VIFF, pt. 3: Duos habet!
The Two Popes When Jonathan Pryce and Anthony Hopkins are on screen together, this is a
great movie. It really feels like we're watching the actual Popes Francis and Benedict XVI interacting, feeling each other out, quarrelling over issues of Church leadership and doctrine, learning to appreciate the other's virtues, despite their considerable differences in style, worldview, and ecclesiology (the papal names they've selected are deeply telling in this regard). These are two of the most fully realized portrayals of real, famous people –– familiar to us, but always at a remove –– that I can recall. When the leads are not sharing the screen, Fernando Meirelles's film is a very mixed bag: The opening act, from the death of John Paul II to Benedict mulling over his decision to abdicate, feels rushed, like a Cliff Notes summary of recent history; as a snapshot of intra-Vatican politics and factionalism, this is far less convincing than, say,
The Young Pope (notwithstanding Paolo Sorrentino's series being a work of fiction). The lengthy flashbacks, providing exposition for the complicated pre-papal career of Francis (then Jorge Mario Bergoglio), are awkwardly inserted and shot (inexplicably, some are in black and white, while others are in colour). They tend to play like cheaply produced dramatic re-enactments in a true-crime show, the quality of which contrast sharply with the incredible performances of Pryce and Hopkins. While the past events depicted do help us better understand Francis and his reluctance to accept the papal crown, they could've been more effectively incorporated simply through more conversation between Pryce and Hopkins. Perhaps most problematically, one is never quite sure if
The Two Popes is intended as a critique of the papal office and/or of the Church generally, or as a sort of love letter to these powerful institutions. The magnetic charisma of the leads, "humanizing" not just the well-loved Francis but also the more opaque Benedict, suggests the latter, even as Meirelles works in repeated references to the Church's chronic failure to address its legacy (and on-going crisis) of mass child abuse and its long history of tacitly supporting (or at least neglecting to oppose) murderous and oppressive regimes.
Portrait of a Lady on Fire Céline Sciamma's follow-up to the terrific
Girlhood also centres on two people who get to know one another under highly particular and unusual circumstances (although that's probably where its similarities with
The Two Popes end). Set in eighteenth-century France, Sciamma's drama is historically specific with regard to the extent of the constraints placed on female agency and its excellent, if austere, period detail, but it also has a timeless, fairy-tale-like atmosphere that feels indebted to Jane Campion (especially
The Piano, less so Campion's adaptation of Henry James's
Portrait of a Lady) and to Perrault's tales. Some synopses of Sciamma's film place it in the 1770s, while others see it taking place "at the end of the eighteenth century." I'm assuming that the main story is set just before the events leading up to the French Revolution, yet, unless there was some explicit date marker that I failed to spot, this is not at all certain. Such ambiguity –– keeping such a world-historical event totally outside the narrative frame –– speaks to the laser-focused intimacy and thoroughly feminine orientation of Sciamma's film. More than a usual "period drama," it feels like a dream of the past, a subversive romantic fantasy doomed to muted tragedy by its time and place. Its power sneaks up on you, building to a final shot that is among the most indelibe in recent memory.
Oh Mercy!
Arnaud Desplechin's latest is an abrupt change of direction in the course of his career, almost completely eschewing the layers of artifice and meta conceits so characteristic of his oeuvre. Instead,
Oh Mercy!, adapted from police transcripts and a TV investigative documentary about Desplechin's rough, northern French hometown of Roubaix (the film's much-superior French title is
Roubaix, une lumière), is a realistic police procedural and gritty mosaic of contemporary life in this city. It's tightly scripted and superbly acted, with stand-out performances by Roschdy Zem, Sarah Forestier, and Léa Seydoux. One can imagine this translating well, and pretty easily, to the stage, particularly a remarkable long scene near the end that is all about performance, staging, and direction. Yet, at the same time,
Oh Mercy! is still quite distinctly cinematic. Desplechin captures the urban environs of Roubaix with both affection and uneasiness--there is beauty, but also real danger, here––lending the film a strong touch of noir style, evident too in its rumantive, pessimistic voice-over narration. In the post-screening Q&A, Desplechin cited Hitchcock (
The Wrong Man) and Bresson (
Diary of a Country Priest) as influences for this project. When a member of the audience asked whether he conducted interviews with the real Roubaisians represented in the film, he answered firmly in the negative. Instead, for "research," he re-read Dostoevsky's
Crime and Punishment in multiple translations.
One Day in the Life of Noah Piugattuk Zacharias Kunuk's best film since
Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner re-creates the 1961 encounter of the titular Inuit community leader with a Canadian government officer on Baffin Island. The white officer tries to convince Piugattuk to move his family from their ancestral home to a government settlement, and to send his children to school there. In return, he'll receive a wooden house, heated by a stove, a monthly family allowance payment, and access to desired commodities like tea, sugar, and tobacco. A local guide imperfectly translates the communication between Piugattuk and other Inuits and this government representative––a tense meeting that takes up the majority of Kunuk's film. What these scenes illustrate is the process of forced assimilation at work, in medias res. It only hints at the coercion and cultural destruction involved in this process, while suggesting that a profound lack of understanding was also partly to blame for it: first, at the level of language, though more generally of mutually incomprehensible mentalities and ideas about "home," identity, money, and productivity/utility. The flawed translation between English and Inuktitut feels wholly authentic, showing in vivid detail how such a meeting might well have played out. It also serves as a kind of microcosm for the ultimate failure in real communication that occurred between Inuit and other indigenous peoples across North America and the representatives of colonial governments. Yet, as in all of Kunuk's films, the situation is necessarily specific to Nunavut, the beautiful and severe Arctic landscape, and the Inuit culture. This film, after all, is set in 1961, by which time nearly every other corner of the continent had long since been enveloped by the "governmentality" of the Canadian or American state. Language gap notwithstanding, Noah Piugattuk clearly expresses his anxiety about the Canadian officer's proposal/command, though he refuses to directly state his choice. Despite his indecision, Kunuk frames this fateful encounter as a truly decisive moment in the modern history of the Inuit people and the (culturally and spatially) distant state imposing its will on them.
The Twentieth Century Matthew Rankin's bizarro biopic of Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King is a weird, sporadically hilarious delight, like a cross between fellow Winnipegger Guy Maddin (especially his
Saddest Music in the World) and
rightful cult classic Cabin Boy. To be sure, King was
almost certainly Canada's strangest PM. For instance: "Not only did King speak with his dead mother, but he communicated with the ghosts of such famous figures as the former prime minister Sir Wilfred Laurier, and even Leonardo da Vinci. He used a crystal ball, now found at Laurier House." And: "King saw magical images in his tea leaves, and even more oddly, in his morning cup of shaving cream. On January 20, 1948, he visualized in his morning lather symbols of the Cold War, a polar bear and an eagle...Then a dog appeared, perhaps symbolizing Canada, which helped push the bear off the eagle." Even so, Rankin pushes his story into still odder, more aggressively surreal territory, skewering not just King and his era of staunchly elitist Canadian politics, but clichéd ideas about Canada, its history and traditions that survive up to the present, often generally accepted and unquestioned. The film gets a little tedious as it nears the home stretch, but on the whole, it's a lot of fun; I'll certainly never look at a Canadian $50 bill the same way again!
Edo Avant Garde As in
Leonardo: The Works, the main pleasure in Linda Hoaglund’s documentary is "the works" themselves, in this case Japanese folding screens produced between the early seventeenth and mid nineteenth centuries, filmed in awesome, gracefully mobile HD by cinematographer Kasamatsu Norimichi. These extraordinary works, decidedly more unfamiliar to most Western audiences than Leonardo's masterpieces, are fascinating to look at (the more closely and patiently the better); and, as the films shows, they take up space and invite visual engagement in a way that is quite different from typical Western oil paintings. It's an important point, too, that something is inevitably lost from this experience by viewing these screens displayed behind glass in a museum or gallery. Hoaglund aims to place them back in their proper contexts, both by showing folding screens arranged in traditional rooms that could've been occupied by (sitting) Edo-era aristocrats or monks and by providing some useful historical information about the wider world of Edo Japan, particularly the shift in patronage to a wealthy merchant class, facilitated by Japan's rapid urbanization, and the combined influences of Buddhism and Shintoism on the art of this period. However, Hoaglund's primary argument--that in their non-naturalistic, "3D" perspective; lack of a clear centre or vanishing point; use of materials like goldleaf to form background space; and focus on animals, plants, and other elements of the natural world without direct reference to human beings, these folding screens were "avant-garde" art, conceptually and stylistically ahead of European painting in this period--is, ironically, too narrowly West-centric, tied to a flimsy History of Art master-narrative that few art historians today would accept and to an overly rigid East/West binary. Hoaglund compares the Edo screens to European art between the Italian Renaissance and the French Impressionists, noting that Van Gogh was heavily influenced by Japanese styles. But what if we broadened the scope to compare these works to Islamic or Persian art (flowing floral schemes and patterns), Byzantine art (particularly the use of goldleaf backgrounds), or even medieval European art (similarly de-centered works like tapestries, which invite a comparable type of nonlinear engagement), rather than only to Old Master paintings? In so doing, we might find that, while the art of Edo Japan was no doubt unique and spectacular, it was rather 400 years of European painting (ca. 1400–1800) that stand as the true outlier in the longer, global history of visual art.
