VIFF 2023: Best of the Fest

                                                   01. Bitten

 02. I'm Just Here for the Riot
 03. A Cooler Climate
 04. Kidnapped
 05. Les filles du Roi
 06. Anatomy of a Fall 
 07. The Birthday Party
 08. Last Summer
 09. Snow in Midsummer 
 10. Monster 

 VIFF 2023, pt. 3: Gods and Monsters

                                                                       Kidnapped From the Red Brigades to Signora Mussolini to the Sicilian mafia trials of the 1980s, Marco Bellocchio has in his later career become Italian cinema's greatest national historian. Here, at 83, he charts the progress of the Risorgimento in the construction of the modern Italian nation-state (culminating finally with the 1870 taking of Rome, formerly a papal possession, as the new country's capital), but in an inspired stroke of historical storytelling, Bellocchio keeps the complicated politics of the nationalist movement in the background while placing at the fore the Church's abduction of Jewish children who have (supposedly, often surreptitiously) been baptized as Christians. It's a fascinating, and horrifying, chapter of ecclesiastical and Italian history, vividly recounted by a sure-handed old master. 

The performances (with the major exception of Paolo Pierobon's Pope Pius IX, who is by turns menacing and magnetically charismatic), however, are rather one-dimensional. That 'dimension,' as it were, is High Melodrama, heightened further by a histrionic score that leaves no room for subtlety. Yet this is, after all, a genuine historical tragedy, and it's powerfully presented and sumptuously envisioned; melodrama has its place, to be sure.

Monster A third of the way in I was confused. Two-thirds in I clued in to what Koreeda was up to here and thought this might be a great one. The last third or so crosses the line from poignant, humane, and sensitive (i.e., Koreeda at his best) to obvious, overly neat, and sentimental in the extreme. And once Monster had crossed that line, near-constant use of a supremely treacly piano score certainly didn't help matters. That said, there is a lot here that is good and interesting, and it's all very heartfelt. But it's a middling addition to Koreeda's oeuvre.

The Birthday Party A memory piece, ca. 1999, wherein a kids birthday party somewhere in Alpine Italy is recalled as a disturbing menagerie of indelibly strange and disturbing sights and sounds, adding up to...well, what exactly? The young protagonist (/presumable adult rememberer) isn't quite sure what he witnessed, and it's that hazy uncertainty and lack of full intelligibility, despite the sharp and vivid quality of the memories themselves, that lend this 17–minute short a surreal, oddly haunting quality. And so now I too will continue to wonder in vain whatever happened to that wheezing, wandering nonna!

Bitten What an amazing surprise! Knowing nothing going in apart from that it sounded potentially pretty fun from the festival programme blurb (and that I was going to be out tonight anyway, after seeing what turned out to be a kinda minor and 'meh' Koreeda film), I found myself totally under the spell of this weird and wonderful debut feature, a kind of French gothic Ghost World meets Trouble with Angels (!) meets Serra's Story of My Death, with some Giallo and early Polanski and Rob Zombie tossed liberally in to the pot. 

Although the ingredients and influences are, bite by bite, easy enough to identify, Bitten is far more than the sum of its parts; finally, this is quite an original and distinctive concoction (okay, belaboured cooking metaphor done now!). *Everything* here works terrifically: performances large and small (although the lead turn by Léonie Dahan-Lamort, who will surely be a star very soon, is on another level entirely), production design, cinematography, editing, musical choices, mood and atmosphere – all superb! I would say that horror debuts don't get much better than this, but, more to the point, horror movies (one of my favourite genres) period don't get much better than Bitten. 

[addendum – viewing #2: A great coming-of-age picture. A poignant, unexpectedly touching reflection on female friendship. A perfectly realized horror(-adjacent) movie, propelled unhurriedly by dream/nightmare logic. Definitely a knockout. Definitely my favourite film of VIFF 2023.]

 VIFF 2023, pt. 2: Summer, Fall, and Riot Revisited 

                                                                          Last Summer I was a bit confused when I heard that for her first film in a decade, Catherine Breillat, now 75, decided to remake a very recent Danish movie (which I haven't seen). Huh? 

Then I watched Last Summer and all was made clear. This premise has Breillat's name written all over it. Rather like the underrated Fat Girl meta follow-up Sex Is Comedy, this is an essentially pornographic premise turned inside out, reduced to its basic elements, and narrativized as an inconvenient mess of emotions, bodies, and Real Life. It's all pretty icky and squirmy, willfully prurient and perverse – but that is, after all, precisely Breillat's comfort zone.

Anatomy of a Fall This has been an exceptionally strong year for films thinking through, patiently and seriously, the challenges, rewards, and peculiar emotional mysteries of marriage: Past Lives, You Hurt My Feelings, in a cringier mode Last Summer, and in a darker, murkier sense Justine Triet's Palm d'Or-winning domestic drama cum legal thriller. 

In the former respect, this is a searingly specific case study, brilliantly acted and staged; Sandra Hüller's performance will surely stand as one of this year's very best. In the latter respect (i.e., as a courtroom procedural), it's highly engrossing, yet, upon just a bit of post-screening reflection, rather too dependent on some far-fetched plot contrivances – essentially the kinds of intricate twists that would immediately precede "To Be Continued" at the end of a multi-part TV episode.

I'm Just Here for the Riot Although this documentary was made, presumably, with television in mind, it was even better on the big screen – the riot scenes more visceral and intense, the emotions on faces filmed in tight close-ups more poignant and affecting. And with the boost of theatre-quality sound, the recurring use of Handel's stately and majestic Sarabande – such an inspired soundtrack choice (though one can't help but think immediately of Barry Lyndon, a decidedly very different film!) – felt powerful and appropriately mournful, rather than ironic or parodic, as I'd initially (mis?)judged from small-screen viewing. 

With the topic of sports rioting a 30 for 30 Trojan Horse, this is ultimately a film about Cancel Culture avant la lettre, as it developed in real time and not just to the famous and high-profile but here to ordinary kids or young adults who got drunk and/or stoned and caught up in an irrational, adrenaline-charged public spectacle, very publicly screwed up – to a serious degree to be sure, though not quite planned-insurrection-attempting-to-lynch-the-Vice-President-and-Speaker-of-the-House-level serious – and then had the next dozen years of their lives very significantly altered, with impacts extending far beyond the official legal consequences of their specific actions. 

I'm Just Here for the Riot is about hockey fandom the way Tar was about classical music. All that is there on the surface, but just below that there's more difficult and thorny topical matter with which the filmmakers are reckoning. Is the Wild West vigilante justice of the social-media age – sometimes seemingly well-intentioned, other times laced with misogyny, racism, hateful vitriol, and threats of violence – justice at all, the film asks its audience? In a more truly just world, the film carefully and cautiously suggests, there would be room for context and measured consideration. In a more just world, there would be some recognition of grey areas and individual circumstances. And in a just world too, Kat Jayme and Asia Youngman would follow Ezra Edelman (OJ: Made in America) as the next 30 for 30 directors to win the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature.

 VIFF 2023, pt. 1: Local, Global and Points Between 

                                                                                                   I'm Just Here for the Riot On June 15, 2011 – a day that will live in local infamy, to be sure – I was gathered with many thousands of others on Georgia Street, between the library and Canada Post, in downtown Vancouver to watch Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals. (If I correctly recall, I believe I was wearing a Ryan Kesler, #17, jersey that day?). After the game did not go our way (the writing was on the wall, as it were, from the first period), I saw that first car get flipped over and hightailed it post haste to the nearest Skytrain station. And I am very, very glad I did, not just for the temporary irritants of tear gas or rubber bullets but for the enduring digital stink that has clung to those who for whatever in-the-moment reasons (morbid curiosity, inebriation, opportunism, genuine sports-induced rage or some admixture thereof) stuck around. 

Twelve years later in my capacity as a History instructor at a local university, my usual first-day ice-breaker, when teaching small enough classes that it's feasible, is to ask students to name their 'earliest historical memory.' Going back to my grad school time as a TA, I remember getting answers like the OJ Simpson trial or death of Princess Diana. But this term the most common I answer I heard from students who grew up in Canada (especially but not only British Columbia) was the 2011 Stanley Cup riot (or that in conjunction/contrast with the 2010 Olympics). I will strongly recommend that they go see I'm Just Here for the Riot to learn more about that faintly recalled 'earliest historical memory.' It is now essential viewing.

While I thoroughly enjoyed Finding Big Country and The Grizzlie Truth, I was not expecting Kat Jayme's latest excursion into Vancouver's quirky/inglorious professional sports history (this one made for ESPN's consistently stellar 30 for 30 series and co-directed with Asia Youngman) to be one of the most powerful and provocative documentaries in recent memory. But this is a film that sneaks up on you; a film that you think is telling one rather obvious story, but then adroitly, stealthily switches tracks to another, one with more profound stakes and expansive reverberations. 

It is bona fide masterpiece. And I really don't think it's hyperbolic (nor a parochial local bias) to go one step further still and call this is one of the most important and thoughtful artistic statements concerning contemporary culture and society (ca. 2011–2023), perhaps second only to the multi-part OJ: Made in America among 30 for 30 docs. In particular, I'm Just Here... captures the decidedly tragic loss of context, nuance, empathy and forgiveness that has been a nasty, insidious symptom of our digital age. This is documentary filmmaking – sports-related or otherwise – at its best and most urgently vital.

A Cooler Climate How did I never know that James Ivory was American? I guess I always assumed he was from, like, the Home Counties or somewhere like that, not a small town in Oregon where he might well have been the lone E.M. Forster fan. His early USC film school projects were funded in part by his father's lumber mill – a factoid that places Ivory closer to David Lynch, say, than Terence Davies, notwithstanding other biographical affinities with the latter. 

Like Davies' resplendent Of Time and the City (and, in a looser, more abstract sense, also Lynch's The Straight Story), this is a film about, as Ivory himself puts it, "vanished worlds," including the mid-century America of the now 95-year-old Ivory's precarious adolescence as a gay young man with artistic proclivities. Yet also, and more strikingly, it's a time capsule of Afghanistan before the Taliban regimes, before US and Soviet occupations, when an early 30s Ivory shot a lot of (truly incredible) footage for a shelved film. He wrote to his parents reporting that Kabul was an unattractive, run-down city, comparing it unfavourably to towns set amidst similar landscapes in Arizona, Colorado, or New Mexico. But through his reading of the memoirs of the Mughal emperor Babur, for whom Kabul became a Proustian lost Eden of sorts after relocating his imperial court to Delhi, together with Forster's writings on Babur's world and age, Ivory was able to imaginatively reframe his surroundings (which he doubts have changed much since the fifteenth century) in more romantic and expansive terms. 

Ivory remembers reading Proust's own Swann's Way in a tent pitched near the Bamiyan Buddhas, world-historical ancient monuments demolished as vulgar idols four decades later by the Taliban, agents of irreparable damage/change that inevitably makes Ivory's memories/footage all the more poignant. 

For his part, Davies blamed The Beatles.

Les filles du Roi A Vancouver local-theatre success story (full disclosure: I am slightly/informally acquainted with somewhere around a third or quarter of the people involved in making this movie) that may now find a wider audience in film form. The only trouble is, it never quite makes up its mind as to whether it's meant as a distinctly cinematic filmization of a stage musical, as a filmed stage musical with some exterior scenes, or some Dancer in the Dark- or Dogville-like Brechtian in-between thing. Yet, this formal ambiguity notwithstanding, it's an altogether brilliant example of translating a complicated, not-very-well-known historical moment into a dramatic popular register while preserving and maintaining an essential historical verisimilitude. It's vividly shot (some light-infused compositions clearly quote Malick/Lubezki, esp. The New World), well acted, and beautifully sung. I suspect –– as both a practising historian/History instructor and lifelong fan of good musicals –– I'll return to it again and again; and might even in future assign it to a class studying Nouvelle France and settler-Indigenous relations.

Union Street A good answer to a question oft-asked by visitors or newcomers to Vancouver, posed in the film by a transplant from Kenya: "Where are all the Black people?" As an historical doc, it's interesting but unfocused. As a doc about contemporary Black culture in Vancouver, this "Telus Original" feels, at times, a bit too much like cable-access programming promoting local businesses. More sustained attention paid to the little-known history of Hogan's Alley and less highlighting of present-day entrepreneurs/artists would have helped to ground and solidify this interesting but unfocused documentary.

Snow in Midsummer Speaking of little-known histories (at least in the West), and of movement between past and present, Keat An Chong's film captures both the immediate terror and the intergenerational trauma and tragedy of Malaysia's "May 13 (1969) Incident," in which members of Kuala Lumpur's Chinese-Malaysian community were attacked and their properties destroyed in the explosive aftermath of a contentious election. Chong's film is a vivid, powerful, and purposefully subtle exploration of that event and its still-problematic legacy in Malaysia. It is locally (or nationally) specific, but speaks also to present tensions and outbursts of violence from the US to India to Canada, the Lower Mainland in particular. Incidentally, I watched this film the same day Trudeau announced to Parliament that evidence strongly suggested India's involvement in the assassination of a Metro Vancouver Sikh activist outside his Surrey, BC gurdwara and then learned from a friend who lives in Surrey (Vancouver's largest suburb, in some respects more culturally diverse than the city proper) that tensions between sectarian and political camps within BC's Indo-Canadian diaspora and student population have become much more heated of late. 

Of course, all of this has nothing directly to do with Snow in Midsummer, and yet it feels organically connected to the film's cautious, concluding sense of hope (also a resounding note in I'm Just Here for the Riot) that calmer heads and cooler climates may ultimately prevail despite moments of sound and fury and the damning persistence of memory.