Vancouver International Film Festival 2015: Part Two

 Arabian Nights, Volume Two (The Desolate One) 

Arguably the strongest film in the trilogy, the second volume of Arabian Nights is a multi-faceted portrait of community told through tales that bounce from pastoral calm to manic absurdity. The quietest episode in The Desolate One depicts the vagabond ways of Simao Without Bowels, an aging outlaw whose contemptuous loner lifestyle turns him into a mascot for the public’s contempt for the government. This is followed by one of the comedic centrepieces of the series, in which a dispute between a landlord and tenant opens up into a ceaseless string of injustices that seemingly implicate an entire town. The chain of troubles grows to encompass a genie, a talking cow (played by two people in costume), a band of masked marauders, a Chinese millionaire with 13 mistresses, and more. In keeping with the wild swings between fantasy and reality established in the first volume, Miguel Gomes moves from the strange comedy of the court to a delicate profile of the residents of a lower-class tenement block, structured around the fluctuating ownership of a dog named Dixie. Shifting between vignettes both funny and tragic, the film depicts the building as a crumbling world that holds even the dead captive until they are evicted. Even the pets, as the eloquent final image suggests, never really leave.

A Matter of Interpretation 

Lee Kwang-kuk is often pigeonholed as one of Hong Sang-soo’s disciples, but it’s hard to imagine the master making a film quite as whimsical and matter-of-factly surreal as A Matter of Interpretation. Hong’s films often play out like a series of alternate realities placed side by side, with minute variations suggesting the seemingly infinite ways people can utterly fuck up their lives. Lee’s second feature eschews that multiverse comedy of manners, but by telling his story of two actors dealing with the aftermath of their breakup through a maze of interconnected dreams, the director creates a haunting sense of unrealized and impossible fates. Still, for all its sense of loss, this is a work of exceptional lightness, where detectives prefer the imaginative play of dream interpretation to dull forensic science and a person locked in the trunk of a car can be transformed into a mass of balloons. Attuned to the struggles of the artistic life, the film evolves from a relationship comedy into something more idiosyncratic and poignant—a celebration of the shared imaginative space that unites people, whether audience and performer or two lovers that have been separated by a mixture of circumstance and choice, huddling around a dream of fire.

The Sky Trembles and the Earth is Afraid and the Two Eyes are Not Brothers 

The title of The Sky Trembles and the Earth is Afraid and the Two Eyes are Not Brothers promises a film far more apocalyptic than the one we get. Still, it suggests something of the disquiet and disorientation that powers this hallucinatory double vision of cultural collision by Ben Rivers. A blast of heavy metal splits the film in two, with the first section following a French film director (Oliver Laxe) working in Morocco. But Laxe soon abandons his shoot and unwittingly stumbles into a Paul Bowles story. Following a beating—in which his tongue is cut out and fed to a dog—the director is dressed in a suit of tin-can lids by four men. His voice reduced to nothing but pained, subhuman sounds, the newly christened King of Tin Cans is forced to dance for the men during a brutal trek through the Moroccan countryside. This section, often shot in claustrophobic close-ups that contrast with the cool distance of the earlier filmmaking scenes, becomes a perverse mirror of the director’s earlier creative endeavours. Whereas Laxe’s film flirted uncomfortably with questions of cultural appropriation and otherness, his transformation into a dancer forces him to become a tool for someone else’s vision and approach this foreign place from a position of submission rather than authority. Beneath the gritty beauty of Rivers’ 16 mm cinematography lurks a classic tale of comeuppance rendered with the frank brutality of a horror film.

The Club 

Having concluded his Pinochet trilogy, Pablo Larrain appears to be casting about for a fresh subject in The Club. What a pity that he’s settled on one of the slowest, fattest fish in the barrel—the Catholic church’s cover-up of pedophilia and other abuses. Inexplicably, he also maintains the grubby video look of No, which was at least justifiable in the context of that film’s mid-1980s setting. Here, it simply cakes an already grey environment in an extra layer of dinge and murk (apparently moral ugliness demands an equivalent visual response). In fairness, there’s certainly some amusement to be found in this story of a group home for excommunicated priests, and Larrain regular Alfredo Castro provides a soulful performance in a role that could have easily collapsed into caricature. Unfortunately, the director seems uncertain in his depiction of the priests, and he succumbs to an easy cynicism that finally renders the film incoherent. He wants to offer a damning reproach to the church’s refusal to acknowledge its hidden crimes, but he also can’t resist meting out some poetic justice. For what purports to be a bleak satire, the film finally strains to comfort rather than disturb.

Vancouver International Film Festival 2012: Part Four

Walker 

The audacity of Tsai Ming-Liang’s Walker lies in its simplicity. Lee Kang-Sheng, Tsai’s favourite actor, dons bright red monk robes and walks down the bustling streets of Hong Kong—but slowly, very slowly. Shots are held for minutes at a time, mirroring the glacial pace of our faux-monk friend, whose every step seems to occur in super slo-mo. At times, this short film resembles a kind of artful “Where’s Waldo?” as Tsai buries the monk deep inside the frame, forcing viewers to scan for that telltale splash of red. Other times he’s front and centre, standing in the middle of a busy street as onlookers gawk and snap photos (the crowd parts around the man, as if repelled by a force field). Either way, every shot is a living tableau, rich in detail and unexpected beauty in a cinematic experience of unparalleled purity.

No 

Style and substance do battle for the heart of modern politics in Pablo Larrain’s No, and the results are about as shocking as an Iranian election. But more than a mordant political satire, Larrain’s retelling of the referendum that brought down Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship is also a brisk, funny piece of high-powered filmmaking. Fortunately, even as he delivers his most mainstream work to date, the director remains his stubbornly eccentric self. The film’s washed-out video aesthetic is just as much a rejoinder to commercial slickness as it is a riff on the dated look of its 1980s setting. The decision to focus on the boldly irreverent advertising campaign against Pinochet yields much humour, while Gael Garcia Bernal’s conflicted adman provides the pathos. His haunted look at the end speaks to the powerful anxieties just beneath the surface of this otherwise jubilant tale. Once he sold freedom—now he sells soap operas.

Mother

First-time director Vorakorn Ruetaivanichkul (or Billy, if you prefer) looks to his own life for inspiration and settles squarely on his mother. No wonder—the woman seems on the verge of self-destructing, with a broken leg and weak kidneys hobbling her body while depression and kleptomania cripple her mind. Billy blends documentary footage of his family with fictional tangents, but the technique is mostly one of expediency (he wasn’t there to film his mother stealing from a grocery store, so he re-creates it with actors instead). Sadly, the jumble of reality and fiction leaves each scene unmoored. A painful sequence where the director captures his mother sobbing helplessly as someone off-camera browbeats the anguished woman over her failings is so isolated from the rest of the film that the powerful emotions stirred up are only muffled. The last thing we see is Billy’s message, “This is what I can do”—an admission of the film’s loving sincerity, as much as its own shortcomings.

Mekong Hotel 

Most films from Apichatpong Weerasethakul feel like overgrown trees deep in the jungle, entangled in the surrounding world and teeming with life. Mekong Hotel, on the other hand, is more like a meagre sapling on a well-groomed lawn. That may be partly due to the film’s unusual origins: based on an old script, it forms the kernel of a larger project currently underway. Everything that you would expect of Apichatpong is here, from the familiar faces in the cast to the flattened mysticism of the story. Scenes of entrail-eating ghosts and thwarted love affairs mix with offhand moments from the film’s own creation, such as the soundtrack being recorded and the director advising his star to wear the tight pants. The director’s fascination with the hazy border between truth and fiction remains, but only in its most rudimentary form. At most, the film holds a passing interest as a sort of sketchbook, offering viewers little more than the unfinished doodles of a keen mind.

In Another Country 

A typical Hong Sang-Soo interrogation of feckless masculinity gets a shot in the arm from a game Isabelle Huppert, providing a welcome dash of culture-clash comedy to In Another Country. That may sound unlikely at first—cultural differences are more often sources of lazy humour—but Hong’s eternal preoccupations ensure the film strays from the ordinary rather quickly. Huppert plays three different French women in South Korea alternately fending off or inviting the advances of the locals in an unending quest for some kind of happiness. The casual tone and goofy bonhomie belies Hong’s meticulous construction, which lays bare the unseen patterns that shape his character’s lives, for good and ill. With its intricate layers of interlaced fictions and dreams, all blurred together with constant repetition, the film could easily be mistaken for a surrealist comedy of manners akin to Luis Bunuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.

Tony Manero

Political horror mergers with black humour in Tony Manero, a startling Chilean film from Pablo Larrain. Raul, a 52-year-old dancer working in a dive bar where the floor is rotten and the disco ball is broken mirror glass glued to a soccer ball, obsesses over John Travolta’s character from Saturday Night Fever. He watches the film over and over, committing each move to memory, memorizing the lines even though he doesn’t know English. And along the way, he casually murders anyone whose death might somehow aid the pursuit of his grandest dream—first prize on a third-rate Chilean afternoon talent show where contestants imitate the likes of Travolta or Chuck Norris. All runners-up receive a lovely poncho for trying. Failure is not an option.

Filmed with a painful intimacy (the camera hovers over Raul’s shoulder like a sour, whispering devil), there’s a shock to the violence that never quite recedes. Raul is terrifyingly numb, a dead-eyed sociopath who would be pathetic and laughable if not for his viciousness. As he dances in his pristinely white suit, the expression on his face contains all the warmth of a corpse—and this is when he’s doing what he loves, keep in mind. Around him, there is talk of curfews, army trucks rumbling through the street, police shooting political dissidents dead by the river. The grand dream of the Pinochet regime plays out like an off-key song on the radio in another room, while Raul abuses and betrays everyone around him in pursuit of his own meager ambitions. There’s no starry-eyed romanticism about escaping the crushing world through the power of pop culture here. Raul’s feeble fantasy offers no respite from reality, but merely another version of Pinochet’s brutality and cruelty, as if everything that touches this foul time and place withers. Under the dictator, all pleasures are debased, all dreams nightmares.