Vancouver International Film Festival 2013: Part Seven

The Gardener 

Faith and filmmaking lie at the heart of The Gardener, an idiosyncratic essay film by the father/son duo of Mohsen and Maysam Makhmalbaf. Beginning as a simple introduction to the particulars of the Baha’i faith, the film turns into a wide-ranging exploration of modern religion, alternating between Socratic dialogue and familial bickering (Mohsen’s embrace of spirituality seems driven partly by a desire to annoy his proudly agnostic son). Admittedly, the film treads on some familiar theological grounds, with both men falling back on banal stock arguments at times, but what compels is how the spiritual debate doubles as a cinematic one. Mohsen pushes his contemplative, exploratory style, while Maysam stumps for a more direct, mainstream approach—he even teases his father by suggesting they hire George Clooney or Brad Pitt if they want a bigger audience. A concluding maze of mirrors and roses allows Mohsen to fold questions of religion and filmmaking into a single stream of stunning images. Everything comes down to perception: what matters the creed as long as it leads to beauty? 

Manuscripts Don’t Burn 

Manuscripts Don’t Burn lays bare the workings of the secret police in Iran, where writers and intellectuals hide their thoughts in cupboards and wash their phones for fear of bugs. Years after a failed state assassination attempt, these men now try to preserve a written record of the crime, despite police efforts to intimidate them into silence. Director Mohammad Rasoulof’s depiction of this paranoid place is unflinching and controlled, but it doesn’t mask the anger that drives the film (his crew is largely anonymous to avoid reprisals). Most chillingly, the film shows police and rebels equally ensnared in the same oppressive system. The ground-level agents—those often conscripted to do the dirty work—are no freer than the people they terrorize. Rather than privileged elites, the state thugs are lower-middle-class grunts punching the clock and struggling to pay the bills like anyone else. Khosrow, one of the central characters, may dutifully torture helpless academics for a living, but he’s really just trying to support his ailing son. This is a society bound by guilt and fed on disparity, and Rasoulof lays bare its brute machinations. A brief dream sequence makes the point even clearer—the only thing that trickles down in this bankrupt moral economy is blood.

Blind Detective

Johnnie To is in full-blown comedic mode in Blind Detective, which is something of a mixed blessing. Yes, the film is funny. Yes, the set pieces are big and wacky and weird—one even involves several people re-enacting a murder by wearing helmets and braining each other with hammers. But do we really need two-plus hours of slap-happy thriller-farce about a blind detective cracking cold cases? Even To’s relentless pacing can’t hide the fact that this film feels padded, with an episodic structure that makes it seem as if we’re watching the first three episodes of a weird new CBS procedural smashed together. To be fair, there are connections between the various tangents, which often deal with women devoted blindly to men (who typically prove to be unwilling or unlikely objects of affection). But this is just part of the film’s more-is-more strategy—why have one variation on the theme when you can have three? Why use any restraint at all? It’s not a running gag until it has collapsed from exhaustion apparently. Fittingly, the film makes a joke of Johnston, the sightless super-sleuth, constantly gorging himself with food in the middle of each caper. Audience members will feel a comparable gluttony as they try to digest this overstuffed comic confection.

You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet 

Death has never seemed so benign as it does in the hands of Alain Resnais in You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet, an autumnal masterwork of exceptional grace and wit. Following the death of a playwright, the man’s friends and colleagues gather at his mansion to fulfill his final wish. The group is filled with actors (and Resnais regulars) who have all performed in their friend’s adaptation of the Eurydice myth, and now must watch a young troupe interpret the same play. There’s a beguiling simplicity to the conceit, and it’s ripe material for Resnais, who has been mining these themes of memory and performance for decades now. As the actors watch their young counterparts, the play steadily breaks down the barrier between past and present. The elder actors begin mouthing the lines of their juniors, Eurydice overlapping Eurydice, Orpheus echoing Orpheus. (Three actresses play Eurydice in the film, but you could just as easily say Eurydice plays three actresses.) The performance overwrites reality itself, as the mansion becomes a train station, a hotel, a café. In the director’s capable hands, the concept is less an intellectual game and more a serene response to the shocks and sorrows of time and mortality. All the world’s a stage, indeed. So who will play us when we’re gone?

Vic + Flo Saw a Bear 

If Vic + Flo Saw a Bear is any indication, Denis Cote must have had some awful camping experiences as a child. The director’s vision of rural Quebec is consistently sinister, and his forests offer death in the place of fecundity. His latest wilderness excursion involves Vic, a 61-year-old lesbian on parole and holed up at her catatonic uncle’s sugar shack with her girlfriend, Flo. Each equally and uniquely damaged, the pair struggle to create a kind of domestic bliss, but they’re menaced by the enigmatic Jackie—a cutthroat terror from Flo’s past with a knack for gardening and existential paradoxes (“Awful people like me aren’t supposed to exist,” she admits at one point). Indeed, in this film, few people outside of the titular duo, save perhaps for Vic’s stern yet forgiving parole officer, seem to even exist at all. People materialize out of the forest like phantoms before vanishing once again. These are not normal human interactions, but rather hauntings, and Cote’s outsider protagonists struggle—and fail—to bridge the gulf that lies between them and the rest of the world. Or perhaps, perversely, they finally achieve a kind of communion with their surroundings in the end, and at last find their place in life. Opinions may vary. Also, the moral of the story: phosphorous is good for the roots.

Vancouver International Film Festival 2012: Part Three

The Minister 

The Minister makes good use of a rock-solid Olivier Gourmet in the titular role of Bertrand Saint-Jean, a French transport minister who steps into the midst of an ideological firefight after he speaks against privatizing the country’s train stations. Basically, his government supports him until it doesn’t—which happens once everyone realizes that the market calls the shots and there’s not much a few measly politicians can do anyway. Powered by brisk, compelling storytelling, Pierre Scholler’s film strips away the illusions of state power, revealing a hollowed-out institution beholden to the whims of the private sector. However, this political cynicism is matched only by the cynicism of the film’s biggest lapse—a series of stylized dreams designed to emphasize the minister’s increasing sense of isolation and helplessness. Were the filmmakers worried audiences wouldn’t be interested in a bunch of suits talking policy? Did they just want something snazzy to put in the trailer? Apparently we are not yet trusted to take our medicine without a dollop of sugar.

Somebody Up There Likes Me 

The best comedies are the the saddest ones. Case in point: Somebody Up There Likes Me, a beautifully absurd take on mortality and maturity by writer/director Bob Byington. The aptly named Max Youngman exists in a state of arrested development, emotionally uncommitted and disinterested in his own life—a condition made literal when he gazes into a glowing blue briefcase and ceases to age. Skipping forward every five years, the film takes us through a succession of failed marriages and relationships, all the detritus and drama of a lifetime reduced to droll snippets of deadpan whimsy. Max’s unchanging appearance seems more psychological than physical; it goes uncommented on by his friends, while the ravages of time take root behind his unwrinkled façade. He doesn’t age so much as the world ages around him.

Berberian Sound Studio 

Peter Strickland has set up quite a challenge for himself in Berberian Sound Studio. How do you make a horror film without horror? Turns out it’s all about the noise—the crunch of bones breaking, the sizzle of flesh burning—and so the film makes full use of the hallucinatory power of sound. Strickland teases the audience with descriptions of an unseen Italian horror movie, filled with tortured witches, perverted goblins, and red-hot pokers in all the wrong places. Instead, we’re left to follow the misadventures of English sound engineer Gilderoy (a wonderfully befuddled Toby Jones) as he works on the film. As the man chops up vegetables to recreate the sounds of the Italian movie’s blood-soaked visions, he begins to succumb to his own guilt over the imaginary violence he is perpetrating—a shot of the rotting food felled by his knife evokes a mass grave, in one particularly amusing example. Unevenly paced, but odd enough to remain engrossing, the film works as a fond tribute to Foley artists, with one caveat—no good can come of being too consumed by your own work.

The Flat 

Let’s just get this out of the way—the score for The Flat is astoundingly, distractingly terrible. It’s like music from a 1960s sitcom, jaunty and tacky and obnoxious, belabouring each emotion and idea on screen. Which is a shame, because Arnon Goldfinger’s documentary is otherwise a nuanced exploration of the ongoing struggle to reconcile with the history of the Holocaust. After discovering Nazi propaganda in his deceased grandmother’s flat in Tel Aviv, Goldfinger unravels a winding tale that finds his grandparents befriending Baron von Mildenstein, a Zionist SS officer whose role in the Nazi regime’s crimes is clouded and contradictory. Remarkably, the baron’s daughter is still alive, and even more remarkably, Goldfinger’s grandparents remained in touch with their German friends after the Holocaust. The film charts the inevitable effect of history on two separate but intertwined family trees: the first generation acts, the second forgets, while the third painfully, haltingly struggles to remember before everything is lost.

Bestiaire 

A visual treat and formal puzzle, Bestiaire is among director Denis Cote’s most accomplished and provocative works yet. The film covers a year at Parc Safari in Quebec, depicting the animals and their human handlers on equal terms, both framed by the fences that hold them captive. But Cote’s interests extend from these sociological observations to more playful musings on voyeurism, as evidenced by the film’s two basic recurring shot types. One features an animal lurking on the bottom margin of the frame, while the rest is overtaken by negative space—an idiosyncratic choice quite unlike how most others would film animals, and one that produces some glorious, even witty, images (Cote won me over with the ostrich). The other shot faces the animals head-on, allowing them to stare straight into the camera for an uncomfortably long time. As the viewer is increasingly confronted with the sense of their own role as spectator, the temptation to sneak a glimpse at one’s fellow theatergoers becomes hard to resist. Sure enough, they met the animals’ gaze with their own blank stare.

Carcasses

As mesmerizing as it is infuriating, Quebec writer/director Denis Cote’s Carcasses resides somewhere in those hinterlands of filmmaking where fact and fiction transform into a single brain-melting beast. The first half of Cote’s film is a documentary, of sorts, focused on Jean-Paul Colmor, a real-life scrap collector whose isolated acreage is home to the sleeping wrecks of 4,000 cars. Cote constructs delicate tableaux of this lonely junkyard world, while Colmor busies himself with salvaging what he can from the old vehicles. But halfway through the film, a vagabond group of four people with Down’s syndrome take up residence in the detritus, scavenging food from Colmor and quietly settling atop his routine like a blanket of snow.

Largely silent, the second half of the film takes on the air of a compressed fable as the outsiders find refuge amidst the discards of Colmor’s home. Cote’s daring is laudable, even though his extreme choices threaten to throw this precarious film out of balance (one might also question the wisdom of comparing people with Down’s syndrome to car wrecks, although I don’t believe any malice is intended). Perhaps I’m simply dismayed by the way the film essentially drops a curtain right down the middle, rather than letting the documentary and fantasy blend together more naturally. But the film poses difficult questions of discarded lives, and even though much of what we would consider a plot is hidden or suppressed, the proceedings are marked by a quiet playfulness that I found endearing. He may stumble at times, but nobody doesn’t tell a story quite the way Cote doesn’t tell a story.

Vancouver International Film Festival 2010: Part One

Cold Fish
The film begins with pounding drums and staccato credits announcing that what we’re about to witness is based on a true story (aren’t they all though?). Perhaps it really is based on fact, but I think the strangest true story can’t begin to compare to the delirious imagination of Sion Sono. While Cold Fish finds him working in a relatively restrained mode after the four-hour epic Love Exposure, I doubt there will be a more grandiose orgy of depravity on screens this year. Charting the moral decline of meek tropical fish seller Shamoto, the film follows its hapless hero as he is taken under the wing of an aggressive alpha-male type named Murata, who goes on to sleep with Shamoto’s wife, steal the man’s daughter, and then force him to become an accomplice in a series of brutal serial killings.

Not being one to flinch from such details as how to dismember a corpse, Sono provides plenty of blood—consider this a film noir crossed with a family drama, all painted sloppy red and dressed up in that meat gown Lady Gaga wore that one time. Sono has a real talent as a button pusher, and he knows how to scramble an audience’s instincts with his schizophrenic shifts in tone. Mundane moments of family interaction are laced with so much shuddering dread you’ll feel nauseated, while grotesque sequences are pushed towards comedy (when Shamoto punches out his daughter whilst raping his wife, the laughter produced by the inappropriate slapstick is enough to send you out of the theatre and straight into the shower moaning, “Unclean, unclean”). Sono dances upon a pile of corpses, all to the tune of “life is pain” (as one character observes, quite reasonably given the circumstances). Profound it ain’t, but you can’t really turn away once you enter this moral freakshow.


Curling
Oh, speaking of piles of corpses…this subdued, enigmatic Quebec film from Denis Cote has got ‘em too. But Cote is working in an entirely different vein than Sono. Julyvonne, a twelve-year-old girl, discovers a mound of frozen bodies in a field near her home in a quiet Quebec village, but after her initial horror, she becomes accustomed to the pile, even making snow angels in the midst of it one day. This might seem like a curious reaction, but Julyvonne has been almost completely shut off from the world by her neurotically protective and emotionally damaged father. Her general sense of how reality works is naturally a bit shaky.

In a Q&A after the film, Cote spoke of the forest as a place out of a fairytale, a place where anything is possible. Perhaps it is this playful tone that makes the film stand apart so successfully. Filmmakers who like to withhold narrative explanations for the sake of effect are fairly common on the festival circuit, but few share Cote’s sense of humour: a scene where father and daughter sit stiffly listening to “I Think We’re Alone Now” is hilarious even as it is kind of heartbreaking. Cote is obviously aware of the danger of taking this sort of loneliness too seriously. Instead, he prefers to follow this pair (superbly played by real-life father and daughter Emmanuel and Philomene Bilodeau) back into the world, with all its attendant dangers and joys.


Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Fields
If there is one aspect of music documentaries I truly, deeply, madly hate, it’s the part where famous people stop by to testify to the genius of whatever lesser-known luminary is in the title of the movie. For this film, we get Sarah Silverman and Neil Gaiman fluttering by to sprinkle a bit of their celebrity pixie dust on Stephin Merritt, the acerbic and occasionally brilliant songwriter responsible for the Magnetic Fields. Because if there’s one thing Silverman and Gaiman know, it’s songwriting.

But to credit of co-directors Kerthy Fix and Gail O’Hara, these cameos are mercifully brief and dispensed with early on as a bit of distasteful necessity. Instead, the film maintains a strong focus on Merritt himself, a somewhat cagey interview subject who often hides behind a sharp wit. The results aren’t always illuminating, but Merritt is too smart and funny to be less than engaging. In fact, he’s downright hilarious in an appearance on a local morning show, where the sleep-deprived singer must perform a morbid children’s song for the chirpy host (“Do you think kids will like it?” the host asks, to which Merritt flatly replies, “They better”). The directors dig up some intriguing angles for the film, particularly by focusing on the intense long-term friendship between Merritt and collaborator Claudia Gonson. Other noteworthy issues—such as details of the band’s own internal workings and the bizarre controversy over Merritt as musical racist—are dutifully explored, punctuated by the expected live and rehearsal footage. Basically, it stays true to the typical form of a music documentary. That’s not always a good thing, but when the subject is worthy of the attention—as he is in this case—it’s hard to go wrong.


Barney’s Version
The great dream of CanCon junkies everywhere—looks like Hollywood, smells like Hollywood, but by god it’s a genuine Canadian movie based on a genuine Canadian book (by Mordecai Richler) set in a genuine Canadian city (Montreal). That faint quivering noise you just heard was the sound of a hundred CBC executives swooning. But if I set aside my knee-jerk snark towards an overhyped domestic behemoth like this, I can at least appreciate the film for what it is: a slick entertainment with a good cast that more or less does right by the source material. Some of the striking literary features of the novel—notably the way Barney’s son annotates and corrects his father’s life story—can’t translate into film, and the filmmakers (director Richard J. Lewis and screenwriter Michael Konyves) sensibly don’t even try to find an equivalent. Given the richness of the plot, they have enough to keep themselves busy.

At its best, the film compresses the novel nicely with some smart little moments, like that great suspicious look Barney gives to an onion he finds in his freezer, unaware that he put it there himself. It’s a funny aside, but it also lightly suggests his growing forgetfulness and the coming revelation of his Alzheimer’s disease. In these moments, the film best captures the tricky funny-sad tone of Richler’s original. But the film also overplays the novel’s sentimentality, and the final revelation is condescendingly drawn-out and over-explained We’re miles away from Cote’s deliberate withholding here. Surrounded by so much oblique and artful filmmaking, a five-tonne giant like Barney’s Version can’t help but feel a little obvious and leaden at times.