I had a pretty good festival. With a couple hundred films on offer I’d be surprised if the organizers themselves had seen everything. It’s possible to make completely different selections. This worked out so that I didn’t watch any of the audience poll winners, which leaned towards local product suggesting a heavy friends and relatives input. A lot of people missed any of my choices and the only ones sharing a common experience bought the pre- selected seasons. I heard a few groans from that lot. As predicted, I found the quality of the festival films falling away as the event wore on.
Some things did register throughout. What used to be CinemaScope/Panavision/anamorphic format seems to be pretty much universal. How they go about that in the digital age I’m not sure. Insyriated stood out for being in the old wide screen format and Ghost Story went one better and used the one time Academy Frame right down to the rounded corners. The East Europeans still seem to be stuck with the washed out colours of the processing from the days of the Soviet block. Those grey oranges in Bacalaureat were really off putting and I suspect Andrej Wadja would have liked something more vivid to colour code Powidoki / Afterimage’s scarlet light that fills the studio when they drape a giant Stalin banner over Boguslav Linda’s windows, the blue dye he uses on the flowers he places on his dead wife’s grave or the red coat that his daughter is ridiculed for wearing to her funeral.
The one thing which re-occurred alarmingly through the bulk of the material I watched was the rejection of their characters’ society. Father Adrien Titieni telling his teen age daughter to get away from corrupted Romania in Bacalaureat is a perfect fit with Wind River’s Jeremy Renner reproaching Native American boy Martin Sensmeier for not leaving the snow country when he had the chance or Ciao Ciao eyeing the escape from her stifling village represented by Canton. This is a pendulum swing from the work that aired in the first more propagandist films Sydney Film Festivals.
I’m kind of disappointed that the film which most impressed me in the festival was the one that came with the most fanfare. Fatih Akin’s new Aus dem Nichts / In the Fade carried off prestigious awards before it hit our shore.
Star Diane Kruger has been around for twenty years and she’s a great looking woman who can make her characters impress, though she’s only had a few films that were worthy of her - Joyeux Noel (2005) Les brigades du Tigre (2006) and Pour elle (2008) and she wasn’t really the focal point in those. This time she’s front and center and the impact is in playing alarming events across her now mature features. She carries that load without a mis-step.
The film opens with her jail marriage to released Turkish drug dealer Numan Acar, which leads to a happy life with him running a city migrant information centre - and then she can’t get to his office because the police have the area cordoned off. A cautious inspector won’t buy her theory of a Nazi outrage and toys with the idea of Turkish Mafia or Kurdish Mafia or drug wars but then the call comes and she’s identifying suspects through the one way mirror and Denis Moschitto her lawyer has her in the court room as co-plaintiff.
The actual trial with it’s graphic description and legal niceties is the stand-out section. An appearance by Ulrich Tukur (The Lives of Others / Das Leben der Anderen 2006) adds to the impact. The subsequent lurch into vigelante-ism is more suspect but by that time nothing could derail this one.
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Aus dem Nichts / In the Fade / Kruger |
There’s a lot more to be said about this one but my guess is that it will be back for more serious discussion later.
We pick up Taylor Sheridan’s Wind River at night with the Indian girl running in the snow as a woman’s voice reads poetry on the track (not a good sign). The ranchers’ animals have been taken and wild life tracker Renner in his white camouflage is out shooting wolves moving on the flock of sheep (actually one wolf repeated flopped over) and finds her bare foot body. This gets in the way of the time he’s supposed to spend with his young son.
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| Wind River /Jeremy Renner & Gill Birmingham in death face. |
The film is a superior action movie drawing on it’s Native American setting, recalling Courtney Hunt’s 2008 Frozen River. Reservation cop Greene (“six officers covering a territory the size of Rhode Island”) on the case is joined by FBI agent Elizabeth Olsen, who Renner cautions that she’d freeze to death on the back of his snow- mobile going to the crime scene without winter gear “in the snow at eleven thousand frickin feet”. The sour Indian woman who outfits her warns “That’s not a gift” and the dead girl’s father Gill Birmingham asks “Why is it that when you people want to help you always start with insults?”
Olsen asks for Renner to be attached to her investigation and examines the body. “Her lungs burst here” he prompts. “I know you’re lookin’ for clues but you’re missing the signs.” There’s the grim autopsy.
Olsen learns about the group of tearaways living in isolation. Greene commented, “Those boys could stand some serious lookin’ into” and this triggers the first action set piece leading to the film’s most imposing scene between Renner and the girl’s brother Martin Sensmeier who discovers her death in the aftermath of the shoot-out. Renner joins him in the truck waiting to be taken away (“Jail’s a right of passage for these kids”) and reproaches him for his life style which offered him a chance to leave “It’s this place Chip - army, college - look at what you chose.”
Following tracks in the snow leads to a contractor’s camp. There Olsen, Greene and the deputies have gone to investigate the frozen victim’s trailer and things rapidly get out of hand. “You’re flanking us!” The announcement that an FBI agent is standing in front of the trailer door gets a shot gun blast through it which Olsen only just avoids on Greene’s warning. Soon there are bodies everywhere.
The final dialogue with Birmingham, who has applied his “death face” though he couldn’t get the right pigments, has ringing dialogue “Wolves don’t kill the unlucky deer. They kill the weak ones.”
Great setting, strong performances, intense suspense. The cathartic shoot out is on he way to being a let down after this build up.
An advance on his Sicaro and Comancharia / Hell and High Water scripts, this one cements Sheridan in place as a significant talent. The stars have gained traction too.
The Nile Hilton Incident looked like a match for the Egyptian crime movies they used to show in the multiplexes in Western Sydney. We should have had some more of that. I was becoming a Mohamed Henedy fan.
In fact this convincing account of incidents in Cairo, shifted a couple of years to the 2011 Tahir Square riots, was actually filmed in Morocco by a Sweden- Germany-Denmark unit directed by ex graffiti artist Tarik Saleh, who did the intriguing animated Metropia. The current film’s rising star Fares Fares does actually come from Cairo making him the film’s most authentic element. Fares2 also did one of the voices in Metropia.
The Nile Hilton Incident is being called film noir, which probably sells tickets, but in fact it's a pastiche of elements of a whole range of crime movies Laura, The Big Heat, Heavy Metal, Gorky Park and The Night Manager among them. This is blended in with it’s bleak depiction of the Murabak era.
The lead is a Cairo police force major whose main duties seem to be making the pick ups for the week’s kick backs in his beat up red hard top. Any case they investigate ends when the bribes have been collected. “We’ve got the money.” Fares’ life is arid. His wife has left him. Leisure is smoking a joint in a seedy brothel, watching his TV which will only pick up an Italian speaking channel or eating frozen meals on his own. He keeps on switching his pistol from one convenient spot to another but the only time he fires it is not when a motor scooter hit man takes out his cousin with a burst of machine gun fire but to smash a full length mirror - not a piece of ham handed symbolism like Le Jour se leve or The Brave Bulls either.
A glamorous Tunisian pop star is found dead in a suite at the Nile Hilton and our man is sent in to wind up the case. They don’t even call out the lab boys. What no one knows at that stage is that Sudanese hotel maid Mari Malek saw the killer leave the apartment. Complications ensue when Hania Amar one of the dead girl’s also glamorous fellow entertainers comes to the station to demand progress on the case. Other officers gawp and Fares tells her “This is no place for you” but he is edged into an awareness that he is still a police officer involved in an investigation. Think John Ireland in Farewell My Lovely. Pretty much without wanting it, Fares begins to solve the case - incriminating photos, making it with the club singer, paying off officers from another district to arrest her pimp and following leads that connect with a member of the Egyptian parliament living in a gated community with its own golf course and featured on press ads for his housing development which will usher in a new Cairo.
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| The Nile Hilton Incident / Fares Fares & Hania Amar. |
After the nice uncle breaks out the jumper leads and pours water on the cement floor, Colonel Fares gets fighting mad, despite being told “We’ve already got the money”. The MP tells his lawyer to move his wife and children out of the country but the Tahir Square demonstrations break out with the final scene being the night time streets filling with protesters who stop beating up Fares (“We are not like them”) while workers cover the face of Mubarak painted on the side of a high rise. The audience at the State seemed to relate to that image. I though it was pretty good too when it was George Raft in Shanghai at the end of Intrigue seventy years back.
It would be interesting to know if this mash up of such diverse elements is conscious or not. It is so seamless and so involving. I’ll watch what Saleh and his cosmopolitan chums do next.
Curiously We Don't Need a Map didn’t share the warm approbation poured over Australian product. Comparing the Eureka flag to the Swastika has already brought director Warwick Thornton grief. You’ve got to like him talking about sitting there thinking “please not me” when they announced Australian of the year 2009, punching holes in a sheet of cardboard with a pencil to make a Southern Cross background for the titles rather than commissioning high end lab work and figuring that a black feller (his choice of words) and producer Brendan Fletcher with a string of superior commercials would be a shoe-in for NITV’s referendum anniversary funding.
Though the pair represent their film as a chaotic endeavor (“let’s go out and do a shit load of interviews”) it is actually remarkably well organised, pivoting around the inescapable new significance the Southern Cross has taken on since John Howard, Pauline Hanson and the Cronulla Riots. The rock singer interviewee comments “Someone who got a Southern Cross tattoo the week before Cronulla, must be spewing now”. It’s now like saying a swastika indicates a connection to Hindu philosophy or (and no one observes this) the Confederate flag.
Thornton visits a playground version of the Eureka Stockade, watches a traditional, celestial aligned cross laid out on the yellow soil and erased, recalls the Southern Cross Company windmills which drained the aquifers the indigenous people relied on for water (a sculptor now recovers the steel for art works) and listens to the significance of rock art explained.
The director and the articulate observers he has sat in front of his camera establish a remarkable context for all this - pre-European arrival Australia a model of multi- culturalism with six hundred different languages, the time when the oral tradition was not dismissed as Chinese Whispers, because then the ones who didn’t know the song cycles would not be able to find the food and water described in them and die, or the First Fleet, the aborigines and the boat people all using The Southern Cross to find their way.
This is not however your usual polemic. Scenes of beach spear fishing, night time fire lit activities and accelerated shots of the stars filmed by Thornton’s son Dylan River punctuate more conventional footage. The action is commented by shots of hands manipulating the Bush Toy Mob’s salvaged-wire figures - Captain Cook’s boat greeted by locals with a sign saying “Fuck off - We’re full”, Thornton in dialogue with the Bush Toy Captain Phillip telling him if he wants to stay he’ll have to behave or a shot-down black man’s grave marked with a toy Southern Cross windmill.
You can see the sensibility of Thornton’s remarkable Samson and Delilah at play finding jokey material in appalling happenings.
The film goes to air in July and plan is to have this one shown in schools. Sounds like a really good idea to me.
Incidentally Thornton advises that the copper who defended with his Billy Club the people the mob attacked in the toilet block during the Cronulla riots, becoming an Australian icon, has been fired for excessive violence.
Andrej Wadja was the greatest film maker of the Communist world and beyond. He left behind a string of brilliant works - Popiól i diament /Ashes & Diamonds, Popioli/ Ashes, Ziemia obiecana / Land of Promise, Czlowiek z zelaza / Man of Iron, Katyn. His final film (he died aged 90) Powidoki /After image is the work of a major artist. Every composition and edit shows this. The question of whether it is a work of art - or revenge or a cautionary tale or an act of contrition tends to over ride this.
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| Powidoki /After image |
legged celebrity artist former associate of Kazimir Malevich and Mark Chagall, Wladyslaw Strzeminski, first seen in 1949 greeting new student Wichlacz (also in Spoor) by rolling down the hill to join her. What happens to the lively red-head whose panties show when she does the same thing?
He’s revered by his students at Lódz School of Plastic Arts and Design and has his admired gallery abstract exhibit “The Neo Plastic Room” in a museum. The Communist authorities reproach him with his thirties quote saying that art should serve the state and deal with him with increasing severity when he fails to conform. Cutting that hole in the Stalin Banner (compare Burned by the Sun or the Tsui Hark Maoist era film ) accelerates the process.
When he’s dismissed, the students rally round him stealing a typewriter for Wichlacz to work on his book "The theory of vision" but their exhibition at the WMCA (the only venue that will have them) is broken up by a truck full of thugs and The Neo Plastic Room is dismantled.
We never see his estranged sculptor wife and his teen aged daughter (“She’ll have a hard life”) is rebuked for turning out to her mother’s funeral in a red coat, though it is the only one she has and her joy is in marching in a borrowed uniform carrying a portrait placard in the political parade. She decides she’d rather live in the children’s home than in the apartment to which Wichlacz has the key. Her last appearance is in a pair of borrowed shoes to convince Linda that she will be all right in the winter.
The pressure increases as a friend gets him a spot at the P.S.S. co-op, painting Stalin portraits and he’s so good at it that the Rail Workers Union want to poach him but even that is taken away from him. His membership of the artist’s union, of which he was one of the founders, is cancelled meaning he can no longer buy paints (“Those who don’t work, don’t eat”) so he tries to put a spin on it by taking the daughter to the movies (the Kino Tatry is showing Les Murs de Malapaga) with the money, only to be faced by a documentary on Socialist Realist art cf. the incriminating footage the Germans show in Katyn or even Oliver Stone running Vlad Putin Dr. Strangelove.
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| Wadja |
His old associate party official offers him money, work and recognition - existence! - if he will conform and Linda is dismissive. He, of course, coughs blood. The final image of the disconnected hand swinging in the window the passers by don’t notice is extraordinarily evocative - if a further downer.
Performance, setting and film form are impeccable. This is recognisably the view that the artist community held of the Communists in the fifties and with Wadja’s stamp on it that
perception gains weight.
Comic strip artist-director Dash Shaw’s My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea has kind of one of those my years in (American) high school plots about the nerdy kids who write these autobiographies, after being at the bottom of the pyramid where the Jocks lord it at the summit, but that’s got conflagrated with The Poseidon Adventure and laid out in ‘Scope animation that is simultaneously naive and sophisticated - bold colours, 3D free textures that seem independent of outline, abstract sequences, of which one showing drowning is particularly challenging.
Probably the most rewarding thing about is that it never lets you work out how to relate to it - touching, grotesque, funny or dreadful. Is it sending itself up or does it want you to reconsider your own relationship history?
Shaw can be equated to the character voiced by Jason Schwartzman, who has just moved up to sophomore and cured his eczema only to find he’s still a bottom feeder. He expresses his concerns by trashing his friend (voiced by James Corden’s band leader) in the Tides High School give away paper that they edit with the girl (Maya Rudolph) who has become an item with his friend. Schwartzman is called in by the Principal and given a damning comment on his permanent record which Jason’s character attempts to retrieve from the school archive, finding calisthenics team star (Lena Dunham) in there looking for her confiscated cell ‘phone. They turn up a document saying that the school is built on a fault line and sure enough the ocean invades it, meaning the new alliance kids have to clamber up though it’s levels to the roof which also represents graduation, despite killer sharks, tribal seniors, fire and explosion. Only Lunch Lady Loraine (Susan Sarandon) supports their race for life.
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| My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea. |
After watching this, multiplex movies come across as unchallenging. Speaking of Multiplex Movies I got to see two movie leads straighten up on the coroner’s slab in the one day, Tom Cruise in The Mummy and Casey Affleck in Texas fringe film maker David Lowery’s Ghost Story. I couldn’t avoid noticing that we have a clear evolution of film monsters - Germany in the teens, Universal classics, Hollywood B movies and the European rip- offs of Hammer Studios, Paul Naschy and the rest, going up market with Coppola and Corman.
On the other hand ghosts seem to start from scratch every time. There’s no indication that Patrick Swayze’s lot had ever seen The Uninvited or either one was familiar with silent The Headless Horseman.
Lowery’s film seems determined to be conspicuous and begin the cycle over again. As well as standard screen it minimises reliance on editing, most scenes being one take. Texas cameraman Andrew Droz Palermo also filmed Hannah Fidell’s indie A Teacher which played here late night TV recently.
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| Mara in Ghost Story |
It manages atmosphere without atmospherics and is curiously touching - even haunting!
However we have been here before. Robert Downey the elder’s Greaser's Palace of 1972 was an acid western Christ story fielding a Father, Son and Holy Ghost and the Holy Spirit turned up in a sheet complaining “It’s always the other two. When do I get to do my stuff?” The pair of films have a community. I wonder whether the makers are aware of that.
Continues in #2
