Vancouver International Film Festival 2015: Part Three

 Arabian Nights, Volume Three (The Enchanted One) 

Mischevious genii abound, while choirs of children and birds serenade us. Who knew the line between European art-cinema and Disney blockbuster would prove so thin? Certainly, the third volume of Arabian Nights is the most hopeful of the trilogy, ending on a simple gesture of kindness and even tacking on a consider-the-children parting shot. But this may also be the most challenging of the three films, if only for the fact that Miguel Gomes has given over the bulk of the running time to a documentary on the world of competitive songbird training. After four-plus hours of far-flung satiric fancies, it can be a bit hard to take your reality straight, you know? The men who handle the birds cut a stark contrast between brute strength and delicacy, and the director seems drawn by the sight of burly workers and ex-criminals caring their finches with an almost child-like gentleness. Much like Scheherazade, who begins this volume in a state of self-doubt and despair, the trainers function as storytellers of a sort, fighting to preserve the bird songs and revive nearly extinct melodies by playing recordings for the finches to mimic. Their redemption—like hers, and Gomes’, for that matter—is gained through a dedication to their art.

My Internship in Canada 

Crowd-pleasing Canuck comedies are rightly viewed with suspicion—the stench of Score and Men With Brooms still lingers, years later—but My Internship in Canada has largely succeeded where so many others have failed in embodying a distinctly domestic mainstream cinema. Philippe Falardeau’s buoyant political comedy is slick without being soulless, and it wields its Cancon with aplomb. Propelled by a jaunty, memorable score, the film follows a washed-up hockey idol turned independent MP from backwater Quebec who, through a series of complicated and highly implausible events, winds up holding the balance of power in a hung parliament contemplating war. The film’s greatest joke may be the very notion that a Canadian political crisis could be this dramatic, but there’s also ample comedic grist in the juxtaposition of hyper-local riding realpolitik and weighty international affairs. Consider it a PG version of Armando Iannucci’s In The Loop, with lower stakes and less swearing—and that may well be the film’s largest flaw. Falardeau is clearly having fun with the material, but he’s also wary of cutting too deeply or directly. Even his parody of Stephen Harper, almost always shown playing music in what can only be seen as a desperate humanizing gesture, is surprisingly mild. Who wants a political comedy that strives to be nice?

Sleeping Giant 

Andrew Cividino’s Sleeping Giant is an unsentimental study of thwarted maturity set against the shimmering green hell of Ontario cottage country. Three teens—Riley, Nate, and Adam—bond and bicker over the course of a summer until finally turning on each other. Cividino possesses an ear for the squawky rhythms of teenage speech, and the bantering between the trio is often as cringe-inducingly familiar as it is funny (I can offer no guarantee against traumatizing flashbacks to one’s own better-forgotten pubescent years). Rather than opt for a more obvious bullying narrative, the director allows the complex web of relationships to reveal how easy cruelty comes at age 15, when people are only just discovering the fraught ramifications of love and friendship and every emotion is projected through a megaphone. Where the film gains added bite is in its portrayal of the adult men in the summer village. Nate and Riley have no father figure on hand—they’re staying with their grandmother—while Adam’s father is a case study in mid-life sexual frustration. The only other man of any note is a drug dealer haggling with the teenagers over weed prices as he boasts of past glories and goads on the boys to monumentally dangerous stupidity. Sure, teenagers are a bunch of amoral self-destructing hormonal timebombs. More disturbing is the fact that so many adults are as well. 

Love And… 

There’s a lot of meta-cinematic sludge to wade through before one reaches the modest core of Zhang Lu’s Love And…. We begin with a love story between an elderly man and a cleaning woman in a mental hospital is revealed to be a film in mid-production, with the gaffer in full revolt against the director. These two slender contrary threads play out again and again in a series of variations that set image against sound in ways that are sometimes ingenious and sometimes tedious, but certainly surprising. One section drains the hospital of all human presence and sets loose a series of portentous symbols to roam the halls. Another draws on clips from Memories of Murder to suggest a police thriller starring the disgruntled gaffer. In the final chapter, an alternate version of the audio from the first section plays over footage of the empty hospital. Defined by a sense of perpetual absence, the film’s four segments seem to haunt each other, and Zhang approaches the question of filming love by outlining the empty spaces where genuine feeling might reside. Full marks to the director for his ambitious attempt at a Borgesian rom-com, but this unfortunately never really rises above the level of an academic exercise. In its exacting coldness, the film inadvertently proves its thesis.

The Forbidden Room 

Exhausting and exhilarating, The Forbidden Room is an exercise in arch-camp chaos, blending together pastiches of forgotten film genres into a singular narrative striptease courtesy of Guy Maddin and co-conspirator Evan Johnson. Stories nest within stories, which give way to further digressions and even the dreams of a moustache and one “valcano [sic].” The viewer becomes lost in a nightmarish labyrinth littered with mad doctors, amnesiacs, squid thieves, vampire bananas, and Udo Kier. This is a film that has not one, but three framing narratives: a lumberjack trying to rescue a maiden from a band of rogues, a group of sailors trapped in a submarine slowly running out of oxygen, and a tutorial on bathing starring national treasure Louis Negin. Delayed gratification is the film’s ruling order, and the viewer’s patience is rewarded with a book of climaxes stuffed with endings for stories not even in the film. Many of Maddin’s favourite themes are in evidence—narcissistic and ineffectual male heroes, dead fathers that won’t die—but Johnson brings fresh textures and eerie morphing techniques that add new layers to the director’s familiar style. If the jittery montage of recent Maddin films evokes repressed memories bursting to the surface, the constantly mutating surface of this film suggests a living, writhing beast—with, one assumes, multiple personality disorder.

Vancouver International Film Festival 2012: Part Five

My Father and the Man in Black 

Any film that touches on Johnny Cash’s pills-and-booze days can’t be that bad, right? And sure enough, Jonathan Holiff’s documentary peaks behind the curtains at a singer on the verge of self-destruction. However, the real subject is the filmmaker’s father, Saul, who shepherded Cash through the peak of his career from 1960 to 1973. Following decades of battling a few demons of his own, Saul committed suicide in 2005, leaving his son with a shed full of Cash memorabilia and a lifetime of unanswered questions. The portrait of a distant, cruel father is buttressed with striking archival finds, such as Saul’s audio diaries and recordings of his phone conversations with Cash, but Jonathan’s need to push the film towards some sort of cathartic revelation can only end in disappointment. The big reveal is that his father was as self-doubting and tortured as the rest of us, a mundane epiphany by any standard. “A Boy Named Sue” offers just as barbed a portrait of father-son relationships in less than four minutes.

Tabu

Much like the F.W. Murnau masterpiece of the same title, Miguel Gomes’ Tabu is a tale of paradises lost and found. Divided between present-day Portugal and Africa during the burgeoning uprisings of the 1950s, the film focuses on a woman named Aurora. In the present, she’s a doddering old lady, lonely and paranoid as she loses her life savings to a gambling addiction. In the past, she’s the radiant young wife of a successful colonial landowner in Africa, willing to throw it all away for a passionate love affair with a musician. Dreamy and sensual, this dialogue-free section is narrated by Aurora’s long-lost former lover, who sorrowfully recounts the passions that would destroy the pair. But beneath the doomed affair lies the threatening shadow of colonialist oppression, personal shame merging with public crime in a phantasmic vision of self-recrimination and horror. Sublime.

The Last Time I Saw Macao 

During the question-and-answer session following The Last Time I Saw Macao, an audience member spoke what was on most of our minds and invoked the name of Chris Marker. High praise, to be sure, but it doesn’t quite capture the peculiarity of this B-movie documentary, to borrow a phrase from co-director Joao Pedro Rodrigues. In this distinctive hybrid film, Rodrigues’ directing partner Joao Rui Guerra da Mata is returning to the city of his past after decades of separation, eager to rediscover the city that has dwelled in his mind for so long. Yet what the pair finds is a world of glory and decay, lonely side streets and desolate buildings. Over top the images the filmmakers impose a lurid sci-fi radio play featuring a missing transvestite, a criminal kingpin named Madame Lobo, a handful of stray allusions to Josef Von Sternberg’s Macao, and a glowing birdcage that turns people into beasts. Fascinating as much for its low-budget formal ingenuity as its twisty narrative, the film plays with memory and fantasy in its efforts to recapture a city lost to time. What else can it finally do but blow it up? The city is gone. The city never was.

The Metamorphosis 

The VIFF program guide name checks Guy Maddin for The Metamorphosis, and it’s hard to argue the point. Like the Canadian master, this South Korean short (directed by Yun Kinam) trades in silent film aesthetics, amped up to borderline camp—and it even has an absent father figure, as per Maddin, although daddy in this case is thrown out of the house for turning into a vampire and attacking his daughter/mime/whatever. Is it a tortured vision of domestic abuse and dysfunction, or a semi-coherent parade of hyper-stylized tropes stolen from the graveyard of film history? Well, it’s fun while it lasts, whatever the hell it is. Sadly, for all the dramatic posturing—Hans Zimmer’s score for The Dark Knight Rises sounds like the Beach Boys next to this film—the ending fizzles, with the film clumsily rushing headlong towards its conclusion.

Emperor Visits the Hell 

Several chapters from the 16th century Chinese epic Journey to the West are reworked for modern times in Li Luo’s Emperor Visits the Hell, with mixed results. In a mere 67 minutes, Li unpacks a varied tale involving a pool-hall hustler who loses his head to a dream, forgery in the book of life, stray ghosts, and the emperor’s titular trip to deal with the ramifications of it all. Yet as fantastic as this all sounds, Li sticks to a deadpan realism. Hell is a room as bland as any other, while the gateway to the underworld is, amusingly enough, a non-descript bus stop. The mundane grounds the mythical, allowing the director to emphasize the satirical undertones of the story—it turns out even the emperor must learn to kowtow sometimes—rather than getting hung up on supernatural visions. Unfortunately, the narrative is stitched together with little picture-book interludes and climaxes with the lead actor drunkenly ranting at the wrap party, lending a haphazard air to what is otherwise a powerful concept.

Keyhole

In 1986, Guy Maddin began his career with a little film called The Dead Father, chronicling a family vexed by the reappearance of their deceased patriarch. Twenty-six years later in Keyhole, he gets around to telling the corpse’s side of the story. A sort of reverse ghost story, the film follows gangster Ulysses Pick (the name is derived from the original absentee parent and, I don’t know, a lock pick) as he holes up in his family home, lugging around a stuffed wolverine, a blind mind reader, and his bound-and-gag son. His goal is to reach his wife, Hyacinth, locked up in her bedroom, where she lounges with her mute lover and her naked father. Meanwhile, one of the Kids in the Hall rapes a ghost, the police have the place surrounded, and Ulysses’ gang is cobbling together a bicycle-powered electric chair in between orgies. As a pseudo-pornographic gangster movie set in a haunted house, the film is perhaps a tad overstuffed.

But as far as Maddin’s ongoing cinematic therapy goes, Keyhole is an important step forward for the director, even if the end results are sometimes jumbled and confused. His world has always been one of failed fathers, all of them missing, dead or simply disinterested in the families they have abandoned. For once, we see the fractured family from the father’s perspective, and the results are unsurprisingly ambiguous (lock the doors, daddy’s coming home). Perhaps that is due to the unfamiliarity of this terrain for Maddin, but it’s also a side effect of Jason Patric’s fascinatingly incongruous performance as Ulysses. Whereas Maddin’s stock company provides the usual mannered performances, Patric offers a terse naturalism unique to the director’s filmography. Charismatic and doomed, Ulysses seems to exist on a different plane from the rest of this world. Charging through the house, he stumbles onto a new memory in each room, clutching at ghosts as he sinks deeper into the past. After a while, it’s impossible to tell who’s haunting who.

The Artist

Armed with the score from Vertigo and the dog from The Thin Man, The Artist prods its audience with a thousand different pilfered pleasures. It’s a charm offensive wielding a crowbar—not necessarily to pry a smile out of you, but rather to open coffins while out on its grave-robbing expedition. Example: Is the gag about the extra that plays Napoleon and thinks he’s actually Napoleon a muddled reference to Josef Von Sternberg’s The Last Command? And does it even matter when the bit is so weak anyway? Writer-director Michael Hazanavicius is on his strongest footing when he relies on the real chemistry between his stars, Jean Dujardin and Berenice Bejo (an impromptu dancing duel, a series of botched takes). But there isn’t enough vaseline in the world to make me buy into the film’s half-remembered nostalgia, which reduces film history into some sort of mawkish twaddle about how the medium moves forward by paying fealty to its forebears—an idea repudiated by The Artist’s very own unimaginative appropriations and distorted notions of silent film. Just compare this to the work of Guy Maddin, a movie obsessive who has internalized the grammar of the silents and learned to speak it fluently. Hazanavicius, on the other hand, memorizes a few phrases and tries to bluff his way through a conversation.

EIFF: Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

A princess who hides her ugliness behind a veil leans over a pond and catches a glimpse of herself in the water, but beautiful now, the beauty she feels is her right but has been denied her. A catfish surfaces and begins to speak, praising her loveliness, and she enters into the water, dropping her jewels as an offering as she asks to be made as beautiful as her reflection. Finally, she floats in the centre of the pond, and the catfish begins to, um, pleasure her.

This rather odd folktale/digression/past life(?) is dropped into the middle of Apitchatpong Weersethakul’s beguiling, baffling, and altogether astounding Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. More a drifting dream than narrative film, this curiosity from Thailand nonetheless tells the story of Boonmee, an aging farmer whose kidneys are failing him. As the end of his life draws near, he is joined by the ghost of his dead wife and his long-missing son, who appears in the form of a monkey spirit with eyes that glow piercing red in the dark.

Don’t ask me what any of this means on a literal level, or how it relates to the story of the princess, but let me assure you no other film this year has offered me as much pure delight per square inch of celluloid. The key is to not allow the idiosyncrasies of the storytelling distract from the fundamental, and rather simple, theme. Much like how Weersethakul’s earlier Tropical Malady was a deeply strange yet completely clear love story, exalting romantic surrender in the most mystical terms, this film hinges on the idea that any death is also a birth, and then allows us to take that notion in any number of directions.

For instance, in various interviews Weersethakul has spoken of the film as an ode to the dying medium of film. Certainly, you can see a reverence for cinematic history in such disparate reference points as Thai costume drama (the sumptuously shot story of the princess and the catfish) and Chris Marker’s La Jetee (Boonmee’s dream of the future, told in a series of still photos). The darkened cavern Boonmee and co. enter at night is both a womb and movie theatre, the shadows on the wall and primitive cave paintings pointing to the beginnings of all visual arts. It’s the origins of man and the origins of cinema—and the primal place where Boonmee goes to die.

You can take a lot of different ideas from this, which is perhaps the point. Weersethakul carefully avoids overexplaining his films in interviews, and his reasons are obvious. He’s after a sense of wonder above all else, and wonder cannot exist without at least some level of mystery. If you completely understood the significance of the red-eyed monkey spirits, if you knew that they were meant to symbolize such-and-such thing, would you feel that mixture of dread and awe at their appearance? Would you feel anything at all?

Perhaps this sounds like a cop-out, but we’re so used to our cinematic pleasures being parceled out through a neatly organized delivery system that we lack the language to properly praise a film that provides such unfiltered delight. If anything, the real problem is whether or not we would be so accepting of this mystical weirdness from a western director. The last thing exoticism should be is an excuse to engage with art we would deny if it were domestic.

But I can think of no director quite as guileless as Weersethakul, whose work is so open and gentle, even as it looks unblinkingly at the darkness of the world (the violence of his homeland is never denied, with Boonmee even wondering if his illness is karma for the communists he killed in his youth as a soldier). There’s no sense of calculation here—in fact, the story might make more sense if there was. It’s also worth noting that Weersethakul’s father died of a kidney affliction similar to Boonmee’s, suggesting that part of the film’s strangeness comes from how it pulls on private experiences and distorts them for cinematic effect. Like North American eccentrics such as Guy Maddin and David Lynch, Weersethakul’s unique sensibility comes from the way his films derive from his own memories and dreams. He’s probably as much a curiosity to his countrymen as he is to us.

None of which is any help for the hapless viewer approaching this remarkable work. We cannot see this film through Weersethakul’s eyes, only our own. But to my eyes, this is a beautiful film by any measure, open with possibilities for anyone willing to enter its mysteries. This is perhaps what the director intends with the multiple worlds we see at the end of the film. In one alternative, three characters sit in a hotel room, transfixed by the dull glow of the television set, frozen into complete passivity. In the other, two of these people leave the room and head to a karaoke bar, where they may or not sing, but regardless, they are free and moving through the world. I cannot tell you which alternative the director intends as reality. But I can tell you which one is more fun.

Brief Reviews

The Lost Weekend: Billy Wilder’s famed Oscar-baiting depiction of an alcoholic writer is not as bad as you would think, but certainly not as good as you would hope. Essentially a horror movie in which the monster is a tumbler glass (any random household object becomes deeply terrifying when accompanied by a sufficiently intimidating theremin score), Wilder stumbles through the film shackled—uncharacteristically—by good taste. Still, the dialogue occasionally has a bit of kick to it, and I was amused by the modest yet unsettling surrealism of the protagonist’s DT hallucinations: a stream of blood trickling down the wall as a bat devours a mouse (cue hysterical shrieking). It’s really one of the few moments in which the film’s intimations of melodramatic social horror story come through. But the earnest, socially responsible speechifying of the ending doesn’t ring true coming from a snide misanthrope like Wilder, and besides that, who watches a Billy Wilder film because they want to learn how to empathize with the plight of their fellow man?

Ashes of Time Redux: Director Wong Kar Wai returns to his 1994 martial arts film of the same name (minus the “Redux,” of course) and comes up with a confounding but beautiful film about the agony of memory. An aura of melancholy surrounds this story of a swordsman who helps strangers solve their problems while hiding from his own, but there’s also something pleasingly perverse about a martial arts movie filmed primarily in close-up, and the confusing early section—with its talky scenes jumbled together in a fragmented chronology—only heightens this sense of disorientation. The tourists expecting wirework and visceral fight sequences will quickly be frightened away. Those who stay will be treated to some truly rapturous image-making and an elusive, but curiously engrossing, narrative tightly packed into a rather dense hour and a half.

Hancock: A soulless, high-concept cash grab in denial over its true nature, which means that we can at least admire its lack of cynicism. Still, this movie’s clumsy mishandling of its story—is it quirky action-comedy or pseudo-tragic fantasy-romance melded with blow-shit-up effects?—could easily be mistaken for innovation or cleverness when it’s actually neither. A dull movie grafted onto the body of a stupid one, and the host dies.

La Antena: An Argentine sci-fi dystopia done in a silent-film style, albeit with many, shall we say, evolutionary add-ons, the most notable of which is how the film uses words on screen as physical objects, in one case even as bullets. Esteban Sapir, the director, constructs some indelible images, but Esteban Sapir, the writer, trips him up with a bland, almost dutiful allegory about corporate media and dissent. It’s tempting to compare this film to the work of Guy Maddin, the going master of revived silent film aesthetics, but Maddin’s films are energized by his personal obsessions and humour. Sapir, on the other hand, wallows in a self-seriousness that seems oblivious to the playful and absurd visuals that abound. Listen here, Sapir: if Maddin can revel in the campy elements of his style and still be taken seriously as an artist, then you can at least pretend you’re having fun. A film best appreciated as a series of stills.

Wooden Crosses: Raymond Bernard is a largely neglected French director, but on the strength of this WWI drama from 1932, I would say he’s ripe for a revival. The film takes place almost entirely on the battlefields and in the trenches, save for a few tantalizingly brief flashbacks to the home front, creating the feeling that all of reality is a bombed-out dirt field filled with dead trees and the security of home is nothing more than a blissful, unobtainable dream. The film seems chiefly interested in evoking trench warfare, which means there isn’t really a narrative here so much as a series of incidents in which soldiers are forced to confront their own mortality. Even though the characters might seem overly familiar at first (cynical veterans, naïve recruits, all that jazz), the film defies expectations. By the time you get to the wounded corporal ranting deliriously with his dying breath against his wife’s infidelity, you start to realize you’ve entered into far stranger, more disturbing territory than your average war film. In this film, death is a lonely hell in which you call out to the living but are no longer heard because you are no longer one of them. It’s anti-war in the sense that it wants us to understand how truly terrible it is to wish such a fate upon anyone. As far as war films go, it’s an effective approach.