Film Freak Central

Telluride '21: Spencer

***½/****
starring Kristen Stewart, Sean Harris, Amy Manson, Sally Hawkins
written by Steven Knight
directed by Pablo Larrain

by Walter Chaw The last 12 minutes or so of Derek Jarman's excoriating, experimental The Last of England is just Tilda Swinton armed with garden shears, framed against a stark background, ripping through her wedding dress in a rapture of rage--a resounding rejection (or a prophecy of the inevitable fall) of the tradition and ritual, the future and hope, that marriages represent. The whole film is scenes of atrocity and decay intercut with home movies of the child this bride was, the couple this bride is a part of, and the calamity of the union into which society has forced her, culminating in this exorcism of these ties that bind. It's one of the great exits in Jarman, and The Last of England's afterimage is all over Pablo Larrain's impressionistic Spencer, a biography of three miserable days, from Christmas Eve to Boxing Day, at the end of Princess Diana's tenure. It seeps through especially in a sequence where Diana (Kristen Stewart) dances by herself down the empty halls of Sandringham, an act of rebelling against the norms and controls imposed on her by the misfortune of her station. The scene would play perfectly against the mute wanderings of a grief-stricken Jackie Onassis in Larrain's previous examination of a woman encased--and left adrift--in a patriarchal system of power and exchange, Jackie. They are complementary portraits of the suffocation of empire. Both can be unpacked by Jarman's takedown of Thatcher's England, and all three left me a mess.

Hot Docs '17: Resurrecting Hassan

****/****
directed by Carlo Guillermo Proto

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 27-May 7, 2017 at Toronto's Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest's official site for more details.

by Bill Chambers Denis Harting, his childhood sweetheart Peggy, and their daughter Lauviah busk together as a capella singers on the Montreal metro. Peggy prefers performing outside to inside: "It's more fun and it's more money. And people are a bit goofier." She says this to her secret boyfriend, Philou, during one of their transatlantic phone calls, which she's becoming increasingly brazen about. If you're going to pity Denis, pity him for getting cuckolded, not because he's blind. After all, so are Peggy and Lauviah. Lauviah had a brother, Hassan, who died in a drowning accident at the age of six. Denis tells a radio interviewer his death made headlines, so I looked it up and discovered that Hassan was not also blind. His parents donated his corneas--not to Lauviah, alas. As I type this, I'm wondering about the ethical propriety of that, were it medically possible. Like any work of direct cinema, Resurrecting Hassan raises as many questions as it answers, though it goes the extra mile in pursuing objective truthfulness by narrowing the camera's field of vision with staggeringly intimate close-ups. It's not Derek Jarman's Blue, but this blotting out of their surroundings does foster empathy for the Hartings, who are quite often literally the blind leading the blind. (They walk the streets in a linked huddle and assist one another at home.) There's a conversation to be had, in a longer, more considered review, about whether scenes like Lauviah--who additionally has some form of autism--petting her cat wrong constitute exploitation. Personally, I was grateful the movie didn't lapse into inspiration porn, and I tend to think of all cinéma vérité as exploitation anyway. (Besides, it's a poignant moment, as the two most isolated figures in the house beg for mutual compassion.) The question to ask is if pointing a camera at this family is cynical, and that's an issue compounded by their being followers of Grigory Grabovoy, a Russian faith healer who claims that human organs can be regenerated at will. To unbury another lede (or drop a bombshell), the Hartings have somehow convinced themselves that Grabovoy's teachings are the key to bringing their son back from the dead, per the title. It's a bizarre set of variables, no doubt, but Denis and Peggy's desire for their own personal Monkey's Paw, deluded though it may be, is only too relatable. Resurrecting Hassan is an inspired and unusually affecting film about grief, which proves an insurmountable burden even for the Hartings, who live lives of constant adaptation.

TIFF '16: The Bad Batch; Colossal; Jackie

THE BAD BATCH
**½/****
starring Suki Waterhouse, Jason Momoa, Giovanni Ribisi, Keanu Reeves
written and directed by Ana Lily Amirpour

COLOSSAL
**/****
starring Anne Hathaway, Jason Sudeikis, Dan Stevens, Tim Blake Nelson
written and directed by Nacho Vigalondo

JACKIE
***½/****
starring Natalie Portman, Peter Sarsgaard, Greta Gerwig, John Hurt
screenplay by Noah Oppenheim
directed by Pablo Larrain

by Bill Chambers Three very different #TIFF16 films--a postapocalyptic cannibal western (The Bad Batch), a modestly-scaled kaiju eiga (Colossal), and a period docudrama (Jackie)--form a trilogy in my mind thematically linked by crestfallen female protagonists who discover reserves of strength in dire situations. The Bad Batch is the only one of these movies directed by a woman, though, and dare I say you can tell, not only in how the camera softly caresses Jason Momoa's Olympian contours, but also in the way the framing and blocking of the heroine imply the constant peril of being a woman. Working through the neophyte filmmaker's genre playbook, director Ana Lily Amirpour follows up her vampire movie A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night with this dystopian flick most reminiscent of the Australian strain in terms of vibe/aesthetics, what with its shantytown sets, symbolic names, and obligatory feral child. (The only thing missing is a car fetish.) Winsome Arlen (Suki Waterhouse) is exiled to the other side of some Trumpian fence in Texas with only the clothes on her back and a tattoo that identifies her as an undesirable (or bad batch). Almost immediately she's dragged away to a cannibal camp, where they chop off her right arm. Missing a leg, too, by the time she escapes, she finds refuge--and prosthetic limbs--in the village of Comfort, whose denizens mostly give her space. Time and body-image issues stoke her desire for revenge, however, putting her on a collision course with Momoa's Miami Man, a brilliant sketch artist who's also a fearsome, unsympathetic consumer of human flesh.

Hot Docs 2012: ¡Vivan Las Antipodas! (d. Victor Kossakovsky)

by Angelo Muredda “The world spins, but they’re always below us.” That’s one of the many pearls in Victor Kossakovsky’s ¡Vivan Las Antipodas!, a high-concept travelogue that fleetly covers four pairs of dry-land spots at exact opposite ends of the earth. The opening epigraph from Lewis Carroll aside, Kossakovsky gravitates to such homespun maxims rather than headier stuff, and the film is all the more dazzling for it – an intoxicating riff on the Looney Tunes bit where Yosemite Sam digs through an outcrop and lands in China. While he’s interested enough in the locals, particularly the source of that comment, two guys who ferry busted cars over their pontoon bridge in Argentina, the director generally turns his Red camera to beautiful images of animal life, fauna, and architecture, weaving strange textures out of his startling juxtapositions between, for instance, a volcanic rock formation in Hawaii and an elephant’s hide in Botswana.

The Motorcycle Diaries (2004)

***/****
starring Gael García Bernal, Rodrigo De la Serna, Mía Maestro, Mercedes Morán
screenplay by Jose Rivera, based on the books Notas de viaje by Ernesto Guevara and Con el Che por America Latina by Alberto Granado
directed by Walter Salles

by Walter Chaw Adapting respective memoirs by then-young Cuban-by-way-of-Argentine revolutionary Ché Guevara (Gael García Bernal) and his best friend Alberto Granado (Rodrigo De la Serna) that documented their Kerouac-ian odyssey down the spine of South America to find the soul of their country, Walter Salles's The Motorcycle Diaries is difficult at best. It's a road movie and a good one, as far as it goes, but it lacks the fire of change of something like Easy Rider in its substitution of a picaresque travelogue lightly spiced with delightful romantic misunderstandings for Peter Fonda's swiftly tilting planet and deserts of the real. Easy Rider talks about the dying of the light; The Motorcycle Diaries talks about how doe-eyed Ernesto Guevara became Ché, the Hoffa of Latin America and eventually the most reproduced and mass-marketed image since Marilyn Monroe's.

Film Freak Central Does Film Forward

May 13th, 2003|An interesting move from an interesting company, Madstone Theaters is releasing six undistributed films, each for a one-week alternating run called "Film Forward". The first thought that comes to mind is that undistributed films are most likely that way for a reason. There's an old Tinsel Town axiom that applies to most of the stuff that winds up shelved for a lengthy period of time (View from the Top, A Man Apart, The Weight of Water): studios often don't know when something's good, but they almost always know when something's bad. The idea of "Film Forward" should be appealing, at least intellectually, for the movie-savvy audience that Madstone is trying to cultivate; the question with currency is, as it always is, whether self-confessed movie snobs will put their money where their mouths are.

Hot Docs '03: Juchitan, Queer Paradise

Juchitán de las locas
**½/****
directed by Patricio Henriquez

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover This documentary has a honey of a subject: a Mexican Zapotec town with a high tolerance for homosexuality. Unfortunately, it blows it when it takes a personal angle that obscures the town's inner workings. At first, the film gets your hopes up by showing Juchitan's relaxed nature--gays and the transgendered are treated with respect, women are given a high rank in society, and the Zapotec language is still spoken in a country where native languages are quickly disappearing. But Juchitan quickly shifts gears to follow several residents of the town, all of whom are male and none of whom give a real sense of how Juchitan society works. Some of these interview subjects are fitfully interesting. There seems to be little agreement on how one should lead one's sexual life--a professor seems to think that monogamy is sexual servitude, while a beautician thinks it's simply a matter of respect. And there is some reflection on the death of a local celebrity at the hands of homophobes, as well as the Catholic church's mishandling of the situation. But one doesn't really get a sense of the society that surrounds them, and while it looks like it might be a great place to raise children, it's in dire need of some socio-historical fleshing-out.