SIFF 2013: What We Saw (Part 3)

Keep track of all The SunBreak’s festival coverage on our SIFF 2013 page.

MvB: For sheer cinema, Laurence Anyways from Xavier Dolan takes the SIFF 2013 cake, so far as I’m concerned. At 160-some minutes, it’s a grand opera of a film, replete with arias from leads Melvil Poupaud and Suzanne Clément, enacting an amour fou. Dolan tells a gripping, affecting story about the costs of being true to thine ownself — if a quirk of nature has mismatched your gender identity with secondary sexual characteristics — but he also tries his hand at motion portraiture: There are regal court dinners, scenes streaked with Klimt-ian rays, and chiaroscuro nights of the soul, as Laurence’s transition to womanhood threatens bonds with family and lover Frédérique.

Audrey: Coming on the heels of Dolan’s previous two rapturous SIFF entries, I Killed My Mother and Heartbeats, Laurence Anyways continues the young auteur’s hot streak and only fans the flames of excitement for whenever he deigns to make his English language debut. Will SIFF 2014 show his next film, an adaptation of Quebec playwright Michel Marc Bouchard’s psychological thriller Tom à la Ferme? One can only hope.

MvB: Also from up nord was Camion, that rare thing: an arthouse film for guys. (Interview with director Rafael Ouellet coming, so stay tuned for that.) When a Québecois trucker dad is involved in a fatal accident, his two estranged sons reunite to see if they can’t help roust their father from his survivor’s depression. They take him hunting, get some work done around the house, and drink beer and watch TV, all without ever talking it out. It may sound comical in synopsis, but there’s rarely been a clearer expression of the way certain men show love by simply hanging around and doing things together, and Ouellet’s guided tour of his real-life birthplace is affectionate, but clear-eyed.

More grittily poetic in its way and more northern, Naked Harbour is from Finnish director Aku Louhimies and set in the frigid working-class East Helsinki suburb of Vuosaari. It’s a series of parallel stories that have kinds of love as their theme: one thread involves a Santa-masked gang’s hold-up attempt; in another, an underage girl who wants to be famous ends up at a porn shoot; in a third, a young mother tries to find a way to explain to her daughter that her cancer may be terminal.

A gang of thieving Santas would fit right in in Fuck Up, sort of a Norwegian Stand by Me, but years later when the kids have become adulterers, drug dealers, and drug takers (okay, one has become a doctor). It’s a bleakly funny caper — the gang’s lead fuck-up gets in over his head with a real gangster — and a meditation on how far people will go to preserve the bonds of friendship.

Josh: My last week also included a forays into Scandinavia with a couple different flavors of something rotten in the state of Denmark. In Northwest (Nordvest) Danish brothers find something of a substitute father figure in a small time crime boss and consequently incite a little gang war by breaking from their former, arab-immigrant stolen goods taskmaster. The performances are strong and the filmmaking is stylish, making the evident escalation into violence and worsening situations surprisingly easy to watch. Who knew Copenhagen had an underbelly, let alone one this seedy (final screening: June 9, 11 a.m., Harvard Exit)! Meanwhile, a slightly quieter but even more devastating slide occurs in The Hunt (Jagten), in which a child’s false allegation spirals into Notes On [how not to handle] A Scandal. The life of a kindergarten teacher’s assistant (played by a very sympathetic Bond villain) is completely ravaged when a well-meaning overcautious teacher mishandles a brilliantly-portrayed young girl’s tall tale about her neighbor and his private parts. With a coda that speaks to the bounds of Nordic emotional compartmentalization. Again, the unpleasantness of the story is redeemed by the engaging production (final screening: June 6, 4 p.m., Uptown).

MvB: The Summit is about a real-life, tragic fuck-up — the deadliest day on K2. Climbers reenact how it went down, and went downhill, from the very beginning of that last push to the summit (it’s sometimes hard to tell the staged versions from actual footage taken that day). The you-are-there immersion leaves you frost-bitten, afraid of heights and tiny tents, oxygen-starved, and stranded overnight. An attempt to clear the name of one climber in particular is frustrated by the evident toll that being in the death zone had taken on everyone’s mental faculties.

Audrey: Tito on Ice is exactly the kind of out-there film that festivals are made for. Partially animated with stop-motion garbage art, it’s a documentary in which a couple comic book artists (with local Fantagraphics ties) travel throughout the former Yugoslavia with their self-made mummy/effigy of “President for Life” Marshal Tito. As a film, it’s uneven at best, but it’s exactly the kind of independent cinema I expect from SIFF.

Josh: With its use of vintage equipment and nonprofessional actors, Andrew Bujalski’s Computer Chess also felt compiled for the festival circuit. Things get really weird when a pack of computer programmers and new age encounter group wind up sharing an otherwise bland cat-infested hotel for a very long weekend. As with his other films, it’s a mostly talky affair, but infused with a sense of paranoia and mystery. In the thick of a film festival, I was won over by its strange retro video world rendered in dreamy monochrome, though I don’t that a multiplex would be as forgiving.

MvB: I saw Computer Chess and I don’t think I got it. Everyone looks very right for the part — the ’80s were a terrible, terrible time — but the conflicts felt ginned up and then mostly dismissed: you know, the concerns about Gubmint funding of chess war games (or something) and the grad student going off the rails (or something). An interesting ride, but in the end not very satisfying.

SIFF has been good to me this year, but I have walked into a few just-average movies: The Way Way Back (written and directed by Nat Faxon and Jim Rash) boasts a movie-stealing turn from a #nofilter Allison Janney (and strong performances from Steve Carell, Toni Collette, Sam Rockwell, and Maya Rudolph) but its constant wish fulfillment undercuts any impact from the trials of its 13-year-old protagonist, who comes to seem like an entitled sourpuss. The Spectacular Now features an easy-talkin’ Southern charmer as an alcoholic teen, who sobers up in a rush once he realizes that Coach Taylor is his reprobate dad. It suffers from that thing where teenagers sound like peevish 30-something screenwriters trying to be clever. Augustine: a period drama about a young French woman diagnosed with “hysteria” by Charcot, a mentor to Freud, and their *yawn* mutual attraction and manipulation.

I could not make it through the incredibly talky Spanish film Yesterday Never Ends, which never succeeds in becoming a film, rather than a restaging of the seemingly action-less play it’s based on. The idea is that it’s 2017 and Spain is still austerity-ridden. There’s EU symbolism in the fact that the husband has been fattening up in Germany, while his radicalized, activist ex-wife (Candela Peña, in full-Julianne-Moore-style freakout mode) lives in her car. It’s one of those movies that annoyingly keeps you in the dark about what’s going on so that it can make dramatic “reveals.” Also, there are B/W cutaways for interior monologues.

Josh: For the opposite of talky, see It’s All So Quiet (Boven is het stil). For a father and son on a Dutch dairy farm, a chilly staring contest between repressed longings and death. And for lighter family relations, Putzel was a charming little Upper West Side story of various permutations of family, geography, romance, and fish (final screening: June 7, 1 p.m., Pacific Place).

Tony: I’ve already covered Alive and Well and Scrapper elsewhere, and liked ’em both. Cliffs Notes: The former is a solid doc about Parkinson’s Disease, directed with heart by music video/commercial vet Josh Taft, and the latter (which Josh already gave a thumbs-up to, earlier in our SIFF 2013 journey) continues to be my favorite movie of this Fest, a low-key gem that just hit all the right notes for me.

A Lady in Paris isn’t the piece of cinematic durian fruit that Just Like a Woman was, thank God, but it’s just as formulaic. Laine Maigl plays a weary Estonian woman who becomes caretaker to a cantankerous old Frenchwoman (Jeanne Moreau), and you can predict every turn of plot, every calculated nuance, from about 27 miles away. The performances make it worth the effort: Maigl’s alternately beautiful and lived-in face speaks with an eloquence the script lacks, and Moreau takes a late-career victory lap with a bravura star turn (I could listen to that glorious Gallic rasp of hers recite Eiffel Tower tour schedules).

Again, I covered Shadowed elsewhere. It’s a locally-shot thriller about a camping trip gone way awry that’s pretty damned silly in places, but also tautly directed by first-timer Joey Johnson. I’ve seen suspense flicks way worse than this net some major attention, and this one definitely delivers the jump-outta-your-seat goods with frequency.

A spoonful of high-gloss, elegantly-directed sugar helps the socio-political medicine go down. So it goes with Redemption Street, a sleek and involving Serbian thriller about a young lawyer in post-war Belgrade who naively kicks up a hornets’ nest of trouble in his search for possible war criminals. It’s not quite as incredible as The Lives of Others (one of its obvious models), but director Miroslav Terzic manages to wrap the rough-hewn distinctiveness of his homeland in a package as ravishing as any Hollywood product.

Josh: Along these lines, although more sugary than political,  Jump was so slick that a New Year’s Eve in Northern Ireland’s second-largest city still felt small-town enough to accommodate all of the coincidences required to make this de-chronological crime caper with a twist of love story click (final screening: June 5, 8:45 p.m., Kirkland).

Tony: I am an utter sap for documentaries about the film industries in exotic lands, so Finding Hillywood and Celluloid Man both stroked my movie-nerd pleasure nodes with very different approaches. Hillywood is a compact hour-long chronicle of the birth of the Rwandan film industry. It follows a troupe of scrappy filmmakers and volunteers with a loving eye as they drag portable projectors and inflatable screens to the most remote villages, screening their locally-shot wares. In some cases, it’s the first time many Rwandans have seen a movie, and it’s undeniably moving seeing a crowd standing in torrential rain, being emotionally touched by films crafted by one of their own.

Celluloid Man, meantime, is a long (2.5 hours), leisurely profile of P.K. Nair, India’s legendary film preservationist. It shouldn’t work for an outsider (and with my relative ignorance about Indian cinema, I surely fit in that category), but it does. Nair–curmudgeonly and quietly passionate–makes for as captivating a subject as the movie’s he’s worked so hard to preserve. You’d also have to be blind not to be enchanted by the glimpses of the salvaged Indian films (some dating back to 1913) on display.

Two musical docs found their way to my stuffed SIFF 2013 buffet plate. Twenty Feet from Stardom is a pretty irresistible profile of some of the greatest backup singers to ever hit a high note on a classic pop song (see more about it here).

The Otherside, meantime, serves up a little bit more of a mixed bag. Anyone who’s going to shine a light on Seattle hip-hop deserves major props, and director Daniel Torok’s put some great live footage into one fast-moving package. He’s also gotten a really compelling birds-eye view of the meteoric rise of homegrown superstar Macklemore. The footage that’s there is so absorbing, it makes you wish–hard–that the movie was longer than 47 minutes: Reminiscences by Seattle’s elder-statesmen MCs and DJs, and some valuable voices in this town’s new guard, get truncated or go unheard as a result. Has anyone else here seen this? I’d love someone else’s take.

Josh: Blackfish: this CNN Films documentary sometimes feels like an extended edition of a television special report and leans heavily on interviews with former SeaWorld employees who reveal that, contrary to childhood opinion, working at an aquatic theme park doesn’t actually require advanced training in marine biology. Still, there’s enough emotional impact in the facts to carry the film: from the despicable history of kidnapping infant whales from the Puget Sound to a slate of deaths at the parks, the true monsters are shown to be the executives who put trainers at risk and keep orcas in repulsive captivity.

My other documentary was And SOMM tracks a pack of bros training to pass the world’s hardest test of fermented grape juice in the sportiest wine movie ever.

Tony: Damned if I haven’t broken my perfect streak of not seeing any of the movies the rest of you guys have by viewing SOMM, and I got a helluva kick out of it. You’ve hit the nail on the head by calling it “sporty,” Josh. For me at least, it walks a great balance between generating true excitement with its competitive sports-movie structure, and finding common-sense humor in its hyper-obsessive Men Who Would Be Master Sommeliers. As one character says, it’s only fermented grape juice….

Last but not least, I caught the midnight showing of All The Boys Love Mandy Lane. This 2006 horror flick got lost in legal limbo back in the day, and is receiving a long-overdue U.S. theatrical run this summer. It sports sharp direction by Jonathan Levine, a tour-de-force opening, a wry sense of humor that (unlike the last 57 Scream movies) doesn’t nullify the shocks, and a wonderfully skewed sensibility that undercuts (no pun intended) slasher-movie cliches with Giallo-style twisted artistry and a streak of grindhouse mercilessness. Is it a stone classic? I’m ready for another viewing, just to be sure.