Vancouver International Film Festival 2015: Part Seven

The Lobster 

The dreaded English-language debut has confounded international talents greater than Yorgos Lanthimos, but the Greek director’s mordant absurdity remains well intact in The Lobster. The film is a perverse nesting doll of dictatorships, with one system of control giving way to another as the rules of romance become iron-clad laws, complete with brutal punishments for transgressors: singles are given 45 days at a quasi-resort/prison to find a suitable mate, or else be turned into an animal of their own choosing. The desperate mating game that results—imagine a version of The Bachelor that involves hunting people for sport and ends with the rejects being turned into dogs—centres on the importance of finding common traits between couples, whether constant nosebleeds or icy, emotionless cruelty. David (played with a hilariously stunned deadpan by Colin Farrell) ultimately rebels against this system, escaping into a secret society of loners that adheres to an equally grotesque set of strictures. Bleak humour verges on outright horror as viewers discover that there is no sane world beyond these perversely mirrored systems of control (in Dogtooth, one could at least take comfort in the knowledge that reality was on the other side of the fence). Lifestyle choices become oppressive whenever rendered on such a large scale, and Lanthimos pushes the concept to bizarre, terrifying extremes.

Experimenter

Stanley Milgram’s famed obedience experiment is much abused and easily distorted. Heard second-hand, the set-up—a subject is told by an authority figure to deliver a series of increasingly painful shocks to an unseen victim—suggests a sadistic vision designed to confirms our worst beliefs about human nature. But Milgram was at heart an optimist, and Michael Almereyda’s Experimenter strikes a suitably bright tone in its deft, playful tribute to the man’s life and ideas. Arch artifice defines the film, with Milgram (Peter Sarsgaard, in a comically fake beard) frequently addressing the camera as meta-jokes pass by in the background. There’s even a literal elephant in the room—an eye-rollingly obvious gag that tickles Almereyda so much he does it twice. Clunkers like that aside, the film is typically sharp-witted and engaging, particularly as it moves past the obedience experiment and into Milgram’s later career, when the doctor was encouraging students to engage in goofy social experiments more suited to Candid Camera than a New York classroom. The film smartly contrasts Milgram’s twin experimental modes, the sinister and the benign—suburban housewives convinced they had electrocuted a stranger or students fooling pedestrians into staring up at nothing—and suggests both stem from the same idealistic belief that the invisible social cues shaping our lives could at least be exposed, although perhaps not eradicated.

Jafar Panahi’s Taxi 

Three films into a ban on filmmaking, Jafar Panahi is putting the lie to the Iranian state’s ability to silence its critics with his remarkably prolific post-imprisonment output. Jafar Panahi's Taxi, his latest effort, proves to be a witty and outward-looking follow-up to the often-frustrating solipsism of Closed Curtain. Forbidden from using a camera, Panahi uses a mix of dash-cam and cellphone footage as he plays the part of taxi driver, offering acerbic commentary on matters of gender inequality and the challenges of making art under authoritarian rule with staged episodes, such as a sequence where an injured man makes a video will urging his family not to kick his wife out of their home should he die. No less cutting is Panahi’s debate with his young niece, who in the midst of seeking filmmaking advice lectures her multi-award-winning director uncle on the rules of what can be shown in Iranian cinema (the pieties of the censor rendered ridiculous when coming from the mouth of a child). “Sordid realism” is the great enemy of the theocrats, but in scene after scene, the director constantly asserts reality’s refusal to be censored. He does not so much break free from his shackles as prove their ultimate irrelevance.

Vancouver International Film Festival 2015: Part Six

Lost and Beautiful 

Fate forces a left-turn upon Pietro Marcello’s Lost and Beautiful, and if the results don’t entirely hang together, they nonetheless reveal a director possessed of a uniquely adventurous sensibility. Initially, the film follows Italian shepherd Tommaso as he struggles to preserve a crumbling palace against the indifference of the state and the threats of the mafia. After the shepherd is felled by a heart attack midway through production, the film veers into the story of Pulcinella—a Comedia dell’arte clown depicted here as a kind of immortal sprite—who is given charge of Tomasso’s buffalo calf. As the film blends documentary with folk tale, the curious bond between man and beast provides an outlet for the grief over the shepherd’s passing, and the unlikely duo become tragic figures of their own. The clown yearns to renounce his immortality and live a normal life, while a farmer plans to fatten the calf for slaughter, uninterested in the fact that he is caring for a talking animal. The fantastic is set on a collision course with mundane reality, and there is little doubt as to which one will prevail: Pulcinella becomes a man and the calf becomes meat. Myths, the supernatural beast sadly muses, must above all else be true.

The Pearl Button  

In The Pearl Button, Patricio Guzman uses the ultimate free-floating signifier—water—to explore Chile’s history of violence. Following the 1973 military coup, over 1,000 people were dropped into the ocean after being tortured and murdered as the regime settled scores and silenced opponents. Guzman explores the grisly process in frank detail, even using a dummy to show how the victims were wrapped up and tied to a rail—often the only remaining trace of these people, whose bodies have long since dissolved into the sea. But the film reaches back further to consider the country’s mistreatment of its Aboriginal population, who were once hunted for bounty (one pound was the price for a man’s testicle or a woman’s breast). The titular button, either encrusted in a rusted rail or used to lure a native of Tierra del Fuego to the new world, becomes a stand-in for the false promises foisted upon history’s victims. The violent stories, recounted by long-silenced voices, sit uncomfortably alongside stunning footage of glaciers and rivers, gentle rains and moonlit seas, and the profoundly unsettling effect is that these crimes seemingly become written across all of nature. Even the beauty contains echoes of the horrors.

The Assassin 

The rumours of The Assassin’s beauty have not been exaggerated. Coming seven years after his last feature, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s wuxia debut is a marvel of meticulous care and precision, all reflecting the patient labour of a master filmmaker. The film, swathed in veils and lit by candle, is a glory of texture and colour. But visual splendor is thin compensation for the film’s jarring tonal shifts and frustratingly shapeless narrative. Hou’s approach to storytelling is typically elliptical—and usually to good effect—but his style seems ill suited to a sprawling medieval saga of vengeance and political intrigue. The director’s dream-like flow of languid long takes remains, but now interrupted by periodic fight scenes that often end as inexplicably as they begin. The titular assassin defers delivering the fatal blow several times, out of what is derided by her mistress as mere “human sentiment,” yet sentiment is sorely lacking in this bloodless wuxia, which is so weighted down by its portentous beauty that it can scarcely move at all. The failed attempt to synthesize such disparate styles—Hou’s meditative “slow” cinema and a visceral martial-arts epic—results in a film that seems to toggle between entirely different modes. The sumptuous atmosphere beguiles, but there is little to see behind the veils.

Vancouver International Film Festival 2015: Part Five

Night Without Distance 

Few films at the festival could match the potency of this 23-minute experimental short by Lois Patino. Filmed in Galicia on the Spanish-Portuguese border, Night Without Distance uses a distinctive combination of negative photography and colour treatments to transform the world into a hauntingly strange landscape. Patino’s human subjects are smugglers (portrayed by actors, it should be noted), but he captures them in abbreviated moments, in mid-conversation or simply standing watch. Motionless, they resemble less human beings than trees transplanted from another world. An opening epigraph speaks of “souls in landscapes,” and the abstract beauty of the film does indeed destroy the distinction between human and environment. Nothing captures this leveling effect quite so forcefully as the image of the distant landscape billowing like a sheet in the wind, whose persistent howl defines the soundtrack more than any of the human voices heard. But look closer, and you see that the movement comes from tiny figures seeming to emerge out of the waving grass. In this strange night, the people flow from one country to another like water. Borders, of course, are nothing but imaginary lines on a map, and Patino’s film is a poetic assertion of their permeability.

Topophilia

The uneasy relationship between industry and the environment forms the foundation of Peter Bo Rappmund’s Topophilia, which follows the Trans-Alaska pipeline—and by extension, the oil moving within—across the continent. Notably, the film actually begins in Long Beach, California, where the oil ends its journey. Focused on the monumental machinery of the coastal port, these early moments are almost entirely devoid of any signs of nature, save for the sea: no trees, no grass, no undeveloped space, and just a handful of humans buried beneath coveralls and safety gear. From there, the film leaps thousands of kilometres to a drill site on the Arctic tundra. Using time-lapse photography, Rappmund follows the line south as it cuts through the seasons; humans and animal appear occasionally, but the focus is always on the pipeline, which carves out abstract compositions on the canvas of the northern landscape. The accompanying field recordings meld the sounds of the pipeline—groaning metal, oil humming as it rushes by—with the crackling of leaves shuddering in the wind. Industrialization disfigures everything around it, until all of nature begins to seem like a massive grinding machine. Even the shimmering surface of the sea takes on the appearance of television static.

Tharlo 

It does not bode well for Pema Tseden’s Tharlo that one of the funniest sequences in the film scarcely even involves the titular character, a rural Tibetan shepherd visiting the city to get his first-ever official identification card. The scene comes as he waits in line at a photographer’s studio, nursing an orphaned lamb while a middle-aged farming couple stiffly poses against painted backdrops depicting everything from Tiananmen Square to New York City. Dressed in ill-fitting western garb, the pair try to make themselves a little more at home by borrowing the animal, resulting in an absurd photo of two Tibetan farmers bottlefeeding a lamb against the iconic outline of the Big Apple. The image aptly conveys the sense that we’re watching the old ways slowly eroded under the pressures of modernity, but it also speaks to Tseden’s conservatism, which ultimately turns this gentle comedy of manners into a sour polemic. Stories of farmers seduced by the big city are certainly not novel, although they surely must resonate more in increasingly industrialized Tibet than the western world. Tseden’s film even adopts the familiar stock villain of the money-grubbing woman exploiting the naïve country boy to carry out Tharlo’s corruption. Between the narrative clichés and dour traditionalist view of women, the film fails to interrogate just what might actually deserve to be left to the past.

Vancouver International Film Festival 2015: Part Four

A Flickering Truth

Evidence of the lingering effects of a nation’s massive loss of its own artistic heritage abounds in A Flickering Truth, Pietra Brettkelly’s documentary on efforts to salvage the Afghan film archives from years of abuse and neglect. Hauntingly, a man recalls being ordered by the Taliban to burn reels of film or else face death; he sorrowfully describes the now-lost films “bleeding into the ground,” rendering cultural destruction in terms more fit for a mass killing. Elsewhere, Brettkelly contrasts present-day Afghanistan with the remnants of its once-vibrant film industry. Students dressed in black and covered in head scarves watch old footage of an actress running through a field, her hair flowing freely as the screen bursts with bright colours. Yet as striking as these moments may be, the film often seems overwhelmed with the wealth of material, archival or otherwise, and Brettkelly seems to struggle at times with bringing everything into tight focus. Is the film about efforts to screen long-suppressed films in the rural regions, where the threat of the Taliban still lingers? Is it about how the challenge of restoring the film archives mirrors the nation’s larger struggle to return to normalcy after decades of strife? Or is it a tour through the rich but largely forgotten history of Afghan cinema? There are worse crimes for a documentary than having too much to tell the audience, but one nonetheless yearns for more details that sadly never come.

Right Now, Wrong Then 

An artist of Hong Sang-soo’s caliber might balk at being described as a social scientist, but it’s no diminution of the man’s talents to consider Right Now, Wrong Then as something of a behavioural experiment. Divided into two near-identical scenarios, the film follows the consequences of even minute changes in words or actions in a married filmmaker’s flirtation with a young painter. In the first section, the encounter ends poorly, with the filmmaker showering the woman’s work with phony praise and omitting any mention of his marriage until it comes out awkwardly at a drunken get-together (this being Hong, soju remains the river of life from which all things flow), and a disastrous post-screening Q&A completes his humiliation. Hong tinkers with behaviours in the second half and introduces honesty into the equation: the painting critique is perceptive and sincere, the filmmaker’s revelation of his marriage coupled with a confession of love for the painter. The get-together still ends poorly—the filmmaker drunkenly strips at a party—but the duo part ways with a warmth and friendship far removed from the bad feeling and regret of the first section. The lesson is clear: bare your soul, but perhaps not your ass.

Slackjaw 

Scruffy, endearingly odd, and running just 70 minutes, Slackjaw knows when to quit before its charms are exhausted. Essentially, director Zach Weintraub has welded a low-key buddy comedy to a paranoid anti-corporate dystopia—even the soundtrack evokes John Carpenter at his most sinisterly synthetic. The film’s hero, an aimless 20-something musician named Rob, is torn between loyalty to his absent best friend and an old high school buddy who now works for the blandly menacing EV Corp. Signs supporting or protesting the company’s presence cover seemingly every lawn in the neighbourhood until the town mirrors Rob’s own internal conflict between conformity and rebellion. Meanwhile, strange happenings—mysterious figures covered in white sheets, cryptic symbols scattered about on posters—only add to the creeping sense of alienation that threatens to overtake him. Amusingly, this is made literal by the titular affliction, which renders Rob voiceless and forces him to converse through the robotic voice of a text-to-speech program, as if his flirtation with the machinery of capitalism might deprive him of all humanity. For all its low-stakes drama, this gentle affirmation of friendship over finance serves as a thoughtful consideration of how corporatization corrodes community.

Vancouver International Film Festival 2015: Part Three

 Arabian Nights, Volume Three (The Enchanted One) 

Mischevious genii abound, while choirs of children and birds serenade us. Who knew the line between European art-cinema and Disney blockbuster would prove so thin? Certainly, the third volume of Arabian Nights is the most hopeful of the trilogy, ending on a simple gesture of kindness and even tacking on a consider-the-children parting shot. But this may also be the most challenging of the three films, if only for the fact that Miguel Gomes has given over the bulk of the running time to a documentary on the world of competitive songbird training. After four-plus hours of far-flung satiric fancies, it can be a bit hard to take your reality straight, you know? The men who handle the birds cut a stark contrast between brute strength and delicacy, and the director seems drawn by the sight of burly workers and ex-criminals caring their finches with an almost child-like gentleness. Much like Scheherazade, who begins this volume in a state of self-doubt and despair, the trainers function as storytellers of a sort, fighting to preserve the bird songs and revive nearly extinct melodies by playing recordings for the finches to mimic. Their redemption—like hers, and Gomes’, for that matter—is gained through a dedication to their art.

My Internship in Canada 

Crowd-pleasing Canuck comedies are rightly viewed with suspicion—the stench of Score and Men With Brooms still lingers, years later—but My Internship in Canada has largely succeeded where so many others have failed in embodying a distinctly domestic mainstream cinema. Philippe Falardeau’s buoyant political comedy is slick without being soulless, and it wields its Cancon with aplomb. Propelled by a jaunty, memorable score, the film follows a washed-up hockey idol turned independent MP from backwater Quebec who, through a series of complicated and highly implausible events, winds up holding the balance of power in a hung parliament contemplating war. The film’s greatest joke may be the very notion that a Canadian political crisis could be this dramatic, but there’s also ample comedic grist in the juxtaposition of hyper-local riding realpolitik and weighty international affairs. Consider it a PG version of Armando Iannucci’s In The Loop, with lower stakes and less swearing—and that may well be the film’s largest flaw. Falardeau is clearly having fun with the material, but he’s also wary of cutting too deeply or directly. Even his parody of Stephen Harper, almost always shown playing music in what can only be seen as a desperate humanizing gesture, is surprisingly mild. Who wants a political comedy that strives to be nice?

Sleeping Giant 

Andrew Cividino’s Sleeping Giant is an unsentimental study of thwarted maturity set against the shimmering green hell of Ontario cottage country. Three teens—Riley, Nate, and Adam—bond and bicker over the course of a summer until finally turning on each other. Cividino possesses an ear for the squawky rhythms of teenage speech, and the bantering between the trio is often as cringe-inducingly familiar as it is funny (I can offer no guarantee against traumatizing flashbacks to one’s own better-forgotten pubescent years). Rather than opt for a more obvious bullying narrative, the director allows the complex web of relationships to reveal how easy cruelty comes at age 15, when people are only just discovering the fraught ramifications of love and friendship and every emotion is projected through a megaphone. Where the film gains added bite is in its portrayal of the adult men in the summer village. Nate and Riley have no father figure on hand—they’re staying with their grandmother—while Adam’s father is a case study in mid-life sexual frustration. The only other man of any note is a drug dealer haggling with the teenagers over weed prices as he boasts of past glories and goads on the boys to monumentally dangerous stupidity. Sure, teenagers are a bunch of amoral self-destructing hormonal timebombs. More disturbing is the fact that so many adults are as well. 

Love And… 

There’s a lot of meta-cinematic sludge to wade through before one reaches the modest core of Zhang Lu’s Love And…. We begin with a love story between an elderly man and a cleaning woman in a mental hospital is revealed to be a film in mid-production, with the gaffer in full revolt against the director. These two slender contrary threads play out again and again in a series of variations that set image against sound in ways that are sometimes ingenious and sometimes tedious, but certainly surprising. One section drains the hospital of all human presence and sets loose a series of portentous symbols to roam the halls. Another draws on clips from Memories of Murder to suggest a police thriller starring the disgruntled gaffer. In the final chapter, an alternate version of the audio from the first section plays over footage of the empty hospital. Defined by a sense of perpetual absence, the film’s four segments seem to haunt each other, and Zhang approaches the question of filming love by outlining the empty spaces where genuine feeling might reside. Full marks to the director for his ambitious attempt at a Borgesian rom-com, but this unfortunately never really rises above the level of an academic exercise. In its exacting coldness, the film inadvertently proves its thesis.

The Forbidden Room 

Exhausting and exhilarating, The Forbidden Room is an exercise in arch-camp chaos, blending together pastiches of forgotten film genres into a singular narrative striptease courtesy of Guy Maddin and co-conspirator Evan Johnson. Stories nest within stories, which give way to further digressions and even the dreams of a moustache and one “valcano [sic].” The viewer becomes lost in a nightmarish labyrinth littered with mad doctors, amnesiacs, squid thieves, vampire bananas, and Udo Kier. This is a film that has not one, but three framing narratives: a lumberjack trying to rescue a maiden from a band of rogues, a group of sailors trapped in a submarine slowly running out of oxygen, and a tutorial on bathing starring national treasure Louis Negin. Delayed gratification is the film’s ruling order, and the viewer’s patience is rewarded with a book of climaxes stuffed with endings for stories not even in the film. Many of Maddin’s favourite themes are in evidence—narcissistic and ineffectual male heroes, dead fathers that won’t die—but Johnson brings fresh textures and eerie morphing techniques that add new layers to the director’s familiar style. If the jittery montage of recent Maddin films evokes repressed memories bursting to the surface, the constantly mutating surface of this film suggests a living, writhing beast—with, one assumes, multiple personality disorder.

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 2015: Part One

 Arabian Nights, Volume One (The Restless One) 

The bees are dying, the shipyards are shutting down, and the director is so overwhelmed at the thought of turning such misery into art that he’s become a fugitive from his own film crew. So begins the first volume of Arabian Nights, Miguel Gomes’ ambitious three-part epic of modern Portugal in the grips of austerity. Mixing self-referential farce with sober documentary, the film gleefully cartwheels over the divide between fact and fantasy. The Restless One, the most eclectic of the three films, shows Gomes testing the limits of the robust storytelling contraption he has engineered, cobbled together from the structure of One Thousand and One Nights and fed by the findings of Portuguese journalists. In this volume alone we move from a clairvoyant talking rooster to an arson-driven love triangle acted out by teenagers and narrated in text speak. Silliness and subversion—abundant in the story of how Portugal’s political and economic leaders were cursed with permanent erections—exists alongside compassionate portraits of the country’s unemployed, who offer some of the film’s most stirring moments. The most profound rebuttal to a ruthless economic system can simply be to assert the humanity of those left outside it, and the unconscious smile on a woman’s face as she listens to her husband’s description of their first meeting holds more power than any polemic. 

One Floor Below 

Radu Muntean’s Tuesday, After Christmas was a domestic drama stretched taut until it became a thriller. His latest, One Floor Below, is the opposite: a flat, uninspired suspense setup that ends up as a pointed study of family dynamics. Sandu Patrascu, a kind of oracle of the Romanian DMV helping people navigate the punishing bureaucracy surrounding vehicle registration, overhears a violent argument between a neighbour and her lover. But when the woman is later discovered dead, he declines to tell the police about the incident, either out of shame over his voyeurism or guilt over his inaction. Enter Vali, the creepy maybe-murderer, who swiftly insinuates himself into the Patrascu family. While Sandu seems more at home jogging alone with his dog, Vali enjoys an easy rapport with the man’s family, offering computer advice to his wife and bonding with his son over videogames. From a certain angle, the tension between the two men could even be read as more a matter of jealousy than anything else. But Muntean, committed to making a sober study of a man plagued by his own conscience, dutifully follows the familiar story to its expected conclusion with little to offer that would elevate it above a dozen other routine protect-your-family thrillers. 

Paradise 

There’s only the slenderest spine of a dramatic arc in Paradise, yet every mundane moment is ripe with dread in this closely observed portrait of life for women in Iran. Hanieh, a 25-year-old single teacher living with her pregnant sister, struggles to get a transfer to a school closer to home, but director Sina Ataeian Dena is more often drawn to the cruel details that provide texture to her day. Elderly women chastise younger ones for talking to men on the bus. Groups of men make catcalls. A harsh bang that sounds like an explosion turns out to be nothing more than a soccer ball kicked into the schoolyard by a group of boys playing outside, roaming freely while the girls endure break-time in an Orwellian indoctrination factory (recess is scored by the voice of the principal barking out commands on how to dress and behave). Hanieh—portrayed with sullen gravity by Dorna Dibaj—drifts through it all in a half-numb haze, often filmed in shallow focus by Dena in order to isolate her even further from a society she loathes. Meanwhile, news of two missing girls drops from the television like a casual threat, and the film’s ambiguous final moments underscore the fear that follows Hanieh. Every stranger holds the promise of good or evil, help or homicide, and the only certainty the women can have is that he is the one who holds all power in the encounter.

The Thoughts That Once We Had 

After the festival’s screening of The Thoughts That Once We Had, Thom Andersen remarked in a Q & A that it would be his final film about film. So it should not be surprising that the film serves more as a loving compendium of the director’s obsessions than a focused essay. Taking the film theories of Gilles Deleuze as a starting point, the film launches into a distinctly personal history of cinema, making it a curious combination of academic argument and private reverie. Perhaps that explains why the film feels at times so obscurely organized as to seemingly be devoid of structure altogether. Even though the film lacks narration—too polemical, he explained afterwards—it is loosely arranged around quotes from Deleuze and others, in addition to brief textual interjections from the director himself. Not that obliqueness needs to be a complete liability, particularly when dealing with a sharp wit like Andersen. Often, the most compelling sections arise from the director pursuing his own idiosyncratic interests into such strange cul de sacs as Timothy Carey’s acting career and the similarities between Chubby Checkers and Hank Ballard’s respective versions of “The Twist.”

But does it add up to anything more than a bravura exercise in cinematic scrapbooking? Given that the director seems more interested in creating an open-ended meditation rather than a conclusive statement, that question may be impossible to answer. I would suggest that the deeply private significance of these clips—clear for Andersen, if not always the viewer—is crucial to the film’s effect, however. The orphaned quotes and stray images are like ghosts, and like ghosts each contain the flickering vestiges of something that once lived. They also contain traces of the viewer. When Andersen watches Debra Paget dance her snake-dance, he sees not only her lost youth but something of his own. Every image we consume becomes remixed in our private mental cinema, playing out in an unending loop in our imaginations and covertly tracing the shape of our own lives in the process. Every movie is a home movie.

Vancouver International Film Festival 2013: Part One

Gebo and the Shadow 

The tendency as one ages is to move into consecutively smaller spaces. A house becomes an apartment becomes a room becomes a hospital bed. Manoel de Oliveira, still spry at the age of 104, appears to be going through a similar downsizing process with his filmmaking. Gebo and the Shadow mostly confines itself to a single, lamp-lit apartment, save for a few brief location shots, but those are so spare and devoid of context that they feel more like the haunted dreams of a shut-in than any real-world place. Indeed, the entire world feels like a shadowy thing just beyond the simple lives of elderly Gebo and his impoverished family. The only hope for a break from their grinding low-rent existence is the return of the long-vanished prodigal son, and even those dreams are ultimately dashed. With graceful economy, Oliveira crafts a suffocating atmosphere of stasis and isolation—the film rarely strays from a few basic shot setups, never mind the room itself. At the end, when sunshine from the street pours into the apartment and slices through this dark tableau, the effect is shocking. This is not a world you wish to see in the harsh light of day.

A Field in England 

So now we know what happens when an English civil war re-enactment society gorges itself with mushrooms and is set loose in the woods. You get something like Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England, a hallucinogenic occult freak-out spiked with droll humour and grisly violence. At times, it can be hard to shake the suspicion that the director has no more idea what he’s doing in this field than his poor confused characters, but the film’s sinister charms and sheer bravura balance its flaws. Focused on just five people wandering the countryside, the film feels at once earthy and detached, a floating psychedelic trip grounded only by the occasional nod to base bodily matters (behold the challenges of shitting in the 17th century). Dodging the war, these characters are hunting for a vaguely defined, possibly supernatural treasure, but the search is merely pretext for daffy conversations and a delirious climactic montage that essentially breaks reality. All bonds are broken; all class divisions dissolved. Society tears itself apart, and the image follows suit.

A Long and Happy Life 

Astute viewers may sense a tinge of irony in calling this High Noon rehash A Long and Happy Life (I guess calling it "Russia is a Joyful and Prosperous Land" would have been too on the nose). Sadly, the rest of the film is as thuddingly obvious as the title. Sascha, the young leader of a farming commune, is forced by the government to sell his land, but his workers urge him to fight back. Against his better instincts, he agrees, only to watch helplessly as the rest of the commune abandons the cause. From there, the descent into violence is as inexorable as it is incoherent. Bricks start flying, brains are bashed, lives are ruined, and fatalistic gloom hangs over the proceedings like a suffocating fog. Director Boris Khlebnikov clearly has something to say about the danger of clinging to a past long since faded into ruin. Too bad he has to impose a grand finale on this modest tale, and in the process crush whatever credibility he had earned with his hitherto competent naturalism. Frankly, I would have been content just to watch Sascha build a chicken coop.

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.

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 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.

Vancouver International Film Festival 2012: Part Three

The Minister 

The Minister makes good use of a rock-solid Olivier Gourmet in the titular role of Bertrand Saint-Jean, a French transport minister who steps into the midst of an ideological firefight after he speaks against privatizing the country’s train stations. Basically, his government supports him until it doesn’t—which happens once everyone realizes that the market calls the shots and there’s not much a few measly politicians can do anyway. Powered by brisk, compelling storytelling, Pierre Scholler’s film strips away the illusions of state power, revealing a hollowed-out institution beholden to the whims of the private sector. However, this political cynicism is matched only by the cynicism of the film’s biggest lapse—a series of stylized dreams designed to emphasize the minister’s increasing sense of isolation and helplessness. Were the filmmakers worried audiences wouldn’t be interested in a bunch of suits talking policy? Did they just want something snazzy to put in the trailer? Apparently we are not yet trusted to take our medicine without a dollop of sugar.

Somebody Up There Likes Me 

The best comedies are the the saddest ones. Case in point: Somebody Up There Likes Me, a beautifully absurd take on mortality and maturity by writer/director Bob Byington. The aptly named Max Youngman exists in a state of arrested development, emotionally uncommitted and disinterested in his own life—a condition made literal when he gazes into a glowing blue briefcase and ceases to age. Skipping forward every five years, the film takes us through a succession of failed marriages and relationships, all the detritus and drama of a lifetime reduced to droll snippets of deadpan whimsy. Max’s unchanging appearance seems more psychological than physical; it goes uncommented on by his friends, while the ravages of time take root behind his unwrinkled façade. He doesn’t age so much as the world ages around him.

Berberian Sound Studio 

Peter Strickland has set up quite a challenge for himself in Berberian Sound Studio. How do you make a horror film without horror? Turns out it’s all about the noise—the crunch of bones breaking, the sizzle of flesh burning—and so the film makes full use of the hallucinatory power of sound. Strickland teases the audience with descriptions of an unseen Italian horror movie, filled with tortured witches, perverted goblins, and red-hot pokers in all the wrong places. Instead, we’re left to follow the misadventures of English sound engineer Gilderoy (a wonderfully befuddled Toby Jones) as he works on the film. As the man chops up vegetables to recreate the sounds of the Italian movie’s blood-soaked visions, he begins to succumb to his own guilt over the imaginary violence he is perpetrating—a shot of the rotting food felled by his knife evokes a mass grave, in one particularly amusing example. Unevenly paced, but odd enough to remain engrossing, the film works as a fond tribute to Foley artists, with one caveat—no good can come of being too consumed by your own work.

The Flat 

Let’s just get this out of the way—the score for The Flat is astoundingly, distractingly terrible. It’s like music from a 1960s sitcom, jaunty and tacky and obnoxious, belabouring each emotion and idea on screen. Which is a shame, because Arnon Goldfinger’s documentary is otherwise a nuanced exploration of the ongoing struggle to reconcile with the history of the Holocaust. After discovering Nazi propaganda in his deceased grandmother’s flat in Tel Aviv, Goldfinger unravels a winding tale that finds his grandparents befriending Baron von Mildenstein, a Zionist SS officer whose role in the Nazi regime’s crimes is clouded and contradictory. Remarkably, the baron’s daughter is still alive, and even more remarkably, Goldfinger’s grandparents remained in touch with their German friends after the Holocaust. The film charts the inevitable effect of history on two separate but intertwined family trees: the first generation acts, the second forgets, while the third painfully, haltingly struggles to remember before everything is lost.

Bestiaire 

A visual treat and formal puzzle, Bestiaire is among director Denis Cote’s most accomplished and provocative works yet. The film covers a year at Parc Safari in Quebec, depicting the animals and their human handlers on equal terms, both framed by the fences that hold them captive. But Cote’s interests extend from these sociological observations to more playful musings on voyeurism, as evidenced by the film’s two basic recurring shot types. One features an animal lurking on the bottom margin of the frame, while the rest is overtaken by negative space—an idiosyncratic choice quite unlike how most others would film animals, and one that produces some glorious, even witty, images (Cote won me over with the ostrich). The other shot faces the animals head-on, allowing them to stare straight into the camera for an uncomfortably long time. As the viewer is increasingly confronted with the sense of their own role as spectator, the temptation to sneak a glimpse at one’s fellow theatergoers becomes hard to resist. Sure enough, they met the animals’ gaze with their own blank stare.

Vancouver International Film Festival 2012: Part Two

The Hunt 

Rumour has it The Hunt is a return to form for director Thomas Vinterberg. Well, perhaps. It does involve child molestation—the subject of The Celebration, his best-known work—so it has the sense of a homecoming (no joke intended). But if we’re talking in terms of merit, then I will have none of it, because this is a rank piece of filmmaking, dull and mean-spirited despite whatever minor interest its polished storytelling and acting may provide. Vinterberg works himself into a righteous lather over a vicious town that falsely accuses a kindergarten teacher of molesting a little girl,but the whole game is rigged from the start to confirm his general contempt for the brainless mob. After a couple of scenes of the girl confessing her lie to uncomprehending adults—they all but pat her on the head and say, “No, sweetie, trust us, you were molested”—the film begins to verge on comedy. While the teacher is weeping in church as a Christmas choir of children sing about baby Jesus, you may be wondering why everyone on Law and Order: SVU is speaking Danish. Is this what passes for high-powered psychological drama these days? All I see is cheap cinematic thuggery.

Thursday Till Sunday 

Children are often reduced to baggage during the dissolution of a marriage, dragged along, fought over, lost. Dominga Sotomayor, perhaps unwittingly, makes this very point when the two children in Thursday Till Sunday are granted the privilege of riding on the rooftop luggage rack of the family car so that mom and dad can air their grievances in peace. Not that either child—hyperactive Manuel and his pensive older sister, Lucia—understand what’s happening. They’re just enjoying the ride. That split between carefree youth and embittered adults drives Sotomayor’s assured debut, which clings to Lucia’s perspective of the growing family discord over a four-day road trip. Set largely in the confines of a single junky Mazda, the film captures the nuances of expression and gesture that reveal these characters—a sour look, a turn of the head, a pregnant pause. Sotomayor captures this all with exceptional grace and skill, playing foreground calm against background disorder with great ease. Finally, the film ceases to simply echo Lucia’s perspective and becomes a larger vision of the family unit in turmoil, everyone alone and together simultaneously, as four private worlds orbit and collide.

La demora 

Beginning as a humble drama about a single mother’s struggle to care for her aging father, La demora soon veers off into the same terrain as a Dardenne brothers working-class passion play. This is a good thing. Director Rodrigo Plas sketches out mother Maria’s dire situation in early scenes, but the crisis that drives her to abandon her father—who is displaying signs of encroaching dementia—is never quite brought into focus. Is it a money matter? Fear of her father’s growing senility? Sheer exhaustion and helplessness? All are suggested as plausible reasons, yet none are developed with enough force to make the woman’s lapse come across as natural. Still, Maria’s frantic nighttime journey from shelter to shelter as her father dutifully awaits her return is a powerful argument for the film’s merits. Mundane emotions—aren’t aging parents a pain?—take on renewed gravity, and Plas’ filmmaking grows stronger as the light dims. The city becomes a lonely landscape of shimmering lights and amorphous shapes, an alien place where the only solid thing for both Maria and her father is each other.

Antiviral 

The young Cronenberg lad has taken up the family business, and comparisons are all but impossible to ignore. Indeed, it’s almost shocking just how many elements from the father’s early work—sinister corporate systems, bodily violation and mutation—are evident in Brandon Cronenberg’s first film. But then one realizes that David Cronenberg has cast such a long shadow over this sort of near-futuristic semi-satiric body horror that any young director would likely owe him a debt, never mind his own son. So instead of picking on Antiviral for what it isn’t (Videodrome, Naked Lunch et al.), let’s concentrate on what it is (a middling debut that fritters away its oddball premise with an aimless rehash of second-rate conspiracy blather). The film’s big idea turns out to be its only one: we’re looking at a skewed version of our own future, where celebrity is all and star-struck acolytes pay for the privilege of being infected with the same diseases carried by the rich and famous. But the film offers little beyond skin-deep riffs on the cult of celebrity while indulging in some baggy storytelling—two hours is quite a long time for such a simple sinister plot to unravel (even the welcome presence of Malcolm McDowell can’t sell this one, I’m afraid). At most, Cronenberg culls some cute jokes from his scenario, and the film’s striking white design ensures the visual pop even if the plot never does.