they are soon joined by The divorcee's ex and his new wife. And then we follow this trio as they find that no one wants them around.

The characters live in a world of partly desaturated colour and only minimally engage with us but they aren't drawn to go further or appear brighter. We are looking at a bourgeois lifestyle that has become so backed up with expecting the important things to be dealt with by assumption or appointment that they are at a loss to act for themselves when they must. The gun is discovered and rediscovered but never thrown out. If the difference between life and death is too hard...

Finally, after we've been taken out of the loop into another just as elastic we arrive at the promise of action but will do nothing to break a loop, it is covert and criminal. Roll credits.

I tried to settle into this as a kind of mumblecore piece and noted that it is one of those films that remind us of how much time and money and trouble films are to make. This isn't a home movie, the production values are high, the acting note-perfect and the look and feel authorial and uniform. When we are invited at several points to join it in a laugh we happily do so but are left lost and worried to find it get up and leave us again. It's only when we accept that it is not about laughs (though it does have a few very good ones) but the absurdity of a life spent in ignorance of how it came to be.

There was no clapping at the credits (a phenomenon I get but don't enjoy) but one guy hissed and was quietly congratulated for it. Maybe the movie worked, then.