MIFFdrawal session 5: Hanna

A hunter's cottage deep in the snowy woods. The hunter spends the long winter nights teaching his daughter, Hanna, about the world. One night she interrupts him with the words: I'm ready. He stops, looks to one side in thought. The next day he goes into the woods and carefully paces a location. He digs and retrieves something very contemporary which he places on the cottage table when he returns. When Hanna asks what it is he replies that it's a tracking device that will tell Marissa where they are and their world will change. Hanna flips the switch. Then it's out the back for weapons training.

Dad cleans up to look more like Eric Bana than he did as a hairy hunter and makes his way toward their planned rendezvous in Berlin. Big military choppers swarm down on the cottage. The first assault ends in silence. A second team bash in to find the first few slaughtered on the floor. A slight blonde snow maiden looks down at them with a disturbing passivity.

Ok, so far that's a hunter and his daughter, a magic device and the powers of a wicked witch. Why is this any more than a fairy tale with assault weapons? Why the hell would you want it to be?

The themes here are genetic modification, wicked witchery, fathers keeping secrets and a babe out of the woods, pure of heart and powerful because of it. Magic and mayhem. But this film has sustained a lot of hate. A lot of paid critics I've read on this one complain about the heavy hand and others (like the ones on imdb) talk about plot holes.

To the first charge all I can say is that the references to Grimms fairy tales, however large they may be writ, work. Yes, I get Cate's witch emerging from the mouth of a huge wooden wolf, but I suspect I'm meant to get it. It's not failed cleverness, it's the film doing it's job. Fairy tales aren't just about princesses, witches and magic they are about strangers and dangers. The thing that I think looks hamfisted to some critics here is the film going beyond use of fairytale iconography for its premise and continuing to become a fairytale itself. Its constant mashup of naivete and worldly gravity (strongest at the Grimm-themed funpark and with the liberal English family Hanna hitches with) serves this end with no necessity to break free of the paradigm. Freeway is a film that does something very similar and, while having plenty of merits, it doesn't succeed to my mind half as well as Hanna.

Second, there is a good deal of inconsistency here, particularly in Hanna's skill set. Why does she freak out at the electricity in the hotel room when she's already experienced a truckload of it at the CIA base? How does she develop sudden skills with internet searching right at the moment when a quick Google would solve a lot of problems? Bumps. One imdb reviewer (I read them first as they are speaking through the experience of paying for the tickets and popcorn) found about eleven major voids in the plot of Hanna which, in his mounting anger, he tabled as evidence of narrative death. I can honestly say that I read all of them, considered them, agreed with most of his points, and didn't remember caring about any of them as I watched the movie. The poster's anger at these resembled that of any other critique of a mainstream film's narrative strength: it's as though they'd thought they were seeing a documentary whose unscrupulous creators delighted in nothing better than deceiving their audiences. Hanna is not only a fiction, it's a hyper-fiction, a story about stories, a fairytale about fairytales. It's really, really not going to be able to stand a lot of scrutiny.

I actually wasn't expecting to like this film. I'd read a lot of negative responses (mostly along the lines of the above paragraph) and others about it suffering from a surfeit of quirk. I'm the first to break out in hives at quirky indulgence on the cinema screen but made it through the screening with skin as smooth as it was while the ad slides were on. Instead, I found a very lean film that did more than its job by doing it with wit and style. Great end to a fun holiday.

MIFFdrawal session 3: Jane Eyre

Charlotte Bronte's GothRom revisits the big screen again in subtle but hearty form. Mia Wasikovska (our own) plays a Jane plain but with a wandering eye and a frustration at the horizon seen from the window doing the same to her as her life: nix adventure. Jane is a furnace beneath her composure and Wasikovska portrays this through her coal black eyes that smoulder from her poise and cleanliness. Then, as this setup demands (of Bronte and any adaptation) all this control must be exposed to disassembling chaos.

Enter Mr Rochester, master of the castle, lands, goods, chattels and anything else in his ancestors' domesday book entry. Dark and sexy as a blue pointer shark he appears in a crash of violent movement as Jane unwittingly spooks his horse while walking through a fog in a forest (blame Charlotte Bronte!) From that point on it's Jane vs Rochester and the tall dark and sexy Michael Fassbender fills a role most memorably substantiated by Orson the Great many decades ago. He doesn't do Orson. He is far closer to the Rochester of Bronte: aristocratic ad hedonistic when not lightlessly gloomy.

He's a good Roch, she's a good Jane. Is it a good Jane Eyre? Yes, because it lets its strengths (undercurrent, unspoken dialogue, robust control over light and landscape to play the atmosphere like a pipe organ) work under their own momentum and forbids the suddenness of melodrama (Bronte's book is fraught but not bodice-ripping). No, it's not a good Jane because the element that might save it from being too plain , the novel's wafting but everpresent creepiness, is turned down so low that it never quite takes to the air. Without the spookiness Jane Eyre can only be a serious study in restrained power. Is it a middling Jane Eyre? No, because the central performances are so exact and never mannered. Maybe middling because the score is a by the numbers string section wash that while not fulsomely everpresent is always unwelcome to my ears and makes a potentially extraordinary film veer toward becoming a resolutely ordinary one.

So, contradictions. I won't rush to watch this again but I'm glad I took the effort.

Little else to say but this from my particular screening. There was an audio anomaly in the first reel or so (assuming reels were in use) which had the pitch wavering down a noticeable microtone every few minutes. This was only noticeable in the music score with its languid strings but it had the curious effect of sounding like 20th century modernism as though the composer, ashamed of his work's conventionality, was twiddling a pitch control in a last ditch effort to gain some edge. It was corrected about twenty minutes in and the problem didn't return. Made me wonder how it happened, though. That pitch waver takes a lot of work in the digital realm but might only be a dirty pinch roller on an analogue machine. That's why called the duration a reel above, by the way.

Now off to find something for tomorrow.....

MIFFdrawal session 2: Rise of the Planet of the Apes

When you make an action movie all you have to deliver is emotional engagement as constantly as possible but with a weather eye on its intensity. When you make an action movie with a sci-fi premise you need to deliver a message with the action payload: like a bomb dropped upon the blazing streets of Desden emblazoned with the words: HELLO HITLER!

You often get the action without the sci-fi and just as often the sci-fi without the action. Sometimes you get the sci-fi and the action without the message. Michael Bay has tried his hand at all of these and has become unassailable (his Independence Day - ID4 for anyone who couldn't spell Independence Day - set the bar for the latter). So, though it wasn't by Michael Bay, when I bought my ticket for Rise of the Planet of the Apes, I knew what I was going to get.

That's why when I say that the best actor in this film is a CGI ape I'm not trying get all narky and sarcy, just stating the facts, ma'am. The great swag of ones and zeros built around Andy Serkis' creates a convincing impression of the animal it is meant to be. Along with the others who are similarly cocktailed, this is the emotional focus of this film and makes sure it does what it says on the title.

The humans need not be anything more than fine looking and flavourless (enter James Franco and the vet he picks up, played by Freida Pinto), instructively pitiable (John Lithgow as the best human performance) or evil (the rest of the cast).

Then you need action which you get here by the truck load and it carries a lot of emotional engagement.

As a kid I saw the first Planet of the Apes and loved its freakiness. I saw two sequels but missed the last until I was too old to care about it. Not all of these films worked as well as the original but they made solid work of its claim. Through the series the rising sense of the disaster of human folly is brought closer to the centre of the screen until the final installment becomes a clear condemnation of racism. See, as diluted from the ancestor as it could get, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes still found a way to punch. Who knows, if Rise starts off a new series we might get some truly ok sci-fi action on our screens.

Tim Burton's ten year old failure needs very little mention here. I'll only say that my love for it does not extend beyond my love for his Batman movies (which I do not love at all).

Oh, there are a lot of "sly" tributes to the original series. I hate these things. Make your own movie. Everyone knows you know where it's come from just get on with it.

Oh, I said this was an action film with a sci-fi premise, didn't I? That might mean there's a message. Is there? Why yes, there is: Don't play God, there's a good chap.

Is this a lukewarm review? The numbers demand that some will be. But mainly it's lukewarm because the film is so on target with its objective. It's emotionally engaging, not emotionally memorable. I'll forget about this tomorrow until the first sequel emerges. I've seen Solaris once. Years ago. It's still with me and probably always shall be. Better? Worse? No, just different. Just different.

MIFFdrawal session 1: Snowtown

Verdant farm paddocks fly by as a clanking rhythm track fades up. A young male voice recounts a dream the violence and strangeness of which make it feel genuine. Then it's off to an outer circle of what was once working class Australia but has now loosened down to life as the welfare belt. Folk here have nothing but the days and whatever they can to separate one from the next. In the kitchen of one dad, three boys are tucking in to some food around the table and the conversation is small talking but warm. Cut to the youngest boy taking directions to shift his position as he stands in another room. The camera pulls back to reveal he is only in his underwear. Same for the other two boys in turn, the last, eldest, having to remove all clothing. He turns, his face neither smiling nor traumatised, face numb as a dental patient's.

This is not the worst nor the end of it. It's life droning with atrocity of scale, appended but not relieved by church, the state distant and begrudging, socio-economically static. Into this, in a sudden introduction, comes John, a man who notices everything that is happening in a room and expert at evaluating relationships and personal power. We first see him in a vague approximation of a hero on a white horse (it's a motorbike and his white hat is a full face helmet but his retributive stare takes in our hero, Jamie (the last photo of the scene above). In the morning he is cooking everyone breakfast with a subtle but firm paternal joviality. By the end of it he's sussed them all, most of all Jamie.

The Snowtown murders are infamous and a wiki search will fill you in. The crimes shown here are in some cases compounded and there is no attempt to display the complete catalogue. This is not a film about murder but seduction. John Bunting is the centre of human gravity that everyone has known and followed at some point, whether a parent, teacher or any other figure who could make authority effortless by expert use of inclusion. The difference between him and those we have experienced benignly is that he has something on his mind that is not going to let go.

Daniel Henshall like the character he portrays is physically unremarkable, sufficiently overweight for it to be noticeable but not enough for him to be the Santa type, most of his face cloaked in dark beard, but his gaze works like the hands of a sculptor. Henshall is a terrifying screen presence and never more than when appearing to be reasonable and patient with anyone around him at the hate sessions he makes of every dinner, lunch or breakfast he's part of (there is a lot of eating in this film ... maybe that was the catering).

Demagogues don't speak of hate, they let others do that, they speak of love and family and they are never more successful as when one of their targets regards them with a smile that has come home. Such is on the face of Lucas Pittaway as he watches John ride his motorised stallion around the paddock. And that's only the start. From that point John takes and keeps Jamie, bringing the boy to the edge of life and then back from it, a changed and stronger life operative. This is a cinematic seduction which, unlike most, has not forgotten to include warmth. Yes, warmth. Most screen seductions go straight to the heat if they're sexual or rush to the afterchill if they're political. This is a seduction holus bolus, an absorption by one person of another, and is done with all the care of someone ensuring the quality and cleanliness of the igredients of the meal they are preparing for themselves.

There is no three act structure of any substance to this as much as the observation of this absorption. More  formal structure would hamper this piece. This is greatly helped by a music score that, praise be to Melodia the Wise, is in perfect harmony with the film, providing a fullness to the package. There's a range of approaches but most of it is based on thick drones, garnished here and there with what to my mind (and experience) sound like distressed field recordings. There are also moments of perfectly tonal guitar based music, as well, but the main brief of the film, its gravity and weight is given solid foundation in the drone. While not directly reminiscent of the sounds, the effect of it reminded me of the beautiful and often frightening  soundscapes Michael Gira and Jarboe assembled for the final Swans albums. Without an orchestral section in earshot, Snowtown's musical bed appears to have been made by itself. A look at the credits reveals the same surname shared by director and composer. If that's nepotism at its finest let's have more of it.

While I'll only mention one further cast member I'll just point out here that Justin Kerzel's direction of his cast reveals him to be what a lot of Australian directors are sadly not: good with his people. The remaining cast member to laud here is Louise Harris as Jamie's mother. Old beyond her years, careworn, she descends to a slow self-damnation with a sadness and anger that needs no spoken soliloquy. A thankless performance but a beauty.

This is the first of the however many I can fit in of post MIFF films that I'll be seeing in my last week of hols before I go back to work. I'm so glad it was still on a screen. I saw it at the Nova early afternoon in an otherwise empty cinema. Having variously missed and passed up several opportunities while it was a fresher release I savoured it minute by minute. Why? Because it's bloody good.

MIFF 2011 Summary

That's it for 2011. It was a richer experience than  the past few. Highlights? I've already reviewed each film I saw so I'll start with something phsyical and trivial. I all but gave up queueing this year. Over last few years I've obviated something that used to make me gnaw things. I sit at the front. Third from is best but if that's gone the very front row is fine, too. As long as it's central. At that short distance your position gets very important.

It took me years to realise and relax about the fact that most people choose the middle rows and many even prefer the back. Now I only have to count every occasion when I've lined up around the corner on Russell St for a film at the Forum, standing for forty-five minutes in the cold and rain only to get the exact seat I wanted. I never failed to get my ideal seat this year only this year I only queued for three films. The rest I was able to swan in close to the screening time and take up my post.

This means that the sole attraction of membership has now disappeared. On those few occasions when I stood in queues outside the Russell and saw the members gathered at ease around a blazing privilege I thought I probably should have .... but no... Also, this year there was a lot more avoiding long unmoving queues by allowing people in a little ahead of time.

I've read on other blogs and heard in conversation with fellow punters of some atrocities of scale among audiences. I'm happy to say I didn't witness any. Some vague growls at the behaviour of the kind of goose who cannot tell cinema from loungeroom, perhaps but nothing egregious. Oh, well there was that guy with the dark ages body odour which made me find another seat but apart from that not even feet on the backs of seats. Are people getting used to cinema etiquette again or is it just old and/or gentle people like me who sit at the front?

I should also point out here that crowd control has not only got more efficient this year but that they seem to be a much nicer bunch. I hope that whoever did the recruiting for the misanthropes of previous years had a chance to catch some flix at this years' turnout. Eyes open.

The range was good for me, including two new ones from a favourite director, an exhilarating gut punch of a horror film that might suggest that the country that both consolidated and castrated the genre can still produce serious and powerful examples of it. The Woman is my pick of the bunch with its unironic embrace of tough eviscerating horror. Anyone who knows me personally knows that I don't have to elaborate on that statement to suggest why it might be my best of the fest. Maybe the way o' the future? End of Animal delighted both with its courage of its central conceit and faith renewal in what South Korea has brought to the table of imaginative and grotesque cinema. A debut feature I'll be hunting down and then seeking further work from the same. Attenberg provided a quite beautiful last movement to the festival. Was it really from the same team that produced the scarifying Dogtooth?

Even the middling entries had some merit. I didn't hate anything outright though I was increasingly unamused at Morgan Spurlock's new self promotion and wince at the extra luggage Errol Morris added to his otherwise tight story of scandal and elusive truth, Tabloid. Innocent Saturday worked a street level view of a major disaster and made some sly points about the society that allowed the disaster to escalate. The Silence of Joan struck me as Kubrick's lessons learned and applied.  Play, The Solitude of Prime Numbers and Once Upon a Time in Anatolia all show enough promise for me to follow the careers of their creators at least beyond the toe test. The urban folk of A Stoker passed easily, keeping within its welcome with a brief running time and plain rather than dull script.

Strange to see Sion Sono straightening up with two classical three act narratives. Both Cold Fish and Guilty of Romance played out in more or less linear fashion developing their themes efficiently along with their stories' momentum. Both good, engaging works but I was missing the weird flamboyant blend of grotesque and often anti narrative style of Strange Circus or Noriko's Dinner Table. I know, I should stop being such a fanboy, grow up and realise that every artist needs room to breathe and develop and this can often necessitate some relief time from the very thing that brought attention to them in the first place.

These two films reminded me of another occasion at a long gone MIFF when I was disappointed at Takeshi Miike's One Missed Call. I did my damnedest to imbue the film with great irony as the shock meister's take on J-horror. But really, it was just him trying it out. Good film but he came from and continued to better and more original. See also Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Loft and Doppelganger. Both disappointments I actually felt embarrrassed by. Gone was the singular grip on horror that he used on Kairo, Cure and Kourei and here were goofy winks that put distance between him and what had made his career.

A reversal of this directed my choice away from seeing Bela Tarr's The Turin Horse. Yes, I go on about how much I appreciate filmmakers who can reduce or abandon narrative structure and forge strong works of fiction. But it was seeing the water-treading Man From London a few years back and then the seven plus hours of his more acclaimed Satantango that had me finally nixing the new one as a choice (right up to the hour of its first, reportedly disastrous, screening). My somewhat uncharacteristic circuit breaker was a preemptive zombified boredom at two and a half hours of worthy nothing. I know better than this. Uncle Boonmee which does very similar things is a favourite of mine from the past few years and Tarr's Werckmeister Harmonies is one of my favourites from the last two decades. Both of those have what most of Tarr's films lack, and it ain't long takes and careful studies of landscape and human behaviour however still it can get (I love seeing that work); they have warmth and whimsy to enrich what is already rich but never fulsome. So, no Turin Horse for this bum on seat.

All up a fun fest, catching up with folk o'er a hot flick and quenching it with an ale at the Forum lounge (always a pleasure). Oh, kudos, too, to the makers of this year's festival promos which proved well conceived and actually funny (and after more than one viewing). For once I didn't dread the next iteration of the inspired by committee promo after the still ads. The MIFF Tales 60th anniversary vignettes were also good but usually screened when the audience was still gobbling and texting. I only heard the audio of these on about two occasions. Start times were pretty much observed (memories of being full-bladdered in the queue for INLAND EMPIRE while the previous session's Q&A dragged on ... then there was the three hour film to get through). I did notice the lack of shorts before features this year but if that means that screening times were easier to organise then I'll put up with that. Still...

I initially frowned at the uncharacteristically high number of US indies in the program but then remembered that without a real arthouse scene in this city even these will probably plummet into obscurity without festival support, as much as any Armenian noir or Peruvian ghost tale.

Joke of the festival goes to my friend Tatiana who texted from the mangled screening of The Turin Horse that the endless long takes were like "waiting for Godard". I'm ashamed to report that I, Godard fan, Beckett fan and mashup fan, didn't think of that myself.

MIFF session 13 (final): Attenberg

A white wall. Seconds later the same white wall. Its texture of plaster pocks and flaking paint becomes interesting. Bela Tarr's idea about long takes and the creativity of the audience comes to the fore. Then, just as I was going to happily meditate on time and entropy two young women approach each other from each side of the screen. They stop short of an intimate space and gingerly crane their necks to bring their faces together in a kiss. But it is the kind of kiss two gekos might give each other. They are working out the process. Their dialogue has the naive lilt of absurdism. Unsuccessful, they assume the roles of fighting cats, snarling and clawing.

The blonde woman, Marina, waits at her father's side in hospital and at home, as he goes through treatment for a condition that, while undisclosed, appears to be terminal. Their continued dalogue soon becomes the focus of the film. What a relief it was to witness the examination of developing grief enacted in a perfectly functional father daughter bond. Their conversations touch on all that concerns them in the light of his impending death and are a realistic blend of grimness, fear and humour.

The third strain of this film is Marina's growing experimetation with sex and love. She works as a chauffeur for the local mining company and strikes up a relationship with a young visiting contractor. Step by step the awkward pair travel to their consumation which, though unerotic to the eye, is trauma free.

The first strain, which gives the film its title, develops into a series of odd dance duets which look like a mix of chrorus line routines and animal behaviour seen on David Attenborough documentaries (Bella, the brunette, misprononounces the name as Attenberg).

If all this sounds like Ingmar Bergman does Wes Anderson allow me to disabuse. The central relationship between father and daughter gathers a quiet but powerful momentum and while humour and whimsy trade time in their talk with the details of cremation (currently illegal in the film's native Greece necessitating complicated organisation to effect. The mounting gravity of this and its effect on Marina managed to bring me ust short of tears with its quiet and dignified intensity.

Marina's odd friendship with Bella, mostly the dances but also a number of dialogues that while funny reveal strong differences between the two. Quirky exchanges, often funny but never cloyingly cute, they place Marina in her self-limited social realm. This strain coalesces with a gentle power with the main, providing the finale with a reinforced sense of transition.

This is low-narrative filmmaking that prefers emtional movement over character motivation or the three acts. It is still fiction, though and yet more proof that fiction can play without narrative and still engage its audience. Because of this, Attenberg must take longer to settle into its rhythms and carefully guide its viewers away from the expectation of narrative and allow them to savour the work of a sturdy cast and some individualistic writing. Seldom has grief felt so light and yet so like grief.

An easy and fitting farewell to the festival.

MIFF session 12: Guilty of Romance

Two detectives find a bizarrely arranged body in a rainy alley in Tokyo's red light district. What at first looks like the corpse of a murdered prostitute becomes sections of  a woman's body with parts of a mannequin replacing what has been taken from the body. Another corpse, identically arranged is found in a nearby low rent apartment. The two complete a single body ... almost. The head, hands and genitalia have not been recovered.
Izumi is a young housewife who perfects the details of her husband's domestic life. Her constant rearrangement of his house slippers in the moments before his entrance looks like OCD at first but when he comes through the door and inserts his feet into them he congratulates her on their positioning. "You're improving," he tells her. She blushes and bows, delighted. The evening passes from the silence that accompanies his reading, through a sexless marriage bed, to the morning's parting ritual which will be reversed at the end of the day.

He is a writer of popular but trashy sex novels which we see him reading before adoring fans. She is allowed a career at the local supermarket pushing rubbish from the frozen goods section on to listless shoppers (you know her from your own supermarket whenever you politely refuse the satay chilli egg solutions sizzling on the grill as a host of cold ones lie scattered on a paper plate....anyway....) Here she is spotted by a pinku agent who coaxes her into a more lucrative career which occasions what seems to be her life's first orgasm.

Radient (everyone is saying so) with a new taste for the nasty and flavoursome she ventures into the realm of the Love Hotel and there meets a pimp who at first seems to be a street performer and, through him, Mitsuko, a wild and ageing beauty who promises an even more lucrative career than before. These two get on from the word go. Just as she had radiated admiration at her husband's readings she now does as much at her new mentor and friend's daytime work, lecturing in poetry at the local elite university.

The journey from here to the corpse of the opening is intriguing and pacey. As always with a Sion Sono film, for each splash of hedonism we get some extra depth as a counterweight. The everpresent theme of identity returns but here is given new faces as these two women's lives and wishes twine with increasing tightness. Central to this is the notion of women empowering themselves through sexual allure: is it buying in or playing strings?

Sono is often described as a transgressive filmmaker but I think that does him a disservice. As his control over his medium has visibly increased so has his power to metre his content. What once was shock value is now more firmly contextualised and so more powerful  (the violence of this and Cold Fish bear witness). If he was a bad boy once his excesses have led him to become a wise man.