The NZIFF Diaries: Part III

After the line-up for the Dunedin leg of the NZIFF got released, I checked it against the Wellington line-up. We usually miss a few films. Docos, old films, the occasional big ticket. Nothing too serious.

But this year, more than 20 of the films I was interested in were AWOL. This included four of my most anticipated (Goodbye to Language; Black Coal, Thin Ice; Borgman; Concerning Violence), a good chunk of the Incredibly Strange programme, and a number of films getting good buzz out of Auckland (Fish & Cat; Timbuktu). Let’s just say the foetal position was looking pretty comfortable.

There’s still a decent line-up, though, and I’ve already experienced some through screeners. The Babadook was terrifying and nervy, a real essential; Point and Shoot was a fine collation of American activist Matthew Vandyke’s compelling footage from the Libyan Civil War and beyond; REALITi reminded me of the post-Infernal Affairs output of Hong Kong director Alan Mak, moody depiction of middle-class unease that are impressive productions hamstrung by anaemic stories.

The ones I haven’t, though? I was out of town opening weekend, so I started Monday.

I began with Love is Strange, the latest from that steadily productive essayist of the gay American experience Ira Sachs. Sachs draws from a grab bag of pressing social issues for this melancholic tale, which follows a newly-married, elderly gay couple’s bid to piece their lives back together after one is made redundant. Anchoring this ‘topical drama’ are Alfred Molina and John Lithgow, actors whose dignity and tenderness define the whole film, even in its bleakest moments.

Sachs’ unintrusive style also brings calm and intimacy to scenes that could easily be overegged by a Richard Curtis (say, with frenzied editing and soaring strings). But he betrays a weakness for coincidence and easy outs, and a couple of revelations late in the film undercut both its quiet politicised outrage and its examination of the pressures of inhabiting the same space (or not) as those you love.

I should have gotten more sleep before I saw Winter Sleep. Not that Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s latest is boring – far from it. Ceylan dedicated his film to Anton Chekhov, and it definitely shares DNA with plays like The Cherry Orchard and The Seagull – the self-absorbed patriarchs and the gossips that surround them, the destructive play on aspirations and desires, the dead animals. If Ceylan’s making a play for the title of modern cinema’s pre-eminent dramatist, he could be drawing from worse wells for inspiration.

In Winter Sleep, Haluk Bilginer plays troll in the hill Aydin, an actor who’s retired to a grand hotel carved into the rocks of the Anatolian countryside (an inheritance from his father), drawing income from a handful of guests and some disgruntled tenants in the nearby village. The Anatolia it depicts is a vast, difficult steppe, which casts the dissembling, condescending Aydin as an extra in the history of the land. Dense and languorous, Winter Sleep isn’t as easy a watch as Ceylan’s last film Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, but it’s infinitely rewarding and worth catching.

Sad kids ruled the in-competition shorts this year, continuing a long and healthy tradition of New Zealand shorts about sad kids. Programme opener Eleven tells a tired story of peer pressure, only its stillness setting it apart. Cold Snap uses its chilly cinematography and its Kuleshov-esque sad kid protagonist to great effect, but it could stand to trust the audience with its metaphor. And U.F.O. tries to bluff you into thinking it’s not about a sad kid, but that doesn’t stop it from going whole hog once it shows its hand. It’s an insensitive, blunt-force grotesquerie about sad kids suffering through poverty and domestic violence: a local companion piece to the similarly ugly, patronising Precious.

It’s probably no coincidence that two of the three films not about sad kids were the best in the programme. Space comedy Over the Moon doesn’t fully deliver on the promise of its pulpy Forbidden Planet-style production design (poor jokes and a clumsy internal rhythm see to that). Ross & Beth, though, realises and builds on its influences with far more conviction. Starting with an elderly family couple and an arc reminiscent of Owen Marshall’s short stories, Hamish Bennett’s short carves a poignant, optimistic niche for itself on the back of warm performances by Annie Whittle and John Clarke.

Likewise, School Night lives and dies on its lead, and Hayley Sproull plays her quarter-life crisising high school teacher with great vulnerability and vitality. Drawn to a party full of late-teens by a former student, Sproull’s performance prods at the bubble of adulthood with trepidation and exhilaration, and director Leon Wadham brings a light, exuberant touch to the look and sound that complements Sproull’s energy wonderfully. Easily my favourite of the six.

I was late to Force Majeure by reasons of bad scheduling and donburi (the donburi that was not even that great, smdh). Having missed about ten minutes of it – I entered during the avalanche and consequent act of cowardice that triggers the rest of the film’s conflict – I can only echo Judah’s enthusiastic recommendation. Ruben Östlund’s tale of a nuclear family having a nuclear meltdown gets the most out of its handsome setting, an upper-class ski resort nestled in the pit of giant, dead-white mountains. Östlund plays with focus and framing so that married couple Tomas and Ebba (Johannes Bah Kuhnke and Lisa Loven Kongsli) are dwarfed and consumed by their surroundings, their arguments and anxieties bouncing against their wood-panelled prison walls and echoing into the unfeeling fog.

Insignificant in the middle of the French Alps, Tomas and Ebba’s nightmare holiday is funnier for Östlund’s apathetic aesthetic. And it’s very funny – a scathing portrait of masculinity and self-righteousness in family dynamics. A single-take scene set in an outside bar, Tomas and ginger friend Mats sitting low to the ground, is a highlight for the way it’s shot: Tomas is centred so the frame cuts off the heads of those standing, and as people talk and argue around him, he’s left powerless and humiliated, unable to recapture his prized alpha identity. It couldn’t be more pathetically poignant.

My Day Three of the festival began with Under The Skin, Jonathan Glazer’s oblique sci-fi horror and boy howdy what a trip mates. Scarlett Johansson takes the lead with an uncanny valley performance of a woman, prowling the streets of Glasgow for sacrifices to an abstract alien presence. Johansson endows her unnamed observer with a feline regard for the world – she’s hyperalert, disdainful, surveying everything with predatory eyes. It’s a chilling performance, one more remarkable for how Johansson slowly unravels it, cracks of empathy and fear and confusion appearing in the armour she wears as outsider.

Johansson’s but one of an incredible team Glazer’s assembled, and the result is a film that’s full of humanity even as it sets itself apart from it. Mica Levi’s score throbs with menace, swarms of strings and discordant synths undercutting even the most tender moments. Chris Oddy’s production design and Daniel Landin’s cinematography work to similar ends, balancing the terrifyingly clean sci-fi imagery with a Scotland full of grime and beauty, in the Moors or under streetlights. It’s essential, basically – a film of dizzying, aggressively challenging achievement.

Not so essential is Sol Lewitt, Chris Teerink’s documentary on the great American conceptual artist and his work. Teerink regards Lewitt and his work with the kind of reverence Christians reserve for the Holy Trinity, and he shoots accordingly –  slow dolly shots and pull-outs emphasising the enormity of each artwork’s achievement, close-ups highlighting the simplicity and intricacy of the work, shots of Lewitt’s intelligent designplans for each piece of art.

This approach stifles any exploration of why Lewitt produced the work he did, though, beyond some vague platitudes about ‘accessibility’ and ‘the idea as art’. Talking heads add little but starry-eyed anecdotes about Lewitt’s generosity and production quirks, and Teerink seems to be far more concerned with the act of realising Lewitt’s concepts than the concepts themselves. It’s the only explanation for the framing device being the largely silent mounting of Lewitt’s Wall Drawing #81, ‘Spiral’, in a museum tower – all how, no why.

This content is brought to you with funding assistance from New Zealand On Air.