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.

Drug War

Facing a death sentence, a criminal leader bargains for his life by helping the police infiltrate the underworld. Will he betray them? Do you even have to ask? Drug War’s premise may sound as generic as its title, but Johnnie To’s film is stranger than any of the familiar genre tropes it draws upon. Like a coke-addled tribute to M, the film lays bare the intertwining structures of the police and criminal worlds, and then shoots everyone in the head for good measure. What began as a terse procedural ends with such grisly violence that any distinction between cop and crook has been blasted apart in the crossfire. Fortunately, To has more on his mind than doodling in the blood spatter, although his intentions only begin to become clear late in the film with a surprise reference to Erich von Stroheim’s Greed, of all things (it turns out chaining your main character to a corpse is a metaphor made for any occasion). By the time we reach the climactic schoolyard shootout, the clinical detachment of the early scenes has long since melted into festering disgust, leading into a conclusion that is as inevitable as it brutal. Drug lord and prison guard both peddle their wares, and the war begins and ends with a needle: the junkie’s syringe or the state’s lethal injection. Pick your poison.

Vancouver International Film Festival 2011: Part Five

Dreileben 

Easily one of the highlights of the festival, this mammoth omnibus out of Germany combines three 90-minute features, each one exploring the escape of a convicted killer from different angles. The first part, Christian Petzold’s Beats Being Dead, focuses on the hospital orderly whose carelessness allows the killer to escape. The murderer is barely a presence in this part of the trilogy—he’s less a tangible villain and more a phantom, haunting the orderly’s intense relationship with a troubled hotel maid. It’s a marvelously compact film, as powerful as anything else Petzold has done, and it captures young love with a potent mixture of sensuality and violence. The two lovers regularly traverse the forest where the killer supposedly hides, and that walk becomes laced with a dread and uncertainty that stands in for all the terrors and traps of their doomed relationship.

Dominik Graf’s Don’t Follow Me Around is comparatively lighter on its feet, and may well be the highlight of the trio for me (it’s a toss-up between this and Petzold’s offering). While the first and third films maintain an icy style built around control and stillness, Graf’s contribution is loose and lively, a quick sketch drawn on 16mm. Our focal point this time around is Johanna, a police psychologist brought in from outside of town to help the investigation. Fascinatingly, Graf smuggles several different genre stories into the mix, including the manhunt and even some business about police corruption. But these all occur in the margins, similar to the police sirens that periodically roar through Petzold’s earlier film before disappearing into the forest. Graf’s real interest is the relationship between Johanna and her old friend, Vera. The pair discovers that they once dated the same man, years before they ever met, and the implications of that one coincidence play out in increasingly surprising ways in the lives of both women. The film turns out to have been a mystery all along, just not the one we were expecting.

The final part, One Minute of Darkness by Christoph Hochhausler, is a comparative let-down after the strength of the first two films, but that may be simply because the director takes on the greatest challenge of all three films. While Petzold and Graf benefit from having easily identifiable protagonists, Hochhausler splits his film between two equally inscrutable, reserved characters: Frank Molesch, the escaped killer, and Marcus Kreil, the police officer hunting him down. Between the man in the woods trying to hide and the cop brooding on how to find him, the film spends much of its time watching men in isolation. It’s a static film, in other words, but not without its own merits. Hochhausler plays on our prejudices against the killer—built up by two films where he was essentially a bogeyman under the bed—and twists around our expectations of who he should be. The film takes on an unreal quality and becomes a fable in which our own contempt for the man turns him into a monster. Hochhausler skews our perspective of everything that came before, provoking the viewer to return to the beginning and delve deeper into this complex and strange world. Any film that can do that after nearly five hours is a success by any measure.

Life Without Principle 

Johnnie To turns Hong Kong’s recent financial turmoil into a high-energy crime farce in Life Without Principle, an often funny film about economic corruption and greed on every level of society. Everything is set in motion by the murder of a loan shark—seemingly the only character not fretting about money in the wake of global financial chaos—with the killing examined through multiple, increasingly amusing angles. The plot is densely woven and rich in character and incident, and To keeps everything moving briskly, pausing only for the occasional oddball detail. The film works as a derisive response to the stock market and all its attendant greed: smart people fail, while fools flourish. But I’m not entirely sold on the ending, which essentially rewards the greed of the sympathetic characters, while ensuring that the expected villains get what they deserve. If the system is truly as random and senseless as the film makes it out to be, surely To’s favoured characters need to suffer as much as the rest? The director backs away from the harsher implications of his story, and the film’s satiric edge dulls noticeably in its final moments.

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

The best parts of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia lie in the first half of the film. A man has confessed to murder, and the police, town prosecutor and a doctor now drive through the countryside in the dead of night, trying to find the body in the featureless grasslands. These scenes border on Beckett-like absurdity, with all the village authority figures forced to wander the desolate night roads while the self-professed killer tries to remember where he hid the body in his drunken rage. The black comedy continues even when they discover the body: while making his official statement, the prosecutor inexplicably describes the victim as looking like Clark Gable, leading to much teasing all around. But the tone twists in the daylight, and while the film remains worthwhile, it also seems to shed some of its more intriguing idiosyncrasies. Ceylan moves away from deadpan existential comedy to a more earnest, at times even sentimental drama about the nature of justice and the truth. It’s still a compelling film, shot and performed with great skill, but be wary of what you wake to find in the harsh morning light.