VIFF 2020: Best of the Fest

01.  Moving On (Yoon) 

02.  There Is No Evil (Rasoulof)

03.  Twilight's Kiss (Yeung)

04.  Servants (Ostrochovsky)

05.  My Rembrandt (Hoogendijk) 

06.  Undine (Petzold)

07.  Memories to Choke On, Drinks to Wash Them Down (Leung/Reilly)

08.  Merkel – Anatomy of a Crisis (Wagner)

09.  Summer of 85 (Ozon)

10.  Hammamet (Amelio) 

   VIFF 2020, pt. 3:  You Can't Go Home Again                                           

Twilight's Kiss  The loveliest film at this year's festival, and one of the loveliest, period in an awfully long time, is Ray Yeung's romantic portrait of two Hong Kong seniors, a taxi driver with a wife and adult children and a retired divorcé whose son has convinced him to convert to Christianity. The former secretly cruises for furtive encounters with other men; the latter is more integrated into Hong Kong's community of gay older men, though he is careful to keep this important part of his life and identity concealed from his family. What is initially a chance encounter develops into something far more meaningful and impactful for both men. Yet, as their relationship progresses and deepens, even the sweetness and joy of shared moments are strained with the weight of secrecy and regret. As a swooning, circumstantially doomed, romance, there are some echoes here of In the Mood for Love, another great Hong Kong film––but Yeung's love story, of two men in the autumn of their lives, is a very different one. The social and personal factors that constrain the full flowering of their relationship are markedly different, too. And, in contrast to Wong Kar-wai's eye-poppingly stylish '60s Hong Kong, Yeung's representation of the contemporary city feels more lived-in and open. The elegant period elements in Wong's tightly constructed film converge in on his lovers, and seem to exist for them and their ephemeral moment of connection. In Twilight's Kiss, Yeung's couple are just people living ordinary lives surrounded by many others doing the same. Their relationship adds an intense charge of feeling that is theirs alone. The world around them keeps going on at its normal rate and rhythm, as other people, including their families and friends (all presented as complex, interesting individuals, none of them mere foils for or accessories to the lead characters), have other experiences, feelings, and relationships.

Hammamet  The consistently superb Pierfrancesco Favino gives another astonishing performance, here as notorious Italian Prime Minister Bettino Craxi. Gianni Amelio's film focuses primarily on the final years of Craxi's life, after he had fled Italy for the titular town in Tunisia to avoid facing trial on corruption charges. This abbreviated biographical scope allows for an unhurried rhythm and long, patient scenes centering on extended dialogues between Craxi and his visitors. As in Suburra and Bellocchio's The Traitor, Favino is considerably stronger than the rest of the movie playing out around him, but given Amelio's near-constant focus on Craxi –– a kind of disgraced lion-in-winter figure  –- Favino's tour de force performance very nearly is the film, together with some stunning scenic backdrops on both sides of the Mediterranean. 

John Ware Reclaimed  This passion project of novelist/playwright/documentarian Cheryl Foggo illuminates a thoroughly interesting and significant chapter of Canadian – or really, North American – history that deserves to be better known: that of an African-American man who, after the U.S. Civil War, ventured to Canada and became a successful and prominent Prairie rancher. For Foggo, her brother, and other African-Canadians she interviews, Ware's legacy is distinctly personal. With a good historian's resourcefulness and tenacity, Foggo endeavours to push past the vague legend of "Alberta's Black Cowboy," to learn more about Ware, his family, community, and social context, and to share widely what she discovers so as to dispel the notion that Canada, and particularly Western Canada, is lacking in Black History. 

My Mexican Bretzel  Like, say, Tarnation, Stories We Tell, and Dawson City: Frozen Time –– films that seemingly share little in common ––  Nuria Giménez's found-footage montage (for lack of a more precise definition; it's borderline sui generis) is a remarkably clever piece of storytelling assembled out of fragmentary shards of the past; moments richly evocative and mundane stitched together as a kind of diaristic narrative. It's as much a "documentary" as F for Fake, but Giménez plays it much straighter than Welles, and the cumulative effect of her film is genuinely haunting, whatever its other claims to "authenticity." If nothing else, this is another illustrative reminder of just how irrelevant the conventional binary of "documentary" and "fiction" has become – if it wasn't already so back in Welles's heyday. 

Moving On  Yoon Dan-bi's quietly excellent family drama is one of the great surprises of this year's festival. Yoon and her wonderfully naturalistic cast capture in such subtle and exacting detail the dynamics within a family, whether in group dinners and celebrations or in small, one-on-one moments between, say, an aunt and her niece or an adult brother and sister both going through tough times. There is a rather obvious impulse to situate Moving On within the illustrious and extensive tradition of the Asian family drama, from Ozu to Hou to Koreeda (all three auteurs are mentioned in the festival catalogue blurb!). However, the movie that most immediately came to mind for me was You Can Count on Me. In its tenderness, warmth, humour, and real empathy, so many scenes in Yoon's film recalled that indelible last scene in Lonergan's, with Laura Linney's Sammy saying a reluctant goodbye-for-now to Mark Ruffalo's Terry (neither actor has been better before or since). Moving On's final moments are no less poignant, though they're so much sadder because it's goodbye-for-good, and in more ways than one. 

Mickey on the Road  It's a bit of a shame, really, that I happened to watch Lu Mian Mian's entirely solid and occasionally inspired film right after seeing Moving On. Mickey on the Road –– a road-trip drama/comedy about two young women who travel together from Taiwan to Guangzhou, though for different reasons –– is probably not overly melodramatic or excessively aesthetically showy, yet it seemed to be both after the masterful subtlety of Yoon's film. And while Lu's work is, at times, quite funny, its laughs felt somewhat forced and too self-consciously quirky compared to the wholly organic humour of Moving On. That is to say, it's not Mickey on the Road's fault that I'm exceptionally smitten with Moving On (even more so after a follow-up viewing, post-Mickey). To be sure, Lu's movie has plenty to recommend it, including a pair of charismatic lead performances and some really rich and fascinating insights about cultural differences between Taiwan and the southern (Cantonese) Mainland. But watching some dozen and a half movies over just a couple weeks' time ultimately, emphatically underscores the differences that separate great films from good ones. Where Mickey on the Road feels through and through like a promising feature debut, Moving On is a first feature that is almost unbelievably assured and mature. 

VIFF 2020, pt. 2: Stately horrors 

 

There Is No Evil  The English title of Mohammad Rasoulof's film –– its original Persian title translates literally as "Satan doesn't exist" –– evokes, coincidentally or not, Hannah Arendt's famous notion of the "banality of evil." Without giving away too much about this masterpiece in four movements (it's really best to go in with as little advance knowledge as possible), suffice it to say that each of the four, thematically linked stories explores what it means to do evil, to effect it in the world, as well as the mystery of its true source or nature if men are only banal part-time conduits for the doing of evil. Does this elusiveness then mean that evil, or "Satan," doesn't actually exist? Is it a mere by-product of the impersonal operations of the State? Rasoulof's film, though occasionally a touch too didactic, mostly resists supplying any easy answers to such thorny questions. What it shows across its four acts is a world fatally scarred by the terrible things people have done to one another, however banal, unintentional, or unwilling those actions. 

Servants  Ivan Ostrochovsky's stunning, noir-influenced film is similarly, though more immediately, concerned with the power of the state over the moral and spiritual lives of its citizens. The setting here, rather than present-day Iran, is Czechoslakia in 1980, as the totalitarian communist government attempts to root out resistance within the Catholic Church, specifically in a Bratislava seminary where some teachers and pupils have expressed criticism of the state-sponsored Pacem in Terris movement. In Ostrochovsky's vision of the past, this historical milieu is a strange and ghostly space shot through with dread; a soul-crushing, Kafka-esque nightmare. Yet, there is a stark beauty and a sense of mystery within every monochrome frame. The spiritual tumult of the young priests-in-training and their aged ecclesiastical mentors is most evocatively expressed in Servants' many moments of eerie calm, only barely suppressing the profound anxiety just below the surface. 

Merkel – Anatomy of a Crisis Centering on Angela Merkel's bold and fateful decision to allow hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees to enter and seek asylum in Germany, Stephen Wagner's film focuses, above all, on the long period of indecision and the behind-the-scenes bureaucratic wrangling and maneuvering that led up to Merkel's eventual, humane stance. It's a political thriller of sorts, but one concerned with the place (or possibility) of morality and empathy in a world of Realpolitik pragmatism and micromanaged economic minutiae. As Merkel, Imogen Kogge is excellent, transcending mere impersonation, and the rest of the cast is nearly as strong. Though Wagner's style is rather pedestrian and clearly televisual, his vocabulary of rapid cuts between scenes and locales, frequent establishing shots of European capital cities, and news footage mixed in with terse conversations in state offices, cars, and via phone meetings feels perfectly pitched as an aesthetic representing the complicated governmental and intergovernmental strata of present-day Germany and the E.U.

The Town of Headcounts Shinji Araki's film, an odd mix of drama, comedy, and science fiction, plays like an especially clever episode of Black Mirror, but situated within the specific context of Japanese society. It's a dystopian tale of a cult-like community that provides a life of dull leisure for its trapped members, who are then supplied as "headcounts" for various corporate or political ends necessitating the anonymous presence of crowds of people. While this premise sounds convoluted on paper, it largely works in practice, particularly because the cast is equally good in comic circumstances and in the film's darker moments. The most unnerving aspect of Araki's work is that its dystopia exists within normal reality and contemporary society, albeit at its creepy, invisible margins, not far off in some distant future. 

Special Actors Shin'ichirô Ueda's movie shares some conspicuous similarities with Araki's: namely, a weird cult and the use of ordinary people as performative props inserted purposefully into certain real-world situations. Both films are also critiques of certain aspects of Japanese culture (though, as such, I can't pretend to be able to fully "read" them). Ueda's work, however, is a much broader, zanier comedy. The "special actors" of the title are amateur performers hired to add some movie-like excitement to regular life. One "actor," for instance, is tasked with threatening a customer and then taking a fake beating so that said customer can impress his date. In the main storyline, the stakes are higher: the team of "special actors" are hired by the sister of a brainwashed inn owner to infiltrate a Scientology-like group in order to prevent the group from taking possession of her family's inn. Much silliness ensues, some of it a bit tedious. But with Ueda's light, screwball touch, it's mostly a lot of fun. 

Last and First Men Of all the movies at this year's festival that have suffered unfairly from the indignity of being streamed off a laptop to a TV, the late Jóhann Jóhansson's deep-future time-capsule might be the worst served by this virtual fest format. Tilda Swinton narrates a message addressed to us  from a future race of man (the 18th; we're still the first) some two billion years in the future, reflecting on the end of their own Neptune-based civilization, over long-held black-and-white shots of brutalist futuristic structures and cryptic monuments now in a state of ruin. It's at times hypnotic, at times boring. But I suspect the former impression would dominate were this projected on a proper movie screen –– or better yet, presented as an art-gallery installation, where this really belongs, partitioned off in a dark, quiet space amidst the mixed, strange fruits of human imagination. 

Sanzaru For horror connoisseurs like us, too many horror movies – including many good ones – are thoroughly predictable from about ten minutes in, their characters all stock types, the scares pro forma. Xia Magnus's film, about a Filipina nurse and her nephew residing with a terminally ill older woman and her son at a house in rural Texas, is refreshingly inscrutable through much of its runtime. While this haunted-house story ultimately hits some familiar horror notes, its patient plotting helps to build thick atmosphere, interesting, multi-dimensional characters, and general goodwill. More unsettling than jump-scary, Sanzaru is a slow burn that gradually worms its way under one's skin.

The Curse of Willow Song Far less successfully, Karen Lam's Vancouver-set feature aims, at once, for horror, neo-noir, and gritty social realism. It misses all these targets, but it falls especially short on the last one. Perhaps non-Vancouverites won't mind (or even notice), but, speaking as a longtime resident of the city, Lam's representations of the Downtown Eastside and some kind of vague, shadowy Lower Mainland criminal underworld feel really off-base and simplistic. (This is just local nitpicking, but at one point a character is picked up on the DTES, the driver seems to drive south across the Second Narrows Bridge, and they end up at an industrial park that is said to be in Surrey...) Willow Song's guiding template seems to be Sin City, or something of that sort. In consequence, the film's depictions of serious social issues like drug addiction, homelessness, sexual harassment, and the difficulty of life after prison are regrettably cartoonish. There is some good stuff here: the b&w photography looks sharp (again, it would benefit much from the big screen); Valerie Tian's lead performance is solid, relatively subtle, and gets better as the film goes along; and the horror special effects are pretty impressive for a low-budget indie. But these bright spots are just not enough to make up for all the ways this movie goes wrong.