MIFF Session 4:The Nowhere Inn

"This is how actors play rockstars." Annie Clark says in her St Vincent persona, pretending to smoke a cigarette while in her dayglo bondage stage outfit. She is, of course, a rock star playing an actor. We've already seen her as Annie explaining her real name vs stage name in a brittle and funny opening sequence when the driver of her white stretch limo tells her he's never heard of her. Soon after that she meets up with Carrie Brownstein who will make the documentary that we have been told remains unfinished, letting us know that the film we are watching is a layer outside of that. After we have seen some concert footage of the strident theatre rock she has continued from associations with the likes of Polyphonic Spree and Sufian Stevens, we see Carrie  trailing after her backstage, trying through gritted teeth to suggest that she be ... interesting. Annie resists this pleasantly to her real life friend but starts to wonder if she should be more like St Vincent offstage as well as on. Well, it's either that or a straight concert film and who wants that so, Annie, after stumbling on a few scenes which teach her a thing or two about others' preception of her, throws it in and becomes St Vincent all the time. This becomes a campaign of ruthless personality suppression and persona promotion that, with the increasingly troubled response from Carrie, makes this film what it is. And what is that?

It's an expression of fame's seduction and corruption, from dizzying satire to white knuckle thriller and trippy freak out does attempts at similar fictionalised attempts on Bowie, Freddy and Elton by country kilometres. The reason is not just in the self-reflexivity that can pre-apologise for indulgent tricks but keeping the tension between the depicted filmmaking and the actual filmmaking tight. This is made clear from the off but my favourite moment of it is a lot simpler than many of the devices it tries. In an effort to humanise St Vincent Carrie grabs a fan from the queue and takes her in to meet the idol. It's still Annie so she is nice to the young fan. The fan tearfully recounts the tragedy in her life that led her to cling to St Vincent's music which prevented the fan's suicide. Annie morphs facially into St Vincent, collapses in a chair at first genuinely affected but then obviously plaing to the camera. In a reverse shot we see the camera taking the close up we've just seen. The meta camera then registers Carrie's dismay at this show. It's plain, performance-forward and a great deal subtler than the film gets at its most flamboyant but it's all the more powerful for that.

This can only work with the committment by Annie Clark to match Carrie Brownstein's deadpan front. If that isn't done it's already the vanity vehicle it seeks to lampoon. This can be a little like a trick of a good singer singing poorly for a role and only works if you forget the talent chosen against the talent to get it wrong right. To her credit, the more Clark gets earnest the funnier she is, that goes for the whacked out extremes towards the end with her family show as well as the more poignant scene of her family reality which really does border on the painful (publicly at least). It's as good as the power of her stage performances and that's more than you can say of many. This is how rock stars should play actors.

Director Phil Benz keeps a firm hand on the tiller through the excess, never letting it escape into whimsy or indulgent cuteness. He and Brownstein are veterans of the deadpan, awkward humour that has dominated American comedy from the 2000s on (their work on Portlandia alone secures their place). It's as though he thought of the much bigger budget as a means to sharpen the tools rather than get a warehouse full of them. This meta satire plays fair from the start, never tries to be more difficult or profound that its material allows, gives Annie nothing she can't do and mixes the rock star and the film about her to a level where it's deliciously hard to tell the difference. And it's bloody funny. And comparisons be damned: first one to compare it to Spinal Tap is a rotten egg.

MIFF Session 3: NINJABABY

Rakel is a working on a graphic novel or trying to as her life of casual bumming around can get demanding. Her flatmate notices her changing, her behaviour and body and throws her a pregnancy test. It's positive. As she's not showing to any obvious degree she figures when it might be and who might have co-authored it and he, an easy mooded fitness instructor is the one who takes her for her abortion. The doctor at the clinic frowns and performs an ultrasound that shows a healthy foetus at the end of its second trimester. You know the deal with that, three mesters and yer out. No abortion for Rakel today.

She traces the timeline back six months and realises that the massive root rat (I really did type that then and for the first time ever) from out of town that she flung with once, has to be the father. He's tall, passably sexy and utterly self-centred. Not for him but since she's there, anyway... Back in Oslo her sister, a record producer is heading off to LA on a career making job and can't take the bairn once born even though she and her partner have been losing the race against father time to father children. Fitness instructor steps in to offer a relationship, come what may. It's like choosing a banking solution on the phone. Meanwhile a cartoon version of the foetus is appearing on surfaces wherever she looks, wisecracking and sowing guilt intentionally or not.

Early on in this film I wondered what it would be like if it were Australian film. This own-voice syndrome test can render films trading on local charm try hard in a few lines. Use it on things like The Obvious Child and you get cinge instead of cute. See also anything by Wes Anderson. That applied to this until the more serious aspects of the situation emerged and the quirky mood stretched so tightly around the story that it became transparent, a thin protective layer rather than a way of working. Rakel begins to ask very serious questions of herself as the world that has gathered around her begins to adapt and cope much better than she does at its centre. The story has set this up so well that it feels like it hasn't changed at all.

A lot of that is due to the commitment of Kristina Kujath Thorp to what might easily have become a frustrating and alienating character. Her caprices and quirks feel natural and can frequently create winces in the viewer but without the balance she discovers in her performance it might have been too hard to follow her. Doubly so when you consider that the pleasantness of the people around her is never beige but credibly ... nice. Nader Khademi brings a quiet gravitas to Mos, the fitness instructor, rounding out his patience with Rakel with some quirks of his own. Are some of his decisions that believable, though? I think they might be but I just didn't want it so. Even Arthur Berning's "Dick Jesus" is played against his character's over confidence and provides a surprise or two in the final act.

So, I'll reccomend this one for its gift at the end. It takes a while to unwrap it but its poignancy is sobering and valuable. For a film that only needed to be lightly quirky to find its gravity AND keep all that quirk intact AND never to rely on cuteness, it kicks more goals than it started with.

MIFF Session 2: POLY STYRENE - I AM A CLICHE

Mixed race and facing down the late '70s British ultra right Marion Elliot changed her name to Poly Styrene and formed a band called X Ray Spex whose blasting style barged into the London punk scene. They recorded one of the seminal albums of the movement and collapsed shortly after when Poly left. That is part of the story of this film. The other part is her daughter's quest to connect with her deceased mother. This part is the point of the film but it can't be told without the first.

Celeste Bell, Marion/Poly's daughter and co-director of this film, did know her mother while she lived and had made the beginnings of peace after years of alt.religion and bipolar disorder which saw Celeste willingly taken from her mother's care. The film timeline cinematically recreates the process of discovery that Celeste went through as she encountered the pieces of evidence her mother left behind. Punk rock left a lot of casualties. Not having the support of the mainstream industry whose destruction it sought, many of these were sentenced to cultural obscurity. Celeste finds that her mother was one of its heroes, one of the few to bear a genuine socio-political motivation and successfully so, but one whose fragile mental state could not cope with such pressures and prizes that her career brought.

So after we are treated to a rich and well composed, thrilling biography of that career the film holds its breath and proceeds to the harder part. Celeste is frank about the effects of her upbringing on her own mental state and the sense of healing or at least treatment the emerges from her telling this story is poignant and (more than once) chilling. The film takes the risk that this longer part might lose its audience but I wonder about that. It's certainly slower and more meditative but it's also deeper. Poly Styrene followed a brief explosive career with what to her fans felt like obscurity. I was a fan in the late '70s and I knew almost nothing of what had become of her. This is an opportunity to fill in that larger volume of her biography that has been so ill served.

While a few of the friends, family and colleagues are shown on screen they are mostly heard in voiceover and the string of them makes for easy absorption as the story progresses. U.K. film star Ruth Negga reads Poly's diary and interview excerpts as a role. I wondered about this at first but then, given Negga's performance and the performative nature of interview (especially rock music interviews) and diary writing it becomes a welcome feature, standing in for what we won't be able to hear otherwise. I was amused to see a few cuts from Molly Meldrum's lengthy interview with her from '78 or '79. Meldrum reliably won RAM's klutz of the year award and his interviews were often chaotic and anti-informative through no fault of their own. I have seen this full interview on Youtube and might again as the bits of it on screen reveal that the two seemed to be having a natural sounding conversation and some real thinking is coming out of it. (For contrast in the extreme, Youtube Meldrum's attempted interview with Prince Charles for some perpective.)

I do recall the Molly interview but more than that the British tv documentary about the legacy of the hippies in which Caroline Coon talked of the punks as being the hippies' revenge. The docco featured the now well known footage of X Ray Spex in a practice playing the gleefully ironic song that gives this film it extended title. Also there was a swell of representation in the NME and other organs of the time. And it struck me that everything Johnny Rotten (poignantly absent from this film) said about the spirit of punk being self expression despite all was far more potently expressed by Poly. Her general's peaked cap or solider's helmet were as comic book as they were anti-militarism. She didn't take the hair glue, garbage bag skirts, or nasal safety pins. But her unignorable dental braces were real and served as gleeful reminders that she was who she was. And when she sang Oh Bondage Up Yours she was having a laugh as well as being gravely serious. I might be old but the solid fury of that song has not been softened by the deacdes and can still slap you across the face. Same with the poignancy of Germ Free Adolescents with its surprisingly gentle arrangement contrasting with the power of the vocal. 

There's a photo set from the time featuring Poly Styrene, Siouxsie Sioux, Debbie Harry, Pauline Black (who does appear in voiceover), Viv Albertine and Chrissie Hynde. There are a few goes at it and the women are doing what young people do when having their photo taken in a group, going from smiles to contorted mugging (never with them all doing anything like the same thing) to the light weariness that sets in after a few have been taken. It's a reminder of the youth of these pioneers but also how durable the legacy of women in the punk years. Poly Styrene's place is set for as long as anyone can remember.

This film begins with Celeste Bell gazing at a wall of tvs playing an old video of her mother's band. Bell seems numbed by the sight. The video has been distressed to one step short of outright pixelation, only the vague madly coloured shape of the woman in the military cap tells us who it is. If we didn't know that this film is here to tell us and we will learn more than we might want but we'll also pick up a thing or two about fame and stress in the darker margins of the industry. Celeste makes her peace but it is left open. I appreciated how in the final act of reconcilation shown on screen there remains a sense of overhang, that some wounds can never quite heal, some deeds will always haunt, some ghosts will always roam.

MIFF Session 1: SISTERS WITH TRANSISTORS

Delia Derbyshire recounts the cacophony of air raids on her native Coventary. Her then child's mind recieved the tritonal sirens and explosions and the mass of human voices and movement as a kind of music; not a lullaby but music all the same. Later in this absorbing documentary we hear Pauline Oliveros describe lying on the back seat of the family car on a long drive, listening to the motor and how it changed the sound of her parents' voices. That's why this film works so well: it goes to the source idea and demonstrates in organised footage how to construct a history the same way these composers started with field recordings of the world around them or built from basic waveforms to produce music that, until it was aired, was as new as your next breath. And if think that adds up to a lot of squeaks and drones you're right but only partly as the emotional core of these women's compositions is as substantial as a Mozart trio or Wagner opera. It's made with circuit boards but they might as well be frets or keys when you hear the results.

But this film avoids the over-validation that its title might suggest and, having established the male domination of music throughout history, it allows the composers to speak for themselves. Keeping almost entirely to a blend of sourced film from the matching era and archival footage of the composers themselves Sisters with Transistors keeps everything firmly centred and linear. For a parade of artists who might well be unknown to you the structure of this film plays fair by covering each major composer in a named section before allowing them to interweave for its final statements.

While I knew of Delia Derbyshire and Suzanne Ciani I had no idea of Daphne Oram or Pauline Oliveros whose work and thinking are solid pioneering. I'm spending this afternoon seeking their music out. After seeing Oram create a polyphonic composition using hand drawn squiggles on clear cinemfilm and the choral results or listening to her talk about racing the clock to deliver a score for television by grabbing every reel to reel tape recorder she could locate in the greater London area and brainstorming music where there had only been neurones and synapses. As one voice over put it, this work is synthesised from nothing ... but that's not true at all. What you are hearing, whether it's the screams of dying circuit boards (like the score of Forbidden Planet when Morbius dies) boundless drones or the reinterpreted whispers of distant machines you are hearing inspiration and, sometimes, you are hearing genius.

I am delighted to report that the MIFF Play app works perfectly well with a Chromecast (my smart tv has one built in) but (from last year's experience) a laptop plugged into a tv with an HDMI cable does a fine job as well. Working that out might well determine your enjoyment of MIFF this year as it's probably going to be entirely online. 

Review: VICIOUS FUN

A nerdy but acerbic critic and editor of a horror magazine blunders his way into a support group for serial killers. Without spoilers that's all you need to know about this one. Actually, there's one more thing. This film honours its joke. There is no back pedalling for irony's sake nor any genuine disrespect to the genre that burdens most horror/comedies and renders them neither scary nor funny. That is what keeps the good examples list small. Now it's stronger by one.

It's 1983 and the video shops are bursting with independent horror movies. Whether it's teen slashers, Cronenberbian body nightmares, supernatural forces, the shelves are heavy with cinematic murder and mayhem. Joel has coped with his lonely fascination with the genre by starting his own magazine Vicious Fanatics. We meet him as he watches a Wes Craven like director going over the editing of the new masked killer movie. Joel is tut tutting about the lack of originality instead of doing the interview he's there for. The director stops him with a question of what  Joel would do instead. Joel's response is well rehearsed and has at least the ring of deep thought to it. He is shown the door.

Later, languishing at home, he gets drunk while waiting for his flatmate. She comes in and all but evicts him for the evening as a girlfriend comes around for movies and pizza. He has already seen her getting dropped off and pashed by some blocky alpha boy and is developing a sense of rejection that only the self deluded can create when imagining connections between themselves and the objects of their affection. But it's not happening tonight (again) so he drunkenly resolves to follow the guy in a vague hope of finding some way of discrediting him to her. 

He ends up at a bar, sidles up to the bad guy who turns out to be quite friendly. Joel then all but drowns in drink and disappointment as he tries to work the bar for himself. He crashes in a broom closet and wakes to find the bar closed and bursts in on what seems like a self help group who welcome him. After fumbling a few vague confessions which could be about any addiction he finds out they are talking about how hooked they are on murder. Enter the missing group member who with a hilarious debunking of Joel's pet horror movie project exposes him as a fraud. Then it's on.

There are the expectable nods to the horror hall of fame in character names and some subversions of old tropes but where this film gets it right is that it leaves these incidental and concentrates on the tension and comedy of the central situations. In lulls it reveals how thin is the divide between its ambitions and the cheaper aspects of fulfilling them. These happen at junctions where the writing has been left undercooked and the pace has slackened for some character development. This is not an unknown flaw (entire third acts of Wes Anderson movies depend on it as a feature) but it can edge towards cuteness in a film so bent on keeping momentum high to work properly. While this does happen more than once it never drags the whole down with it. A flatly functional cop at the station has been reading Joel's magazine and has a highly articulate speech about why horror is a respectable genre of cinema. It only just works because the delivery renders it a stoner in a police uniform gives us such a funny juxtaposition that we let it through.

Vicious Fun is all up what its title claims for it. As an invitation to revel in the baseness of human behaviour that the legacy of '80s horror supplies it is a chorus of pure glee. If you were inclined against horror as a vulgar interest this film has a lesson for you that you might not mind taking. If you are already in there with the rest of us, it's still fun.

Vicious Fun is on Shudder.

Review: THE BOY BEHIND THE DOOR

 

A car drives slowly through a living wasteland of a suburb with small oil derricks blackly nodding by every other house. The car stops at a house and the driver opens the boot to reveal two boys of about ten years old boudn and gagged. A flashback bursts to life in a golden field in complete contrast to the steel blue hell of the opening. The two boys run through the grass, playing catch with a baseball. One of them runs to the nearby forest to get the ball and doesn't come back. The other one goes in search and has his head whacked into a tree for his troubles. Then they are in the boot on the way to hell house. One of the boys, Bobby, has been left in the boot but manages to kick his way out. Getting his bearings he leaves the garage and goes into the house where he finds his friend Kevin, imprisoned in one of the rooms and shackled to the floor. There is a man downstairs who seems to be waiting for something to happen. He's watching tv and boiling the jug. There's a stopwatch on his wrist. Bobby almost gets by him. For the next eighty or so minutes there will be almost nothing but tension.

Too many twists and turns for more plot than that but if you were after a tight thriller that works well enough to keep your interest and tell an involved story with probably kless than ten minutes of dialogue then give this one a go. There are plot holes galore but I'll keep it to one. Bobby has to get rid of a lot of blood on the floor as a threat is making its way toward him. He seems to do this almost completely in minutes with a couple of tea towels. Could anyone really do anything like that? No but I couldn't care less as the pace of the action was so firmly helmed and the payoffs and underlying creepiness just took me away. Committed performances, especially by the two friends, a lean and mean aesthetic and a willingness to risk losing its audience through some bad character decisions make this one worth the time. It's not a gamechanging genre buster but it works. Oh, and watch out for the MAGA sticker. Funny.

The Boy Behind the Door is on Shudder.

Review: SWEET RIVER

A woman returns to goes to a cane farming town for answers about the murder and resting place of her son. She is befriended by the neighbours and starts asking around about what happened to her son who is considered a victim of a homicidal predator long gone presumed dead (or shown to be dead). There is also the story of a school bus crash. So while all this is happening there are shady things in everyone's past that our heroine Hanna finds out, often by accident rather than investigation. And weaving their way through this near static tale are the ghosts, or something, of a host of children who are a mix of bus crash and murder victims who appear in the cane fields or clodhop on the corrugated iron roofs of the auld Queenslander houses. This all kind of coalesces and then the credits roll, leaving me frowning at the waste of opportunity.

Before that, though, I should note that every frame of this film is not only National Geographic worthy beautiful but keeps promising to tell a compelling story only to be let down by a typically Australian undercooked screenplay. It's not just the look. All the performances are good and feature fine moments of screen acting, either pushing character envelopes with a gesture or expression or holding right back and letting the context do the talking. The score is a magnificent synthesised tide of mood enhancement and mystery building. This really should have been a winner.

Ok, so how come Hanna's son Tommy died here when the place seems so new to her? Wasn't she there at the time? If she was why doesn't anyone know who she is? If there was an explanation for that I missed it. In this script where important things are said or done because they probably should go in that bit it gets pretty easy to miss things. Also, for all the emotion aired on screen there seems such an energy vaccum behind the camera as scenes succeed others with such little substance. It feels like they were reading off a draft put together as a scrapbook and just went along with it.

What does work is the world building. This community is walled in by its own guilt and the physical barriers of the towering cane. The cane is where the figures of the dead appear most and the rapidly changing visibility of the setting renders scenes with them shiveringly creepy. One moment involving this is so gently unsettling I wondered if I'd really seen it at all. At it strong moments this film really does deliver eerieness. There is a sound, a shriek that lies somewhere between a human scream and an alarm that appears in the distance throughout and when you know (or, more accurately, suspect you know) what it is it, too, sends chills. It's just a pity about the undercooked mystery plot that wraps around it which goes from a good slowburn start to a dish that never quite feels ready.

Here's why I care about this and won't simply let this go as a nice try. I'm from North Queensland. My paternal grandparents were cane farmers. There were cane farmers on my mother's side, too, and we holidayed at their place once when I was about eight. I remember the wonder of the cane burning at night and the newness of staying in a different place (Bundaberg). Anyway, there was a milk bar a short walk away that sold these peanut shaped caramels coated in chocolate (like Fantales, apart from the shape). These might have been made locally as I've never seen them anywhere else and you got them in a paper bag. They were enticement enough for me to brave walking through what felt like two kilometres of jagged edge road through three metre high canefields either side, whispering and hissing away, hiding untold numbers of snakes, monsters or killers. I just kept thinking of the caramels and I wouldn't touch them until I got back to the house. That memory has long made me wish for a horror story to be set in canefields. Now there finally is one it ends up being this film with a baffling choice title, a film whose success is completely undermined by the indecision of its storytelling and a director who can get an incredible looking scene that leaks interest the longer we sit through it. So, I'm still waiting.

Sweet River is on Netflix.