CPHPIX day 10: Norte the End of History, Praia do Futuro, The Man of the Crowd, Moebius

Boy was I tired saturday. Many films, many writeups. Also, beer on friday. But if you can't drink beer on friday, then you should reevaluate what you're doing, is my opinion. So I probably missed quite a lot about the films saturday, but yeah.

Norte, the End of History (Lav Diaz, Philippines, 2013)

I'd really been looking forward to this one. Lav Diaz has made films since 1998, low-budget, underground, often punishingly long. This film was one of his shorter ones, at only four hours and a bit. It metwith rapturous reviews in 2013, and so I hoped for the discovery of a major voice I didn't know before. I think I'm a bit underwhelmed. It was good, very good. But I think I wanted more.

The film is an adaptation of Crime and Punishment, and for the first hour, which was sorta faithful to the novel, I couldn't really see the point. The story is so iconic, but also so elemental that I wanted something added to it. And the main character, Fabian, wasn't such a good Raskolnikov. He drunkenly discussed Philipino history with his friends, and it's been done. I was worried what the rest the characters from the novel would be like, as there's some pretty tough characters in that book, if you play it straight. And the film sorta botches the Crime-part, one of the most chilling chapters of prose ever written.

But then the film took a detour, and all became much better. An invented character, a poor and saintly family-man, takes the punishment for the crime, and for about two hours the film is more about his struggles in prison, and his family left behind. The prison-part is quite melodramatic, but the extended run-time helps with allowing us to settle into the hardships of the situation. I loved this.

Once Fabian re-enters the film, his story becomes much better as well. He goes from being a bad Raskolnikov to being more like a subversion of the figure. While religion serves as the lackluster universal solution in so much of Dostoevsky - a revolutionary writer who sometimes seem to want to be a reactionary one - in Norte, Fabian becomes Born Again for a moment, then gives up on it. And his true colours become clear later on.

The film seems to have a political dimension. Fabian and his friends switch easily between English and Philipino, and talks about helping from their exalted position. The poor are abused and punished. Apparantly, Fabian is very much based on the young Ferdinand Marcos, former dictator of the Philipines, and from the same part of the country as Fabian. There might be a brave and explicit politcal position at the end. Or it might be a car-crash.

The fim might be a bit too subtle for it's own good. The long takes with slow zooms are always beautiful. But I was surprised at how slick the film was, I'd thought it would be more raw. Good film, but I guess I'd prefer his earlier ones.

Praia do Futuro (Karim Ainouz, Brazil, 2014)

At the end of a festival, films might suffer from a sense of deja-vu. Praia do Futuro was fine, with beautiful images and a nice story. But I've seen it all done so much better this year. Praia is Portuguese for beach - I learned something! - it's a gay film, so the first third of two men cavorting on a beach really reminded me of Stranger by the Lake. But with less specificity, and much less beautiful. Also, so tired of people drowning or talking about seamonsters, the weirdest trope of 2014. Not Ainouz' fault, but still.

It got better once the central couple got to Berlin. The film had points about rootlessness, and the grey German city-scape supported them quite well. Rooftops, snow in spring, northern beaches, foggy roads. And a single stunning sequence, set inside an elevator in the middle of a circular aquarium. Great but too little. A fine film, but firmly second tier art-house, of what I've seen this year. I've got nothing more to say.

The Man of the Crowd (Marcelo Gomes & Cao Guimarães, Brazil, 2013)

At this point I was almost falling asleep, so this is very short. Yet another Brazilian film, this time a sloooow film about lonely people. And the 'saudade' they feel, as underlined by the melancholic bossa nova tunes strategically used. What was most striking about this film was the very narrow aspect ratio used, the screen was completely squared. This made the wall almost crumple in on the characters. A scene of two people standing in an appartment, which in a more normal ratio could have been caught in a single setup, has to pan slowly from person to person. It created quite a striking and unusual effect, but unfortunately also one I was too tired to really apreciate.

It's a film worth seeing, I think, more so than Praia do Futuro. It has some fine fantasy-scenes, and an extremely well-developed mood. Just not the right time and place for me to be put in that mood.

Moebius (Kim Ki-duk, South Korea, 2013)

Ah, coffee, such a great invention. Don't know why I didn't drink more coffee yesterday, it really saved me at this point. Also, the film was quite a bit more energetic than the stuff I'd seen before. Kim Ki-duk is one of the most famous South Korean directors, maker of The Isle, Spring Summer Autumn Winter... and Spring, and his Pieta won the Golden Lion from Venice in 2012. I saw it last year at PIX, and hated it. It's just awful, complete pathetic rubbish. So I wasn't expecting much, and was therefore quite positively surprised by this one. Which is stupid, ugly nonsense, but with self-awareness. Which really helps a lot.

Castrations, rape, people getting off on pain, incest. This was dumb. But what is most striking about the film - other than the mutilated genitals - is that there is no dialogue. It's not silent, but people are only laughing, screaming and gasping. Which they do quite a lot. Also, the film looks like the cheapest digital, like a soap-opera or a film by Hong Sang-soo. These two things are brilliant. There is none of the pathetic ruminations of violence, which brought down Pieta, and while that film used a klichéd and boring scheme of greys and primary colours, in this one the handheld camera just catches blurs and splotches and nothing seems coordinated. I had an idea, that the film seemed like something found in a scrapbook by an insecure teenager, and then converted into a film in a few weeks. There is nothing done to hide the fact, that it's immensely stupid, and small, and nonsensical. And that is quite nice. I'd even think I'd recommend this film, and am considering if I misread Pieta, if it actually knew that it was nonsensical rubbish as well.