Vancouver International Film Festival 2012: Part Six

Three Sisters 

An unsentimental look at poverty in rural China, Wang Bing’s immersive documentary Three Sisters spends month following the lives of a peasant family making do in the shadow of the Chinese industrial colossus. Agriculture isn’t much of a way for anyone to make a living in modern times, but especially on the small scale practiced by the family here. So father heads off to the city to find work with his two youngest daughters, while his eldest stays with grandfather and minds the farm (the mother’s whereabouts are less clear, although she’s been out of the picture for a while, it seems). But Wang is less concerned with sculpting a grand narrative arc out of his material than he is with teasing out the daily rhythms of his subjects’ lives. The ordeal of separation and reunion largely exists as a backdrop to the unending grind of chasing sheep and harvesting dung from the pastures. Survival makes its own demands of life, and chores take precedence over drama.

Everybody in our Family 

Unconditional fatherly love can be a very scary thing, as evidenced by the vicious hilarity of Radu Jude’s Everybody in our Family. Early on in the film, divorced dad Marius goes to visit his own father, revealing a strained collegiality that dissolves into a torrent of accusations and abuse. Yet moments after nearly coming to blows, the pair is back to normal—such as it is—with Marius’s father even telling his son to drive safe. The scene’s horrifying (and horrifyingly funny) emotional pivots can only hint at the carnage to come. As Marius finds his efforts to spend time with his daughter rebuffed by his ex-wife’s boyfriend and mother, the man’s desperation escalates so naturally you likely won’t blink once he starts tying up people and dodging cops. Gifted with a stellar troupe of performers, Jude uses the cramped confines of a single apartment and a nimble handheld camera to emphasize the humanity of people doing inhumane things. Emotional Grand Guignol on an intimate scale, the film lays bare the extremes of love and hate that can be contained within the family unit. Like the best black comedies, the laughter sticks in the throat.

Something in the Air 

Considering how much Something in the Air draws on the radical youth of writer/director Olivier Assayas in the 1970s, it’s impressive how much the film avoids the seductive glow of nostalgia. In fact, this double-edged ode to France’s post-1968 generation is many things: brisk coming-of-age drama, political thriller, even love story (most notably between Assayas and cinema itself). Alternately giddy and mournful, the film surveys the chaos of the French left following the failed dream of the 1968 rebellion. Young feminists argue with old chauvinist radicals while Maoists cling to their delusions like European communists at the height of the Stalinist purges. Heady times, and Gilles, the director’s stand-in, wanders amid the ruins, painting and fucking his way to Italy and back in a search for purpose. Assayas shows his younger self trapped between the warring factions of politics and art, and the film’s achievement is bridging the gap. All false mistresses abandoned and all failed masters betrayed, Gilles embraces the cinema in the film’s final rapturous moments under the benediction of the Situationists (the corpse of Guy Debord appreciates the work, I’m sure). By simply succumbing to his best self, Assayas discovers his own private revolution at last.

The Compass is Carried by the Dead Man 

After the screening, writer/director Arturo Pons described his debut feature, The Compass is Carried by the Dead Man, as an “existentialist emigration” tale. It’s an apt summary of this gently absurdist fable about a boy named Chencho determined on riding a wagon all the way from Mexico to meet his brother in Chicago (God is his copilot, a corpse his navigator). Along the way, he picks up a misfit crew of others set adrift by the violence and poverty that has wracked rural Mexico: a soldier who accidentally kills his commander, professional wailing women who have run out of men to mourn, a one-eyed boy with a three-legged dog. Occasionally, the film lapses into overloaded symbolism and cutesy characterizations—the Sisyphean push-cart man who gathers rocks he has stumbled over is probably the worst of this tendency—but this isn’t so much bargain-basement surrealism as it is a documentary of everyday eccentricities. Pons sketches the splintered communities of his Mexico with affection and sorrow, while also striving for a transcendental release that seems beyond him as a filmmaker. He’s far more profound when being profane. Funnier, too.

Lore 

War is hell, but so is growing up, which is perhaps why so many filmmakers love to depict war’s brutalities through the eyes of a child. Cate Shortland’s Lore offers a neat inversion of this old formula, her shell-shocked brood not ordinary innocents but doe-eyed Hitler youths. The children, led by eldest sister Lore, make their way through the devastated ruins of Germany in the dying days of World War Two after their Nazi parents are arrested. Who can resist that hook? I’m as eager as anyone to see how the children shake off their master-race programming, but the initial tension and dread dissipates into bland simplifications and overwrought visuals (Shortland never met a sun-dappled meadow she didn’t like). Final message: strict dining etiquette is equivalent to Nazism. Miss Manners is surely unamused.

Carlos

In Carlos, Olivier Assayas paints the terrorist as rockstar, a high-rolling celebrity, self-assured and charismatic. Considering we’re talking about Carlos the Jackal here, there’s probably something to this, even if the ensuing collision of sex and violence sometimes crosses into the absurd. Case in point: the scene where Carlos tells his girlfriend that guns are an extension of his body, and then proceeds to elaborate upon his argument by fingering her as she licks a grenade. Not that the rockstar life is all kinky, explosive sex. On his first mission, Carlos’ gun jams after only one clumsy shot (don’t worry, baby, we can just cuddle this time).

But that aside, Assayas has actually made a remarkably engrossing epic here—remarkable because this two-and-a-half-hour film is actually an abridgement of a miniseries that runs over twice as long. Perhaps that accounts for the rather breathless pacing as over twenty years is compressed together, but there’s still an inevitable sense that we’re sometimes missing something important. Gaps in Carlos’ life are often signaled by a slow fade to the black, one of which produces not only a wife and two children, but also a mistress. That’s one fruitful ellipsis.

“Behind every bullet we fire, there is an idea,” Carlos explains early in the film, and the phrase becomes an epitaph for his terrorist career. He begins as a communist supporter of the Palestinian cause, but as he goes deeper into the web of international violence, he begins lending his particular talents to whichever criminal state is willing to play ball. He lusts after fame, hungers for power, even as he argues his every action is for the cause. Fittingly, his years of hiding end when a French agent discovers him leaving a hospital after a liposuction operation—the man’s own vanity betrays him. There may be an idea behind every bullet, but that idea remains stationary. And all the while, the bullet just keeps moving farther and farther away from the power that first gave it motion. Violence always moves past any feeble notions of principle.

Summer Hours

Summer Hours is a museum piece, in the strictest sense of the term. Commissioned by the Musee d’Orsay in Paris, this gentle family drama by Olivier Assayas could easily hang somewhere on the walls of that institution. Now, there’s no great sin in hanging in a museum—certainly not one like the Orsay, where some of the greatest masterworks of the 19th century would keep you company—but Assayas seems saddened at how art once so vital can be mummified by its own beauty. One can only wonder at how the Orsay responded to this film, which suggests the worth of each piece has little to do with the institution, and more to do with the private histories and personal meanings that can never be contained within a museum.

The story Summer Hours tells is one of clarity and elegant simplicity, marked by subdued emotions and the soft light that suffuses its pastoral scenery. Three grown siblings—Adrienne, Frederic, and Jeremie—reunite to dispense with the estate of their deceased mother, who for years has shepherded the reputation of their renowned painter-uncle. The family home is itself something of a museum, cluttered with great art (a rare and valuable vase holds some flowers picked from the garden, while a broken Degas plaster is found in a plastic bag at the bottom of a cabinet). While Frederic, the eldest sibling, wants to keep the family home and choice pieces from the art collection, the younger two—both living abroad—prefer to be rid of it all.

Regrets are swallowed, arguments abbreviated. The situation is obviously rife with opportunities for showboating dramatics, but the film prefers quieter moments. There’s no more emblematic question in this film that the tender inquiry, “Are you crying?” Usually, this is asked of someone stewing in his or her own melancholy, staring sadly into space (gazing at some irretrievable vision of a paradise lost to the void of time or something similarly poetic and doomed, I suppose). The answer is typically “No”—the person in question just needs a moment to mull the innumerable sorrows and compromises of life before carrying on dutifully with the business of living.

These are fragile emotions and the film handles them with care, as if they could shatter at any moment. The three siblings' interactions are a believable mixture of tenderness spiked with the occasional irritation. Even a shocking revelation about their mother’s personal life is played in muted tones. The reaction is more one of numbed incomprehension than anger. The moment passes so quietly that only in hindsight do you realize how many other films would have played that scene to the hilt, letting the revelation become the point of the story, rather than tossing it away as an offhanded tangent.

That restraint should not be underestimated. Family dramas too often opt for shouty melodrama not because it adds grit and realism, but instead a kind of morbid escapism. Almost every family I know is built upon the things left unspoken, all those frustrations and private grievances that are never said not just because they could destroy the family, but also because you love these people, as much as they piss you off and even hurt you. There’s a pressure valve of familial rage in almost everyone. Watching a family where the members are able to crank it wide open and let all that emotion gush is immensely cathartic, albeit in the same gratuitous, messy sense that one could say pornography is cathartic.

What is there to this drama then, if not catharsis? How about memory—or more specifically, how it’s created and how it’s nurtured? At the end, the eldest sibling and his wife walk through the Musee d’Orsay, where pieces from his mother’s house now reside. Notably, a desk from her study is prominently displayed in the decorative arts section (that’s the point at the end of the tour where the visitors all roll their eyes at the displays of artful bric-a-brac and wearily inspect the old chairs with feigned interest). It’s discomfiting to consider how the desk once sat in that house, covered in papers and books, a vase filled with fresh flowers on one corner. Once that purpose and meaning has been drained away, only the empty vessel remains—the past so incredibly close, yet now beyond all touch.