SFIFF53: 2 capsule reviews

I Am Love: I can't believe that director Luca Guadagnino didn't know what he was doing when he set this weird, vague, lackluster story with its boring underdeveloped characters to a selection of modern composer John Adams' vital, complex, and challenging symphonic pieces. Starring Tilda Swinton as the standard repressed nouveau-riche wife and mother who is liberated by the chef, the film is internally discordant, alienated, inflated, and absurd. As an ironic recycling of Italian film cliches it's quite interesting. If that is indeed what it is.


Winter's Bone: The best thing about this film is its incredibly authentic-looking cast of sinister, redneck, crank-cooking outlaw characters. Their blasted, wizened faces are a true reminder of what this country really looks like outside of the cities. Unfortunately the reality principle doesn't extend to the heroine, who is too beautiful by far for this dismal scene. She's idealized in every other way as well - it's as if the dysfunctional conditions which have disfigured everybody else have just bypassed her completely. Script and plot are fairly standard Hollywood too.

SFIFF53: 3 capsule reviews

Father of my Children: This stunning contemporary film from director Mia Hansen-Love is both realistic and seductive; based on the life of independent film producer Humbert Balsan, it is a warm, indulgent look at work and family life (with impeccable acting from children and adults alike) which changes tempo in a shocking way mid-stream. Almost two films in one - both astonishing.

Wild Grass: Delightful, unusual, and unclassifiably odd, this wonderful film by Alain Resnais about mid-life crisis, romance, obssession, and chance confounds expectations at every turn. It is light-hearted and flirtatious, with sinister edges, and flourishes of the absurd. Easily the funniest and most unconventional film I've seen in the festival so far.

White Material: From its opening shot of jackals in the beam of a flashlight to its shocking conclusion, this lean, intense, thrilling, beautifully shot and flawlessly acted film is another Claire Denis masterpiece. Set in her native Africa and starring Isabelle Huppert as a plantation owner who refuses to leave despite encroaching chaos, it is a tense, fraught, disturbing film - and still characteristically complex in its treatment of the individual, family, and society.

SFIFF53: Domain

Patric Chiha's second feature Domain is an interesting and thoughtful if slightly brittle drama about a seductive woman and her adoring nephew, starring the notorious French actress Beatrice Dalle. She plays Nadine, a mathematician whose absolutist statements betray a fierce will to order which in turn guards a chaotic interior life she completely denies. Her persona is extreme, a dominatrix fantasy irresistible to the 17 year-old Pierre, who flirts on the edges of an obsession, choosing her dresses and high heels in a timid attempt to stage-manage a sensation he is not mature enough to understand. That Nadine's image is at odds with her reality is something Pierre must come to terms with, and his doing so constitutes a rite of passage for them both. Nadine's need for him to adore her as the inaccessible domina is of the essence of her instability, and as things progress we discover the toll such an elaborate defence mechanism has taken on her health. Her alcoholism brings her crashing to the floor on more than one occasion, and at a certain point we learn she has incurred a potentially fatal cirrhosis as well. The woman who, at the beginning of the film, charms young men with her physical and intellectual presence, who speaks authoritatively about rhythm and beauty and order is reduced to a pathetic figure in rehab who complains that her vision of structure behind chaos has dissolved, that disorder is permanent, that life is not worth living.

It has to be said that the intellectual pretensions of this script do not entirely come off. Nadine's academic world is unconvincing, one-dimensional - in fact it really only has stylistic implications. Her theoretical statements are like the foam that skims off the top of a glamorous identity disorder. And they belong to an atmosphere I can only describe as inorganic; an aesthetic which leans toward what is artificial and contrived, a sort of sterile geometry which finds its visual home in the frozen forests at the end of the film. This aesthetic is connected, I think, to the revelation of Pierre's homosexuality, if only because it brings his adoration of the female-as-icon into sharper focus. Nadine is ultimately just another Joan Crawford-Bette Davis fantasy figure, interesting (to gay men) not as a real person but as a representation of something deeply felt and aggressively pursued. If the aesthetic is a conscious attempt to acknowledge what is destructive about this approach to femininity, it is a very sensitive one indeed. But Chiha's treatment of his male lead leaves me unsure about his intentions in this respect. Pierre's despicable act in the final scene, which suggests a destructive subtext all his own, does not sufficiently undo the effect of his portrayal hitherto as innocent, even angelic. If relationships like this one are to be understood as mutually complicit there needs to be a more thorough examination of male culpability than this. That being said, it is also true that self-understanding tends to come in sudden leaps, that the issue of culpability is not always the most direct route to the heart of a problem, and that cruelty itself, or at least, the life-negating impulse enshrined in this film, might be viewed in more than one light. Think of Freud's death instinct, or of Sade's theater of erotic cruelty, of Bataille or Nietzsche or Foucault. Seen from this angle, both Nadine and Pierre (in his final act) are actualizing something dark and paradoxical at the center of human life. At its outer limits, the film could be viewed as a purely symbolic journey altogether, a journey in which nobody is actually hurt and all decisions, or excisions, are applied to aspects of identity. Chiha has chosen a difficult, highly combustible theme to work with, and I think he has chosen to avoid some of its nuances and highlight others in service of what is ultimately a very provocative film. Sometimes provocation is a virtue contingent upon vice - and seen in this light, the film's flaws, the things it doesn't say, are actually its merits.

SFIFF53: The Day God Walked Away

This extraordinary first feature by Belgian director Philippe van Leeuw about a woman who survives the Rwandan genocide is a contender for the New Directors Prize and deserves to win it - it is a brilliant film, absolutely authentic and uncompromising. The performance of Rwandan survivor and singer Ruth Nirere is so rigorous an enactment of grief, disorientation and breakdown it is just astonishing to watch. Nirere plays bereaved mother Jacqueline who returns after being trapped in a ransacked house to her cottage to find her children murdered by Hutu gangs; she is subsequently hounded out of the village by its new occupants before she can prepare their bodies for burial. The rest of the film traces the trajectory of her psychological condition as she evades capture, encounters another refugee in the forest and nurses him back to health, and subsequently begins to slide, after these initially life-affirming gestures, into a kind of emotional category of being you have probably never experienced but know on an instinctive level is absolutely correct, ie. commensurate with the facts. It really has to be seen to be believed. The effect is elegantly achieved, without recourse to melodrama or histrionics, so we are afforded what I think is the incredibly privileged opportunity of considering what it means to encounter a world which has turned, in every conceivable way, upside-down and inside-out. We can sense it in Jacqueline's complicated response to her companion's recovery, which heralds a kind of false return to 'normalcy' she finds intolerable, and in her willful self-exposure and ultimate return to the site of her original, lacerating dislocation. The film is an assured, mature, compassionate reaction to what is at bottom an unthinkable, impossible dimension of our history on this planet. As if this wasn't enough, cinematography is inspired as well. Look out for the shot of Jacqueline's unspeakably tormented face intersected by the silver threads of her upturned necklace, with inverted crucifix on her forehead. This one shot sort of says it all.

SFIFF53: Between Two Worlds

Sri Lankan director Vimukthi Jayasundara's third film about the civil war, Between Two Worlds, is (as the title suggests) a study in ambiguity, division and chaos. Affairs are violently disordered and because there is a sort of temporal rupture operating throughout we encounter violence from times past as well. Between scenes of riot in the modern city near the beginning of the film and a savage attack by machete-wielding warriors on horseback at the end, the imaginative space of this film is defined by its random exposure to assault on every level. It is a fluid, disconcerting environment which conditions personal life as much as social; the central character is moved in a seemingly arbitrary way to expressions of both tenderness and savagery (most notably, in one scene, toward the same person at the same time) as he struggles to find a context for his own wildly fluctuating impulses. This character is something of a puzzle in and to himself - we gather from stories told by fishermen that he is the reincarnation of a figure in Sri Lankan originary myth who is born of a virgin and raised by the sea, but he is also a contemporary individual with a history and family and village of origin in this world. His thoroughly uncanny character is developed in weird, disconnected episodes which, as Jayasundara explained in the Q and A, are best understood as visual puzzles. We encounter him falling from a great height into the sea at the beginning of the film, so his otherwordly character is established from the outset, but then we see him beating a man who is dressed as Mickey Mouse on a street littered with smashed computers, which is disorienting to say the least. He escapes to lush country, he sees visions, he surrenders, he sleeps, he makes love, he fights, he hides in a tree ... It is images like this latter one, which conform to the shape of the myth, that help to clue us in to the fact that the spatial and temporal disconnects we keep running into are probably as much a function of his own double nature, as human body and mythic embodiment (between two worlds) as they are qualities in the world at large. There is occasion amongst all this admixture and chaos for some lyrical camerawork - the scenes where his wounded eye is healed by his lover's breast milk are beautiful - but the deliberate visual discords end up abstracting events so much it is ultimately difficult to really engage emotionally. Audience members reported feeling moved, but I left feeling slightly baffled and tired.

SFIFF53: 2 capsule reviews

Cracks: This glossy, good-looking film about love and obssession in an elite British girls' school gets high marks for production and design, but with two of its leading three actresses turning in consistently overwrought performances it is difficult to salute them or director Jordan Scott. In different hands it might have been a truly sinister film, but what we get is a sort of gorgeous bohemian pot boiler, dripping in lovely period detail, but devoid of subtlety or imagination.

Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky: Another offering to the gods of style (knockout wardrobe!) this lush, expensive film about the seduction of Stravinsky by Coco Chanel starts out well, with its raw and breathless performance of The Rite of Spring, but it quickly deteriorates into standard genre conventions made all the more turgid by a moronic script. Even with the hypnotic screen presence of actor Mads Mikkelson it is an inexplicably banal and meaningless experience.

SFIFF53: My Dog Tulip

"Unable to love each other, the English turn naturally to dogs." So begins this charming, singular tale of a man and his dog based on the novel by J.R. Ackerley and brought to life by artists Paul and Sandra Fierlinger in a beautifully crafted animated feature (consisting of 80, 000 paperless drawings) which adopts different styles for different states of mind, ranging from what look like fully detailed watercolor paintings to bizarre sketches. With characters by Christopher Plummer, Lynn Redgrave, and Isabella Rossellini, the story illustrates how one man's lonely life was turned upside-down (sometimes literally) by the arrival of a poorly-trained 18 month-old Alsatian bitch. It is funny and poignant (Ackerley says his 15 years with Tulip - 'Queenie' in real life - were "the best years of my life"), packed with dry English observations (petting the stud dog in its own home would have been wildly inappropriate, "as if one had intended to stroke the butler"; Tulip's expression when leaving a 'calling card' for other dogs was "businesslike, as though she were signing a check"). Humor can be a bit too anatomical and certainly too scatalogical for some tastes, but there is plenty to enjoy in this film besides, and if you love or have ever loved an animal as passionately as did Ackerley, you will respond to that sentiment in every frame of this sly, witty, unusual film. Here's the trailer:

SFIFF53: The White Meadows

If there were any doubts about the political complexion of Iranian writer-director Mohammad Rasoulof's The White Meadows they have been effectively squashed by his (and editor Jafar Panahi's) recent arrest and detention by Iranian authorities. Rasoulof has just been released on bail, but Panahi has not yet been so fortunate. It's an ugly real-life coda to what in the film is the most subtle and haunting political critique imaginable. Viewers could be forgiven for lingering on the film's gorgeous surfaces (reminiscent of Shirin Neshat's black and white video work and of Pasolini's mythic themes and 'real' faces) or choosing to interpret its succession of poetic episodes as mysteries which have to do with the human condition generally. Shot among the dazzling salt-encrusted escarpments of Iran's Lake Urmia, the film's central character Rahmat rows his wooden boat between isolated communities; he attends a variety of rituals, collects the tears of those concerned and takes them away in a small glass bottle for purposes unknown until the last scene. The fictitious rituals bear close relation to any number of superstitious folk practices in human history, which is to say, they seem both strange and authentic. A beautiful girl is sacrificed as a bride to the sea; a dwarf is completely shaved and sent to the bottom of the village well to deliver wishes in sealed jars to the fairy who lives there; a boy who breaks a taboo is stoned. Every story segment, and the ritual at its center, is filmed with great attention to the symmetry which inheres in such practices and speaks to their function as specific forms of entreaty or atonement. Like individual lessons on the relationship between spiritual and aesthetic matters, they are parables about the art of magic, or the magic of art. Each vignette is linked by some visual refrain to the next, so that the bride who floats in a sea of burning bowls echoes the burial-at-sea of the boy in a graveyard marked by buoyant oil cans, or his ritual stoning earlier in a field of blanched posts. Dialogue is minimal, but realistic and, notably, quite funny; sounds (of crackling flames, tinkling glass, dripping wells, the slap of oars in water, or crunch of salt underfoot) are exquisite, and music is breathtakingly beautiful, including the strange notes of the lute which hangs from a tree and is plucked by the breeze. But such satisfactions as these, and they are considerable, are multiplied a hundredfold when you view the film as a political allegory, a representation of life in a theocracy with all of its absurdity, zeal, waste, loss, and sadness. The message is implied, and it makes itself felt in episodic and understated ways (the most overt being the 'rehabilitation' of the painter who refuses to see blue) but they accumulate quietly until the entire premise of the film can be seen to reflect and contain it. These crisp, white beaches blooming with fungal salt pilings and littered with dead birds are a representation of affairs generally, where people's very tears contribute in a vicious circle to their own sorrows as the environment grows weirder and less hospitable by the day. The sublime conclusion makes this reading clear, I think, though it too could be interpreted in different ways. What is indisputable is the perfection of the images, so delicately handled, so haunting in their mixture of tenderness and irony. It is difficult to imagine a more deeply felt, more deeply human meditation on the nature of folly and suffering than the one this incredible film affords us. It is a magical, subversive masterpiece, perfect in every way.

SFIFF53: T-Bone Burnett

The live audience with T-Bone Burnett Sunday evening at the Kabuki was not, for all its warmth and breadth of illustration (in the form of big-screen clips from his movie credits) overly revealing of this legendary musician/music producer's intellectual or emotional process: interviewer Elvis Mitchell was relaxed and witty, but T-Bone seemed a bit nervous, not so surprising given the size of the audience hanging on his every word. We did hear a little about his formative influences; Hoagie Carmichael and his band in the 1946 Gilda (which he described as ground zero for what music in a film should be), the new authenticity in Elvis Presley's 1957 Loving You, and American Graffiti, as well as some exceedingly brief mentions of musicians Ralph Stanley, Jimmy Reed, and John Goodwin, of his parents' Ella and Louis records and their Cole Porter songbooks, but the conversation was vague and rambly; it felt like the rubber never really hit the road. Maybe there is no road exactly. When questioned about his methods, T-Bone explained that his process is not very conscious ... I do it by feel. He was more expansive in the anecdotal department, with generous comments about the many friends - musicians, directors, and actors alike - who have worked with him along the way, including Anthony Minghella, the Coen brothers, Johnny Cash, Callie Khouri and Jeff Bridges; we heard about Reece Witherspoon's finally being ready to sing 'Wildwood Flower' in Walk the Line after bending over double and screaming at the top of her voice in the studio yard, and of Johnny Cash's barely contained violence, his southern gothic darkness, albeit the only victim in this story was a guitar Cash scored with a nail. Clips from his many brilliant musical-production credits included scenes from O Brother, Where Art Thou (when he, as he put it, pulled the sword out of the stone), The Big Lebowski, Cold Mountain, Walk the Line, Across the Universe, and Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood, to name a few; the music in these segments more than made up for whatever wasn't said, and maybe that is the point, after all, that music is its own best interlocutor.