The CIA and Selected Shorts.

Ennio

 Generally our local viewers can only consider the Oscar winning non fiction and short films with curiosity. However this year enterprising distributors are putting them up on the screen for our consideration - as Variety puts it.

I got another chance to see Ennio, The Glance of Music, his former collaborator Giuseppe Tornatore's three hour homage to Ennio Morricone, a great companion piece to Ettore Scola's Che strano chiamarsi Federico / How Strange to Be Named Federico tribute to his late colleague Fellini. Too many of these giants of the Italian film are gone now.

Tornatore's film relies of phenomenal library research, interviews and extracts, rather than dramatisation. Coming from a musical family and training with classical instructor Goffredo Petrassi before his years with RAI, cameras were never far away as Morricone acquired celebrity status. His sound stage recordings were filmed, providing material to cross cut with the finished films, here often with fabulous effect. Their Sacco & Vanzetti montage is a highlight that few films could follow - but they do. The two sources of course play in time like  the interviewees singing or miming the scores. The scene of Tim Roth at the piano in Tornatore's Legend of 1900 cutting back to the actual pianist performing, is particularly arresting

Scored by Morricone. Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto - Volonte & Bolcan

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When bombarded with so much information, only a few elements can register. We hear about young Ennio listening to a Stravinski recital through a door left ajar, watching John Cage perform and later explaining that a typewriter was part of his own orchestration. Dario Argento says that having Morricone score your film is like winning an Oscar. We get Joan Baez' finale “Here’s to You...” lyrics as a last minute addition, become a chart hit, Morricone's last public trumpet performance being on the church steps for Pontecorvo's wedding.  His honorary Oscar was seen as a farewell tribute only to be followed by the real thing for Hateful Eight. Add the out doors pop concert throng singing along with one of his chanted scorings. Morricone jokes that it will take two hundred years to evaluate Tarantino's comparison with Beethoven. 

The film does run on to the point of being exhausting but the material is all so good, what are you going to cut? 

 

Daniel Roher's Navalny sits on the edge of conviction but is certainly remarkable as a piece of actuality film making, as we watch the subject fall victim to Novichok poisoning, we are told at the hands of Vladimir Putin. You Tube star Russian Opposition figure Alexei Navalny  emerges as an agreeable protagonist. He speaks ironic English with just the right amount of accent, like his fetching blonde wife & U.S. educated daughter. The family is a gift to an indignation stirring film maker.

Struck down while flying ("I was on my way home.Then I died") Navalny is rushed to a Vienna hospital. His Russian doctor watches him taken away and says "Nobody thanked me." The star turn is the introduction of "one very tired Belgian with a lap top", who uses the dark web to break the 'phone records of the Moscow Signal Institute represented as a Domestic Assassination machine and puts Navalny onto the line with a gullible scientist from the photos on the wall, claiming to be one of the team on the job of murdering him. In the back ground, the reporter's delight, as his plot delivers, is visible

  Navalny & wife.

We get Vladimir Putin saying that if he wanted Navalny dead, he'd be in the ground by now but he's nowhere near as media savvy. The film carries us with it, in a purpose-fit climax of Navalny flying back to Russia, where he faces the risk of death and, despite diverting the plane,  being greeted by a mob of supporters calling his name - alerted by social media. His opponents will say it's all a CIA stunt but the film does include Navalny's involvement with Russian extreme Nationalists. I wonder whether I would have finished with their  footage of him feeding carrots to a German donkey, but as a film and argument Navalny is immensely involving.

 

Two programs of Oscar finalist shorts are also getting limited screening. Applause, applause!   I miss the Tournés d'animation.

The animated ones are usually the highlight. This year we got an Australian entry, Lachlan Pendragon's An Ostrich Told Me the World is Fake and I Believe Him pitting Griffith Film School against Disney and the Canadian NFB. 

Our toaster telemarketer 3D hero takes in his stride that a fellow office worker doesn’t extend below waste level, but he has to find himself dropped into a tray of spare faces (the boss’ jaw keeps falling off), where a live hand intrudes, and get advice from an Ostrich in the elevator to understand the situation. 

A good dash of The Matrix or Free Guy goes with the spooky content that separates this one from the joke 'toons it resembles. Comic design and smooth technique. OK but this is the big league.

Similarly Amanda Forbis & Wendy Tilby's The Flying Sailor is fine but light weight for the Canadian Film Board studios which once produced L'homme qui plantait des arbres and Ryan.

Deliberately crude animation covers a British sailor, caught up in the 1917 Halifax Harbour Explosion glimpsed in the background. He's blown into the air for over a mile to arrive unharmed but naked - except for his boots. The protracted semi abstract flight echoes 2001.

Ice Merchants

João Gonzalez’ Portugese, drawn Ice Merchants is a near abstract account of a father and son whose living is abseiling down from their high mountain home to sell ice to the people below. The design is unfamiliar and the illusion of dropping unrestrained down the cliff face is striking.

Peter Baynton &  Charlie Mackesy's BBC The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse is the pick of the animation and indeed the pick of the year’s Oscar shorts, a top of the line childrens’ film that inhabits a curious territory between realism and fantasy.

Without the need for any explanation the young boy is lost in the snow. Joined by a cake-loving talking Mole, they search for the boy’s home. The menacing fox is redeemed with the film’s best scene, in the flooded river. An imposing, sad white horse, which provides another revelation, rounds out the group.  "Home isn't always a place, is it?"

... and separated from the rest with a caption about unsuitable content we got Sara Gunnarsdóttir's My Year of Dicks  putting on screen Pamela Ribon's somewhat incoherent, episodic, thirty years in production five attempts to lose her virginity on turning fifteen in early-’90s Texas. 

It drops into the styles of Robert Crumb, manga and the psychedelics to illustrate the lead’s adventures, running through Cool Bitch Party and a sex talk from her unjustifiably laid-back dad. The givers and takers turn out to be a dismal lot though an old friend does come through.

The live artist material proved unexpectedly more remarkable. At thirty seven minutes Le pupille / The Pupils barely makes it as a short film and it arrives with the names of heavy hitters on the credits - producers Disney and Alfonso Cuarón, with script and direction from Alice Rohrwacher, sister of  Alba Rohrwacher, the pair having previously collaborated on features Lazzaro Felice / Happy as Lazzaro and Le meraviglie  / The Wonders. 

It's off-putting to note how few of the films of busy Alba have come our way. Her unusual looks and willingness to depart from our expectations of a major star, not to mention a considerable talent, justify more attention. Here again she registers as part of an ensemble of less well known players, in the glamorless role of mother superior at a penniless nineteen forties girls' school, a story spun off a letter Elsa Morante (“My Brilliant Friend”) wrote.

The prayers of the innocent girl pupils are particularly sought by petitioners, including a well off, red lipped  Valeria Bruni Tedeschi putting a whole 70 eggs into a luxury scarlet Torte offering, outraging parsimonious Rowacher, who psyches the girls into giving up their treat - with one exception. Alba contemptuously gives the hold-out a delicious looking slice which ends squashed in her hand, from which, safely out of sight, the girls greedily take crumbs, while short changed workers carry off the cake.

Strong on tacky Catholic imagery, with the kids costumed and posed for the Xmas pageant by habit-wearing sisters in sparse surroundings -  washing mouths with soap and talk about the evil eye. Nice. 

Anders Walter & Pipaluk K. Jørgensen's Ivalu is a handsome but over oblique mix of folklorico and message piece. In Greenland, young Mila Kreutzmann’s sister Ivalu goes missing so her granny takes in the girl’s national costume for Kreutzmann to join a welcome to the queen. Inconclusive blip insets suggest misdeeds of dad Angunnguaq Larsen. Striking visuals like the downwards opening shot of a raven flying over the bleak landscape. 

Good looking film with OK performances and unfamiliar setting.

Cyrus Neshvad's La Valise Rouge / The Red Suitcase is a telling account of sixteen year old Iranian head scarf girl Nawelle Ewad, found looking for her red carry bag at the carousel at Luxembourg airport. When opened by officials, it proves to contain art materials, including portraits of her, hair spread. Though no one speaks the girl's language, the signatures on the paintings match her passport, asserting her claim to the bag. Turns out grey haired man Sarkaw Gorany she is avoiding, waiting with the bunch of roses, is her arranged husband now trying to trace her with his iphone. She turns her pile of Ayatollah-face currency notes into about thirty Euros which the coach driver scoops off for her fare, only to have the angry husband-to-be search his vehicle and retrieve the red bag from the luggage space where she is hiding. 

A disturbing message piece which fits its eighteen minutes nicely, this one is smoothly made.

Tom Berkeley, Ross White's An Irish Goodbye starts with father Paddy Jenkins bringing scrapping brothers Lorcan (James Martin), having Downs Syndrome, and Turlough (Seamus O'Hara) come back for their mother's funeral and intent on selling up the family farm and planting his reluctant sibling with an aunt. Participation is made conditional on completing the dead mother’s hundred-item bucket list which includes sitting for a naked portrait and putting the urn of ashes into space with fireworks rockets.  

This one is an agreeable miserabilist two reeler made appealing by the brother’s affection.

Pick of the batch is Nattrikken / Night Ride directed & scripted by Eirik Tveiten. Waiting at the Trondheim tram terminus on a freezing night, diminutive Sigrid Kandal Husjord is told she can’t shelter in the car while driver Øyvind Uhlving takes his break but activates the door while he’s away. A series of mistakes has her start the tram and picking up from a stop she over runs to the abuse of hoon passengers, who move on Ola Hoemsnes Sandum riding in the front She proves to be in drag. Asked for the driver’s protection, Husjord leaves bully Axel Barø Aasen to drive and comforts the escapee on the roadside bench.

Best moment, the cop car lights passing them in pursuit of the tram. Feature standard production values.

There aren't too many nights like this available at the movies now. I enjoyed this one.

Barrie Pattison - 2023