Review: WARFARE

part of my subscriptionDo you remember Eric Prydz's 2000s hit Call On Me? No? Well, if you ever slunk home after a long Saturday night and chucked Rage on, you'll remember the video. A group of beautiful and fit young women compete for the attention of the hunky gym trainer. Gyrations and pelvic thrusts and Californian perfection in the hair, faces and bodies. All the reward is directed at the male who is standing in for those playing at home. Well, that's how this movie about military violence begins. After enough of the Prydz clip the reverse shot is of a wall of soldiers in action gear grinning and leering and cheering: bonding. You will remember this moment as the film continues. You will need to.

This film has a progress rather than an act structure. It is based on the collected memories of the soldiers who participated in the operation and, while an arc does become clear, what we are watching is military procedure without context beyond that of warfare itself. Ok, got it, roll credits.

Well, the rest of the film is a steady build from the crew establishing their base to starting operations to defending themselves against an elusive enemy. The point of their presence and commandeering the house becomes clear as they identify armed suspects appearing in the neighbouring buildings, the soldiers are drawing them out. When a grenade is tossed in through a window the operation changes from a clean-up job to a siege with increasingly traumatic and brutally violent effects on the men.

A multinational cast of young, intense performers gives us a thickening tension and at frequent intervals, we go back to that bonding sleazy pop video. When we're looking into the body of a soldier halved by an explosion with his internal organs exposed or another's legs hacked by weaponry, we recall the doof doof techno rhythm and the beautiful young things grinding around erotically and wish we were back there when the worst thing was what the men no so secretly wanted to do with those dancers. If that bonded the characters, it now bonds the audience to the movie.

The insistence on depicting the real time events highlights the apparent futility of the operation. What does it mean when a single act of aggression renders the soldiers into automatic motion drilled in by training? And where are we looking when we understand that almost all of what we are seeing is the force and equipment of an invading army? When they are threatened our empathy defaults to them. A poignant single shot before the end credits puts this into perspective.

I am gladdened that this wasn't a found footage movie as the real-time feature suggested. The presentation is the cleanest digital video and multiple setups every scene. About half way through I began to wonder when the point was due to arrive but as that mark drove by it became clear that this was the point: noise, danger, life and non life. While I was happy to emote-along the characters closest to my field of vision, I kept thinking of why they were there. I did not support the war in Iraq. This coloured everything I saw between the two credit sequences and I kept thinking of the ever darkening sleaze of the Eric Prydz video and feeling sick that the erotica and the ultraviolence became indistinguishable. A strong piece that yet must beg for indulgence lest its audience should wise up and walk out.

Viewing notes: I saw this as part of my subscription to Prime. It was a robust 4K presentation. It's available for rent at other sources.

FRIDAY THE 13th @ 45 (Spoliers!)

A young woman hitchhikes her way to her job as a cook at a summer camp. After being weirded out by a local preaching doom, warned off going to her destination because of murders that took place there, and then given the ick by the driver of her ride, she gets out and is pursued into the woods to her violent death. Meanwhile, the other young things assemble at Camp Crystal Lake to setup for the advent of the kids. They notice the persistent absence of the new cook (we already met her) and then they, too, start suffering the slings and arrows ... and javelins. Cinema has entered the 1980s.

Sean Cunningham's 1980 teen slasher from a screenplay by Victor Miller was intended as a cash-in after the success of John Carpenter's seminal Halloween from two years before. This is how the film is often dismissed but that really is a disservice. While the parent group is similarly absent, leaving the nascent adults to fend for themselves, the threat of the suburban jungle is replaced with the wilder environment of the forest at night. 

These teens, also, have cleared school, having even less anchor points to the social order. This is illustrated early with the snake. Anyone who has never seen this film needs the warning that it depicts the onscreen killing of a snake by a machete-wielding kid. It happens as part of a panic among the group which is solved by violence. I cannot apologise for it but I can see how it establishes a pragmatism that puts the young adults into preparedness. In the realm of the movie, it's a small crisis brought to a head. It might well haunt more recent views beyond the running time.

For all I prefer in Halloween, I have to admit that the internal politics are given more depth in Friday the 13th. Along with the effective Tom Savini gore of the kills, this cultural aspect is brought to the fore, providing the monster with the kind of grounding absent in Carpenter's shape. In this first outing of the franchise, we don't even catch sight of the killer until the last. At this point we also get the motivation and its twisted ugliness.

A 1950s-set prologue has already given us a kind of standard setter and appears to speak for the film itself by punishing pre-marital sex. This, and a careful misreading of the ensuing movie bears out the common misconception that teen slashers are puritanical thunderbolts, warning the too-young away from the sins of the flesh. This falls apart immediately when you consider the target audiences were the same horny teens on screen who didn't once consider their desires to be preludes to murder. More centrally, it's the deranged monster with the machete that's doing this. As Alex West of The Faculty of Horror podcast once perfectly phrased it: the movie's rad, the killer's conservative.

A glimpse into the future will show how the F13 franchise developed this. The first four display an offroad freedom to the young adults' choices and, while sex is a generic given, they're also adventurous outside of that one. For now, back in 1980, the adults in the form of ludicrous cops and uptight veteran youth counsellors, and crazy Ralph the doomsayer, offer only a kind of dead skin as faces of authority. The result isn't an instant Lord of the Flies but an incursion by the big bad world lashing out from the dark.

It's taken me a while but I've come to appreciate Friday the 13th. When I first saw it during schoolies week in 1980 it was a tearing thrill ride before an eerie walk home though canal-ville on the Gold Coast to the flat I was staying at with other demographically threatened late teens. In a strangely prescient co-incidence, there was a serial criminal known first as the balaclava rapist and then balaclava killer on the loose along the Gold Coast. We were aware of that as we tried to navigate the then forbidding urban landscape of the strip.

This film also carries a surprise for anyone aware of the franchise iconography. It is not Jason who does the killing but his vengeful mother. Her dispatch with a machete to the neck appears to give a second birth to her wronged son whose grisly mutated form polarises out of the lake water and attacks the final girl in what might or might not be a dream. Than he's still out there? she asks the cops from her hospital bed. Yes he was, growing, getting nastier and uglier. But he was also developing and distinguishing himself from a decade of slasher clones who preferred F13's flamboyant gore over Halloween's suspense. And, of course, the Halloween sequels lay down and copied the copy. Jason got his hockey mask on the third go and its assumption was a comment on the society of his victims. Yes, of course, it's fun rather than philosophy but it's fun that got that tiny bit closer.

Viewing notes: I saw this on my birthday of Friday the 13th on Paramount's superb 4K transfer which enhances the always unexpected beauty of the cinematography. It was a birthday celebration and the viewing was ruled by peanut-gallery commentary, but we did take it in in spirit. It has been available as part of a boxset of the Paramount-owned franchise, and Stan used to stream it. Otherwise it's rentable online from a few outlets.

Review: UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE

A rowdy French class gets disciplined by its teacher who's at his wits' end. What threw him off was the myopic boy who claims his glasses were stolen by a turkey. Sir bundles them all in the bad closet and says he won't teach them again until the boy has glasses again. This begins an expansive weave of threads as we follow characters through the snowy town who are looking for solutions. 

Matthew Rankin's absurdist canvas contains a gentle but resonant rug-pull about three quarters of  the way through. When it's revelation is clear it changes this film from something I might begrudgingly like to a work of satisfying depth. 

Until that point, though, it ain't easy. Once you've lost count of scenes of children walking against screen filling walls and dialogue whose whimsy borders on painful you would be forgiven for thinking that this is one of those movies you pick on your MIFF pass because you like the venue. When you get to the character dressed as a Christmas tree, your memories of Roy Anderson movies (I don't mean Wes, Roy is Swedish and can be even worse) might come flooding back with the weight of bad exam days.

But there is, in this case, more. I had to begin by telling myself that these separate narratives were like folk tales and the city which is described as zones of colour like beige or grey depending on the brick work is lent a fabulous look by its endless walls and barely snatched images of the white winter sky. This is Canada but it is a Canada whose French component is complimented by Persian rather than English. Don't ask me.

Actually, you can ask me. The theme of the overall arc here is connection. Family, community, culture, generation and location and it is moved with the notion of fluidity (gender, personal identity and more). Rankin, as writer, director and character, wants us to consider the organism of our community and the flow of our lives. The children, in their wild goose quest for a means to free the high value banknote from the ice takes them across town and back from afternoon to night, encounter a cross section of the townsfolk, all of whom have a story or a folky tip to share. Matthew Rankin as character and creator (though this does not stumble into heavy handedness) seeks his familial roots but must intersect with the same kind of undeclared network, even to the extent of connecting with the guide of dowdy civic tours of liminal urban wastes. 

The connections appear and are deftly drawn. The characters are, once knowable as parts of the greater tale, warmly presented. This film wrested my resistance from me the way a grumbling shy kid can be collared into enjoying a party. I thought I would be writing something like Roberto Rossellini makes a Wes Anderson film. Instead, I can report that I was most pleasurably proven wrong.

Viewing notes; I saw this at the Kino in Melbourne on a cold and rainy morning. It felt perfect.