Manuscripts Don't Burn (Mohammad Rasoulof, Iran, 2013)
Iranian cinema is insanely good. At this point, everybody probably knows this. Lately, however, it's changed. The Green Revolution in 2009 led to more repression, leading to censorship, exile, and an unmooring of style. Mohammad Rasoulof was apparantly arrested at the same time as the more famous Jafar Panahi, and both were given bans on filmmaking, but while Panahi responded by making a brilliant diptych of allegorical films on art/non-art, freedom, et al, Rasoulof chose to make a much more direct film, a thriller on the crimes of the Iranian police state. I aplaud this film, it's brave and 'important'. I was fairly bored by a large part of it, I must admit.
The first half was pretty dull. To begin with, it just seems as if we follow different sides in the war on art, the henchmen, the boss, and the artists themselves. A plotpoint regarding an old - apparantly real-life - case on the attempted murder of a busload of dissidents keep popping up. So far, so good. I was settling in to this being a multi-plot film, with only slight connective tissue between the stories. Everyone in this film deals with sickness in some way, a sick child here, an old and infirm man there, some unspecified pills being taken there. Which paints a picture of a sick society, which is, well, meh, but fair enough. If only the style wasn't so extremely one-note and dull, mainly made up of handheld fly-on-the-wall shots. I got really bored. But then, a few things changed.
Some stylistic flourishes crept into the film. Voiceovers over poetic pictures. People talking while their mouths remained shot. Beautiful shots of snowfilled landscapes, roads, Teheran by night, creating a sense of dread and despair. At least once, this sense of style fell over into drab symbolism, but still, it created some energy. But more importantly, it turned out that the plot was actually extremely well constructed. I don't want to spoil it, but there's a temporal twist to it, which is revealed in a side-plot that earlier seemed like non-sequiturs, but once their implications for the plot became clear, my stomach sank. As the screws are fastened at the end, Rasoulof turns to a few long-takes without mercy, some of whom will stay with me for a long time.
In the end though, this still wasn't really a great film. It is a bit boring, and a bit simplistic. If that seems like a dumb way to critisize such a brave and angry movie then consider this: In the film, a piece of art upsets the the system so much that they take extreme measures to bury it. What is so damaging about this piece of art? The film makes explicitly clear, that it is it's documentary features that the regime wants to supress. It tells a true story, naming names. Well, now, I ask you: If Rasoulof then wanted to hit the regime where it hurts why didn't he make a documentary? Why all the made up stuff about henchmen, and sick kids, and nagging caretakers? It doesn't really add that much, and it takes away from the accusations. All in all it's a bit of a weird film: A piece of Iranian art on the impossibility to make art in Iran, it does sort of invalidate itself. But that might be sophistery. The main problem with the film remains that it is too dull to fully connect, especially in the beginning.
Éden (Bruno Safadi, Brazil, 2012)
This was fun. Someone sent the wrong copy to the festival, so there was no subtitles. That's the second time one of my screenings has gone wrong, that's twice too many. As there was nothing else on that I wanted to catch, and as the film was very visual, I decided to stay. I did not get all of the plot, though.
There was a woman, Karine, and she was pregnant. And sad. Then she went to a church. Then she talked to another pregnant woman in a weird yellow robe. Then she returned to the church, and apparantly became part of it, and began wearing her own kind of weird robe. A couple of flashbacks revealed the father of the child, and the man who killed him. Then the woman in the yellow robe gave birth. Then Karine went to see the newborn in the night, and heard a noise, and hid, and then the leader of the church, and the woman in yellow, and the guy who killed Karine's lover talked about something which I did not get. Then Karine left the church. I was told afterwards, after asking someone to explain the plot, that she was angry the pastor would leave it to the murderer to decide whether he would turn himself into the police or not. That whole plot-strand seemed pretty coincidental to me.
I did get the visuals, though. The film began with Karine laying in an empty, boat-shaped pool, with a look of despair. These pools played a large symbolic role. Karine saw three births in these pools: Of her love with her father-to-be, as they cavorted in swimsuits in a night-time, neon-lit intermezzo which reminded me a bit of Michael Mann. Her baptism into the church, and in the end, the birth of her child, which more importantly for the film seemed to mean her birth into motherhood. The birthing scene was long and intercut with scenes of an eclipse, and in the end Karine held her baby and smiled into the camera. I think I got the point.
I like the graininess.
It was a beautiful film, with the look of analog - though obviously it was a digital copy - and an impressive soundtrack. The whole experience was bewildering, though. How did the festival not notice that they had a copy without subtitles? Well, maybe it was KDM-coded and they couldn't watch it before the screening, but what kind of imbecile distribution company sends a wrong copy with KDM-coding? That's a sure way to get festivals to stop dealing with you.
Der Samurai (Till Kleinert, Germany, 2014)
There are way too many genre-films at the festival. There is the section called Thrills and Kills, there is a focus on War Films, another theme called We Made It, filled with fanmade versions of Robocop, Rambo etc, a retro on William Friedkin, and several of the directors called Lone Stars seems to have gotten the term from how much violence they put into their films. And even then, this lo-fi, apparantly crowdfunded queer-horror film sneaks into the catch-all World Views section. Why isn't this in Thrills and Kills? I suspect it's due to it's obvious filmic and thematic qualities, but then why do they curate a section where the films has to lack depth and flair to fit in? I don't get it.
Nevertheless, this is a fine film. It's not horror, though. It's a guy in a dress with a sword. The Samurai of the title. A young cop, Jacob Wolski, who is obviously a closeted guy man, tries to stop him. You can all guess how it goes. Blood, shocks, shadows. It's beautifully filmed, the colours pop, and there's some touching stuff in it. The Samurai tries to seduce Jacob, and tells him a story of how they could have met and danced at a party. But the story we see, what Jacob is able of imagining, is him flirting with a guy and the whole town laughing at him. Where Horror normally is the abnormal, the unexplainable, in this small-town setting it is simply what is different. I.e. queer-ness.
I don't think I get the subtext: Jacob feeds a wolf, and his surname sounds like wolf, and a woman calls him Lonely Wolf. And the Samurai at times seems like a wolf. Did Jacob's queerness call down the terror on the town? That doesn't seem that progressive? Or was it his repression of his sexuality which caused it to explode? The Samurai keeps wanting Jacob to follow his lead, and Jacob seems immensely fascinated, but always pulls back. In the end, The Ark's It Takes a Fool to Remain Sane plays on the soundtrack, and it's used thrillingly. It feels like a smart point. I can't explain it, though. Lacan wrote about Le Non-Dupes Errent, those who aren't duped are wrong. Jacob isn't duped. He knows he is gay, but he also knows it wont be accepted by his surroundings. And he lives with that. Perhaps his unwillingness to transgress creates this ultimate transgression. In the end, he is cured of his non-foolishness. Or something.
I couldn't get the trailer to work, so here is the music video to The Ark's It Takes a Fool to Remain Sane
It's a very fine little film, which deserves to become a cult-curiosity. It's hardly more than that. Glad to have seen it, can't wait to see something more substantial today, when Jia Zhangke's A Touch of Sin screens.
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