Finishing off my Italian cinema theme week as I promised, with a screening from Melbourne’s Italian Film Festival of the latest film by Alice Rohrwacher, who made The Wonders years ago following her debut Corpo celeste, and whose each successive film I’ve loved even more.
My wife Kerry accompanied me to this screening and she was asking me about Alice Rohrwacher’s previous films. I loved Happy as Lazzaro; it was my second favourite film of the year it was released (2019 over here). But I’m not good with plots at the best of times, and aside from a feeling to the film that I’ll inadequately refer to as ‘magical’, I don’t really have much to offer. Needless to say, I’m unlikely to be equal to describing this film either, and in a year or two I doubt I’ll remember much.
Ostensibly Josh O’Connor plays Arthur, a mysterious Englishman travelling in Italy and thus mostly speaking Italian, in the 1980s (not that you’d necessarily spot that), who has a crew of friends with whom he robs Etruscan graves that he finds through his skill with a dowsing stick. But this isn’t how we are introduced to him. Instead he’s in the company of some beautiful women in a train carriage, the classical beauty of one of whom he noticeably remarks upon, drawing attention to her nose reminiscent of ancient paintings. It’s an embarrassing moment for him at the time, but these women, we (and he) eventually learn, are spirits of the past, and this little bit of ghostly business accompanies a framing story that pierces through the narrative at times, of Arthur with his girlfriend, whom it appears has died or is missing (it’s never made clear), though he does meet her mother (played by Isabella Rossellini, endearingly daffy).
The plot aside, this is a film that’s perhaps about the moral responsibility we have to the past, to ancestors, ghosts, shades and the spirits of the dead, their memory, and the limited purchase they still have on our world. It’s a film that communes pretty thoroughly with the dead, and itself feels like a strange invocation in the way it’s made. Narratively, it’s pretty oblique, but it’s very evocative at sustaining a supernatural feeling, which is somehow akin to magical realism but not that, because that always seems somehow twee to me and this film is very much more in the dirt and the graves and the funerary rites, limning the space between the living and the dead. Even our leading man Arthur seems barely there, increasingly looking like a ghost and the very image of “crumpled”.
I just loved this film, like I loved Rohrwacher’s last, and she even brings on her sister Alba briefly as some kind of personification of the devil as a high-end fence for stolen artefacts. For a film about the dead, this isn’t mournful but instead filled with life and music and dance and song and colour and crossdressing. And once again, it’s one of the year’s highlights.
CREDITS Director/Writer Alice Rohrwacher; Cinematographer Hélène Louvart; Starring Josh O’Connor, Carol Duarte, Isabella Rossellini, Vincenzo Nemolato, Alba Rohrwacher; Length 133 minutes. Seen at Cinema Nova, Melbourne, Saturday 30 September 2023.
I’ve already written about the two British films I saw at the 2023 Melbourne International Film Festival, but there were also of course a number of other European works in the festival, from France, Belgium, Estonia and Georgia (which I think counts as part of Europe and which I am treating as such). Perhaps Turkey (sorry, Türkiye) also counts, perhaps it doesn’t, but I’ll give that film (the new one by Nuri Bilge Ceylan) a separate entry. So yes, this is a mixed group, including a documentary, one that cleaves closely to it (the Wiseman, which uses letters), comedy (I’ll call the Georgian one that, though tonally it falls as something a bit more complex) and deadly serious drama, including a Palme d’Or winning (largely) courtroom drama.
A Couple (2022). Billed as that rare thing, a Frederick Wiseman fiction feature, but the truth is a little bit more shaded, as it presents texts adapted from Sophia Tolstoya’s diaries, read out by an actress (Nathalie Boutefeu) walking through nature or sitting at her desk. The presentation of these texts is giving strong echoes of late-period Straub & Huillet, whose films would often have non-actors reading texts (which they often held in their hands or were visibly looking at) while standing in sylvan settings, and such is the way here too, albeit altogether more actorly. It has a classical stillness and gravity that you’d expect from someone with the age and experience of Wiseman and it feels of a piece with the rest of his output in a way, even if it stands a little to the side (not least for running only very little longer than an hour). It’s a slightly sardonic title for a film that only has one human voice, that suggests perhaps this couple was not the strongest and that becomes clearer as the film progresses (indeed, one could take the French original title as a consciously bilingual pun in that regard). Quite subtle.
Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry (2023). This Georgian film makes for a pretty solid comedy, following a 48-year-old woman living in rural Georgia (she seems older, but perhaps that’s just the toll of her life) who has a near-death experience at the film’s start and embraces this with… well, if not gusto, at least a certain loosening of her life’s rhythms. The way this plays out goes in some surprising directions, though she is never willing to give up her own independence. The lead actors certainly don’t hold anything back (not least Eka Chavleishvili in the lead), but I think it’s shot with some sensitivity, and ends up being almost sweet after a fashion.
Smoke Sauna Sisterhood (2023). I can see how this film might hit different depending on who you are, but it’s a pretty great documentary about women sharing a smoke sauna (which, we learn at the end, is an intangible cultural heritage of Estonia). There, literally exposed, they share intimacies, and the camera is never exploitative (we don’t even see some of their faces), as they talk about not just joy and friendship, but also trauma and stories from the past that have come to define the way they feel and how they approach the world. It’s pretty heart-wrenching at times, but it ultimately feels like a spontaneous expression of shared feeling that brings the group together, and I think the cinema audience too (at least those who are open to it).
It’s Raining in the House (2023). There’s something quite Belgian about this slice of life bit of coming of age miserabilism. Perhaps it’s the way it focuses on class issues, as these two underprivileged teens grow up in a seaside town with absent or drunk parents, and doing everything they can to get by (petty crime, low level drugs, feckless friends, temp jobs). It’s not that it’s bad at all and in many ways I did appreciate the way the director controls the tone of her film rather nicely. However it made me reassess whether I wanted to spend the rest of the day in a cinema (and, reader, I didn’t, thereby possibly missing out on some potentially great films, but I did see the Australian women’s football team win their World Cup quarter-final).
Anatomy of a Fall (2023). After last year’s Saint Omer, this feels like an almost pedestrian courtroom drama by comparison, but with Sandra Hüller’s focused central performance, I think there’s a lot that’s appealing (perhaps not the most exciting winner of the Palme d’Or, but not unworthy). It’s a film in which a lot of the drama revolves around language and how we use it, as Sandra, a German writer, finds herself living in France, a country where she has a poor grasp of the language, so all her communication is in English. Her husband shows up dead early on, apparently the victim of a fall, but the questions swirling around how he ended up dead continue, both at a procedural legal level (evoked in the court) but also at a moral, existential level of why the characters (including their young son Daniel) felt the way they did, how they lived their lives, how they negotiated their differences. It’s a film as much about living together as a couple as it is about the fatal end of that couple, and it’s beautifully acted and solidly written. Never boring despite its running length.
CREDITS
Un couple (A Couple, 2022) [France/USA] — Director Frederick Wiseman; Writers Wiseman and Nathalie Boutefeu (based on letters by Sophia Tolstaya Со́фья Толста́я); Cinematographer John Davey; Starring Nathalie Boutefeu; Length 64 minutes. Seen at Kino, Melbourne, Sunday 20 August 2023.
შაშვი შაშვი მაყვალი Shashvi Shashvi Maq’vali (Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry, 2023) [Georgia/Switzerland] — Director Elene Naveriani ელენე ნავერიანის; Writers Naveriani and Nikoloz Mdivani (based on the novel by Tamta Melashvili თამთა მელაშვილი); Cinematographer Ágnes Pákózdi; Starring Eka Chavleishvili ეკა ჩავლეიშვილს; Length 112 minutes. Seen at ACMI, Melbourne, Sunday 6 August 2023.
Savvusanna sõsarad (Smoke Sauna Sisterhood, 2023) [Estonia/France/Iceland, certificate 15] — Director/Writer Anna Hints; Cinematographer Ants Tammik; Length 90 minutes. Seen at ACMI, Melbourne, Sunday 20 August 2023.
Il pleut dans la maison (It’s Raining in the House, 2023) [Belgium/France] — Director/Writer Paloma Sermon-Daï; Cinematographer Frédéric Noirhomme; Starring Purdey Bloquiau, Makenzy Lombet; Length 80 minutes. Seen at Kino, Melbourne, Saturday 12 August 2023.
Anatomie d’une chute (Anatomy of a Fall, 2023) [France] — Director Justine Triet; Writers Triet and Arthur Harari; Cinematographer Simon Beaufils; Starring Sandra Hüller, Swann Arlaud, Milo Machado-Graner; Length 150 minutes. Seen at the Forum, Melbourne, Saturday 5 August 2023.
I’m working through fuller reviews from my list of favourite films of 2022 (here) but among them are a few that I wasn’t expecting, like this gentle, lilting Kiarostami riff in the fig orchards (rather than olives), structured as a series of two-handers between various characters over the course of a couple of working days (or maybe it’s just one, I can’t quite recall). In any case, a fine film with a predominantly woman-centric cast and crew.
This is a rather gentle film with some darker undertones as a group of (primarily) young women come together picking figs in an orchard, or at least I’d say that was the focus of the film, whose single setting means this functions as a sort of chamber drama. Indeed, the group of pickers includes some older women and men, who have a choral role to play, singing and commenting on the kids’ actions, and some young men of various types, including a rather sleazy and opportunistic boss. Throughout the day various pairings of these characters get together and hash things out, and while there is no big reveal or drama to speak of, a number of smaller stories play out in a naturalistic way. It’s all very lovely, though you’ll need to take a moment to get into its rhythms, in a setting—and with a title—suggestive of some Kiarostami films, though this is Tunisian (not Iranian).
CREDITS Director Erige Sehiri أريج السحيري; Writers Sehiri, Ghalya Lacroix غالية لاكروا and Peggy Hamann بيجي هامان; Cinematographer Frida Marzouk فريدا مرزوق; Starring Fidé Fdhili فداء الفضيلي, Feten Fdhili فاتن الفضيلي, Ameni Fdhili أماني الفضيلي; Length 92 minutes. Seen at the Embassy, Wellington, Sunday 30 October 2022.
I think even at the time of its release, this was widely thought to be the best of the trilogy and it holds up. There’s still something about Kieślowski’s style that seems overly fussy, overly attentive to the right image, the right idea, expressed in the perfectly written way that nevertheless feels a bit over-rehearsed somehow? But it all comes together in this third part, focused on the idea of “fraternité” and suffused, truly suffused, with the colour red (not in the way of say Cries and Whispers, mind, but the colour is consistently a presence throughout the narrative). It’s about the way people come together—or almost do so, with missed connections throughout the film, only emphasised by the focus on telecommunication (those opening shots tracking telephone cables, and phone calls—including the eavesdropping thereon—being a running motif throughout). Irène Jacob, of course, is every bit the model in the central role of Valentine, but she also ties things together with her slightly lost look—that look that’s on her poster, and repeated in that final image—like the lost dog she comes across that kickstarts the narrative, or the puppies it gives birth to, a lost look also imitated by Jean-Louis Trintignant’s ex-judge Joseph, or Auguste (Jean-Pierre Lorit)—the man you sense may be Jacob’s life partner, whose path never quite meets hers until, eventually, surprisingly, it does. And for all this seems engineered to be satisfying, it is also quite satisfying, a fitting conclusion both to this trilogy and to Kieślowski’s career.
CREDITS Director Krzysztof Kieślowski; Writers Krzysztof Piesiewicz and Kieślowski; Cinematographer Piotr Sobociński; Starring Irène Jacob, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Jean-Pierre Lorit; Length 99 minutes. Seen at home (Blu-ray), Wellington, Friday 18 November 2022 (and first on VHS at home, Wellington, in the mid-1990s).
I don’t think it would be overstating the case to say that this trilogy of films largely compromised my introduction to ‘world cinema’ back in the mid-1990s. I was too young (or rather not sufficiently precocious) to have seen them in the cinema, but a year or two later on VHS at home, and they do make for a good introduction. Even now, re-watching so many years later, this film is much as I remember it: very consciously constructed, with bold use of colour (in the camera filters, in the scenery and set design, in expressive lighting choices), striking symbolism and the kind of directorial vision that makes it very clear—even to a young cinema neophyte such as myself 25 years ago—that every camera movement, every detail and every choice within the frame is very much intentional. I found this a little overbearing at the time, and I still don’t believe this is my favourite of the trilogy, but there is such an assured style that I can’t help but be impressed by it, lugubrious and mournful as the subject matter can be (a woman dealing with the death of her husband and child, in a peculiar twist on the concept of “liberté“). Moreover, there’s Juliette Binoche in the lead role, who is an undeniable force and even in the depths of her character’s grief and sadness makes her compellingly watchable.
CRITERION EXTRAS:
Two of the extra features are short films from the director’s film school days. His own is Tramwaj (Tramway, 1966), with the kind of throwaway premise that a lot of short movies have—in this case, a boy sees a girl on a tram and then realises he must chase after her. Still, there’s something to how it’s made despite the complete absence of sound, not that you’d have made the link between this and the director of Three Colours: Blue right away.
The other short film is Twarz (The Face, 1966), included not because he directed it (it was one of his fellow students, the otherwise unknown Piotr Studzinski) but because he stars in it. Indeed, it’s a fair bit more enjoyable than Kieślowski’s own student effort, with a cutting humour to its portrayal of the self-involved artist disgusted at his own face (which he has nevertheless used obsessively in his own art).
There’s a short featurette of interviews with various collaborators, including Binoche and the cinematographer Idziak, as well as some film writers (Geoff Andrew, Annette Insdorf), discussing the film and its creation, and how the director put it together, which is all fairly informative.
CREDITS Director Krzysztof Kieślowski; Writers Krzysztof Piesiewicz and Kieślowski; Cinematographer Sławomir Idziak; Starring Juliette Binoche, Benoît Régent, Florence Pernel, Charlotte Véry, Emmanuelle Riva; Length 98 minutes. Seen at home (Blu-ray), Wellington, Sunday 13 November 2022 (and first on VHS at home, Wellington, in the mid-1990s).
I’m not sure is this is the best of Pedro Costa’s three films grouped together as the “Fontainhas trilogy” after the Lisbon slum/shanty town where they take place, but after spending so much time with these characters in this place, its quiet reflectiveness feels the richest, perhaps because of that time spent. Costa too has developed his video aesthetic that he began with In Vanda’s Room, recapturing some of the painterly contrast that was at play in the first of the three (Ossos) but without the conventions of the narrative. The characters are still slouching around going nowhere, interspersed with the tall and elegant elderly man Ventura narrating a letter to someone long gone it seems. and there’s not much in the way of plot to speak of, but it swaps out the crumbling buildings of the previous films for the new apartments built in their place, which have a sort of antiseptic quality, though there’s still plenty enough places for Costa to find his crepuscular shadows. I can’t really explain too much why I like it, but it’s an experience that just needs to sort of wash over you, and at that level I find it rewarding.
CREDITS Director/Writer Pedro Costa; Cinematographers Costa and Leonardo Simões; Starring Ventura, Vanda Duarte; Length 156 minutes. Seen at home (DVD), Wellington, Saturday 12 March 2022 (and I’m fairly sure I saw it a cinema in London, probably the ICA, back in around 2007, but I don’t have a record of it).
It’s that period between Christmas and New Year so it’s time for me to post up reviews of my other favourite films of the year, as most of them will be making it into my best of the year list. One recent release is the latest film from Leos Carax, which has plenty of people hating it, and other passionate fans. I’ve never really been into Sparks, though Edgar Wright’s documentary earlier in the year helped me to get my bearings, but I enjoy their arch orchestral pop music and it fits very nicely into this grand folly of a film. That’s exactly the kind of film Carax makes, though, when he does turn his hand to it (his last was 2012’s equally absurd, equally grand, equally green Holy Motors), so I’m not complaining. There are long stretches where it doesn’t work, even is a little bit dull (I find myself unable to warm to Adam Driver’s character for example), but right from that bravura coup de cinéma opening sequence, when the film does spark, it really has no equal in the rest of cinema.
This certainly reads from the reviews as if it’s a love it or hate it sort of film, and I can see why, but that’s always been the case with Leos Carax’s films I feel. That said, its curious blend of self-awareness and anti-naturalism starts right from the opening number (“So May We Start?”), so you should get a good sense pretty quickly if it’s not for you, but it feels to me a bit like La La Land if that film had properly committed to the emotions. Both films have a sort of emptiness to them at their core, too, but this feels like a stylistic choice, about two people who want some meaning in life but can’t ever get beyond the surface level, never doing much more than saying what they think they should feel rather than actually feeling it. And so having a child who’s a puppet feels like a perfect expression of this abyss (“A-B-Y-S-S”, Henry even spells it out). It’s a film filled with affect, beautiful shots that seem bravura (early on we get Henry’s hands coming in from the side of the frame threateningly towards Ann’s neck before veering into an embrace almost imperceptibly) that turn out to be cleverly foreshadowing, a bold use of colour (green, usually), and those Sparks songs which just grind the themes down until they feel a little bit fresh. Look, I can’t pretend it all worked, but (Adam Driver aside) it’s exactly the kind of thing I love to see on the screen, an ideal showcase for a grand folly of self-indulgence.
CREDITS Director Leos Carax; Writers Ron Mael and Russell Mael; Cinematographer Caroline Champetier; Starring Adam Driver, Marion Cotillard, Simon Helberg, Devyn McDowell; Length 140 minutes. Seen at the Penthouse, Wellington, Saturday 2 October 2021.
Some films are made for film festivals, and none more so than any given new film by Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Some of them have becoming (surprisingly) modest arthouse hits, like Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, and Memoria is very much in a similar mould, with lush jungle terrains (here in Colombia) and a slow, mysterious narrative that seems to promise both naturalism and also science-fiction and fantasy at times. The central investigation may recall Brian De Palma’s Blow Out, in being based around a mysterious sonic fragment, but there’s little else that recalls mainstream narrative cinema, and Tilda Swinton is looking strangely ordinary here as she searches for… something.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul proves that even making a film largely in English and set in Colombia, he’s still able to make exactly the kinds of films he makes, which is to say slow, somnolent and oblique. As with Cemetery of Splendour I nodded off a little at times (to be fair that one was a film about people with some kind of sleeping sickness), but it felt like part of the artistic process, a durational one, about a woman who seems to be searching for the source of a mysterious sound. That search takes her to various specialists (real or imagined?), and to a small village in the mountains, and those shots of ruins and lush vegetation seem very much of a piece with his most famous works. I think in many ways Memoria extends those themes, with some surprising additions that never exactly serve to make clear what’s been going on, but instead intensify and deepen the mystery. But that’s often the way. This had me fascinated and I loved the slow rhythms of it, but it danced nimbly away from explaining itself. Undoubtedly both this and the pacing will madden many of its potential viewers, but it’s an experience in being open to the possibilities of narrative.
CREDITS Director/Writer Apichatpong Weerasethakul อภิชาติพงศ์ วีระเศรษฐกุล; Cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom สยมภู มุกดีพร้อม; Starring Tilda Swinton, Jeanne Balibar, Elkin Díaz; Length 136 minutes. Seen at the Embassy, Wellington, Thursday 18 November 2021.
One of the best things about film festivals—and where they differ most markedly from commercial film distribution—is the way they feature a multiplicity of filmmaking techniques. This is especially evident amongst the documentaries. Whereas most of what gets released is deeply conventional (and there were certainly some of those at Whānau Mārama – New Zealand International Film Festival), you also see more poetic, dreamlike, experimental examples. This Georgian film, for example, very much follows the poetic route, with no narration or on-screen text, very few interviews, and is largely just a succession of grand, thought-provoking, curious images of trees being moved.
If the most common type of documentary is the talking heads method of personal testimony, usually about an individual subject and blended with archival footage or even recreations, then another major form—and perhaps more prevalent at film festivals—is this one, which eschews narration or on-screen text to provide contextualisation, and instead just observes its subjects, using the rhythm of the editing, the elegance of the framing and a few musical cues to draw out its inherent drama. It’s slow cinema, in which we just seem to spend time watching trees, watching trees being dug up, watching trees being transported, in slow lumbering ways because these are very large, very old trees. We never even really see the person who’s taking these trees, and only at the end do we get a sense of why they are being taken, but instead we see the communities and the villages of Georgia, where its set and we get a sense for the rhythms of life in these places. It’s not an easy sell, but it has an emotional centre along with a lot of hydraulic diggers.
CREDITS Directors Salomé Jashi სალომე ჯაში; Cinematographers Jashi and Goga Devdariani გოგა დევდარიანი; Length 86 minutes. Seen at City Gallery, Wellington, Sunday 7 November 2021.
It may be a rather poor and (relatively) small West African country, but Burkina Faso has a really strong cinematic history, not least thanks to the FESPACO film festival, celebrating pan-African cinema. I’ve reviewed a number of films from the country, and here I cover one of the lesser-known works by its greatest director, Idrissa Ouédraogo.
Burkina Faso population 21,510,000 | capital Ouagadougou (1.5m) | largest cities Ouagadougou, Bobo-Dioulasso (490k), Koudougou (88k), Banfora (76k), Ouahigouya (73k) | area 274,200 km2 | religion Islam (61%), Christianity (23%) | official language French (français) | major ethnicity Mossi (52%), Fula (8%) | currency West African CFA franc (CFA) [XOF] | internet .bf
A landlocked West African country, formerly known as Upper Volta, and whose official language is only spoken by around 10-15% of the people (Mòoré, the language of the Mossi people, is far more widely spoken). The name comes from the Mossi for “upright” and the Dioula for “fatherland” (the old colonial name comes from its position on the River Volta). Habitation in the country stretches back to 14000 BCE in the north-west, with more permanent settlements from the 4th millennium BCE. An Iron Age Bura culture existed until around the 13th century CE, while the modern day ethnic groups arrived just prior to this. Several separate Mossi kingdoms were set up, and these various tribal groupings existed side-by-side until the arrival of European colonialists, who started to claim territory from the 1890s onwards, and the French protectorate taking in the present country was formed in 1896 and by 1898 took in all the present-day lands, although as part of an Upper Senegal and Niger territory. It wasn’t until 1919 that the present country was separated as Upper Volta (Haute Volta), before being dismantled in 1932, then revived again in 1947. Autonomy was achieved in 1958 and full independence on 5 August 1960, under its first president Maurice Yaméogo, who swiftly suspended democracy and was ousted in 1966. A series of military and military/civil governments marked by coups governed until the coup which installed Capt Thomas Sankara in 1983; he pushed through the country’s change of name the following year and an ambitious programme of anti-imperialist reforms, though another reactionary coup replaced him with Blaise Compaoré in 1987. A semblance of democracy was introduced in 1991, though power still resides largely with the President, who appoints the Prime Minister and has the power to dissolve government.
Though the country is underdeveloped in many ways, Burkina Faso is one of the chief countries in African cinema, not least due to the establishment of the pan-African FESPACO film festival in Ouagadougou in 1969, which continues to take place every two years. A number of internationally renowned directors have come from the country, including Idrissa Ouédraogo (one of whose films I review below) and Gaston Kaboré, amongst others.
Samba Traoré (1992). The great Burkinabé filmmaker Idrissa Ouédraogo died on 18 February 2018, so in the weeks following that I had wanted to check out one of his lesser-known films, and this is the one I alighted on. There is no hint in Samba Traoré (which takes its name from that of the lead character, played by Bakary Sangaré) of any deficiency of production or craft: it’s a handsomely shot and beautifully acted film about a man returning from the city to his home village, to settle down and find a new life. He’s running from a life of crime, or at least, one specific crime (the film starts with him staging an armed robbery of a petrol station), and of course the narrative demands that this eventually catches up with him. In the meantime, this is an easy, fluid portrait of small village life, as Samba reconnects with old friends and meets a woman he wants to marry (Mariam Kaba). It’s never condescending to its characters or to its audience: the film is simply constructed, but the camera moves expressively and there are layers to the characters that go beyond any simple didactic drama of wrongdoing, punishment and redemption. This really is a fine film.
CREDITS Director Idrissa Ouedraogo; Writers Ouedraogo, Santiago Amigorena and Jacques Arhex; Cinematographers Pierre-Laurent Chénieux and Mathieu Vadepied; Starring Bakary Sangaré, Mariam Kaba, Abdoulaye Komboudri; Length 75 minutes. Seen at home (DVD), London, Thursday 1 March 2018.
filmcentric 