Tag: film

Both Sides of the Blade (Avec Amour et Acharnement)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

To borrow the same metaphor, Both Sides of the Blade is a double-edged sword. On the one hand we have a finely-acted drama minutely detailing the ins and outs of marriage and infidelity; on the other, we have an overwrought and sentimental tale that doesn’t ever compel the audience to sit up in its seat the way the average Claire Denis film usually does. This is a half-baked, disappointing effort from one of our great living directors, all the more of a letdown due to her normally high batting average.

The radiant Juliette Binoche, returning with Denis after Let the Sunshine In (2017),stars as Sara, a woman seemingly secure in her relationship with Jean (Vincent Lindon). The film opens on an idyllic scene, the middle-aged couple swimming in the sea, cuddling and kissing before returning to their Paris apartment and making love. But the music, courtesy of Tindersticks, suggests an erotic thriller; a mash of discordant trumpets and strings portending confusion ahead. For Jean has entered into business with Sara’s former flame François (Grégoire Colin), alighting a moody marital drama that never settles on a consistent and engaging tone.

Denis is known for her highly stylish approach to filmmaking, even when making a so-called “domestic drama”: from Sara’s first sighting of François to a frantic agency opening to the endless arguments with her husband, the camera gets inside her head and creates an appropriate sense of disorientation, further complimented by Denis’ mixture of camera formats. From moment to moment, the dialogue is smart: while on the nose throughout, it allows the couple to test each other, as they debate what François means to them and how he will dominate their lives.

Binoche typically excels in the main role, portraying a woman who knows what she wants, but is afraid of what happens if she gets it. She’s both smart and cunning, sexy and brave, afraid and manipulative, often within the same scene. Even when the story falls short, she finds new dimensions to her character throughout. Lindon rises equally to the game, moving between magnanimity and jealousy, pragmatism and anger, with ease. Together, they keep the lockdown-light drama engaging — with reminders of the coronavirus pandemic throughout and endless scenes shot within their modern Rue D’Amsterdam apartment — throughout each scene despite the failure of the plot, co-written with novelist Christine Angot, to give them any shape to their respective destinies.

But what of François, occupying the Count Vronsky-role in this modern-day Anna Karenina? Wearing a Le Coq Sportif jacket and riding a motorcycle, he’s criminally underwritten; giving us little sense of why he’s such a big deal. Other supporting players, including Jean’s black son and white mother, or a friendly pharmacist, are equally tokenistic, making me feel that the film would be better without them taking part at all. The whole thing is filled with unearned moments, even if the individual craft is fairly sturdy. While by the end you can see from both sides (of the blade) now, it’s that crucial third side that needs further sharpening. Or even better, a much sharper knife.

Both Sides of the Blade played in Competition at the Berlin Film Festival, running from February 10th to the 20th. On all major VoD platforms in December.

Rabiye Kurnaz vs. George W. Bush (Rabiye Kurnaz gegen George W. Bush)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM BERLIN!

Being both highly important and deeply funny at the same time without one part overshadowing the other is a difficult line to tread, but Rabiye Kurnaz vs. George W. Bush, stemming from a fantastic central performance by Meltem Kaptan, manages to feel absolutely effortless. The kind of crowd-pleasing comedy that you could probably recommend to just about anybody, expect it to be a domestic hit in Germany and perhaps even have many admirers overseas.

The year is 2001. The US is in paranoiac overdrive due to the recent 9/11 bombings. Turkish-German Murat (Abdullah Emre Öztürk) travels to Pakistan from Bremen without telling his mother Rabiye (Meltem Kaptan). He is later arrested by the authorities on suspicion of terrorism and later taken to Guantanamo Bay. As he is not technically being held on American soil, he is denied the right to a fair trial, leading Rabiye to enlist the services of German human rights lawyer Bernhard Docke (Alexander Scheer).

It is at once a courtroom drama and a culture-clash comedy, with the chaotic Turkish mother and the stereotypically rigid German lawyer butting heads on the proper way to do things. For example, while he insists that things takes time, Rabiye likes to rush into rooms, demanding the nearest minister’s attention. But where a lesser screenplay might have let this play out in obvious, cringe-worthy ways, Rabiye Kurnaz has laser-sharp focus on both its central characters, making their relationship feel natural and well-earned despite their many differences. It’s a huge step up from the other war on terror comedy Curveball (Johannes Naber, 2020), which lacked both urgency or even a single laugh.

Taking place over many years, the film does a great job of explaining the different levels of bureaucratic hell that Murat is under without ever having feeling complex or over-explained. New developments that could’ve become repetitive or over-laboured are placed in new settings each time, managing to reveal something new about the characters in the process. Kaptan, with her larger-than-life demeanour, huge bird’s-nest haircut and motor-mouth attitude, is the absolute centre of the piece. Rarely falling into cliché, she elevates the script into the kind of well-made broad comedy (with a message) that contemporary cinema so often lacks.

The facts of the case are shocking: not only are 39 people still held in Cuba without ever having a fair trial, but the German government has been proven to actively cover up their involvement in the so-called war of terror. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, making a comedy such as this a better delivery system for the film’s message than any dark and depressing camp-set drama ever could. In fact comedy is perfect, because it humanises Muslim people instead of constantly seeing them through a victim/perpetrator binary, actually working better than nearly all of the 00s war on terror thrillers to discuss the legacy of American overreach.

It also provides a key lesson to the new wave of unfunny American “serious” comedies, from Don’t Look Up (Adam McKay, 2021) to Bombshell (Jay Roach, 2019). You don’t need to lecture in order to get your message across. You simply have to be funny. Rabiye Kurnaz is all of that and more.

Rabiye Kurnaz vs. George W. Bush plays in Competition at the 72nd Berlinale, running between February 10th and 20th.

Before, Now & Then (Nana)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM BERLIN

A once stylish yet reserved, opulent yet modest, Before Now & Then creates a reflective portrait of a country in turmoil through the romantic experiences of one women. More of a contemplative character portrait than a traditional romance, it offers rewards in its resplendent filmmaking while smartly examining the nuances of the feminine experience.

Nana (Happy Salma) has a comfortable life. She lives on a large Dutch colonial estate alongside her husband Mr Darga (Arswendy Bening Swara) and children, hosting gatherings of women where they listen to music, eat food and talk about family. But her dreams suggest otherwise, reminding Nana of her violent past escaping the coups and genocides that characterised 60s Indonesia. Having lost her first husband and child in the coup, she remembers the war in vivid detail, unable to move forward in a country that’s on the cusp of rapid change.

The role of women in this patriarchal society seems yet to be defined. While men are free to go and do as they want, as seen through Mr Darga’s dalliances with other women, Nana gathers the small pleasures while she can, like smoking a cigarette on the terrace or playing with her children. At the meat market she meets the mysterious Ino (Laura Basuki) — with a kind smile, she simply radiates empathy, allowing Nana to figure out how to navigate this new reality.

It’s not only Nana who seems stuck between past and present; the film itself has little concern with traditional narratives, instead giving us a full sense of who Nana is. A lot of the time, we simply watch her thinking, captured against the gorgeousness of her house and almost always impeccably dressed. Her daughter asks her why women’s hair has be kept up: the answer is “to keep secrets”, the likes of which are slowly revealed to us piecemeal throughout this carefully crafted story.

A great sense of romanticism and unspoken longing comes through the music, mixing contemporary 60s songs, traditional and a lush score that moves between waltzes and playful string movements. The music, bringing to mind In The Mood for Love (Wong Kar Wai, 2000), is almost constant throughout the film, almost acting against the slowness and consideration of the characters themselves. Credit must go to Salma herself, able to command the camera and allow us to see her perspective even when it seems like she’s not doing much at all.

It’s likely that many of the cultural and feminine nuances of the story eluded me — it’s not particularly illuminating for anyone learning about mid-twentieth century Indonesian history for the first time — yet once I settled into its rhythms, I found it to be a fine, absorbing aesthetic experience, even if I was never fully enraptured by its style.

Before, Now & Then plays in Competition at the 72nd Berlin Film Festival, running from February 10th to 20th.

Rimini

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

Ritchie Bravo (Michael Thomas) is the kind of loveable, broken rogue that you can’t help but love. He calls his casa a pirate ship; he dons a huge “sealskin” jacket; and he always provides a bon mot on the right occasion, especially in front of the ladies. But beneath the armour, the persona, the legend, is a man, adrift in a miserable seaside town, covered in snow and blanketed in cloud.

Ritchie Bravo is a schlager singer, crooning the kind of cringe-worthy songs that make Tom Jones sound like an opera singer. He lives in Rimini, a far cry from the warm, sunshiny city of its most famous son Federico Fellini. Unlike Fellini, who actually recreated the town on set in Cinecittà Studios, Ulrich Seidl shoots firmly on location, finding the kind of places so cringe-worthy — like an oldies bar named 007 Dancing (3.6 stars on Google Maps) — you simply couldn’t make them up.

Bravo navigates these wintry spaces with ease, sliding between shoddy slot casinos, beachside boozers and shuttered hotels, breezy and easy in public, desperately alone in private; drinking vodka to hide the stench of booze on his breath, and covering his pouchy belly with tape to look better when singing dreadful, sentimental belters in front of coach-loads of elderly Austrians. To supplement his income, he sleeps with some of the visiting ladies, these sex scenes shown in almost all of their unadorned glory.

In these scenes, Seidl shows a part of human life others may shy away from: normal people have sex; old people have sex; fat, ugly people have sex. It’s a part of what people are, no matter who they are or how they look. In this way, his sex scenes, however awkward they look — and using minimal cuts — are somewhat revolutionary in conventional, non-pornographic cinema.

But watching all this, it’s hard not to wonder: what does Ritchie think? What does he actually want out of life? In Ulrich Seidl’s characteristic style, borne from a seasoned documentary career before moving to features, he shoots almost exclusively in medium and long-distance frames, favouring planimetric compositions and still camerawork over flashy inserts or rapid cuts. It’s almost like he’s following a real guy called Ritchie instead of creating a story about him — which starts in North Tirol at his mother’s funeral before taking us back to his life in Rimini, where a sudden blast from the past requires him to rapidly (and perhaps unethically) increase his income.

In this manner, it’s not too different from Sean Baker’s Red Rocket (2021), also featuring a sex-adjacent hustler that toes the line between good and evil, relatable and awful at the same time. The most satisfying part is how cleverly the dramaturgical line snaps into focus: despite looking like a shabby character portrait, this is a neatly plotted story with a beginning, middle and end, simply composed of the kind of longer, more contemplative, enigmatic and interesting scenes that many other screenwriters would choose to leave out.

Touching on themes of race, identity, belonging, sexuality and more within its runtime, it nestles various ideas within its simple seeming style; resulting in a touching, intellectually rich and at-times hilarious portrait that I would simply love to watch again. Thankfully for us, Ulrich Seidl has already wrapped on a continuation of that same world. I will be first in line: Ritchie Bravo is too big for just one film.

Rimini played in competition at the 72nd Berlinale, when this piece was originally written. It premieres in the UK in October as part of the BFI London Film Festival. In UK cinemas on Friday, December 9th. On BFI Player on Monday, September 4th.

Flux Gourmet

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

In-fighting, flatulence and freaky food is all on the menu in Flux Gourmet, the latest offering from oddball auteur Peter Strickland. Conjoining his pet themes — the meaning of compromise, deep dives into noise, and the way sex is used as a weapon — into one culinary package, it’s further proof of his unique, uncompromising style. While not reaching the heights of The Duke of Burgundy (2015), it’s a strangely amiable comedy that might not provoke any belly laughs, but kept me wryly smiling throughout.

It occupies a realm between what I’d term horror-light — taking the giallo-lighting, penchant for gore and rapid zooms the genre is often-known for — and light-fantasy, set in an institute dedicated to the fusion between cooking and music. Heading a “band” taking up residency for an undefined amount of time in this location is Ella (a brilliantly prickly Fatma Mohamed), berating her colleagues Billy (an emo Asa Butterfield) and Lamina (a more straight-laced Ariane Labed) for not following her vision to the letter. Soon the band find themselves butting heads with the institute leader, excellently played by Gwendoline Christie. She wears so much black-eyeliner that she resembles a panda.

The film betrays its left-field approach to storytelling early on, when the narrator, Jan Stevens (Makis Papadimitriou), a Greek journalist tasked with documenting this collective, complains of gastric turbulence. There is something wrong with his intestine, leading him to constantly hold in farts. This means that he’s perennially uncomfortable, making his job chronicling the various disagreements within the band incredibly difficult. Their pursuit of culinary performance perfection is later complicated by various rifts between the group, including the sly machinations of the institute leader and a rogue collective previously rejected from the institute lingering menacingly around the edges.

Strickland does a great job of establishing and interrogating the unique personalities of all the players, giving us a TV series worth of content within just two hours. These aren’t just types, but people with their own hang-ups and neuroses, not easily solvable within the confines of a movie. Repetitive moments — from the teams synchronised wake-up to their morning walks to crucial “after-dinner speeches” — give us the full overview of each central character, allowing us to see the story from a variety of different perspectives. One could easily imagine a longer-form adaptation with a different collective appearing each episode.

This is definitely true when it comes to the actual art at the heart of the film, developing Strickland’s obsession with noise as previously seen in The Berberian Sound Studio (2012). I wanted more: from the crackle of fresh food hitting the pan, to the boiling of water, to the crack of an egg opening, hearing conventional kitchen sounds blown up to surround sound is a true auditory delight. But beyond a running joke about a flanger ruining their performance and generic droning sounds, the actual mechanics of the music is left sorely unexplored.

And when the “wind” does finally comes, it simply arrives too late, making for an unsatisfying finale. Nonetheless, I’m happy someone is giving Strickland the money to make films this stylish and weird. I’ll come to his restaurant anytime.

Flux Gourmet played in the Encounters section of the 72nd Berlinale, when this piece was originally written. It is out on monst VoD platforms in September.

The Line (La Ligne)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM BERLIN

The distance between mother and daughter is represented quite literally in The Line, with a 100 metre painted border separating Margaret (Stéphanie Blanchoud) from her mother Cristina (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi). The line, created by her younger sister Marion (Elli Spagnolo), is a last-ditch resort to stop the perennially angry Margaret from hurting her mother again.

It’s a film that starts in exaggerated fury, women chasing each other across a room in slow-motion to opera music. It doesn’t matter what set Margaret off: everything sets her off, with physical violence her first resort when she feels she can’t win an argument. She is given a restraining order. She repeatedly ignores it. Hence the line, both physical necessity and apt metaphor.

While the premise might seem absurd, it never stretches the bounds of plausibility. This is because, to paraphrase Tolstoy, every family is absurd in its own way. Ursula Meier’s Swiss-French drama is highly attuned to the neuroses and internal logic every family abides by in order to survive, crafting a touching exploration of mother-daughter relationships and the difficulty of seeing eye-to-eye.

The focal point is Marion. She might be the youngest in the family, but she possesses a steely resolve, aided by God, that makes her the ultimate go-between, standing on the line outside their house like a friendly border guard. Untouched by the neuroses that make up adult life, including Christina’s melodramatic, selfish nature, Margaret’s stress and their other sister Louise’s (India Hair) bad brokering skills, Marion has the kind of conviction only afforded by youth. Credit must go to Spagnolo, who holds her nerve excellently against veteran actors.

Using music as a through-line, whether it’s ex-concert pianist Cristina’s impending deafness, Margaret’s guitar skills or Marion’s choir-practice, the family bound together by both deafening highs and almighty lows, all in search of some kind of settled harmony. While the cinematography by regular Denis-collaborator Agnes Godard is mostly unshowy, the clean blocking and the occasional flourish help to elevate the material from being a mere actor’s showcase. So do the fine Swiss locations, adding mountain grandeur and rustic charm to the kind of story that could be set anywhere in the world.

But great music lingers not only in their harmonies and melodies, but also their cadences. The Line fails to wrap up its music and distance metaphor in a satisfying way; cross-cutting between different events and ending on a cliff-hanger just when they should finding a neat way to converge. Cliffhangers work best when you can resolve the chord yourself, but this diminished ending left me wanting a more satisfying and pleasing conclusion.

With that said, family isn’t a battle, it’s a war. Once the lines are drawn, it’s hard to put them away again. The Line shows this conflict in all its messy glory.

The Line just premiered in competition at the 72nd Berlin International Film Festival, running from 10-20th February!

Peter von Kant

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

Every remake has one central question to ask: why does this film actually have to be made? The answer eluded me throughout Peter von Kant, François Ozon’s tepid French-language remake of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s classic 1972 film The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. The genders may be flipped, but it captures little spirit of the original while treading no new ground.

The year is the same, 1972, but the action has moved from Bremen to Cologne. Peter von Kant (Denis Ménochet) is now a filmmaker. In remaking Fassbinder, Ozon essentially recasts von Kant as a version of the great German himself, with Ménochet attempting to replicate his large posture, towering gait and menacing bursts of anger while snorting Scarface-levels of cocaine. He is constantly awaited on by the silent Karl (Stéfan Crépon), a weedy assistant with a handlebar moustache. Suffering from a break-up, the petulant filmmaker is granted a new lease on life by the arrival of Amir (Khalil Gharbia) — both beautiful yet vulnerable, he falls quickly into his hands. But love and art are a dangerous mix, with von Kant’s manipulations quickly descending into petty neediness.

“Great filmmaker, human shit,” quips von Kant’s friend Sidonie (Isabelle Adjani), a remark that could be applied to Fassbinder himself, who completed 40 films before his death by overdose at 37. But anyone expecting any new insights into the mighty, taboo-busting filmmaker will be disappointed, Ménochet aiming for dark drama but landing on broad soap opera instead. The supporting actors aren’t particularly interesting either; in fact, it really does just feel like they’re going though the lines.

Talking of the actual words in this “adaptation”, it’s quite remarkable just how rigid it is. Even banal lines such as the proffering of coffee or the booking of flights are kept almost exactly the same; making me wonder why this was staged as a film rather than as a play. And while the set is well-designed — from the film posters on the wall to the beautiful models-blown up Helmut Newton style — and the costumes are typically brilliant from the filmmaker of 8 Women (2002), that same sense of lived-in sadness that characterised Petra’s apartment is sorely missing.

That space was navigated in Petra von Kant with some of the best blocking committed to film, especially within just a single space. And while it would be fruitless for Ozon to replicate the impeccable cinematography from Michael Ballhaus in the original, it would’ve at least been effective for the film to at least give us a similar sense of space. Instead, Ozon prefers conventional filmmaking techniques, such as cross-cutting conversations and inserting reaction shots instead of the languid, moody filmmaking of the former. It undercuts the effectiveness of the adaptation massively — instead of deeply mannered high German drama, we get a micro-dose of French farce that actually feels more artificial than the notoriously stagy Fassbinder while retaining none of the same dark emotion.

Fassbinder looms large over the German filmmaking psyche, a filmmaker unafraid to tackle the norms of West German society through his depictions of sexuality, gender and race. As a result, it’s no surprise that Ozon’s doodle was chosen as the opening film. Not only is this a major step down from his previous Fassbinder adaptation, Water Drops on Burning Rocks (2000), but the ultimate tribute: in attempting to re-do Petra von Kant, he reminds viewers just why Fassbinder is such a revered filmmaker. It’s never just about the script; it’s how you adapt it that matters. The notes might sound the same, but the music is completely off-key.

Peter von Kant opened the competition of the 72nd Berlinale, when this piece was originally written. It premieres in the UK as part of the 66th BFI London Film Festival in October. In cinemas on Friday, December 30th. On an major Platforms on Monday, February 6th.

Bringing in the big hitters: a preview of this year’s Berlinale

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

If you judge a festival by the wider impact it had on the cinema scene, then last year’s bed-bound Berlinale seemed to break through its digital confines and become an unmitigated success. Radu Jude’s Bad Luck Banging, or Loony Porn (2021) had a fairly decent American release, Petite Maman (Céline Sciamma, 2021) was a petite, tear-provoking miracle, What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? (Alexandre Koberidze, 2021) became the unofficial film of Euro 2020, and I’m Your Man (Maria Schrader, 2021) was a rare cross-cultural German hit. It’s a reminder that good films are still good no matter how you watch them.

This year the organisers seem keen to repeat their success, so an all-star Berlinale competition team have arrived. There’s Denis Côté with That Kind of Summer, perhaps promising something substantial after his last few amusing trifles. There’s Claire Denis with Both Sides of The Blade (pictured above), probably poised for a hit by reuniting with Juliette Binoche. François Ozon is gender-flipping Fassbinder with Peter Von Kant. Ulrich Seidl is returning to Austria with Rimini. And Hong Sangsoo is, well, making a Hong Sang-soo film with The Novelist’s Film.

While Claire Denis is actually a newcomer, there’s a whole host of repeat offenders in the competition, with editor Natalia Lopez Gallardo the only debutant in competition with Robe of Gems. France is well-represented with seven films; Germany with four; and there’s an American entry in the 60s feminist drama Call Jane (Phyllis Nagy). Further afield, there’s Dark Glasses from Dario Argento in the Berlinale Special, Peter Strickland’s Flux Gourmet in Encounters, and Alain Guiraudie is opening Panorama with Nobody’s Hero.

With a coronavirus-prevention regime that the Chinese Olympic committee would appreciate — three vaccinations, full FFP2 masking, daily tests, no parties (at least, I got no invites), booking your tickets in advance, and 50% capacity screenings — the Berlinale is actually going beyond the requirements of the QR code-happy Berlin state to promise a truly virus-free Festival. If your phone dies, it’s basically game over, so I’m bringing two charger packs.

The time has probably passed to write something like “cinema is back” — it actually never went away, it just got smaller. But Germany’s biggest festival is brave to mount anything in-person at all, especially as Sundance and Rotterdam succumbed to Omicron-inspired digital editions. I’m hoping for cinematic excellence, a dozen negative tests and a return to the kind of buzz and vibe that only a physical festival can bring.

The Berlinale Film Festival runs from 10-20th February. Follow DMovies for all the coverage you need.

Inner Wars

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

As Inner Wars reminds us in its final post-script, Ukraine has been at war with pro-Russian separatists since 2014. It is a war without end, without resolution and without many resources; occurring in a far corner of Europe that is easy for people in the West to forget about. The Donbass region has experienced endless death, squalor and misery, with at least 13,000 people dead.

Many images of this war paint it as a male endeavour — think the unforgettably bleak images of Sergey Loznitsa’s Donbass (2018)— but hundreds of women have also made their way to the front lines. Once there, they face two enemies: the pro-Russian separatists and the patriarchal structure of the Ukrainian army.

Both an urgent and brave piece of war journalism — one scene literally capturing the filmmaker encamped in a cramped house under shellfire — and a contemplative look at the survival of femininity within a harsh, masculine world, Inner Wars uses its three protagonists to paint a broad and affecting picture of Ukraine’s female fighters.

They are the chain-smoking and cheery Elena, nicknamed The Witch, who followed her lover to the battlefield; Lera, a mortar commander, protesting against the dreadful conditions of her camp; and Iryna, a veteran who lost two of her legs and one of her eyes in a mine accident. They might be bound by the same struggle, but their relative levels of command within the military shows off the multifarious nature of war.

As the title suggests, the focus isn’t so much on the battle against the Russian separatists, but the internal struggle these women face for acceptance in a patriarchal society. Unlike the all-female squads that exist in Kurdistan, captured in Eva Husson’s Girls of the Sun (2018), these women are usually one of a few within a male battalion, working twice as hard to command the same respect as men. We don’t hear contemporaneous male perspectives at all (a lot of the time their off-hand comments aren’t even subtitled), a useful and moral choice that puts these women’s experiences front and centre.

Director Masha Kondakova immerses us in the battlefield — while we don’t see any action itself, we get up close with the resistance forces existing within such a depressing world. But it’s in Kyiv itself where the documentary finds its most combative moment: a distraught and bitter Iryna challenging Kondakova about her true intentions behind the film. It’s fascinating that this combative exchange is kept in, showing an ethical messiness to the documentary form that other filmmakers might choose to smooth over.

The prioritising of portraiture over projecture gives the film its steady power, buoyed by intimate handheld frames and a minimalist synth score. While the larger war is likely to carry on for some time yet, Inner Wars shows that at least some progress can be made by honouring the contributions and bolstering the leadership roles of some of its most dedicated combatants.

Watch Inner Wars online and for free during the entire month of December only with ArteKino.

Estonian Dispatch: The First Feature Competition Round-Up

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

There are few greater pleasures than watching new visions by debut directors: offering rough and ready versions of ideas that they simply couldn’t wait to get off the page and onto the big screen. The Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival — celebrating its 25th year — offered all of this and more with its First Feature Competition, with 20 films from first-time filmmakers that have little in common besides a desire to make a strong mark upon the cinema stage.

With minimal sleep but plenty of company and even more coffee, I managed to see all 20 films in this debut stage in the small yet bustling city at the heart of Northern Europe. Braving the cold, rain, snow, sleet and slippery streets, and catching a mixture of cinema screenings and screeners — two experienced while waiting in airports — I can safely say that the programme featured a strong combination of crowdpleasers and arthouse experiences, showing off the next generation of filmmakers in style. As Festival Director Tiina Lokk told us in our podcast interview: “There could be mistakes, but you see the talent.“

Other Cannibals

Perhaps the best example of combining both broad appeal with an intense personal vision is the First Feature Competition winner Other Cannibals (Francesco Sossai, pictured above). Beloved by basically every British person I met in the festival, this German-produced, South Tyrol-shot black-and-white tragicomedy is a loopy journey exploring an unusual friendship with shades of the oddball humour of Ben Wheatley. It wouldn’t have been my first choice for the winner — that would’ve been the touching German drama Precious Ivie (Sarah Blaßkiewitz), exploring racism in Germany with great nuance and humanity — but its a deserved winner nonetheless with the potential to be a breakout hit.

The biggest commercial success is probably destined for Immersion (Nicolás Postiglione), a taut Chilean thriller that uses a simple conceit — man stuck on a boat with two strangers and his obstinate daughters — that could easily be remade on Michigan’s Lake Superior. Expect a streaming pick up for this one, which shared the Jury Special Prize with the French Her Way (Cécile Ducrocq), which boasted a brilliant, pick-of-the-fest performance from Call My Agent’s Laure Calamy as a sex worker raising funds for her son’s cooking education.

Often the most interesting visions win the critic’s awards, with the FIPRESCI prize going to Aleksandra Terpińska’s Other People (pictured below),which adapted the unusually-written rap novel by Dorota Maslowska to excellent effect; providing a panoramic portrait of Polish society which doesn’t shy away from its savage critique of unfettered consumerism. A perfect movie to catch just ahead of the Christmas holidays. Using a great array of cinematic tricks, it deserved to be joined by Lithuania’s Feature Film About Life (Dovilė Šarutytė) for its affecting blend of narrative fiction of home-video, but which failed to win any awards.

Other People

I’m broadly happy with the awards, but it is a shame that Asian efforts — from the incredibly well-shot black-and-white, dream-like vision of Chinese film Who Is Sleeping in Silver Grey (Liao Zihao, pictured in header) to the dour, depressing yet truly original Dozens of Norths (Koji Yamamura) from Japan to India’s whimsical The Cloud & The Man (Abhinandan Banerjee)— missed out on any awards. In fact, Immersion was the only non-European film to win an award in this section, making it a more insular, Euro-centric ceremony than it needed to be.

As a British critic, I’m often harshest on my own country’s efforts, which is why it was a shame that The Score (Malachi Smyth) failed to live up to the hype of its ‘heist-musical’ designation. A more un-categorisable entry was Adam Donen’s deeply idiosyncratic Alice, Through the Looking: À la recherche d’un lapin perdu (pictured below), a phantasmagorical journey through space, time, memory, filmmaking, philosophy and almost everything else you can think of. It was a film that didn’t really succeed, but it was deeply interesting nonetheless. Equally entertaining was our conversation with the filmmaker, which you can listen to over on Mixcloud.

Watching movies themselves is only one part of the pleasures involved in a film festival, especially one as egalitarian as Tallinn Film Festival. Where in Berlinale and Cannes access to talent is moderated through PRs, regulated meeting slots, and the dreaded roundtable, Tallinn allows you to easily share drinks, conversations and good times with the talent themselves, especially the debut directors and actors who are just as glad to be there as you. This kind of direct communication allows for the free transfer of ideas and debates about cinema and national character types, giving one the sense of truly being at the centre of the film world, if only for ten days.

Alice, Through the Looking

An excursion to Estonian’s second largest city of Tartu — which will be a European Capital City of Culture in 2024 — was also included as part of the festival’s hospitality package, expanding my understanding of the Baltic nation’s make-up. And whether it was the innovative, digital-first national museum, the melancholic ruins and bridges above the town, the bohemian river-side cafés and bars, or the pink-pastel buildings that suggest Wes Anderson’s next movie, it’s these types of small journeys that definitely expand what a film festival can provide: not just watching one film after another, but the opportunity to engage with a larger cultural context. Estonians don’t just provide cinema, they provide a true sense of unforced community. I simply can’t wait to visit my Baltic friends again this time next year.

Alice, Through the Looking: À la recherche d’un lapin perdu (In Search of a Lost Rabbit)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

Brexit broke a lot of people’s brains. In one corner, the nationalists who get upset if someone forgets to wear a poppy or, god-forbid, kneels for racial justice; in the other, the Follow Back Pro EU types who never stop talking about how European they feel. It’s a never-ending national nightmare. Unable to move on, the UK is threatened with complete stagnation.

But perhaps there’s also the chance for reinvention. Not the usual kitchen-sink dramas that define so much of British cinema — calcifying misery with stories of people cheated by a heartless government. Cinema that pops off the screen, uses an array of tricks, that calls attention to itself and probes discursively and violently into the heart of Englishness, the Queen and the psychic break between ourselves and Europe… someone like Romania’s Radu Jude or Mexico’s Michel Franco.

Enter Alice, Through the Looking: À la recherche d’un lapin perdu. The multilingual title, referencing Lewis Carroll and Marcel Proust in the same breath, shows off the film’s often exhausting ambition, attempting to create a kitchen-sink fantasy that comments on everything from the nature of art to the impossibility of storytelling to the problem of England. Incredibly ambitious for a first feature, it might falter regularly, but at least shows a willingness to inject some Godardian spirit into British filmmaking.

The French New Wave might appear on the surface to have arisen as a result of café culture, rarefied intellectualism and the influence of Hollywood cinema in Paris. While that is true to a certain extent, artists like Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais and Jean-Pierre Melville were also responding to the atrocities of the Algerian War — finding new language to explore the unimaginable. For the #FBPE-types, Brexit is still a trauma they cannot comprehend, and must revisit again and again, unable to engage in the necessary therapy needed to process their grief.

If it feels like I am digressing in my review, it’s more like I’m responding in kind to the discursive elements of Alice, Through the Looking — which meanders, refracts, retracts and contradicts itself with blinding regularity. Using Carroll’s tale as mere scaffolding for its essayistic and philosophical inquiry, it tells the story of a French girl named Alice (Saskia Axten) looking for a man named Rabbit (Elijah Rowen) after they shared a one-night stand. Sadly for her, this is just after the EU referendum; plunging the expat into a universe where nothing makes sense.

Which takes us back to the French. Godard’s aim with a film like Weekend (1967) was to cram every frame with so much symbols that the meaning was completely lost — which itself was the point. He was presumably inspired by T.S. Eliot (also making an appearance here…) whose “The Waste Land” collides so many fragments of metaphor and conversation together, it’s hard to make heads or tails of it at a first reading.

What those two have is the ability to create a love of the art as it unfolds in the moment. This film has flashes of brilliance here and there, but we are often left with empty philosophising, wooden line deliveries and awkward cutting in favour of genuinely compelling moments. Like the cameo appearances seen in Godard’s masterpiece, Slavoj Zizek’s plays himself, making comments about appearance and essence or something (I zoned out); Steven Berkoff (appearing as both mentor and actor, like Melville in Breathless (Godard, 1960)) gives feedback on cuts of the film itself; the legend Vanessa Redgrave narrates. But ultimately the film finally belongs to Donen — gravitating to film from opera, pop music and radio dramas — himself, both in its success and its failures, the jokes that land and the many (many, many) that do not. He owns it completely and if it doesn’t all work, the ambition is still to be respected.

Social realism feels completely inadequate to our current, absurd moment. If Alice, Through the Looking contains various missteps throughout its runtime, at least those are missteps in a welcome different direction.

Alice, Through the Looking plays in the First Feature section of the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, running from 12-28th November.