Vancouver International Film Festival 2013: Part Four

A Place to Take Away

Somewhere from 500 to 600 tourists visit Brazil’s impoverished favelas each day, according to A Place to Take Away. It’s hard not to feel uncomfortable about this fact, but Felippe Schultz Mussel’s documentary is a measured examination of slum tourism and its effects. Favela residents often staff the tour companies, which some argue are bringing business to cash-strapped neighbourhoods. Or is this just, to borrow the old Situationist line, “a cheap holiday in other people’s misery”? Mussel mostly holds back from editorializing, save for one misguided sequence where tourist photos overlay the favela until the city is all but invisible beneath the beaming smiles of pasty vacationers. Fortunately, such lapses are rare, because the film is much more compelling when it allows its subjects to speak their minds. Near the end of the film, one of the tour guides enthuses about creating a museum to memorialize local crime scenes, complete with bullet holes in the walls. Community renewal is all well and good, but too much improvement and you could start to lose business.

Closed Curtain

Iranian director Jafar Panahi continues his struggle to make films with another film about his struggle to make films. Closed Curtain finds the director turning inward, as he begins to survey the damage a 20-year sentence to house arrest has wrought upon his psyche. The story concerns a writer hiding out in an empty house with his beloved dog, who must remain hidden due to Iran’s injunctions against the “impure” animals. All the man wants to do is write in peace, but he’s disturbed by the intrusion of a potentially suicidal woman on the run for unknown reasons. At first, the film seems to be building into a fine chamber piece, with two people struggling to form some sort of common bond under the weight of political repression. But the film takes an unfortunate—if inevitable, given the circumstances—meta-fictional turn near the middle and never looks back. Man and woman become angel and demon whispering into the director’s ear, one urging him to continue his work while the other contemplates darkness and defeat. I can’t deny Panahi his right to self-pity, but it limits his artistry even beyond the physical constraints placed upon it by the regime. He may not be able to leave the house, but surely he can still open the window a little?

The Dirties

Every school shooting seems to prompt some tongue-clucking censor to decry the pernicious influence of violent videogames and movies on malleable young minds. The Dirties, Matt Johnson’s disturbing and hilarious first feature, takes that idea and stands it on its head. Students Owen and Matt (played by Johnson himself as a hyper-verbal teenage Tarantino) are making a film about bullying, and the two movie-mad geeks have turned the project into a ridiculous mishmash of references, including homages to testosterone-addled touchstones like Scarface and Pulp Fiction. Rabbit holes abound: the film about bullying is a reflection of the real-life bullying faced by Matt and Owen, while Johnson’s handheld camera style suggests a documentary about two teens making a movie. There are films within films within films, and as Matt grows more unstable and Owen more distant, fact and fiction become harder to separate. Johnson’s well-observed comedy of teenage life transforms into a brilliantly cutting examination of what it means to see the world through the eyes of a burgeoning killer.

Distant

Distant is built entirely around a lone formal conceit: each scene is a single shot filmed from some far away vantage point. Over the course of 13 shots, director Yang Zhengfan muses upon distance, both physical and emotional, with varying success. The strongest scenes are those that manage to hint at larger narratives, such as a wedding party slowly fragmenting in the park. Others verge upon the bleak deadpan of a Roy Andersson tableau, most notably when an old man collapses by the side of the freeway. (A person comes running from off-screen, offering a brief hope of rescue that is dashed once we realize they’re just jogging by.) But much of the time, the scenes feel thin and underdeveloped, as if the ingenuity of the conceit were enough to carry them. Sadly, it’s not. The greatest distance is the one between film and viewer, and Yang never quite manages to bridge the gap.

La última película 

Both love letter and eulogy, La última película is a bittersweet farewell to celluloid, combining visions of annihilation with self-effacing wit. Riffing on Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie, the film follows the exploits of a brash American director and his bemused local guide in Mexico. He’s come to the country to film the Mayan apocalypse, and in the process make the last movie to be set to film. No such luck, though. In this endearingly chaotic film, a nice simple apocalypse would come as something of a relief. Directors Mark Peranson and Raya Martin draw upon at least nine different formats, ranging from iPhone to 16 millimetre. The film celebrates the future of the medium as it mourns the end of an era, and its mash-up of styles offers a vivid snapshot of cinema in transition from analog to digital. Years from now, this film may well seem like a lost artifact, nothing but a curio of a lost time and a strangely doom-obsessed people. So what? The Last Movie is already 40 years old, and we know how well that apocalypse turned out. Every time is the end times.

Vancouver International Film Festival 2010: Part Two

A Somewhat Gentle Man
The latest example of a loosely defined genre that could be termed Scandinavian deadpan—those films where lots of pasty, sad-looking people stand around chatting endlessly in uninflected tones about ridiculous things. A fair example: Ulrik, just released from prison, meets up with two former criminal associates who begin arguing over whether or not he was supposed to be released from prison today or tomorrow. Gentle absurdity rules the day, and the film plays a game of thwarted desires. Women repeatedly throw themselves at Ulrik when all he wants to do is sit down and eat. His criminal buddies want him to kill the man who ratted him out when all he wants to do is to live a quiet, good life as a mechanic. The film is certainly funny, even if the humour starts to taste a bit sour after a while (much of it is based on the basic ugliness or stupidity of the characters). However, a touch of violence is required for the crime story to play out, and this is where the film shows its weakness. Once that dark cloud appears, the film loses its bearings—it can’t quite find a believable way to resolve the drama and maintain the comedy.


Poetry
When Mija, the grandmother protagonist of Lee Chang-dong’s excellent Poetry, is told that her Alzheimer’s disease will cause her to first forget nouns, and then verbs, she sighs fretfully, telling the doctor that the nouns are the most important words. But for Mija, verbs are what give her the most difficulty. She struggles throughout the film with finding the correct course of action in response to her slowly collapsing world. Mija (a complex and powerful performance by Yoon Jeong-hee, who came out of a 16-year retirement for the role) is a woman faced with some difficult moral questions. She ekes out a modest living with a part-time maid job for an elderly stroke victim, who takes Viagra and wants her to make him feel like a man again, much to Mija’s disgust. Meanwhile, her grandson is accused of raping a classmate recently driven to suicide. In the faint hope of avoiding a scandal, Mija must pay off the mother of the dead girl. At the same time, she seeks relief in the form of a poetry writing class.

What might seem overbearingly trite—a journey of self-discovery through the art of poetry—is instead something subtler. The actions Mija settles upon are perhaps not the wisest or even most moral choices, but they are the only ones she has left in her vocabulary by the end. And the film’s final sequence serves as an eloquent demonstration of the necessities of art. Only by learning to speak for someone else does Mija at last find her own voice.


Winter Vacation
Li Hongqi’s Winter Vacation might be one of the weirdest and most unexpected pleasures of the entire festival for me. There were a fair number of walkouts when I attended, but if you’re on this film’s wavelength you’ll be aching with laughter. This is a comedy of nothingness—pauses and blank stares, empty lots and dead space. The film is essentially a series of vaguely related vignettes focusing on a group of bored kids on their winter vacation. Every actor is directed for maximum stiffness, heightening the absurdity of each awkward conversation. In this strangely lifeless industrial village, children say they want to grow up to be orphans and father keeps forgetting to take his medicine. Everyone sleepwalks through a slow-motion farce on the tedium of wasted lives.

The only reference point I can think of for this idiosyncratic sense of humour is Sweden’s Roy Andersson, who specializes in a more apocalyptic variant. So to give a sense of the film’s peculiar charms, it’s probably easiest just to describe a typical gag: a woman goes to a cabbage seller and begins peeling off the wilted outer leaves before handing the vegetable to the vendor, who then weighs it, taking his time fiddling with the measures and just generally drawing out the process to absurd lengths. They haggle on the price, settling on $2.10, but when the woman opens her purse she says that she doesn’t have the $0.10. Exasperated, the vendor agrees to sell the cabbage for $2.00, and as the woman leaves, she grabs up all the leaves she had peeled off. “It would just go to waste otherwise,” she explains, scurrying away. That’s a long walk for a short gag, but so what? A good stroll improves the constitution, I say.


Chantrapas
After Nicholas, a young Georgian filmmaker, finds his work banned at home, he heads abroad to France for a bit of free expression, only to discover a new set of barriers comparable to what he left behind. Director Otar Iosseliani has a lot of interesting points to make here about art under oppression and the plight of the expatriate filmmaker, but he also has an irritating tendency towards cuteness, including the rather questionable addition of a mermaid. I suppose this is some sort of symbol for Nicholas being swept away by his artistic indulgences, but it could just as easily be Iosseliani who is being dragged under by own whimsy. Still, there’s a lot of admirable wisdom in this film, and it possesses a hazy, meandering sort of beauty at times, despite its unevenness. In his final, best joke, Iosseliani also suggests that even if you are free to say what you want, there is no guarantee that anyone will listen—or that what you are saying is even worth listening to. A pity Iosseliani didn’t apply this self-questioning instinct to improving the film itself.


Rubber
Sadly, this film about a sentient rubber tire that explodes people’s heads with its telepathic abilities is not the cult oddity you would hope. Mind you, it’s still an oddity, but more of a high-concept, self-aware meta-film than campy horror. A stirring manifesto kicks things off as a character looks into the camera and delivers an impassioned defense of the “no reason” aspect of art, the senseless whims that can be found in every film (“Why is E.T. brown? No reason!”). An audience is transported into the middle of a desert to watch the film through binoculars. Characters in the film attempt to poison the spectators in the hopes that they can finish the film early if no one is watching. And yes, a tire rolls around, following a beautiful young woman like a horror-movie stalker, and blowing up random animals and the occasional human head. It’s funnier than you would expect, and mastermind Quentin Dupieux has a passion for the aesthetic possibilities of man-made objects that makes for a weirdly pretty ode to the inanimate. Dupieux reserves his most loving gaze for the tire, while the humans are treated more like props. Still, precocious high-concept trash only goes so far, and by the end I found myself yearning for a bit of low-concept reality after all this empty cleverness.

You, the Living

Life is hell. It’s hard and ugly and too long when you’re young and too short when you’re old. It’s random and cruel and ridiculous. And people? God, don’t get me started on people. They’re beastly and vicious and selfish and ugly when they’re naked in the bathroom mirror. They make strange noises like grunts and farts and screams and “I don’t love you anymore” and “Don’t you think those pants are ugly?” They kill you. They cause traffic jams. When you get the best seat in the movie theatre they come and sit right in front of you, even if there are plenty of other empty seats. And then their cell phone rings during the best part of the movie and they sit there and chit-chat in Ukrainian about who-the-fuck-knows-what. Yes, life is hell.

What else can we do but cling to the little mercies? A stray kind word, a tasty piece of pie, kittens—whatever it takes to relieve the darkness and make it through another day on your lonely death-march to the sweet release of the grave.

You, the Living figures somewhere in this grim portrait as a bastion of hope and relief, even as it serves as a catalogue of squalor and despair. This latest bleak comedy from Sweden’s Roy Andersson is dark, jubilant, and strange, and considering Andersson is not a prolific director by any measure—four feature films since 1970, with this one taking three years to complete—that means a new film from him is that much more of a rare occasion to be savoured.

You can see the years of craft and care that went into this film. Andersson is not a typical narrative filmmaker, and like Songs from the Second Floor—the black comedy of pre-millennial madness that was his last film—You, the Living is essentially a series of intersecting vignettes, each one usually told with a single intricate shot. The film feels almost like a series of living paintings—each scene is a richly detailed and meticulously composed tableau filled with layers of action and sly background jokes. Careful viewing is rewarded. For example, in one scene, a psychiatrist addresses the camera, explaining how weary he has grown of his patients: “They are quite simply mean.” In the background in the doctor’s waiting room, Andersson contrasts this speech with a man consoling a woman by tenderly putting his arms around her. “These days, I just prescribe pills,” the doctor says.

People unable to see past their own personal sadness populate the film. Almost every character is trapped in a private emotional hell of his or her own creation, and if this makes the film sound oppressively grim, I should make clear that Andersson’s method is to expose this self-pity as ridiculous and comical. He looks to the absurdity of tragedy; his style offers a bemused distance from mundane misery as proof of Charlie Chaplin’s old line about how “life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.” With its static style, bleak subjects, and surreal touches, You, the Living might appear rather forbidding and dense on the surface, but its goal is beautifully simple—Andersson asks us to stop worrying about our own misery and consider each other instead.

One of the funniest vignettes illustrates this point. A man named Benny is caught in traffic and declares to the camera that he had a dream in which he was sent to the electric chair. We then see the dream, beginning with Benny at a dinner party attempting to pull the tablecloth out from under the dishes. Unfortunately, the table is long and overloaded with dishes—the trick ends with him lying on his back having destroyed all the china. The scene changes to a court where Benny consoles his lawyer, who is too busy sobbing to defend him, while a woman laments that the dishes had been in her family for 200 years. He is convicted to death, of course.

As he is strapped in to the electric chair, someone offers him this brilliantly useless advice: “Try to think of something else.” How can you think of anything else as you’re being strapped into the electric chair? There is nothing left to think about but your own death. There is no consolation that remains. From behind a pane of glass in the gallery watching the execution, the woman’s complaint about the 200-year-old dishes is repeated as the recurring chorus of this whole dream.

The sequence is brutal and funny, and it captures the spirit of the film. Why be more concerned with a set of dishes than a man’s life? Throughout the film, people rarely pay attention to others. They are too pre-occupied with selfish concerns and petty complaints to treat each other decently (even the psychiatrist, going to work, finds his patients won’t hold the elevator door for him—he has to take the stairs). People become so obsessed with their own suffering that they forget to even enjoy whatever pleasures life has to offer. In one vignette about a couple having sex, the man simply lies there, complaining about his retirement savings, looking so skinny and pale he might as well already be dead.

Remarkably for a filmmaker who spends so much time focused on humanity at its meanest, Andersson is still filled with sympathy and fascination for his subjects. One of the sweetest scenes in the film comes towards the end, when Anna—who has spent much of the film crying over her unrequited love for a guitarist named Micke—describes a dream in which the pair is married and living in a house on a train. Through their window, we see the world rushing by in a blur while Micke plays his guitar. As they pull into the station, a huge crowd of strangers cheers for their happiness. The whole scene could easily devolve into mockery of the girl’s naiveté, or scorn for her inability to give up on her vain love for Micke, but the beauty of this strange, unrealizable dream fascinates Andersson. He has no interest in deriding the dreamer.

In the end, everyone looks to the sky and sees a fleet of bombers coming in, presumably to put an end to their sad, awful lives, which makes this film a backwards way of illustrating the old carpe diem theme. Instead of showing people who have grabbed at the pleasures of life, Andersson shows people who have neglected to seize the day and whose time has now run out.

Throughout the film, buoyant music is everywhere; as the bombers come in, a bouncy ragtime tune plays. Earlier in the film, we hear a similar song on the soundtrack while a man with a sousaphone plays along in his apartment. His wife screams at him to stop, slamming the door so hard that a picture falls off the wall and into their fish tank. In the apartment below, a man hits the ceiling so hard with a broom handle that the light fixture falls from the ceiling. Everyone seems deaf to the joy of the music itself.

A note on how I saw this film: Impatient with waiting for the film to finally open in North America (it premiered at Cannes in 2007 and has been wandering the festival circuit ever since), I downloaded a copy of the DVD screener using Bittorrent. Who knows if and when You, the Living will make its way to theatres around here? But at least it is out there, lurking on the horizon like one of those bombers at the end of the film, waiting to swoop down and blast us out of our miserable lives.