Review: LADIES IN BLACK

Teenaged Lisa starts work on the cocktail frock floor of a big department store in Sydney at the end of the '50s. She quickly proves more capable than the slave status normally accorded a fresh school leaver and is soon head hunted by the even ritzier section of model gowns, presided over by the mysterious mittel European Magda (a superb Julia Ormond) whose quotable savoir faire promise much more and tastier wisdom than the Anglos at the cocktail dress counter. Things look good.

At home Lisa is Leslie, girl from the suburbs whose mum (Susie Porter) makes her clothes for her using the same patterns she used when Leslie was ten. Dad is a burly lug (Shane Jacobsen) who needs a little schooling if he is to survive the decade to come. Leslie eventually must decloset herself about her name change but for the nonce she lives a double life.

Elsewhere at the counter Myra is having trouble getting her husband interested in her and we will hear the gamut of the euphemisms for homosexuality suitable for mixed company until matters get crucial. Her counter mate Fay is bored with the oafs she encounters but doesn't quite know what she wants. Magda's homelife is a pleasantly managed continental European series of fine breakfasts and soirees. The 2018 audience knows the reffo tag for racism and the story will negate the power of it through love of various kinds.

Even the darkest of these themes is blended like the ingredients of mock chicken in an old Home Ec text but lest I give the impression that this is a twee piece I should point out that veteran Bruce Beresford keeps a firm hand on the helm and takes what is essentially a feelgood tale of a girl watching the times around her change and smuggles in a fair amount of contemporary observation to allow some harder corners to poke through.

The xenophobia is not surprising of itself but its casualness might remind an Australian audience of recent speeches on the floor of the Senate that might well have been made during the film's setting. The scenes of mother and daughter negotiation feel natural and pointed clarifying the kind of sexual politics to come. The sexuality of Myra's Frank has a bizarre conclusion, all the more considering that the source novel was not written in the '50s but he '90s. The subplot's wrap-up could have come out of a British grim-oop-north family saga. Source material or hasty writing? It's hard to tell.

Beresford stitches a lot of post war Sydney on film into the palette and we're allowed to see enough of the work to mentally comment. It's a pleasant way of letting us join the real past with the detailed construction of it for most of the screen time.

I kept wincing at the score, though. The mallet approach to emotive orchestral scoring with a piano tinkling in cutely came so close to being embarrassing I wondered if it were irony. But, no, I suspect that the '70s chick flick tweets on the 1001 strings of Bartholemew Cubbins were paid for and delivered without a smirk. I can't fault it for not sounding like John Carpenter but couldn't help feeling that most of the intimate and weighty moments between characters would have meant more if the music was ditched. This kind of jobbing film music neither serves the period of the setting nor this one.

However, I wonder how many people will care about that. Why should they? What they get is a radiant cast performing a frequently amusing and engaging story about a society on the turn that ends, as it must, on a note of naive optimism. Cynicism need not apply here. It's just the adaptation at work. I wasted neither my time nor money on this ticket. I just kept thinking of the similar and more exhilarating earlier Beresford film The Getting of Wisdom. I guess I missed the struggle.

Review: BEAST

Moll is a young tour guide on the Isle of Jersey, bored but boxed into mundanity by a mother who treats her like hired help while the other daughter is showered with favour. Even Moll's birthday party is deflated by sis who announces a pregnancy. Moll strays to a dance, stays all night and is saved from date rape by a man who seems to have appeared from under the soil. His name is Pascal and he is everything Moll's mother hates and fears with an equal fury. Pascal is nature. Moll is in love.

Oh, and there's a murderer on the loose, abducting teenaged girls, raping and killing them and leaving them in shallow graves for later discovery. When they're not betting on the Portuguese farm worker their money's on Pascal. Pascal is golden blonde, sweaty and as dangerous as all freedom but understands he must earn Moll's trust. Both of the pair have a past and it's violent and guilty. But ... is he the killer?

Michael Pearce's intense debut feature is a study in contrasts. It's not just the wild nature vs corsetted civilisation on either side of the love story. It's also in the stiff and brutal motion of the fearful villagers and the strange balletic movement of the lovers when they are alone. And, while Pearce strives for a balance between these elements he seems to have found a need to prefer to write the symbols large. This never feels clumsy, though, it gives more of a sense of these things, images and actions, needing to be stated with strength. When you see the scene with the rabbit you know you'll see it again with higher stakes in allegory. This is not the self-conscious severity of a Bruno Dumont but neither is it subtle. It assumes you recognise it plainly. The gleeful shaky cam moment on the golf lawn with the roaring nocturnal beach punched in does what a lazy film leaves to an orchestral score. The nuance is elsewhere.

Most of it is in performance. Jessie Buckley and Johnny Flynn in the lead roles stun with their range and can be at their most menacing or eerie in the quietest exchanges. Geraldine James as Moll's mother is the embodiment of interpersonal domination, changing course on a five cent piece to control the mood and output of everything living within every cubic centimetre she surveys. Her interactions with Moll are sobering in their efficacy. In one of those unsubtle but strong touches mentioned above Moll's mother has another incarnation in the form of a flown-in police officer whose gothic interrogation scene comes from an even deeper nightmare. Yes, Moll is seeing and hearing her mother in the interrogator. We know. But we are still compelled.

When I see any film I look for its statements. Sometimes these can be and remain obscure but now and then they are so certain that the next task of seeing how the film expresses them is part of a more unconscious process. And then at the third act I wake this up and prepare to relish the taste of it. An '80s horror movie ends with the wink that that monster is still with us. A good rom com gives us a sting that the reconciled lovers have issues they haven't even dreamed of. But here, following each unfolding revelation I honestly had no idea of where it was going. It did. I didn't. Because of that alone it will be among my best of this year. But there's so much more. It's beautiful. It's ugly. It's good.

Review: THE WIFE

Melodrama is too much maligned, dismissed as cheaply emotive but without it we don't get the great American films of master Douglas Sirk, a lot of '50s Hollywood, the British kitchen sink realism of the '60s, that's before you get to silent cinema which required an appreciation of melodrama on the part of its audiences to work at all. As I see it, melodrama in cinema is a moral setting against which the emotional conflicts are given licence to bloom. The Wife is a story in which the secret of a marriage and literary career burns slowly and then quickly and brightly until you almost hold your breath for the explosion you know is coming. It's a good example of a contemporary melodrama.

Glenn Close is the wife of the title. Her husband, narcissistic and wayward, has just won the Nobel Prize for Literature. They trampoline on the mattress, hand in hand, singing:"I won the Nobel. I won the Nobel" until she trails off and leaves the room on a pretext of something familial. Thereafter, through the first two acts, each time he speaks about the prize publicly the camera's gaze shifts from his anodyne glow to his wife's increasingly strained loyalty smile. We get many indicators that he, Joe (Jonathon Pryce) is a monstrous father, having a history of affairs, making a clear and humiliating preference for his daughter over his son in the presence of both, and carrying the secret that is telescoped in a very early scene: did she, Joan (Glenn Close) sacrifice her own writing career to support his or does it go deeper into ghost writing of his works which have delivered him the apex of literary recognition?

Most of the story is set outside the comfort of their home in America, in the salubrious surrounds of ceremonial buildings and five star hotels in Stockholm so they are on notice to perform for the public as the private shaking resentment festers in Joan's bosom. She must sit beside Swedish royalty as her husband pays her the kind of tribute given the long suffering rather than reveal the truth. How will this end?

I first remember Glenn Close as the self sacrificing earth mother in The Big Chill where she quietly commanded the self-licencing gaggle of old friends until giving up her husband for a single night to another woman. She did a lot of those. But the turn she made of her role in the retro-ethical Fatal Attraction or the end title sequence of Dangerous Liaisons where she scrapes away the powder and makeup of her doomed aristocracy are what I recall her for most of all and they are the ancestors of this one. This is a melodrama so it is allowed to emote beyond the bounds of naturalism but that doesn't mean overacting here, it means clarity. Close's wise and durable beauty is stretched to breaking with anger but restrained by her sense of the order of things. Pressed to a detonating fury in the third act, she knows the effect she has been fearing this will have is happening before her eyes and, after an extraordinary circular parallel track on her face against the gaudy coloured wall as it moves in sickly patterns behind her, she knows how she must end it. So do you and, whether you'll admit it or not, that's why you like melodrama.

Review: THE BREAKER UPPERERS

Jen and Mel run the titular service by which they are hired to decisively break couples up. Already the premise will strike anyone who has been in a relationship. They start and they end and when they end one always wants to hang on and the other always wants a clear rupture. When you think about it even the "let's stay friends" line is always from the dropper and can do more damage to the communication that the worst outright rejection. If you could just get someone else to step in and do it for you .... what you wouldn't pay.

This means that the pair are hired by the worst of the ones in the relationship and their measures traverse the waterfront of dump from the gentle to the brutal. What could go wrong? Just one moment of line-crossing kindness that opens a world of chaos as Mel starts showing sympathy. This feeling and the swelling problems gestating from its spark are the basis of the plot of this film as Jen and Mel are forced to question their own motives and see the friendship beneath them.

Sounds too warm n fuzzy? Well, as Mel says to a former mark when the latter has assured her that they will never see each other later: "this is New Zealand". If you've ever had a friend from New Zealand ("this is Australia!") you will know the routine of deadpan gallows humour, bursting understatement and the kind of sweetness that you always suspect is what poison tastes like. Like them, this film loudly and joyfully treads on sexual mores, race politics, ageism, consumerism, self loathing and narcissism and it does all that because it must. As a result this is one of the most effortlessly funny films you'll see this year.

Writers/leads Jackie Van Beek and Madeleine Sami keep things on a constant boil and provide a studied Jack Sprat pairing. Moments of competitive professionalism are a joy. James Rolleston as the sperm canon footballer who is impossible not to love owns his every shot (so to speak). Celia Pacquola is the perfect choice for the disastrous Annie.

If you see a trailer for this and go in expecting something satirical and dark you will have to do your own panning for it. The approach here is far more understated and does beg some indulgence.Take it easy and you get the lot. Ask for classic black comedy and you will leave poor.

Review: C'EST LA VIE

Super caterer Max is dealing again with a couple who want to skimp on the costs of their wedding reception. The venue has a massive view of the Eiffel Tower and they're talking about saving on the petit fours. With deadly precision Max takes it further in an increasingly withering display barely restrained contempt until the parsimonious pair are forced to retreat, perhaps forever. He's not displeased. He heads off to the baroque chateau for his next job, juggling an over disciplined assistant, the wrong band, a depressive waiter who once dated the bride, a host of workers who have their own problems and an overbearing narcissist who thinks he is a natural orator and balloon performer. What could go wrong?

Well, this is the kind of film that telescopes each disaster of varying magnitude and tests the characters to bring it through. If there's too much tension about this it must veer towards satire but this gentle and charming ensemble piece keeps the brittleness at bay but does forage for some deeper laughs. You know what's going to happen (the massive quantities of what must be the sponsor champagne label would have seen to that) but the fun of it is in the performances and they fit together here perfectly.

Really? That's it? Hey you get a good, fast paced event comedy in sumptuous surrounds and performed by a mix of old stagers and hot young newcomers delivered with all the charm of the French (when they are trying to please). What more do you want?

MIFF roundup 2018

MIFF 2018 arrived and found me fully prepared with booked pass and readiness to exchange any session that was getting too full at venues where that's bad (the only one where it's indifferent is Hoyts) and fairly high hopes of seeing some fine flickeroonies. Oh, and hand sanitiser to ward off the lurgies.

But maybe I was too ready. Despite sharing a few screenings with cronies (one of them a date) I feel now I over organised it to avoid the social aspects almost entirely so what was left was some movies in fine places. So, while I got around and caught up with friends on non-screening nights the experience of the festival itself was oddly quite lonesome. I think this is largely due to how much of an intolerant old grump I've become. I've got all frowny at the sight of people taking the best spots in the front row of the Forum (as they are perfectly entitled). I've mentally grumbled at having to stand in a queue because the person who has been nice enough to want to see a movie with me can sit somewhere less geeky than the front three rows. And then I've felt the frozen palm of injustice at how some of the sessions I've chosen go into "selling fast" or "standby" status. I even exchanged a screening of festival favourite Hong Sang Soo as it was getting full at the Kino and that would mean having to queue for half an hour.

The worst was saved to last through, as I timed the four pm session of Asako I & II so I could just stroll in and take my front row vista but still had to wait in a queue. I was near the top of the stairs, true enough so close to realising my dream. But it had gone four and there were still people strolling out of the cinema. None of the staff seemed stressed by this and by ten past I was getting irked. I was about to collar one of the ticket inspectors when a thought occured and I checked the starting time. I'd got here half an hour early, exactly what I used to do and had congratulated myself that I did no more. That's how bad it got.

Apart from that I had no symptoms of a cold ... until today, the Monday after (which means I got it from a Friday screening and probably the non-festival one). Having read about the importance of hand health I packed a sanitiser for generous application after every screening. It probably did nothing (viruses wouldn't even notice it, after all) but it felt thorough.

Finally, this will be the last MIFF helmed by Michelle Carey who has steered the great ship well clear of reefs of mediocrity. Under her reign we have seen a much heightened professionalism in the volunteer staff (who don't need to be professional so it's more impressive when they are). If her successor is half as good future fests will still be joyous. Farewell!

So, lonesome and lately bugged by disease, how was it?

THE MOVIES

HIGH

Our House

As lean as prize sashimi this story of either a haunting, time travel or perhaps collision of dimensions makes everything it tries work






Thoroughbreds

A new member at the cool table at Heathers High this deadpan folie a deux wins its every last scene








Nico 1988

Kept cold and video-ugly, this story of the last ditch of someone famous for a past she'd rather erase embarrasses the likes of The Doors, Stoned, Sid and Nancy etc by leaving the mythology in the bin. Rock icons have kitchens, too.





Tigers Are Not Afraid

Unsettling and heart rending account of displaced kids orphaned by the cartel gangs needs every frame of magical realism it can muster to keep us from screaming at the scenes it dishes up.






Here to be Heard: The Story of The Slits

Fat free rockumentary keeps its accounts plain and participants separated for a neat and hard history of a band made icons after their time. Take note all who think they can do Julian Temple's signature cheek, you might just try this approach, it's simpler and more effective.



MIDDLE

Cold War

Love and indecision in a time of hate and scission: this love across borders tale works well for most part but unlike the same team's luminous Ida this one ends up feeling too light







The Eyes of Orson Welles
Mark Cousins makes film personal like no other but this started feeling overlong when it should have been constantly engaging. Next time?






Good Manners
A sagging middle act prevented this from being the Angela Carterian fable it almost was.






Los Silencios

A hair more of the magic and a hair less of the realism might have left a deeper impression





The Insult

The characterisation of the principle combatants was good enough to have more of them and their complicating encounters and less of the swell building around them which grew repetitious and draggy







Happy as Lazzaro
Despite a beautiful realisation of the title character and intriguing treatment of the strange world of the first act this one lagged a little too much in its journey to the finale which felt rushed.





Asako I&II

Common gripe of the slow or saggy middle act also applies here as an otherwise fresh and engaging tale of love and identity beckons us in. Could survive the removal of about twenty minutes. Like The Insult the third act would only to open on a new scene (really? there's more?)





LOW
The Green Fog
Some inspired loony mechanisms were highlights but it grew repetitive and tiring









Wildlife
Good performances all round couldn't lift this above its own softly waving surface






The King

Nice idea to use an enduring public figure to make a moral map of his nation but it ends up too self confused to mean a great deal.






That Summer
An 80 minute admission that the filmmaker was more interesting than interested in a subject that master documentarians would fashion into gold soon after





NAVIGATION
App downloaded stealthily and in good time (I can remember the terrible days of waiting on the post for the credit card passes), ready to rock from the word go. If anything it's a touch more reliable and slicker to use (maybe I'm just better at using it). I wish the login would allow access to tickets on startup rather than having to thumb a few taps to get there. Not a big deal and maybe one only related to persons with passes but still... Otherwise, exchanges and additional tickets were easy to arrange with the app.

Website is much improved with very easy and rapid navigation through the mass of information presented. The Calendar is the best way of shortlisting with a pass and allows immediate information on venue vs time grid for making those difficult session choices.

VENUES

REGENT
A little Regent is better than no Regent at all. My first two sessions were in this splendour and I only wished the use of the venue stretched further than the opening weekend. Still ...

FORUM
The old favourite. I managed to get a good swag o' screenings in there. Other people continue to prefer the front and when your session is annoyingly sold out at 1.30 pm on a weekday that can get annoying.

COMEDY THEATRE
I don't have the same gripe with this venue that others do. Then again, I sit on the front row when I can so I wouldn't be bothered. I love the old style theatre ambience and the wine and choctop kiosk open until curtain up.

ACMI
It's a well appointed modern cinema but I still find it a little too sanitised. That gets forgotten when the movie starts, of course, but I'll still steer away from sessions there if I can. Only saw one at ACMI this time.

KINO
My least favourite MIFF venue as it doesn't cope well with larger crowds. Even the front seats get taken early and if you're too far to either side the image will be warped. Only had one session there and it was fine but I still veer from it when choosing.


HOYTS
The only cinema that even standby sessions can't faze me with. I have never failed to get a good seat in that first three-row block where you are at the front but no one is sitting behind you. Even when seeing a film with a friend who won't sit at the front we got good seats.


STAFF
It's worth repeating year after year that the staff in the past five to ten years have been good to deal with, being both well informed and courteous. I have clear memories of when they were a necessary feature the festival that you just had to put up with.

CROWDS
I hate standby sessions. I know they can convey a sense of really being in the festival vibe but considering how crap the average punter had got with cinema etiquette they can also be a nightmare of mobile light pollution, seat kickers or folk who fail to understand that the seat in front of them is not a good place to jam their shoes. Had someone two seats away who jostled past "sorry, I have to be in the middle" and then had to be told to turn her light polluting phone off as the film was starting.

Latecomers still frustrate me as they disrupt the screenings. It's an event to go to a festival film; you really can't calculate the likelihood of getting to a venue on time, factoring in your trains or parking? Why are you only getting here half an hour into the movie?


MISSED
The new Hong Sang Soo film, Grass, went into standby rapidly. Rather than battle the grots at Kino I exchanged it for another film. This director's films have so long been popular at MIFF that it's crazy that none of the marginal mainstream or arthouse, if you will, cinemas have picked up on it. If he can fill the Forum or the Kino at one in the afternoon he'd good for a release for a month or two in the wild, surely. His fans' reverence approaches that of David Lynch's or Wes Anderson's. Release his movies normally! Kino! Nova! Westgarth! Freezers of choctop sales guaranteed.

Otherwise, the same thing got me out of The Kindergarten Teacher and Behind the Curve (which, unlike Grass, will quite likely turn up at the cinema if not on streaming). Kore-eda's Shoplifters and The Third Murder would be good to see. I wasn't going to bother trying for a session of the new Terry Gilliam film as it's unlikely not to get a general release. See also Mandy and The Cured. Tower: A Bright Day might conceivably turn up on SBS on Demand as might The Night Eats the World or Fugue. Looking forward to local releases of Now Sound and Bad Reputation.

As usual I wanted to see almost everything on the program. I knew I'd be adding sessions to the thirteen I'd already picked. Maybe next year I get membership for the passport and really do it.

FIN
I got up from my seat at Asako I&II with feelings described in my intro, that it had been a quiet and solitary affair, regardless of the company I had kept throughout. While the top titles provided real delight I have felt very little of the experience of seeing Wisconsin Death Trip at eleven in the morning at the Forum all those years ago that sold me on getting a pass and committing to ten or more movies. Wisconsin Death Trip is not a great film but the whole experience got me hooked. I'd been to MIFF before but now I had a way of approaching it that promised riches by avoiding the big tickets and looking in the shadows. I made my way down to the club and had a glass of shiraz, taking a few pictures. It's not the same without either company or the expectation of something really strong on screen coming up or bidding recovery from. So, yeah, I gotta plan it better.

Roll on August 2019.

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.