A Serious Man

Aren’t the serious questions such a drag sometimes? I’m talking of those lofty concerns that have spurred on great minds and dullards alike to pontification throughout the ages. Does god exist? Why do we suffer? And finally—exude a soul-weary sigh here, if you like—just what’s the point of it all?

Yes, just what is the point of it all? That’s a question that could easily be asked of A Serious Man, the latest film from Joel and Ethan Coen. As they often have in the past, the brothers tempt seriousness while simultaneously belittling that same sobriety. This is a caricaturist’s version of existential agony, a cartoon rendition of the calamities visited upon a hapless humanity. Viewers might suspect the Coens are hiding some sort of profound truth somewhere beneath the elegantly designed chaos of this film, but I remain skeptical—strip away the mask, and all you will find is a bemused smirk.

Diverging from their usual meat-grinder approach (toss a bag of money in and watch a gaggle of dimwits leap headlong into the blades trying to catch it), the Coen brothers look to an anonymous Minnesota suburb in the late 1960s for this tale of Larry Gopnik, a Jewish physics professor whose life has suddenly collapsed into a series of increasingly cruel and ridiculous indignities. He discovers that Judith, his wife, wishes to get a divorce and marry Sy Ableman, a bald, liver-spotted man at least twenty years older who comforts the distraught and confused Larry, thwarting the cuckolded husband’s urges to rage and self-pity. Larry obligingly moves into a motel, taking with him his deadbeat brother, who is constantly draining the cyst on his neck while working on an incomprehensible mathematical opus called “The Mentaculus.”

Marital crisis is but one aspect of the shit-storm tornado that upends every aspect of Larry’s routine existence. A Korean student attempts to bribe Larry into giving him a passing grade; when the student is rebuffed, the boy’s father threatens to sue for defamation in retaliation for Larry’s accusations of bribery. As things get worse and worse, Larry frets over money and whether or not the university will grant him tenure—anxieties not helped by the fact that the tenure committee is receiving unsigned letters accusing Larry of “moral turpitude.” And this doesn’t even touch on Larry’s intimidating redneck neighbour, or the angst-ridden spawn of the Gopnik clan, which includes pot-smoking Danny preparing for his bar mitzvah and bratty Sarah stealing money from dad to pay for a nose job.

Many more incidental or minor humiliations beset Larry as he wanders through the film stunned and harried by his transformation into the punch line of some cosmic joke. Even when he goes to three different rabbis seeking solace and wisdom, he receives little comfort. The youngest (the “junior rabbi”) merely rhapsodizes about how the hand of god is apparent even in a parking lot, while a middle-aged rabbi recites a stock story he apparently tells everyone and then offers a few platitudes about being good and helpful. The oldest declines to speak to Larry, but after Danny’s bar mitzvah, he offers the boy a few words of appreciation for Jefferson Airplane and that’s it—apparently, the only wisdom that age brings is brevity.

Of course, in the world of the Coen brothers, brevity is a mighty high source of wisdom indeed. Their characters often pollute the air with all sorts of incessant, nonsensical chatter, and that is especially true in this film, which is filled with blissfully absurd, frequently hilarious exchanges in which people talk in circles around an empty centre. More than any of their previous films, the Coens have created a kind of music out of this noise. Phrases and words repeat—Santana Abraxas, “Out in a minute!”, “I didn’t do anything!”, Dick Dutton—until they become meaningless, just more of the empty noise of Larry’s world. The best way to come out of a Coen brothers film looking smart is to keep your mouth shut.

Still, just as the Coens seem to be laughing at Larry’s crisis and dismissing his quest for higher answers, so too might viewers look at this film and shrug it off as pointless and snide—just another typical shooting gallery from the Coens, they might say, just another film about stupid people doing stupid things, albeit with less bloodshed than usual. So what?

The film boils down to this: life is cruel and unfair and will just screw you over in the end, so just try to be good, okay? And then, keep boiling, let the pot start to smoke and you will find this: life is cruel and unfair and will just screw you over in the end, so why bother doing good, right? And then, fuck the pot, leave it on the stove until it’s just a black metal lump, and you’ll realize this: I just wrecked a perfectly good pot, and I haven’t learned a damn thing. That's what you get for taking a lesson in life philosophy from two terminal wise-asses. Granted, there's a kind of wisdom here, but if you take it too seriously you may find yourself the only one not laughing—and isn't that really the definition of a serious man?

Incubus

Incubus feels like a film from a foreign country that doesn’t exist, a fantasy land somewhere beyond the borders of reason and good taste. In this strange place, everyone speaks Esperanto, sex demons plague the countryside like mosquitoes, and William Shatner is the biggest leading man in Hollywood. Also, everyone walks backwards and wears pitas on their heads like hats and instead of shaking hands and saying hello they all just rub bottoms and fart on each other.

Well, it’s just one theory. Take it or leave it.

In reality, Incubus is simply a rare Esperanto-language film, a daffy art-horror oddity starring a pre–Star Trek Shatner. I have to give credit to writer/director Leslie Stevens for the outrageousness of the Esperanto gambit, although it’s debatable whether or not the language is ultimately a liability here. The actors certainly struggle with speaking this strange tongue, resulting in some fairly clumsy line readings and distracted performances. You can almost see the beads of sweat on their foreheads as they enter another dialogue scene, all of them no doubt thinking, “Oh shit, how do I say this again…?”

But Stevens obviously wasn’t just trying to torture his actors, and there are benefits to this initially baffling choice. Even though it was filmed around Big Sur in California, Incubus really does come across as the product of a foreign culture, the use of Esperanto giving the story an alien quality that makes it much more palatable. This sort of simplistic supernatural allegory wouldn’t fly if it was played on familiar ground, but in an exotic language, it comes across as an obscure foreign folk-tale, the mythology of a lost culture. Plus, I am quite certain the only way the actors could keep a straight face while spouting this ridiculously baroque dialogue was to translate the words into a language they wouldn’t understand. Lines like “My hands tremble with desire!” at least make for a kind of overwrought poetry when appearing as text at the bottom of the screen, but spoken in English they would probably only prompt laughter.

Objectively speaking, this actually isn’t a particularly good film, even though it does have some assets to draw upon. Most notably, the famed Conrad Hall provides some gorgeous black-and-white cinematography, moving between sun-dappled pastoral idylls and hellish nighttime murk with great facility. Dutch angles, underwater shots, and distorted close-ups abound. The film is riotously stylish.

But the story is overly simple, even a touch silly—and definitely too thin to really hold together a worthy feature film. A demon named Kia stalks the countryside, luring men to the sea and drowning the poor schmucks in order to claim their tainted souls (one of the more memorable images in the film is Kia building a sandcastle on the corpse of one of her victims). In a moment of arrogance, Kia decides to corrupt a pure soul and deliver it to her master, the Incubus, otherwise known as the God of Darkness. That pure soul happens to be Marc, a wounded soldier played by Shatner.

Stevens twists around the corruption angle so that the demons are appalled to find Marc’s love has defiled Kia’s evil (“holy rape” is the charming phrase they use). In retaliation, they unleash the Incubus on Marc’s sister, and after a bit of rape and general mayhem, the love between Kia and Marc vanquishes the God of Darkness, appearing in the climactic scenes as a goat-headed beast that squeals like a pig. Incidental weirdness aside, this is basically the old song about love triumphing over evil, which you would expect to make for a great yawn of a movie, even with all the sex demons and goat monsters running around.

And yet, the stupid thing is so damnably watchable. Sure, I rolled my eyes and chuckled derisively from time to time, but the sheer strangeness of the whole enterprise justifies the experience. Even the weirdly archaic values behind the story—an evil, loose woman redeemed by the love of a good man and the promise of a holy union—only lend to the sense that we’re watching an ancient foreign fable.

As an object exiled from a time that never was and a place that does not exist, Incubus prompts fascination, if nothing else. Look at it as a kind of anthropology experiment, and try to deduce what sort of society could birth such a curious mythology. It’s a trick question, of course—as is almost always the case in these exercises in cinematic exoticism, the foreigners are us.

EIFF: Day Nine

Okay, so I've blinked away the scum that coated my eyes after watching Pirate for the Sea, and I've cleared my head and thought only positive thoughts all day. Now I'm ready to write up the last two films I saw at the film fest.

Dammit, I don't want to hate any more movies. I'm so tired of hating movies, and I feel my prose growing gnarled and hunchbacked as I scowl through another review of more EIFF mediocrity. Just give me a bright spot to go out on, that's all I ask. Not just for me, I ask, but for the suffering few who might read this blog. Oh lord, please, spare the innocent.

Passenger Side

And yet, here I am tempting my own wrath by going to see a quirky Canadian comedy-drama that seems aimed straight down the middle-road of independent filmmaking. Perhaps I bring this on myself.

A sometimes charming but clearly flawed film, Matt Bissonnette's Passenger Side follows a pair of brothers as they drive across Los Angeles in a day. Various eccentric characters are encountered along the way, their chief reason for being apparently to help the film reach feature length. Some moments are funny, to be fair—an encounter with a hermaphrodite hooker is downright surreal, actually—but mostly these digressions just add to a sense of a film lost and struggling to find its bearings.

But let it not be said that Passenger Side is not without its virtues as well. I found myself enjoying the fraternal interplay of Joel Bissonnette and Adam Scott, even as they were saddled with sometimes overwritten, unnatural dialogue (call it a case of DCD, or Diablo Cody's Disease). And Matt Bissonnette finds some surprising emotional depths in these two characters as we move from glib, jokey exchanges to more complicated family dynamics. There's some meat to this rather slender premise.

Unfortunately, the film stumbles in the final moments, and not just a minor, slip-on-the-wet-grass kind of fall—this is a full-on, tumble-face-first-into-a-brick-wall-because-your-pants-fall-down kind of wipe-out. It's as if the film is afraid to follow through with its modest ramble of a tale and has to somehow instill a sense of narrative payoff at the end of the journey. Inexplicably, we end with a plot twist, which feels somewhat incongruous considering the film's general lack of a plot in the first place. Sensitive little dramedies just shouldn't have big "gotcha" moments.

Love at the Twilight Motel

Ah, final film of the fest. At last we reach the end. Tell me, little film, what will you offer me? Pleasure, or pain?

Perhaps both? A compelling documentary about the pain of pleasure, Alison Rose's Love at the Twilight Motel offers a glimpse into the lives of the clientele at a shady Miami motel that charges $25 for the first two hours. Rose interviews seven different people, ranging from Cadillac (a recovering junkie) to Gigi (a 46-year-old overweight escort) to Richard (a Cuban rafter who works as a massage therapist and claims he was destined to have lots of affairs with married women).

The use of the word "love" in the title might be misleading, as this motel is not really in the business of love, but rather sex. The interviewees muse on what it means to be faithful and the distinction between sex and love, in the process offering insight into the torturous ways we rationalize and compartmentalize our lives. It is to the director's credit that she doesn't try to force an artificial argument on the film, but rather allows each interview to provoke its own conclusions.

Mr. B, for instance, is a happily married man who professes to adore his wife, even as he admits that she can't satisfy him sexually. However, his use of the motel goes beyond mere infidelity, as he elaborates on his use of heroin and shoots up for the benefit of the documentary crew. In one remarkable moment, he even receives a text message from his wife asking where he is. He sighs—"I hate lying," he explains—and then decides to pretend that his phone has died. The problem isn't that he's bad at lying, according to him, but rather that his wife seems to believe whatever he says, suggesting a certain contempt for her gullibility even as he emphasizes his love for her. Near the end of his interview, he concludes that he is a functional junkie. Considering the vast schism between his family life and motel behaviour, functional schizophrenic might be more accurate.

And this is just one of the twisted personal stories we discover. All of the interviewees offer some startling personal revelations—so many, in fact, that the film might start to feel like a bit of a gratuitous exercise in revelling in the sordid underbelly, a walk on the wild side for us all-too-boring gawkers in the audience.

But the film is too thought-provoking (and beautifully composed, incidentally) to be dismissed. Issues of how and why people isolate sex from emotion arise, as do questions of how repression affects our personal lives. We meet prostitutes struggling with past sexual abuses and self-justifying philanderers who seem blind to their own contempt for women. We see people filled with self-loathing and, surprisingly, others serene and content. All people struggling to find a measure of peace, but none quite sure of the route.

It's a fine film, and certainly an excellent way to conclude my festival-going for another year. Thankfully.

EIFF: Days Seven and Eight

Fair warning: this is a pretty dire post. Three films, only one keeper, and that by Michael Haneke no less, which is a bit like saying the best part of your vacation to Singapore was the caning.

Enter if you dare. I'll try to remember to go see some good films tomorrow.

Those Three

I'm struggling with how to summarize this one. Maybe try to imagine a version of Andrei Tarkovksy's Stalker that is somehow half the running time and yet feels twice as long—that captures some of the stultifying power of this film, which often does feel like a clumsier version of Tarkovsky's mystical wonders. Better yet—how about a humourless version of Waiting For Godot in which everyone dies and then a pregnant woman walks on stage and delivers a baby.

No, wait, that actually sounds kind of fun.

Or at the very least, more fun than this monotonous little Iranian film about three military deserters who wander a snowy plain where they meet a pregnant woman and then die of exposure. Along the way, there are a few other incidents of note—a few squabbles, a random encounter or two, but nothing of great significance. Essentially, we watch three figures wandering an endless white landscape, blotted out by the environment. Aside from the occasional tree, there are no landmarks, just a seemingly eternal, numbing haze.

I suppose writer/director Naghi Nemati is going for a spectral anti-military film in which our three protagonists head off in dangerous terrain rather than stay in the army. They face the inclement world, suffer at its hands and die, while a baby comes into this same cruel environment at the end as a symbol of future hope or continued suffering or—who cares, really? I get bored just writing about this earnest, thoroughly unimaginative attempt to convey so many banal concepts. Never before have I been so conscious of the fact that going to the theatre is nothing more than staring at a white sheet for an hour and a half.

The White Ribbon

I'm a little ambivalent about the films of Michael Haneke. He's undeniably a brilliant director, but his depictions of middle-class alienation often have the feeling of an expert marksman with a barrel of fish. Sometimes I just wish he would apply all that formal rigour of his to something completely outside of his comfort zone instead of gunning down the same easy targets each time.

As it stands, The White Ribbon does seem like a bit of a broadening of Haneke's usual world, however slight that expansion might be. True, this depiction of an Austrian village set just before the First World War is in many ways a typical Haneke excursion into cinematic water-boarding, but there are also surprising moments of tenderness and humour. The narrator, Lehrer, is a schoolteacher who behaves honourably and kindly, without even a trace of the wanton cruelty that defines so many Haneke characters, including a great many of those who populate this film. And I never would have believed people might laugh at a Haneke film unless I heard it myself, but the scenes revolving around a pastor's son discovering the joys of masturbation are surprisingly quite funny.

Of course, this being a Haneke film, the innate cruelty of human society is always lurking around the corner. The little village is rife with inexplicable crimes, including, most gruesomely, the torture and blinding of a young mentally handicapped boy. The mystery unfurls with Haneke's typical commanding grace, and ultimately implicates the entire society (of course), suggesting the seeds of Nazism that lurk in the younger generation will come to bloom because of the willful blindness and cruelty of the older.

Also typical of Haneke are the instances of button-pushing horror, including the aforementioned child mutilation, as well as some gratuitous incest and even a bit of nasty animal violence (the guy just can't give up on his usual cinema of shocks, I suppose, although he does show some admirable self-restraint for most of the film). Still, the black-and-white cinematography is excellent, and Haneke's command over his material is as sure as ever. Even if Haneke's conclusions are pretty much predictable from the start, the unfolding of this plot is still a thing of terrible beauty, and worth beholding.

Pirate for the Sea

Ugh. Now we're really hitting the dregs of the fest. This tedious piece of agit-prop focuses on Paul Watson, a co-founder of Greenpeace who went on to form the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, an organization dedicated to defending marine life. With their own ship—named for Farley Mowat, who also appears in interviews in the film—the Sea Shepherds attempt to block the Canadian seal hunt and illegal Japanese whalers near Antarctic.

Director Ron Colby gets some suspense from these tense, often violent confrontations, but make no mistake—this is a ham-handed, dull, at times even downright dim-witted documentary. The film takes a fair cause—outside of Ottawa and the Maritimes, who even supports the seal hunt anymore?—and makes it seem almost unlikeable. Watson is surely a charismatic fellow with a powerful sense of conviction, but I like some ambiguity and nuance in my documentaries (or at least a bit of originality or insight), and Colby really has little to offer viewers looking for anything other than a confirmation of their own rightness.

Instead, we get a fawning, uncritical portrait of a controversial figure who could surely provoke more interesting work than this. Pirate for the Sea is a film so unthinking that it can show the crew on the Farley Mowat being warned that if the hull is breached they could easily die, and then later capture that same crew ramming a Japanese whaling ship with a device called "the can-opener" intended to rip open the enemy ship's hull. Yet still Colby allows Watson to claim the moral high ground of having never harmed anyone in his actions, even as the man engages in activities that could result in the deaths of people on both ships. And this doesn't even touch on the disturbing fact that Watson supplied AK-47s to a ranger station on an island conservation area, supposedly for the purpose of warding off illegal fishing. I hate to be a nag, but whatcha gonna do with those Kalashnikovs, Paul? Shoot the fishing nets?

The detail flashes by so quickly you have to wonder if Colby is embarrassed to mention it, or simply doesn't give the matter a second thought. Sadly, the film isn't interested in such contradictions. Instead, Colby settles for broad gestures toward easy sentiments that reveals a failure to employ any rigorous critical attention to his subject, or, for that matter, his craft (the general blandness of the film's style suggest nothing more than a corporate recruitment video). Good intentions don't excuse bad art.

EIFF: Day Six

A Prophet

Here I am, reaching the end of the week, and I'm starting to feel my resolve sapped by one too many mediocre films (I think Getting Home might have pushed me too far). But then I see a film like Jacques Audiard's A Prophet, and I'm a little embarrassed by my lack of endurance. First, because this is a quality piece of work and it shouldn't feel like a chore to drag my lazy ass out the door to see it, and second, because Audiard manages to sustain a remarkable level of tension for two and a half hours without relenting—a rather impressive feat of endurance in itself.

One could take this tale as a sly commentary on the immigrant experience, but A Prophet offers a great deal of satisfaction simply in the twists of its tight narrative. Malik El Djebena enters a French prison with nothing, slowly working his way up in this world of rival factions. A group of Corsican gangsters strong-arm Malik into assassinating one of their enemies in prison, and the young man finds himself playing the role of their lackey, sneered at for being an Arab and yet increasingly essentially to the operations of the gang. As Cesar Luciani, the group's leader, finds his partners whittled away through paroles and murders, he increasingly relies on Malik. And yet still the young man has to jump when his boss calls, doing errands and making coffee.

All the while, Malik is quietly gathering power, creating a drug-running operation outside of prison and forging alliances with other gangs both inside and outside the prison. This is a difficult character to capture, and Tahar Rahim does an excellent job, depicting Malik's transformation from helpless to powerful in a way that feels plausible and natural. After the initial shock of being forced to murder a man, Malik effaces himself, gives himself over to the role of servant, only to find that his dutifulness and loyalty is a kind of power in itself. And Cesar, as portrayed by Niels Arestrup (in a performance that nicely complements his work in Audiard's last film, The Beat My Heart Skipped), inspires some pathos as he travels an opposite trajectory, transforming from a fearsome, domineering figure into an isolated, helpless old man.

Audiard's direction is often tactile and vivid. He casts his eye on little viscous details that make for some striking images. Yes, it's an engrossing, intense story, but much of the film's power lies in those small touches that make the most sensational moments feel tangible. I'm struck by the sight of Malik washing the blood from his hair after a particularly grisly hit, which makes a surreal bit of movie violence suddenly seem horrifically real. Or what of that string of blood and spittle that arcs between his hand and mouth before that first assassination? The blood comes from a razor hidden in Malik's mouth—the only way to get a weapon this close to the intended victim—and it drives the weight of the moment straight into my gut. Aside from a few ill-conceived excursions into the supernatural, this is a film that remains firmly rooted in a queasy, inescapable present.

EIFF: Day Five

When I can, I like to find a unifying thread between all the films I'm watching, and today I have a handy theme: things I'm ignorant about. In particular, today I'm talking about Chinese cinema and Pedro Almodovar. So let's blunder through this together, you and I, faithful reader, and see if we can't crack these nuts.

Getting Home

My experience of contemporary Chinese filmmaking is limited mostly to art-house fare like Zhang Ke Jia, so I was quite curious to see Getting Home, a more mainstream example of the Chinese cinema. Director Zhang Yang does a solid job balancing the sadness and humour in the story of Zhao, a construction worker carrying the body of a dead friend to be buried near his family home at the Three Gorges. It's a charming film, but not without some serious problems.

The plot takes on an episodic shape, with Zhao encountering various figures along his journey who are moved by his plight to help him. Some episodes veer a bit too much into tear-jerking terrain—a fact not helped by the obnoxious score, which underlines each emotion and then adds five exclamation marks in case we missed the point—but others have a nicely understated droll whimsy to them, such as the scene where Zhao fakes mourning at a funeral in order to get a free meal, only to be joined at his table by the man from the coffin. Other comedic moments carry on that tone of low-key weirdness, such as a nice bit of underplayed physical comedy when Zhao tries to commit suicide by knocking his head against a tree.

The problems with the film are deeper than structure or performance, and have more to do with its treatment of the Three Gorges Dam, which has caused environmental devastation and lead to the relocation of over a million people. The unspoken intention of the film seems to be turning these larger issues into minor and ultimately harmless inconveniences. By the time a kindly police officer takes Zhao under his wing, the film had lost me. Getting Home ends as nothing more than a paean to the benign, all-knowing state apparatus in China; Zhao's biggest error is his foolish attempt at self-reliance. The implication is that he should have simply given himself over to the wisdom of the authorities, who will care for all Chinese citizens like a dutiful parent.

Oh, horseshit. Maybe films like Zhang Ke Jia's Still Life and The World don't represent the mainstream of Chinese culture, but at least they don't swallow the government agenda with uncritical loyalty. Give me some intelligent, idiosyncratic filmmaking instead of obsequious nationalist propaganda any day of the week.

Broken Embraces

I must shamefully confess that Pedro Almodovar is a major blind spot for me. Yes, I'm aware this man is one of the major figures in the Spanish cinema at the moment, much lauded for a body of work stretching over thirty years. And yet, I just can't find the motivation to dig into his work, and what little I have seen has only spurred on my galloping indifference. What can I say? It's carried me this far, so I haven't had a reason to stop.

But I found myself enjoying Broken Embraces, his latest collaboration with Penelope Cruz, which makes me wonder if it's time to start digging deeper into Almodovar's work. Strangely, most critics so far seem to have yawned through this one as it makes the rounds on the festival circuit, and I'm not sure what to make of that. Does that mean I too would be bored by this film if I was actually familiar with Almodovar's work? Or is this merely an indication that a good director on familiar terrain can't really excite jaded critics who crave something new, not just another solid film from a well-known director? Your guess is as good as mine, and I won't bother trying to fathom the mysteries of the professional film critic's mind.

In all fairness to the lukewarm reviews so far, I should be clear that this is not a flawless film by any means. For the work of such an experienced director, Broken Embraces is surprisingly clumsy at times as it jumps between different time periods while trying to build up a somewhat overstuffed plot. There comes a point when plot twists start to feel gratuitous, as if Almodovar was throwing in surprises that are justified by the film's themes, but which only provide more unnecessary clutter to the narrative itself. And the ending is a bit limp, with people explaining away the convoluted story instead of allowing events to unfold before our eyes.

So, there are weaknesses. But there's also a lot to enjoy in this weirdly referential comedy-melodrama-noir mash-up, even if it lacks the expected grace of an old master exploring his craft. In fact, the sheer amount of things going on in this film may be its biggest charm.

I'm not even sure I can summarize the film. We begin with a blind writer named Harry Caine, who was once a director by the name of Mateo Blanco (Lluis Homar), and then go deeper into his past, into a passionate, doomed love affair with Lena (Penelope Cruz), the lead actress in one of his films. But Lena is the mistress of the film's producer, a controlling old business man who instructs his son to follow Lena around, filming her every move on set in order to watch for any potential infidelity.

From there, I'm not sure if I can explain much more without giving away the whole game, but suffice it to say, there is a mess of double identities, secret relationships, and so many movie references I can't even begin to process the elaborate conversation Almodovar seems to be having with the entire history of film. In fact, the easiest way to pick apart this film might be to figure out all of its references. There are telling allusions to Vertigo and Peeping Tom, and a glimpse of one of Ingrid Bergman's collaborations with Roberto Rossellini, a real life example of a leading woman in an affair with her director. I can only imagine how much more I'm missing.

Perhaps that's the source of some people's dissatisfaction with this film. It seems like a minor pleasure, and yet it is still so dense that it feels like much of it passes by the viewer at first. Still, the incidental charms of this film are often enough to satisfy, whether it be hilarious glimpses of Girls With Suitcases, the farce Mateo is making with Lena, or the eerie sight of Lena's sugar daddy watching the soundless video of his lover leaving him while she stands behind him, reciting the words she spoke in the video (it makes sense when you see it, honest). Despite the frustrations and the flaws of the film, it's hard not to like a work brimming full with so many striking ideas and images, rich with poignant performances and broad comic turns, often from the same actor.

EIFF: Days Three and Four

Okay, two things: first, I'm sort of cheating in the title to this post. I didn't actually go to see anything at the film festival on day three, but I felt weird jumping from day two to four, hence why I threw it in there.

Second, I've decided to skip the usual orgy of verbiage that I seem to require whenever writing one of these things. No, I've resolved to keep my words chaste from now on. More films, less chatter. My promise to you.

Outrage

Kirby Dick is clearly pissed off, and rightly so, in this documentary about gay Conservative politicians who hide in the closet while pursuing an anti-LGBT agenda. The film begins with an astounding audio recording of Larry Craig's police interrogation after his failed bathroom tryst with an undercover officer, begging the question: is Craig seriously in such deep denial that he believes having sex with other men doesn't make him a homosexual? Or is he simply that dedicated a liar and hypocrite?

Sadly, we'll probably never know. Dick obviously can't get direct interviews with people like Craig or his wife (who I am sure would have some whopper stories to tell if she cared to talk), but he does get some insights from formerly closeted politicians like Barney Frank and Jim McGreevey. He also follows the work of people like Michael Rogers, who runs BlogActive, which is dedicated to outing gay politicians. And while some people might feel uncomfortable with this sort of prying into the private lives of public figures, Dick's film makes a persuasive case that the self-deception required by living a double life often leads to a dangerously homophobic legislative agenda. Many of these closeted politicians seem to adhere more closely to an anti-gay agenda simply for fear of being associated with their own denied identity.

What's especially chilling is seeing someone like Charlie Crist, current governor of Florida, who has left behind a fairly impressive trail of evidence for his own homosexuality, but continues to deny his sexual orientation, even to the point of getting married—seemingly just to help his chances at a VP slot on the McCain 2008 ticket.

The film's most significant flaw might be its occasional lapse into conspiracy thinking. A note at the beginning of the film declares this to be a "brilliantly orchestrated conspiracy," which is perhaps a slight overstatement. There's no real deep organization behind this history of lies, but rather just a large group of powerful men who have internalized years of homophobia and turned it into a corrupt lifestyle. When Dick starts trying to suggest that the mainstream media is complicit in some sort of conspiracy to hide the truth, I think he starts to overreach. Yes, the mainstream press ignores many of these outing controversies until they blow up to Larry Craig proportions, but more than anything else that seems to be a function of the same homophobic discomfort that informs the politicians in the scandals.

There are times when Dick panders to paranoia when some good hard-nosed documentary filmmaking is really just required. The worst example of this is when he points out an episode of Larry King Live was edited after its first airing to remove a comment from Bill Maher outing Ken Mehlman, chairman of the RNC and crony of Dubya.

The film leaves the incident suggestively open, as if it were sign of a conspiratorial censorship. Is it not plausible that a major news corporation would not have the guts to stand behind a potentially libelous offhand remark offered without backing evidence? This is surely the same kind of self-censorship that keeps people like Ken Mehlman in the closet, but there's no real proof that it is somehow directed by the halls of power instead of ass-covering legal departments. Even more troubling, the film gives no indication that Dick bothered to interview anyone involved in the incident in order to uncover what actually happened—suggestive possibilities being better here than facts, apparently. The righteous rage and sense of purpose Dick brings to this documentary is vital and necessary, but unfounded conspiracy-mongering isn't really needed. The simple truth is frightening enough.

Tales From the Golden Age

It just wouldn't be a film festival without something from Romania, would it? And so we have Tales From the Golden Age, an omnibus film consisting of five different stories set during the twilight of Ceausescu's rule. That's right, an omnibus film—the Romanian New Wave is all grown up now.

The film benefits from being solely written by Cristian Mungiu, who directs one of the stories while handing over the reins to four other directors for the rest. None of the directors veer too far from the same deadpan style Mungiu effects, and the whole film maintains a consistency of purpose and general quality that is rare in these types of films. Admittedly, it's a minor work when compared to Mungiu's last film—the brutally powerful 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days—but still quite enjoyable.

In fact, I like Tales From the Golden Age as a sort of complement to 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. In that film, set during the late Ceausescu era like this latest one, Mungiu depicted a young woman's attempt to get an abortion as a cold-sweat nightmare. It was intense and immediate, narrowing the widespread political repression of the Communist regime into personal bodily subjugation.

By contrast, this latest film takes a more detached, absurdly humorous approach. Each of the five tales is treated as an urban legend of life under a repressive regime, all told with a dryly mocking tone. In one story, a student decides to earn some extra money by scamming people out of their empty bottles and getting the deposits for herself. With her partner in crime, she goes through apartment buildings posing as a member of the Ministry of Chemistry taking air samples to measure pollution from nearby industrial factories. The plan sounds ridiculous, but it works—largely because every person they talk to admits to having filed numerous complaints about the stench. Indeed, most people are surprisingly easy to scam. They're just happy to see someone from the bureaucracy doing something.

The rest of the stories maintain a similar balance between the absurd and the bleak. People create little black market enterprises to get by, while others struggle to hide the occasional bit of good fortune lest it be taken away (one of the funniest sequences in the film involves a policeman and his family trying to figure out how to silently slaughter a pig so that none of their neighbours find out they have meat). The film very nicely captures the farce of living under a crumbling dictatorship while not covering up the tragedy of the situation. In short, a worthy example of police-state humour.