Monday, November 30, 2015

Vancouver International Film Festival 2015: Part Six


Lost and Beautiful 

Fate forces a left-turn upon Pietro Marcello’s Lost and Beautiful, and if the results don’t entirely hang together, they nonetheless reveal a director possessed of a uniquely adventurous sensibility. Initially, the film follows Italian shepherd Tommaso as he struggles to preserve a crumbling palace against the indifference of the state and the threats of the mafia. After the shepherd is felled by a heart attack midway through production, the film veers into the story of Pulcinella—a Comedia dell’arte clown depicted here as a kind of immortal sprite—who is given charge of Tomasso’s buffalo calf. As the film blends documentary with folk tale, the curious bond between man and beast provides an outlet for the grief over the shepherd’s passing, and the unlikely duo become tragic figures of their own. The clown yearns to renounce his immortality and live a normal life, while a farmer plans to fatten the calf for slaughter, uninterested in the fact that he is caring for a talking animal. The fantastic is set on a collision course with mundane reality, and there is little doubt as to which one will prevail: Pulcinella becomes a man and the calf becomes meat. Myths, the supernatural beast sadly muses, must above all else be true.


The Pearl Button  

In The Pearl Button, Patricio Guzman uses the ultimate free-floating signifier—water—to explore Chile’s history of violence. Following the 1973 military coup, over 1,000 people were dropped into the ocean after being tortured and murdered as the regime settled scores and silenced opponents. Guzman explores the grisly process in frank detail, even using a dummy to show how the victims were wrapped up and tied to a rail—often the only remaining trace of these people, whose bodies have long since dissolved into the sea. But the film reaches back further to consider the country’s mistreatment of its Aboriginal population, who were once hunted for bounty (one pound was the price for a man’s testicle or a woman’s breast). The titular button, either encrusted in a rusted rail or used to lure a native of Tierra del Fuego to the new world, becomes a stand-in for the false promises foisted upon history’s victims. The violent stories, recounted by long-silenced voices, sit uncomfortably alongside stunning footage of glaciers and rivers, gentle rains and moonlit seas, and the profoundly unsettling effect is that these crimes seemingly become written across all of nature. Even the beauty contains echoes of the horrors.


The Assassin 

The rumours of The Assassin’s beauty have not been exaggerated. Coming seven years after his last feature, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s wuxia debut is a marvel of meticulous care and precision, all reflecting the patient labour of a master filmmaker. The film, swathed in veils and lit by candle, is a glory of texture and colour. But visual splendor is thin compensation for the film’s jarring tonal shifts and frustratingly shapeless narrative. Hou’s approach to storytelling is typically elliptical—and usually to good effect—but his style seems ill suited to a sprawling medieval saga of vengeance and political intrigue. The director’s dream-like flow of languid long takes remains, but now interrupted by periodic fight scenes that often end as inexplicably as they begin. The titular assassin defers delivering the fatal blow several times, out of what is derided by her mistress as mere “human sentiment,” yet sentiment is sorely lacking in this bloodless wuxia, which is so weighted down by its portentous beauty that it can scarcely move at all. The failed attempt to synthesize such disparate styles—Hou’s meditative “slow” cinema and a visceral martial-arts epic—results in a film that seems to toggle between entirely different modes. The sumptuous atmosphere beguiles, but there is little to see behind the veils.

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