Vancouver International Film Festival 2013: Part Five

Anatomy of a Paperclip 

Writer-director Ikeda Akira draws life lessons from droll weirdness in Anatomy of a Paperclip, an ultra-deadpan look at the life of Kogure, a schlubby loner consigned to the drudgery of working in an artisanal paperclip shop (which is not really a thing, but let’s just roll with it). Berated by his boss and bullied by a syphilitic street tough, our hero—shackled by an unexplained neckbrace—sits back and accepts the endless humiliations of existence with inscrutable calm. It’s only after setting free a butterfly trapped in his apartment that he begins to pull himself together, with some encouragement from a mysterious gibberish-spouting woman who invites herself into his life. The film’s humour doesn’t always work—wit this dry easily turns arid, and the film’s longueurs can drive one to contemplate just how slight this story actually is—but Ikeda’s fantastic tale gets by on screwy charm alone. Like any good fable, Anatomy of a Paperclip offers a wealth of fine moral advice, ranging from the virtue of selfless kindness to the wisdom of avoiding sketchy street vendors.

Rhymes for Young Ghouls 

First-time director Jeff Barnaby tackles the abuses of residential schools in Rhymes for Young Ghouls, but rather than a tactful history lesson he offers a blood-soaked crime saga. And why shouldn’t he? These scars are still fresh, even if the film takes place over 30 years in the past. Indeed, Barnaby is often at his best exploring the fraught relations between the generations, such as that between teenage artist–drug dealer Ayla and her fresh-out-of-prison father. But the film never fully dispels the lingering staleness of its many borrowed genre tropes, nor the blandness of the second-hand characterizations that populate much of the cast. It sounds strange to complain that the film’s representative of colonial oppression is too one-dimensional, but the Indian Agent Popper is stock villainy incarnate, lacking everything but a moustache to twirl and a cat to stroke as he plots his next cruel act. He’s a snarling manifestation of all that is vile in Canada’s treatment of aboriginals, embodying a host of ills and injustices, which are then easily dispatched with a bullet to the head. For all the film’s promise, it never quite realizes a way to reconcile social critique with Tarantinoesque revenge fantasy.

A Touch of Sin 

Wuxia by way of the arthouse, A Touch of Sin is Jia Zhangke’s L’argent—a work of unrestrained anger from a supremely restrained filmmaker. It’s not quite on the same level as Bresson’s masterpiece, but Jia nonetheless injects a newfound sense of urgency to his critiques of the pitiless modernization of China. Over the course of four segments, he looks at men and women pushed into violence by injustice and economic disparity. One man rails against the corrupt village chief; another survives as an itinerant gunsel. A woman is mistaken for a prostitute and lashes out to defend herself, while a young man moves from job to job as any hope for the future shrinks from view with every vanishing dollar. These little parables of despair and violence speak to the loneliness of a rapidly industrializing society and the impotent rage of the weak against the strong. Fittingly for such a consciously theatrical venture, the film ends with an audience watching a travelling show, with the performers singing of sin while the masses watch impassively. It’s a moment of self-reflection for Jia, who aligns his own work with a larger artistic tradition—a rare moment of continuity in a violent, changing world.

Redemption 

Redemption—Miguel Gomes’ short, sort-of companion to last year’s Tabu—imagines a series of melancholy inner monologues for some of the chief actors in recent European history. The soundtrack suggests we’re in for a sober reflection of the costs of power upon those who wield it; the visuals suggest something more puckish. As the actors narrate the semi-fictious personal lives of four different politicians, Gomes illustrates the speeches with seemingly irrelevant—or at the very least irreverent—stock footage. People leap from buildings and African dancers spin, offering a mocking counterpoint to the bittersweet musings of the leaders. Yet the faded images also fit with the overriding nostalgia of the monologues. Nicolas Sarkozy, for example, laments missing his daughter’s childhood, before shifting gears to contemplate the loss of his own youth. It turns out even neoliberal bagmen can cry. Decide for yourself whether they deserve pity or scorn.

The King’s Body 

Quiz time! Who was the first king of Portugal? Give yourself a pat on the back if you guessed Dom Afonso Henriques, a Galician who proclaimed himself Afonso the First. And if you guessed incorrectly, fear not, because you’re no more uninformed than the 24 Galician bodybuilders interviewed in The King’s Body. João Pedro Rodrigues quizzes the group about the king, asks about their tattoos and scar, and has them strip down to their skivvies while posing in front of a green screen. The film recreates the dead king through the body politic, but what makes the film compelling are the interviews. With a bit of gentle prodding from Rodrigues, the group speaks about the ways life has marked their bodies, and in the process many reveal a yearning for the mythological not far removed from the legendary sovereign. (One man even reveals that he has tattooed his own name on his arm in Elvish.) Considering the self-serious nature of many of these men—everyone seems really intent on appearing as badass as possible when posing with a broadsword, for instance—it would be easy for the film to lapse into derision. But Rodrigues finds something touching in these genial muscleheads. They share with the king a yearning for grandeur and myth-making, and their strength will fade as surely as his legend.

Mahjong 

Last year, João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata teamed up to make The Last Time I Saw Macao, a unique blend of documentary, memoir and science fiction. They return to that same reality-bending format in Mahjong, but with diminishing returns. The noir-inflected plot concerns a vanished mystery woman and two agents of a shadowy organization stalking each other through Chinatown at night. The narrative is shaky at best, and it strains to hold together even a modest half-hour film. Outside of a few key images—fluttering toy hummingbirds, a warehouse of mannequins, shoes littering a pile of rubble—the film seems casting about for purpose. The directors challenge xenophobia in general and anti-Sino sentiment in particular, with one character even asking, “Why are the Chinese always the villains?” Sadly, the film runs out of steam before finding an answer.

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.

Vancouver International Film Festival 2012: Part One

Reconversao 

With Los Angeles Plays Itself, Thom Andersen established his mastery of the cinematic essay. With Reconversao, his study of the works of Portuguese architect Eduardo Souto de Moura, he moves into the realm of the cinematic epigram. Blending Andersen’s own pithy observations with interviews and texts from Souto de Moura, the film offers a fascinating running commentary while portraying the architect’s work through stop-motion photography. It’s a curious stylistic choice, but one that ultimately does justice to the work: trees turn into amorphous masses of green and car lights burst into exploding stars, leaving the unmoving buildings at the centre of the convulsive world. Souto de Moura muses on the divide between building and nature, dismissing the false romanticism of ruins while embracing decay in his own work. He makes for a superb documentary subject—obsessive, observant, acutely aware of the subtle influences of architecture on the human mind, and not above the occasional dab of pungent humour. In short, a Portuguese Thom Andersen.

A Story for the Modlins 

Sergio Oksman’s short A Story for the Modlins leads with its best trick: the film begins with the credits to Rosemary’s Baby. Confused, spectators craned their necks at the projection booth, wondering if someone mixed up reels. Then the film begins to fast-forward, and we are transferred from Roman Polanski’s horror to one of an entirely different stripe—a horror of thwarted ambition and family cruelty, Polanski’s devlish family replaced with Oksman’s pious oddballs. Built around the life of Elmer Modlin, a nameless extra in Rosemary’s Baby, the film uses a striking mixture of photographs and grainy videos to show the delusional artistic ambitions of Elmer and Margaret, his painter wife. Their only son is driven away by their increasingly hermetic lives, leaving the couple to spend their days bringing Margaret’s deranged spiritual visions to life. Often funny, the film’s strength becomes a weakness when Oksman makes a sudden turn towards pathos at the end. It’s hard to feel too much pity for a family you’ve just spent twenty minutes laughing at.

Morning of Saint Anthony’s Day 

Is this the coyest zombie movie ever? A horde of young Lisbonites descend upon the early-morning city, lurching forward so haltingly that one wonders if they are undead or merely really hung over. Some are covered in blood, while others drop to the ground and heave their guts out. Largely silent, the film’s characters are essentially faceless, but one youth stands out for the small red flower he carries—part of a tradition carried out by couples on Saint Anthony’s Day. Everything feels like a lark, an art-film goof on zombie tropes, right up until the final scene when director Joao Pedro Rodrigues at last tips his hand with a single dramatic gesture and a few lines from Fernando Pessoa. The film revels in loneliness as an apocalyptic condition—a notion rendered simultaneously lovely and absurd under the director’s discerning eye.

The Capsule 

Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Attenburg was a lo-fi cinematic gem, a scruffy deadpan riff on sexual confusion as nature documentary. Who could have expected her follow-up would be to run many of the same ideas through a surrealist dream machine, with late-period Jan Svankmajer serving as one of her stylistic templates? (Seriously, a show of hands, please.) A mere 35 minutes in length, The Capsule is a dense, dazzling tour through the sexual politics of a group of seven women living in an isolated manor. Describing narrative is largely irrelevant when dealing with a film where characters are birthed by domestic furnishings (one emerges from a cluster of chairs, while another rises out of a mattress). The film’s power is only momentarily dispelled by some questionably tacky animation, which is at odds with Tsangari’s more physical imagery. More often, however, Tsangari calls upon high style and high fashion to give flight to her opulent fantasies, and the result is a sensuous nightmare of domination and control. And top prize for the best goats at VIFF this year—a surprisingly competitive category—goes to the film’s well-coiffed herd of fashion-conscious ruminants.