SYDNEY FILM FESTIVAL 2017  part two.

Despite it’s apparently conventional film form, Philippe Van Leeuw’s Belgian- French- Lebanese Insyriated / In Syria accommodates a profoundly disorienting idea. Think Desperate Hours in a war zone.

In the apartment of a well-off Damascus family, three generations are now sheltering in what was recently a comfortable bourgeois home, with a lodger family and an Indian maid. Though traces of their normal life surround them, cell ‘phone reception is out, bomb blasts rock the building and snipers take down pedestrians in the parking lot.

Insyriated / Juliette Navis, Hiam Abass

The home represents the achievements of a lifetime to mother strong faced Hiam Abbass (Satin Rouge, The Visitor) which she refuses to abandon though her family are the building's only remaining residents. Looters on the other hand see nothing of value in her carefully tended consumer goods. Abass clings to the routine of normalcy, making tea for her father in law and berating her young daughter for washing her hair when water must be brought up from the cellar by hand. However new mother tenant Diamand Bou Abboud and her husband have stitched up a deal to leave the country with their baby.

That’s not going to fly. From the window maid Juliette Navis sees the husband shot down and Abass orders her not to speak, knowing that any rescuers are likely to be killed. Then there’s a knocking ...

Repeatedly the hardest thing to do is nothing - for people both sides of the barricaded doors. Self contempt and reproach build among the shut-ins. Comes the desperate after dark finale and there’s the disturbing spectacle in the marksman’s red dot playing over the faces of the characters we know.

The film develops a rare intensity in it’s scenes of crisis and moral complexities. Casting, performance and film craft are impeccable and any audience are soon confronted with the question of what they would do in the on-screen situations.

Agnieszka Holland is back on the festival circuit, though she has long since moved away from the Holocaust subjects for which they know her, doing series TV and versions of “The Secret Garden” and “Washington Square” - more familiar when it was adapted as “The Heiress”.

On the new film Spoor she shares director credit with her daughter Kasia Adamik. This sets it’s tone immediately with striking shots of deer antlers moving among the long grass at dawn already suggesting nature as a mystic experience, which is the way grey haired lead Agnieszka Mandat-Grabka’s character sees it. Like her neighbors she lives, with her adored dogs as companions, in in an isolated home in the woods. She chats to the wild boor that wanders into her yard and abuses a neighbor whose wire snares are a cruel death for the forest deer caught looking round at the audience. When Mandat-Grabka  takes a lover it is naturally entomologist Miroslav Krobot whose preoccupation is with the insects in the undergrowth here - nice shot of blue beetles mating.

Spoor /Agnieszka Mandat-Grabka, Miroslav Krobot.

Her uneasy appointment as local school English teacher is put at risk when she takes her charges on an expedition into the dark trees looking for her missing pets. The local priest, who is a cultural supporter of hunting, and the Polilja station cop, who joins the pack, are reduced to close-ups of lips framing platitudes about animals having no importance, no souls.

The only people who are exempt from the lead and the film’s assessment as crude intruders into this bucolic environment are the scrubbed up juveniles, an expelled city I.T. technician and the girl sex slave of the local bogus playboy club, and when bodies start turning up in the woods they are the ones who become the suspects.

The first half of the film is evocative and gripping. with the intriguing wild life straying through the foliage and seen as targets by the hunt-and-drink lot who seem to be violating  the natural order, with the dead animal heads strewn about their houses, paralleling the grotesque costumes of their seasonal celebration.

When the conventions of the who-dun-it assert themselves the film becomes less than it looked like it was going to be. It’s still a well crafted and played entertainment but it’s also a disappointment. The cast and technicians are regulars in Slavonic production.

The film’s comic spooky mood gets and holds attention and suggests new ground.

From Cédric Klapisch we expect something lively original and maybe even charming. His l'Auberge espangol trilogy provided that. No such luck here. The new Ce qui nous lie / Back to Burgundy is overlong and repetitive. It is great to look at, full of ‘scope vistas of seasons transforming the Burgundy vineyards - along with beautiful people - but they get to be boring company.

Pio Marmaï  comes back to the family vineyards after five years in Australia (!) - cut from him waiting on the bus stop with the circus poster, after a run in with dad, to the same stop showing a new circus poster and him with a rucksack & beard. His siblings Ana Girardot and François Civil are running the business. Hospitalised father Éric Caravaca (the only familiar face in a sea of fresh talent) dies and the trio face the question of how to deal with dividing the estate menaced by tax debt. Oliver Assayas’ 2008 L'heure d'été / Summer Hours kicked this idea about rather better.

There’s more wine making detail than anyone could ever want (“only wimps spit at a tasting”) and at great length the action gets to pivot on whether the most talented wine maker among them will carry on the family tradition. There were films like this about tobacco growing. I can’t help wondering whether we’ll think about this one the way we do about those in twenty years time.

Giradot comes across like gang busters and the rest are equal to the task but even the best passages, like the brothers lip-synching the dialogue between her and the stroppy picker who they see romancing Giradot in the distance, have a current of meanness out of character with the director’s best work.

Put this one down as the major disappointment in my highly selective viewing.

With Ucitelka / The Teacher  Festival Favourite Jan Hrebejk and his regular writer Petr Jarchovský are back on familiar ground documenting the abuses of Communist control in 1980s Czechoslovakia which we saw in their Kawasaki’s Rose.

This one starts confusingly with widow teacher and party secretary Zuzana Mauréry calling the new roll in her 1983 Bratislava suburban school class room, cross cut with what turns out to be a parents meeting called to discuss an allegation of her misconduct.  

Ucitelka / The Teacher - Zuzana Mauréry

We hear she’s into manipulating the families of the children in her class to provide services she wants - smuggling food to Russia, house keeping, running errands or fixing her appliances. Some of the parents are hearty supporters of her methods which include providing test answers to their children to boost their grades.

This comes to a halt when young ribbon twirling gymnast Tamara Fischer, who has been told in front of her class mates that she’s the dumbest kid there, puts her head in the gas oven. Her dad Martin Havelka places a complaint and when the school calls a meeting to determine action, he’s told that he’s an unreliable participant because punching out a stroppy foreigner got him a jail spell. Similarly disgraced window cleaner Peter Bebjak (himself a director of similarly themed efforts like Cistic) was a scientist before his wife broke with the restrictions of the socialist community and fled abroad. Mauréry sees him as replacement husband material and gets him the spot as school janitor, which comes with a flat. She encourages his artistic son who innocently gets involved in a foreign exchange voucher scam.

The meeting becomes tense and attention goes to Bebjak when he stands up - but he just wants to use the loo. The kind of moment we expect from Hrebejk.

Even an account of her dismal pupil success rate fails to swing the meeting against Mauréry and it looks like the head teacher will have to give her a promotion and a rise to defuse the matter.

The final montage of the subsequent lives of the kids is quite touching and following the coda in the class room with the Václav Havel photo on the wall, takes some of the bitterness of what we have been watching.

Performances are superior but craft aspects are mixed as with the irritating panning in the opening meeting. This one is uneasy viewing with it’s comedy elements and the sadistic treatment of children not only by their elders but also by their peers.

Then there was Song Chuan's unexpected Ciao Ciao a Chinese-French co production which paints a vicious picture of rural China?

Bookended by shots of the line of green and red train carriages running distant through the verdant countryside, this one covers the return of local girl Zuquin Liang/Ciao Ciao to her Yunnan province village. The kids call out “whore” when they see her city clothes and her family is made up of retrenched dad who is first seen catching a green river snake to use in his home made remedy and mum  getting by putting out for the local bootlegger. She complains that back breaking work in the tobacco fields for a year earns less than a city job in six months. She tells Ciao Ciao that at least she’s pretty and will have to use that to escape drudgery.

Marriage to the bootlegger’s tearaway son (the kids shout “drunk”) looks like an out but that disintegrates when his dad’s business is busted by the local cops on about people dying from home made liquor and she starts pairing with the urbanised town hair dresser who promises to take her back to Canton.

This one bears little resemblance to the Asian films in the mutiplexes, with its bilious colours,  raunchy make out and it’s depiction of petty corruption with gift cigarettes or the mayor sending out the emigrating workers with red rosettes that match uniforms of the kids’ band that plays them off as they are instructed to remember the one child rule despite the enticements of the big city. It’s not in the class of  say Jackie Chan’s Railroad Tigers or Ann Hui’s Huang jin shi dai /The Golden Era and it would be interesting to understand the mechanism which put Ciao Ciao in a festival and those into restricted distribution.

Newton proved to be an endearing if unpolished Indian drama from Hindi screen writer Amit Masurkar whose only other major project as director was the 2014 comedy Sulemani Keeda, about Hindi screen writers.

The new film is something different to the Bollywood movies that occasionally surface here. To start with, it has another look. The ‘scope image is soft and the colour less brilliant suggesting a cut price offering but the obvious budget limitations (small cast, a few real locations) don’t inhibit the story-telling in a film which relies on the strength of it’s subject and the appeal of its leads.

Rajkummar Rao is young and idealistic or is it egotistic when we see him refuse the arranged marriage with a girl who is uneducated and under aged. As a reserve poll organiser, he is briefed on the scale and importance of the up coming national election and he queries the procedures for dealing with the murderous Maoist insurgents bent on disturbing the vote. Sure enough, when the regular poling officer is told he hasn’t been given a metropolitan spot, he begs off (heart condition) and the unbending Rao is the one sent into the remote jungle where the Marxists Nayals are rampant. We’ve already seen a
candidate gunned down, fresh from promising every child a lap top and a cell phone.

Rao heads a less than stellar team arriving at an outpost commanded by officer Pankaj Tripathi who urges them to just fill in the paper work and forget about the idea. He has to be threatened with a written complaint to make him head up the security team taking the pollsters to their designated station, which proves to be a ruin in a burned out village - one the army has pacified. Promising new star Anjali Patil joins them as and goes about the task wearing her bright Sari while Rao’s lot have been got up in camouflage flack jackets and steel helmets.

Despite obstacles that include the fact that the hand full of locals they have come to record have no idea what the election - or any election - is about, Rao pursues his task, working up to a confrontation with the military guides. A weak coda damages conviction.

The film weaves between significance, comedy and tension with the odd flourish like a montage of shots of the real candidates who are represented only by symbols on the voting chart. It’s not all that compelling but it does raise a serious issue in a manner we haven’t seen before and has novelty value to paste over it’s short comings.

If you’re thinking too much Akira Kurosawa is never enough, there are a couple of feature length documentaries on his work but you had to settle for director Steven Okazaki’s Mifune the Last Samuri to go with the retrospective. A film that covers the life of the most famous Japanese actor since Sessue Hayakawa and reminds us just how good the films that represent his collaboration with the “perfectionist” Kurosawa are, can’t be a bad thing.

This one reproduces the mainly black and white footage beautifully and it’s interesting to hear from Mifune’s collaborators. The women have aged remarkably well. Dealing with survivors has brought some unfamiliar names into the foreground.

Filming Mifune ; the Last Samurai

That said, this one is for the choir. There is little on the actor’s pre-Rashomon career about which we know so little. The only other director who gets any attention is the remarkable Hiroshi Inagaki and that for his Myamoto Musashi films. His 1958 Muhomatsu no issho / The Rickshaw Man is well on the way to being Mifune’s best performance and it gets one still photo here.

Then there’s the discovery of the fact that while the juvenile did Seven Samurai in a bald cap but Takashi Shimura actually shaved his head for his part.

Keanu Reeves’ narration is unobtrusive, mainly adding a selling point to the production. Director Steven Okazaki’s documentaries and features extend back to the nineteen eighties.

Picking my way through this event is cheating of course. It means that I don’t run the risk of seeing the truly awful or the unexpectedly excellent which is what the festival experience is all about. Maybe I’m past that.