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.
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