Quote: Martin Luther King Jr.

"Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted"

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.