VIFF, Part 3: Heavens to Betsy
Last but not least:
Amour / Beyond the Hills / If It's Not Now, Then When? Three of the festival's most interesting offerings, grouped together here because, in their areas of overlap and contrast, they serve to highlight the strange, subjective experience that is watching films, reacting to films, and then trying to make some sort of coherent, critical sense of one's reaction once has the dust has settled. Through most of its runtime, Michael Haneke's Palm d'Or-winner is great. From the indelible opening sequence on, we get a portrait of dying, and of the day-to-dray struggle of caring for a dying loved one, that borders on the revelatory. Representations of death are, of course, ubiquitous in the visual culture of our time: bodies exploding from bombs and mines, shot and stabbed and tortured to death in alarmingly creative ways, mauled and sometimes fed on by various real and fantastic creatures. Most of these modes of death, while disturbing (or not, given their constant presence in the things that we watch), also feel comfortably removed from our own experience. With the partial exception of those who serve or live in a war zone, few of us will die in such spectacular, lurid ways.
Amour is marked by a kind of straightforward, prosaic realism that is radically mundane. While one may try and perhaps succeed in detecting layers of metaphorical meaning (a la
Cache or
The White Ribbon), I would argue that every scene in Haneke's latest, up to its final act, is best read on an absolutely literal level; to superimpose the symbolic over what's on screen is to reduce or cheapen or qualify the sympathetic, yet unsentimental, matter-of-factness of
Amour's narrative. The manner in which Anne finally dies over-particularizes what had, to that point in the film, been a seamless balance between the dramatically specific and the universal. What's more dubious than the death scene itself, though, is the poetic, symbolically loaded coda that Haneke subsequently appends, an awkward tonal shift. If we assume this closing sequence is a fantasy of sorts (as opposed to something more metaphysical), the intentions behind it are admirable--the notion of preserving in memory the "better-times" version of the deceased loved one; the couple exiting the film's almost-sole set, their apartment, into the wider world wherein they seemed happily active before Anne's sudden health problems. But what came before these dreamy scenes is
more admirable than this late stab at transcendence; however inherently un-poetic, Haneke should've played his narrative to its logical end-point.
Beyond the Hills, meanwhile, achieves something like transcendence, yet makes a final, provocative point of settling for less. Cristian Mungiu's masterpiece is a film of subtly shifting perspectives, and of divergent, wholly incompatible conversations ostensibly about the same thing. Where we can detect discursive overlaps among the spheres of religion, medicine/psychology, and law in the film (the rituals of penance and suspected possession, diagnosis and treatment, trauma and hysteria, and legal inquisition are rooted in some common epistemological assumptions), its characters are hopelessly at odds in communicating across constitutive lines of belief and perception, particularly the skeptical, secular-minded Alina and her hosts at an Orthodox monastery, including her childhood friend, now a nun. For most viewers, Alina will serve as the audience-surrogate; that is, until the year's most viscerally intense (yet painterly) movie moment: a sea of black-robed bodies struggling frantically to restrain the hysterical (possessed?) non-nun against a stark backdrop of pre-industrial night. We do not necessarily discern this movement in perspective when it occurs; only later is it clear that we have entered the subjective space of belief, a space in which transcendence is not only perceived to be possible, but is the only acceptable resolution. It's a ghost story on par with Carlos Reygadas's
Silent Light, with similarly potent echoes of Dreyer's
Ordet--which is why, when Mungiu yanks us back to Earth, it's a particularly rough, and powerful, crash landing.
Among these three films, James Lee's
If It's Now, Then When? ventures furthest afield in its concluding moments. Yet where the parting scenes in
Amour struck me as incongruous with the film's established tone, those in
If It's Not Now recolor but do not feel fundamentally out of step with what had preceded them. It's not so much a twist ending in a "gotcha!" sense. The film's shocking final events are actually foreshadowed earlier on, but it never crossed my mind that they were really going to
go there or...
there. Following what feels like a strong example of the meditation-on-lethargy/ennui/interpersonal-disconnectedness strain of art cinema with a doubly provocative gut-punch (graphic violence + subversive sex), Lee's film is the closest thing in contemporary East Asian cinema to Catherine Breillat's now-classic
Fat Girl. And, if nothing else, it's the perfect, jarring antidote to festivalitis, that blur of fineness-but-sameness that tends to set in by the twentieth or so screening.
East Meets West I don't personally feel qualified to place or properly evaluate Jeff Lau's film because, on the one hand, I've never seen anything quite like it, yet on the other, it's apparently representative of a sub-genre (the Hong Kong romantic fantasy) that Lau apparently helped to invent and popularize back in the '90's. Suffice it to say, then, that I enjoyed every minute of this deliciously bizarre, eye and ear-popping entertainment. The musical selections were especially terrific, including but not limited to the Turtles' "Happy Together," Pachelbel's "Canon in D Major," and Richard Strauss's "Also Sprach Zarathustra," with an irreverent nod to Kubrick.
Rose Wojciech Smarzowski's period drama's is entirely competent and sometimes quite moving, by virtue of the uniformly fine acting, but it's more edifying in illuminating a moment in history, likely little-known outside of Poland, than it is compelling as a piece of cinema. There's a (seemingly) fourth wall-breaking moment right in the opening shot, set during the bloody Warsaw Uprising, but what follows from there is--not to sound glib--a pretty routine filmic narrative of wartime tragedy. Still, if the form and style of Smarzowski's film provide little that separates it from other, similar films, the details of ethnic construction in the creation of the nation are productively specific and supremely unsettling.
Wagner's Dream A number of the most fascinating films at this year's festival, and in recent cinema more generally, muddy the distinctions between "fiction" and "documentary" filmmaking, calling into serious question whether these even remain useful categories, at this point. This is not one of those films. It's a standard-issue behind-the-scenes making-of doc, following a decidedly unconventional production of Wagner's
Ring Cycle at the Met in New York. The ambition and technical difficulty involved in this theatrical project provide the drama and keep things interesting every step of the way. Some of the filmed sequences from the operas are astonishing by default, making
Wagner's Dream the next-best thing to attending in person at the Met. But the doc's by-the-numbers form feels all the more bland compared to the innovation and audacity of the opera productions. And while the blurb in the festival program alluded to the controversial history of Wagner's most famous work, the historical entanglements of the
Ring Cycle are brushed aside entirely on screen. The point here is, of course, the technical wizardry behind and on stage, but the ambiguous implications of endeavoring to produce the most spectacular, hypnotic possible incarnation of Wagner's operas deserve to be teased out and considered.
When the Bough Breaks The richest, most fully-realized "characters" in film this year appear in this documentary about a family living on the impoverished margins of Beijing, at odds over the educational costs and prospects of their children. It's absolutely compelling, as compulsively watchable throughout its 150-minute run-time as the not dissimilar
Hoop Dreams. Filmmaker Ji Dan shatters any oversimplified preconceptions about poverty in China being limited mainly to its rural interior, with residents of the coastal cities basking in the fruits of the economic boom, while at the same time, raising questions about the value and purpose of higher education that are by no means exclusive to the Chinese context. The only problem with this otherwise superb film is that the documentarian never situates herself within her narrative, instead opting for a fly-on-the-wall approach that actually feels distracting; only once in the included footage is it explicitly acknowledged by the subjects that they are on camera, a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment. Following this family's day-to-day lives for what must have been a great many hours, what was the director's personal investment in what she was filming? What was her relationship like with her subjects? Was there any sort of financial arrangement made beforehand? If not, did Ji Dan ever feel tempted to help her subjects out as she watched them struggle, perhaps resisting this impulse so as not to compromise her hard-hitting narrative, while inevitably influencing in its course in myriad ways, despite the film's objective stance? These are not peripheral concerns, and yet they remain ever on the periphery, beyond the margins of the frame.
