NZIFF 2021: ドロステのはてで僕ら Droste no Hate de Bokura (Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes, 2020)

In marked contrast to the very long and very melancholic films screening at any given film festival, not least last month’s Whānau Mārama – New Zealand International Film Festival, is this Japanese film. It has a short running time and a very high concept, so there’s not much to it (certainly not much in the way of budget) but it’s made with love, an old-fashioned amateurism with all the etymological meaning of that word, and the enthusiasm shows.

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This is undoubtedly a slender film, and not just in its concise running time. It’s a classic high concept premise elaborated on a shoestring budget (the closing credits show behind the scenes views of the filming setup) and feels rather like an extended short film in some senses. Like any time travel film, thinking about it too deeply is probably a mistake, but it throws so much energy at the screen that it’s hard to find time to do that thinking. Generally, it has the feeling of a farce put on a theatre company (which it may well be, after all) and the narrative follows its repetitious journey with small changes each time until eventually it’s all you can do to keep up with the almost infinitely recursive loops of time it creates. It’s as clever as it is silly, and would outstay its welcome if it were any longer, but it has a certain something.

CREDITS
Director/Cinematographer Junta Yamaguchi 山口淳太; Writer Makoto Ueda 上田誠; Starring Kazunari Tosa 土佐和成, Aki Asakura 朝倉あき, Riko Fujitani 藤谷理子; Length 70 minutes.
Seen at the Embassy, Wellington, Monday 15 November 2021.

NZIFF 2021: La Nuit des rois (Night of the Kings, 2020)

Again travelling around the world, and at any film festival I always try to make space for some African films. Whānau Mārama – New Zealand International Film Festival featured a few of these, and though my favourite was probably Lingui, the Sacred Bonds by Chadian master Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, this Ivorian film certainly is diverting. I didn’t fully understand it, but there’s a deep and tangible sense of mystery to it that’s quite compelling.

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This is a strange and oblique film that has a certain intense power despite (or because partly because of) its sense of mystery. It’s the mystery perhaps of religious observance, with a hint towards a ceremony where servant and master are reversed as it is in the prison which is the film’s setting. Here it seems the prisoners are in charge (though still prisoners) and where when the red moon rises a storyteller holds court and takes them through to a new day where order is (violently) restored. We follow the young man who becomes the Roman, or storyteller, and the unmoored narrative feels sometimes as close to science-fiction as it does to folk tale: certainly all the names and titles, ancient enmities and conflicts, a sense of impending doom (or perhaps release), could be from any given fantasy film set in any era, although this one is also firmly in ours. I don’t really have many of the tools necessary to fully engage with it (plus it was late and I was quite sleepy) but it certainly has something compelling to it.

CREDITS
Director/Writer Philippe Lacôte; Cinematographer Tobie Marier Robitaille; Starring Koné Bakary, Isaka Sawadogo, Steve Tientcheu; Length 93 minutes.
Seen at City Gallery, Wellington, Friday 12 November 2021.

NZIFF 2021: Titane (2021)

The closing night film of the New Zealand International Film Festival ended up being the Cannes Palme d’Or winner Titane, which is certainly a very bold and disturbing film to be winning major awards but there’s something to that. I was never quite sure if I really loved it while it was going on, but I do know that it was surprising and confrontational, and quite baroquely stylish, with an excellent performance from newcomer Agathe Rousselle and grizzled veteran Vincent Lindon.

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Watching this Cannes prize-winning film most strongly reminds me of the work of Claire Denis. The influence of David Cronenberg is perhaps most obvious in its body horror genre trappings, but for me Denis is the influence that seems clearest to me, and partly that’s a matter of tone. The one time I’ve seen Denis discuss her film at a live Q&A was after a screening of Bastards, which also stars Vincent Lindon and is set in a twilight world riven with anger (at least in my recollection), and reading interviews with this film’s director Julia Ducournau reminds me of the way Denis would confront her critics, never seemingly more engaged than when she was outraged by an angry comment.

Clearly there’s a lot that audiences and critics are divided over with Titane, and some of the criticism is probably quite at odds with what Ducournau intended, but it seems at heart to be about human connection. Along the way it dispenses with trite psychologising — we see Alexia (Agathe Rousselle) briefly as a child, but any relationship she has with her parents is very much only indirectly implied, and the reasons for her turning to murder are never really delved into — in favour of a heady immersion into a stylised world of machines and flesh. This isn’t the romantic abstraction of, say, Ex Machina, but instead a very fleshy world of scars and body transformation, which hints at a trans subtext (though the filmmaker denies that) and certainly speaks to gender fluidity, an in-your-face be-queer-do-crimes vibe. That said, when she comes into contact with Vincent Lindon’s firefighter, the film changes perceptibly to being one about acceptance and love despite everything — and there’s a lot there for his character to blindly accept.

The filmmaking is fearless when it comes to bodies, and that much is certainly evident from Ducournau’s debut feature Raw, but it’s also very much within a genre framework where this kind of horror is a little bit abstracted from the emotional reality (a scene with a knitting needle lands very differently in, say, Happening) without entirely relinquishing that primal response. That can make twists like Alexia’s relationship with the car make a certain amount of poetic sense, but her relationship with Vincent seems pretty profound too, and he is great in what must have been a challenging role. The textures of the colours and images, the propulsive music and relentlessness of the endeavour carries it, along with a fair amount of jet black humour. I’m not even sure if it’s a great film, but it feels pretty special.

CREDITS
Director/Writer Julia Ducournau; Cinematographer Ruben Impens; Starring Agathe Rousselle, Vincent Lindon; Length 108 minutes.
Seen at Embassy, Wellington, Sunday 21 November 2021.

NZIFF 2021: Разжимая кулаки Razzhimaya Kulaki (Unclenching the Fists, 2021)

This tough little Russian film screening at Whānau Mārama – New Zealand International Film Festival won a prize at Cannes thanks to Andrea Arnold’s jury, and I think there’s a lot to commend it, even if I didn’t fully connect with it. I think there’s a lot going on that could resonate pretty powerfully for those who tune into its specific vibe — though it’s a fairly bleak one.

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The more I think about this film in retrospect the more I have some respect for what it’s trying to do, but certainly while it was playing out, I found it quite a tough watch. This is not so much because of what we see on screen, but the fact that it centres on Ada, a character who is largely hollowed out by childhood trauma. As the source of this pain becomes clearer (and I gather from other reviews that this is much less oblique to native audiences, who will be more aware of the Beslan school siege of 2004), it also makes the behaviour of other characters a little more explicable, like her controlling dad (Alik Karayev) or her hyperactive younger brother (Soslan Khugayev). But it doesn’t change the fact that the lead actor (Milana Aguzarova) has to convey a character who is withdrawn from the world and often frustratingly passive in her dealings with other people, meaning there’s not much for a viewer to latch onto and so this story set in an impoverished part of North Ossetia just ended up washing over me. However, as I said, I do think the story its telling is quite complex and interesting and may work better on a second viewing.

CREDITS
Director/Writer Kira Kovalenko Киры Коваленко; Cinematographer Pavel Fomintsev; Starring Milana Aguzarova Милана Агузарова, Alik Karayev Алик Караев, Soslan Khogayev Сослан Хугаев; Length 97 minutes.
Seen at the Roxy, Wellington, Wednesday 17 November 2021.

NZIFF 2021: Earwig (2021)

I don’t like to focus on disappointing films when I’m doing my round-ups, but Lucile Hadžihalilović is one of the more interesting directors of the last few decades (even if her similarly controversialist husband Gaspar Noé tends to be the better known). She’s only made a handful of features, so it’s with sadness that I report I didn’t much like her newest (English-language) feature film. Still, it has all the elements of her style, so undoubtedly there will be big fans of it out there; after all, if Wes Anderson can have people hanging on his every twee set design detail, then there’s no reason why the same can’t be said for Lucile Hadžihalilović (though one suspects part of the problem is the darkness of her vision).

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I’ll give it to the Lucile Hadžihalilović cinematic universe that it is at least thematically consistent. There’s a vision at work which seems to link it to her two other feature films, Evolution (2015) and Innocence (2004), filled as it is with early- to mid-20th century fustiness, chiaroscuro tonality, throbbing soundtracks and corporeal strangeness that hints at something Cronenbergian. The atmosphere, in other words, is on point and deeply evocative. There’s not even any dialogue for the first 15 minutes, and when it does enter it has the whispered resonance of thickly Belgian-accented ASMR. A girl (Romane Hemelaers) is cared for by her… father… I think, Albert (Paul Hilton). Her dentures melt and need to be refrozen and refitted each day. A strange man on the other end of the telephone wants something. And then there’s a waitress at a local bar (Romola Garai) injured in a fight with another mysterious stranger. There are elements of a story here, but they never seem to cohere in any way that feels satisfying. Perhaps that’s the point, perhaps one just needs to give into the feeling of it all, and some may well enjoy it at that level, but the whole thing just felt too opaque to really enjoy.

CREDITS
Director Lucile Hadžihalilović; Writers Hadžihalilović, Geoff Cox and Brian Catling; Cinematographer Jonathan Ricquebourg; Starring Paul Hilton, Romane Hemelaers, Romola Garai; Length 114 minutes.
Seen at the Roxy, Wellington, Sunday 14 November 2021.

NZIFF 2021: Herr Bachmann und seine Klasse (Mr Bachmann and His Class, 2021)

Following up with the last few reviews from films screening at Whānau Mārama – New Zealand International Film Festival, this Polish-German co-production has had a UK cinematic release recently, and it’s certainly the kind of diverting, prettily shot and slightly magical comedy-drama that could do well. In the context of a festival, it feels like a little bit of whimsy, but we all need that from time to time.

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Not many documentary films earn their comparisons with the work of Frederick Wiseman, but this one does. It quietly, and of course without narration or context, shows the work of the titular teacher in a small yet diverse German school (though we do see one or two of the other teachers at work, making me wonder if the filmmakers were perhaps undecided about who to focus on initially). Mr Bachmann is a man close to retirement but who still cares passionately about all his kids, who come from a variety of backgrounds (Turkish, Bulgarian, Kazakh, and more) and I guess one of the themes is finding a common ground among all these cultures. We see classes on all kinds of subjects but the film’s focus is on bringing the individuals — not just the teacher but also his students — closer to us, on dramatising what motivates them and maybe in the end to convince us that the kids aren’t all bad. Certainly it feels like a film that finds the spark at the heart of being a teacher (and I do wonder how it would play to them) but the running time rushes past.

CREDITS
Director Maria Speth; Writers Speth and Reinhold Vorschneider; Cinematographer Vorschneider; Length 217 minutes.
Seen at Light House, Wellington, Sunday 21 November 2021.

NZIFF 2021: Ailey (2021)

I’ve seen a range of different documentaries at Whānau Mārama – New Zealand International Film Festival, and if this one fits into the rather more didactic end (which makes sense as a film best intended for public television), it’s no less interesting for that. Any documentary is going to succeed on the interest generated by its subject, and the Black American dance pioneer Alvin Ailey certainly is one such figure.

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Not every film I go to see is moving or memorable because of its formal sophistication. This is a fairly straightforward documentary in that respect, blending people talking with archival footage, but the story it tells remains fascinating, being that of African-American dancer and choreographer Alvin Ailey, who founded his own school of dance (which is still going as we see them rehearse a piece for its 60th anniversary) and toured the world. Part of what I like, though, especially watching the old footage — part of what moves me — is just the form: there is nothing like dance and ballet that seems quite as much like magic to me. How the dancers can put their bodies into the form that they do for such a long time, so gracefully and seemingly without effort (though clearly it is a punishing endeavour), it’s remarkable when it’s done well and clearly here it’s done very well. So just to learn about Ailey’s life and work is moving enough, just to see extended footage of him and his company at work, and makes the film (which seems to have been made for TV and would fit that format perfectly well) a worthwhile one for anyone keen to learn about 20th century art.

CREDITS
Director Jamila Wignot; Cinematographer Naiti Gámez; Length 94 minutes.
Seen at Penthouse, Wellington, Saturday 13 November 2021.

NZIFF 2021: سعاد Souad (2021)

Whānau Mārama – New Zealand International Film Festival showcased films from plenty of countries, and among the films from the Islamic world that I saw, Souad may not have been the finest (the films from Iran were, as usual, far richer and more accomplished) but this showcases a different side of Egyptian filmmaking from what I’m familiar with, perhaps something more akin to a little indie film in its sensibilities.

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I don’t think this film is perfect by any means, but it does feel like something a bit different from the Egyptian films I’ve seen, a bit more naturalistic and less reliant on melodrama to carry its story. It deals largely with two sisters, and the guy who (in some ways) comes between them but also is largely unseen for much of the film, and thematically it’s dealing with what is already now a hoary old chestnut of the dangerous effects of social media. However, given the strict conservatism that exists for interpersonal relationships in the milieu this is set in, there’s an implicit critique of the orthodoxy that’s driving young people to popular social media sites that encourage toxic and self-destructive behaviour. In a sense though that’s just in the background, albeit rather powerfully at times, and mostly I enjoyed this as a story of two sisters that takes a surprising turn part of the way through, but is carried ultimately by those performances. Like many modern films, it ends on an unresolved note that feels a bit abrupt but also suggests the story goes on, and who knows what it will bring for any of the characters we see.

CREDITS
Director Ayten Amin آيتن أمين; Writers Amin and Mahmoud Ezzat محمود عزت; Cinematographer Maged Nader ماجد نادر; Starring Bassant Ahmed بسنت أحمد, Basmala Elghaiesh بسملة الغيش, Hussein Ghanem حسين غانم; Length 96 minutes.
Seen at City Gallery, Wellington, Sunday 21 November 2021.

NZIFF 2021: Śniegu już nigdy nie będzie (Never Gonna Snow Again, 2020)

Following up with the last few reviews from films screening at Whānau Mārama – New Zealand International Film Festival, this Polish-German co-production has had a UK cinematic release recently, and it’s certainly the kind of diverting, prettily shot and slightly magical comedy-drama that could do well. In the context of a festival, it feels like a little bit of whimsy, but we all need that from time to time.

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When you see the title and hear its words spoken (right at the start of the film), you know that it definitely is going to snow at some point, and the dreamily distanced tone suggests clearly — again, pretty early on — that not only will it snow, it will be metaphorically Meaningful. This film has the carefully composed artfulness of a Kieślowski film, though it strikes a far more magical realist tone in being about a mysterious man (Alec Utgoff) who seems to have supernatural powers, and its hinted that it has something to do with his childhood near Chernobyl. But for the most part it plays out as something of a satire on the bland, depressed and heavily medicated nouveau riche middle classes, living in cookie cutter houses at the edge of some industrial city, presumably in Poland (where it was made and filmed). The film has a contemplative tone, a bit like Donnie Darko perhaps if not even a bit meditative like Tarkovsky, and even if it does have that heavy metaphor weighing down on it, it still makes for a pleasant film about wealth, class and privilege punctured by the post-war histories of Eastern Europe embodied in our man Zhenia.

CREDITS
Directors/Writers Małgorzata Szumowska and Michał Englert; Cinematographer Englert; Starring Alec Utgoff Олег Утгоф, Maja Ostaszewska, Agata Kulesza; Length 113 minutes.
Seen at Penthouse, Wellington, Friday 19 November 2021.

NZIFF 2021: L’Événement (Happening, 2021)

In New Zealand, plenty of the films that make it to the film festival NZIFF are ones that elsewhere in the world would go straight to cinemas and get all kinds of rave reviews, but foreign language films generally have to be quite middlebrow and forgettable to get distribution, so I can only hope that Happening manages to do so, because it’s an excellent period drama.

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This isn’t the first film at this film festival I’ve seen which deals with women seeking an abortion, but this one is set in 1960s France, not the most tolerant place to be looking for such a service. However, the film makes a clear case for why it should be accessible, given the struggle our central character Anne (Anamaria Vartolomei) goes through. She’s young, inexperienced and clearly ill-equipped to have a child, but puts herself through all kinds of trauma in order to try to have a normal life, while naturally the deadbeat dad (well, a fellow student) has practically no worries about the situation at all. Given the subject matter though, this film strikes a rather dreamy and detached tone, unlike say the grim existential angst of say 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days or Never Rarely Sometimes Always, or even the period chiaroscuro of Vera Drake, It makes some of the darker material easier to take in a way, this aesthetic care taken over the look of the piece, without dwelling on flashy period details (the era its set in is picked up from tangential clues mostly, rather than people striding around in silly wigs and fashion). Plus it has a great performance from the young actor at its heart.

CREDITS
Director Audrey Diwan; Writers Diwan, Marcia Romano and Anne Berest (based on the novel by Annie Ernaux); Cinematographer Laurent Tangy; Starring Anamaria Vartolomei, Kacey Mottet Klein, Sandrine Bonnaire; Length 100 minutes.
Seen at Embassy, Wellington, Friday 19 November 2021.