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NEW DIRECTORS/NEW FILMS 2020 (April 28-May 8, 2021)
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BIPOLAR (Queena Li 2021)
QUEENA LI: BIPOLAR (2021)
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HA KAILANG IN BIPOLAR
On the road in Tibet with a lobster
Richard Gray on Letterboxd says "Queena Li’s Orpheus by way of Alice tale is all about the journey. The best use of a lobster in a narrative since Annie Hall." The Girl (Leah Dou) may be getting over something. Maybe her ridiculously pretty boyfriend (He Kailang), who shows up in swimming pool flashbacks inexplicably suicidal (I guess the movie's named for him), did commit suicide. Or maybe he's her, and maybe her alleged career as a singer-songwriter hit a snag. At the outset we see the Girl in a phone booth getting bad news. Her Tibetan pilgrimage takes a turn at a fancy Lhasa, Tibet hotel. She has arrived here alone on her birthday. Her room is big but dinky. She steals the "rainbow" lobster enshrined in a lobby display as a holy creature, and carries it beside her in her car as she goes wandering cross country.
Leah Dou, a singer-songwriter fluent in English as well as Cantonese, is the daughter of the Cantonese pop superstar Faye Wong who played the winsome Faye in Wong Kar-wai's Chungking Express. So whe comes from fame and privilege, and she projects ennui and entitlement, but modestly. The news the Girl receives in the phone booth brings pain and her body starts to shiver. As she cringes in the booth and memories take over for a while - the film announcing itself as more surreal than, in the routine of its road picture trajectory, it actually winds up being. Sometimes shadows drift underwater though, and there is the occasional flashback to Pretty Boy. What continues apart the nice music is Ke Yuming's beautiful, fluffy widescreen black and white cinematography, ultimately the dominant thing. It is is heavy on overlaid images and framing shots using drapery, shrubbery, leaves and branches. Later the Girl's car breaks down in the middle of nowhere - the adventure begins - and somehow she winds up continuing in a very local pickup truck with lots of folkloric decoration and fringes. Girl doesn't know where she is going. At a temple or school she is commended for saying this. Nobody knows, someone says, but they usually can't admit it. Use is made of Tibetan holy places and wooly bearded, matter-of-fact old Tibetan men (and a boy monk) ready with a chuckle and a word of wisdom. And there is a flamboyant wig salesman played by a real local celebrity, the Tibetan/Bhutanese lama, filmmaker and writer Khyentse Norbu. Girl's English comes in handy when an American on horseback invites her to a feast. A young woman who says she's pregnant hitches a ride. They release some caged animals, including an elephant.
The Screen Daily Rotterdam review describes the film as full of challenging hints and portents (it's certainly rich in alternate possibilities) and says that "Audiences game enough to come along for the ride might not all end up at the same destination; this isn’t the kind of filmmaking which comes with a map." No, it doesn't. But the meandering road trip movie is a familiar genre and though this one is teasing and pretty, it's not so memorable. The lobster may be what people will remember. It's often talked of. The old question of whether it hurts for a lobster to be dropped into a pot of boiling water comes up repeatedly. If only David Foster Wallace could have been on hand to provide a thoughtful answer. The lobster develops serious health problems, and ultimately the Girl's aim to deposit it at the (famous?) Ming Island Lighthouse is thwarted for several reasons, a main one being that there is no lighthouse. Try as one might, one starts to care how things will turn out even if it may just be that they'll end; but darned if there isn't a sense of an ending, somehow.. A mite long, though.
Bipolar, 107 mins., debuted Feb. 3, 2021 at Rotterdam. Screened for this review as part of New Directors/New Films at MoMA and Lincoln Center, hybrid post-pandemic version Apr. 28-May 8, 2021.
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LEAH DOU IN BIPOLAR
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EL PLANETA (Amalia Ulman 2021)
AMALIA ULMAN: EL PLANETA (2021)
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ALEJANDRA AND AMALIA ULMAN IN EL PLANETA
Acts of random reality denial
Unless you're very rich, there is an edge between yourself and homelessness that is thinner than you may think, and this is a frightening fact the new Spanish comedy El Planeta gives us some bitter tastes of in its series of dry black and white (but mostly black) vignettes. The director is conceptual artist Amalia Ulman, who studied costume design at Central Saint Martins in London, whose history seems not unlike that of Leo, her character here. Her mother Ale Ulman is here too as the mother of "Leo" (Ms. Ulman), and they are living, barely, in Gijón, Asturia, in a flat where they can no longer pay the utility bills. They live by grifting and in self deception. But how much of comfortable bourgeois life, in a time of economic crisis, is a thing of self-deception and narrow margins?
Leo and her mother are stylish and the mother looks young. They like shopping. A credit card is still working and mom charges meals and food to a rich man friend who may or may not exist. Leo sells her sewing machine to someone, perhaps to afford a trip to New York where she has been requested to design outfits for Christina Aguilar; only it would be only for the prestige as the pay would be minimal. But she would take nothing less. As for her mother, she qualifies for virtually no benefits because she is considered a housewife, and she doesn't consider getting a job. So the time and money are running out.
In the opening scene, Leo is meeting with a married man who has answered her online self-advertisement as a sex worker. But his requirements are disgusting and his pay offer is derisory so it's a no-go. Later in a shop Leo meets Amadeus (Chen Zhou), a sometime London resident minding his relative's business. He seems attractive. He lures Leo into a date, which turns to sex at his place. The next day she learns he might buy the small shoes he's admiring for his son. He has a son and a wife too. Is that a thing? Yes, as a matter of fact it is.
Leo doesn't wear heels because she was in an accident as a result of which her legs hurt.
At the end, it seems mother is interested in how she's heard the food in prison is good.
This is a kind of bare bones sexually explicit pessimistic comedy that is stunning in its cold-bloodedness. It has been compared with early Jim Jarmusch, but where is the hilarity of Stranger Than Paradise and Down by Law? or the sense of orderly pacing? I found no delight here. What I did find was a mindset that's eye-opening about living on the edge and living by lies, women who call eating nothing but cookies and cakes a "disassociative diet" and who, when the electricity is turned off, switch to reading in bed on their cell phone, or peruse a book by the timed light in front of the elevator. In the daytime they shop and afterwards treat themselves to taxis. The end is in sight, but when it comes they'll never tell, not even one another.
Il Planeta 79 mins., debuted at Sundance, Jan. 2021. Screened at home for this review as part of New Directors/New Fims, MoMA and Film at Lincoln Center, Apr. 2021. Metascore 79%.
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FRIENDS AND STRANGERS (jAMES vAUGHAN 2021)
JAMES VAUGHAN: FRIENDS AND STRANGERS (2021)
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FERGUS WILSON AND GREG ZIMBULIS IN FRIENDS AND STRANGERS
Looking at a generation and a class in a very intentional piece of seeming randomness
An Australian film about "millennial ennui" and, possibly, deeper menace, James Vaughan's debut feature, which he also wrote, has very slow-moving dialogue that's caused it to be linked with mumblecore, but it has more of an agenda. It concerns Ray (Fergus Wilson), a twenty-something videographer who runs into Alice (Emma Diaz) in Sydney in the summertime. She is driving her brother's car to Brisbane and he joins her on an ill-starred camping trip. The two wind up together in a tent (zip, unzip, zip); Ray misunderstands what's going on (nothing), resulting in a very delayed-fusing (but short-lived) "comedy of manners and misunderstandings." The action is so slow, the conversation so inconsequential, it seems almost an acid trip. This quality will eventually be redoubled, or more. Soon Ray is back in Sydney running some errand with a friend, then having to be rescued by his disapproving mother when his car breaks down.
She wonders when he's ever going to amount to anything. An underlying message of the film is that this very question, seemingly threatening, is really a sign of safety, because it is only askeable by and of the semi-affluent. The answer doesn't matter because, whether Ray succeeds at anything or not, he'll be okay. Those who lack this level of ease don't have the luxury of asking.
The acid trip feel redoubles during Ray's visit to a seaside villa where he’s expected to film a wedding and wanders the house and talks to the bride's father David (Greg Zimbulis), a garrulous art collector with a pouty daughter, Sammy, lazing in her messy room. Ray's gets into dangerous territory again - it's largely his function to do so - when David makes seemingly damning remarks about artists whose works cover his walls floor to ceiling as being foul minded and deranged and Ray refers to it as "filth" and gets tromped on, also literally knocks a hole in a wall when pushed by David to test its strength. All the while from next door comes fluctuating, sometimes very loud and disturbing string music whose sound is very much on the order of fingernails clawing a blackboard. Mood quite effectively outweighs content here. Mumblecore obviously never achieved this level of menace, hysteria, of lurking horror.
Later the director rounds out his picture of social privilege by pointing out that, in fact, there is not a single non-white or probably non-Anglo person to be seen throughout this film. Ray winds up joining a tour of the fancy seaside property as it ends and a lady asks, "This may be a stupid question, but what about the aboriginal people, are there any around here?" The guide begins, "No, that's not a stupid question at all..." but somehow the tour gets interrupted at that point and there is never an answer. Ray goes swimming, and his mother comes to rescue him, brought by David who, no surprise, has discovered they're old school friends. Closing captions say "Filmed on the lands of the Eora and Ngunnawal peoples." Friends and strangers, indeed. A little film that begins by annoying and trying one's patience but ends up seeming pretty cool.
The cinematography of Dimitri Zaunders may mirror "the looks of surveillance footage" as Leonardo Goi writes in (The Film Stage but it's really quite handsome all through, especially when depicting landscape, and more strikingly it exudes a sunny, bland beauty that makes everything more trippy.
Friends and Strangers, 93 mins., debuted at Rotterdam Feb. 3, 2021, virtual also at Jeonju, it was screened online for this review as part of the MoMA/Film at Lincoln Center series New Directors/New Films (Apr. 28-May 8, 2021).
US release by Metrograph in theater and at home starting Feb. 25, 2022.
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PEBBLES ( P.S. Vinothraj 2021)
P.S. VINOTHRAJ: PEBBLES (2021)
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CHELLAPANDI IN PEBBLES
Raging in the heat in Tamil country
Pebbles is the grim drama of a alcoholic man, Ganapathy (theater actor Karuththadaiyaan) - also (in modern psycho-babble) a "rageaholic" - who drags his little son Velu (newcomer Chellapandi) out of school on a bus trip to his wife's impoverished village in the Tamil Madurai district after she runs away from his abusiveness. When he and the boy get to the town, they learn his wife has left to go back to him. Everyone heaps abuse on everyone else. All this takes place in remote southeastern India, Tamil country, which looks like the American southwest. It's so hot and dry nothing grows but wispy little trees. Women sit around waiting to grab rats when they're smoked out of their lairs, for food. The direness of the environment suggests the Australian outback, and these people feel a little like abandoned Australian aborigines.
Vinothraj shot the film in washed-out widescreen images with Sony A7 camera with CP.3 lenses: it's possible nowadays to get near-professional-quality visuals with a portable camera costing three or four thousand dollars and edit with the latest version of Apple Final Cut Pro. It's a particular advantage to work this light as an independent filmmaker can today when the subject is rugged country and unbearable weather like this. The determination, plus the modern technical efficiency of method, pay off as a combination in this powerful little film that Richard Brody of The New Yorker commends for "the stark clarity of its story and the audacity of its style" and calls "the best dramatic feature" in this year's New Directors/New Films series.
The ultimate subject is dire poverty aggravated by extreme drought. Rage and alcoholism are seen as almost, in a way, legitimate responses. It makes for what the jury at Rotterdam, giving Pebbles the highest "Tiger" award, called "pure cinema." But as Brody points out, Vinothraj is a keen observer of the social and physical details he finds and the momentary changes of situation and mood his story delineates, so people like a woman with a child in her lap on the back of the bus and angry riders who tangle with Ganapathy over his smoking stand out and are individually memorable, even extra tickets charged for pots of water and the loose pole detached from the bus's roof. Even Ganapathy standing and glaring in all directions, retying his lungi, or energetically lighting a cigarette: it all seethes with energy and menace, though menace we sense is going nowhere and in time will burn itself out. Velu is obedient, and follows, but also tears up the return bus tickets so they must walk back and runs the the opposite direction in powerful protest later on, and continues to provoke and sabotage is father in other ways, throwing away his matches and burning his father's bare back with a reflective shard. There is no order here but the background throb of desperation and the rage of one against another when all are victims, but the filmmaker creates his own sense of order and perhaps of hope through his relentless attention to physical detail and his gift for pauses and silences that give his little film its power and its passion, the sense of a story, however grim and petty, told extremely well and with precision.
Pebbles/Koozhangal, 75 mins., debuted at Rotterdam Feb. 2021 where it won the Tiger Award; FICUNAM, (Mexico, Jeonju (all internet). Screened at home online for this review as part of the MoMA/Film at Lincoln Center series New Directors/New Films (Apr. 28-May 8, 2021).
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LUZZU (Alex Camilleri. 2021)
ALEX CAMILLERI: LUZZU (2021)
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JESMARK SCICILUNA AND MICHELA FARRUGIA IN LUZZU
Maltese fisherman must give up his ancestral job
Luzzu is the kind of neorealist docudrama that never quite goes out of style. Not when it's about someplace unfamiliar or new (yet perennial) social problems. The luzzu is an archaic small fishing boat indigenous to the island of Malta, where this takes place. It's most unusual to see a movie actually set in Malta, and the dialogue may be the first time you've heard the Maltese language, a unique combination of Arabic, Italian and Sicilian with some English thrown in. Unlike Arabic or its many local dialects it's written in roman letters and has no diglossic linguistic relationship with classical or modern standard Arabic yet it's a Semitic language included in the European Union. The language dramatizes what a peculiar mixture these people are.
The protagonist, Jesmark ( Jesmark Scicluna) is a handsome, square-jawed young fisherman and son and grandson of fishermen who fished with the same luzzu boat, which for them was sustainable. In the current economic climate it's not. The movie piles problems on Jes and his wife Denise (Michela Farrugia), The old fishing boat leaks and requires extensive repair, which may not be enough. The couple's baby boy has growth problems requiring special diet and regular visits to expensive specialists. The local wholesale fish market appears corrupt, or at least discriminates against Jes and his father, whom he fishes with while his luzzu awaits repair. Regulations are so strict now Jes's father insists - following a dutiful call from his boat to the local fishing authorities on his cell phone to ask - very much against Jes's wishes - on throwing back a swordfish (dead because they die the minute they're out of water) which would have netted them hundreds of euros.
The safe alternative, a steady paycheck, for Jes would be going to work on a trawler. But he knows those damage the sea bed and he will not work a job that destroys the environment his family has been part of for generations. But while he is righteous, a big negative problem is his anger and big mouth. He is becoming persona non grata with a gathering number of people in the trade he has offended. It's classic, really: the biggest problems here are Jes and his luzzu - and they are where the movie hooks up our sympathies from frame one. Nothing is subtle here. But nothing gets in the way, either. So we are drawn in when Jes is tempted to throw in his lot with a lucrative but dangerous illegal black market operation having nothing to do with the sea.
Camilleri is a new voice on the world cinema scene who works in the neorealist tradition of early Visconti, Rossellini, the Dardenne brothers, and an American mentor, Ramin Bahrani, the Iranian American from the South whose early films, Man Push Cart (ND/NF 2006), and Goodbye Solo had a pleasing authenticity. He has gone in other, less effective directions with his socially conscious filmmaking since but producing efforts like this one are always welcome.
Luzzu,, 94 mins., debuted at Sundance Jan. 2021 (Sciciluna won an acting award at Sundance, where the film was nominated for the world Best Picture prize). It was also included in the Tronheiim Norway virtual fest, Sofia, and Hong Kong. Screened online for this review as part of the MoMA/Film at Lincoln Center series New Directors/New Films (Apr. 28-May 8, 2021).
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AZOR (Andreas Fontana 2021)
ANDREAS FONTANA: AZOR (2021)
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JUAN PABLO GERETTO (CENTER), FABRIZIO RONGIONE IN AZOR
The turning of a Swiss banker
With AzoR, Andreas Fontana's lavish debut is something rare, if not for every taste. It's a bit of a slow burner; its climax is a smug smile. Its score consists of discreet throbs, coming more often toward the end than at the beginning of an event. Believe it or not, it's a Swiss film about banking, private banking, that is. Coming at the latter part (1980) of Argentina's 1976-1983 "Dirty War," when assassinations, disappearances, and highway robbery were rife. Into this world comes Yvan De Wiel (Fabrizio Rongione), partner in a private Swiss bank that bears his name, with his wife Inés (Stéphanie Cléau), together on a visit to Buenos Aires from Geneva. He will have to clean up, repair bridges, meet people at the very top of the country's power structure. De Wiel's partner René Keys, who dealt with the Argentinians, has suddenly disappeared.
Technically, perhaps, this is an Argentinian film. Fontana is Swiss, but he makes his home in Argentina now. He is introducing someone he might have known into a world, that is a time, he himself is visiting - because he was not in Buenos Aires in 1980. This makes a nice companion piece for the early films of Pablo Larraín. It is more gilt-edged version of the South American dictatorship nightmare.
Graham Greene and Conrad have been mentioned, and also John Le Carré as shot by Coppola. This film is grand, and filled with menace. It is a very, very slow burner, but the menace is always there from the start. Even the language seems treacherous, the way everybody switches back and forth from French - to comfort De Wiel and his wife (but the latter is often excluded from discussions in this male-dominated country), or Spanish, to comfort everybody else. And you never know when they will switch, or what secrets anyone is harboring. You may want to say: Wait! Let the banker meet with people in a bank. Because there De Wiel might be more at ease, rather than a club belonging to the ruling junta, a race course, a lavish party, or a swimming pool, or driven somewhere in a car whose chauffeur he does not know. De Wiel doesn't even swim, ever, his wife says. Indeed he does not look good even in shirtsleeves. Throughout the many testing scenes the high-level mise-en-scène never ceases to impress and even to delight. Fontana seems to have all the means necessary at his disposal.
Much of the time, early on at least, De Wiel looks uncomfortable. Indeed the main job for actor Fabrizio Rongione (a Belgian, despite the name), one he performs extremely well, is very slowly and subtly to sweat, wilt, and go pale, while remaining impeccably polite and wearing the proper outfits and maintaining a superficially calm and proper demeanor. The object of De Weil's wife, when she appears, when not merely smoking a cigarette in a fine dress and talking to a sad woman from a once important family who has much to be silent about, is to give her husband pep talks, or chide him not to give in to cowardice or fear. Someone says of Keys's disappearance that any man has a right to be afraid at certain times and places. And indeed we sense that these scenes are such times and places. Thoroughbred horses and favorite daughters suddenly disappear all the time. Whether Keys got out or is locked in a basement is not entirely certain.
Slowly, De Wiel drifts into what is essentially insanity - learning to deal with a high level criminal element (one junta honcho is a collared monsignor). He is deeply uncomfortable with the idea of replacing Keys, evidently a bold, eccentric risk-taker whom everybody loved and utterly unlike himself. But probably his discretion will work better for the junta, in the end. The Heart of Darkness, after four other chapters, is "Lazaro." It is a place somewhere upriver, where De Weil will hear a lengthy listing of what must be essentially hundreds of millions of dollars worth of stolen goods these men would like him to help them turn into cash. As before, he maintains a calm demeanor. He is ready for it, after all. His wife was right, And the final image as he is taken back to town is that quiet, satisfied smile. It's a very neat and expressive ending to this thought-provoking film. Is the focus too specific and rooted in its time and place to be of wide interest? I didn't think that while watching Pablo Larraín's Tony Manero (NYFF 2008) and Post Mortem (NYFF (2010). They were more colorful. They had Alfredo Castro. But this is creepy in its own very confident way.
Cowritten by Fontana with Mariano Llinás, writer-director of the arthouse epic La Flor.
Azor, 100 mins., debuted March 2021 at the Berlinale; also showed at Moscow. It was screened online for this review as part of the MoMA/Film at Lincoln Center series New Directors/New Films (Apr. 28-May 8, 2021).
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WOOD AND WATER (Jonas Bak 2021)
JONAS BAK: WOOD AND WATER (2021)
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ANKE BAK IN WOOD AND WATER
A quiet visit to Hong Kong
Jonas Bak is a free lance photographer whose debut feature stars his mother, Anke Bak. Is this therapy, a way to reconnect? He himself lived some time in Hong Kong, location of most of the film, with his lawyer wife, unable to work in the film industry because he knew no Chinese. (He lived longer in Scotland, but that's not very far from Germany.) This is about an older woman's solitary journey to a faraway place to be briefly closer to her estranged son. The film doesn't particularly go anywhere, but it has a meditative quality. It may show how sometimes getting away can really be getting away. It's a bold journey for a reserved woman of a certain age, even if nothing much happens.
As the film begins, the mother's character retires at 60 from years of working in the office of a church in rural Germany. Her semi-estranged son (in the film) has been for years in Hong Kong and she hardly ever sees him. He can't come for a family celebration scheduled for now so she decides to go to Hong Kong to see him. They chat on the phone and he says this will work. He arranges for her to stay at his apartment there, but he's never around that we ever see; she is left on her own. She is a quiet, placid soul, so she handles this pretty well. The apartment at least has big windows with rather spectacular views. As to the result, Bak has alluded to "slow cinema."
She is lucky in having pleasant encounters, though nothing dramatic or exciting, despite the fact that the Hong Kong protests of 2019-20 are in full swing. One day she can see a long parade of demonstrators from the window. The first day, she can't get in at the late hour when she arrives at her son's apartment building and she has to stay at a hostel-like place in a bedroom shared with a young woman. However the young woman is chatty and tells her briefly her "story." Later, the (as promised) friendly building receptionist accompanies her to lunch at a friend's restaurant, and another day, lets her come to the park to do tai chi with him. By chance she goes by herself to a fortune teller. An elementary school classmate, a retired art teacher, is there and can translate for her.
The essence of her fortune is that her element is water. This means she is noble and respected by many people, but her children will leave her, and she needs wood, and must live near it. This rings true for her, obviously, for the children leaving, and she happens to live on the edge of the Black Forest, near wood. That night, she dreams of a forest. Another day she goes to a therapist her son has seen, following a paper she found lying around, and learns he has been diagnosed with anxiety depression and is taking medications for that.
Bak spends no time getting from here to there or back again. He has evidently saved only the parts of his 16mm shooting that he liked. In an interview with a Berlinale organizer he has explained that the film is different from what he had planned, that his mother said that she would never do things in the script, so he scrapped them. He said he now hopes to make this the first part of a trilogy, the next two being about the son, though the mother will have to make an appearance. He doesn't know if his mother will oblige. One wonders who he'll cast as the son, and if the storyline will get closer to his own life, or diverge more.
As Beatrice Loayza says in her generally favorable comment on this film in her New York Times 2021 ND/NF preview , Bak avoids a "white woman finding herself in a foreign land" trajectory, partly because of the pull of the omnipresent (but avoided) demonstrations; I'd say also because of Anke Bak's evident placidity and good nature. She seems to know who she is, though she has no need to tell anybody. She tells the therapist her husband and her son's father died when her son was seven, and this may have traumatized him. Her, perhaps not so much? But the self discovery trajectory surely isn't entirely avoided. The fortune teller must provide food for thought, and the visit with the son's therapist too. Surely there is some "finding herself" in these two encounters.
But many questions are left unanswered and even unasked, and as Beatrice Loayza also says, not much happens. This is a genre of "gentle" festival film that provides background for viewer meditations, the gathering of a peaceful mood. At the heart of this mood is Anke Bak. In seeming to listen to her nature, and even delve deeper through the medium of the Chinese fortune teller, Bak may have provided through fiction what he was originally planning to provide in record, non-fiction form.
MoMA/Film at Lincoln Center series New Directors/New Films (Apr. 28-May 8, 2021). It will be presented at the Berlinale in June. h will be released theatrically in New York at MoMA on March 24, 2022, Los Angeles on Fry, Apr 15 at the Lumiere Music Hall.with a national release to follow.
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ALEPH (Iva Radivojevic 2021)
IVA RADIVOJEVIC: ALEPH (2021)
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A PHILOSOPHICAL DISCUSSION IN A DINER IN ALEPH
A wagon hitched to Borges shoots for the stars
The title is a nod to Jorge Luis Borges' famous short story "The Aleph", which is one of his many references to the nature of infinity, endlessness, labyrinths, and the illusion of reality. Iva Radivojevic 's Aleph is a travelogue of experience, a dreamer's journey through the lives, experiences, stories and musings of a series of protagonists spanning, the notes tell us, ten countries, five continents, multiple languages. I lost count after a while; it starts with American English, Spanish, and Arabic. Radivojevic lives in Brooklyn but spent her early life, we are told, in the endless libraries of Yugoslavia and Cyprus.
Borges is a conceptual writer. His stories are not stories but ideas for stories, stories within stories within stories whose brilliance is so great he is a main reason for John Barth in the late sixties writing about "The Literature of Exhaustion" - that is, a literature in which all ideas have been thought of, and therefore exhausted. It's a high-concept, self-reflective, post-modern fiction and Borges was in some sense the last word, and yet he is loved for that. He is one of the great masters. He can wipe out a whole genre with a two-paragraph sketch.
The Aleph in Borges' conception is a dot - in Arabic it is the first letter, and a straight line, which can also be the beginning of any word that starts with a vowel - and within that dot is all things, all scenes all angles. It can also be a line of wood, in it too is all things.
Iva Radivojevic's "Aleph" starts with this high ambition, but Borges is a big name to hitch your wagon to. Having scenes in multiple languages turns out not to work very well, and the film winds up feeling anecdotal and, worst of all, pretentious and moody, or in the case of several interchangeable young women, one Slavic, another Indian, depressed and pouty. This is not a kind of world-weariness that impresses. A young bedouin man who dances and asks big questions in Arabic dialect creates a better impression. He has energy and humor. But after a while it all begins to blur. The "wildly eclectic" and multi-national New Directors/New Films collection doesn't need to pile on further eclecticism within an individual film whose sequences are simply tacked together in the hopes that the result will seem complex and profound. Perhaps her high concept will bear better fruit another time.
Aleph, 90 min., debuts at New Directors/New Films 2012. It was screened at home for this review.
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APPLES (Christos Nikou 2020)
CHRISTOS NIKOU: APPLES (2020)
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ALIS SERVETALIS IN APPLES
Looking for a past, a present, and a future in an amnesiac world
Mention has been made of the Greek Weird Wave and Nikou worked with Yourgos Lanthimos on Dogtooth, but he has his own voice in this philosophical sci-fi film, and it's a humanistic one. Yes, this is a kind of pandemic setting, or more like an epidemic, of amnesia, in Athens. But the focus isn't at all on a collective event, which is only background. Mainly we are interested in Aris (Aris Servetalis), aka Number 14842, a gloomy bearded man, who is found on a bus at the end of the line having forgotten where he was going, and his name, and everything else. This is a familiar situation, it turns out: he's taken to the hospital's Disturbed Memory Department where there are plenty like him.
After days or weeks pass and no family members claim him, he's set up to build new memories of his own, supplied with an austere, empty apartment, and a woman in charge of the unclaimed and her bearded, bossy cohort give him instructions delivered to him in his mailbox periodically on cassette tapes. Dutifully following these, he does things like go to bars, buy apples, dance, have anonymous sex, ride a bike (nobody forgets how to do that, remember) and - essential to the program - takes Polaroid photos of himself doing these various things, thus accumulating new "memories" that he puts in a snapshot album.
Also he meets a woman at a movie, Anna (Sofia Georgovassili), who's amnesiac too, in the same program. She has more Polaroids, and thus appears to be a little ahead of him. On the other hand he seems to be getting real memories back maybe better than she is and, after all, this is a pretty Mickey Mouse program they're in anyway. One big thing is that he's quite a good cook. He knows how. Oddly however we mostly see him only eating apples, though one day he switches to oranges when the grocer says they're said to stimulate memory.
On a night out at a club, following a taped instruction, with Anna, he gradually starts dancing, and gets better and better. It's "The Twist." (This film is determinedly retro, and not at all realistic. The way Servetalis does this gradual dance reawakening is hilarious and nicely modulated. ) He seems to avoid chances for sex with Anna. Maybe he just doesn't like her; or maybe he is remembering somebody else, someone important and real. Another effort is to find emotional memories by attending to the mortally ill at a hospital and then going to their memorial services, and this leads to a memorable surprise.
The simple, golden-brown-toned, boxy-formated, warmly austere way this film is presented contributes to a very specific mood, suggesting when you've got nothing you've still, after all, damned well got something. Somewhere in there is your humanity. This is the quality that most appeals about Apples, though it is sometimes undermined and loses pace midway due to a sallow, slack quality, expressed directly in physical poses and facial expressions adopted a lot by Servetalis early on. This down-at-the-mouth-ness links the film more with George Orwell than Charlie Kaufman. Sequencing of events can also seem a little random at times. But these are small reservations. Apples is distinctive and works. Nikou is a significant new talent with a story to tell and a sureness about telling it. This is a new angle on the existential modern dilemma.
Apples/μήλα, (Mila) 91 mins., debuted at Venice Sept. 2020. Twenty other important international festivals are listed including Toronto, Zurich, Hamburg, Chicago, Mill Valley, AFI, Tokyo and Miami. Screened at home for this review as part of the MoMA/Film at Lincoln Center series New Directors/New Films (Apr. 28-May 8, 2021). Metacritic: 81%.
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ROCK BOTTOM RISER (Fern Silva 2021)
FERN SILVA: ROCK BOTTOM RISER (2021)
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VOLCANO IMAGE FROM ROCK BOTTOM RISER
This short experimental documentary feature packs in a lot about Hawaii
Rock Bottom Riser, whose subject is Hawaii, is Portuguese American Fern Silva's first feature, an experimental documentary that it's been said Werner Herzog would be proud to have made - which seems quite true though this is in no way derivative work. It's a short film, only 70 minutes, but packed with information with many twists and turns that work fine because they're all part of the complexity of a subject that encompasses indigenous people, white colonialism, science vs. native craft and art, cluelessness, stoner nuttiness, spectacular lava from live volcanoes, and a surfer sailing in on a long easy wave. The natural scenes, especially the volcanoes, make this clearly a film designed to be spectacular on a very large screen though many will have to see it in the largely virtual New Directors/New Films this year. There are texts, there are speeches, there are scenes of deep unperceived absurdity, all this so concentrated that second viewings would be beneficial.
"...Silva catapults us through a fiery wormhole, runs us through a forest glimpsed in infrared (shades of Predator), and allows us to glide above the Earth as fiery magma belches out of the Kilauea volcano in Hawaii and flows around a small village like a river of fire, as a burbling Carpenteresque synth score fills the soundtrack. And that’s just the first five minutes of this at once playful and serious avant-garde documentary, which offers a consistently unpredictable survey of Hawaiian history, culture, and political issues..." (Keith Watson in Slant)
From NotMattDamon on Letterboxd:
"this documentary has everything
cool nature shots
A Simon and Garfunkel deep-cut
hard to decipher science
vape tricks
Dwayne the rock Johnson
Dramatic monologues."
More from Keith Watson:
"The film puts particular emphasis on the tense interplay between Western notions of scientific inquiry and indigenous rights, with the battle over the proposed construction of an astronomical observatory on top of Mauna Kea—the most sacred site in native Hawaiian culture—serving as a focal point. The Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), as the project is known, is positioned as both a colonialist substitution of indigenous modes of inquiry and a Trojan horse for the further displacement and carceralization of native Hawaiians."
If it works, when you're done watching all these things are whirling around in your head: the sweet, clueless lady and her middle class white class sitting to learn about the "poetry" of Paul Simon's "I Am a Rock": we hear the song and watch the rapt listeners, but are spared the explanation. At the "Volcano" vape shop we watch a spectacular display of smoke vaping and smoke-ring making by a trio of regulars, and this comes after a lot of volcano footage so the overlap is doubly or triply trippy. The "cool nature shots" resonate strongly with the issue of indigenous sacred land that is particularly intense in Hawaii and Silva's underlying motivation.
As Watson hints, and the Letterboxd list notes, there is some pretty incomprehensible professorial blackboard-jotting talk about stars. But there is another talk with a heavy French accent that justifies space exploration and future colonization as well as I've ever heard it done. A seduction? Dwayne Johnson, also often seductive, we see here distanced, a shot of him on a TV screen on a wall, as he unconvincingly and repetitively claims objections to his upcoming playing of King Kamehameha are being nicely sorted out.
Which of these and the various other pungent sequences you will like best or find most significant will depend on you and may change on subsequent viewings. They are all there, they all fit, and there is an admirable avoidance of cliché in the choices. Even the final surfer sequence feels fresh because it's so simply shot. Werner Herzog, take note. This is a film that's both passionate and witty. Promising work.
A FSC-Harvard fellow, Fern Silva is a faculty member at Bennington College. He received his BFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design and MFA from Bard.
Rock Bottom Riser, 74 min., Color, 5.1 Sound, Super 16mm/35mm, debuted in Paris at Cinéma du réel in March 2021. It also showed at the Berlinale in March in the Encounters section, receiving special mention. Watched online at home as part of its US debut in New Directors/New Films.
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MADALENA (Madiano Marcheti 2021)
MADIANO MARCHETI: MADALENA (2021)
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PÂMELLA YULE IN MADALENA
Repercussions of the murder of a trans person in Brazil's Centro Oeste
Madiano Marcheti takes an overlooked issue and makes it more haunting by indirection. A body is "found" (by the camera) at the outset in a vast soya field where it's doubtless been dumped. It is the corpse of Madalena, a young trans woman. Brazil has more than twice the number of trans murders than the next Latin American country, Mexico. But while the film points out Brazil's terrible trans statistic in a closing caption, Marcheti isn't interested in the "issue" simply as such or the police procedural aspects of the narrative. The film doesn't explore the murder. Instead it quietly follows brief periods in the lives of three people indirectly touched by this event but unrelated to each other. The fluency of the filmmaking, the perfect pitch of the scenes, are what make this an impressive, memorable, and formally audacious debut. Unlike the proverbial pistol that must be used if it is introduced in the play, a corpse need not be explained but will nonetheless greatly heighten the focus and tension of what follows. And the apparent unconcern about this individual death is itself a pungent comment on a widespread and terrible problem.
The film establishes how vast the soy fields are. It turns out they have been consolidated in the hands of a single agribusiness family, but that's not explained. We see the plants waving in the wind and big agricultural machines to work them. But men have to go through doing something by hand (picking weeds?). Overseeing the whole thing is a veritable cloud of drones (to check on the men, perhaps?) and ironically looking, as if spying, groups of rheas, flightless birds with long waving necks and long beaks who seem to be scanning the horizon, enigmatically looking for trouble.
Marcheti doesn't have to connect the three parts because they're not connected; that's the point; but they have a rising and falling dramatic arc with sharp internal contrasts. They start out cheerily with a portrait of the local population with its poverty, pursuit of pleasure, and sexism; move on to a unique individual whose special connection to the event heightens tension to a high pitch; then taper off with a comrade of the deceased who is sad but philosophical, and, after all, pursuing her own pursuits, but by her nature more affected - and endangered - than others.
Luziane (Natália Mazarim) is a pretty young cis gender woman who works as hostess at a noisy club called Texas. Her primary concern about the disappearance of Madalena is that the latter owes her money, and she is struggling to pay for her new Vespa-style motorbike. Young men surround her and vaguely menace her. She has to get tough with a wise-ass young "bro" who tries to park his vehicle in front of the club, and she stands watching a group of showoff "bros" doing flashy wheelies with their bikes. She actually gets into Madalena's little pad and hunts for money. We learn the farm workers live in rows of tiny cement hovels.
Jump to the other economic extreme, Cristiano (Rafael de Bona), a tall, good looking, but not very secure young man whose father owns the whole vast farm and from whom he expects to inherit it, and whose mother is in politics with an election coming. It appears that he visits the farm every day and oversees what's going on, while he must field over-critical and over-demanding calls from his absent father. His discovery of the body puts him in a state of panic. This is bad for the farm and could be ruinous for is mother's election. It is his responsibility to hush it up but he doesn't know what to do. He can't tell anyone about it, not even his friend Gildo (Antonio Salvador), who he wants to have help him. His father's call demanding he start harvesting that night leads him to escape into vaping and drinking, and, thus fortified, he takes Gildo out to the fields but there is no understanding. There's excellent buildup of tension throughout this sequence and, if you are identifying, you are seeing how totally everything, for Cristiano, revolves around Cristiano.
Last we spend time with Bianca (Pâmella Yule), a young trans woman who revisits Madalena's abandoned house with younger trans friends and they each gather up some possessions as mementoes. Later Bianca goes on an outing with two friends. Does Madalena appear as a ghost to her? (She believes in flying saucers.) There is a feeling of homage or farewell, but also that they are not lost in sorrow. It's over. It happened. But the stream they bathe in has the air of being a place where you might meet up with crocodiles or snakes. It's a symbol of the danger trans people, particularly trans women of color, live in everywhere, not just in Brazil. But with Marcheti, what impresses is an ability to drop into lives with astonishing quickness and confidence, relating them effortlessly to a larger, and complex, situation. Use of the whole milieu, the unforced portraiture of the Centro Oeste region, is assured and impressive, too.
Madalena, 85 mins., first showed, in progress, at San Sebastiàn Sept. 2019, and debuted at Rotterdam Feb. 3, 2021 (virtual). Screened at home for this review as part of the MoMA/Film at Lincoln Center series New Directors/New Films (Apr. 28-May 8, 2021).
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RADIOGRAPH OF A FAMILY (Firouzeh Khosrovani 2020)
Firouzeh Khosrovani: RADIOGRAPH OF A FAMILY (2021)
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A life in Iran told with reinvented photographs and dialogue
This is certainly an interesting and, for a non-Iranian, surprising family. Basically the older father of the filmmaker marries his younger wife from a distance, because, he says, he can't take the time away from his medical studies in Switzerland, where he's been for years training as a radiologist. The future mother's marriage ceremony is performed with a portrait photo standing in for the groom. The bride then comes from Iran to Geneva to live with her husband. He is liberal and secular and she is a hijab-wearing devout muslim. Maybe his commitment to liberalism wasn't 100%. Maybe he has a tendency for self-sabotage.
She is never happy with living in the secular, western environment, though she does apparently learn French, calls her husband "misyew," and for a while gives up the veil. After she gets pregnant and then suffers a severe back injury while skiing (to please her husband), she prevails upon him to return to Iran. (X-rays of the mother's damaged back further carry out the radiology theme.)
As little Firouzeh grows up, mom takes charge. She becomes a follower of a radical Islamist leader and this empowers her. When her husband asks to return to Switzerland because it's too dangerous in the chaos of revolutionary Iran, mom refuses. She takes over the school teaching job of a teacher expelled by the Islamists, and is so successful she becomes the principal.
To fit revolutionary ideals, the spacious house is stripped of silver, glassware, paintings, and lampshades. We don't actually see this, of course. The filmmaker uses a big living room throughout like a stage set, moving things around in it to suggest how the family lifestyle changes. This is only one way the film is fanciful, not literal, in its presentation of information. But more of that later. It gets weirder. The house is used for religious banquets. Mother gets military training and goes off to the front during the Iraq-Iran war. She makes sure father silences his Bach (western classical music is not approved, never was, for her) and listens to it on headphones. Somehow they seem to remain in the same house. One day the father dies, in his last time still listening to Bach on his headphones.
In his Hollywood Reporter review, Stephen Dalton calls this a"stylized documentary," and "an elegantly composed mosaic of real events and artfully restaged memories." The trouble with this method, for me, is that after a while one doesn't know which photos are authentic and which ones are artfully faked. Is the elderly lady at the end, sitting in that symbolic room and frailly reciting with a Qur'an, the filmmaker's mother? There is no way of knowing. At that point it would hardly matter. She is used symbolically. Unlike factual documentaries of lives, this one does not interrogate living people or in any way allow them to speak for themselves. Firouzeh's mother and father speak almost entirely in invented dialogue read by actors.
Another problem is that there are never ages of people given or dates for events. By looking up on Google, I found out that the funeral in London of the Islamist revolutionary that the mother goes to by herself was in 1977, but we don't know how old Firouzeh was then. It would certainly have been nice to know how old the mother and father were when they married. Probably the disparity was dramatic and the mother was a teenager. More importantly one would like to learn a little more that's specific about events in Iran.
And finally, this film tells us almost nothing about the filmmaker growing up at the time when this story is happening. What did she feel? Apparently she sided with her father and was largely ignored by her mom. What kind of school did she go to? What was her life like? What were her sorrows and joys? Where does she live now and what is her life like today? It turns out all those stylishly recreated or invented films and snapshots leave big gaps in a story that remains very impressionistic. Perhaps this reflects Firouzeh's remoteness from both parents, growing up.
In contrast one thinks of Persepolis, the four-volume series of Bande dessinées (French comics) published 2000-2004 by Marjane Satrapi and the lively film version (NYFF 2007) made in collaboration with Vincent Paronnaud with the voices of Chiara Mastroianni, Catherine Deneuve, and Danielle Darrieux for the main women. Satrapi lived through the Iranian revolution and left Iran for good, for France, in 1994, at twenty-four. Her focus is on her own constantly changing ideas, growing up, spurred by the waves of Islamism and a Marxist-Leninist uncle. She is lively and outspoken, goes to French school in Vienna for a while, has sex and experiences the double lives the bourgeois Iranians were living. There is more about external events and when things are happening. Firouzeh's film weaves its own magic, I suppose, but it leaves me feeling hungry and makes me feel uncomfortable, even depressed. Persepolis is meatier stuff. It's fanciful too - it's a graphic novel, after all - but you feel the presence of real people.
Radiograph of a Family, 82 mins., debuted at Amsterdam Nov. 2020 (two awards) and has been included in over half a dozen other international festivals including Goteborg, Sofia, Hon Kong and Jeonju. Screened at home for this review as part of the MoMA/Film at Lincoln Center series New Directors/New Films (Apr. 28-May 8, 2021).
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SHORT VACATION ( Kwon Min-pyo & Seo Han-sol. 2021)
KWON MIN-PYO & SEO HAN-SOL: SHORT VACATION (2021)
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Snapping the world's end with a plastic camera
Jake Cole describes Short Vacation in his review for Slant as "an austere, poignant reverie about life's promise." You might see it that way, but on the face of it, this little film focused on four teenage girls is not so much "about" anything. The young filmmakers have made a film about four Korean junior high girls. Their names are not changed; they are just "being themselves" in a constructed, improvised slice of life. Early sequences show them with their teacher, Mr. Kang, who heads their photography club. It hasn't yet led to any photography. Seeking to remedy this, before school lets out for the summer he gives them each a throwaway 35mm. film camera loaded with a roll of film and tells them their summer vacation assignment is to use these to take pictures of "the end of the world." It's a challenge to find a symbolic scene or image that leads to a day and night together when the girls get to know each other better, have some quiet fun, and take some pictures.
These scenes are largely improvised. What do the the girls learn? You'd have to ask them. This is a movie about nothing - the hardest kind to describe. It is the sum total of many little non-events that add up to a feeling of hanging out with four Korean teen girls, all in the same class, three who knew each other and one newbie who fits quickly in. Its extremely low key naturalism is what it has to offer. In that improvisational, hanging out style it may capture what it would really be like in the company of these four girls. . . hanging out.
They get along together very well, forming two compatible pairs in a harmonious quartet. Their "end of the world" project resolves, somehow, into the decision to try to take the Seoul subway to the end of the line. Maybe that will have an "end of the world" quality This is what leads to their adventure, which is to get a little lost and wind up, in the rain, too far from home to go back that evening. They decide reluctantly to sleep at an empty senior center. It becomes a sort of pajama party where they sit up talking much of the night, especially about their grandparents.
There is no "end of the world" - no setting that gives off that aura for the girls. The end of the line has turned out to look a lot like every other station, so they take a hike further in search of a more remote one. They find restaurants, old folks, dogs, and a cat and after trying to escape the rain but then, it being a hot summer day, give up and enjoy getting wet. There is no epiphany, no tragedy. The worst thing that happens is that one of the girls disappears for a while (she is feeding a cat) and their smartphone batteries run out and they can't recharge them. When they realize it's too far and too complicated from the subway main line to get back in the dark and rain, they show some concern about the building they are going to stay in. Will somebody come in? Is it too "gross"? But they don't show much concern about their parents worrying. They think they can just be "pitiful" and say they were lost and they'll be forgiven for being out all night.
Thus is this film structured to avoid all drama even when drama might loom. The aim seems to be simply to put the four girls together, away from other influences and people so we can hear them interact. Their silly, trivial conversation becomes a stream of young consciousness, a dial tone of placid adolescence. You must learn to praise this film for being so uninteresting, so uneventful. Because anything else would have distracted from its aim.
Short Vacation/Jong chak yeok79 mins., debuted Mar. 2021 in the Berlinale's Generation section, also in festivals at Busan and Seoul. Screened at home for this review as part of the MoMA/Film at Lincoln Center series New Directors/New Films (Apr. 28-May 8, 2021).
Somewhat surprisingly but gratifyingly, in a private review Mike D'Angelo rates this a for him enthusiastic 71/100 (May 26, 2021) and hopes it gets US distribution. That would be nice.
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WE ARE ALL GOING TO THE WORLD'S FAIR (Jane Schoenbrun 2021)
JANE SCHOENBRUN: WE'RE ALL GOING TO THE WORLD'S FAIR (2021)
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Perhaps a calmer look at online obsessions
Focused on a lonely young woman stuck in her attic room playing an internet game, Jane Schoenbrun's film seeks to depict the way in which for some, mostly of the younger generation, obsession with the online world can seem to veritably suck away the soul - figuratively speaking, I hasten to say. That this is a frightening, disturbing prospect is an impression augmented by focusing on an online game developed out of horror movies. The actress playing this person, the voluntary victim, whose name is Casey, Anna Cobb, has a sort of deep involvement in her role and an open, childlike face that many reviewers have commented on favorably, predicting a future for Cobb. Unfortunately there is no escape from the fact that the film itself is stultifyingly boring, dreary and uneventful. Some have noted that it makes 85 minutes seem like quite a long time.
The use of webcams and smartphone cameras for the images offers a new direction for variety in film images, appropriate for depicting this kind of world. Use of these media in film seems not very hopeful for those who value sophisticated visual technique and aesthetics; but you never know what an inventive new eye can do with a different medium. Sean Baker's debut of Tangerine, six years ago, was a sterling example. It sparkles, the look enhancing the lively personalities depicted. And it was shot with no professional or even quality amateur lenses but nothing but three iPhone 5s cameras.
The phone images were enhanced, though, using a small battery of cool modern tools: the FiLMIC Pro app, a video app to control focus, aperture and color temperature and capture video clips at higher bit-rates; and, importantly, an anamorphic adapter for widescreen imagery. The digital tools underfunded, minimalist filmmakers have at their disposal today are a main way that they can produce attractive results with economic means. Schoenbrun isn't interested in that however but in suggesting the dreary, limited technology unsophisticated online geeks are satisfied with.
At the outset the film takes eight minutes of us in effect staring through a webcam disturbingly alone with Casey - who would want to be such a person? Who would want to be stuck with her? The effect is "real" in having no feeling of being edited or being a real film made for an audience. But this is the kind of "realism" that is achieved at the terrible cost of boring the pants off of us. The saving grace: it's creepy. And the "point" is that Casey is announcing her signing up, though whatever that means exactly wasn't clear to me, for the "World's Fair Challenge," which is billed as the internet's "scariest horror game."
This game is further depicted as altering participants in frightening ways, such as making one guy unable to feel his own body. But though Casey seems creepy and sad in her isolation from human, live society and her lack of apparent affect, she appears relatively bright and cheery describing what she's about, going out in the snow with her webcam (leaving her room a potentially hopeful sign) and declaring, matter-of-factly, "I love horror movies and thought it might be cool to try living in one."
I fell asleep after that, figuratively, as the leaden pace continues, though it is clear Casey dons some kind of horror mask, and connects with an older man who creepily follows her, directing her to film herself sleeping and then obsessively watches her, though in the end he seems concerned for her well being. Reviewers have commented favorably on the fact that all this does not lead to some kind of gruesome apocalypse; that the film depicts an internet-obsessed life as more routine than outsiders might think, and less harmful, if not ideal for developing young minds and bodies. But as the film concludes, it seems this world - not so different from the online chat rooms of the eighties, by the way - can easily become a hiding place for a young person in need of psychological help, and not getting it this way.
I asked myself if this could constitute a viable "High Maintenance" episode and I had to say not.
We Are All Going to the World's Fair, 85 mins., debuted at Sundance Jan. 2021. Screened at home for this review as part of the MoMA/Film at Lincoln Center series New Directors/New Films (Apr. 28-May 8, 2021).
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LIBORIO (Nino Martinez Sosa 2021)
NINO MARTINEZ SOSA: LIBORIO (2021)
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KARINA VALDES (RIGHT) IN LIBORIO
Revisiting a popular Dominican legend
This new film from the Dominican Republic starts out on the wrong foot for me. It's always risky to begin a movie at top speed because the audience isn't ready; and where can you go from there? A hurricane is something you need to build up to, but Nino Martinez Sosa, the maker of LIborio,, opens with his protagonist in shirtsleeves battling the hurricane that is going to temper him, somehow, into a man with healing and forgiving powers. But this remarkable event is allowed only four minutes to unroll. It's violent and noisy, but it's only a big man in a damp shirt roiling around. It seems both too much and not enough.
Sosa sets out to tell the 'true' story of Olivorio Mateo, a peasant who according to legend returned from a battle with a hurricane transformed also into a leader of local people. He acquires a following and moves around the countryside directing spiritual gatherings, doing good, and so forth. (He doesn't always heal. When a woman comes asking her lost son to be brought back to life, he disappoints her.) The actors and rural settings are attractive, though sometimes the filmmaking seems as naive as the characters. The whole thing seems rather like a ballet, and like a ballet, it shows generic figures and does not delve beyond the surface.
The seven sections of the story - Liborio, Returns from heaven, To move the people, And raise the dead, Of this land of ours, Tearful, Blessed, present events from changing points of view toward the emerging but always somewhat mysterious "Papá Liborio." There’s his grown son, who is happy to find his father alive and becomes his chief follower. There is Matilde (Karina Valdes), the woman in who attaches herself to him as a follower and second in command and becomes the mother of his child. There is an outsider and recent convert who remains suspicious to others. And so on. This multifaceted approach doesn't hide the fact that the film unquestioningly believes in Father Liborio - until the US invasion comes.
At that point it soon turns out to be a pet project of the local Marine commanding officer, Captain Williams (Jeffrey Holsman), to destroy Liborio, whose independent authority is seen as an obstacle to American colonial interests.
On the one hand this sleepy production finally gets a slight jolt past midway with the arrival of the odious Capt. Williams. On the other hand this development only further highlights the simplistic nature and naiveté of a film that never seems confident of its storytelling or distinctive in its cinematic style. While Oscar Duran’s cinematography is handsome, it needs a further edge to convey the sort of numinous magic we believe to be experienced by the Father's followers who come to accept him as a reincarnation of Jesus.
Liborio is an admirable stab at recreating local legend and reviving national culture. But it seems too much of a stretch to compare this film as some have done to Lucrecia Martel's complex, historically precise Zama. It lacks that kind of stylistic flair.
Liborio, 95 mins., 99 mins., debuted Feb. 2021 at Rotterdam, also showing at Göteborg, Tertio Millennio (Rome), FICUNAM (Mexico), and San José (Costa Rica). Screened at home for this review as part of the MoMA/Film at Lincoln Center series New Directors/New Films (Apr. 28-May 8, 2021).
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TAMING THE GARDEN (Salomé Jashi 2021)
SALOMÉ JASHI: TAMING THE GARDEN (2021)
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TREE MOVED ON BARGE IN TAMING THE GARDEN
TRAILER
Collecting trees in rural Georgia
Taming the Garden tells about this extremely, obscenely rich Georgian guy called Ivanishvili, the former Prime Minister who loves trees - big, old ones, hundred-year-old trees, and buys them from farmers here and there in Georgia, and, at enormous expense, his own expense but also some public inconvenience and sometimes shock to the locals, moves them to his own private compound park on his estate in Shekvetili. There are articles about Ivanishvili's tree collecting hobby here and there. Large trees are regularly moved as a way of preserving them. It's not such an eccentric practice as some may think, and moving a full-grown tree may not be prohibitively expensive. But this is the Guinness Book of Records of tree moving.
It has caused power lines to be taken down temporarily, and whole main roads into a town to be shut down for a day at times. For the trees to be taken down the road to the coast where they're ferried across the water slowly on a barge to the park, some tress may have to be chopped down along the road. How do you lift a big tree with its roots out of the ground? Well, it's a bit of a mystery but we see long pipes with drills being inserted in the ground alongside each other under a couple of trees, and then we see the large section containing the roots contained by planks. And all along we have heard the sound of metal and saws.
Jashi, the filmmaker, is often most interested, as we are, in the people. For a while she hangs out watching experienced tree men and hearing their chatter. More often she watches oldsters around a farm watching when a tree gets taken away. A 75-year-old lady remembers planting some trees when she was twenty-five. When she was that age a now 100-year-old tree was relatively young. All kinds of family histories are tied in with the old trees. Rumor has it that some old tree or trees got severely damaged in this process, or had some limbs lopped off, and lost some of their looks. A tree, though, is a being that grows more beautiful in old age. When these trees are removed, there is compensation, but no filling is provided for the empty space that is left behind. Houses may be hotter in summer. Foliage may be sorely missed.
There is a lot of complaining. Some farm family members say they felt coerced. But they don't claim that the have been cheated. Some say they will miss the tree; others say it always made a mess, it got in the way of the orchard, or they wanted to get rid of it but couldn't. Certainly Ivanishvili has the power here, the power of money, plus the power of political influence.
Ivanishvili gets the last word, though, and some objections may be stilled by what they see at the end. The final ten minutes or so of the film are taken at his park of very old trees. It's amazingly beautiful. The trees look like they belong together; this seems an over-tended but extraordinarily rich forest. Grounds are being cared for by little crawling green machines operated by two men. Wide but unobtrusive paths wander through. A watering system also wanders this way and that. Even the way it sprays is graceful. The place is in its way a masterpiece. The trees by their nature are very individual; they don't look posed or organized. One can only hope that some day this will be open to the public - but not too many at a time.
I was seduced, at least. Others simply find this whole film "surreal," and Allan Hunter of Screen Daily thinks the park looks like "the secluded lair of a Bond villain." Yes, perhaps so; but didn't you ever want to be a Bond Villain? This is a billionaire who has made a natural fantasy real. If the choice is between Bolsonaro tearing down the Amazonian rain forest and this guy, I'll go for this guy. And I liked this filmmaker's quiet observational approach and subtle use of music.
Taming the Garden, 86 mins., debuted at Sundance Jan. 2021; it was also shown at the Berlinale, Cinéma du réel (Paris), FICUNAM (Rome), Docudays UA International (Ukraine), and Hong Kong. Screened at home for this review as part of the MoMA/Film at Lincoln Center series New Directors/New Films (Apr. 28-May 8, 2021).
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WE (NOUS) Alice Diop 2021)
ALICE DIOP: WE (NOUS) (2021)
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POSH TRADITIONAL HUNTERS IN NOUS
A search for unity in diversity - along the rail line
Documentary filmmaker Alice Diop grew up in the banlieue of Paris as the daughter of African immigrants. For years they made payments to arrange to have their remains returned to their native Senegal upon their demise. But when they asked her as a teenager to start making such payments for herself, she had to tell them that she had no desire to do that; she would stay in France, in death as in life.
But how much is she "intégrée" in the contemporary "multicultural" France? How much is it really multicultural? These are questions that probably hovered as she made this subtle, observational new documentary film, shot, she says, obsessively "en banlieue" (in the suburbs) and about people living nearby and around but not in Paris along the dividing RER B intra-city train line as she shot everyone, from a mechanic living out of his van to people who still hunt in a lush preserve with wild game. (The RER is a hybrid commuter and rapid transit line that cuts through the middle of Paris from north to south, like a deeper spine that overlays the vertebrae of the Métro.) The result is a doc that as Jessica Kiang wrote in Variety, quietly morphs into an "epic interrogation of France's multicultural project."
The mechanic who works on cars here and there comes originally from Mali. As he works on a car, he tells his mom using earbuds and mike that he would really like to return, but he has not done so - for twenty years, so it doesn't seem likely. We follow the filmmaker's sister, who visits people confined to their houses, some of them sprightly talkers. Her father, now retired, says he is satisfied with what fifty years of life in France have brought him. He never had trouble finding work, and he could buy a house. It is enough.
Suddenly it's a service to honor the memory of a king of France and we are studying faces in the congregation of the Basilica of Saint Denis, where French royalty is buried. These are parishioners who are all white and look as if they themselves may very well identify with royalty. Suddenly, the camera eye roams through the eery Drancy center, also on the RER B line. It commemorates the 10,000 children (and 50,000 adults) held at the internment camp here who were denounced, arrested, detained, and sent to Germany where they died. We hear excerpts from their plaintive, deeply saddening letters. Drancy is a dramatic sign of an earlier, total, lack of "integration" for part of the population, the Jews of WWII France.
Alice's camera roams on: Teenagers and young adults hanging out in the summertime; people watching 14th of July fireworks. Finally Alice herself, who has not minded occasionally answering questions from behind the camera, appears talking with Pierre Bergounioux, a French writer, white, who has been an inspiration to her and whom she sought out after reading one of his articles, because she discovered he has long written himself about the sort of poor and under-noticed "banlieue" locations and their inhabitants that she has made it her aim to film.
While this scene and the far-ranging conversation that Bergounioux and Alice hold light up and connect all the segments that have come before, there is intentionally no clearcut point of view. She has shifted from on scene to behind camera, to fly-on-the-wall, to interactive, because by its nature the subject Alice touches on here is always a moving target, with conclusions remaining undrawn. But she chooses the title intentionally: "nous," we. Everyone here is part of the picture.
If this works better than it may sound, it's partly because of editing that creates a rhythm and inserts interstices that bind unlike things, even to the bookending of the aristocratic French people who go on an historic formal-dress "hunt', but who, also, strictly, live on the RER B line. Likewise, the young men of color along the water with their shirts off who listen with a mocking air to an old Édith Piaf song on the radio outdoors but are till listening to it, and still know the words and savor certain parts. Alice Diop is showing that French culture has a surprising power to bind people, even those from all the new places who distance themselves from it. The closing song is Jean Ferrat's "Ma France," part of which goes:
My France
From lowlands to forests, from vales to hills
From the spring to be born to your dead seasons
From what I lived to what I imagine
I shall not stop writing your song
My France
Rather than seeking to be revolutionary or contrarian, Diop consciously joins an established tradition of continuing to write France's changing song. But it's work. . "'We' is what happens when 'I' opens up," she says. Orla Smith in Seventh Row likes this film but thinks it just skims the surface and would like something as long as a Frederick Wiseman documentary. She has a point. Alice Diop should certainly continue her project of chronicling France's "nous." But not everyone needs to push as hard and relentlessly as Frederick Wiseman. There is a place for delicate touches.
Nous/We, 116 mins., debuted in the Berlinale Mar. 2021, showed at Paris' Cinéma du réel, and was screened at home for this review as part of the MoMA/Film at Lincoln Center series New Directors/New Films (Apr. 28-May 8, 2021).
Now opening theatrically in the US starting with Jun. 22, 2022 at MoMA in New York.
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DARK RED FOREST (Jin Huaging 2021)
JIN HUAGING: DARK RED FOREST (2021)
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Harsh winters for Tibetan Buddhist nuns
Jin Huaqing is a Chinese documentary filmmaker with numerous short films to his credit. In Dark Red Forest he spent a year focusing on Tibetan Buddhist nuns. Thousands of them are in a single monastery, Yarchen Monastery located on the Tibetan Plateau, and during the coldest time of the year move out to huts scattered over a mountain, one num per hut. Their outer garb is a thick dark red cloth. At the end of the season the huts are taken apart and lugged back. What we get is an external picture of an austere spiritual practice. There is even a time when some prostate themselves over and over moving along a rough road. They wear padding on their fronts to mitigate the roughness. There is also a sequence of testing before an audience, where what appear to be very young nuns are in the spotlight, speaking with shrill, artificial voices. There are the familiar trappings, the "prayer wheels" endlessly spun, the big drums held aloft. What else do we see? What do we learn? Jin Huaqing has no narration, only the bare bones of information at the outset in captions, 10,000 nuns, 4,000 meter elevation, and so forth. We also learn from signage that the Chinese want to subsume Tibetans into the mainland population and aren't very friendly toward monasteries.
There is an austere beauty in the harsh landscape at times - the snow on the ground, the dawn light over the mountain, the flushed faces of the nuns. They are of all ages from young to pretty old. With their shaven heads, they look alike, and sometimes it's hard to tell which gender they are. The sheer population is an eye-opener. There are revealing moments. Besides the very young performers, we see nuns being questioned by a monk (whom we do not see), who often finds fault with their knowledge, or when they are tongue-tied gently dismisses them. They are told to work harder. Some are told they must go home, and this is hard for them to take, especially after many years as a nun, and the voice says they may be too old now to have children, and should find another place to be a nun.
This did not have the beauty of some films about western Christian monasteries. The monastery itself in those films seems a comforting, enveloping place, with its thick stone walls and its rituals organizing the day from dawn to dusk. As can happen with the documentary without narration, we're left with many questions. It's not clear what the accomodations in the monastery are like, also not clear how the nuns sleep in the huts, or do they sleep there at all? Many details seem to be missing.
There's a sequence where nuns seek help for ailments. It can be little surprise that they rely heavily on folk medicine. Still neither the diagnosis nor the prescription leaves one confident that they're in reliable hands.
As a friend of mine used to say after many a ND/NF screening, "That's another place I never have to go." Is this, indeed, the last word? There seem many ways of learning more. But this seems a difficult subject, Tibetan Buddhism being less amenable to western study than the Japanese kind.
Dark Red Forest, 85 mins., debuts in New Directors/New Films May 2021. Screened at home for this review as part of the MoMA/Film at Lincoln Center series New Directors/New Films (Apr. 28-May 8, 2021).
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BEBIA, À MON SEUL DÉSIR (Juja Dobrachkous 2021)
JUJA DORACHKOUS: BEBIA, À MON SEUL DÉSIR (2021)
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ANASTASIA DAVIDSON IN BEBIA A MON SEUL DESIR
A Georgian family drama seems hampered by its own ambition
This film from Georgia seems to want to be about a f--ked up young woman who cuts herself and works as runway model currently in London. But it gets all involved in staging the funeral of the girl's aged grandmother, with over-the-top professional mourners and various other screen-stealing characters of this neurotic family like the mother (Anastasia Chanturaia), a moody older brother, sententious father and various other characters, all pouty and full of themselves. Even Veronica Solovyeva's cinematography, in arty, shadowy black and white, vies for attention, and sometimes the cameraman likes to cut off the tops of people's heads or focus on one little thing and not let you see what's going on, which is no help.
Ariadna (Anastasia Davidson), the protagonist, is assigned a ritual task to link her dead grandmother's body to where she died, which involves traveling over the country unspooling a thread. This among other things occasions many flashbacks including to the "bebia," or grandma, herself, Medea (Guliko Gurgenidze). We have already seen her to be rather mean and pessimistic, brushing the girls' hair and telling her women's lives are just one generation after another doing the same things. At the funeral banquet somebody says she was a psychologically abusive teacher by her own admission: that fits. The ritual unspooling requires a fifteen-mile walk on which Ariadna is accompanied by Temo (Alexander Glurjidze), a young man who picked her up at the airport whom she doesn't know but who seems somehow now part of the family.
I'm indebted to the Variety reviewer for reminding me that Ariadne in the Greek myth, alluded to here, gets rescued from the Minotaur after helping Theseus navigate the labyrinth with the help of a thread. But not much is made of this theme, nor is this Ariadne transformed. She remains the same messed up young person at the end. Dobrachkous's film is full of ambition but, at least on the first go, doesn't seem to hit its targets, and is a turnoff from the get-go. She is trying to do too much at once. This is her first feature after working on two screenplays before. Some viewers seem enthralled. No doubt there will be more.
Bebia mon seul Désir, 118 mins., debuted Feb. 6, 2021 at Rotterdam (virtual), also showing at Seattle Apr. 9. It was was screened at home for this review as part of the MoMA/Film at Lincoln Center series New Directors/New Films (Apr. 28-May 8, 2021).
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STOP-ZEMLIA (Kateryna Gornostai 2021)
KATERYNA GORNOSTAI: STOP-ZEMLIA (20212)
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Yana Isaienko, Maria Fedorchenko in Stop-Zemlia
Ukrainian high school junior year class portrait is charming if a bit familiar
In Stop-Zemlia, the directorial debut of Ukrainian Kateryna Gornostai, an introverted high-school girl called Masha (winsome gamine Maria Fedorchenko) sees herself as an outsider who for safety must hang around with Yana (Yana Isaienko) and Senia (Arsenii Markov), two fellow students who share her non-conformist status. While she is trying to deal with the intensity and confusion of the year before graduation Masha is pushed out of her comfort zone further by falling in love, an emotion one of the teachers not very helpfully has presented as in psychology, something like an illness.
The main characters are all infected, then, because they find themselves in a chain of unrequited affection: Yana is in love with Senia; he is in love with Masha, and Masha is in love with Sasha (Oleksandr Ivanov). Masha's crush is used by Gornostai as an excuse to follow the handsome, sensitive Sasha's story, including his troubles with his obtrusive, verbally abusive alcoholic mother and his piano playing taught, incidentally, by an over-touchy older woman piano teacher. This hint of sexual predating behavior is one of numerous troubling details the film passes over without comment. We notice that woman's hand that won't leave the boy's shoulder. Doesn't anybody notice?
Certainly Kateryna Gornostai’s look at the troubles and joys of youth is nonetheless carefully crafted as it quietly surveys the year for the eleventh graders. The director is a documentarian who has sought to build a low keyed yet in its way panoramic drama. She uses her cast of remarkably poised, well coiffed, and nice looking teenagers to play fictional versions of themselves, centering mostly on Masha but also on a bully boy and his small sidekick and of course Masha's sidekicks and Sasha. There are probably a few too many characters, though the main ones we get to know the names of at least.
We feel like we're there, but we just perhaps don't stick around quite long enough because we move around. As Kevin Jagernauth wrote in his review for The Playlist at the Berlinale, there's an effect of "immersiveness," but that leads to too much information about characters and behavior being left aside, including some big issues. He mentions "depression, PTSD, cutting, bisexuality, abandonment, bullying" - all as "issues" the film "glides over." And don't forget the over-touchy piano teacher! Jagernauth even goes so far as to say he thinks that the more material the film adds, after a while, the "less meaningful the experience becomes."
He has a point. It's observable with the repetitious scenes of Sasha and his mother. One strong scene could have announced the dysfunctionality of their relationship, and then it could have been brought further to light by being set in another context. Jagernauth is also right that the film's dream sequences are "ultimateluy extraneous," another thing added without enriching. He likes the film's unhurried pace, its avoidance of hysteria.
The title refers to an Eastern European game of blind tag when you call that out when you think you've got someone to tag, is obviously seen as symbolic of the search for a boyfriend or girlfriend as well as lostness and needing to belong.
These young first-time actors, partly playing themselves (though interpolated "interviews" are as made-up as anything else), are presentable and unvaryingly charming. There's the buly and the bullied kid, the misfit boy, the sensitive boy, the sensitive girl. . . but aren't they beginning to blend together a little? The first-time director does a good job of wrangling the main ones within a field of what are essentially extras in a created atmosphere of familiarity, trained to feel and act if they'd nearly all been in the same homeroom class for their whole lives. They work well together - and by the way, Ukrainians are pretty good dancers.
I thought, however, of how all this might have worked better. First, as a TV series. The Norwegian series "SKAM" wisely makes each season primarily about one couple (or with Sana at the end, one person), while skillfully delineating relationships. But "Skam" has a lot more time than this film's two hours, which just isn't enough for this kind of sequence of sketches.
Though there are some intense moments. The one when three best friends cut themselves, though it's comparable to the age-old ceremony of pledging blood brotherhood (or sisterhood), feels distinctly troubling So does the mother's continual hounding and verbal abuse of Sasha, which is just repetitious and boring after a while: we get it. Finally less and less that's new, or new-feeling, emerges, even if kids are redefined as of these times. THey can't go to bed without their phone, and they accuse each other of being "homophobe" (as they do in "SKAM" and which is a good thing). But anecdotes on the order of Senia's of being lectured for an hour by his father on contraception and finding out he knows more than his dad, deliver familiar material to us. I guess all this winds up being a nice calling card for everybody - the able, energetic Gornostai and the main young actors as well, part of a bourgeoning, youthful film industry with women directors that reportedly was on hand at the Berlinale this year.
Stop-Zemlia, 122 mins., debuted in the Berlinale's Generation section Mar. 1, 2021. It was was screened at home for this review as part of the MoMA/Film at Lincoln Center series New Directors/New Films (Apr. 28-May 8, 2021). It screens virtually May 5-10.
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ALL THE LIGHT WE CAN SEE/TODO LA LUZ QUE PODEMOS VER (Pablo Escoto Luna 2020)
PABLO ESCOTO LUNA: ALL THE LIGHT WE CAN SEE/TODO LA LUZ QUE PODEMOS VER (2020)
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A new variation on ancient Mexican legends
Between Popocatépetl and Ixtaccihuatl, one day before the war. Maria, forced to marry a bandit, escapes her fate and runs away into the woods in the company of El Toro. Rosario, in love with an assassinated general, weeps on his tomb dug into the side of a volcano. All of them are destined to wandering and error; all climb, fall and are beset by doubt, all are adrift and lost in the night." So the director, Pablo Escoto Luna, who is 24, describes the premise of his film, Todo la luna que podemos ver/All the Light We can See. Using simiple, sometimes primitive film methods and untutored actors, the director follows a very slow, meandering path, out in beautiful landscapes around the volcanoes Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl in the Valley of Mexico, in telling the story of a woman who will do anything to be united with her lost love. but Escoto Luna interweaves multiple stories and a while bibliography of sources ranging from Garcia Lorca to Hannah Arendt. For a better idea of the complexity of this young director's (still basically simple and pure) canvas, see Daniel Gorman's comments in In Review | Online.
The review forTHE FILM STAGEcalls thie film "mostly successful"noting its style method is "risking vagueness and grandiosity" but thinks it "worth remembering. I thought of some of the films of Eugène Green. However this young man has not yet reached Green's level of confidence. Not to be confused with the New Directors/New Films closing night film, Theo Anthony's All Light, Everywhere.
Todo la luz que podemos ver/All the Light We Can see, 123 mins., debuted May 3, 2021 at FTD Marseille. It was was screened at home for this review as part of the MoMA/Film at Lincoln Center series New Directors/New Films (Apr. 28-May 8, 2021). It screens virtually May 5-10. Last Chance to Rent May 11, 6:00 PM ET.
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MOON, 66 QUESTIONS (Jacqueline Lentzou 2020)
JACQUELINE LENTZOU: MOON, 66 QUESTIONS (2020)
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LAZAROS GEORGAKOPOULOS, SOFIA KOKKALI IN MOON, 66 QUESTIONS
Daughter reconciles with estranged dad by being his caregiver
This first feature by the young Greek director Jacqueline Lentzou (who already had eight shorts to her credit) is about a young woman called Artemis (Sofia Kokkali) who is called back from abroad to care for her suddenly disabled father, Paris (Lazaros Georgakopoulos). There seems to be nobody else to do it. She does this with a very ill will because she and her dad are estranged. One only wonders why she would do it at all. He himself is strange, inarticulate or at least willfully tight-lipped, not just with her. It seems he has MS, but has had a stroke, or something - nobody is sure what has happened, as the story is told.
This vagueness smooths things over as the film focuses closely on the man's disability as it must be performed by an actor, reportedly using some version of the Alexander Method as his preparation tfor a full-body recreation of tremors and general weakness. An attention-getting, risky business, which goes very well on the whole, though not entirely. There is an early scene where a physical therapist shows a group of family members, including Paris, how to help Artemis stand up and step forward. The actor, Lazaros Georgakopoulos (suggestive first name!) is so impressive I naively wondered at first if a real disabled person had been engaged for the role. However, the ease with which the actor later on fires up a cigarette with a lighter (when Paris spitefully refuses to do so), or eats, seems incompatible with his general shakiness and disability. He will not have to say much. Sofia Kokkali, who has been a frequent collaborator with the director, works too hard to show the difficult changes her character is going through.
Scenes alternate between being agonizing, and irrelevant. Why must so much time be devoted to ping pong? Like the unnecessary mythological names, other devices are added for framing - interpolations from "found" VHS family tapes from the nineties; tarot deck cards, from which the mysterious title comes - when more solid dramatic scenes might have helped, still winding up with a shorter and pithier film.
A "secret" about Artemis is revealed to Paris that, in a typically grating and molasses-slow sequence, she offers to tell him. Why bother? He knows. But he declines. Somehow this awkward discovery of hers, which we can't reveal, except to say there are rustles of interest in festival "queer" sections, makes Paris understand Artemis better. And at a restaurant meal - a difficult undertaking, one would think - he performs another feat of dexterity and slides over beside Paris and gives her a big hug. Problems solved.
Moon, 66 Questions 108 mins., had French internet release June 2020, debuted at the Berlinale Mar. 5, 2021, showed Mar. 25 at FICUNAM, Mexico, and was screened at home for this review as part of the MoMA/Film at Lincoln Center series New Directors/New Films (Apr. 28-May 8, 2021). Last Chance to Rent May 11, 6:00 PM ET.
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DESTELLO BRAVÍO (Ainhoa Rodríguez 2021)
AINHOA RODRIGUEZ: DESTELLO BRAVÍO/MIGHTY FLASH (2021)
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A town of old people
Beatrice Loayza in her New York Times preview of this year's New Directors/New Films series heralded Ainhoa Rodriguez's distinctive and surprisingly mature debut feature Destello Bravio as one of three good films in the 2021 series about older women. This one as she put it is about ladies of a certain age stuck in "a dead-end Spanish town" with their "idiot male components " with their "gloomy routine" periodically interrupted "by bursts of surreal eroticism, unsettling manifestations of their repressed desires." That is an overview of Destello Bravio. But that doesn't convey the style and the wit of it.
What I like about this film isn't just its distinctive grayish look, painterly in village landscapes and positively Vermeer-ish in the interiors, but the natural flowing rhythm of its dialogue, which contrasts with the awkward, self-conscious scripts of other ND/NF first films.
There is nobody young here and there's no escaping the men are burnt-out old birds and the women have lost their looks, though some of the latter cover that with the elegance of piled up hairdos you want to see, careful makeup, and lizard skin high heels. This is Spain, after all. There is a solemnity and quiet grandeur even about the bourgeois living rooms.
This is a town in the Estramadura, a remote region of Spain near Portugal. Letterboxd reviewer Michael Sicinski specifies Tierra de Barros, and says with cruel wit that Rodríguez's version of it is "a universe where all the young people have moved on, and seemingly taken narrative development with them." Definitely, the focus here is a state of mind and state of society, not an event. The director isn't concerned with philosophical pronouncements à la Roy Andersson or scary evocations of weirdness à la David Lynch. There are characters. Perhaps it's true they aren't threaded through the film quite as clearly as they might be, but there are some potent sequences, notably a woman taken out and humiliated by men, left all night naked in the countryside to come back next day weeping. There is the big banquet of ladies who get drunk and start writhing and making out. Admittedly stylistic and technical decisions wind up giving most scenes their distinctive feel.
It's also clear that Rodríguez is concerned to bring out the hypocrisy of Catholicism and the deeply entrenched differences in genders, as she does by setting the action around Holy Week and switching back and forth between all-male and all-female gatherings. She is also more focused on a mood than on individual stories, an imminence of something dire that hovers over the near-nothingness. Leonardo Goi in The Film Stage notes the unnamed, unspecified town "juts into being from a fable, a land of almost biblical desolation and solitude." "The old folks marooned here." he writes, are the "last surviving members of an old species, but the film is so committed to its oneiric and sepulchral fabric that they may as well be dead already. Ghosts in a ghost town." They are half dead - someone even says so. Or they may be on the edge of an apocalypse, the sudden "mighty flash" of the title that a strange woman predicts, in one of her pronouncements to herself into a tape recorder, will one day suddenly possess the valley. Sound effects constantly predict something mad and strange - but it may just as well be only a collective desire for such a thing to relieve the boredom.
Maybe not everything comes together here. But this is work that makes you sit up and take notice. Forced to watch it at home, I switched to my big screen and turned up the sound. I wanted to hear the full resonance ofr those pungent voices and savor those colors and that fancy makeup of the vain ladies well past their prime. It would be very interesting to know how Rodríguez cast this film and how she got these balls-out performances from all these old people.
Mighty Flasy/Destello bravio, 98 mins., debuted at Rotterdam, showing also at FICUNAM (Mexico) and it was screened at home for this review as part of the MoMA/Film at Lincoln Center series New Directors/New Films (Apr. 28-May 8, 2021). Last Chance to Rent May 11, 6:00 PM ET.
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GULL ( Kim Mi-jo 2020)
KIM MI-JO: GULL (2020)
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JEONG AE-HWA AS O-BOK IN GULL
A tough debut film about a Korean rape
This is a youthful South Korean film about a Seoul fish market vender who becomes the victim of rape. In various ways this is not your usual rape movie. O-bok (a powerful Jeong Aehwa) is 61 and petite and feisty, which may make her not seem a likely victim. though her energy may make her youthful and attractive. The audience never sees the rape, only events leading up to it and away from it. You might feel this way is more from the victim's point of view, since O-bok cannot "observe" what is happening to her when she's assaulted. But this might be considered the public's point of view, because no one wants to think about rape.
There is the freshness and boldness of the newcomer about this film made as a graduation feature for the film school of Danking University. The school is also the producer. A relentless little movie, it's made up of many small naturalistic scenes made so the action and shifts of locale never let up. Kim decided on few closeup shots and an avoidance of camera movement: a calm, placid lens, an ironic contrast to the protagonist's turbulent state. There's a relentlessly unfun, style-less quality, but one might have said that about Italian neorealist films that are now classics. Director Kim is taking on society - which, despite #MeToo and changing attitudes, is a tough decision to make. The title she has said is an homage to Chekhov's The Seagull but doesn't relate specifically to the play; she thinks of her protagonist as a bird who can't fly away, and also was reminded of the sound, to her, of the English word "girl."
The director planned to focus on a mother-daughter relationship in a sexual assault but later chose to make the mother the victim, which surely adds to the resonance, or lack of it, in the society beyond, since this woman is the breadwinner of the family whose lack of education makes her daughters tempted to distance themselves. This is a film about class as well as male power, and a film about the dangerous role of alcohol in Korean culture. O-bok's three daughters have gotten college educations thanks to her hard work and she is left seeming to them rude and uneducated. A fishmonger, she can talk like one. In a rather overly explicit one-way phone conversation O-bok remonstrates with her own mother, who now has dementia, for not assuring her an education with the many benefits it would have brought her in life.
The market is waiting for government-aided improvements. Getting all the venders on board for this requires bonding which, in Korean culture, requires getting drunk together. O-bok is assaulted by Gi-taek, a fellow vender and the powerful chairman of the redevelopment committee. We don't glimpse him till later. He can't be made vulnerable.
It's after a stiff dressup restaurant dinner where O-tek, her husband and the betrothed eldest daughter sit down with the groom and his parents, that O-tek goes and hangs out with coworkers to unwind by getting drunk herself. When she's drunk the others leave her, thinking her "safe," and the assault - which we don't see - occurs. She is bleeding as she comes out of the subway on the way home. The moment of shock and realization this causes for the reader is a potent one.
Things are never the same. Though O-tek never wilts, she can't focus on her shop, on anything but what has happened, which she can't talk about at first. She tries medical help, then complaining to the police, seeking supporting witnesses from the market, and first her eldest daughter and then the youngest one come along to help her. O-bok ultimately has to absorb, without imploding, the rage she must experience at her assault and at living in a culture dominated by males and tolerant of violence. When her husband finds out he drunkenly recites the saying that when a woman is raped, she has wanted it.
For her next project, Kim is planning a mother and daughter revenge story. "I’m expecting to make a Korean-style film, a mixture of action, thriller and comedy," she said in a Variety interview. Let's hope that will be more fun.
Gull, 74 mins., won the Grand Prize for the Korean Competition at the 2021 Jeonju Film Festival and showed in San Sebastian’s New Directors sidebar, also released in Switzerland, French-speaking region, and shown at the London Korean Film Festival and Filmfest Hamburg. It was screened at home for this review as part of the MoMA/Film at Lincoln Center series New Directors/New Films (Apr. 28-May 8, 2021).
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EYIMOFE (THIS IS MY DESIRE) (Arie & Chuko Esiri 2020)
ARIE & CHUKO ESIRI: EYIMOFE (THIS IS MY DESIRE) (2020)
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JUDE AKUWUDIKE IN EYIMOFE (THIS IS MY DESIRE)
Ah, Lagos
The Esiri brothers, Arie and Chukko, spent most of their early life in England going to school. As they returned periodically to their native Nigeria they report overcoming initial distrust and concern and gradually coming to appreciate and even love the place. Now they have made a first feature there, teeming with its energy - and its frustrations and heartbreaks.
When I lived in Cairo in the sixties it was the largest city in Africa. Lagos has since gotten the jump on Cairo by half a million (Lagos 21 million, Cairo 20.4 by a recent estimate), and Lagos is growing by half a million a year.
This first feature the Esiris have made, set in Lagos, is clearly impatient to show their concern and affection for the place and simply reveal to us as much as they can at one time of this world partly strange to them and yet theirs. (This is much the way my young self would have wanted to film sixties Cairo.) Eyimofe is cast in the form of two halves focused separately on two people, a man and a woman struggling to survive in the city at multiple jobs, as many do. Alive, specific, and vibrant, this film is a complete and invigorating (but also exhausting) contrast to the country's usual myriad hastily produced "Nollywood" film industry products which have little interest or value for outsiders.
Eyimofe (This Is My Desire) teems, like the city where it's set. The successive scenes, whether focused first on Mofe (the appealing Jude Akuwudike), then on Rosa (the arresting Temi Ami-Williams) are shot by skilled Beginning cinematographer Arseni Khachaturan largely in busy locations that show off the city - in many specific situations - as well as the protagonists; and it reminds me, in its crowded energy, of that Cairo I once knew and loved so well and have periodically revisited, finding it always larger, more overwhelming, more a nightmare, yet the spirit of its people as vigorous and charming as before. One imagines the Esiri brothers feeling the same.
But while Eyimofe has unquestionable festival appeal and is an energetic and accomplished production, it sprawls like the city and doesn't quite hang together, primarily because the two protagonists who divide the action between them have only the sketchiest narrative connection - except that both are making expensive but seemingly futile efforts to leave the country, he for Spain, she for Italy.
The struggles of Mofe are almost unbearably pathetic and intense. He is the "engineer" at a printing firm where the machinery is continually breaking down and the electrical system is dangerous. The Esiris have said "Nigeria is a third world country, so it's more difficult than other places." That's for sure. When Mofe and his new young electrician, Wisdom, handle fuses or connections they get continual shocks. The young female boss is imperious, queenly, disdainful toward Mofe when he quietly insists equipment must be replaced.
At home where Mofe lives with his sister and her young kids, a tragedy occurs. As he deals with the aftermath, he encounters impossible expenses and Kafkaesque red tape. A visit to his estranged father in the country to appeal for help is chilly and surreal. He keeps pursuing a visa, passport, other emigration arrangements, only to encounter continual additional tangled obstacles and requirements. Nonetheless he strives on. The tragedy does not deter him. At night he works at his secondary job, a street repair stand where he fixes little appliances. And so on and on. There is no poetry here, save the poetry of a human spirit that doesn't falter - not that he has not lashed out in anger at the broken wiring and fuses and incurred his lady boss's ire. This can't be Dante's Purgatory: there are too many different levels of struggle.
Rosa's life has different problems, pertaining to her young pregnant sister and men. Her two jobs are hairdresser and bartender, and she is responsible for her school age sister Grace (Cynthia Ebijie). Grace's pregnancy is problematic; she is not taking her unspecified meds, which she is warned endangers the pregnancy. Then there is the sharply dressed landlord, Mr. Vincent, who loves Rosa madly but whom she keeps at arms length, while accepting his favors because she is so needy. She's short for the rent, for medical fees for Grace, and for the travel "arrangements," which will include numerous fake documents. For this she falls under the control of unscrupulous broker Mama Esther (Nigerian comedian Chioma Omeruah in a pungent cameo), who wants the baby or, barring that, to have both women as her wage-slaves.
Mr. Vincent, courtly, generous, but needy, must take second place to Peter (Jacob Alexander), an American expatriate, who has greater means and is generous with this attractive young woman who comes to bed with him. But she goes back and forth, not wanting to be too obliged to the landlord or too overly demanding with Peter. At one point the ladies' fridge breaks (again) and thus one evening Grace meets Mofe.
The Rosa half of this picture has a gentler pace, but it has its own rhythm, and its own dire situations. It also has more interiors, and whether indoors or out, every shot has a different set of eye-candy coordinated colors in Khachaturan's increasingly ravishing images. In the maternity clinic, the walls are dark blue and the attendants' uniforms are bright red, which is prettier than it sounds. Rosa and Grace have a succession of different hairdos and outfits. But this though less turbulent and more aesthetic nightmare is still a nightmare. It's also of course a picture of ways big city urban third world problems are complicated by being unattached and female. At the end, Rosa finds a big compromise solution. In an Epilogue, things for Mofe are looking up. But nobody's going anywhere.
And that's your story, which artistically is a bit shapeless. But as the Variety review from the 2020 Berlinale says this "low key charmer" really shines, which shows from the start, as "a clear-eyed portrait of a vibrant city, informed by the unfakeable love and well-earned exasperation of two talented native sons."
Eyomofe ((This Is My Desire), 116 mins., debuted at Berlin Feb. 2020; also IndieLisboa, Hamburg, London, Rome, Nantes (internet), San Francisco and Seattle. Screened at home for this review as part of New Directors/New Films (Apr. 28-May 8, 2021).
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FAYA DAYI (Jessica Beshir 2021)
JESSICA BESHIR: FAYA-DAYI (2021)
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A dreamy doc about khat is perhaps better than it deserves
Faya-Dayi, a poetic and sometimes beautiful black and white film weaving documentary material about people in Ethiopia and the khat industry (and the addictive stimulant leaves' ever-present consumption) is "hypnotic" in its effect but also numbing and much less informative than it might be if it provided sociological facts and personal information. It's set ostensibly in Harar, Ethiopia, which is considered by some authorities to be where the thousand-year-old custom of khat chewing was born. The filmmaker Jessica Beshir was forced to leave Harar when very young due to political unrest. In her poetic, dreamlike film composed through visual-conscious editing and the use of live and diegetic music and a new age score to bind images together and give some moments an edge of magic, she's made a film that may have "mythical undercurrents" and suggest the spiritual lives of some of its subjects. But over and over we come back to the gangs of hopped-up men and boys stripping khat plants and arranging them in bunches in a large warehouse, bagging them, loading them on a truck to be shipped.
A Variety reviewer describes the film as a mix of "observational vérité" and "esoteric myth-building" that "suggests an in-and-out grasp on reality." Younger boys air the legend (clearly there is a lore that surrounds the plant) that heavy khat-chewers enter into their own private reality, though the Wikipedia article suggests its use is not much different from amphetamines, strong coffee, or lots of green tea. But the reviewer adds that this "seductive device" eventually palls as it "unfurls across two calculatedly low-energy hours." We meet people, though we admire their faces, only superficially, even if the film is "an immersive success, as the languid rhythms of the filmmaking mirror the woozy impact of the drug..."
What is the woozy impact of the drug? It doesn't seem one of the many that William Burroughs thought worth trying. It's usually described as chewed for hours to make dreary routine work palatable. If it is like an upper, it doubtless may leave its heavy users drained between uses. Young men sorting or arranging the khat branches are obviously speeded up on the leaf-chewing; an older, bearded long-time user, with his head scarf and thick, dog-eared Qur'an, often looks either drained or blissed-out.
The final message, not a message because nothing is spelled out, is that many dead-end lives are lived here, and youngsters are notably seen discussing whether they are going to take off on a boat presumably crossing the treacherous route to Lampedusa. No magic there. This film is cunningly edited. It may make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. But Jessica Beshir will go on to do good things.
Faya Dayi, 120 mins., debuted at Sundance. Also shown at Seattle, three prestigious documentary festivals, Nyon, Switzerland (Visions du réel), Hot Docs (Toronto), and True/False (Columbia, MI), and it was screened at home for this review as part of New Directors/New Films (Apr. 28-May 8, 2021 NYC and virtual).
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ALL LIGHT, EVERYWHERE (Theo Anthony 2021)
THEO ANTHONY: ALL LIGHT, EVERYWHERE (2021)
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("A far-ranging look at the biases in how we see things, focusing on the use of police body cameras")
Anthony began his career as a filmmaker with Chop My Money (2014), a 13-minute film that was a day in the life of three street kids in the Eastern Congo. Next came Rat Film (2016), 82 minutes, a documentary that uses a study of the rat and its habitations in walls, fences and alleys to explore the history of Baltimore. He did a short documentary not long ago about sports record photography, the 37-minute 2019 Subject to Review.
Here, in New Directors/New Films' 2021 Closing Film, Anthony moves on to meatier matter, still taking off from recorded images and considering, as the blurb for Subject to Review said, "how the technology exposes deeper questions of spectacle, justice, and imperfect human knowledge." Anthony's researches took him to Arizona as well as his native Baltimore.
Axon, formerly TASER International in Scottsdale, provides a main focus. This booming business, proudly shown off by the company boss, Steve Tuttle, in shirtsleeves, now produces a panoply of devices, starting off with the Taser electroshock stun gun weapon and moving on (rebranding itself to do so) to the body camera - both used by police. That the company started off with Taser weapons and moved on to police body cameras is telling in itself; the owner sees these as two sides of the same function, the Taser to disable citizens/offenders "harmlessly" (but they have been known to result in death), the body camera to protect the police from charges of abuse. It's all computerized, tied in with a high tech system, and activated when the cops pull out their weapon.
Anthony also had access to the Baltimore police department where the Axon body camera was being explained to some police, and to a community meeting where Ross McNutt, President and CEO of Persistent Surveillance Systems, is trying to sell a group of Baltimore citizens of color on the advantages of another aerial surveillance camera system, strenuously objected to by some, particularly a citizen originally from Haiti. Eventually the system was assumed by the City of Baltimore, whose crime problems have been well known.
Underlying these specific highlights, and a neuroscience focus group wearing far-fetched looking tracking devices to analyze their visual responses, there are narrations and music linking them together under general themes of: the camera as an all-seeing eye that is flawed, and earlier surveillance systems; carrier pigeons with cameras on them used by the Germans in WWI; early systems of recording data (photos and measurements) on "criminals" and things like facial types and "pictorial statistics." These narratives and images, accompanied by droning music, are attractive and may be thought-provoking. Basic flaws in the historic "criminal composite" system are pointed out and the fact that it never led to apprehension of any criminals. A wealth of archival imagery, old photos, drawings, diagrams, and sketches make this section attractive and reflect Anthony's extensive related research into the subject matter his film broadly broaches.
It probably wouldn't be enough just to focus on the Axon body cameras - which of course are linked to whole computer systems to detect, record, and analyze. How all these hypertrophied and outsourced to private industry systems are growing by the day is troubling indeed. But the other information and images and the narration and Dan Deacon's musical score are all part of the package. This is entertainment, after all. Anthony's team makes the end result both entrancing and disturbing. "From what picture does the future dream?" Whatever that means.
What somebody said in Baltimore is, turn the camera around: that's what the people want. They want the Big Brother overhead lens on the cops, not the citizens.
What astonished me is that it's an essential part of the police body cam system that cops can choose to turn it on or off. It apparently only records permanently when they choose. Before we get there, moreover, it's already designed to show only what the cops see, so in court, the body camera information won't show when the cop saw something that wasn't there or missed things that were there. In all the Axon devices, the scale is weighted in favor of the police.
A whole segment of black filmmaking students at Frederick Douglas High School in Baltimore working on a related project is sampled toward the end, but it's explained that it was decided to cut most of it out. This somehow isn't so bad, because it's part of Anthony showing the complexity of his process and its openendedness. (The students made their own film.)
This is, then, another version of an experimental doc (like, also in ND/NF 2021, Fern Silva's Rock Bottom Riser) that is interestingly made to bring us into the filmmaker's thought process so it's both beautiful and stimulating to watch. It is food for thought, a starting point, perhaps, left with pieces we have to put together for ourselves. While some citizen reviewers found it "pretentious at times" or felt it "tries too hard to be deep," its evident energy and invention is one obvious reason why the ND/NF organizers honored it by selection as their Closing Night Film. It comes out with all barrels blazing. It shows off a bit without ceasing to be serious and informative. A documentary that was less "experimental," that focused a little more clearly on one central issue, as Alex Gibney would have done, might also have wound up not being as much fun. But you have to be open minded to enjoy and be stimulated by this kind of film.
For fuller details of the multiple threads woven into this complex film see Sheri Linden's review in Hollywood Reporter.
All Light, Everywhere, 115 mins., debuted at Sundance Jan. 31 (special jury prize in nonfiction experimentation), 2021, showed at Copenhagen's CPH DOX Apr. 24; Toronto's Hot Docs Apr. 29; at Jeonju (virtual) Apr. 29; in Columbia, MI's True/False May 7. It was screened at home May 13 for this review as part of New Directors/New Films (Apr. 28-May 8, 2021 NYC and virtual).
