SFIFF 61 (aka, SFFILM Festival) Opening Night

This year's festival, which kicked off last night, seems to be having something of an identity crisis so far as its name is concerns, thus the strange title of this post. Nevertheless, the show goes on, as does this blog (apparently).

A Kid Like Jake

An adaptation of a stage play, this family drama on a contemporary topic probably played better on the stage than it does on the big screen. Claire Danes gives it her all in an attempt to capture the inner conflict of a "normal" mom (a white "progressive" lawyer who lives in Brooklyn) when forced to confront the gender-expansive play of her four-year-old son (he loves dressing up as a princess, playing with dolls, and is obsessed with The Little Mermaid).

But the screenplay, adapted by the playwright (Daniel Pearle), can't really pull off the complexity it's clearly aiming for. The surface plot, about New York private elementary school entrance criteria, is not compelling (at least to me). Yet the film offers its share of pleasures: Jim Parsons is great as the husband, a therapist whose off-kilter therapy sessions with Amy Landecker (also excellent) lighten the mood. And a dinner table conversation gone awry provides just the right amount of awkwardness, thanks to a cameo from Aasif Mandvi.

SFIFF 59: Weekend One

It's been a few years since I've posted here, but as long as Blogger still exists it seems as reasonable a place as any to post these things. SFIFF kicked off last Thursday, and I've been attending at least one film a day. Below are my thoughts on the first four days of the festival (now a week ago).

Love & Friendship

Whit Stillman brings his unique brand of dialogue-heavy comedy ("heavy" seems too weak an adjective) to an adaptation of a Jane Austen novella, featuring Kate Beckinsale as a caustic aristocratic widow. Hilarious, delightful, and biting, it delivers, with apparent effortlessness.

Hunt for the Wilderpeople

A surprisingly sad buddy/coming-of-age comedy from Taika Waititi. The tragedy and lightheartedness play off each other well, keeping the sweetness from becoming too strong while depression never gets a chance to settle in. The plot drags in the final act, and an over-the-top car chase scene feels tacked on from another movie, but overall this is that rare example of a "family" movie that doesn't feel dumbed-down.

Author: The JT LeRoy Story

Author documents the complex saga of JT LeRoy, who gained a literary following in the late 90s and early 00s before being unmasked as a "hoax". Investigating whether that word applies here is, in large part, the film's preoccupation. Nearly all of what's shown to the audience is direct from the mouth of Laura Albert, the woman who penned JT's literary output and embodied him in countless telephone calls with psychiatrists, authors, film makers, and musicians. Under normal circumstances, such an unreliable subject would doom a project like this, but given the nature of the underlying story it only enhances the resulting film. What we get is a dive into questions of what constitutes authenticity, authorship, and above all, identity.

Paths of the Soul

Featuring non-actors engaged in a religious pilgrimage, this Chinese-made, filmed-in-Tibet feature is at its best when it evokes the sense of overwhelming devotion its subjects seem to be experiencing. They travel 1200km from their homes (where they are subsistence farmers or builders) to the religious center of Lhasa. Not content merely to walk that long distance, they only take a few steps at a time before kowtowing, falling to the ground and touching their forehead to it (they equip themselves with leather aprons and wooden mitts to make this at all possible over such a long distance). Only when the action becomes more scripted, such as in an encounter with another pilgrim along the road, does the film flag a bit (though one could argue that the entire point of such scenes is to bring a sense of normalcy to the matter at hand).

Five Nights in Maine

A drama about grief, featuring an ideal cast and a restrained script: David Oyelowo is flawless, and and Diane Wiest presents a multi-layered performance that could have been a cardboard cutout of a mother-in-law. Yet the end result is strangely inert.

Chevalier

The biggest disappointment on my schedule so far, what promises to be an insightful comedy of manners (six friends on a boating vacation decide to compete to see who's "the best in general") degenerates quickly into improvised, poorly-edited not-much-happening.

Very Big Shot

Billed as a comedy, the story follows three brothers in Beirut as they try to make it in the world. The youngest plays it straight, running their family's pizza shop. But the eldest has bigger plans, first as a criminal and then, improbably, as a film producer. This is where the comedy element properly kicks in, after a rather violent first act. Unlike Wilderpeople, the elements aren't tightly woven together, but the structure still works, building the film into a proper satire by its climax.

Blood of My Blood

A story told in two intertwined parts, set hundreds of years apart, this is one of those international films for which I'm lacking the proper cultural context (in this case, Roman Catholic Italy), yet which I nevertheless found enthralling. The first part is a detective story of sorts, where the mystery is whether one character is in cahoots with Satan. The second part involves a "vampire" (whether that designation is literally accurate remains up in the air) now inhabiting the same chambers explored in the first. Altogether enjoyable, and something I'd see again at my earliest opportunity.

Counting

A documentary not about anything in particular, separated into 15 parts that, more than anything else, documents the filmmaker's home town of New York and his travels to attend film festivals around the world. But this is not a travelogue, but instead a piece of extended observation. The thing that impressed me most was that I was never bored, despite the relative formlessness of the endeavor, and the shots are not only engrossing but frequently beautiful.

All These Sleepless Nights

Billed as a documentary/fiction crossover, "documentary" here mostly seems to mean using real locations, and the actors' names, but the extent to which the story matches reality is of course impossible for a viewer to derive. Krzysztof and Michal wander from party to party, club to club, often until the morning light. There's a *Jules and Jim*-esque interlude in which Krzysztof enters into a relationship with Eva, an ex of Michal, but the narrative, such as it is, is not the focal point of the endeavor. This hit the same sweet spot of post-adolescent reminiscence (and late night electronic music) that Eden touched last year, and was a great way to close out the opening weekend.

The Rest, Two Weeks Late

The festival ended two weeks ago tonight, but I haven't finished my blogging duties for the year. Here are the rest of the feature films I saw at SFIFF 56.

Helsinki, Forever
Another documentary made nearly entirely of existing footage (though in this case with much narration added), this film was part of an afternoon honoring Finnish film historian, preservationist, educator, director, etc. Peter von Bagh. It's at once a history of Finnish film and an introduction to the city of Helsinki. Not a great movie, but a refreshingly unfamiliar slice-of-the-20th-century.

The Mattei Affair
The one archival presentation I attended this year, The Mattei Affair is a sort of mix between Citizen Kane and The Parallax View: a biography mixed with a paranoid thriller. Based on a true story, it follows Enrico Mattei, the head of the Italian state-owned oil company after WWII as he grows his power and tries to set Italy off on a different path than the rest of the West when it comes to dealing with oil-rich states. All of this is told in flash-back, as the film opens with Mattei dying in a plane crash, under mysterious circumstances. Highly recommended, a gem.

The Kill Team
This chilling documentary about US soldiers in Afghanistan who killed innocent citizens (for no better reason than to have killed someone while at war) looks at first to be straightforward, cinematically. Each of the soldiers involved has their standard "talking head" interview, while the family of the would-be whistleblower tries to get prove their son innocent in a military court.

Yet the soldier interviews, especially those of a particularly unrepentant individual, show how powerful the "talking head" format can be with a sufficiently captivating storyteller. Several directors at the festival (of both documentaries and fiction) talked about how important the human face is to film. It seems that the talking head-based documentary may be coming back in fashion. And maybe that's right.

The Strange Little Cat
This well-oiled machine of a film, about one day in the life of a German family, is shot almost entirely within an apartment. It's hard to describe the joys of this piece, but perhaps that's because I can't find much to compare it to. There's almost no story (it seems that the whole family, including grandma, some aunts and uncles, cousins) are coming to dinner. And the preparations for that nearly push the mother over the edge. But nothing explodes.

Hard to describe, but easy to like. And the music, adapted from a piece by a Bay Area native (who happened to be attending my screening), was lovely as well.

Il Futuro
Based on a novel by Chilean author Roberto Bolaño (sadly, it's not been translated to English), the film follows a pair of teenage orphans as they try to find their way in the world. In Rome, more particularly, whose ruined ruins and derelict Cinecitta studios both point to past glories. Also pointing to past glories is Rutger Hauer, as a one-time film star who's first seen as a mark for a scheme by our protagonist and her brother, but who becomes the voice for the ruins of the city.

Before Midnight
The most recent in what some might call a Richard Linklater's trilogy, but which I suspect is only the third installment of an ongoing franchise, this film catches up with Jesse and Celine nine years after Before Sunset. It takes this one awhile to find its footing: too self-conscious for the first half hour (needing to add exposition about what's happened to our characters in the long time between encounters), the climax, a half hour argument in a hotel room, is pure gold. Painful, of course. But brilliant.

Weekend Two: Fiction

Youth, Me and You, They'll Come Back
Not only are the next set of films in my weekend wrap all fiction, but they are all coming-of-age films. Unusually for coming of age stories, though, only one (Youth) had sex as its major theme (and even then it has to share the stage with mortality).

Youth, directed by Justine Malle (daughter to director Louis Malle), hit the closest to home. The story centers on Juliette (a stand-in for the director) who spends most of her time attending college in Paris and living with her mother while her father's health deteriorates at his country estate, with a stepmother attending him.

Juliette's reaction to her father's decline is denial. She talks to her father as if everything were fine, suggesting the travel to India together. Meanwhile, she's trying to define herself as a sexual person: after being rebuffed by a guy in her class for her virginity, she does what she can to eliminate that as a barrier, picking up guys in bars. Malle tries to keep this threads tied together, as they clearly are for her personally, but they are really two separate stories (though that's clearly part of the point, too).

They'll Come Back, from Brazil, also features a female protagonist wandering out into the world. But this one is only 12 years old. Left on the side of the road by her family, she travels through a variety of episodes in socioeconomic classes she's not used to. The social awakening this inspires in her is, to my tastes, a little too easy: being among the service class, she realizes for the first time that the servants her family employs have their own lives. But the director referred to his film as a "fable", so like Youth, it's likely unfair of me to fault it for this directness.

The last of these is the most traditional: Bernardo Bertolucci's newest film, Me and You, features a 14-year-old male lead who decides he'd rather not go on the school field trip so instead hides out for a week in the storage closet in the basement of his mother's apartment building. The awakening here is provided by his junkie half sister, who he helps through her DTs and thus becomes a better personal. Forgettable, though I did appreciate the double shot of Bowie's 'Space Oddity' at the end, once with totally different Italian lyrics.

Weekend Two

The second weekend of the festival was a busy time: four movies each day. Rather than posting it as two chronologically-ordered four-film posts, I've grouped the films into three categories. First, I'll address documentary.

Inequality For All, Let the Fire Burn, Deceptive Practice
Two "social-issue" documentaries could hardly be further apart than Inequality For All, a sort of Inconvenient Truth for income inequality in the U.S. featuring Robert Reich in the Al Gore role, and Let the Fire Burn about the MOVE organization in Philadelphia centered on the 1985 bombing (by the police) of MOVE's home, which resulted in the deaths of 11 people and the destruction of more than 60 homes.

Reich properly locates himself as a centrist on the political spectrum, as Inequality's message is a realpolitik view of our consumer economy. He's not interested in getting rid of inequality, just the vast inequality that's come into play since the Reagan years. The middle class, Reich argues (aided by lots of animated graphics) simply needs to be given enough money/jobs to buy enough stuff to keep the economy growing. And, he argues, the rich would be even better if the middle class were given more. It's a win-win! While I have no problem with trying to lift up the middle class, the film's failure to address any political views or issues outside the center-left of American politics (besides the usual images of "anarchists" breaking windows in protests, and of Tea Partiers dressed up in silly hats) seems short-sighted. Not even the environment, which seems like a nice center-left thing to bring up, especially when discussing a growing consumer economy and showing shots of car manufacturing. This film will play well to its entrenched audience, but I don't think it's transformative.

Let the Fire Burn, by contrast, gets at the heart of more deeply structural issues in U.S. society. Assembled entirely from archival footage, and centered on a commission set up in the wake of the tragic fire, this film asks tough questions about race, power, freedom, and innocence. The MOVE organization is treated by the film just as some crazy folks, but is taken seriously. This doesn't mean they're treated as right: testimony from the only child to survive the fire reveals much that was questionable in their child-rearing, and (mostly black) neighbors' complaints about MOVE's antagonistic behavior seems valid. Yet the humanistic stance taken by the film towards these "anarcho-primitivists" stands far apart from the rote shots of protestors in Inequality. In the end, Let the Fire Burn has no answers for us. Maybe that's what really makes it more serious than Reich's lecture.

But I did not spend all my documentary-watching time on political matters. Deceptive Practice: The Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay takes the magician as a starting point for a discussion of, on the surface, the history of 20th-century slight-of-hand as seen first by a kid hanging out with his grandfather, then later as a working performer spending his off-hours with the greats. But at its heart the film could be about any life pursuit: how does one get to be good at something? Jay tells us that it's through contact with folks who already are good, and through practice. So it's touching to see him give faces, names, and stories to each of his mentors, most of whom are little-known outside the world of magic (unlike Jay himself, who besides his magic has become a recurring character actor in films).

Day Eight

Prince Avalanche
David Gordon Green's buddy movie starring Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch is mostly just what that sounds like. We find the pair repainting a strip of road after a wildfire has blazed through the area. Green revealed in the Q&A that he first set out to make the movie in this location (in Texas), and only later found the Icelandic film on which his script is based. And the location shooting is beautiful, pulled off by his usual cinematographer Tim Orr.

The non-visual part of the film is for the most part much less interesting: dudes are worried about women, yell at each other, get drunk, sing a song, feel better. Still, a few scenes, such as one featuring a real-life victim of the fire sifting through the remains of her home, or a few shots of children by the side of the road, remind us why Green was once so loved in the American indie circuit.

Rent a Family Inc.
This Danish documentary about a Japanese man who rents himself and his employees out as stand-in family members and friends to clients (such as those wanting to save face at their wedding) is awkwardly split between two stories, one about the business and one about the man's own family life (which is seriously troubled). Though the former seems to comment on the latter, I couldn't get away from my misgivings about the ethics of the documentarian. The man's family was unaware of his business and so was not given the real reason for them being part of a documentary, and though his wife now knows, the family has not even seen the film (he has, but did not want them to see it). The director, during the Q&A, put the onus of responsibility for these decisions on his subject. But I'd expect the guy with the camera to take a broader view of ethics than whatever his main subject thinks is right.

The rent-a-family business is surely a fascinating topic, but this treatment left me feeling dirty.

Day Seven

(No day six because I took a night off on Wednesday)

Frances Ha
I first became a big fan of Noah Baumbach after seeing his The Squid and the Whale, and since then have been disappointed by his cinematic output. Margot at the Wedding was unpleasantness apparently for its own sake, and while I liked Greenberg a good deal more it didn't rise to the level of apparently-effortless naturalism. Not that Squid was realistic, exactly, but it felt true.

This new film, while not even attempting to reach the same levels of emotion, succeeds in feeling right. I fear that my words are not doing a good job of explaining what's so good about Baumbach's best works, but I'll say this: Frances Ha's black-and-white, low budget, 20-somethings-in-New-York aesthetic is enough to carry the weight for a mostly-disconnected set of circumstances the title character finds herself in.

Computer Chess
I had planned on this evening being a double feature of mumblecore, given the filmographies of Gerwig (star and cowriter of the first film) and Bujalski (director of this one). His Mutual Appreciation was my introduction to the "genre". But neither film actually ended up fitting the mold very well. Computer Chess was by far the more divergent.

Set at an A.I. chess tournament in 1984, the first half of the movie seems to be a fond send-up of the culture of computing academia/industry, featuring professors, grad students, engineers, and hangers-on. As the movie develops, however, things start to get weird, and while I found the ride enough fun to stick with it the oddity of the second half (dreams, cats, a group of new age swingers sharing the hotel conference room with the nerds) hard to fit into the framework I'd built for the film. What are these spot-on characterizations of programmers doing in this plot?