Thursday, December 3, 2015

Vancouver International Film Festival 2015: Part Seven


The Lobster 

The dreaded English-language debut has confounded international talents greater than Yorgos Lanthimos, but the Greek director’s mordant absurdity remains well intact in The Lobster. The film is a perverse nesting doll of dictatorships, with one system of control giving way to another as the rules of romance become iron-clad laws, complete with brutal punishments for transgressors: singles are given 45 days at a quasi-resort/prison to find a suitable mate, or else be turned into an animal of their own choosing. The desperate mating game that results—imagine a version of The Bachelor that involves hunting people for sport and ends with the rejects being turned into dogs—centres on the importance of finding common traits between couples, whether constant nosebleeds or icy, emotionless cruelty. David (played with a hilariously stunned deadpan by Colin Farrell) ultimately rebels against this system, escaping into a secret society of loners that adheres to an equally grotesque set of strictures. Bleak humour verges on outright horror as viewers discover that there is no sane world beyond these perversely mirrored systems of control (in Dogtooth, one could at least take comfort in the knowledge that reality was on the other side of the fence). Lifestyle choices become oppressive whenever rendered on such a large scale, and Lanthimos pushes the concept to bizarre, terrifying extremes.


Experimenter

Stanley Milgram’s famed obedience experiment is much abused and easily distorted. Heard second-hand, the set-up—a subject is told by an authority figure to deliver a series of increasingly painful shocks to an unseen victim—suggests a sadistic vision designed to confirms our worst beliefs about human nature. But Milgram was at heart an optimist, and Michael Almereyda’s Experimenter strikes a suitably bright tone in its deft, playful tribute to the man’s life and ideas. Arch artifice defines the film, with Milgram (Peter Sarsgaard, in a comically fake beard) frequently addressing the camera as meta-jokes pass by in the background. There’s even a literal elephant in the room—an eye-rollingly obvious gag that tickles Almereyda so much he does it twice. Clunkers like that aside, the film is typically sharp-witted and engaging, particularly as it moves past the obedience experiment and into Milgram’s later career, when the doctor was encouraging students to engage in goofy social experiments more suited to Candid Camera than a New York classroom. The film smartly contrasts Milgram’s twin experimental modes, the sinister and the benign—suburban housewives convinced they had electrocuted a stranger or students fooling pedestrians into staring up at nothing—and suggests both stem from the same idealistic belief that the invisible social cues shaping our lives could at least be exposed, although perhaps not eradicated.


Jafar Panahi’s Taxi 

Three films into a ban on filmmaking, Jafar Panahi is putting the lie to the Iranian state’s ability to silence its critics with his remarkably prolific post-imprisonment output. Jafar Panahi's Taxi, his latest effort, proves to be a witty and outward-looking follow-up to the often-frustrating solipsism of Closed Curtain. Forbidden from using a camera, Panahi uses a mix of dash-cam and cellphone footage as he plays the part of taxi driver, offering acerbic commentary on matters of gender inequality and the challenges of making art under authoritarian rule with staged episodes, such as a sequence where an injured man makes a video will urging his family not to kick his wife out of their home should he die. No less cutting is Panahi’s debate with his young niece, who in the midst of seeking filmmaking advice lectures her multi-award-winning director uncle on the rules of what can be shown in Iranian cinema (the pieties of the censor rendered ridiculous when coming from the mouth of a child). “Sordid realism” is the great enemy of the theocrats, but in scene after scene, the director constantly asserts reality’s refusal to be censored. He does not so much break free from his shackles as prove their ultimate irrelevance.