MIFF Session 6: OUR HOUSE

This is going to sound like a spoiler but it isn't. At one point about half way through this film a young girl Seri plants a plastic Christmas tree in the clay near a river, plunges a plug into the soil and the tree lights up. It didn't work at home. The thing is when you see it you are not surprised. This film is a measured feed of strange information in morsels so manageable that something like this feels natural, not dreamlike or surreal, natural.

We first meet Seri (around twelve years old) dancing with her friends at home. At one point she breaks away and kills the mood by turning on a light and asking if any of them heard the door opening. They hadn't. She shrugs and reignites the conversation about her upcoming birthday party.

We see her interact with her mother. They have been emotionally distant  since the loss of the father/husband and coexist in a kind of ongoing truce. The mother is seeing a man and it is getting serious. Seri has a child's resentment of this and her youthful spirit cannot be easily contained.

Then we enter what might be a different timeline or even a parallel universe as a woman wakes on a ferry in confusion. She gets up, with a few bags and walks aimlessly to the deck where she interrupts a younger woman who is on the phone. The latter, Toko, is concerned about the older woman who reveals that apart from her name, Sana, she has no memory of who she is or how she got there. Toko takes pity on Sana and invites her to stay at her house which we soon know is the same house as Seri and her mother live in.

The two women strike up an easy companionship. Sana goes out looking for work and tries to work out how to establish her identity and whether the gift wrapped box she's been carrying is for her or she bought it for someone else. We get strange information about Toko who might be involved in a kind of militant activism, belying the gentle demeanour we have already observed (there is the impression that the cause is benign, though).

Through a series of near collisions between the information spaces and the timelines/worlds we are kept constantly engaged, wondering how this will resolve. This might have been the stuff of an overextended short, the type that often plays at the Forum in the early afternoon at MIFF. However, the touch is so featherlight and yet so confident that we willingly let it guide us.

The director Yui Kiyohara comes with a pedigree that reached out and grabbed me when I read it in the program. She studied under the intriguing contemporary master Kyoshi Kurosawa whose strange career led him from pinku sex films to Yakuza dramas to some of the strangest horror cinema I've ever seen (concurrent with but not part of J-horror) to the odd social fables he's more recently been making. A title card announces this film is from the Graduate School of Film and New Media, Tokyo University of the Arts, where Kurosawa teaches. There were two ways to take that. I took the shut and and watch path and was rewarded. A lean eighty minutes of real depth and masterful handling of material that might either crash though the floorboards or blow away into the ether. More please.

Screening notes: a very happy nothing to report. Perfect seat at a perfect screening. I do wish the festival club were open for afternoon screenings but you can't have everything. This, at about half way might well be my pick of the fest.

MIFF Session 5: HERE TO BE HEARD - THE STORY OF THE SLITS

The origins of bands are messy. One of the things that documentaries about British punk bands repeatedly demonstrate is that they form like algae clusters on a microscope slide gathering and fraying in a tiny soup that looks just like them. The Slits have in their family tree associations with Sid Vicious, Joe Strummer, Mick Jones, Keith Levene, Budgie and well, everyone else who huddled around in that place at that time when the gigs were composed of whoever was playing and a crowd that looked just like them and ended up on stage however briefly themselves with the same lot out front. The Slits were the same except they were all female and shut everyone up by sounding just the same. It's when they developed and started recording (particularly the first two albums) that they were a band that sounded only like themselves.

This documentary, restless with film and video footage which flashes up in fragments between present day interviews with all original surviving members, fulfills all of the above. It's messy, knows it and knows it must be but it's also disciplined and, for all its constant motion, quite spare. When you've seen a few rock doccos you will know the last two words in the last sentence can only be a compliment.

The arc is described by the current day interviews which are not quite a long baton pass but come close and should. The players and their intimates tell the story and it forms as an emotional progression the way few rockumentaries really commit to (Right Here about the Go-Betweens is a marked exception). There is no real stardom to report beyond the recalled joy or admiration of those at the centre.

What am I trying to say? Well, maybe I should compare this to the significant films about the Sex Pistols or Joe Strummer. Most of those were done by Julien Temple whose record stands without need of further praise but they tend to give in to the frayed romanticism that the press both sympatico and hostile gave that band. The Slits generally got short shrift by comparison and it is telling that Tessa points out the ripped jeans she's wearing in one photo which were created by an unfan brandishing a blade while Ari Up was in the pants, who said: "Here's a slit for you." That's the difference. This is not a tale of infamy on the high seas of naughtiness, it's a report of violence. No cuteness, no laddish kudos, just hostility. That's the difference.

I loved The Slits when I heard Cut because I didn't get it. Like all music I eventually surrendered to after initially trying to reject it (like PiL, when younger, Revolution #9, Steve Reich, Adrian Sherwood, or early Swans) it both disturbed and intrigued me. That's what fascination is: can't look, can't look away. Emerging from the buzzsaw guitar three chord slogans the band made a scary and atmospheric album more by dub than Stooges with its own beats and language. All of that is here on screen. For that celebration and the final words of unaccredited band member exuberance I declare this to be an essential music documentary.


Screening notes: I winced at seeing that this session was on standby. I envisaged endless queues and a bad seat to one side of the front. Well, the line was already in by the time I got there (Regent crowd control take note) a little before screening time. I flashed my ticket with the app and strode through and found a pretty much prefect spot to one side of front row centre. Even the yapping folk behind me shut up as soon as the production badges showed up and there was no seat kicking. A near perfect screening which I almost dipped out from in despair. A lovely time had by all. Actually, that's true, such a united response. Can't get better than that, given the subject matter.

MIFF Session 4: THE EYES OF ORSON WELLES

Most documentaries about figures form cinema history are strangely boring, a lot of murmuring talk with clips to represent a medium that lives on its image engaging audience. That's why I was excited to see the Mark Cousins was helming this study of Orson Welles. Cousins, who made the mesmerising Story of Film a few years back, knows how to make a talk fest engaging: making the talk essential to a parade of images both on point and peculiar.

With a trove of Welles's own art from travel sketches, home made Christmas cards, film and stage production ideas, personal caricatures, and so much more, Cousins traces Welles's career by timelines as they loosely fit into chapters with the names of chess pieces, pawn, knight and king, and then a coda with a quote from Kenneth Tynan. As we see the development of the artist from his early travels, through his precocious radio and theatre production to Citizen Kane and beyond on film we are given Cousins' insights into the man and his art. From the grandeur of Kane's set pieces to the intimacy of his changing Santas on cards a Welles emerges that we might well have imagined but is here more fully realised than I've seen before.

Cousins, of course, knows his cinema and his use of motif is astute, if sometimes imposing. We return persistently to the photo I've included here; a young man thinking, head resting in a hand, accepting the projection of whatever conceit the filmmaker using the image wants. It's a touchpoint and we see it variously in detail in full, reminding us that we are being presented with an image and an idea as Cousins' narration in the second person addresses Welles himself.

More than any figure in 20th century cinema, Welles demands a broader canvas in his biography or critical appreciation if only to emphasise that this flawed master of the form considered it only one of the things he did and wrote in the 1960s that he thought film was a "dying, dying art". Cousins is determined to show us the need for examining the Welleses of the world and bids us in his gentle Ulsterman lilt to explore for ourselves. So, if you see this one don't go getting the blu-ray of Citizen Kane until you go foraging for something old and forgotten (there are many starting points in this film) and something new and unknown. You are part of the art you witness. So, if you smoke have a cigar and if you drink have a sip of cognac. You are you're own movie and should seek the company of others.



Screening notes: My first session at the Forum. It was packed at 1.30 pm on a week day! I sauntered in and my jaw dropped at the sight of the first two rows almost completely filled. I found a seat third from and had a fine old time. I like to exit left at the Forum as it allows a quick flyover of the lovely interior but even though the doors opened I was told by a teenaged vollie that they were um only letting people out the other door today. Miffed but philosophical I did as bade and filed out with the rest to the footpath on Russell where the wind was biting and the sky was grey. I got over my privation on the walk. There was a lot to ponder.

MIFF Session 3: GOOD MANNERS

Clara, poor, serious and skilled, wins the audition to be a rich woman's nanny when the latter's baby comes along. Meantime, would she mind hanging around to cook, shop and bear with? She moves in, finds her new employer a lot less privileged than she seemed, getting shunned by friends in boutiques and drinking alone like a teenager heading for a crash. Also, Ana, the rich one, sleepwalks. Not just to the fridge at midnight but into town to hunt for blood. Also, the two of them spark up a physical bond that soon turns to solid love. So, when the baby starts coming out - which might not be a baby at all according to Ana (who had consensual sex with what she doesn't realise was a werewolf) - Ana, Clara and we are in for a shock.

This tale of love across the barrier of death, and of a commitment to responsibility makes pointed use of the blend of a motherhood story and outright horror. Pointed because we are left in no doubt of Clara's sense of duty until the inevitable challenge to it forces her either way. If anything the mixing of media works well towards this. Ana's story of the conception is narrated over picture book illustrations that go beyond the childhood aura they suggest (which reminds us of her crudeness and oddly her innocence). There are two musical numbers which rise from the onscreen action rather than get presented as out of world set-pieces. It reminded me of nothing so much as magical realist stories which act like fairy tales here but break into violence there, adopting literary styles to match.

The presenter who introduced the screening name-checked Jacques Torneur (though, his boss Val Lewton would have been more accurate) but I was more reminded of the 1941 Wolf Man with its appeal to the central character's pathos. Also, one of the finest goes at the sub genre Ginger Snaps with its collision of high school and werewolf. In both of those cases we arrive at the tightened third act expecting violence but receiving tragedy. Here we get a potential reconciliation but it's just as loaded as those examples.

At two and a quarter hours the middle act could use a lot of trimming to avoid overstatement and repetition but what we do get is still a strong fable of finding the right thing to do when that is the hardest thing to do.



Screening notes: Got to ACMI in good time to just swan in and take a good seat centre of the third row. Not more than about half capacity and most of them packed into the back. The presenter read out a well written introduction to the film addressing the queer, genre, race and class elements and invoked the name of Jacques Torneur which was pleasing if not entirely satisfying a comparison. And then, having read it out, fled to the exit to our light applause. Some annoying titters at moments by people who seem sociopathically detached from the emotional weight of what they were seeing broke out a few times but didn't decline into a chain of guffaws. Overheard among the crowd as we filed out, a man to his companion: "That bit where (deleted) happened it just lost me." Well, what the hell were you doing there, goose, the synopsis was pretty clear that that might be on the cards. Anyway...

MIFF Session 2: WILDLIFE

1960. Young family the Brinsons, Jerry Jeanette and young Joe, move into a small Montana town following Jerry's next job, a country club gopher/groundskeeper. He's well liked by the club's guests but his boss catches him fraternising a little too closely for comfort (Jerry has joined a bet with two of them) and he's fired. Jeanette is restless and needs something to do beyond the housewife role. Joe is slow to fit in at school and isn't enthusiastic about having to be in the football team. Things tighten in the house as Jerry keeps drawing blanks at job hunting. There are fires in the nearby mountains and they are approaching. Finally, Jerry signs on as part of the firefighting team and leaves town. Jeanette, already on edge, gets a job as a swimming instructor where she takes one client's progress and attentions too far and has an affair. All this is watched with increasing frustration by Joe who tries like an antibody to shape himself around the increasingly dark and disappointing acts of grownups.

So, it's Joe's story. He gets the fewest lines but his huge absorbent gaze fills him with the world and his powerlessness to change it. This is also a story of waiting. The fires hang low over the town's daily thoughts. Perhaps they'll be quenched by the coming winter's snow or rage beyond human control and raze the town and all of its venal and venereal squalor. Jeanette takes Joe on a trip to the fire front and he looks at a burning hillside in awe that might be fear of the devastation or a plea for it to get on with it.

The literary film is as old as cinema and this one joins a long and ragged line, with outstanding literal examples like The Tin Drum or bizarre companion pieces like Naked Lunch. Between those two points there are many, many, many growing up stories and most of them are slow and affectless. A very few like To Kill A Mockingbird hit bullseye targets with every scene and carry the weight of a great read. Wildlife almost makes it to the border of Mockingbird country.

Ed Oxenbould's Joe has an arc that occurs entirely in his head. It's his understanding of what he sees and his binding dependence we see pushing him to acts of escape. Dano has wisely chosen against the device of narration, choosing instead to let the young actor establish a dialogue with the audience. Considering how tightly he frames the actors in this film of characters that's a big job but Oxenbould brings it home. Then, when you have the strength of Carrie Mulligan and Jake Gyllenhaal to create the torment and strain, young Ed had better make sure his face is readable. Not a moment of performance feels wrong here.

That's the next thing. This is the directorial debut of an actor. These can work ( Charles Laughton's Night of the Hunter) or they can be over performative (Robert Duvall's The Apostle) or they can be a showcase for every movie trick in the book to show how cinematic the actor really is (George Clooney's abysmal Suburbicon). Wildlife mercifully introduces and maintains a straightforward plainness of style, admitting the great beauty of the plain and mountain setting but really concentrating on the interplay of performances in settings. A pity then that the repetitive nature of much of the narrative results in an outstayed welcome, a film whose power is left to fend for itself against a dourness unrelieved by humour. Its hundred and four minutes felt like two hours or more.



Screening Notes: Once again into the magnificence of the Regent Theatre for the second (and final) time this fest. The queue curled just around Russell St but was moving so briskly by the time I reached it that I as well joined it as walk beside it. I found a front and centre seat easily with no one behind me and only one other on the row. Ed Oxenbould was present and introduced the film and took questions for twenty minutes afterwards, revealing some fun facts and interesting choices by Dano (who, rightly cut all scenes of Jerry at the fire, allowing the sense of waitingmore strength) and proved himself an admirably articulate and effortlessly charming seventeen year old (God, that makes me sound ancient but it comes from my own memory of being that age). What had been a shining and cool morning had become a steel grey, damp and freezing afternoon. Well, Melbourne, winter, MIFF :)

MIFF Session 1: COLD WAR

Right, so you're in Poland just after WWII and you're driving around the farmlands recruiting young and beautiful peasant folk for a morale boosting song and dance review to tour the land and help the big rebuild. It's not the first audition but it's the only one that day that breaks though and it's given by a luminously beautiful girl who claims her song came from a Soviet musical. She also seems a touch too urban for the brief but love at first sight can find a way and does.

If anything the affair only fuels the passion on stage and the show is a strong success. It's not love that gets in the way it's the great overarching mediocrity of officialdom. How about a few songs on collectivised agriculture and maybe a reel or a ditty about Comrade Stalin might be thoughtful. The guy, Wiktor, plans an escape when the troupe play Berlin. He goes to the rendezvous and waits  while she steels herself at an afterparty and drinks through it. He drags himself through the pre-wall checkpoint and heads for Paris. He swings it up at jazz clubs and composes for horror movies while she high kicks it back home with the chorus from Stalin! The Musical. 

This fable of life decisions might be seven hues of dire if it weren't for the increasing complexity that renders each subsequent reunion of the lovers as they variously marry or shack up with the almost yous to hand. The song from the audition was a post war standard in Poland and plays as a plaintive motif of longing and regret throughout the film, surviving Soviet choruses, folky solos, slinky smoky jazz renditions or ad hoc a capellas. You might be reminded of Scorsese's criminally overlooked New York New York. The characters claim a famous song which serves as their own personal theme.

Pawel Pawilkowski who gave us the quietly powerful Ida shoots again in deep black and white, the near-square frame of academy ratio and gives us the sound in mono or damn near mono. Moments of official punishment or the world's torments that typified the time are entered but noticed rather than dwelt on. The focus is kept strongly on the two players and how their love endures through some difficult changes of character often enforced by the lovers themselves. While this might have collapsed into lightness the insistence on intimacy prevents this. The Cold War of the title is, of course, a personal one.

Just as Ida looked and behaved like it was made in the same post war era, coming across like an Eastern Bloc new wave, but expressed a sharp hindsight, Cold War wants us to walk around in the days of style and oppression but not to live there. He has something more timeless on his mind.  

Screening notes: The Regent is most welcome back to MIFF. The queue reached the Russell St intersection. I waited near the entrance until it was almost all in and happily found a front left row seat after everyone else had shuffled in. The screen did look a tad skewed but one advantage of 4:3 ratio is that this is far less a problem than it would be if the film had been in 'scope (I wonder if contemporary cinema seating schemes are still based on that ratio with some very recently designed cinemas have seats absurdly close to the screen but ridiculously far to either side). Audience was well behaved (though the odd shouter at the back had some issues of which I remain happily ignorant) but coughing was choral. An early precaution to pick up a hand sanitiser will continue to pay off. Good God, am I really that old now?

Review: MY FRIEND DAHMER

In his late teens Jeffery Dahmer is withdrawn and fascinated by life, death and decomposition. He has a hobby shed out the back of his place where he keeps roadkill in jars of acid to watch them slowly dissolve. Back in the house his mother has been released from psychiatric care but is as difficult as she ever was. His father is worried about his son, admitting that his attempts to encourage Jeff to join in at school is a reflection of his shame at his own social inertia. The houses of the neighbourhood are well aloof, planted like acorns in huge forested area of Ohio. If there was a Huck Finn moment or two in childhood the teenage years have stamped it into the moss.

At school Jeffery doesn't engage. His dead eyes observe passages and obstructions from behind his golden wave of fringe. One day, taking a chance, he fakes an epileptic seizure in the hallway, winning him instant notoriety. A small group of friends watch as he repeats the performance to various scales and they form a kind of dare club around him, taking him into their group but egging him on to more performance. He understands the exploitation but also knows that it forms a real point of contact and provides a kind of high school career.

Nothing like this can last and it gets harder for him to comply when his home life is degenerating into insanity and divorce. Can he embrace the abnormal, knowing it is the extent of his acceptance, when his home is so threatening?

You know what Dahmer became. It's why you bought the ticket. And that's why the what-happened-next titles at the end are needless here at the dawn of the Google aeon. But if you buy your ticket with the notion of seeing a serial killer in training, a kind of true-life Dexter, go and see something else; that's not this film.

The source is not crime reports or police files, it's a personal memoir by cartoonist John Backderf who went to school with Dahmer. Backderf's story is told through his own memoir. He knows you know, too, which is why he didn't call it My Friend Jeff. But he keeps it to what he knew of his classmate at the time (with some supplemental research for completeness). Backderf's story describes someone who is not a monster in waiting but a vulnerable kid squeezed into a series of losing breaks. The novel is kept in an adolescent style of stretched anatomy tempered with a strong knowledge of the grammar of comics and a great sense of atmosphere. That is the thing that the film recognises and runs with. This is an unflinching portrayal of youth coping with the ugliness that the developing observation of the teenager comes to see in the world around.

Ross Lynch, Disney alumnus, is in every scene in the title role and allows us into the strolling detachment engine of his character. He takes Backderf's portrayed foward lope with the hands hanging idle in front perfectly so it it seems natural but feels wrong. He must act through Dahmer's dead expression as effectively as if he were masked by prosthetics. It's a strongly sustained performance thanklessly restrained. Anne Heche (almost unrecognisable)  hurts her scenes with Mrs Dahmer's disorder. There are significant shortcuts taken with her story for narrative tightness but we get enough of her to know her importance. Dallas Roberts makes us squirm with his self loathing. Alex Wolff brings a similar severity and vulnerability to Backderf that effectively extends his work in Hereditary.

You'll find the decor of its era and might even hum along to a lot of the music but the lougnerooms and kitchens feel lived in and the hits and memories are kept digetically to what's on the radio or playing on tape in the car. We're not here to titter at the time. And we are not here to bathe in an origins of a supervillain. We see a vulnerable teenager and his exploitation at the hands of his peers (Backderf does not let himself off lightly in this story). He just happened to become one of the most nightmarish criminals in living memory. It's familiar but it's infamous. It's home but it's hell. See the movie for the interpretation and read the book for the detail. If you do both or either you won't find a monster explained but you will, I think, be reacquainted with some of the sour tastes of high school. Would you be ready for that?