SFIFF 56: Me and You

This production from Bernardo Bertolucci shows the master's touch in all departments, including, and this surprised me a bit, his deft evocation of youthful ennui, which was subtle, intimate, confident.  Even the 80's sounds (Bowie, The Cure) had a contemporary retro-hipness about them, and the rewritten lyric to Space Oddity was for me the perfect moment in the film, so beautiful was it and so pertinent to the characters in their present predicament.  But there was something missing nevertheless - a feeling of whatever at the heart of things - again, not inappropriate given the (youthful) subject, but not in the end what I look for in films.

SFIFF 56: A Hijacking

A taut, well-paced, absorbing drama about ordinary men caught up in an extraordinary situation - the hijacking of a merchant vessel by Somali pirates - this award-winning Danish feature had a sort of documentary exactitude about its details, especially its characterization, that raised the stakes emotionally and left me completely wrung out, but impressed. The scenes in the boardroom between the CEO of the Danish shipping firm and the British negotiating team he hires to help him are superb, nail-bitingly tense and realistic.

SFIFF 56: Marketa Lazarova

It's been a while since I've seen anything as gorgeous as this film, but the absurdly wooden plot cranking away in the background with its stereotypical medieval characters brawling and feuding over issues I could care less about spoiled things a bit for me.  I want to take the luxurious surfaces of the film, which are as beautiful as any I have ever seen, and eliminate the dialogue altogether (or the subtitles anyway), replacing it with bits of Shakespeare or any other playwright worthy of the cause - then it would be the truly extraordinary thing it was destined to be.

SFIFF 56: Leviathan

This phenomenal film was the highlight of the festival for me and I can't wait to see it again!  It's in a category of its own, the documentary-as-pure-art-object category, and I was appropriately ravished and amazed by its deep sensuality, both visual and aural.  No special effects, only unusual perspectives and powerful lighting, the footage is raw, direct, and dazzlingly poetic all at once, a wordless vision of reality as dream or nightmare, depending on how you feel about waves, blood, fish, flight, nets, chains, winches, and men wielding steel hooks and sabers in the middle of the night.

SFIFF 56: Shepard and Dark

A quiet, slightly oddball documentary about old friends Sam Shepard and Johnny Dark attempting a joint project and derailing their relationship in the process, this film raises some interesting points (about creativity, responsibility, and self-knowledge) but doesn't pursue them, perhaps because they only emerge when the two men are apart and commenting on one another in absentia.  Together they make an odd, uninspiring pair whose glory days of deep connection are long gone.  I can't decide whether I'm intrigued or perplexed by the unanswered questions left in their wake, but there is definitely a sense of wanting more.  It might just be the lingering after-effects of proximity to the troubled, troubling figure of Sam Shepard, who seems to be more than usually lost and uncertain, and in a strangely domesticated way at that.