MIFF Session 16: ASAKO I & II

Have you been in love? What did you love about the other? Looks? Personal qualities? If you've been in love once or more, was any time love at first sight? Did that endure past the speedbump of physical attraction?

Asako is at a photography exhibition but can't take her eyes of a tall shaggy haired boy who breezes past the prints as though they're ads. She follows him out to the street. He turns and looks. There are actual fireworks going off but they don't need to as the metaphorical ones are cracking and flashing inside the two nervous systems that encounter each other on the street. After only an exchange of names and what the Kenji characters refer to the pair are kissing like long lost lovers. They are now inseparable, forming an embrace even on a road where their motorcycle accident has thrown them. Their more level headed friends enjoy the spectacle of the lovers and the adventurous cuteness they radiate. One night, he, Baku, says he's going to the shop, leaves and never returns.

Asako eventually leaves this scene in Osaka and travels to Tokyo, working in a coffee shop which delivers to clients that include a Sake label whose new recruit is Baku's doppelganger. Asako, retrieving the coffee jug is struck silent at the sight of this apparition, insisting on calling him Baku though he has clearly introduced himself as Ryohei. He is easy in his business suit and cleaner cut hair but her strange fascination with him throws him. Catching up with her on the street at a later occasion he is able to demonstrate so quick thinking charm to invert a negative situation and also allow him into her company.

He is not the bad boy Baku but he looks just like him and might well do as far as life partners go. They shack up and all seems well. You know this is doomed, don't you? Ok, but it's done well. An old friend from the Osaka days lunches with Asako and brings her up to date on what she's been up to but also, seeing with wide eyes, Asako's new love, can't help but fill her in on the fact that Baku has not just popped up again but famously. A rotating ad screen outside the restaurant obliges with the credit card commercial that Baku has become famous by starring in. So, the Baku/Ryohei thing is not just in her head, it's something that everyone else can see. This is not magical realism.

We wait for the moment when both doppelgangers are in the same moving picture. What will happen? The third act addresses this and it is not everything we might expect. The good news is that the characters themselves also appear genuinely surprised by it.

If overlong, Asako I & II does what it says on the tin. We are given a young and beautiful woman, her self-surprise at finding herself in love and a massive complication to deal with that. We are also given a beautifully crafted scene between an aspirant actor and a failed one on what acting ought to be. In a film whose riches are given in a generally lean degustation we are treated to a course too many or so it feels. This is writing rather than a young, beautiful and ready cast. And it is writing rather than a light hand on the beige aesthetics of the near-hipster Tokyo young.

What saves it is the commitment to the fairy tale purity of true love and the verite denial of such an ideal. Between them we have an antidote to the 500 Days of Summer but something that can't quite match Eternal Sunshine. If nothing else, it has piqued my interest in new Japanese cinema and its reliable ability to absorb, evolve and freshen.

MIFF Session 15: THAT SUMMER

Peter Beard, photographer, socialite and interesting person begins by showing us through a book of his photos, remembering this or that detail as he turns the pages. It's engaging. Whether it's the biggest rhino he'd ever seen or Mick Jagger and family visiting Beard's Long Island beach house. It wasn't until he shut the book that I realised I'd just been watching someone describe the pages of a book. But there is more.

Beard's friend from the New England aristocracy, Lee Radziwill, sister of Jackie Kennedy, had an idea to make a film about two of her relatives Edith and her daughter Edie who were living in a rundown mansion in the Hamptons in a weird kind of royal hillbilly existence. Mother and daughter eccentric to the nines, surrounded by cats who appear to infected the humans into servitude, sit in rooms, reminisce, opine in Katherine Hepburn style lost accents about anything that comes up as the weeds grow over the windows.

We get four reels edited to the extent of whole sequences and sound matching as we sit through a dollied up dvd extra. That's not being mean. The project was abandoned because the footage we see is very samey, never breaking through the promise that the true life eccentrics seem to radiate. It's as though some travellers came across a field of gold nuggets, thought they were pretty and moved on.

The pair had hired two brothers to help them with the filming, Albert and David Maysles. These two had earned some serious stripes in the '60s with the likes of The Beatles First U.S. Visit, Salesman and the mighty rock/true crime/end of '60s nightmare concert film Gimme Shelter. They turned up and saw the gold on the ground, came back and made the incomparable Grey Gardens which allowed the Edies to bloom into their full identities and appear in a portrait of a ghostly remnant of the old one percent.

The only thing this brief show reel adds is that the interesting people who got there first didn't quite know that they need to store all that interesting-ness into batteries of observation. It's not a bad proof and it shows the working but it will find no credible place on the documentary shelf without its greater context. Would Criterion be interested in a special edition of Grey Gardens, perhaps? It's that or festivals until exhaustion.

MIFF Session 14: THE KING

It took me a long time to find out about Elvis. By the time I discovered rock music in the 70s (I'd been classical only until 13) he was a naff old square with slicked back short hair. And then I saw the movies before I heard the music, the real music, the music from before them. Until then he might as well have been Fred Astaire. Strangely, when punk landed and took me with it and Johnny Rotten had some vitriol to spit at the news of Elvis' death I started seeing clips played in tribute from the earlier days. It was a different figure; young, slim and wild. I wondered why that had been kept under tarpaulins of Vegas ballads, deep fried sandwiches and reclusion. That's not a long wonder.So, a day after the 41st anniversary of his death at 42 I went to see this.

Documentarian Eugene Jarecki has created a dense essay that embeds Presley's lifestory into an account of the state of the Union then and now. Rather than wheel out a cast of old stagers to reminisce (though there is that) Jarecki is interested in people's take on the phenomenon and how to place it in America's idea of itself.

In the Tupelo birthplace two old ladies from the 99% praise the figure but lament that the country and its ideals are strangers. A long line of contemporary musicians (particularly delighted to see the Handsome Family among them) joins him in a road trip in Elvis' own Rolls Royce as they travel north, south and west to the big bright green-room mirror of a city where the Elvis of the tearing energy softened into his own tribute act.

Everyone has something to say and mostly the needle of their concerns wavers freely between the culture of screens and endless money and the pure vs the neon Elvis. The best, as always, comes from the dissenters. Chuck D. reminds us that Elvis was just one of the origin points of rock and roll, that he promotes the cultural appreciation that Presley used so joyously, but that the playing field should surely be levelled by now. Will it, though. The fluid montage behind the chat and the testimony is increasingly coloured by imagery from the 2016 federal election and the towering pumpkin coloured freakshow who won stands tall as a clip from the near-death King has him at the piano singing in his pitch perfect velvetine passion the old standard Unchained Melody. Near naked dancers cavort in rains of money on game shows, swat teams shatter doors with rams, the towers fall and there is even a glimpse of the blinding mushroom of Los Alamos as Trump is announced to the throne room.

At one point Jarecki asks his father, driving in the car with him, what the latter thinks the film is about. His father bats the question back. Jarecki looks away but seems to think himself a memo to include this in the film.

MIFF Session 13: THE INSULT

Tony is watering the plants on his balcony. The water drains straight on to the street and splashes a building inspector and his crew. They knock on Tony's door and politely inform him that they will replace his illegal drain with a standard one and he slams the door on them. When they fix it up in what seems like record time Tony smashes the new drain. The building inspector calls him a "fucking prick". Oh, Tony is part of a far right Christian political party. The inspector, Yasser, is a Palestinian living in a refugee camp. They are in Beirut.

What begins as a spat about Tony expecting Yasser to apologise escalates, through various mistakes and bad turns into a major trial fomenting a national explosion point ready for a detonator. If it were only about the escalation this might be a satire fuelled by the touchy and dangerous politics of the middle east. But this is a tale of reconciliation and its often ill fitting components.

As the initial riotous hearing deflates both parties and they ready themselves for ever tougher combat we do get to know them and also that, as each is meticulous in stating the disadvantages of his adversary, both are acutely aware that the avowed basis of all of this is a verbal exchange on a street. The problem is that it does not stay there and broken ribs and a premature birth result. And there is the problem of the origins of the pain which precede the insult by generations and greater conflicts. The insult really is just a spark.

The cast have a field day with their roles, particularly the two combatants at the centre (a wide eyed and intense Adel Karam as Tony and a self possessed but pained Yasser played by Kamel El Basha) and the legal adversaries who render the central spat into the international incident it threatens to become Camille Salameh and Diamande Bou Abboud as the lawyers.

If there is a problem it is overstatement. The writing and performances carry us along without the potential awkward moments that might mar such a tale by giving in to easy emotionalism but there is just too much reinforcement of the rising stakes that the centre can get lost. What only just saves it is the infrequent off stage encounters between Yasser and Tony that add a refreshing complexity to their competition. More of this might have allowed it its own gravity. It works as it is but a taste more of the personal might have strengthened the momentum of the bigger picture.

MIFF Session 12: HAPPY AS LAZZARO

Lazzaro is the village gopher. Some might call him idiot but if he jumps to anything that anyone else tells him to do it is not with incomprehension. With his beatific glow and awkward gait he's a kind of Charlie Chaplin imagined by Raphael. He doesn't know who either of his parents are but has a grandmother (who is probably just the old lady that everyone calls Nona). Scene by scene we learn that these modern day farm workers are more like feudal serfs, bound to their land and tobacco crop by the local Maquisa and her family.

But even corrupt rustic idylls have a limit. The young Marquis stages his own kidnapping with the aid of Lazzaro which is cut short when an accident befalls the latter. When the police arrive to investigate the kidnapping they find the necker cube moving away from them: the peasant life is actually the horrific enslavement we were seeing.

When Lazzaro wakes from his unconsciousness it is decades later but he hasn't aged a day. We have already seen local religious postcards of saints and we have heard Lazzaro and the young Marquis call the wolves in their mountain isolation. When Lazzaro rises and goes looking for the people of his former life he finds things have changed beyond recognition but also that even the corruption of time and bitter experience need not mean the end of life. If he is a saint he is one tied to a landscape from millennia before, an Etruscan line, perhaps. In any case he seems destined for either of the ends that await the saintly: apotheosis or martyrdom.

This curious magical realist tale is given to us with heavy serves of both elements but, damn me, if it doesn't also feel as light as a feather. It's a kind of Bela Tarr homily rendered in the colours of Breughel and the daydreams of Cervantes. It is exactly what the bungled Jupiter's Moon from last year: a credible and acceptable tale of the power of simple goodness indebted to no particular religious party. Is there a faith based on the transference of human venality to the plain survivalism of the wolf? If there isn't I think it might have a case with this tale.

MIFF Session 11: THOROUGHBREDS

A billionaire belt of a Connecticut town. A teenaged girl stares down a horse. Her expression is unnervingly blank. A Gladstone bag from which she draws a large knife.

The same girl is admitted to a palatial home on a bright afternoon for private tuition with the daughter of the house, also a teenager, Lily. The lesson falls flat as the first girl, Amanda, reveals that she has no feelings and has spent her life faking joy, sadness etc. to get by until her deed with the horse and psychiatry caught up with her. The two establish (strike up is far too jolly) a friendship or rather rekindle one as it is revealed they had been friends at primary school. We are left to guess what changed that until adolescence. The girls' budding acquaintance is interrupted by Lily's stepfather Mark who is in his buff and managerial forties and looks upon both girls before him with something neither they nor we find easy. Add a local drug dealer too slow for girls like this and you have a plot ... about a plot.

Wait, haven't we already seen this in Tragedy Girls or Mean Girls or Heathers or even Ginger Snaps? Of course we have but each one that works (and this one does) sets its own table. Tragedy Girls added the manipulable narcissism of the screen-addicted generation, Mean Girls played like Restoration comedy in the Valley, Heathers was meant to be Kubrick's high school movie. What Thoroughbreds adds is a depiction of a generation so planned and eugenic and protected that symptoms of sociopathy look like chapter titles from a self help management book (the chapter cards, though not titled, that divide this film are not merely cute). These are the inheritors of the dot com me -first one percent whose endless houses (the scene of Lily searching for her mother is a long Scorsese-like tracking shot through rooms of so many decorative themes they look like a sample living installation) hold the future corporate monsters, capital pirates and pirates in the Capitol.

The deftly written dialogue between the girls could be by Harold Pinter and the flat perfection of its delivery plugs straight into the greatness of Heathers and its inheritors with performances from Anya Taylor-Joy with her terrifyingly too young face and the more earthy but unsettlingly deadpan Olivia Cooke as Amanda. The late Anton Yelchin contributes great comic pathos with his Tim the dealer and Paul Sparks (whose versatility has taken him from the giggling psycho in Boardwalk Empire to the tragic figure of House of Cards) is both intimidating and unironically hilarious as Mark.

Add a score made or parts of the orchestra misbehaving rather than an orchestral score (which it is but only technically) and you have a deadly black comedy more Trump-era ready than Tragedy Girls, and that's saying something. I hope that, unlike that undersung gem, that Thoroughbreds gets a proper post-festival release and reaches out to what is left of the cultists of cinema who have been starving around  the feeble braziers of Irreversible or Fight Club for too long. This is great cinema, lean and hungry. Offer yourselves, the joy is in the eating.

Oh, sorry, almost forgot: ;)


Screening notes: I don't have a problem with Comedy Theatre seating but that's because I like the front row and had only two companions-by-default to enjoy it with. I was able to nab a choc top from the anesthetic kiosk just before the screening and enjoyed the holy living hell out of the film. Tomorrow's session is on standby. Weep for me.

MIFF Session 10: NICO 1988

Not everybody gets famous. Of those who do, not everyone wants it. Of those not all of them get to choose what they are famous for. This story of the final years of an artist who is best known by a tiny fraction of her output from her earliest years. This is dealt with quickly as Nico, on the verge of a career reviving tour is seen fending off a persistent British radio interviewer's questions about the Velvet Underground. Imagine Cher still being asked about Sonny Bono.

Nico was in the Velvet Underground for one album and a few shows, imposed upon the extant group by their manager Andy Warhol. It's true that the three songs she sang on that record are classics and she put them in her sets to the end but she swiftly proved herself capable of highly individual and strong material of her own. Records like Desert Shore and The Marble Index are so different from even the first solo album made of songs by the likes of Lou Reed and Jackson Browne that it sounds like a different person making them. And twenty years after that it was still: so, tell me about the Velvet Underground. This film addresses the rest.

Nico or, as she is increasingly insisting, Christa Paffgen is introduced in middle age attempting to divest herself of a past she was only barely part of looking forward to playing live with a new band. She has her own continued opiate addiction and that of some of the band, as well as the awkward attentions of her road manager and the dodgy collaborators that resuming a live career on the bottom necessitates. But she is enjoying the freedom of this and the chance to perhaps remove the shackles of a cult notoriety she didn't pursue. We see her in serious rehearsal and live performance and what we see is the power of that lure of freedom. We might also know that the year 1988 is the year of her death, an everyday accident that might befall the humblest and plainest of us.

Front and centre Danish actor Trina Dyrholm gives us a Nico as much in control of her minute to minute life, noting the warm and cold spots in the rooms and crowds around her, who records the sounds of hot water services as well as the crashing tide as all sounds can be music and the elusive one she is chasing is from a memory and probably more a whole experience. Dyrholm's intensity doesn't omit humour and it is the humour of one who knows she can say anything abruptly and have it received as wit and observe the difference in that reception from person to person. She also, crucially, assumes all the vocal duties, sounding perfectly like Nico as she would have sounded off record, wailing iron high notes in Janitor of Lunacy and losing the low notes of All Tomorrow's Parties at a sound check. With a performance as committed as hers this can send real shivers.

This is a good point to praise the film for its realisation of a very authentic live sound. As the droning arrangements proceed we hear this bit of guitar and that of violin and the vocals come and go with the singer's microphone technique and the overall effect is that of slightly articulated mud which is the way every single gig (especially smaller venue ones) until advances in audio reproduction in the decades that came after the setting. With the camera often kept at punter-level the sense of being there is very strong. I would have to think hard of another movie that did that so well.

The notion of authenticity that drives the theme and chief character is extended to the use of the hard square of old video (a lot of it looks like it was shot on VHS or at least undressed hidef digital) where everything looks a little more real than is comfortable, just short of being ugly. And that's the point of it. Maybe now that the comfort zone of three more more decades catches up with artists who preferred to deliver their music with a minimum of contrivance and a contempt of legend, the punks, post punks and those who were always on the lonelier side of the margins. Don't get me wrong, we can learn from legends but we'll remember more profoundly the sudden revelations that can come from a conversation at a kitchen table. That's where this film is sitting. Come on in. Kettle's on.