MIFF Session #5: KEDI

All this film had to do was show some cats. I would have copped that for one and a half hours with nary a complaint. But this is not just a film about cats. It's about an ancient city: Istanbul, once Constantinople. And it is about its people. And its cats. Oh, I said that already. Well, this film couldn't have been aimed more squarely at this worshipper of felinity and I enjoyed meeting the lot of them.

There is a status of cat in Istanbul that lies somewhere between stray and domesticated. These are the moggies we are to spend the most time with. They climb the vines and roofs of the classical city, beg at cafes, hunt in the drains, visit the homes of their many admirers, get picked on by other cats and sometimes perish because life on the street does that, too.

Here, you'll meet the fish thief, Psycho the overprotective spouse of the near identical tuxedo cat whose temptresses are warned off with violence and sonics, the market mouser, the cafe adopted by the local aristocat who claws at the window when he is peckish and gets served meals of an increasing fussiness. But you'll also meet the litters upon litters of kittens who in being saved by kindly humans can also save their benefactors who themselves know the hardship of wild life.

This wonderful documentary is a love letter to a city that stood at the centre of one empire for a millennium and its conqueror's empire for longer still. It's people are traditionally a mix of these forces and live as they can as the constant changes around them deliver challenges.

Between the city and its people are the cats, spurned or indulged, exploring gymnastically or gathering for their children. They are shown through the twinned skills of astute, muscular filmmaking and a deep knowledge of their nature. If you have ever loved a cat for its delightful and infuriating antics you will recognise everything you see here and it will oddly feel like seeing it for the first time. There is no depiction of violence to the animals (one is the victim of an attack not seen) but the sheer volume of the stray litters can only suggest that a sizeable number do not make it through.

But as Talking Heads once observed, cats prefer buildings to people and we see them luxuriating in the architecture of their beautiful city, snoozing, stalking or exploring with what one observer astutely calls their superpowers. The cats with names are listed along with the people interviewed in order of appearance in the end credits as we watch both move around a town so close to the origins of civilisation that it feels like archaeology verite. Pdrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

MIFF Session #4: FEAR ITSELF

A young woman's voice over a shot of a gloomy day through an upstairs window tells us that since her accident she has felt numb and has taken to reading, idle browsing on the net and watching horror movies. It's the last activity that's got her thinking of "what they are and how they are made to take advantage of who we are". Having been through a horrifying experience in her life (a car accident which infrequently resurfaces throughout the narration) she begins to understand the processes of creating or nurturing fear in a viewer, the small print of the contract, why we sign the contract, sit back and get scared. Why do we keep going back to this state? What are we agreeing to when in it? Should we feel used even if we have enjoyed it?

The voice keeps to a narrow emotional range as it explores the cinema of fear. This never gets tedious. The visuals, apart from a framing shot at the beginning and the close, are entirely taken from other movies. These are almost exclusively horror and stretch from the generic to the outside margins. There are some non-horror sci-fi quotes (Gravity, Logan's Run) but this only directs us back to the theme of fear rather than genre cinema. The voice is Scottish, mild enough to be mistaken for North American. That's intentional.

The clips are seldom money shots, acts of gore or supernatural cataclysms. Quite often they depict moments of establishment or development detached from the payoff. The voice continues, often drawing out previously established points for rewording rather than development. This is never tedious. This is not a documentary and we are not relying on the voice for information but allowing it to suggest thoughts as a hypnotist might. We don't need to hang on the words. We can surface from the waves of our response as it plays to the screen and listen now and then. Soon enough, we understand that we have made another contract with this film as surely as we had with Suspiria or Ringu.

Are we listening to a first person account of a real traumatic event and its narrator's discovery of the machine inside the horror film? It stops mattering. The voice is less a narrator than a vocalist, commissioned, paid in full. She is an actor but her performance is an essay, describing in metaphor what we are seeing and then sometimes directly describing it. The coldness of the delivery doesn't allow us confidence in her the way we were happy to listen to Mark Cousins or Martin Scorsese talk about cinema. Her tale is lighted by the images of violence, gore, suspense and confrontation. If the extra score (also commissioned) swells louder than her voice we drift below it and wait for the next rise or fall.

The tension between the mesmeric control of the voice with its storm of visuals and your willingness to find a useful spot to digest it will reward you. This is expert editing and mixing. This is adventurous essaying. This is cinema about cinema which feels like cinema. Find it and play it. Play it again. It's your midnight movie and it knows where you live.

MIFF Session #3: KATE PLAYS CHRISTINE

In 1974 Florida television reporter Christine Chubbuck committed suicide on air during a news broadcast with a few words about TV news being ruled by blood and guts. Don't Youtube this; you won't find it. There is thought to be one copy in existence and that is kept under lock and combination. Whether true or not the notion that Paddy Chayefsky based his screenplay for the monumental Network on this incident has persisted. Why did she do it?

Kate Lyn Sheil, an intense New Yorker, travels to Sarasota Florida to find that out and prepare for her role as Christine in a film. She undergoes a slow and often pained metamorphosis, transforming herself into a figure whose witnesses are few and whose story is mostly a mystery. Before she gets to the brunette wig and brown contact lenses she digs into the locale and everything she can find that might give her an insight into the elusive ghost she is to make flesh. When the wig, brown eyes and spray tan go on and we get the intended finished film in glimpses, we set in for what feels like it is going to be a compelling ride. So why isn't it?

Because it never makes up its mind about what it wants to say or how to say it. I don't doubt Sheil's sincerity for a moment but her efforts are given such an evasive setting that even if we wanted to just follow her progress through the construction of this role we simply aren't allowed to. If the persistent fakeness of the wig never lets us accept Kate as Christine with a sense of conventional cinema we are never given an avenue to consider it anything but poor wardrobe. If it's meant to be a fourth wall breaker it's one that neither uses metaphor nor battering ram. The cold video look to the movie scenes and their frequent interruption by the cast as to the veracity of a line or its reading feel contrived rather than assured. Any intended comment on the blurred line between fictive presentation and history is smothered by what always just looks like soap opera outtakes.

Throughout this, Sheil's efforts to earnestly forge ahead and embody her character are repeatedly subverted by the sense that the big idea will be revealed and all will be well. A moment when she reads a Howard Beale rant from Network and delivers it with a studied weariness feels quite pure and poignant under the assumption that that film profited on the act examined here, that Chubbuck finally gets to read the eloquent lines that real life could not write for her. And then in the finale Sheil's intervention in the scene lets her deliver a freshly minted monologue of genuine power. It's scripted but compelling and fulfils the promise we've seen in the better moments of the previous hundred minutes that her intense conviction was nourishing a real performance.

Then we cut from this moment of power to an anticlimactic line which stretches into a needless end title sequence featuring the physical deconstruction of the role around the actor. We are no wiser than we were about Chubbuck's self-destruction. We have seen an actor's struggle with playing a historical figure with no history. Even the question that might have been central as to why bother making the film at all has not been substantially addressed. We are left nowhere.

Director Robert Greene fronted up for a Q and A session and managed to render all his answers to central questions into a rambling vagueness. At one point he dismissed the question of what was real or not as bullshit. Well, sorry, but if you're going to ask us to sit through one and a half hours of an essay (this is, despite all claims, not a documentary) which depends on its audience posing that very question, you'd better be prepared to front up and answer it yourself when your film doesn't.

I'll at least be on the lookout for the future roles of Kate Lyn Sheil.

MIFF Session #2: EVOLUTION

The surface of the sea from below. The sun is out and the water has a golden tint. We linger on it but don't mind as it's so restful. Then we follow Nicholas in red togs, swimming under water. He passes coral and marine vegetation of great beauty before happening on the corpse of a young boy like himself who has been decomposing on the rocks for what looks like months. In horror, Nicholas swims back to shore to tell his mother what he has seen. His mother has been cooking up a kind of blue mud with worms that might be noodles at the stove. She diverts Nicholas' claim of seeing the body and suggests he has imagined it.

The island where they live is peopled entirely by adult women and boys around ten years old. The women all have unnervingly smooth features with Scandinavian-style invisible eyebrows. We soon learn two other things about life on the island: the boys are all taking medication and there is a hospital with a single doctor and a platoon of nurses. Nicholas, like all the other boys, is subjected to medical treatment and tests. His curiosity also drives him to follow the women in their nightly rituals, forming a slow parade by lantern light out to the seashore. The dead boy from the opening scene is brought in from the waves. The boys get nosebleeds often. Some of them vanish never to return. There is a kind of ritualistic solemnity to the medical procedures. The lights of the operating table reflect in Nicholas' eyes like star fish.  This is the kind of life that needs not Twisties to compare itself to the straightness of the greater world.

Lucile Hadzihalilovic's second feature as director has both the same tightly reined weirdness and dogged pursuit of its initial promise as her first. Blending an extraordinary eye for cinema with an uncompromising commitment to tell her strange stories. Just as 2004's Innocence never surrendered to the dark fairy tale a more conventional treatment would have demanded, Evolution does not fall into a body horror plot. There is none of the young Cronenberg's fetishism here. It's more reminiscent of Kubrick with its even pacing and the functionality of scenes and tableaux. 

If anyone, though, I was most reminded of Matthew Barney. The sheer force of Barney's vision in the Cremaster films and their joyous completion of ideas that make you wonder if you saw of dreamed them is here, in more muted form. What you think is going to happen happens and keeps happening. The point is not the resolution of conflict but the carriage of certainty and its reporting in detached fashion that does not permit detachment from the viewer. This is a demanding film. Seldom has a running time less than ninety minutes felt so full and compelling. Please don't let another twelve years pass before this woman gets to make another film.

MIFF Session #1: BLOOD OF MY BLOOD

Renaissance Italy. A soldier returns to Bobbio after his twin brother, a priest, has died. If his brother committed suicide his remains must stay where they are in unconsecrated ground. If the monks of the local convent prison can prove that the nun they have jailed led the deceased to death through a pact with Satan then the bones can rest in the shadow of the church. What happens to the woman in question? Usual deal, she dies or she dies in varying extents of pain.

At first the soldier threatens the woman with his dagger. Then, having failed to emulate his brother's ascetic piety by virtue of his worldliness showing him how futile it was, he begins to identify with the prisoner. The case continues to its end and it is ugly.

Present day same location. The convent in disrepair is the object of a Russian billionaire's interest for development. The old aristocrat in residence who keeps himself in a Schrodinger-like state of non/existence and who might well be a vampire, opposes this move and tracks down the local official who is brokering the deal. We have seen the old Count before, in the convent, sage and senior but inactive. Here, he seems to be the same but, if immortal, just older. We have also seen the official, the soldier of the previous tale. Nothing is quite what it seems and we are led to a climax of strange and haunting imagery in which both stories are concluded.

I have to mention the use of digital video here because it's impressive. The antique story is shown with none of the usual filmy processing. The effect of the scenes with their strong painterly composition is that of what a Raphael or Titian saw while painting rather than the end result. The present day section is pointedly conventional in looks. Interesting.

There is a clear logic to each of these stories. No one will have trouble with the course of events. The trouble comes from trying to reconcile the two. At initial viewing, they seem to sit awkwardly beside each other as though introduced by a host who knows or cares little about the art of social blending. It's only with a few breaths on the stroll away from the cinema, that correlations appear and a kind of sense emerges. I still don't know what that leads to beyond a sense of retribution against entitlement but it's still with me. So, that's a good start to the ol' Fest, then.

MIFF 2016: New Fest New Approach

Yo, kinderoons. Sat time o' year again when I rug up in the ol' o'er coat, throw a woolly scarf 'roun' my neck and strut into the blast for two weeks o' cinema the great in August. Can't wait.

The fare this year is really on the up. I don't get a sense of any particular region or industry dominating or even forming a profile bump. You could pretty much throw a few darts at the program and pick your tickets that way.

That's almost how I'm going to do it, too. Instead of making 13 choices good and true for my mini pass I'm leaving it to the time to decide finally and make it more spontaneous. I'll probably end up adding a few but I'm also thinking I want this to be much more an infiltration rather than a big social charabang holiday. I want it close and reclusive.

So, this time I won't be posting any picks I've already made nor any I make on the day. Sorry to anyone who might have expected the big list but it just won't work with the approach I've taken and am looking forward to. The holiday has become a little routine o'er the last few years and I'd like to surprise myself. So, no offence to any who might take it but I'm doing as much of this as I can solo. Roll on, winds o' August.

PS - I'll be reviewing everything I see and doing the round up at the end, as usual. Just this time I won't know exactly what will be on it ;)  Strangely excited by that.

Do We Really Want Vinyl Anymore?

It's 1973 and Richie Finestra is about to sell his minor record label to German acquirers on the promise of it bringing the weight of Led Zeppelin. He's cleaned up his act, having dragged his young family through alcohol and cocaine excess and now is settling in to what looks like a comfortable middle age. Things go wrong almost straight away. Soon enough he's back on the bad stuff and rediscovering his wild beast as he sees a New York Dolls show so explosive it seems to bring the house down, literally. We get glimpses of where he's come from, the mafia connections, the blues guy he tried to popularise but had to sell to the mob. Now, with all this guilt and rapacious nihilism beckoning, we join him in the decade of decadance. so why isn't Vinyl any good?

First, the time travel tourism it falls into with a mix of composites (there's a Sly Stone alike who's actually pretty intriguing), anachronisms of convenience (hip hop style sampling shown at its birth) and actors playing historical figures like Robert Plant. This could work well but so much of it is laboured and indulgence-begging. The intended thrill of "hey, that's Lou Reed" does not progress further than the appearance of historical figures in music bios like The Doors or Walk the Line as namechecking.  The cockney-led band that look and sound like late '70s punks feel less like what is to be than a grab at a kind of retrospective prescience (hey, we knew about this stuff  back in '73). The era would be more compelling if we saw what we had to do without.

Second, Richie Finestra stands at the end of a long line of bad guy heroes who bellow with machismo and lumber into plot-thickening disasters of judgement. Like the mafia scenes his characterisation feels tired, like a nineteen year old whizz bang rocker churning out powerchords like Pete Townshend never happened. His identikit features, brutally handsome, sensitive but oafish, honorable but sneaky, with a ton of hooky vices to bring him down when the going gets a little too good. The extra here is a sense of vision he is supposed to harbour despite all the crassness of the music industry around him pressing in. But this vision all too frequently gets articulated as the kind of cliches that would make a fanzine blush. He's not a maverick of the record industry, he's a cover version, note perfect but not the real thing.

See, Tony Soprano had the chaos of a whole crime empire to contain while dealing with his own instability. Same with Nucky Edwards but the constant outbreaks of all out war and terrifying decisions wore him thin. Don Draper ground against his times that were a-changin' until, at rock bottom, he found a way of absorbing and exploiting them, learning very little in the process. But by the time we get to Richie Finestra the thing that sets in for me is exhaustion. He's a loser who, by all appearances, fully deserves to keep losing. It's very hard to watch this and not just because of the constant parade of failure. We've reached peak male psycho from US cable series. There's no turning back.

Third, if you look around Richie's thundering bulk you will see a whole cast of incompletely drawn but enticing characters whose stories, if awarded some lasting focus, could really get something done. The tiny but wonderful Juno Temple does so much with her upstart character Jamie that you want to drag her back into the room with every exit. She uses her frail physicality to emphasis her force. The story from her perspective, of lack of power striving to consolidate and triumph, is instantly more watchable than Richie's. Richie's wife played by the impressive Oliva Wilde, does enough with the trouble the story gives her, also to give more to viewers than the Finestral centre. Ray Romano proves there is life after mediocrity as the hapless Zak, colleague of Richie. Even Jack Quaid's Clark Morelle, a young Ivy Leaguer fallen on hard times in the mail room who explores the newly forming world of disco would give us a hotter centre. But what we get is more of the same. Bobby Carnavale who tries to inject Finestra with charm and charisma but is hampered by writing that keeps him snowed in, is an alumnus of Boardwalk Empire. He was the super bad guy of one of the seasons. It feels like he's just changed costumes.

Vinyl is the creation of Martin Scorsese and Mick Jagger, two figures I'd normally trust to tell the tale of the record industry in the '70s. But the problem is not that these two lack any insights into the setting and era, both lived there and did some of their very best work in that environment. The problem is that we're getting the perspectives of the present day versions of them. Scorsese has long abandoned the energy that kept his films so electric (why does Taxi Driver still feel new but The Aviator seem dated?) Jagger has seemed happy enough for decades to float on a reef of laurels, distant in every way from the greatness that his younger self so fiercely created. Vinyl feels old fashioned the way that Oliver Stone's The Doors or Sid and Nancy did when they were new, plugged full of cliche and indulgence. There's still an interesting story to tell here but it isn't that of Richie Finestra, the very lumbering relic that the punks on the distant horizon would name dinosaur. Look around him. Write there. Shoot there. And we'll be there.