SYDNEY FILM FESTIVAL 2019.
My 2019 Sydney Film Festival turned out to be an Agnes Varda season with some associated first releases. I could have worked it harder but I didn’t want to face diminishing returns. I let go four hundred and fifty minutes of Béla Tarr’s Satantango, to which I felt I had an obligation, and more reluctantly lost Brillante Mendoza’s Alpha - the Right to Kill to a sheduling conflict. Cutting down on viewing and mainly going for familiar names has never been the way to play Sydney Film Festival. There were the usual irritations - the inadequate documentation on the animation programs, finding a card-only box office that hadn’t been announced or waiting in a queue for the Bong Joon-Ho Q&A that was never going to be let into the full house. For a horrible moment it looked as if the audience which received Rachel Ward’s Palm Beach rapturously might vote it in as best picture but the engaging Bong beat that one out with his new Gisaengchung / Parasite.
In that one ubiquitous Korean Kang-ho Song (Foul Killer, Joint Security Area, The Host, Subijaki Western Django, Taxi Driver - where did he find the time?) Boon’s regular leading man heads a family making a miserable living folding pizza boxes in the basement flat where they can see drunks peeing against their window in the garbage filled alley way that the decontamination suit fumigators treat with a cloud of spray invading their home.
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| Parasite. |
Son Woo-sik Choi bolstered by photo shop diploma manufactured by his computersavy sister So-dam Park tutors the daughter of the prosperous architect planned house (studio constructed with constant arguments between the director and the designer) He soon has his sister teaching computer, his dad driving (planting panties in the car to remove the former chaufeur) and finally his mum replacing long serving housekeeper Jeong-eun Lee. The only giveaway is that they all smell the same. Finally the owners go on holiday and the infiltrators have what they want - the house and it’s contents - to themselves. But in from the rain comes the former housekeeper who proves to have a hidden agenda of her own.
Handsome just off realistic production values with a confident cast. As in Snowpiercer, we get the division between rich and poor. Boon must be tired of questions about whether the wealthy and envious poor families represent the two Koreas.
Palm Beach itself gathers a squad of Australian celebrity players backed up with Richard E. Grant who is the only one to show the required disdain for the tourist trap lifestyle of the inhabitants of the Northern Beaches. T-Shirt Czar Bryan Brown’s 73rd birthday is an occasion to gather together the members of his old band (think The Blues Brothers or Casi leyendas). Couples Brown and Greta Scachi, Sam Neil and Jaqueline McKenzie and Grant and Heather Mitchell are accompanied by their second generation. When guest Aaron Jeffrey turns down champagne for the tinnie from his own Esky we know he’s going to be allright.
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| Palm Beach |
They think this one is a warm and fuzzy tribute to the Oz lifestyle. It’s not. Put it up against the similar and much abused Grown Ups films or more probing pieces like the French 2010 Les Petites Mouchoirs and the local offering shrivels.
Normally Sydney Film Festival is grey hair and oldies being helped down the stairs. It was a bit startling to find myself surrounded by eager young people holding excited conversations. I thought they must have got the day for Nick Offerman wrong - but no. They were there to see Brazilian heart throb Wagner Moura star of the ferocious Tropa de Elite movies.
Normally Sydney Film Festival is grey hair and oldies being helped down
the stairs. It was a bit startling to find myself surrounded by eager
young people holding excited conversations. I thought they must have got
the day for Nick Offerman wrong - but no. They were there to see
Brazilian heart throb Wagner Moura star of the ferocious Tropa de Elite movies.
He didn’t talk about those. He was there to spruik his new film Marighella an account of Brazil’s Public Enemy Number One in the days of the sixties dictatorship, a subject which had clear overtones of life under the current Jair Bolsonaro government. Their concerns over freedom of the press resonate locally at a time when the news media here are full of coverage of police making off with Australian journalists’ records.
Marighella kicks off with the subject’s followers robbing a train (lengthy fluid camera movements) and sticking up a bank. I couldn’t help wondering how a film full of violent action could be so unexciting but that was not what this one was about. It documents the desperation of Seu Jorge’s Marighella taking up an “eye for eye” struggle with the then current regime who were big on torture and assassination, to follow their agenda set by the USA, determined that the rest of South America wasn’t going to follow the Cuban model. This one is a Brazilian “Years of Lead” movie right down to the abduction of an American consul.
In a gesture towards balance, they show Marighella’s team shooting down a US police instructor in front of his six year old and spare some sympathy for the sadistic cop on their trail, showing him trash talking the C.I.A. (no one uses the name) officer for whom he has contempt, telling him that won’t stop the US from funding him because they know he is the most effective opposition to the Marxist underground. They even allow characters to contemplate the notion that Armed Struggle may not have been the best path.
However, there’s no doubt about who Moura thinks are the good guys. The film gets into issues like the Brazilian authorities failure in their efforts to prevent news of Marighella’s activities getting out, countered by the Americans who want to put his wanted posters everywhere. We see a cop pissing on one.
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| Marighella :Adriana Esteves & Seu Jorge |
Despite the sketchy depiction of the movement, the actors do register. The scene of them shouting the Brazilian National Anthem cut into the end credits was
taken during a warm-up exercise they did to energise their performances
and retained by Moura to emphasize the seriousness of what they were
doing.
He registers sympathetically in person calling himself “an actor who
directed a film” rather than a career movie director. The Hub overflowed
with his admirers cheering, whooping and whistling his observations and
his triumph in getting his film a release in Brazil. Time was when that
was what a Cinémathèque audience did - but that was another country.
Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Werk ohne Autor / Never Look Away
is a BIG picture at three hours plus, employing an army of Czech and
German workers and dealing with big Themes - art and history, the Nazis,
divided Germany and Holocaust guilt. It looked like make or break for
Von Donersmark to re-establish his Lives of Others reputation after his limply received re-make of Jérôme Salle’s Anthony Zimmer.
Does he get away with it? The answer must be a qualified yes. Never Look Away is very good on art, quite good on politics and if, it was twenty minutes shorter and had a stronger ending, it would impress more as drama. We get a surprisingly charged moment towards the end when super despicable Sebastian Koch shows up in young Tom Schilling’s atelier. It’s has the impact of the monster crashing Victor Frankenstein’s wedding in the James Whale film.
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school mentors, the repeat of the bus horn sequence.
Let’s add a special note for the super sharp camerawork of Caleb Deschanel of all people.
The Souvenir is so British. It belongs to the tradition of Brief Encounter, The Terence Davies trilogy and Steve McQueen’s Shame. Tilda Swinton has got to be in this one but it’s a bit much to find it’s made by her school chum Joanna Hogg and stars her daughter Honor Swinton Byrne.
Briefly, in what we are told is that in the early eighties (I.R.A. bombs, sixteen millimetr film, manual typewriters but not the street scenes, cars and costumes to clue us in)e young Swinton Byrne is found among her film school chums discussing the under privileged as subject matter “I think we’re all as real as each other.”
The pace is solemn. The nearest they come to a sex scene is a montage of peeling stockings off legs with austere music. Most of the film is uninteresting wide shots set in a replica flat where we can see Hogg’s photos of the real life setting of her story through the windows, spaced by jarring inserts.
They say part two is on the way.
Briefly, in what we are told is that in the early eighties (I.R.A. bombs, sixteen millimetr film, manual typewriters but not the street scenes, cars and costumes to clue us in)e young Swinton Byrne is found among her film school chums discussing the under privileged as subject matter “I think we’re all as real as each other.”
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| Souvenir : Swinton Byrne |
Into her life comes toff Tom Burke who claims to do top secret stuff for
the Foreign Office and pays for snacks at his club by personal cheque.
In easy stages they become a couple.
Burke goes through a nasty withdrawal as Byrne watches and, after a
fling with a willing skin head and Burke’s spell in rehab, she takes him
back into her home and her bed but those of us familiar with these know
that’s not going to work out. Sure enough mum Tilda will advise “The
Worst.”
The pace is solemn. The nearest they come to a sex scene is a montage of peeling stockings off legs with austere music. Most of the film is uninteresting wide shots set in a replica flat where we can see Hogg’s photos of the real life setting of her story through the windows, spaced by jarring inserts.
I sat there hoping in vain for a significant revelation to justify my time, thinking I never encountered a British film school with well behaved students listening carefully to their instructor before tasking with the tidily stored gear. They are not game to show us Swinton-Byrne’s student film.
They say part two is on the way.
On the other hand I watched Ursula MacFarlane’s Untouchable, drawn like the people around me by prurient interest in Hollywood tycoon Harvey Weinstein’s outrages. As it rolled on I realised that what I was watching was not documentary but narrative. Movies generate these - Dalton Trumbo as a political prisoner rather than the world’s best paid writer who worked out how to manufacture film scripts on an unprecedented factory basis, Leni Reifenstahl as a proponent of fascist ideology not someone who took on the Berlin Olympics movie because it gave her unprecedented film making resources and access to stud athletes like Hollywood Tarzan to be Glenn Morris.
Untouchable is not all that much interested in finding out how “fat kid from the Bronx” Weinstein got to be the Hollywood billionaire deal maker in a few decades. It busies itself with his career as a serial sexual predator. There seems to be little doubt that Harvey Weinstein is a monster. Before all this broke I remember bad mouthing him at my Chinese movie event for his treatment of Stephen Chow and the destruction of the splendid Siu Lam juk kau/Shaolin Soccer. I thought at the time that could come back and bite me but I needn’t have worried. There is no sex in that narrative. Nobody cares.
The makers of Untouchable have enough to keep them going without any analysis of his creative work. A succession of women whom we know from their winning screen appearances show up to denounce him - Gwyneth Paltrow, Paz de la Huerta, Rosanna Arquette. Add the technically blind actress whose silhouette with guide dog is their knockout punch. Details of the fortune spent with the sinister security company trying to intimidate his opponents is overlaid with ominous music. That photo of Weinstein with Hilary Clinton must have raised a hoot of triumph in the production office. Scenes of the Me Too movement filling the streets of Manhattan represent a judgement of near Biblical proportions.
The only thing they left out is Weinstein being stripped of his Fellowship in the British Film Institute. Now that must have stung.
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| Untouchable : Weinstein |
The film’s production values are strong. The making is accomplished,
even innovative retaining the interview sections where the subjects
pause or think.
My sympathy goes out to the producers of the inevitable TV movie to
come. How can they top documentaries offering imperiled Paltrow, Rose
Byrne, Arquette and the rest? Where will they get someone so perfect a
clean cut hero as crusading Ronan Farrow and what chance has Kevin
Spacey in a fat suit against Weinstein himself who already gave a better
performance than all the real life movie stars he accompanied in Joe
Eszterhas’ An Allen Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn?
Another non fiction piece was Jennifer Baichwal, Nicholas de Pencier and Edward Burtynsky's Anthropocene: The Human Epoch, shot in 20 countries on six continents and an account of what they describe as the sixth great extinction in the planet's existence.
We are shown the unprecedented scale of human intervention in the natural order, 10,000 elephant tusks (it doesn’t look like that) on fire in Kenya, nickel-copper -cobalt- palladium mine’s underground corridors in Norilsk Siberia, among the ten most polluted places in the world, potash mines in Russia's Ural mountains, lithium evaporation ponds in Chile's Atacama desert, the Dandora giant landfill garbage dump in Kenya, constantly scoured by human scavengers and marabou storks, a ten storey bucket-wheel excavator in the open pit coal mine in Hambach in Germany, the twin-bore Gotthard base rail line in Switzerland, world's longest and deepest tunnel, bulldozer harvested Carrara marble quarries in the North Tuscany Alps or a text book juxtaposition of mossy endangered old-growth rain forests on Vancouver Island and the stripped by loggers slopes they leave. Throw in the factory doing Michelangelo's Davids - all recorded on a three hundred to one ratio shoot.
In all this imposing Koyaanisqatsi spectacle, the odd human face registers - the African wildlife officer disturbed that the tusks being burned behind her represent elephants that she actually followed in the wild, a sculptor who prefers woolly Mammoth Tusks to Elephant Ivory or the armed rangers who know that the animals they are protecting fear them because they are men, like the poachers they are there to combat.
It’s pretty impressive stuff though it’s not hard to imagine Alice Vikander’s austere commentary stripped out and replaced by one extolling the accomplishments of engineering. The makers proudly point out that the piece was shot and edited without a script and it hasn’t benefited from that. As the Yes Man told John Barrymore in World Premiere “It has size but it lacks shape.” I couldn’t help thinking they were a bit hard on Global Warming! For the first time in living memory the State Theater was habitable for the pit-of-winter Sydney Film Festival.
Ritesh Batra made the widely admired The Lunchbox and six years later here he is back again with Photograph a German/Indian movie processed at the Sam Spiegel Labs, a rather better film which has the faults and qualities of the first movie multiplied.
The plot has Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Sanya Malhotra, a couple of not quite young people who meet when he starts to hawk her one of his tourist instant photos in front of Mumbai’s Gate of India. She is called away and he is left with the picture. All the market traders know that his revered village Grandma, Farrukh Jaffar has stopped taking her pills because he won’t get married. To get himself off the hook he sends her the picture as being his bride to be and finds himself in more trouble when the old woman packs up and comes to the city to meet the girl.
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| Photograph :Nawazuddin Siddiqui & Sanya Malhotra at the movies. |
Malhotra has problems of her own, though she tops her accounting class (her picture on their building’s poster). Her family arrange meetings with the used-to-be-fat son of a business associate. Conveniently (the film leaves out all the difficult stuff) the leads meet on a bus and she agrees to support his deception - so charming meetings with granny Jaffar.
The lead pair are as irritating as potential lovers in a Naruse film. Even with the laid back performances, we feel like giving them a good shaking until they get physical. He’s bankrolled the marriages of his two sisters and is into buying back the family house for granny who doesn’t need it. She won’t tell her parents that the path they put her is on nothing like what she wants. Her excursions into his world give her Delhi belly from street food and the disturbing sensation of having a rat run over her feet in a movie theater.
The film's digressions are more involving than the main narrative. A taxi driver from his old town is upset when Siddiqui tells him to stop reminiscing and keep his eye on the Mumbai traffic. She has the village woman maid tell her about the country side and he gets advice when he smokes a joint with the totally corporeal ghost of a suicide his friend witnessed.
We never see the formula entertainment movie Siddiqui takes Malhotra to but Photograph is actually full of borrowed movie plots - the purported photo is the spine of Pupi Avati’s splendid Bix (what happened to that?) and finding the pictures of the heroine in the admirer’s room runs for Past’s Abwege through de Palma’s Sisters.
We never see the formula entertainment movie Siddiqui takes Malhotra to but Photograph is actually full of borrowed movie plots - the purported photo is the spine of Pupi Avati’s splendid Bix (what happened to that?) and finding the pictures of the heroine in the admirer’s room runs for Past’s Abwege through de Palma’s Sisters.
Here we’re still closer to Merchant Ivory than Bollywood but that’s not an accurate location. It’s hard to knock a film that so clearly wants the viewer to like it.
In the wake of the winning Bend It Like Benham, Gurinder Chadha’s Blinded by the Light is stretching it a bit offering the personal redemption of Viveik Kalra a 1987 British Pakistani teenager through the discovery of Bruce Springsteen.
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| Blinded by the Light : Williams, Phagura & Kalra |
The kid is is having a rough Teenage with his car worker dad out of a
job and the neighborhood skin heads spitting on him and daubing
swastikas on the family home. However as happens in these, things take a
turn for the better. His Sikh chum Aaron Phagura introduces him to old
casettes of The Boss, the school chum girl protestor Nell Williams comes
round (he tells her that if she’s just doing it to tick off her
conservative family, that’s totally allright), his English teacher
recognises his individual voice and gets him work experience with the
local paper and (nice this) the menacing neighbor turns out to be a WW2
veteran who is heavily down on anyone using the swastika he fought
against.
Our hero’s old chum’s dad Rob Bryden in a dumb wig turns out to be in touch with the Springsteen thing from his own generation and it all ends uplifting if kind of obvious with the girl rescuing his dad from the fascist marchers.
Krystyna Janda showed up front and centre in a new movie - made nearly forty years after her debut in Andrzej Wadja’s Czlowiek z marmuru/Man of Marble. She’s been about all that time - Mephisto, Elles and the rest - becoming a kind of scaled down Euro Meryl Streep. Here speaking three languages, she’s still able to head up a substantial Italian-Polish piece from countryman Jacek Borcuch whose career is largely in Polish TV and unknown to me. Their Dolce Fine Giornata is prime Festival fare. It’s what used to be called Radical chic - issues served up as entertainment or entertainment propping up issues, like the early films of Barbet Schroeder - very like the early films of Barbet Schroeder.
Janda plays a famed Polish poet living in the lush Italian countryside of which we get some nice scenics of mist rising on the hills or the historic bell tower. Rumpled husband Antonio Catania shuffles round the elegant villa in old slippers and daughter, rising star Kasia Smutniak (Perfetti sconosciuti, which I always seem to be referencing) manages to make her presence felt in an under-written part. She has brought the family to support mum in her acceptance of the Nobel Prize for literature, the only award of any value she observes.
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| Dolce Fine Giornata : Janda & Smutniak. |
Janda teaches grandson Wiktor Benicki to swear in Polish and value Frank Sinatra. Her guests troop out of the family home at dawn with suitably Fellini-esque music. Add in “a ltlite crush” Krystyna has developed on spunky local Coptic restauranteur Lorenzo de Moor. All in all, Krystyna is living the fantasy life of her target audience or film festival subscribers.
About this time Muslim extremists zap Campo Fiore market in Rome killing tourists. If they’d made it the Bataclan attack we would have a different movie. Local feeling runs against refugees, so Krystyna elects to make the big gesture and turns down the award. She and her Arab squeeze go internet viral.
At this point the film establishes its story arc. Journalist Robin Renucci does an attack interview. Drunken police captain Vincent Riotta, who summoned eight officers with torches and a dog when Benicki went missing, now turns aggro. His own son has been beaten because of her campaign and he and the local mayor, who is up for re-election, have met hostility for nominating her. “Do you think you can say anything?”
Janda’s comfortable world is caving in on her. This is not something we are used to seeing in movies or any other place - Alain Cuny in Pascal Aubier’s 1971 Valparaiso, Valparaiso maybe. It’s agreeable to face something not laid out on familiar lines, something that requires second thought.
Also buried in the Festival deluge, note Sohrab and Rustum a new fourteen minute animation from Lee Whitmore, maker of Ned Wethered all those years back in 1984. Sohrab and Rustum is conspicuous, not the least as a contrast to all the festival toons with it. You could not fit this one into Adult Swim. Indeed there’s no indication that it’s maker has seen material with that aesthetic.
It is what Palm Beach so desperately wants to be and fails, an appealing rendition of the Australian experience, of a treasured childhood event recalled after a lifetime - and it feels like it.
In a beach front girls school, the uniformed class listens to a fifties battery radio but their attention is won over by a winning, glasses-wearing young woman English Teacher who reads them an 1853 imitation Biblical poem by the son of the founder of Rugby school, something that is completely removed from their experience and ours.
The realistic outlines playing over coloured backgrounds are stylish and unfamiliar and achieve the mix of nostalgia and adolescent wonder the piece drives on. It left me wanting to see the other work Whitmore has produced since I lost touch with her career. Now that would actually have been worth having in the event's Australian Women Directors season.
At this point the film establishes its story arc. Journalist Robin Renucci does an attack interview. Drunken police captain Vincent Riotta, who summoned eight officers with torches and a dog when Benicki went missing, now turns aggro. His own son has been beaten because of her campaign and he and the local mayor, who is up for re-election, have met hostility for nominating her. “Do you think you can say anything?”
Janda’s comfortable world is caving in on her. This is not something we are used to seeing in movies or any other place - Alain Cuny in Pascal Aubier’s 1971 Valparaiso, Valparaiso maybe. It’s agreeable to face something not laid out on familiar lines, something that requires second thought.
Also buried in the Festival deluge, note Sohrab and Rustum a new fourteen minute animation from Lee Whitmore, maker of Ned Wethered all those years back in 1984. Sohrab and Rustum is conspicuous, not the least as a contrast to all the festival toons with it. You could not fit this one into Adult Swim. Indeed there’s no indication that it’s maker has seen material with that aesthetic.
It is what Palm Beach so desperately wants to be and fails, an appealing rendition of the Australian experience, of a treasured childhood event recalled after a lifetime - and it feels like it.
In a beach front girls school, the uniformed class listens to a fifties battery radio but their attention is won over by a winning, glasses-wearing young woman English Teacher who reads them an 1853 imitation Biblical poem by the son of the founder of Rugby school, something that is completely removed from their experience and ours.
The realistic outlines playing over coloured backgrounds are stylish and unfamiliar and achieve the mix of nostalgia and adolescent wonder the piece drives on. It left me wanting to see the other work Whitmore has produced since I lost touch with her career. Now that would actually have been worth having in the event's Australian Women Directors season.
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| Sohrab and Rustum |
Barie Pattison 2022
