MIFF session 11: Innocent Saturday

Dark blue night. Young Valery, an industrial trainer, walks nervously along a walkway in a gigantic industrial complex. He is recognised by someone in a passing car. They exchange urgent but fragmented information. Valery is taken through part of the interior of the complex by a colleague who warns him against panic. He stumbles into a meeting of men variously dressed industrially or in business suits. The talk is apocalyptic. One says it will be worse than Hiroshima. Another rejoins that what they need is another Nagasaki. Ukraine, spring 1986, welcome to Chernobyl.

A particularly  bullish apparatchik shouts his way into control of the talk and, seeing the lowly instructor, makes him swear an oath of silence. He is then free to go. He walks back to town as dawn breaks and is accosted by another colleague who seems to have been hit with the medieval martyr stick. He has been to the core, seen the great power slowly waking through exposure. It was so beautiful and humbling that he felt like diving in. Valery leaves him on the road. The inspired man starts coughing. We won't see him again.

A little later, Valery bustles his way into his girlfriend Vera's worker's dorm, pulling her by the elbow from the line of them as they file out. He explains the situation hurriedly and begs her to dress and go with him to the train station. Their run to the station, using shaky cam and it wayward focus is strong visualisation of a panic kept secret in a crowd. It's spring, labour day and everyone is happily in short sleeves in the sunshine. Only two people among them know that the sunshine and fresh air will soon turn to poison. They reach the station in time to see what will surely be the last train pull out and leave them there, sentenced to either cataclysm or decades of slow death. We linger on their faces. We need to.

What follows is a number of small circumstances that contrive to get Vera and Valery into a wedding party and keep them there. He fights through the rejoicing crowd the same way he might have to fight through another very soon. This drunken one is no better than the imaginable survivalist one as both are large groups of people continually colliding in celebration of life but condemned to death.

This party is where the majority of the film takes place and while it can drag the sense of hopelessness that its claustrophobia grinds soon becomes the central point of the film. These people have nowhere to go that will free them from their doom. This might be enough but as Valery rejoins his old cronies in the wedding band and plays part of their gig with them, another theme emerges which touches on the use made by the Soviet system of fear and personal gain achieved through betrayal. Valery, like the machine he's bolted himself into, uses his knowledge now the same way he once did. Much of the film sees him trying to undo the opportunism of his past through good  works but he also knows, as one of his old bandmates points out, he might be executed for inciting a panic. The final sequence is a compression of freedom and despair and features an extraordinary fadeout device that should be in flimmaking textbooks for its simplicity and power.

We are then treated to a mercifuly few consequential titles of the fate of the people of Chernobyl which are less than necessary in light of the abstracted account of it we have just seen. If that fade had given to a few seconds silent blackness before the credits rolled, its power would have said more than the words on the screen. A small pick but a pick nonetheless.

MIFF session 10: Once Upon a Time In Anatolia

A perfectly serviceable episode of Law and Order just directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. Three cars roll through a softly undulating landscape that by day would look verdant and lush but now at night looks like the setting for a nightmare. They stop and frogmarch a young bearded man to an ancient looking drinking fountain. Is it here, they ask him. No, he says, I was wrong the tree was rounder. Everybody back in. Again and again, eah wild goose chase taking about fifteen minutes. Finally they stop for the night at a local inn and take in a meal along with a huge dollop of local history. Morning. The next sortee to find the buried victim of the killer in their care hits paydirt. The next half hour is given to a real time field police report of the crime scene. And then on to.... you get the idea.

If you were playing the Tarkovsky drinking game with this one you would be a casualty by the end of the first thirty minutes. This extremely long police procedural goes at its own pace and will neither be hurried nor suffer the illusion of hurry through nervous editing. The body is located, examined. End.

No, you don't get out of it that easy. Throughout all the waiting you do with these characters (and there is more waiting than anything outside of a Bela Tarr film) a dialogue strikes up and develops between the doctor who needs to be present and the chief prosecutor. It is about the unfortunate death of a beautiful woman. The conversation, taken up and put down repeatedly, becomes the real story of what we are seeing and as soon as that is understood, you are watching an interesting film. A film too long, for certain, but an interesting film with good characters fleshed out well with fine performances.

But at 157 minutes this tests the patience of the blessed and the canonised. Beautiful lensing over landscapes that scream cinema, faces lingeredon which time has carved with lessons and hardship. A constant and believably serious underburn. But so long and so shiftless that the arrival of the subtle denoument plays like a moment of inspiration and the final and finally arriving, at last, please make it the last, amen of a funeral service. Strong effort and modest payout but curiously satisfying.

MIFF session 9: Pom Wonderful Presents the Greatest Movie Ever Sold

See that title, see the movie. It does what it says on the tin. Morgan Spurlock sets his sights on nefarious comedy of product placement, financing a documentary about it which ... is about it.

A series of meetings with a spectrum of intimidatingly urbane whitecollars, self perjuring Hollywood high-fliers, social commentators and consumer guardians takes us through the concept of co-branding as the arc: we are seeing this film pre and post natally at the same time. Spurlock cuts deals, thrills at acceptance and sighs at rejection and gets his film made. Here's proof!

We watch the erosion of everyday variety into a focussed travel from one product to the next from those who have coughed up the most to dominate the film until we are getting full 30 second tv syle commercials right there in the middle of a feature documentary. Spurlock keeps it light but our eye is always on his central question about integrity.

This film is never boring. It can't be. It's targets are the same as ours and they are easy to shoot. Does what it says on the tin. But here's my problem:

It can't work.

Everybody knows about product placement and few in any of this film's audiences would be under any delusion about commercial cinema being .... commercial. Spurlock's films veer even closer to the flame of entertainment over veracity than Michael Moore's. He did get away with it once. Supersize Me had an agenda and, by aiming a home made ging at a corporate Goliath none would quibble over his popcorn sensibility.

He's good at what he does. There is a lot of information in every minute of this film and it is served in perfect bitesized portions. Who cares that it's information we either already know or can guess at from what we do know? It's fun. Who cares that making a infotainment such as this needs only the very slightest of veils of commentary to give its creator's sellout an ethical cool? Dig? Morgan Spurlock isn't selling out, he's buying in. Morgan Spurlock isn't six of one, he's half a dozen of another. And the lossless march of market-proof irony goes on.

But it can't, really. At the bottom of all of this jokey dance with the devil and self parodic lamentation about artistic integrity is the idea that there is an art so pure that the most ethereal breath of Mammon woud kill it on contact. Without this point the film is next to meaningless and yet it cannot stand the most casual scrutiny. It is surely beyond cynicism. (Have yet the hallowed halls of academe produced a concept so apt, so progressive, so superliminal and so ... dicky as post-cynicism? No? Time.)

This is a clever prank but like most pranks can only be clever. The statement about money owning art is as old as human settlement. Playing corporations by playing into their hands is ok but then the film was made and did look as it did. I can't damn this film, it's brief eighty-eight minutes are packed with amusing and sometimes thought-nurturing material but the choctop that I didn't bother getting beforehand would have been similiary sugary and flavoursome, packed with enough scooped ice cream to give the impression that it's a legit dessert. Yeah, it's entertaining but so are the blockbusters whose posters we see repeatedly throughout in the offices of movie moghuls and on walls and the sides of buses.

I'd leave it there but for one thing that ruined my tolerance. In his quest for possible backers, Spurlock is often seen lurking around the shelves of supermarkets. He picks one bottle from a shelf and can only share it with us through helpless laughter. It's a shampoo for use on both human and animal. This is funny until you realise...why shouldn't it be? Hair is hair. Shampoo cleans it. Shooting at name brands is shooting cheap. Shooting at nonbrands (wih an assault weapon) is bullying.

"Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?"

In the spirit of the neopostcynical environment let me be the first to say: Bullshit!

MIFF session 8: Play

A gang of five black boys in a Stockholm shopping centre. Two snow pale Swedish boys stroll down a walkway, innocently flaunting their affluence. The gang take in every syllable and after a voting game make their move, crowding in on the white kids and conning them out of their mobile phone. Cut to two white kids with their Asian friend, being sent off by their parents on a spending trip. The gang moves in. This time we follow them from stalking to the move and far, far beyond. Bullying at its finest.

As frustrating and angering the gang's behaviour gets (I'm talking white knuckle fury in the auditorium, here) it soon becomes clear how deliberate it is. This is paramilitary bullying and it works a hair short of the Stockholm Syndrome (association intended by me and the filmmakers). This gang knows the power of its numbers and the effect its ethnicity has on its victims down to the youngest and most childlike member (the eldest couldn't be more than fifteen). It is this effortless calculation that carriesboth the narrative and our wish for its momentum. These boys are monstrous. Their victims are increasingly pliant. Where can this end?

But the gang is a group of boys. They defend themselves against a blustering but ineffectual attack by a group of men while on a tram but lift their feet at a train platform when the cleaner trying to mop the foor asks them. There is no contradiction here. Adults who act like adults carry authority for them, be they ever so humble. Adults who act like schoolyard brigands are met with force. But, again, it is the victims and their continued subserviance that creates a mounting anxiety. They aren't constantly compliant but the few acts of defiance they are capable of only lead them further into the gang's control.

This is presented in a series of long takes by someone who knows how to use them. This is not Bela Tarr or Tarkovsky whose still canvases absorb you into a new cosmos; the camera is set up to record variously with a roving eye or a stubbornly held stare, at all times delivering narrative information (yes, if you've seen it, the Native American busker shots, as well). The opening scene of the initial scam is a single shot from a camera mounted on a mezzanine, expertly taking us to whichever point of attention we need. This is not shaky cam it is a Kubrickian determination that requires an expert hand with the coreography of extras and speaking parts alike.

The colour palete is rich and the image has a sheen and depth that adds a shiver of veracity to us observing. Stanley Kubrick would have loved the Red Camera. From genteel innercity Stockholm, through industrial sites to the forests and wastes, we are shown a setting that seems to offer the victims less and less hope. If you go in knowing that the Swedish colours are blue and yellow you will see a lot of that combination. A running gag of a wooden cradle abandoned in a subruban train provides some light relief but also suggests a lack of care that might have created the central situation. The cradle comes into play later and poignantly.

I've been mentioning Kubrick a few times in this review even though I think his name is over-called whenever extraordinary cinema is discussed. I'm not a huge fan of him but admire much of his output and ideas. One of the latter is his notion that a film should be made up of six or so non-submersible units, blocks of the world through the screen where the events seemingly must happen, keeping well shy of stepping in himself to help out, leaving that to his audience. Well, that's what happens here. A few large blocks of this reality (including a kind of denoument that Michael Haneke or Gaspar Noe might approve of) and a coda.

A film's coda ought to both provide a final flourish of what we have seen but also add something mysterious or uncontrollable, a little wafer-thin mint on the pillow that tastes of salt and vinegar. Well, that happens here, too.

I pick MIFF films from the copy in the guide. Often I'll charge into a favourite director (there are two Sion Sono films this year!!!). I'll always try to find a film that I fear to see (eg The Woman from this year or Dream Home from last year). And then I'll go looking for outside chances. These simply have something in their descriptions that appeal to me, no depth needed, just enough salt or sugar in the presentation and they're on the list. These have the highest miss rate, almost destined to disappoint. Play didn't.

MIFF session 7: The Woman

Chris is middle America. In his early 40s he has everything in the list David Byrne makes in Once in a Lifetime; clean cut and confidently in control of his life and those he is responsible for. He even has a woman he found in the woods tethered up in his cellar. Oh, the rest of the family know about it, too. They are going to civilise her. She's a family project.

That's the sum of the plot information I'm going to give. The rest of it is best experienced fresh and without peeping at the imdb. That might be hard to do for awhile if you don't see it at the festival but I urge you to wait until a cinema release (unlikely now our arthouse scene has been cremated) or on an optical format snared from o'erseas. If you have any genuine love for what cinema can achieve at its wildest and yet most intentional then you need to see this film. Simple as that.

I have seen gorier films and films more unrelentingly violent than this but not since Martyrs and Irreversible before it have I been so exhilarated by relinquishing my control over a film and letting it force its way into me like this.

I am unaware if director and co-writer Lucky Mckee has made any statement to this effect but this film, even more than Martyrs (for which the claim was made) this is an anti-torture-porn film. Where Martyrs takes a kind of Kubrick approach to the use of pain in art The Woman chooses a linear assault on its audience as brutal as the actions and motives of its characters. There is no luxuriating in the means of pain and, crucially, no path of identification with the perpetrator. The person who can empathise with Chris and his very scary son will require immediate and terrifying psychiatric attention. There is similarly no sleaze or covert invitation to fellow travel. We are meant to be appalled by what we are seeing. If the silence of the full house at the Russell this evening is anything to go by, I think we won't be hearing of any copycat cases any time soon in this neighbourhood.

The film's great strength is the shift in ethical position. An impossibly oppressive situation presented to the family reveals a range of responses that for the most part must be kept secret from the family autocrat. The results of dissent to the latter are horrifying. The real achievement of the film lies in its management of this complex interrelationship. The morality here is front and centre but also protean, self-preserving as well as righteous.

There is something else that impresses me about this film (note that I haven't even mentioned any performances yet: they are uniformly strong): the music. It starts out with a winceable reliance on the kind of American indy rock that parties like it's 1974 and punk is never going to happen, a robotic constant replay of old man's music presented as new. Then when things start getting very very serious it is temporarily binned in favour of some old style synthesiser grind that really does sound fresh by contrast. Why? Because its violence is entirely appropriate to the atrocity happening on screen. No coy, winking irony, no reprieving levity, just a big ugly noise that matches the pictures. Then it's back to the robot rock and the sense that this America is culturally on borrowed time. Morally, as well.

I should stop gushing and let you get on the case of tracking it down or booking yourself any session left.

Other things that occurred to me:  rather than the resolutely ok Life During Wartime, this is exactly the kind of thing Todd Solondz should have developed from his masterful Happiness. Chris with his violence with a smile and unrestrained colonising of other human life reminded me of Dubbya and his delivery of US foreign policy in the 2000s. The power of the woman is solid and punishing in this tale that, while it might in fact preach, practices practices practices....

MIFF session 6: Cold Fish

WOOO HOO! Now we're cookin'
"You think of the earth as a small blue dot. I think of it as a cluster of rocks"
So screams Murata San to Shamoto San as the former stands over the film's first murder victim who is still choking to death. Here endeth the lesson. Well, not quite.

(Shamoto, who runs a) LITTLE (tropical) FISH (shop) MEETS (Murata who runs a) BIG (tropical) FISH (emporium). Shamoto's life is small and low on function. His daughter is a tearaway and hates his new wife who has grown cold on him. Called in one night to a supermarket to represent the daughter who has been caught shoplifting, the couple are desolate and expect the worst in this latest of minor atrocities enacted by her. Then Mr Murata influences his way into the scene and charms the supermarket manager out of pressing charges. He then charms the unglued family to see his bigger and better shop. It's the big business version of their own dowdy place and they are humbled and excited by it. Mr Murata suggests giving Mitsuko (daughter) a job to keep her honest and start her earning.

Things already aren't looking quite right with the appearence of the burningly sexual Taiko (Murata's wife). Mitsuko goes to work in the Murata uniform and when her father goes to check on her and visit the family saviour he is treated to the scene I started with above. One step and he's an accomplice. The corpse is dismembered (in more senses than one, though it's offscreen) and rendered ...elemental and cast to nature. Mr Shamoto didn't know he was weak until he met Mr Murata. Now he does, how will he cope with the knowledge and what can he do about it?

This is a non-Yakuza gangster story based on a much smaller story from the news. Sono, as he did with Suicide Circle, Noriko's Dinner Table and Strange Circus, brings his own vision to the table. This outing is visually restrained (as Noriko was) by comparison. These are the deep waters of a character study and would only be muddied by the flamboyance of Suicide Circle or Strange Circus. Sono uses 35 mm filmstock and sticks with it, favouring a plain optical tone until the setpieces towards the climax demand more. As usual, he draws strong perfomances from his cast and takes his audience to the far side of crazy to the point where even those chortling nervously are equally in the spirit as those who gasp in horror. At some points the only response entirely individual. Seeing it at a packed Greater Union tonight, this phenomenon was both disconcerting and thrilling.
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As with all his films, however far into gaspingly violent mayhem he can take us, Sono never loses sight of morality and doesn't mind showing how ghastly its face can get. This story of a weak man who finds his strength when forced is pushed far beyond the shadows on a multiplex screen, however strong they might be. Morality bends, warps and acts like it's on the same acid that Hendrix took at Woodstock but, unlike the Tarrantino or Ritchie gangster comedies, it never surrenders to nihilism, however close it comes. This is exhilarating cinema!

Screening note: I sat in my usual third from front row centre. At the point of the feature starting, as those around me cool talked into their moblies, saving seats and closing off anodyne chats, a huge guy sat a knight's move away from me. The moment he removed his jacket I caught a gust of the worst B.O. I've ever smelt outside of a friend of mine who went for weeks at a time claiming that nature was its own soap. A thick, almost staining acrid stench. He managed to clear a near perfect circle of seats around him and reminded me of photographs of the devastation of the forests at Tunguska.

MIFF session 5: Tabloid

Joyce Mckinney, a poster girl for southern U.S. clean livin' tells the story of her life's great love and how she snatched him from the clutches of the Mormons who then snatched him right back. Between claim and counter reclaim is a tale of forced sex (she upon him) and cultism that ignited the gutter press and resulted in a police investigation and trial, forests fell for the next days' fish and chip paper.

As one tabloid got the exclusive rights first they followed her version of events. Its rival in chief dug for dirt and found a continent's worth of it. Far from the wronged southern belle her version held as essence, she was a thoroughly experienced sex worker, offering myriad services for the gentleman half of the great unwashed including, crucially, a lot of role play.

Ok ... if that's true why did she drag a licenced pilot and bodyguard to accompany her to the UK (where the Mormons had sent him), financing the entire jaunt. Publicity? She didn't want for clients back home. Doesn't gel unless the part of her story about her life's great love is actually true. Alright, call it psychotic obssession, her motives here are not entirely impure. There's more to come which you will NOT expect but for that you'll have to see the movie.

Errol Morris pioneered a technique whereby his subjects are lined up to look him and his camera in the eye, allowing for a conversational warmth and relaxation to pervade their testimony. This works here as it always has; the connection between the speaker and the auditorium a solid current.

Next, Morris injects two other tropes, a series of tabloid fonted statements which flash over the image like Fleet St headlines, adding irony to, often contradicting and now and then very cheekily correcting what is being claimed behind them.

The second device is the use of campy old footage from various sources to the same effect as the headlines. This can fall like a lump of granite through a frog pond but here the choice of material is so sharp and precisely timed that it serves to support the form AND luxiuriate in the embellishment and fabrication that we are experiencing. The central turth alluded to above, thus is rendered curiously inviolate, however little we can eventually credit the speaker.

This was an all but full house which roared along to its mastery. That's another reason why I love MIFF: I can wash and bash around in the cinematic equivalent of a mosh pit in front of films that I might otherwise quietly enjoy at home accompanied by few or all on my lonesome.

You could easily point to the timeliness of this project, given the current story of the stories, but what it damns and celebrates are timeless things: sin and human curiosity.