Hard to believe that’s the first week of the festival over. I have to say, it is very different from the usual experience. I mean, not the movies, the movies are great. But that weird sense of timelessness that the pandemic brought has been doubled-down on as I just go from film to film in my own bed. Then I roll over and sleep, and is it a nap? Am I gonna be out for 8 hours? Who knows? Since day and night have no meaning anymore, it’s hard to delineate one day from the next. And I seem to always be running behind the schedule I made for myself. Still, enjoying it enormously.
Author: gffreviews
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Back to the Wharf
Chinese noir about how life turns on a dime. Song Hao is a conscientious student on track for university, after years of hard work and good choices. Then he is told his university spot has been given to another student, Li Tang, his friend and the son of the corrupt mayor. Both he and his father storm out the house to speak to Li Tang. Song Hao arrives in Li Tang’s neighbourhood first, but goes into the wrong house. There, the inhabitant is surprised by him and attacks him believing him to be a burglar. In the struggle Song Hao stabs the man, and runs off in a panic. His life is over.
His father arrives moments later, only to see Song Hao fleeing, and assuming he must have been arguing with Li Tang, enters the same house. Upon discovery of the wounded man, he kills him for fear of the shame and ruin that will befall his family if the man is able to tell his story. Unbeknownst to father and son is that their coming and goings from the house has been witnessed by Li Tang from his bedroom window in the house across the road. That night, the mayor makes up for stealing Song Hao’s university place by promoting his father to a lucrative position, but Song Hao cannot cope and runs away.
The rest of the film takes place 15 years later, when Song Hao returns for the funeral of his mother. Li Tang is now a wealthy property developer, and Song Hao’s father has started a new family with a new son to carry on the family name without disgrace or ignominy. But old sins cast long shadows, and the question of whether Song Hao can ever quiet his guilty conscience enough to start a new life is one that wavers throughout the film.
This is also a film about class and corruption in China. Li Tang is almost like the Joker, constantly laughing and smiling, but utterly indifferent to the people he walks over to get what he wants. In his designer suits and lavish lifestyle, he acts like life has been oh-so good to him. Meanwhile, Song Hao did everything right, had it all taken away from him, and his life became a downward spiral of misfortune. The story of these two schoolfriends is a bit like Blood Brothers, as the passage of time only seems to deepen the power disparity between them.
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Truman and Tennessee
Archival interviews, footage, and readings in their words of Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams on their work, life and friendship. They met when Truman was 16 and Tennessee 28, and formed a lifelong bond that lasted until death. The film traces their youthful exuberance in their common sentimentalities, their drifting apart with time and consuming romances, their professional rivalry, their decline into alcohol and drug abuse, and the nadir of the relationship with broken confidences and scorning in public print. Ultimately though, despite its ups and downs, even at the end, their friendship endures, despite the vast distances between who they were and who they become.
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Enemies of the State
Man, the knots people will tie themselves in coz they can’t hold two truths at the same time. What is so difficult about understanding that you might be being investigated for national security reasons and guilty of sex offences at the same time?
This film builds this story up like it’s a mystery, was Matt DeHart being persecuted by the federal authorities or was he a child predator? It’s not really a mystery though, since both things can obviously be happening, so it’s not really pulling the rug out from anyone when they switch from presenting the case for the former to presenting the case for the latter. It’s like the Julian Assange thing all over again, I don’t know why they think these things must be mutually exclusive.
Unfortunate to see the old Warcraft getting namechecked in all this.
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Apples
There is a plague which causes people to have spontaneous amnesia, forgetting all of their previous life and identity. Those whose identity is lost, and who have no relatives to claim them, are entered into a rehabilitation programme, giving them daily tasks to undertake to give them an idea of what they might like and help share in culturally universal experiences, like riding a bike or going to a fancy dress party.
Apples has the tone of something like Lobster, where there is a flatness and frankness to the characters as they try to interact with no frame of reference or emotional baggage. It’s fun to watch adults react to stuff like little kids, getting a fright at their first car alarm and running away. Simple touches like not knowing how to dance to music or dress so you don’t look like your cats are deid. The busker playing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, because he’s clearly having to relearn how to play the guitar.
It also is reminiscent of things like The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, as it kinda looks at how integral memory is to identity, and if the loss of that narrative can provide new avenues for forging a new personality. Is it worth trying to remember, or building anew?
Quietly cute and weird little movie.
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Iorram
A beautiful documentary combining archival interviews with members of Outer Hebrides fishing communities, set to footage of their modern day descendants, and woven through it just the most haunting score. People tell stories of their memories of childhood, of characters they knew, of the coming and going of change in their world.
They talk about the old style of fishing, with sail and oar, no navigational devices, just a knowledge of their fishing grounds that was thorough and expert. They tell these tales over footage of modern boats heading out to sea with their engines and mechanical winches, filled with wifi and CCTV and every other kind of technology for scouting the presence of fish. But still, here are the people of the same communities making the same kind of living as generations before. They still make their own creel by hand. The more things have changed, the more they have stayed the same.
People tell of fishermen’s superstitions, sightings of mermaids, kelpies and fairies. The intricate weaving of the mystical with the mundane, the witchcraft with the weather.
As the score echoes the crash and hush of the ebbing and flowing ocean, and the sound of long memories recalled. Just a beautiful film.
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The Last Ones
The Last Ones is about a total prick who owns a mine in Lapland, and thinks he can take whatever he wants, like other people’s land and other people’s wives. It’s almost criminally boring.
I’ve heard this described as Finnish Western. The mine is set up on indigenous land, with the Sami reindeer herders in their tipis in the background, and a corrupt and lawless ruler of the surrounding town presides over a drunk and disillusioned population who came here to seek their fortune only to discover a hard and unjust life. Add to that the love triangle over the only fuckable woman in the town and you can see why people feel there are enough tropes to warrant the name.
But it’s not really. Because it’s not stylised enough in its execution to be called a Western. This is just a film about a lot of miserable people, and it has far more in common with bleak movies about English industrial mining towns than it does with American frontier film. The tone is all wrong, and the hollow pacing doesn’t build to a rise in tension, or a swell of hope cruelly dismissed, but is that unbroken plod that characterise films about working grind.
This film is a good half-hour longer than what I thought was the end shot, and a good two hours longer than what I hoped was the end shot. Just acres of grassland between meaningful events. No investment in any of the characters. And all the music in it sticks out like a sore thumb. So dull.
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Shorta
Speaking of toxic masculinity. Shorta (the Arabic word for polis) is about two policemen getting trapped in the ghetto during a riot of their own making. It’s hard to know who you are supposed to be rooting for in this, both cops are such absolute cunts. And then they pick up some poor bastard and use him like a bloodhound to try and figure out a way out the estate.
There seems to be a bit just as the riot’s kicking off where the police help a shopkeeper defend his store from looters, and I think you’re supposed to go, “Thank God the police are around” or something. But it’s like, man, it’s just stuff – you two are out here murdering and sexually assaulting folk.
So no, I didn’t root for the cops. From the get-go I was hoping they’d be killed and their heads mounted on spikes at the entrance to the scheme as a warning to the others. And nothing that happened over the course of the film made me change my mind or feel more sympathetic towards them. In fact one of the last events in the film, which kinda draws it full circle, goes to show how both of them have learned absolutely nothing, and would do the exact same thing again.
Also, remember what I said about The Mauritanian? About the black and brown characters being assaulted and killed just to provide the white characters with an opportunity to reflect and grow? Yeah, tons of that.
In a way, this is a zombie film, just the swarm is the denizens of an urban housing scheme, with their foreign dress and dark skin. Some of the shots are like 28 Days Later, rather than anything that acknowledges the humanity in the people pursuing them.
Fuck this movie. 16 Blocks does something similar much better, and Clash does it even better than that. Go watch one of those.
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Victim(s)
Brutal. That was so much darker than I thought it was gonna be.
It starts with the murder of a teenager and the stabbing of two of his friends by a fellow classmate. In Malaysia teenagers stabbing each other actually makes headline news, and the intro follows the story blow up, as people call for the death penalty to be implemented despite the offender’s age. His mother is vilified for raising a monster, and they are slated as a middle class family trying to buy their way out from under the law.
It also follows the mother of the victim as she tries to come to terms with her loss, trying to hold onto his memory. It is when she goes through his laptop that the movie begins afresh and you see the reasons and events that led up to the tragedy.
It’s not until I was watching Victim(s) that I realised how low I had set my expectations. I had been expecting a straightforward, “stabbing people is bad, but people usually have their reasons for stabbing people, and it’s a shame our youth get wasted in this way”. The movie itself was far more visceral, drawing heavily on toxic masculinity, misogyny, homophobia, class, and every kind of abuse. It is not simply a bullying movie. And it pulls back from the school setting to the present-day scenes to show the same bile and bloodthirst in the way adults interact over the story.
The three main characters are the murderer, his female friend, and the boy that was killed. Each in their own way is shown to be a victim without ever excusing or condoning the terrible decisions they make, or minimising the impact they have on others. Both the mothers of the killer and the killed are shown coping in the wake of this devastation and at a total loss to understand why it happened. But can any revelation of the truth now stop the juggernaut of hatred and outrage bearing down on those involved?
Ooft.
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Redemption of a Rogue
A fella’s dad insists that he not be buried on a rainy day, so the prodigal son, who returned only to see him off, is stuck in this shithole town waiting for the weather to clear before he can do this one last act before he commits suicide.
Went from a strong start with really excellent humour, to spending too long on music played directly to the camera, drawing focus and momentum from the story, until the whole thing just unwound.