Review: PRIMAVERA

The girls of the orphanage are watching a young stray mother cat suckle her kittens. When the matron finds them, she teubars the kittens from the mother, bags them along with a hefty rock which she drops into the canal outside. The girls get back to their business, rehearsing for their concert where they will be either masked or hidden from their aristocratic audiences or married off to the men of the group as breeding machines. It's Venice in the 18th century and if you're a woman your choices are limited.

When the composer the orphanage is using proves a duller drawcard for patronage then the one with the more famous composer a few blocks down the canal, the board agrees to get the one they let go a few years back. He's good at tunes but even better at underselling himself. He himself was sold into the priesthood as a child when his mother made a foolish vow to her god to send him off there after reading a coincidence as a miracle. So, he has been less than stellar away from the orphanage but his reputation as a composer has improved and, through his incessant asthmatic coughing, manages to whip the players into a shape concordant with his fiery music. His name is Antonio Vivaldi. Yes, that Antonio.

When I saw that this film with this subject matter was on offer I resolved to see it. I'll put up with a lot of cuteness in the name of celebrating a favourite composer, twee as it can get, and Vivaldi's story is a good one. In this case, it's also a very well told one. The centre is not on the composer but one of the violinists in the orchestra, Cecilia. She is chosen as the soloist by Vivaldi as she played without regard for approval but what the music demanded. We follow her musical progress but also her arranged attachment to a war hero officer. Those two things will prove contradictory in this scheme.

While we haven't had an inundation of composer biopics lately, there is a tradition among them that the composers be treated as a mix of gods and rock stars, rude and explosive and beloved for the greatness of their art. This stretches well before Amadeus crowned the approach and is partly what I expected. Vivaldi wrote the hit song of virtuoso violinists in his series of concertos called The Four Seasons. His enlivening music that set a flashing violin performance against a string ensemble can win non-classical listeners the way that Kind of Blue wins jazz skeptics. His evocation of the forces of nature expresses a boldness and power that sets it apart from its baroque contemporaries; we hear the summer storms, feel the snowfall, and even the oppressive asthma-hostile breathless heat of summer in the sound without ever needing to be fanciful. It's there.

This film scores big points for doing little more than suggesting that the composer turn his attention to nature as an inspiration. In the performance moments, there are a very few subtle hints at this epochal work. Mostly, we see the effect of Vivaldi as a mentor to a developing musician, the limitations of a society that forbid both artistic heights and human fulfilment in the same person. Apart from the crowned heads and local worthies our pallett is as beige and ascetic as the uniform dresses that the orphans must wear and the plain lower cleric garb of the composer's priestly garb. The walls of the cultural prison might well have been the inspiraiton for the sense of dress in a Venice that has been so richly celebrated for its colour, fashion and art. When the music takes flight it almost lifts us from our seats. 

As the post credit note (no, not a spoiler) reminds or informs, Vivaldi was a local unknown in his life and the wonders of his music were not uncovered until two centuries after his death. His life was as cloistered as it is suggested here. Cecilia's tale might seem more fanciful and free-thinking that would have been the case at the time. She is named after the patron saint of music which spirit is let free to roam her otherwise cloistered mind. But that is just the effect we encounter while listening to Vivaldi's music in the knowledge of how he lived and died. A sober portrait of genius but very welcome for all that.

Viewing notes: Primavera is still hanging on at cinemas like Melbourne's Nova but is also available through Prime for rent or purchase. .

Review: THE END OF OAK ST

We open on a community barbeque and the narrative telescoping of every plot point we'll see along the timeline of this movie. The main family is stressed to collapse. Dad's still delivering pizzas, Son sees the coming scission and regrets and brings his dog to the party against Mum's wishes, Daughter wants to go to Cornell to be taught by Carl Sagan but it's too expensive, and Mum's writing a bitter novel about all of it. Then, the whole neighbourhood gets yanked out of the present by unseen forces and now they're in the land of the dinosaur.

Then, for the remainder of the running time, they have to workshop their troubles and fighting for their lives so they get a forced perspective on things while they try to figure out what has happened and how to get back to where they once belonged. That's it.

This is David Cameron Mitchell's third feature after the brilliant teen horror It Follows and the (can't comment, haven't seen) Under the Silver Lake and I'm getting reminder notes from the legacy of Richard Kelly who, so far, really only had one great movie in him. (Kelly did crap on his own legacy with a hasty new cut of Donnie Darko which lowered its IQ but we can talk about that another time.) People got It Follows wrong, thinking it was punishment for teen sex (it was more about knowledge and responsibility) and it looks like he never wanted that to happen again. Well, it won't with this one. It's even set in the '80s, as though that's going to protect it from people who find it too literal and pointless.

As an example of that, I'll cite this movie's use of the dioptre (diopter for those of US spelling bent). There is a scene of the family discussing the situation. We see tight two-shots where both characters (mother and son, daughter and father for e.g.) are in sharp focus but couldn't be. They are in focus but the lens is focused on two points with an attachment that looks like a halved lens. It's almost as old as cinema itself but I'll give a very famous example: when Chief Brody is talking to Bad Hat Harry on the beach in Jaws, the beach behind Harry should be a blur but it's sharp. When dioptres are used there's usually a telltale seam, often with noisy subjects like hair but sometimes it's right along a seam in the set design like a doorway or darkness. As this is a technique I notice on sight, I was distracted in locating the seam. There's one in which the corduroy couch in the middle distance goes suddenly from sharp lines to a blur. Have you noticed how long this paragraph has gone explaining this? Well, watch that scene and try to explain to me how it served the narrative even slightly. It's there because someone watned to do it. That's all. And there are a few more. Anyway...

The thing about it is not that it doesn't cut it as an action adventure, that works a treat, it's just that you have seen this action adventure more times than you can count. Anne Hathaway leads the cast with dependable skill and the whole thing goes at a clip before it ends. I didn't stay through the end credits but it wouldn't surprise me to discover that there was a post credit scene.

Apart from some slightly new takes at the detail level there is really little more I can say. If you want popcorn with a zero-challenge movie, this is it.

Viewing notes: the Shogoth behind me in the cinema murmured something at one point but I let it pass. Then, when a cataclysmic event happened, he groaned out loud: "was that really necessary?" I swung round and met his Friday-night-with-beer-pizza-and-the-boys grin with the hiss: "Please be QUIET!" regetting the "please" instantly. He was silent for the rest of it.

Review: TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA

Chris, a young filmmaker, gets a gig as the director to resurrect an old slasher franchise. As a young and queer and independent director she's demographically perfect to reboot a genre long characterised as anti-sex. If she's doing it, it's gotta be right for now, right? Let the wokies take that. But then, after a meet and greet with the original final girl that's straight out of an '80s horror flick, she is entranced and pleasurably fearful of the older Billy Presley who has been living in voluntary obscurity since the first Camp Miasma movie. All the plans Chris had for the origin story fade to invisibility as she tries to get Billy to tell her what her crucial look in the eye was about all those years ago. The suits won't be thrilled (you'll meet them) but Chris is about to go for a career igniting ride.

Jane Shoenbrun's third feature sees the production values catch up with her ideas. Those sprites of the mind are flying in the light like fireflies and make this characteristically slower paced outing rich and strange (which, Schoenbrun herself will soon be). First, there might be a reference to every single '80s slasher that ever was (as well as a host of them from before). Second, her themes of untreated pain and alienation in the nooks of lives, are here more concentrated than in We're All Going to the World's Fair and I Saw the TV Glow. The discipline is palpable and makes the whole busy movie rush by.

Apart from those themes we have a lot of notes about cult movie fandom, video culture and seeing grown up things too young. It's about the slasher genre and why it keeps coming back for new crops of teenagers before and behind the screen and it addresses the misconception of the subgenre that it is a conservative warning about having sex too young. I sing again with the hosts of The Faculty of Horror podcast: The movie's rad, the killer is the puritain. And it is about the monster of the Camp Miasma franchise, a box headed blade-wielder known as Little Death. I think I knew that little death was a euphemism not long after I knew I could have my own and that was from reading (and almost  all that that implies). Keep you eye on that concept and you'll find the slow focus of the central mechanism of this movie roll into clarity.

Schoenbrun brings her multi-media montage to a frenzy. When the time comes to evoke gthe '80s style in quote from the film within the film, she gleefully overstates the geysers of blood but goes on to gtakea more considered look at a massacre scene and the look in the eye of the then teenaged Billy as life events converge on her during the shoot all those decades ago. This is a rich mix.

Hannah Einbinder shows us depth from the word go as an ambitious but still timid young artistwith big issues; her trek is a constant development. However, it is Gillian Anderson who takes and keeps centre screen with an updated Norma Desmond of the slasher movie. She is clearly relishing this role, by turns monstrous and nurturing.

If this is what Schoenbrun can do with only two feature films notched up, I can only wait for the next. I don't care if she is accused of ghettoising her sexuality the way others are charged with doing that with their ethnicity, aren't artists meant to express what they know? Let's be fair about this. Then again, her next project is aa series adaptation of Cherles Burns' eerie coming of age graphic novel Black Hole. Some carry over themes in that and she uses the stark black and white of the comic I think we're in for a treat. Meantime, try this flavoursome third album from an artist worth your attention. Oh, she usually gets compared to Lynch. Sure, but I'm going to add Luis Bunuel.

LOGAN'S RUN @ 50

In this future you get blown up at the age of thirty. You can try lying about your age but the little jewel light on your palm will start blinking and it's off to the carousel of  "renewal" for thee. Some try to flee, and get called runners, but are hunted down and killed by the Sandmen. So, that's it for choices. One day, one of the Sandmen, Logan, gets a mission to find Sanctuary, the mythological home of successful escapees, it's a tad thankless as his own use by is brought forward and the command will deny all knowledge. Ok, that cute girl from the Transmat Tinder seemed a little out of joint with the society. She's probably part of the underground. They run. Sandmen in pursuit.

Logan's Run is an adaptation of a co-written novel from 1967. If you're seeing hippie happenings in the renewal ceremony, that's why.  Even with the reference being out of date in an America soured by the Vietnam War and Watergate, the juxtaposition of kaleidoscope colours and ritual adult termination works well. The softening of one renders the violence of the other clear. The runners aren't just going for their lives, they are the ones who walk away from this Omelas (please read Ursula Le Guin's short fable), opting out of the paradise that depends on mass murder for its continuation. 

Dystopian cinema was having a moment in the early to mid '70s with outings like ZPG and Rollerball. Popular science books like Future Shock foretold a society of detachment and alienation. THX 1138's culture includes counselling booths where a bland picture of Christ spies on the locals and advises them to buy more. Hollywood could sell tickets to bummer premises, regardless of the ending and the sharper of the directors could go to town on design and poignancy. Logan's Run feels like a feature film but looks like a contemporary TV show. Someone only just seeing it now might find that offputting but it's intentional. The slick new city looks like the Brady Bunch in a nightwear-only shopping centre.

The lightness of the dialogue feels cultivated, suggesting a cultural imperative to the naivete of its sound. That goes with the climate controlled skimpiness of the costume and the sex and hedonism on delivery. This state of things is a designed culture. Everything is beautiful, even the official lie that renewal meets what it says rather than violent population control. A later scene, outside the city shows a kind of AI that has gone from gathering seafood to something ghastly as a logical extension. Could Sanctuary itself, the promised home of the escapees, be different bullshit from the same source? Who said the future's shock had to be hard and all at once? Modern audiences of this film might not easily see its darker shades and what that might say about them as consumers.

Everyone in the city is beautiful. They're bred that way and no one's older than thirty. To that end the perfect Micheal York and Jenny Agutter as Logan and his partner in escape Jessica are machine perfect humans being apex male and female as the 1970s would have them. Both British actors in a cast of Americans, they keep their accents but for a few vowel shifts and both provide solid reinforcement of the assembly line smile to the extent that it looks more like fancy dress. York was often considered a self-player, a handsome fencepost but he's shouldering the role as well as he did in Cabaret, here. Is it that or had he finally found his perfect part? Agutter, always an alert presence on screen, effortlessly displays the resistance under the skin. By the time we get to Peter Ustinov's doddery sage, we can see the purpose beyond the sheen.

I revisited this thinking that I would be in for an exercise in ridicule, a taste of where dystopia met Disney but really, this is an example of why it can be good to be wrong.

Viewing and reading notes: I hired this through Prime but you can also get it on HBO and Apple. You could try for an old DVD at an op shop or online but you won't get a new copy on physical, hereabouts. Oh, and again, please seek out and read the four page wonder that is Ursula Le Guin's Those Who Walk Away from Omelas. It's an extension of the trolley problem that will keep you thinking which (like Guinness) is good for you. 

Review: THE BLUE TRAIL

Brazil in the near future. The old get their houses marked with alloy laurel wreaths. Then they get sihpped off to "colonies". No one comes back from a colony. Tereza, seventy-seven, is doing fine, thanks all the same, is put into the custody of her daughter who is less than pleased to accept the burden. One thing Tereza wants to do before death is fly in a plane. As her documents card just leads her back to her daughter's blocking, she goes off grid, bribes a riverboat man to take her where she can bribe a local to take her in an Ultra Light. This story, even if she does get up in the air, is not about the destination.

This satire on what the future of the aging population might look like is happy to take things slowly and let the lessons fall gently. Tereza discovers much that her shrinking life in the village was keeping hidden about life in the greater world. The title refers to a rare snail that secretes a blue liquid as its trail. Folklorically, a drop of that into each eye will produce visions of the future. It only ever seems to give people bitter trips of bad things that happened in the past. That's funny both times we see it and it's not hard to plug it into the story's overarching theme of the hazards of escape.

What we see of the colony is the reduction of the old to cattle. They are required to wear incontinence nappies whether they need them or not. They are strapped into their transport seats with what look like restraints rather than safety devices. Tereza used to work in a crocodile butchery. At the start of the film we see the baby crocs flowing down water slides before we see their caracasses on hooks getting trimmed with circular saws. The recalcitrant old are trussed up in cage-backed vehicles for forced transport to local police stations.

Then again, while her featurelessly routine life in the village is reduced to existing through each day and year without event, as soon a Tereza's adventures begin on the river and she variously finds contentment and disappointment, we are compelled to wonder why she couldn't have just done something comparable before the threat of incarceration. I know, plots drive on conflict and crisis, but perhaps the easy inclines of the story's timeline points might have benefitted from a few more peaks. 

I say this mainly from my admiration of Denise Weinberg's charismatic performance at the centre as Tereza. Nothing gets past her and when she is placed in front of the hurdles and failures along the journey you know the cogs and sparks are flashing behind those strong eyes. This is not a film of intense dialogue, it is far more a visual feast, but then she might have been given more licence to act without words. 

This is hard to say for sure as the film has good performances that feel independent of the director. That is my problem, if any, with this modestly eight-six minute fable, we feel like more fable. Funnily enough, I am, for the second year in a row, avoiding my usual winter holiday with MIFF and just taking a week off. This movie felt exaclty like the kind of thing I would have chosen to get in another movie at the Forum. Glad I saw it but wouldn't have missed it.

THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS @ 55

Judge Justin Playfair's nerves have been pushed to snapping. The years of seeing the worst of humanity and the law being abused have cast him into a fantasy: he thinks he's Sherlock Holmes. His brother is using this leverage to get the family's fortune signed over to himself. There is also a troubling blackmail attempt looming against Justin. He agrees to an assesment by a psychiatrist, confident he'll sail through it  but an incident at the hospital makes everyone who has seen it doubt Justin's supposed mental illness, particularly the doctor intended as his assessor, a Dr Mildred Watson.

If you're still with me, you might be thinking how cute this sounds, an early '70s goofy comedy where the crazy man turns out to be a sage. Not so fast. Early scenes where Justin does answer to his real name complicate that scenario. His first dialogues with Mildred suggest that there is a kind of crushing sadness to his fugue state. The ethics of his pantomime name that failed his own strength and had him running to idealism are flattened against the wall in a world he insists is built only of fact. A middle-act musing on the principles in Western movies compound this. Justin Playfair is screaming under his clipped adopted accent and deerstalker hat. Dr Mildred Watson does assume a journey of her own in following her patient's hard won whimsy and armour but, despite early signs, it won't be leading to a big song of hope before the credits.

The opening years of the 1970s in American mainstream cinema boasts a number of durable fables of eccentricity against the system, joyful whimsy against the staidness of the world. Harold and Maude, Catch-22, Little Murders, Where's Poppa, A New Leaf and more stood up to the crewcut authority that saw students gunned down on campuses and the repression of anti-war protests. It was a time of reckoning for a film industry that had passed over more Doris Day for more Easy Rider and for a brief period the films that emerged in this spirit were given decent budgets and backed by the studios. After all, there really might have been a dollar to be made in this hippy shit.

Not all of it works, sometimes it's more shit than hippy, but when it does it holds principles that sing out to the decades beyond it. I showed Harold and Maude to a small group of Millennials back at the end of the 2000s and each one left the experience with a new favourite movie. At one point (traffic cop scene) the machine glitched and they cried out for me to repeat it from the start of the scene. I did and had never heard such laughter as it played. A very similar experience was had with Little Murders. If they Might Be Giants was available at the time, it would have joined them.

There's an important link between these films that has to do with their times as well as any optimism for their future. In Harold and Maude, it's the memento mori: the love story is overcast with the spectre of death, from the camps in Europe to the inevitable end of their relationship through death (not a spoiler, btw). In Little Murders the swelling tide of social rage spills into widespread homicide that weighs down any possible skidding off into the whimsy that began the film. In They Might Be Giants, Justin's loopy pursuit of an imagined Moriarity points increasingly toward a darkness at the end of the tunnel. 

If anything, it's Giants' presentation of a frightening ambiguity that might keep it from discovery as a cult movie. Some cuts omit a late scene at an all night supermarket. I remember seeing this as a late night movie and laughed loudly at the chaos of it, how the authority was caught up in the whirl and drawn to its own version of madness. If you see the cut without this, the film ends on a dour note with the final image promising a kind of doom for the characters in their personae or for the personae themselves.

The limited edition blu-ray from UK label Indicator provides both cuts. Having seen the shorter one in a local release, I opted for the longer one. The supermarket scene doesn't travel well across the years as its cuteness is not supported by its execution. It's still a good idea, just no longer a hilarious one. However, the shorter version that cuts it out leaves the film hanging heavily, swinging sluggishly towards an ending that only feels like a massive bummer.

What saves the film from its frequent skids from substance is a cast that enliven its uneven writing through commitment. George C. Scott as Justin brings his scenery gnashers out from the trophy room but keeps it warm as well. It's almost an apology for his publicly regretted (and Oscar winning) performance in Patton. Through the bluster he does allow us to see the screaming void that lies between Judge Playfair and the fictional sleuth role that feels so much better. Joanne Woodward as Watson gives us a professional whose own struggles with her profession stem from a frustration with its ethical slides. Her acquiesence of Justin's persona carries her own denied melancholy.

I don't think They Might Be Giants will be much cited in the same statement as Harold and Maude. It's still hard to get a hold of and the accretion disc of senior cinematic gems has been steadily fading with the fade of arthouse venues, the oaf-handed wash of the streamers masking off anything that takes engagement that might draw eyeballs from the phone screen to the viewing screen. I'll do some waving right here. We need more Don Quixotes to tilt at windmills. They really might be giants.

Viewing Notes: I watched my imported Indicator Blu-Ray of this film which allows it to scrub up well with clean video and audio, a good booklet and some worthy extras. The cut without the supermarket scene was available on Blu-Ray locally through Cinema Cult but I suspect it's out of print. I couldn't find it on the streamers but was not surprised about that. Find if you can. You'll be glad of it.

Review: THE MUSICIANS

To honour her father (and as a flex to her brother) Astrid demands that her company (roadwork equipment) fulfil dad's wish to hear an unplayed string quartet played for the first time. To honour the music, she wants it played on Stradivarius instruments. Eye watering amounts at auction later, she assembles the fiddles and then the players, applying interpersonal patches where needed, and sets them all at a country mansion to rehearse for a broadcast and recording that might well see her business back in black. The players either hate or disrespect each other and can't get it together to finish practicing a single movement. Time for the big guns. She persuades the composer who would as soon forget his own work, to come along and pep everyone up. This should go a lot more smoothly than it does. 

Gregory Magne's film of contemporary manners plays things easily with a series of increasingly important waves of conflict and resolution, piecing together the shards of dischord and arhythmia until, obstacle by obstacle, the greater problem is unavoidably clear. This is a film thatr understands music.

Hotshot young bowslinger George springs in, ready to take over while Peter is worried that his blindness will prevent him from an effective performance. Young influencer Appolline on the viola never went to music school but has played Carnegie Hall and Peter's ex squeeze Lise on cello turns to animate ice when they are in the same room. They are all daunted by the entrance of the composer Charlie Beaumont who is uneasy with the errant youthfulness of his forgotten music.

This is a film about ensemble, cooperation and concetration on the part as an essential to the whole. Music is not the magic that lesser attempts make it, something that only godlike people produce. It is work and it is acceptance of place in service of skill. 

When I chose this today, I wanted something far from the horror and violence and darkness I might normally go for that now only reminds me of the darkness in the news. I got it. This is a quiet lesson in banding for good instead of the screaming entitled narcisism deafening the globe. But if I'm suggesting it is a kind of soft feelgood piece in a French accent, I should also state that, for all its apparent gentleness, The Musicians packs a punch; it just takes its time to get to your gut. 

There is a moment that an American movie would put in the centre to prove the concept and show that everyone has learned and is ready for the world. Here, when Peter starts a folky version of the standard In The Pines and the others add their own parts, it's not a mounting cresendo of the righteousness of the buddy system, it's low key and through a natural sounding arrangement that really could have taken place. And it will melt your heart. Thetitle sequence of the film opens with what looks like a huge dank room in a monestary that soon proves to be the interior of a cello. In its first minutes you are told the type of movie you are going to get and assured that it is under way. Just what I needed. 

Viewing notes: went to a morning session and realised that this is the kind of movie that attracts seniors who can be even more entitled that teenagers about opining audibly. There was a contingent at the back and they are blithely gasbagging through the ads. But then they ceased and watched the movie all the way through quietly. Bliss.