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.

SFIFF 55: Wuthering Heights

Andrea Arnold does Wuthering Heights!  It's a dream come true!  She totally gets the book, and then, thank god, she doesn't betray it with a lot of BBC-drama type styling and other thespian nonsense.  What we get is raw, unmediated human nature briefly diverted by civilization but returned through tragedy to its elements.  Civilization is the tragedy.  She celebrates the natural sublime, the bleak, rain-lashed landscape, the savage, 'inappropriate' emotions, the mud, blood, and fur; birth and death and cruelty; fire, rock, and rain.  It is thrilling and beautiful, hands down the best film in the festival.

SFIFF 55: Snows of Kilimanjaro

This is a heartwarming story about good people whose ethical mindsets have calcified in middle age and don't serve them so well when crisis hits.  Set in the port city of Marseilles among shipyard workers and their families, I was expecting something grittier by far, but this gentle drama about salt-of-the-earth types got progressively sweeter until a sort of cynical instinct in me began to reject it.  The film was inspired by Victor Hugo's How Good Are the Poor, which is a sentimental disaster of a poem and not to be read under any circumstances.  I'm not immune to feeling good about good people, and I enjoyed the film's many subtle moments, but it's impact was weakened by its excesses.

SFIFF 55: The Loneliest Planet

I wanted to like this US/German production because, 1. it was so beautifully shot, with gorgeous landscapes, 2. it was a chamber drama with only three characters, which usually makes for dramatic intensity, and, 3. it had Gael Garcia Bernal in it.  But the film was ruined for me by the horrible character of Nica, whose irritating and banal personality pushed its way into every scene, as well as the general insufficiency of the script, which was so lackluster I nearly fell asleep.  The concept was good, and it could have been a great film, but it wasn't.

SFIFF 55: Twixt

Francis Ford Coppola's latest film is a luxurious gothic romp, with vampires, mad preachers, dead children, damned souls, doomed virgins, Edgar Allen Poe, and a lot of mist on the lake, which thing is a problem for the blocked, haunted, alcoholic writer at its heart (you just have to see it) but wonderfully comedic for us.  Beautifully shot, with isolated spots of impossibly rich color in cool, moonlit ghost-scapes, bright small-town vignettes that reminded me of David Lynch, and odd 3-D scenes.  It's an extravagant spectacle, but Poe's refrain about the death of beauty is still tenderly explored, and there are layers of mystery and enigma as well.  It's not entirely beside the point to remember that Coppola, like the character at the center of this story, lost his own child in 1986.

SFIFF 55: The Source

The perfection of this film is due in large part to the great trove of raw footage at its heart.  It's fascinating to watch in such detail the magnetic effect this self-styled 70's guru had on his 100-odd beautiful 'Aquarian children', and thank God it found its way into the hands of filmmakers skilled enough to render its power intact.  The result is a fascinating anthropological document of people on the edge of society developing primitive instincts to worship and wield power that lie at our collective core whether we care to admit it or not.  Glamorous, hypnotic, and profound ...

SFIFF 55: The Last Gladiators

I don't know what this says about me, but I loved watching the tough guys in this excellent doc about sanctioned violence in the NHL beat the crap out of each other.  It was a complete adrenaline rush!  There will be people who laugh at rather than with these bruisers, but I so appreciated the quietly unapologetic, sometimes gleeful logic of the film's central character, Montreal Canadiens star Chris Nilan.  He's a sort of heroic archetype, and his profound maladjustment to ordinary life didn't change that for me.  It's a great film, funny, thrilling, and compassionate.

SFIFF55: The Double Steps

A brilliant and completely original feature from Spanish director Isaki Lacuesta uses the life of French painter Francois Augieras, who painted his own 'sistine chapel' in a bunker in the Mali desert and then concealed it under sand, as a jumping off point to explore themes of identity, legend and visual representation.  It is poetic, non-linear, charming, funny, and beautiful, and its characterization of modern Africa is completely sympathetic.  It's easy to see why it took grand prize at last year's San Sebastian Festival.

SFIFF55: Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present

A good documentary about an exceptional performance artist, this portrait focuses on her 2010 MoMA show in which she met the gaze of 750,000 gallery visitors one by one over a period of 3 months.  It was incredibly moving to watch individuals respond to her peculiarly open and vulnerable face with their own expressions of gratitude, curiosity, and pain.  Clips and interviews reveal her to be an extraordinary and charismatic personality whose creative feats of endurance challenge art world norms, audience passivity, and the limits of her own spiritual commitment to radical living and loving.

Frameline 35: 'Absent'

This unusual thriller from Argentinian director Marco Berger is a complete departure from his debut Plan B.  Both films are psychologically astute, intelligent and erotic, but Absent swerves into much darker territory with its study of youthful obsession, sexual taboo, and paranoia.  In a clever twist on the seduction-of-a-minor theme, so prevalent in anti-gay rhetoric, 30-something swim-coach Sebastiano (played by Carlos Echevarria) is tricked early on into first driving his 16 year-old student Martin (Javier de Pietro) to a doctor's office one evening and then extending his hospitality to a couch for the night when Martin's supposed arrangements go awry.  The relentless way this innocent-looking boy draws the well-intentioned but increasingly nervous older man into his web of attempted seduction is developed in tense, spiralling detail, with claustrophobic sound design and camerawork, but at some point the discomfort it generates splits into divergent streams in the viewer's mind; one stays with the action, while the other begins to question the film's intentions - its bowing to genre conventions and persistent invocation of Hitchcock become a shade too heavy-handed, perhaps ironic (?), close to parody without ever exactly crossing the line, and for some time we are unsure just where Berger is going with it all.  

Given the revelations in the second half of the film these self-conscious effects make wondrous sense, and I marveled all over again at the intellectual facility of this young director for whom elements of film grammar/history double as psychological clues and even plot devices.  The slightly ramped-up genre tropes refer not to the action after all, but to the windmills in its unfortunate protaganist's unconscious mind, and when events swerve into more dreamlike territory the sense that we are witnessing the exteriorization of a sealed, completely occult experience intensifies, with layered cuts, sequencing distortions, and obscure visual keys (darkness, shots through water, through glass, broken windows, eye movements, eyes ... ) which extend the ominous effects of Carolina Canevaro's weird soundscape and Pedro Irusta's incredible, spooky, thrilling score.
 
Berger has commented somewhere that he makes 'gay films for straight people', and it's true that straight audiences will identify completely with the characters in both Plan B and Absent.  They hover on the cusp, they are straight people who find they are gay, or gay people who think they are straight; they are embroiled in scenarios as complex, challenging, or ambiguous as any we have seen or can imagine - and when sexual orientation comes in as somehow integral to all that, we respond to their situation as if it were our own.  It's an oblique approach to the theme which works well, completely sidestepping the 'otherness' that usually inflects gay films and situating characters inside our shared predicament.  I hope he finds the crossover audience he deserves, for his sake, but mostly, for ours.  We all need films as good as this.  Berger is a master already and he's barely out of film school - its phenomenal.

Frameline 35: Three reviews

Four More Years:  This film is a class act from beginning to end, hilarious, delightful, and very clever.  Its script alone should win every award going.  It is sharp, fast-moving, on-target, and very, very funny.  Why can't we have more of this kind of screenwriting over here?  We used to have Woody Allen, but he is churning out the same tired old stuff these days and this film from Swedish director Tova Magnusson-Norling is completely fresh.  The acting is great as well, the characters intensely lovable, and the concept - the leader of the centre-right party in Sweden falls for the second-in-command of the victorious socialists - is superb.  I can't even begin to imagine how funny it must be for Swedish speakers familiar with the scene.  But we get the gist of the tax-cut/tax-hike rhetoric, even if it is laced with references to things like the North Bothnia Rail Link.  Actually the North Bothnia Rail Link part is important.  I should like somebody to text me about the North Bothnia Rail Link in that way.  And have I mentioned the Serbo-Croatian, Social-Liberal aspects of bisexuality yet?  See this film. 


Wish Me Away:  I wasn't ready for how complex and passionate this documentary about country music phenomenon Chely Wright's coming-out was going to be.  If you like soul-searching stuff, and I do, this film is one of the stand-out events of the festival.  Quite apart from the in-depth revelation of how intelligent, thoughtful, courageous, divided, and conscious one human being can be, it really opens up the issue of just what it means to be gay in homophobic country with a crowbar.  It is hell.  People have to subvert and destroy themselves - especially people who dream big, apparently.  Chely Wright is a kind of superstar, and was an icon in the country music scene, a virtual archetype of beauty and goodness to a community saturated in hate for gays and other differently-oriented types.  Her journey as documented here is intensely moving; I cried my eyes out.  Her on-camera deliberations are a complicated, eloquent testament to just how thorny and profound a human predicament like this can be.  Coupled with fascinating footage of meetings with her spiritual advisor and publicity agents, editors, tour-managers, make-up artists, friends and family, it is a rich and beautifully-crafted film that will make you realize, if you don't already, what is at stake emotionally and spiritually for LGBT people everywhere.


Last, Fast Ride - The Life, Love and Death of a Punk Goddess:  This is one of those films that sometimes crop up at Frameline, where the subject is only incidentally gay or lesbian, but the issue at stake is something else.  I like that about this festival.  It illustrates how GBLT issues bleed into other issues, like feminism, or 'values'-politics, or media representation, or any area where the political and personal collide.  In this case the late, great, and beautiful punk-rock star Marian Anderson's sexual orientation is not exactly the point; nor are her sexual antics on stage, or even her outrageous acts of provocation generally, though these get closer.  It is that she was a victim of childhood sexual abuse by her father, an alcoholic, violent cop.  Everything that comes after, and there is a lot, can be seen in the light of this traumatic original sin.  Her life becomes an object lesson in how profoundly destructive such early trauma can be.  No doubt she means many things besides to many people, and I don't mean to deny any of that.  On the contrary, her achievements, her fearlessness, her energy, and raw talent (her voice alone is incredible), not to mention her sweetness and intelligence, as illustrated here in several interviews, contribute to what is at least my understanding of the magnitude of this crime against her, because it becomes abundantly clear as the film goes on that the effects of her sexual abuse were so far-reaching that no amount of personal talent, courage or virtue could save her from its destructive legacy.  It is a tragic film, a study in identity and struggle and loss, but I was filled with admiration for how fiercely this woman fought to define herself against unbeatable odds, and filled also with a renewed sense of disgust and hate for the men who perpetrate such crimes against children.  Fans of local punk scene will love it as well.  There are tons of stunning performance clips, and interviews with Tim Armstrong of Rancid, Dexter Holland of The Offspring, Becky Wreck of Lunachicks, Texas Terri, Daniel deLeon, Greg Langston, Fate Fatal, Ginger Coyote, and more.              

SFIFF54: 'Another Earth'

Another Earth: I loved this film.  It's basically a character drama exploring themes of loss, guilt, and atonement, but the presence of a second, identical earth on the horizon, with all its quantum implications, gives the film a brooding, crepuscular feel, an ambiguous atmosphere that hovers between menace and possibility.  Its a brilliant debut, intimate and powerful, and possessed of the sort of integrity that can characterize indie productions when they are conceived and developed from the ground up by ensembles as intelligent as this.

SFIFF54: 'Nostalgia for the Light'

Nostalgia for the Light:  This brilliant film from Chilean director Patricio Guzman succeeds on so many levels it is hard to summarize.  It creates its own level, it's a miracle that exceeds the sum of its parts.  Elegant commentary and dazzling images (of deserts, bones, moons, stars) attain a sort of harmonic convergence in which history, astronomy, and ethics align.  In revealing the ecstatic relationships between human and celestial bodies, light, time, space and memory, Guzman manages as well to bring reason and compassion to bear upon his country's darkest and most secret crimes.  It's a documentary - but it's also an astonishing work of art.

SFIFF54: 'Aurora'

Aurora: An unforgivably bleak and tedious attempt to render the texture of one man's despicable mind, this 3-hour exercise in testing the limits of audience endurance fails to justify itself psychologically, philosophically, artistically, or in any other ways relevant to sentient life.  Director (and star!) Cristi Puiu must be satanically depressed, or worse.  Avoid at all costs.

SFIFF54: 'The Mill and the Cross'

The Mill and the Cross:  Lech Majewski's intriguing study of Bruegel's painting (the Way to Calvary) zooms in on vignettes within the canvas and then develops mini-episodes from there, sliding backwards and forwards in time and in and out of the picture as a whole, until all are unified under the by now greatly expanded 'sign' of the painting.  With a dramatized Bruegel (Rutger Hauer) explaining his political, social, and aesthetic motives, the painting is transformed into a miraculous freeze-frame of a convulsion in history and society.  You have to see it to know how artfully this effect is achieved.

SFIFF54: 'Silent Souls'

Silent Souls: Cinema might be the best medium yet for conveying the symbolic nature of cultural forms, and Siberian director Aleksei Fedorchenko's lovely adaptation of Aist Sergeyev's 'The Buntings' is a case in point.  The Merjan (Russian/Finnish) burial at the center of this lyrical film doubles as ritual for the vanishing culture itself, but it is not a complex or sophisticated film - its virtues lie in its simplicity, its physicality, its poetry, its tenderness, and its quiet beauty.  Some of its scenes and images - the drowned typewriter, the ribbon ceremony, the incredible choral scene, the naive poems - are pure illuminations, limpid and inspired.