Review: MIDSOMMAR

Christian and his uni friends are excited about going to Sweden to witness a seldom-performed ceremony. They're would-be anthropologists so, while it's a great holiday idea, it's also pretty compelling field work. Christian's girlfriend Dani is recovering from a traumatic grief and, while the others don't want her there to bum them out, she joins them. Who knows, there might even be an opportunity to end a draggy relationship. So, they get to Sweden, go remote and take some mushroom tea just before entering the eyebrow-free zone of happy rustic Norsefolk. It's charming and fun but then ...

Ok, there's an issue with this film that is bothersome. I've seen it spoiled by people who could not have seen it (before local release date and not the kind to grab a torrent), who have spoiled it because someone else did it to them or they might borrow some clunking worldliness by it. But that's a strange one because this is not a film that depends on twists and turns but rather a growing realisation on the part of the audience as to what is really happening (it is NOT obvious). It's funny, too as the director's previous film Hereditary played a fun game of anti spoilers with an intentionally misleading trailer. The trailer for Midsommar doesn't really do a lot of beating around the bush but it's not plot points that stand or fall, here, it's your own emotional response. However, in deference to any who want to go in fresh and in contempt for the Troglodytes who think they're being sophisticated by spoiling with material already in the trailer. There are significant moments of real shock in this film but they serve more as transition than motivation (but there really is some bad stuff, the kind of which you think: oh, they wouldn't do that would th-? Before containing a big scream).

So, what's left to say? Plenty, really, and this feeds back into plot management. Dani's family tragedy is clearly telescoped in the earliest scenes so, while its details are best kept cloaked, it doesn't shock or surprise as much as leave a gut punch. Already fearing she has become too fulsome with her boyfriend, she is at a loss as to how to proceed to keep what might be her one handhold on personal control. So, while the news about the Swedish trip surprises her she all but invites herself. Who knows, there might even be an opportunity to share some fruitful bonding.

Aster did something similar to this with Hereditary, whereby a means of emerging from grief is suggested and tried before something far worse than a few tricks with ouija boards could ever be. So with Midsommar a series of disorientating and divisive incidents that put the friends under others' control tell us little about where they might be placed, narratively and physically, by the time  of the final scene. In the end it's a little like the alignment of the planets at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey (but that still won't give you the impact of the end).

A second, quasi-spoiler, is that this film is just an update or even remake of The Wicker Man. Beyond both fitting easily into the sub-genre of folk horror there isn't much to this. The earlier film's grounded skepticism of its final act is what produces the horror. We can't stop it, despite our disbelief as we know they believe and consider it unstoppable. The rich and Wagnerian fall of the ending of Midsommar is not about belief but an acknowledgement of ritual in support of some very earthly nature. There is real intention and poignancy in the setting of this tale sharing its general location with the home of the Nobel Prize.

Aster again has responded to the aesthetic needs of his tale and instead of Hereditary's gloomy dark interiors we have the warm open spaces of a summer under the midnight sun. Tootling and groaning folk music and costumes could only ever smell of the lightest perspiration, worn under head dresses made of wildflowers and straw. You want to be there. And when things get trippy he uses CG both subtly and showily as flowers that seem to swallow and food that seems to breathe in the distance and in closeup with the same absence of effort. The fragrance of gardens and sex are only window decoration to these revellers (and this is the point to stick in a bit about some lazy othering of Scandinavians, peasants and the notion of the cursed appearance of the inbred none of which are resolved nor challenged) as their rites evoke both and seem to undress the most ardent of urbanite inhibitions. We close on a facial expression and we feel both at home and less trusting of home.

MIFF Session 4: THE UNKNOWN SAINT

A bank robber buries his loot and makes it look like a grave. When he gets out he finds that a mausoleum has been built around the grave as a shrine to the unknown saint. An aging man attempts to pray for rain in the barren landscape. A new doctor takes up his position in the village and is faced with a life crushing boredom. The villagers hang around the barbershop and the dispensary because where else. The mausoleum guard, one of the few responsible office holders in the area, takes his job very seriously. The bank robber, musing, calls in some help. What could go wrong?

This fable of wishes, faith and futility is kept very deliberately pedestrian as the tension felt by the characters must be kept under the surface. The spectre of religion is centre screen but handled without mockery; characters who turn to it are desperate rather than deluded. This film is more about coping with difficult hands of cards and turning to imagination and inventiveness in a barren world of rocks, dust and misguided worship.

The vistas of unending dunes and distant mountains, of cloudbanks that seem to be for someone else, nurture the gentle play of people who are content with their plain means having known no other kind. SOme hard thinking has gone into the world building here, even though it's familiar to anyone who has an idea of the lunar landscape of North Africa; it's wide open but constrained. A deceptively plain story told with great delicacy.

MIFF Session 3: THE TOMORROW MAN

Retiree Ed spends his days preaching a secular apocalypse to online forums, stocking up his survivalist garage and frowning at a new commentator who he imagines talks directly to him. One day at the supermarket he spies an age appropriate woman, Ronnie, who pays, like a survivalist, in cash. From lifelong can-do habit he sets up his own meet cute. From that point the main business is the thawing of rom com partners and the unsteady road to compromise and the admission of mutual need.

This plays out very conventionally and the comedy is kept light. Actually, it's kept just short of the point where potential audiences might not tolerate a senior sexual union. As soon as you notice this you begin to twig that there will be something that will emerge from under the carpet of gentle string sections and quaint winter years discoveries. When that appears it is both alarming and heartwarming and, finally, this seemingly anodyne picture of hope in later years becomes one of real preparedness. The ending of this film is extraordinary.

John Lithgow and Blythe Danner as the central duo shine as a couple of colliding forces: he's hoarding for the future and she fills her house with the past and both will need to let go of these things. This can edge towards poignancy but a very fine game of balance is being played here. Perhaps too fine as the resulting smoothness does not lull so much as drag at its worst. Gentle indications of youth fleeing or advising with their own fresher wisdom feel too gentle where they might do better erupting. Still, a pleasant and thoughtful meditation on the need to recognise what's important, even if that's arranging deckchairs on a Titanic.

MIFF Session 2: IN FABRIC

A divorcee re-enters the dating scene in a dress that kills. I'm not being figurative, the garment attacks people and you should see what it does to washing machines. Through a series of spoilable events it ends up in the possession of a washing machine repairman whose droning technical summaries send the people he's talking to into subsexual trances. The sales staff speak like vocal installation art. One says, when sensing a customer's reluctance: "The hesitation in your voice is soon to be an echo in the recesses of the sphere of retail."

Peter Strickland's new film is a clear progressive step on from the creepy world of Berberian Sound Studio and the severe one of The Duke of Burgundy. It's a progressive step because there's more and stranger. Just as we might think we have his M.O. down he gives us something else set in a familiar bed of absurdity and sensuality. Sometimes the dress's malevolence is funny but at other times, suspended in the dark above a sleeper, it's genuinely eerie. The coven-like sales women seem to animate the shop's mannequins (in one instance with functioning organs) but can also freeze into inanimate stupors themselves. Blended into this are many moments of perfectly credible workaday moments like the closeted meetings with the duo of middle managers and -- and far too much else. Oh, one thing I need to report is the ASMR aspect. The scenes in the boutique have an extraordinary sound mix or murmuring shoppers that is only just loud enough to be noticeable. At first I thought it was people in the audience.

After all that cramming the screen with big artsy worthiness, is there much else? Well, that's it but it's also one of the most thoroughly entertaining films I've seen for years. One thing Strickland never forgets is the spoonful of sugar. It's necessary. One aspect of this is the beautiful partially electronic score by Cavern of Antimatter which recalls Morricone's '70s thriller music. Another is the mix of performance styles from kitchen sink to stylised. And somehow it all works.

Strickland introduced the screening which began with a short film he had made as part of an anthology. Cobbler's Lot is an adaptation of a Hungarian folktale which, while not silent, has intertitled dialogue and a look somewhere between Powell and Pressburger's early technicolor and Guy Maddin's antique cinema that never was.

I also went along to an interview/Q&A session with him in which he managed to illuminate a few shadows. While the interviewer (an esteemed Melbourne cinema academic) often obstructed the flow of his responses, the questions from the audience seemed to animate him and his replies took on a lot more warmth and enthusiasm and without the audience members interrupting him his accounts of things like actor preparation and stylistic choices were at last lucid and rounded. A lovely appendix to what might well be my pick of the Fest.

Winter Part 2: Matchstick Men

Aye, the chill thickens outside. The wind howls and the fire crackles. Let's make it though to spring with these warming (some chilling) treats about walking with the unknown. As always, some of these will pose a challenge for you to access but you will be glad of the trouble when you see them. On!

Phase IV (Saul Bass, USA, 1974)

A sci-horror about an organised army of ants might make you think schlock. Saul Bass's mid-70s tale is far closer to the kind of rethink of humanity that was just around the corner in David Cronenberg's mind. A biologist and a mathematician find themselves besieged in their research station by a horde of the social insects who take to building human-like structures that look somewhere between temple pillars and watchtowers. The world is about to change.

Catch Us If You Can (John Boorman, U.K., 1965)

What starts as a pardonable ripoff of Hard Day's Night soon starts developing a social conscience as Dave Clark makes off with a poster girl and their exploits are absorbed by the ad campaign she's supposed to have fled. Travelling through the ad industry, futile military destruction, proto hippies who ask the beat group leader if he has any heroin for them, a bickering middleaged couple into kinkiness and collection toward a final dejecting illusion, this just doesn't play out like the big loud shouting pop that the band were famous for. A clue might be found in the directorship of one John Boorman whose strange existential thriller Point Blank was less than two years away. Possibly the only British Invasion promo feature that felt like a U.K. film from the time. Not as complex as Billy Liar or as wrenching as A Kind of Loving it's still more grey-skied and kitchen sink than the usual fare. A Harder Day's Night? Maybe not but nor is it the Zardoz of beat-group movies.

Scanners (David Cronenberg, Canada, 1981)

David Cronenberg's fifth film continues his fascination with society and science and the individuals who get caught between the two. Cameron Vale is a scanner which means he can read minds. His skill has left him dejected on skid row. Taken up by a scientist who wants to develop his skill but also pursued by a corporation that wants to exploit it, Cameron has to learn on the lam, knowing he must stop running, turn and face the strange. Cronenberg went from strength to strength in this initial phase of his career, keeping an eye on the body horror sub-genre he invented but with a mind to find greater depth in the telling of the tale and the characters that populate it.

Blancanieves (Pablo Berger, Spain, 2012)

Pablo Berger's retelling of Snow White rips the carpet from under our feet. It plays soundly on a daughter's distance from her father and grief for the mother who died as she was born. Her flight from the house dominated by her wicked stepmother lands her in a company of a novelty act of travelling bullfight clowns (seven, in fact, guess the average stature) and shows a great talent for the bullring herself. Before you worry about supporting bullfighting by watching this film stop now and just watch it (my reason would be a spoiler). The meltingly beautiful Macarena Garcia brings both a feisty youth and tragic gravity to the title role while her counterpart Maribel Verdu as the wicked Encarna finds the sexiness in her dark role but is not above its comedy. Oh, didn't I say? This 2012 film is a silent movie. There's a score but the dialogue and narration are entirely on intertitles. But the film barely needs them as Berger's scholarly hand knows its way around silent cinema. He was worried by cash-in accusations in light of the high profile The Artist but needn't have been. Blancanieves is every frame it's own film (closer, if anything, to something by Guy Maddin but even then ...) Please seek and watch. Light the fireplace if you have one but maybe pass on the apple bobbing.

The Blair Witch Project (Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick, USA, 1999)

Three students head out to the woods on an assignment to make a documentary about a local legend. Whether it's forces beyond their ken or that they get as psychologically lost as they are physically is kept deliberately ambiguous. That is why this horror tale would work regardless of its production values. On that it added two things that put it right in the middle of hitsville in a year of strong imaginative cinema on big budgets. BWP was made on a couple of maxed credit cards and a lot of favours. This film didn't invent the form it took but it became a source point for what would soon be known as found footage movies. It was also backed up by an early viral marketing campaign which worked because we weren't familiar with the concept on newsgroups and the web. Multimedia was a slight thing online in 1999 but that lent a kind of stolen authenticity to the campaign theme that this was real footage. That worked even if you didn't believe it because the film (unlike most of its descendants) works like an origins episode of a campfire tale. Take this one on a 20th birthday spin for the end of winter.

MIFF Session 1: VIVARIUM

Young and upwardly mobile Tom and Gemma are househunting when they come upon a strange real estate office promoting a new housing estate. They drive out with the realtor to inspect the place and find that it is just one of an apparently boundless cluster of identical green houses. The realtor vanishes during the house inspection and the couple discover that they can't leave, the estate is so labyrinthine and circular that they are bound to return to the house they were shown, number 9. Out of petrol and irritated they enter the house and stay the night. The next morning they find a box of groceries and another containing a baby. The message on that box reads: Raise the child and you will be released.

That's as much plot as I'll give here as there are many twists and turns that are best discovered fresh. We have already seen a cuckoo chick in action, ousting the egg and chicks of a nest. We take little time to see that something very similar is happening here. This is in great part due to the sheer intentional artificiality of the setting with its painted clouds and CG aerial shots. The audacity alone would sell it to a point but it needs our engagement as it grows ever stranger.

This comes largely in the performances of a pair of instantly appealing actors, Jessie Eisenberg and Imogen Poots. Without the warmth of these turns this film might well have made the mistake of misstepped absurdism that starts at ten and just retreads whimsy, becoming exhausting. This film, though it outstays its welcome by about twenty minutes, is not allowed to make that mistake because this cast responds to strengths in the writing that allow for dynamics that keep us guessing. That's a pretty fine feat for a film that declares itself to be outside reality. So much of that is that it starts rooted in a very appealing realism. When we go beyond that we do so with the same kind of memories that the couple have.

The screening featured a Q&A with director Lorcan Finnegan who crucially mentioned Woman in the Dunes as an influence. Amid all the Magritte and Terry Gilliam aesthetic, it was this very film that I recalled with its characters who begin by resisting life responsibilities to find how much easier it is to resign to them and the saddening resonance that has. A good start to a MIFF I think I'll enjoy.

Lorcan Finnegan (R) Q&A with MIFF
programmer Thomas Caldwell

Review: YESTERDAY

You've seen the trailer or the poster. What it says on the tin is that after a worldwide glitch no one remembers The Beatles except for one struggling singer/songwriter. This fable about the importance of telling the truth makes no attempt to explain why what looks like a worldwide power outage could remove vinyl LPs from a record collection but what it does try is to convince us that The Beatles left the world a better place. So, if no one remembers the songs that improved life on earth why does it look the same as if they did? I'm beginning with what look like closing remarks because this is a film that begs a lot of indulgence from its viewers. It does say that on the tin as well but can it sustain a running time that pushes the two hour mark: will love be all you need?

Well, this is a Richard Curtis screenplay so if you liked the Four Weddings, Love Actually etc. juggernauts then you'll demand a kind of measured light and dark comedy in the dialogue and scheme. Danny Boyle as director is going to provide plenty of extra visual goodies to keep you amused if the romantic subplot doesn't quite work. But, really, what carries this kind of film more than anything else is the casting and that, at the very least, comes right through. Himesh Patel is a kind of rabbit-in-the-headlights Russell Brand (which means he's more likeable than the real thing) as Jack and he is countered by the energetic and rangy Lily James as Ellie and the pair do compel when they share the screen. My favourite choice, though, is the always welcome sass and sharps of Katie McKinnon whose megamouthed moneygrubbing cynicism feels fresh and (mostly) short of caricature. All the stock, aren't-we-lovely Brits characters do everything they need and even the real pop star as himself Ed Sheeran doesn't embarrass.

OK, so it looks good, flows with light laughs and a feelgood message, does the elephant get a feed? If you presented Beatles hit songs to a public that had never heard them, would they still be hits? There is evident work put into fitting these songs into a more contemporary presentation that allows something like Help as an electric rocker or I Want to Hold Your Hand as a perky acoustic number sound genuinely fresh. But there's also a kind of fall back approach that has most of the songs sounding like Beatles night on Idol or X-Factor. If you've ever seen one of those where twenty-nothing contestants unfamiliar with the back catalogue try filtering them through contemporary stock vocal gymnastics it can be as wincing as a YouTube of Star Spangled Banner fails at football games. The problem is that if you are to carry a concept like this through you really have to include that approach as one of the few graspable handles of veracity. As superbly crafted as the best Beatles melodies are some can easily get smothered. And what are we to make of the song-off scene where Sheeran's fine sounding acoustic pop number is trounced by a schmaltzy Beatles standard? Does the reverence here lie in the notion of great songcraft or great songcrafters?

I don't think that's overthinking things in a film whose what-if concept is dependent upon its audiences sharing its assumption that The Beatles are so unassailable. I'm a massive Beatles fan but a second generation one. I found my way back to the '60s from what I felt was a largely barren '70s. While my ardour was temporarily dampened by punk it returned and is in rude health as I type. It makes me wonder that if the chief targets of this fable are the same millennials as its lead characters, is it only a bold attempt to lure them into the values of their grandparents without the context of the generational conflict that fed the transformative culture of the '60s? Is it a way to push through the infinity of streaming in pursuit of quality or unsubstantiated reverence?

I enjoyed Yesterday (yes, I know there is a clue to my last question in that title alone) but hesitate to recommended it without reservation. In being less about The Beatles than an idea of them how deeply felt can the message of truthfulness really go?