PIX15: Parabellum, White God

Parabellum (Lukas Valenta Rinner, 2015, Argentina)

If you're going to straight up copy the opening scene of another, more famous film, you better to something with it. When I saw the opening of Parabellum, it was immediately clear that the director was copying the opening of Reygadas' Silent Light. A shot of the sky at dawn, slowly cirkling round, through trees, coming to a stop on a field. Something has to happen. Clanging sounds rise: Clangclangclang and then BAM! A punchline!

Another joke: An early scene simply shows the boring office life of the main character, but violent, significant eposition is heard on the radio. 'Oh' I thought. 'Smart way to explain the backstory. Clearly the point of the scene can't be this dull delivery of paperwork.' CUT! After office work, but in the middle of radio sentence, meaning we never really learn exactly what is going on.

Something is clearly happening, though. The mood is sinister. Our man dream of fireworks shooting up from all over Buenos Aires. He leaves his world behind, and travels to a camp to learn survival skills. Here, the imagery truly comes into it's own. Turns out director Lukas Valenta Rinner was born in Austria, which seems fitting, since the scenes at the secluded survival camp is so reminescent of the resort and the weight-loss camp from Ulrich Seidl's Paradise's  Love and Hope. Very rectangular framing, much about ordered, regimented hours and classes, much droll comedy in the pale citizens all trying to do something out of the ordinary in exactly the same way.You've kinda seen it before, but it's very well made and very funny. I might have hoped for just a tiny bit more, though.

I often decry when films let such superfluous stuff like 'plot' or 'character depth' detract from the important stuff like sounds and images. But at times, a film has such a masterful grasp on it's style that it can withstand a whole lot of detracting. Such a film is Parabellum. Seidl is pretty famous for not holding back with his characters, but there is till often fleeting glimses of sweetness in his films - it's often what his characters are searching for. Parabellum could have used a bit like that. I'm not looking for a conventional love story, but all dialogue in the film is instructions and commands,and it's awesome and funny, so I have fath that Rinner could have written a few good conversations as well.

Something to make the characters more livid, so that we care more in the third part of the film, where practice and reality becomes blurred as the trainees must find their own way up a river - the horror! This is where the payoffs are, but they could have hit harder. The imagery remains great throughout, and culminates in an absolutely stunning final shot. There is no doubt that this debut director can make film. I'll watch whatever he does next, without a doubt. A longer film, with just a bit more variation, could be a major arthouse triumph!

White God (Kornél Mondruczó, 2014, Hungary)

Hey, did you know that 'God' is 'dog' backwards? Think about it!

Un Certain Regard har a pretty legendary selection in 2014 with Amour Fou, Force Majeure, Jauja and Bird People. And White God won. So I was quite curious if this could really be a deserving winner of that competion. And no. It's not. Not at all.

I get why this gets attention. It has spectacular dog-imagery  attained through practical effects. But honestly, that's all it has and it's not the most flexible of imagery. It looks awesome every time, but the filmmaker doesn't even try to vary it enough to fill the runtime. There is a great intro with slomo and music. And then there's the attack in the final 20 minutes.

And the rest of the time, it quite honestly seems as if the filmmaker doesn't know what to do. The filmmaking is competent arthouse but still awfully color-coded into teal and orange. There's a bunch of silly human stories about a teenage girl and boys and her asshole conductor and none of it is interesting. Worst of all, the main dog gets a whole character arc to explain his feral devolution, and I swear it contains actual references to Disney films like Lady & the Tramp and Oliver & Co.

Disney can be awesome. Frozen is a masterpiece. But you can't treat the dogs like anthropomorphized little people without it hurting the sublime savagery of the final part. Think of The Birds. The birds in The Birds are terrifying because they attack without us knowing why. The birds in The Birds wouldn't be half as terrifying if we'd spent 40 minutes seeing the leader bird being treated like a bird. It's dumb. And the specificity also takes away from the metaphoric utility of the creatures. Now think of Bird People. The fact that the main character turns into a bird in that film is less overtly impressive than what has been done in White God, but filming as a bird can be varied for a long time. It doesn't start as interesting as an army of dogs, but it also doesn't become tired as fast. So in the end it's better.

This was a dissapointment. I'm guessing this won't stand the test of time. It's typical 'can't believe they did this'-cinema: You see it once and it's cool, then there's no reason to watch it again.

PIX15: The Princess of France, Over Your Dead Body

The Princess of France (Mattias Piñeiro, Argentina, 2014)

Prologue:
There are a lot of films out there. To handle all those films, you need to create systems to sort them. We all know the genre-labels: Action, comedy, romance. You know what you get. As a cineaste, a snob, I mostly sort by director, and then by country, by era, etc. If I hear something is Romanian New Wave, it's probably worth seeing. If it's Japanese Extreme Cinema, it's probably crap. But I'm not a formally educated film-buff, I've had a bit in high-school and a few classes in college, but I'm not as well versed in cinematic history as many of my peers. At times, I don't know what I'm talking about. So I create my own mental categories to sort weird films together. After I'd seen Jessica Haussner's masterful Amour Fou, I wrote that it was something I called Austrian Rectangle Cinema - Ulrich Seidl, Nicolaus Geyrhalter, even Michael Haneke. I was kindly informed, that it's probably more correctly called Berlin New School, since Haussner has been working with directors and systems that is already grouped together under that name. I don't mean to make fun of that correction, that is fine, you write to be understood, if people already understand a description, don't improvise unless you're sure what you say is more correct.

The reason for this long preamble - apart from the fact that prologues always seem Shakespearian to me - is because I'm going to coin yet another genre-name. I've seen a bunch of films from Argentina and Chile, that seems kinda alike to me. They often involve young, incredibly beautiful people, all doing cultural work, and hung up on romances - so often more than one. It always has an extremely high amount of cultural capital, and includes references to art, to literature, to theater. We're talking films like Leonardo Brzezicki's Noche (2013), Christián Jiménez' Bonsai (2011), perhaps even something like a lot of films by legendary Chilean director Raul Ruiz. We're talking the spirit of Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortazar. And I'm going to label this kind of cinema - damdamdaaaam - : Southern Cone Hipster Film! Or SCH!-films for short.

Main Review
If Sourthern Cone Hipster is a style, then I think Mattias Pineiro is it's main auteur at the moment. He makes very peculiar pictures. He has so far made three films based around actors working on Shakespearean comedies. In Rosalinda it was As You Like It while in Viola it was Twelth Night. And he's more in command of his camera and his world than the rest of his contemporaries, I think - though not as much as directors like Lisandro Alonso and Lucretia Martel, who I don't consider Southern Cone Hipster. The opening shot of this one is absurdly wellmade. On a rooftop, at night, a woman yells. Then the camera pans, and begins watching a group of footballers playing far below, while titles and credits are shown onscreen. It's such a great idea, and so well done, but it also says so much about what's to come.

For me at least, in Shakespearian comedy, it's all about games of love being played between men and women. In Much Ado About Nothing everybody treats their task of getting Beatrice and Benedict to fall in love as a game, while Don John plays a much more sinister game of lies and subterfuge with the affections of poor Hero and Claudio. Football is a great metaphor for the film. First, the players pass a ball back and forth between them, the same way the lovers will change affections constantly. And then they form two teams, as in two genders always playing with each other. But not on equal terms. For some reason, there are eight players in green, and only three in orange.

There are 4 women and 2 men in this film. The central character is Victor, returning to Buenos Aires from Mexico with funding in his pocket to create a radio-version of Love's Labour's Lost. All the women are actresses, and all of them have been in a relationship with him, or are now, or want to be. It's confusing. I quite honestly lost the plot at the point where the same two short scenes are replayed 3 times with different participants and outcomes. I have no idea if all versions are supposed to really happen. So I don't get the specifics of the romantic entanglements. There were also way too many dark-haired beauties for me to tell them apart (there might have been more than 4...) Don't get me wrong, a film can never have too much dark-haired beauty. It's just, what is won in aesthetic quality is lost in clarity of plotting.

So I began focusing on details at the fringes. One scene takes place in a museum space, where the characters look at paintings of nude women, by Bouguereau I think. An enemy of impressionism, forgotten by the future, but much popular in his day with his piquante paintings hanging in many a French boudoir. The discussion touches on how much art-history is tangled up with the female body and the female sex - much more so than with female artistery. Victor himself might use his art to get women, or he might use his women to make art and stories. It's not entirely clear, not even to himself. He might also be used. There's a genderbending aspect of the film, in that they switch the roles of the play and have the women play the four central male characters. And while the play concerns machinations of men, in the film the women might be the combatants, competing with each other over Victor. They might also simply decide he isn't worth. Actually, I can't exactly figure out if they did. I should probably rewatch this at some time. And watch some other Pineiro at some point.

Over You Dead Body (Takashi Miike, Japan, 2014)

Sometimes you have a lot to say, even when you don't really get a film. Other times, you draw a blank. I have nearly nothing to say about this film. Miike is famous for Audition, the only other of his I've seen is 13 Assassins. It's not my thing. I was also not in the mood. Just before entering the cinema, I discovered a logistical error by the festival, which threw a bunch of my carefully laid plans into dissaray. So I was frustrated, confused, thinking way too much about what I had to do to see the films that I wanted to see. And then the film began, and the plot was all over the place, and there was a sexscene and a goldfish and now they were all samurais and... who cares?

Ok, I got the plot. It's awfully simple. More actors! More meshing of play and real life. A married couple play the lead characters in a lavish production of Yotsuya Kaidan, a famous Japanese ghost story about a ronin who leaves his wife for another woman, and is haunted by ghosts in revenge. The actor playing the cheating ronin is also cheating on his wife, and the wife also seeks supernatural means of revenge. And then there's blood. Who cares?

In a way, I wish this had just been a simple adaptation of the play, because those scenes are by far the best aspect of the film. Not just because the story and the central characters are fascinating even in the glimpses we see, but also because the staging is so aweinspiring. Heavily theatrical, with giant sets turning and changing, and multicolored lightning creating shadows and colours all over. It's beautiful, it's grandiose, it's fascinating. The scenes in the real world are so boring compared to that. I get why they're there, because nothing about the staged play is frightening, it's so theatrical that it never seems real. But the frights in the real world are boring as well, so cut them out. The theatrical murder and mayhem and horror is more like Grand Guignol, it induces a guilty relish at being allowed to watch all the blood and the violence at a distance. Which might not be what horror is supposed to be today, but the feeling I'm left with is of a director creating a much more complicated plot than he needed to be, in order to make it more conventionally effectful. That is bad. Simple but strange is always better than convoluted but conventional.

Also seen: I rewatched Lav Diaz' From What Is Before, and I've watched a bunch of films from the main competition, which I'm reviewing in Danish. But if you get the chance to watch Antoine Barraud's Portrait of the Artist, seize it! It's pretty close to being a masterpiece. Laura Bispuri's Sworn Virgin is very fine as well, as is Jeppe Rønde's Bridgend, which will get a British premiere shortly. Yannis Veslemes' Norway is a vampire film, and I don't much care for vampire-films, but it's use of lighting is ridiculously accomplished, and the film is worth it for that alone.

PIX15: Hill of Freedom, Greenery Will Bloom Again, Da Sweet Blood of Jesus

New year, new festival. I'll review a bunch of stuff in different places, some in Danish, some in English. I didn't watch anything on day one, but today I saw three films.

Hill of Freedom (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea, 2014)

I began the festival the same way as last year: With the newest from prolific South Korean director Hong Sang-soo. It's the perfect way to start a festival the way all Hong's films start: Bright colors, korean script, and the charming pianomusic by Jeong Yong-jin. Same as always. Last year I was utterly charmed by his Our Sunhi. I'd heard, that this new one, Hill of Freedom, might be his very best, so I was looking forward to it. It's good. It's obviously fun and charming and Hong-like. But I wasn't as hooked as I was last year.

As I wrote last year, Hong Sang-soo can go from being really tricky to not that tricky. This is him at his utmost trickiest.The actual plot is very simple: Japanese guy Mori travels to Seoul to track down Kwon, a women he met a few years back. While searching for her, he meets an assortment of other characters, most notably other woman Young-son, who he gets involved with. The trick is the way the story is told: Through a bunch of letters that Mori has sent Kwon, which Kwon unfortunately drops, so it's completely out of order. Chronology is jumbled, and a whole bunch of the film is apparantly dreams that Mori has, so when something happens, or even if it actually happens at all, is always in doubt. There is an obvious order to a lot of it, with small stories involving a dog, another boyfriend, a man in debt, but then there's a bunch of weird other stuff. A young girl lives next door to Mori, whom his friend gets in a fight with, and then she gets collected by her father. Mori's voiceover then says 'you were lucky you were in the bathroom' and the scene ends. What? The film is full of playfulness like that.

This trickery is unusually bombastic by Hongs standards, and the film-language is unusually busy as well. The camera is static as allways, but nearly every seen involves zooms and pans to keep track of the characters. Mori is constantly in motion - when he isn't sleeping his day away - and the camera most always keep track of him. It's beautiful as always, but it's as if too much happens, too many characters. It doesn't breathe the way Our Sunhi did to me. Watching these films, I learn what kind of Hong I'm most drawn to. Hill of Freedom is a lot like In Another Country from 2012, where a young woman wrote three different stories about Isabelle Huppert travelling to Korea, down to the famous foreign actor visiting the country - Ryo Kase was in Letters From Iwo Jima. I wasn't a huge fan of In Another Country as well. I prefer the simpler ones, like Our Sunhi or Nobody's Daughter Haewon or Woman on the Beach, which aren't less weird, but just in subtler ways. The repetitions of Sunhi is actually weirder than in Hill of Freedom, since the bizarre details such as many characters telling Mori he was right to fight somebody unseen, using the exact same language, can be explained away by the film being authored by Mori. In Sunhi, it was simply the world that was weird.

With a prolific director like Hong Sang-soo, his filmography will constantly be redefined. I thought he was moving in a less tricky direction recently, and was focusing more on female characters than male. But now Hill of Freedom seems like the summation of everything he has made this decade, and focus is squarely back on week men. I wonder what we will get to watch next year. I hope they drink more Soju, it just isn't the same with red wine.

Greenery Will Boom Again (Ermanno Olmi, Italy, 2015)

What I always want out of a film is seeing something I haven't seen before. One of the best things with that principle, is that ignorance becomes a strength. Like with this one: I was pleasantly surprised by this one, because it had features I've never seen before. I'm pretty sure that says more about me than it does the qualities of the film, but who cares, I had a good experience.

Ermanno Olmi is a legend, whom I've never seen a film from before. He is 83. He won the Golden Palm in 78 for The Tree of Wooden Clogs and the Golden Lion in 88 for The Legend of the Holy Drinker. His sixties work should be really strong as well. But I haven't been that interested in checking him out, and I probably wouldn't have seeked this one out, but it fit my program. It's a World War One film, that takes place in a small outpost in the alps, that have been completely snowed in. Their communications gets intercepted by the Austrians, so now the enemy knows where they are, and begins attacking. That's pretty much it.

The film reminded me of submarine movies. The small outpost is plenty claustrophobic, and the men are sitting ducks while snipers snipe, mortars rain down, and a tunnel is being dug under them to undermine the place. The brass wants new communications, so a soldier is ordered to run outside, but unfortunately it's a full moon and there is no place to hide. He takes two steps and throws himself into the snow, and is immediately shot and killed. The next volunteer instead kills himself. What I realized was: I don't think I've ever seen a film told from the perspective of the defenders. I've only seen a few World War One movies: Paths of Glory and Blackadder Goes Forth is what first comes to mind, but those film revolve around the iconic notion of going over the top. This film shows the other end of that, the people sitting in their small dugout, waiting for the mass of men to come towards them. Undoubtedly, there exists films like that (I'm guessing something like Letters from Iwo Jima might be like that) but I've never seen them. And I was riveted.

80 minutes. The pictures are exquisite, color-drained digital. It looks cold and devoid of soul, as so much digital filmmaking does, which is very apt for this story. The men are pretty much indistinguishable from one another. The pace is slow, the mood is opressive. The men will adress the camera all the time, and tell small anecdotes about themselves, and I don't think a single one of them did anything to me. Actually, objectively speaking, this is not that good a film, I think. But I liked it anyway. A small surprise.

Da Sweet Blood of Jesus (Spike Lee, USA, 2014)

Objectively, this was an even worse film than Greenery Will Bloom Again. Spike Lee is also a legend, and in my opinion his Do the Right Thing is the best American film of the eighties. But it's been a while since he was really relevant, and this one is extremely lowbudget and made through kickstarter. It's a remake of an indie-film from  1973 called Ganja and Hess.

There is a thing called 'late-period style', which is used about films made by old directors. Normally, it connotes austere style, concerned with aging and death. This is not that. And Spike Lee is only 58, still very young for a director. But there is this enjoyable freedom in the filmmaking, as if the director knows that only a fraction of people are still interested in what he does. He does what he does best. The film opens fantastically, with dancer Charles 'Lil Buck' Riley doing his gliding dance around Brooklyn to gentle piano music, an opening that mirrors the way Rosario Dawson danced to Public Enemy at the start of Do the Right Thing. Back then the mood was intense, this time it's elegiac. The film never becomes that good again, but there's a bunch of nifty scenes.

Dr Hess has inherited a bunch of money from his parents, the first african-americans to own a Wall Street firm. He collects and writes about African art. His unstable assistant murders him with an ancient Ashanti dagger, that was used in ancient blood rituals, but Hess doesn't die. He begins drinking blood. Ganja, an English black woman, arrives at the 40 acre lot at Martha's Vinyard, and the couple fall in love. He murders her as well, and she springs back to life. But can they live with themselves as vampires?

The symbolism is pretty simple, and was seemingly more pointed in 73. Dr Hess sucks the blood out of the black community, without giving anything back. He prays on the poor women - including Felicia 'Snoop' Pearson from The Wire! - whom he can get to do anything since his whole demeanor proves that he is loaded. In a late scene, he visists a former victim, and her demeanor is exactly like a junkie, making Hess into her dealer, another person who prays on his own community. All his victims are black.

The style has been described as 'exploitation', but that is way too easy. It's more like daytime soap meets an incredibly good and experienced director who knows exactly what he's doing, but has no money or time to do that much. The acting is inconsistent. The original music is cheesy, but the whole film is drenched in music, soul and hiphop from a bunch of unsigned artists, as well as a couple of Brazilian songs, which I loved. There is the feeling of a director doing exactly what he wants, and not caring what anybody says. Pretty much everyone in the film is shown naked at some point, men and women. There's a really hot scene with two women flirting, which is filmed in one shot where the camera keeps circling over and over and over, which then cuts to a women naked in the shower with sex-funk playing underneath.

Everything about this film is bad taste, but in a much weirder way than just b-movie aesthetics. I liked that. There's a warmth to the feeling, a sense of communality. It reminded me of Michel Gondry's The We and the I, which he made with a group of young art-students. That film is too rare in film. As is music by kickass Brazilian artists. It's worth your while.

GIFF day 10: Jauja, Exit, Butter on the Latch

Jauja (Lisandro Alonso, Argentina, 2014)

In discussion of film, as in so many artforms, money is often the enemy. Boo on Hollywood, capitalist purveyor of superficial entertainment. Yay on those artists on the fringes, using small crews and cheap practices to make much more daring, personal art. People like Lav Diaz, who can make eight hours of black-and-white film in a year, or Pedro Costa, who portrayed the poor people of Fontainhas with digital camera and a small crew. Or like Lisandro Alonso from Argentina, who's film Los Muertos was just a depiction of a man travelling from jail to where he used to live. That one, the only Alonso I have seen, was great and beautiful, using amateur actors, natural light, nature photography. This one is a bit more professional, with Viggo Mortenson playing the main role, and the film being a historical drama with costumes and guns and stuff. It still retains a sense of the austere, of the amateurish, of the personal and daring. I felt like it spoke to me very personally. Which, at least at times, was awful.

Mortensen portrays Dinesen, a Danish soldier who is emigrating to Argentina with his teenage daughter. Mortensen is a great actor, and carries himself with a natural strenght that fits the role very well, but he's still awful: He simply can't speak Danish. Almost every linereading of his is a pain to get through. And Viillbjørk Malling Agger is pretty awful as his daughter, Ingeborg, as well. She is supposed to be a young dreaming girl who don't know what she's doing, but she always seems like a young actress who don't know what she's doing. It's horrible. Here's the thing though: I'm absolutely certain that they are in no way worse than the Spanish-speaking actors in this film – or the amateaurs filling the screen in films by Diaz or Costa – but it's just so extremely clear to me when they speak Danish, how awful their linereadings are. It's a really interesting experience, because people don't make films like this in Danish, so I've never been subjected to it before.

And then there is the flipside. As with so many of this kind of film, the story in Jauja is skeletal and allusive. And many of these allusions point to Danish history and culture. I don't want to spoil it, but connoisseurs of Danish literary history will know about the famous nineteenth soldier Dinesen, and who his daughter turned out to be. Not that the story matches up with their lives. Ingeborg runs off with a young Argentinian soldier, and Dinesen takes off after her. Into the wilderness everybody goes, the young couple being followed by crazy deserter Zuluanga, Zuluanga in turn followed by Dinesen, and Dinesen being shadowed by the indigenuous people of the Patagonia. The only thing that doesn't move into the wilderness is official Argentina itself, as they all have to go to an official ball... All these elements are portrayed in the most simple way, along with sealions, rocks and streams, ending up like a poem or one of those famous paintings by Brueghel. Or, as I think is the point of the film, like one of the short stories by the famous Danish writer who's father was named Dinesen. In that way, the film becomes about European culture contrasted with what lies outside, the interactions between those places, in a way that is all the more interesting for me as a Dane, knowing the life stories that the film never includes. It was a singular experience, both awful and intriguing at the same time.

Exit (Hsiang Chienn, Taiwan, 2014)

I watched this film because the program claimed that it 'smelled like Tsai Ming-liang'. It made me wonder what on earth that could mean. Because, in a way it's very true. A Taiwanese film about lonely people trying to connect, delivered without much language, and with a focus on the architecture they live in, that seems very much like Tsai's films like The Hole or Vive l'Amour. But the style wasn't Tsai'ian at all. Tsai films with a steady camera, calmly observing. Almost every shot in this film was handheld and slightly shaking, filled with closeups. Here's the thing: Tsai's films are great because his chosen style is amazing to transmit his chosen themes. So working through the same themes in a different style? It means the film says kinda the same things, just in a less effective way.

So the film removes the style from Tsai, which is the most important part of Tsai, then substitutes it with the style most common from American indie, a style that I really don't like. The story for the film is also kinda seen before. A middle aged woman, living alone in an appartment in Taipei, both her husband and her daughter having moved elsewhere to make more money. She dreams of dancing tango, and takes care of her ailing mother, who is in the hospital. In the hospital, she notices a man in the bed across her mother, who has clearly been in a horrible accident, and now can no longer hear, and has bandages over his eyes. The tender way she begins to take care of him is pretty sweet, but also nothing out of the ordinary.

And yet. I didn't think much of the narrative, and I dismissed the style. And yet I kinda like the film? I guess I have to admit it does do something with style – since as the film is pretty close to being plotless, that can't really be what spoke to me. I have to admit, that a film with as little dialogue as this, that manages to keep interest, is doing something right. The architecture IS beautifully used. There is a dream sequence that is beautifully done, perhaps even more effective for how much it stands out from the rest of the film. The ending of the film includes some shots held for a veeeeery long time, which I always like. And even if 'the lonely woman' is a trope in this kind of cinema of modern ennui, I don't think I've ever seen this particular middleaged woman before. This kind of film doesn't normally deal with menopause. And I can't recall another film where maxipads played such a big symbolical role...

Butter on the Latch (Josephine Decker, USA, 2014)

Watch this trailer to the end!

Another Josephine Decker! Thou Wast Mild and Lovely was one of the biggest surprises from the festival, so I was quite excited to see this one, her debut feature. It's not quite as good. In a way, it's the same style, a mix of indie-tropes, visuel poesy, and glimpses of horror, but the indietrope drawn on at the start of Butter on the Latch is one of my most hated of all the tropes. I hate when a young debuting film director, wherever they come from, debuts with a story of how young smart creative people in their own town live. Some of it can be really good – Hi, Lena Dunham! - but no matter how great it is, it loses a couple of points in my book. This film begins in New York, with young smart New Yorkers, yapping and yapping about theater plays and nightlife. Mixed with glimpses of something better, but it still started the film at a disadvantage.

Then the film luckily moves to somewhere more unique. A Balkan-music workshop in the Californian woods. Now, I say that is unique, in a way it's as hipster as can be. But it's still visually and aurally unique. At that point, the film finds the same kind of poetry that it found on a farm in Kentucky in ...Lovely. I don't really like the improvised dialogue scenes, they're good for what they are, they're just too indie once again. And I'm not a big fan of horror-tropes either. But Decker simply has a visual style, that is so extremely promising. She builds up a scary scene with quick cutting and weird angles, and then at it's conclusion switches to calm steady shot >< reverse shot, and the effect is even more unnerving. There's an absolutely fabulous sequence, set to Morton Feldman's Three Voices, of women dancing in the woods, where at one point a woman does something with her eyes which is one of the freakiest things I've ever seen. And again, I like that there is a female perspective on everything, with the relationship between friends Sarah and Isolde being the core of the film.

If you have the time, check out at least the start of this beautiful piece of music. American film is way too bad at drawing on modern American classical composers like Feldman, or Steve Reich or John Adams. It's always Philip Glass.

Most of all: Even if this film is weaker than the other, I'm just really really happy to have a favorite new American filmmaker. I joked some time ago, that my favorite American films of the last few years were Frozen and The LEGO Movie, and even though that isn't entirely true – I like some documentaries – it's not far off either. With American film, it's hard to be neutral. Even among arthouse, the country is so overrepresented in the cinemas and on critics list, that when the country's output only make up like 10-20% of what I consider my favorite films, it seems snobbish, perhaps even radical. I like American film quite a bit. I'm okay with Linklater and Wes Andersson, but I rarely adore what they do. Every now and then I like a weird film like Shane Carruth's Upstream Color, or Andrew Bujalski's Computer Chess. I like old masters like Terrance Malick or James Benning. I don't need to pick favorites among my favorite French films each year, if something great comes along, I take. it. But all over the film-sphere, it's American this, American that. And I frankly like that there is a new American voice, whom I'm invested in, that I really want to see succeed, and is really excited about following through further feature film escapades. Feels good. Firmly on Team Decker.

GIFF day 7: Clouds of Sils Maria, From What is Before

Clouds of Sils Maria (Olivier Assayas, France, 2014)

One of my favourite things about film is how well it works with acumulation. Seeing a director struggle with his favorite themes over and over throughout her films. Or discovering a new interesting voice, like Jessica Hausner and Eugene Green this festival, and diving into the rest of their work. A less than great film can still be of interest due to how it plays into a larger body of work (For example, Corneliu Porumboiu's film The Second Game is just the director and his dad discussing the art of refereeing over pictures of a boring football game from 1988, but since refereeing has been used by the director as a metaphor for how a justice system should work in general, the discussion took on a much larger significance for me). Literature also works a bit like that, of course, and my favourite collection of art will probably always be the writings of Thomas Pynchon, but then, you can't really read four-five books in a day, as would be the equivalent experience to the great festival I'm having at the moment.

So because of that joy, I tend to prioritize seeing films by directors I've already seen films from. And yet, while Assayas is one of the directors of this festival I've seen most films by, I originally hadn't planned to check this one out. Just as I didn't watch Something in the Air, his 2012 film on the aftermath of 68, when it played at CPH:PIX13. I've liked most of his films. But one way or another, they don't really acumulate well in my mind. He has his themes, but they are really diverse. Clouds of Sils Maria, about female actors in modern filmmaking, probably seems most like his Irma Vep from 1996, which also included examples of different kinds of filmmaking, as does this one, showing clips from an old silent film, and an invented superhero blockbuster. He's also concerned with a sense of the death of the modernist values from the sixties-seventies, and how they got replaced by something perhaps more phony, as was seen in Carlos and Something in the Air, and in this one is represented by the split between Juliette Binoche's middleaged actress Maria Enders, and Chloë Grace Muntz' young starlet Jo-Ann Ellis. They are going to star in a staged version of the play Maloja Snake, a play about a destructive lesbian relationship between a young, freespirited girl and an elder, buttoned up woman. Maria Enders played the young girl in her breakthrough performance, but now she gets the role of the elder woman.

That play is written by a playwright named Wilhelm Melchior, who commits suicide at the beginning of the film. He is supposedly based on Rainer Maria Fassbinder, who died in 82. Fassbinder would have been Melchior's age, had he lived, but there is still the sense to me that the film is depicting a kind of play that hasn't really been relevant for a much longer time than the film implies. Binoche also seems both a bit too young and a bit too old in a paradoxical way. I got the sense that she was supposed to have played the young actress as an 18-year old a bit more than 20 years ago, but Binoche is 50. On the other hand, I associate young Binoche not with serious modernist filmmaking, but the postmodernist 'cinema du look' like Leon Carax' Mauvais Sang. There is a sense of being out of time with this film, which might actually be the thing I have a hardest time with in Assayas. He seems out of time. Not as in 'timeless' but as in neither fish nor fowl. His handling of his themes seem dispassionate at times.

What I've just written seems way too auteurist, as if films should only be considered according to their directors. Of course, a 'body of work' could work for every kind of person involved in filmmaking, from a scriptwriter to a cinematographer. Most people judge films worthy of watching based more on actors. And in this film, the actresses might actually be the ones who bring more 'baggage' to the film, so to speak. Especially one actress. Most of the film actually focuses on Maria Enders and another young woman, her personal assistant Valentine, played by Kristen Stewart, who goes with her to Wilhelm Melchiors mountain home at Sils Maria, to rehearse the play. The clear subtext of the situation with the play is that Maria Enders has been replaced by a younger, more suitable actress. But with regards to the filmmaking situation, it's Kristen Stewart who has been replaced by Chloe Grace Muntz, as it's Stewart who has both had the sort of troubled tabloid existence and the same attempts at balancing franchise filmmaking with more personal works, that the young Jo-Ann Ellis shows in the film. I like this fact, since it brings a twist into what could be a boring 'generational' conflict between old and good and new and bad. But the film positions that the battle might be more in the women of every generation having to fight for the position as a 'timeless' actress such as Maria Enders. This changes a late scene, where a young filmmaker dispirits the antics of actresses of his own generation such as Ellis, and shows him more like a person without solidarity for his fellow youngsters.

From What is Before (Lav Diaz, Phillipines, 2014)

More acumulation: A film that is 5½ hours long. Perhaps it didn't need to be quite as long, there could probably be 30-45 minutes excised without causing any major damage to the fabric of the tale. But again: The cinema of director Lav Diaz becomes more interesting to me, the more of I see. I saw two of his films last year, his 4-hour 'breakthrough' Norte, the End of History, and Storm Children: Book One, a 2½ hour documentary on the aftermath of Typhoon Yolanda. He has made a bunch of films before that, most of which are very long and hard to come by, so it'll take a while before I get a grip on him, I think. Especially since he is currently in the midst of truly establishing himself in the pantheon of living directors, with Norte having premiered in Cannes, and From What is Before having won the Golden Leopard at Locarno. Also, the two films are very different, with Norte being plot-heavy, in colour, and with a very moving camera, and From What Is Before being black-and-white, more about mood than plot, and with a static camera that only rarely pans side to side. I wonder how his style was before, and how it will be hereafter. Probably, there will be another many-hour-long film next year to check out.

It is truly a privilege to spend so many hours keenly observing the problems of the Philipines. This film takes place in the early 70'ies, two segments taking place in 70 and 71, before the bulk of the film happening in 72. So many scenes in the first stretch of the film feature characters slowly moving towards something. It seems as if they are gathering together at the location for the film, though most of them have lived there for a young time. In 70, we watch as a procession brings sisters Itang and Joselina to a place where they act as healers, in a long interlude with music and dancing - already, this was where the first of the audience lost patience and left. In 71, Christian priest Father Guido has arrived, and is kindly but firmly correcting the way the sisters act and believe. Joselina was unwell from the beginning, but she succumbs more and more to madness and selfharm as the film progresses. There is also Sito, the elder rice-farmer who has taken in young boy Hakob, Tony, a winemaker, and Heding, a saleswoman with an annoying attitude, who spreads rumours and sticks her nose in everything. Then, in 72, the darkness comes. Cows are hacked to death. Huts are burned down. A man is found dead at a crossroads. And Philipino politics will also soon intrude in a big way.

5½ hours is a long time, but it does allow us to truly get to know the place of the film. The camera will hold steady and observe for a long time, as characters perhaps walks on a mountaintop, or perhaps works inside their homes. We get to know these hillsides, seashores, homes, fields and forrests, churches, schools, roads and rivers, from seemingly every angle. And there is definitely a sense of atmosphere. It is cloudy all the time, it rains a lot, and since the soundwork seems to be done really cheaply with microphones stuck on the actors, there is an almost constant roaring of wind on the soundtrack. Also, we get to know these characters through the way they talk, with people using words from Philipino, English and Spanish languages seemingly at random, but much accordingly to the status and education of each person. The rich characters in Norte did the same, so I think I'm learning something about society and language in the Phillipines.

The film is compared to Haneke's The White Ribbon in the programme, another black and white movie about a small society where political evil intrudes. But that comparison, while understandable, is a bit superficial, as there is a definite difference in theme in the two films. In The White Ribbon, evil comes from the characters themselves, we watch as the pathology that would lead to the Reich is first blossoming. In From What Is Before, the evil intrudes on a society from the outside (so a more fitting comparison might be with something like Cabaret). Not all of the characters are innocent, and there has seemingly always been an undercurrent of violence this place, but there is still a dichotomy between the mostly good poor rural people, and the mostly evil and callous government forces who intrude on them. Norte had quite the same, with the intellectual recreating the Crime from Crime and Punishment, and the poor man receiving the Punishment. This scheme might seem a bit simplistic, and I'm not entirely sure it needed 5½ hours to be put forth, much less so an assortment of films of that length. But the documentary Storm Children powerfully observed how neglegted the poor and dispossed were in the Philipinnes, even in the aftermath of a major catastrophe like a once-in-a-century Typhoon. That is so far what I like most in Diaz' cinema, and it is the reason that I'd rank the three films Storm Children > From What is Before > Norte. They work best when they are simply concerned with observing what the country has not wanted to observe. Oh, how they observe, for hours and hours and hours. I'll look forward to yet another dispatch in a years time or so.

GIFF day 6: When I will be a Dictator, Amour Fou

When I Will Be a Dictator (Yaël André, Belgium, 2014)

According to the film, this consisted of found 8mm footage, which the director then all of a sudden realized told the story of her good friend George. Uhm, I doubt it. Some of the footage was from a moonlanding, do they want us to believe that this Belgian director just all of a sudden was offered home footage from an astronaut? No, this can't have been an accident, this must have been planned out in advance.

I don't have much to say about it, though it was good. Reappropriated 8mm footage can't help but feel like countless indie rock videos such as this one, which does cheapen the experience a bit. That it was still so very good had a lot to do with the amazing voiceover. French is such a great language doing this in, and the voice over artist was so animated as she talked in a highpitched voice about killing all the people from their own homevideos: 'Ratatatatat! Bif, bif! Swoooosh!!' (It's in the trailer) That was in the section 'Quand je serais une psychopathe' There were a bunch of sections like that, as the story became about parallel universes where the speaker became a bunch of things. Some of the sequences were meta about film, as we were told that in one universe the big studios got tired of using actors, and then hired ordinary people to act out their own life, causing some dedicated people to act out their own deaths. The pictures were nicely manipulated. In one universe reverse speech was fit into what the characters were saying. In another, where she became a God, she changed time and all the images ran backwards. In that universe, heroic Nazi's saved 6 million people from the gas chambers.

I have nothing more to say, don't think. This will probably be hard to find, but it was nice to see in an almost full theater. People up here have so amazing taste.

Amour Fou (Jessica Hausner, Austria, 2014)

This was the best 'rectangle-drama' I've seen in a long time. Take a look at those pictures above.Those are two amazingly composed pictures, with many many lines and rectangles. But that first picture, while it's photographed straight on, and the two white lines at each side mirror each other, it's still slightly off kilter. The chairs don't match, and the kid and the painting are out of synch. And that second picture is diagonal, with several planes of color meeting each other. There wasn't a single picture in this film that wasn't exquisite. Even the few shot-reverseshot were good, with one side being straight on and the other diagonal, or with one of the persons sitting in front of a big curtain, meaning that in the reverse shot, half the frame was filled with red cloth. I haven't seen any film by Jessica Hausner before, an Austrian filmmaker who has competed in Un Certain Regard at Cannes, but that seems to be a big mistake. Austrian filmmakers are amazing at rectangle-drama's, actually. Haneke, of course, but he changes it up. Less 'auteurist' filmmakers like Ulrich Seidl (Paradise-trilogy, In the Basement) and Nikolaus Geyrhalter (Abendland) can be even more rectangular. Perhaps we need to speak about Austrian Rectangle Films? If so, then Hausner is seemingly the ruler of that style. Yes, this was that good. I am very very impressed.

The whole trailer looks amazing.

As can be seen, this was a costume-drama. Based on the true story of Prussian romantic poet Heinrich von Kleist and housewife Henriette Vogel, who comitted suicide together in 1811. There really isn't a lot to that story. Heinrich wants to die because he is unhappy, and Henriette becomes diagnosed with a tumor, so she wants to die on her own terms. What makes the story great is the way it becomes entangled with the depiction of time and place. Henriette's husband is working on a tax reform that would liberate the peasants and even force the nobility to pay, which makes his noble friends very unhappy. And frightened, since the spectre of the French Revolution still hangs over the country. We know what will happen, that Prussia will become Germany, will become dictatorship, then two countries, then democracy. They don't. The people navigate in a world they don't know. Henriette's sickness might be a tumor the size of an 'unripe apple' in her lower abdomen, but it might also just be a nervous disorder - and it's probable that the doctors would be able to figure this out if only they, instead of analyzing her urine or doing 'magnetical' therapy, simply touched her abdomen, looking for a lump. But they don't. That is simply not part of what can be done at this time. Just as the tax reform cannot be made without a much bigger bureaucracy. In so many ways this world is nothing like ours, with people honestly talking about how most people shouldn't be given freedom. But the central unknowability, that these people has to act without fully knowing the rules, that feeling is universal through the ages. One of the very best I've seen this year. Bravo.

Also Seen

Three competition films. Homesick and Underdog, from the Dragon Award competition, two films most noteworthy for amazing female performances at the center. And the documentary Every Face Has a Name, telling stories of refugees in 1945 and a bit in 2014, which won the Angelos-prize from the Swedish churches.

GIFF day 4-5: Thou Wast Mild and Lovely, Wild Tales, Still the Water

Thou Wast Mild and Lovely (Josephine Decker, USA, 2014)

US filmmaking can feel like a pretty insular world. Lots of different kinds of filmmaking, lots of different kinds of scenes, but many of those can feel a bit closed. There are Hollywood blockbusters, finetuned to make money, there are prestige filmmaking, finetuned to win oscars, there are indie-scenes such as mumblecore, finetuned to... I have no idea what could possibly be of use in mumblecore, but I guess their friends like it? Most American films feel like they are in conversation with other American films, and not trying to discuss that much with films from the rest of the world. Josephine Deckers film definitely speaks with Terrance Malick, first and foremost, but for long stretches it feels more international, like it speaks with Carlos Reygadas' rural Mexico, or with the sensuous images of Argentinian filmmaker Lucretia Martel. Perhaps it just felt Latin American?

It's not that the film isn't connected to American filmmaking. Josephine Decker has acted in mumblecore films, and mumblecore filmmaker Joe Swanberg plays the main character Akin, a hired hand who arrives at a secluded ranch with an old owner Jeremeiah and his lovely daughter Sarah. That part of the film is the oldest story in the book. The growing atraction between Sarah and Akin is depicted with a shocking amount of sensuality. One of those films that make me think, that I know nothing about women. A young female filmmaker making a sensuous film about a girl and a boy longing for each other, begun with voice-over from the girl, that should be filled with lustful images of the male body, right? Why does the camera focus so much on the lips, hands, hair and clothe-covered curves of Sarah? Akin can't stop looking at her, as she is bending over to pick weeds, as she sits and knits with her legs slightly apart, as she walks around in various states of undress, but even when he's not around, when it's just Sarah alone with herself, the camera will glide over her body. I think I got it at the end: It's not really about Sarah discovering Akin's body, as it is about her discovering her own. Discovering how crazy she can drive him with a smile, a posture, small noise. Sarah is so imaginative in her sexuality, as she writhes in grass, dances while sighing, plays with string, even at one point biting the head of a small frog and spits blood out, splashing her blonde hair and lips with glowing red. Which is sexy in action, I promise. Akin furiously masturbates and fantasizes about her in common pin-up positions - but he incorporates the thing with the string - when he finally takes her it's rough, short and to the point. Akin is just a body, when he tries to be playful and flirty it's awful. Jeremiah - who is a weird old man indeed - uses an amazing farmers metaphor: Apparantly horses can be inseminated very easily, while cows need a lot of finesse and a good syringe. He asks Akin: Are you a horseman or a cowman? The film seems to suggest that men are horses and women are cows.

So many good and imaginative things in this film. A short sequence is even shown from the point of view of a cow. The film does become a bit more conventionally American as it goes along. One of the first scenes is a long take of Akin driving up to the farm, getting out of the car and walking, then coming back, taking off his wedding ring, and leaving it in the glove compartment. And fine, mysterious gesture. But that whole wife-thingy is then used to cause drama in the final part. Towards the end, there is a brilliant sex scene, one that fully builds on the great sensual scenes leading up to it. Have never seen a sex-scene quite like it, and I've seen a lot of European films. But the film also takes some surprising twists and turns, which perhaps makes it on the whole more unique, but makes the ending dissapointingly American. Oh, well. Only a second feature. Decker's first is also at the festival, hope to catch that one as well. If it's as good as this one, then Decker is my new favourite American filmmaker.

Wild Tales (Damián Szifrón, Argentina, 2014)

This was sensational! Szifrón was almost unknown when his film was selected to compete at Cannes last year, but his film received a rapturous response. Perhaps not as in people thinking it should have the Palme d'Or, but as in people thoroughly enjoying the film and being happy to see something like it in what can be a pretty serious competition. It's one of the best comedies I've seen in a long time. Six short, unrelated tales, with a common theme of revenge and violence. Most of them depict the indignities of our everyday so perfectly, that we don't know whether to be happy or angry when the characters snap. Road-rage, bureaucracy, parking tickets, unfaithful spouses, traffic (really, quite a lot of the film revolves around cars...) Almost everything begins as relatable, but then quickly spirals out of control. The one section that didn't really work, about two women considering poisoning a mobster who visits their diner, is also the one that is farthest from everyday experience. Though perhaps not in Argentina?

But it's not just what is being shown, the way it's being shown is also uncommonly assured. The first tale is the most outlandish, involving a complicated scheme and massive violence. Then a sudden freeze frame leads into a great, colourful title sequence, with all the names of the many actors matched by clips of animals. At that point, you already know you will have a good time. The best sequences builds and twists and turns, and the filmmaking matches with brilliant tension and release. Camera inside car, inside car, close and claustrophibic -> camera outside, overlooking entire traffic que. Camera inside luggage compartment, or bolted unto revolting doors, mixed with distant longshots. So many good musical interludes. It was the biggest success of the year in Argentina, it has been nominated for a Best Foreign Language Oscar, it could honestly be a big international success. It really is arthouse cinema at it's most accessible and riveting.

But then you might speculate about the future. Is this perhaps lightning in a bottle? Will Damian Szifron be able to follow up on it? I'm not sure. It's so wellmade, in all ways, but perhaps it doesn't show that much personality. It has the dreaded teal and orange look, even. I watched Roy Andersson's latest, A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, today, another film from a maker of weird but sort of funny films from a foreign country, and his films is so uniquely Anderssonian that he still has an audience today, 14 years after Songs From the Second Floor. I don't know if Wild Tales can be repeated and offer the same rewards. But for now, we have a great film.

Still the Water (Naomi Kawase, Japan, 2014)

Why on earth was this film called Still the Water? What does that mean? Why not just Still Water? Or perhaps Still is the Water? There was some kind of very important metaphor about water in this film, about two Japanese teenagers falling in love, and dealing with their families. The girl, Kyoko, loves swimming in it, and think it is envoloping like sex will be. The boy, Kaito, is afraid of the sea, as he does not know what is in it, and thinks that it is 'sticky'. To be perfectly honest, I think this film was badly translated, from the title and all the way through. Kyoko's mother, a shaman in the village, is gravely sick, so her father takes her home so that she can 'flop' on the terrace outside. Que? I did not get this film. Now, the festival didn't make it easy on us presspeople, as there was an overlap of fifteen minutes between the press screenings of Wild Tales and Still the Water, which, since there were only three films showing in the cinema at that point, seemed like weird planning. And I've said once or twice that I might have missed the point of a film due to fatigue. But still, I don't think it was solely my fault for not getting this film. I think it was oblique and muddied.

I'm not sure that, even if it had been perfectly translated, that I would have liked it. I'm not sure I like this style. Naomi Kawase has had several films in competition at Cannes, and won the Grand Prix in 2007 for The Mourning Forest. This was the first one of hers I've seen, so I can't speak to the quality of her films in general. But this seemed like the same kind of films that Hirokazu Kore-eda makes at times, such as Like Father, Like Son, and I run hot and cold on his films as well. All nature imagery, and young people, and piano music. Without some firm grounding, if the dialogue isn't good enough, or the characters superficial, it can become very cloying and sacharine. And in this film, the dialogue was weird, the acting wasn't that great, and the psychology of the characters didn't ring true. So it all fell flat for me.

As mentioned, the dying mother is a shaman. She talks about being one with nature, that death is just transformation. Her philosophy is water at it's stillest. But Kaito is troubled. His parents have divorced, and his mother has taken new lovers. One of them drowns at the beginning of the film. He is water at it's most disturbed, like the typhoon that hits the island. Problem is, every 'typhonic' scene in the film rings false. They slaughter a goat, and the goat just bahs a bit while it bleeds out. Kaito and Kyoko's teenage love seem to be completely devoid of hormones, at least in the way they act. The big death scene, that the film builds to, is sacharine as well, though that seems motivated by the people. Whenever Kaito has to be angry and yell, the limits of the actor are very clear. This did not work for me at all. But some of the images are undeniably beautiful, so beautiful that a short clip rightfully ends the short film running in front of every screening at the festival. A clip of the teenagers diving nude. So before each and every screening at this festival, there is a two-second short clip of the bottoms of two teenagers. That is Sweden for you, I guess.

Also Seen:
Many Scandinavian films, which is why I've only written about three films in two days. But I've seen Winter Buoy, a strong documentary on social workers working with pregnant women to work on their problems with addiction and abusive boyfriends. From the Dragon Award Competition, there was Icelandic comedy Paris of the North, and the darkest film seen this year, Finnish youth road movie They Have Escaped. Two Swedish prize winners from 2014: Rotterdam Tiger Award winner Something Must Break, about two young men struggling with sexual identity; and as mentioned, Roy Andersson's Golden Lion winner A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence. All of those will hopefully be reviewed elsewhere. And finally, I rewatched Tsai Ming-liang's Journey to the West, which I've written about elsewhere, for the third time. On third seethrough, the fiftyfive minutes felt more like fifteen.

GIFF day 3: Alive, Life May Be, Field of Dogs

Alive (Park Jung-bum, South Korea, 2014)

A threehour Korean drama about poor people struggling to get by, from a director I didn't know before. Well, of course! It's from Locarno! I had one, major problem with this film, but first: The good things. This was a very wellwritten film. Park Jung-bum both wrote, directed and played the main character, and especially first and third role was nicely done. A threehour movie has room for plot, and in this one it just rolled along. So much so that I'll admit to losing the thread after 20 minutes, and only really fully understanding what was going on an hour later. Park plays Jung-chul, who lost his parents in a landslide that also destroyed most of his house, which he's trying to restore. The disaster also turned his sister, Soo-yun insane, so she can no longer take care of her daughter Ha-na. To begin with, Jung-chul and his friends loses their paycheck from their construction jobs, as another man takes off with all their money. After a brawl with the supervisors, who don't think it's their problem, they have to find another job. Jung-chul then finds a job making soy-bricks or something (apparantly, they are making tofu?), and then the film also follows the life of his new boss and the boss' daughter, and at this point I got the tiniest bit confused, as a whole bunch of plotthreads are layed down. But wow, when they return! It seemed theatrical, the way fortunes kept being returned and revelations kept coming. Perhaps Chekovian? But instead of Chekov's gun, there's an open window, and a removed frontdoor, which all of a sudden returns and turns the film upside down.

Yeah, it was also welldirected, with many scenes being done in long takes with handheld cameras following characters around. A bit like the Dardennes, perhaps? The view on laborers without solidarity seemed Dardennian as well, spectres of Rosetta or Two Days, One Night. After Jung-chul is hired, the boss fires two older workers who could only work half as fast. Jung-chul then convinces the boss to hire his friends as well, resulting in the rest of the old crew being let go. There are no unions, no way to stand up to the more well off. It's everyone for themselves, and when fortunes turn, it's time for payback. But now about the problem with the aesthetics: Allow me to talk about color-grading for a bit. Almost every film is digitally color-graded these days, and at times it can be great. But there's also the cliché of the film being made too look only teal and orange, resulting in a boring and uninteresting pallette. I hated the colors in this film as well. We're talking winter in a rural area, so everything is all white sky and white snow, with grey concrete and a bit of black earth. And then so many people wore beige as well, for some reason. There were only a few splashes of color, which can really work, when a stripe of green or red bring light into the grays. Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Winter Sleep kinda uses color that way. But here, all the colors were dark and drab and almost sickly. At one point, a character stands in a purple sweater against a yellow wall. Now, those are complementary colors, had they been lighter it could have been cool and sixties'ish. But an earthly yellow-orange contrasted with dark reddish purple. It looked sickly. So much of the film looked sickly and unwell, including the people. Perhaps it's a Korean thing, because Kim Ki-duk's Pieta looked the same way. With that film, the combination of super-pretentious themes and ugly images made me angry. Here, I was just sad that the images weren't more pretty.

Life May Be (Mark Cousins & Mania Akbari, England/Iran, 2014)

I'm not going to write a whole lot on this one, as it was essayistic and discoursive. Filmmakers Mark Cousin and Mania Akbari exchange filmic letters. I came for Mark Cousin, filmhistorian and maker of the very great series Story of Film: An Odyssey. Yet I wasn't surprised that his contributions were quite overshadowed by those from Mania Akbari, who it turns out I knew about, as she played the main character in Abbas Kiarostami's masterpiece Ten. In Cousin's first letter he talks about Akbari, who she is, that she has directed a bunch of films herself, that she's in exile. Cousin's is a great filmcritic, and as he namedrops Scorcese, Bergman, Miklos Jancso, Bela Tarr, and several more, he makes Akbari's films seem like absolutely must-sees. Visually, he just parks the camera on a hillside watching as fog rolls down a mountain and over a lake for about fifteen minutes perhaps? It's beautiful, like James Benning, only perhaps not quite as good. But then Akbari starts talking about her house in Iran, life in exile in cities all over Europe, artpieces seen and thoughts thought. It's a jolt of energy. Cousin's picks up on the naked people in the artworks, and starts discoursing on the greatness of being naked, and then Akbari makes almost a feminist shortfilm of her waxing her legs and bathing her body, before she runs naked through the streets of London. Cousin's response seems stunned and overwhelmed. I need to watch some more Akbari, she seems amazing! And I don't think Ten will ever be quite the same film.

Field of Dogs (Lech Majewski, Poland, 2014)
Remember this one? The visionary retelling of Dante's Divine Comedy I talked about wanting to see yesterday? Caught it today. Twas quite good. It wasn't really a retelling of Dante, though. The main character listened to Dante on tape, and long segments of the incredible Italian original was recited, with English translation onscreen as well. But the film was about a young former scholar who'd been in carcrash that killed two of his friends, and who now always fell asleep and had weird dreams. But he was a scholar of symbolist poetry, not Dante, and the dreams were more symbolic creations rather than something taken from the Comedy.

It's probably easier to watch the trailer, than for me to explain all the imagery...

So, Eastern-European symbolism, and as the trailer shows: Churches and floating bodies. It has to be Tarkovskian, right? Well, not quite. An important difference is that Eastern Europe is of course not just Eastern Europe, and that Poland is catholic while Russia is orthodox means a lot. Religion in this film is less austere, less iconographic than in Tarkovsky. It's more kitschy and romantic. The style also combines highbrow and lowbrow, discussions of Heidegger and Seneca with imagery from supermarkets and informercials. The whole film is on digital, and not afraid of looking like it. There's also a bunch of CGI, though I couldn't tell you how much. When a chuch is flooded, the water is obviously fake. But are the people? Is the church? When the young man dreams of sitting on a chair on a beach with a bikini-clad babe in his lap, the beach is obviously fake. But then it cuts to the chair standing on a mountain-side, that looks real enough. And then there are the animals, the doves, the snake and the oxen. The doves seemed fine, the big yellow snake that crawls around the supermarked had to be fake, and those two oxen that plow up an aisle had to be fake as well, right? But animal wranglers are credited for every animal at the end.

In the end, the film is unique, but I don't know if I'd call it 'visionary'. Majewski definitely sees images others don't, but I'm not sure how many other would even want to attempt something like this? The film also takes place in 2010, during which time Poland was flooded, the president of Poland Lech Kaczynski was killed in a planecrash, and the ash-cloud from Iceland enveloped the airwaves. It all adds to the apocalyptic mood. And it's as a moodpiece unlike few other that the film is worth seeing.

Also Seen:
Some more competition films, Amir Escandaris visceral documentary on grafitti-artists from Sao Paolo, Pixadores, and in Nordic Competition, Danish director Samanou Acheche's very fine and poetic debut In Your Arms, on assisted suicide.

GIFF day 2: La Sapienza, Goodbye to Language, Daughter... Mother... Daughter...

La Sapienza (Eugène Green, France/Italy, 2014)

My plan this morning was to go and see Dominik Graf's three-hour Schiller-biopic, Beloved Sisters. But it turned out I misread the programme, and when I was ready to leave it had already been playing for an hour. I had a Plan B: Field of Dogs, according to the program a visionary retelling of Dante's Divine Comedy. But that one was sold out. So instead I went and saw this one, which played at the local business school, 100 m from where I was. There were a lot of tickets, and it was about architecture, which interests me. So that seemed a fine Plan C.

It was an amazing experience. The plot of the film is simple: A French architect named Alexandre travels to Rome with his wife to look at architecture by the great Borromini. On the way there, in Schwitzerland, they run into a young brother and sister. He wants to study architecture and she is sick. The rest of the film is the men looking at churches and the women talking. But the style... The style was like the rigorous modernist cinema of old, except in digital, and with a deadpan humour that never allowed things to get too serious. The actors walked around and declamated their lines like in the cinema of the great French filmmaker Robert Bresson. Many shots of only feet and hands of people also seemed Bressonesque. The rigourously composed symmetrical shots and long discussions with actors at times looking directly into the camera reminded me of the late-late-late period from 106-year-old-and-still-going filmmaker Manoel de Oliveira. With it's discussions of architecture and multilingual characters especially Oliveiras very great A Talking Picture (2003). And a large percentage of the images is just the camera looking at architecture, filming modern appartment buildings and factories from a distance, and contrasting it with loving closeups of the detailed, light-filled beauty of the old churches.

There is a tiny problem: The film depicts people fed up with functionalistic, modernist life and compares that to the baroque beauty found in Roman architecture, but the style of the film is kinda modernist and functionalistic as well. That is in and of itself not the biggest problem, and the film does critique it's own style as it goes along, slowly accumulating enough over-the-top characters, details and weird interludes, to carry on a sense of baroque-ness. And as the characters achieves the titular 'sapience' (which is a word for wisdom in some way, I don't really know) the style changes, becoming more rounded. But there was another big film recently about intellectuals looking for meaning amongst the old buildings of Rome: Paolo Sorrentino's The Great Beauty. And while La Sapienza works with the same outmoded, modernist form that he critiques, Sorrention's cinema seems to strive towards a new cinematic language, perhaps more fitting to the critique. The GIFF-programmers wittingly describe La Sapienza as a 'rectangle-drama', a great description of a certain type of cinema. In contrast, Sorrentino's film is all curves, broken lines, movements, fluidity. When Alexandre describes a facade by his beloved Borromini as being 'always in motion', his description sounds more like Sorrentino than the static shot we get from Green. And also, Sorrentino's film was one of the biggest arthouse successes in recent years, and even won a Foreign Language Oscar, one of the few times that prize has gone to a truly brilliant film. There is no way Eugene Green's film will get even close to that attention. So in a way, this whole film might be a bit... superfluous...

But on the other hand. I watched this film with many, many people in a big theater, and the people laughed, smiled, and had a good time. Two of the other three showings are already sold out. I was also surprised to find, that director Eugene Green is an old and experienced artist, having worked extensively in theater and only directed four theatrical features before, but those films premiering at Cannes and Locarno. It took no more than ten minutes before I mentally made a note of checking everything else I could find by this weird and idiosyncratic director. I had no idea what I was getting. I will perhaps never get the chance to watch this or the rest of the directors filmography again, at least not on the big screen. This was a unique experience, one I didn't anticipate at all. And surprises like this are the reason I love film festivals so very very much!

Goodbye to Language (Jean-Luc Godard, France, 2014)

Ah, Godard. Trying to handle a late-period Godard film after only one viewing is a foolish task. And this one was in 3D, so there were twice as many layers. I'm mainly confused, and grasping at straws, trying to connect as much of this montage of sounds, words, works cited and images into something adding up to something. I saw and wrote about his first 3D short Les Trois Dés-Astres last year at PIX, so I might begin there. That one depicted 3D as a disaster for cinema, yet another in a lineage of failures for the medium (ranging from the Holocaut to the domination of Hollywood, because those two things can obviously be compared). Perhaps Goodbye to Language is about saying goodbye to the old language of film? The screen flashes Ah, Dieux at times, and the final time I understood it to be a pun on Adieu, but perhaps also on Un, Deux (if you say it with an accent?) There are of course a bunch of clips from old films, but not really anyone I recognized. And the main story is something about a woman and a man, and another woman and a man, and the women are naked a lot of the time, and the men are disparaging and don't really think much of the women. 'Women can't create evil', they say (or something to that effect). Then there's a scene with Mary Shelley, writing Frankenstein, reminding us that a woman wrote perhaps the first piece of horror-fiction. So there is that. I don't know, I don't at all get what the plot was about. There was a great dog named Roxy, though, I liked the dog!

So much stuff on language. Over the end credits, a couple is 'speaking' in dog-language with a baby. There are a bunch of philosophical quotes on language. The two parts of the film are called 'Nature' and 'Metaphor', perhaps suggesting that the second part turns the first part into an understandable language? Except the two parts apparantly mirror each other quite a lot, and none of them are easy to figure out. There's a discussion of language and atrocity, one of the women tells a story of an SS officer yelling at a kid at the entrance to the gas chamber, that 'There is no why'. In the beginning of the film, a professor comments on the subtitle of Solshenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago: A Literary Investigation. What lies beyond language is atrocity. Horror. But also childhood, and nature, shown on screen through the many many scenes featuring the dog Roxy. There is also a scene where a painter tries to explain how to show depth through water colour, mirroring the way Godard himself tries to figure out the grammar of this weird new technology.

And Godard struggles with turning 3D into a language. As with many of his more recent films, he uses low-grade video and digital, and those blurry images create sheets of colour when the image is given depth. The film checks out the ticks of this new medium, for instance filming out of the windshield of a car on a rainy night, which creates floating specks of neon-light where the water-drops mirror streetlight. There are a couple of times where the filmmakers must have turned one of the two cameras needed to film in 3D to the side, making the image simply split, and forcing me to blink each eye to watch two films at once, until the camera turns back and the image connects again. There are other sequences where the effect simply doesn't work for me, where the foreground is too far away from the background, and all of a sudden what was a couple tablelegs turns into a ghostly seethrough presence. And at times there are only abstract dots and lines onscreen. Basic filmic grammar is also broken, as the camera turns upside down, the shadow of the cameraman is seen on the ground, the plot is achronological, etc.

Haven't got a clue. I read the book Jean-Luc Godard: Cinema Historian by Michael Witt recently, and that book noted how perhaps Godard should be thought of as a mixed-media artist than a filmmaker, since for the longest time he has been working with collages of existing media, as well as video, installation, text, sound, etc. This film definitely blurs the limits of the new 3D medium, and is to a large extent about those limits. That is what I got from it on the first try. That, and an ever so slight headache.

Daughter... Mother... Daughter... (Panahbarkhoda Rezaee, Iran, 2014)

When watching a bunch of films over a short period, there will probably always be some that don't get full attention. I was tired, and the Godard mindfuck kept swirling round my brain. Also, this was a sloooow film, without dialogue, but with a beautiful soundtrack of music, nature sounds, and poetic narration in Iranian. Always the sounds of birds cheeping, water running, and a train passing by from time to time. It was hypnotic in a way. It put the person next to me to sleep several times throughout the seventy minutes.

It was a film on boredom, on being trapped in a life without any hope for a future. Grandmother spins yarn all the time, spinning spinning spinning. Mother walks around the wheat-fields, longing for her husband who took the train to get away. Daugher is sick and struggling to breathe, lying in bed all day, listening to the sounds of nature, dreaming of seeing the sky. There is a son, but he also leaves early on. The women are stuck - as many women probably are in Iran. Most of the film is longheld shots of each woman standing or sitting or laying alone, and then the narrator says something about them. We never hear any names. At times the women watch tv together, and we get old black and white clips, or perhaps it's new clips made to look old, I don't know. Death is never far from the family, and at times the women look ghostly covered as they are completely in black, walking the barren landscape. A shot of light streaming over the mountains is amazing, perhaps showing grace. There is only a single shot where the women interact, where the mother strokes the hair of the daughter, and then they cry. It's very cathartic, after having watched so much film without anybody showing any emotion at all.

This was artfilm. Very lowbudget I think. High res digital pictures, no cameramovements at all, all sound added afterwards, only four people in the film. I love seeing such a small and personal projects, and I liked listening to the Iranian poesy. Had it been much longer than 70 minutes, it would probably have been too much, though... Also, googling the director, his name is apparantly spelled a bunch of different ways in the west, and his other features have names like A Cradle for Mother and even Daugher... Father... Daughter... Now I'm intrigued, and would like to see if his films might make more sense through accumulation.

Note on language, apropos Godard: I like Iranian cinema, I've seen quite a lot of Iranian films, which means I've seen a bunch of Iranian writing rolling over screen at the beginning and end of a film, and it has always seemed like curves and not like words. But all of a sudden, tonight, in the blink of an eye, I could make out letters. Not that I understood anything, it just looked like a language all of sudden. Weird how that works.

Also Seen:
Another film from competion, Susanna Lenken's debut feature My Skinny Sister, which I will write about elsewhere. A fine debut, a great depiction of two young sisters.