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.