You know you’ve past the film fest point of no return when…
Life is happening backwards. My film of the festival, Before Tomorrow, has somehow ended up at the end of this blog – so scroll down for a treat.
Think of it as a final scene, the culmination of festivalaciousness, the kind of film that wouldn’t exist without film festivals, film councils, and (hint) supportive distributors who see festival audiences prepared to hold their breath for something different and magnificent.
So think of that review as like the final scene of this blog. I had a kind of credits moment earlier today: picking up that final, vital press and industry ticket for an early morning public screening. I was so happy I got it, basically triumphant, that music swells. Crashing piano chords surround you and it’s like, yes, life has a soundtrack. Roll the freaking credits.
Then you leave the conference room, look down the hotel corridor and there’s a guy in a dinner jacket sitting at a white baby grand tinkling away. At 6pm. While cleaning staff fold sheets next to him. My So-Called Cinematic Life becomes more like “Heeeeeeeeeeere’s Jonny.”
Mama est chez le coiffeur review/interview
Not least because Léa Poole’s Maman est chez le coiffeur features a set of freaky, finishing-each-other’s sentences girl twins in pinafores. Weirdly, given my funereal filmgoing yesterday, it’s a film where no-one dies – but a girl on the edge of adolescence discovers the little deaths and lies going on in the homes of all her friends in the rural Québec community where her family live.
It’s 1966, the Vietnam war is on the radio, Élise’s mum is a journalist – and the whole world is about to change. As Poole told me, she specifically set the film one year before the 1967 World Expo in Montréal, which literally changed Québec society overnight.
Poole is Swiss by birth, but has been in Québec for over 30 years, and her love for the landscape, language and culture is clear in the film. It’s a joyous, gorgeous film about terrible things – although, as Poole says, the brief flashes of news about Vietnam put the domestic tragedies unfolding into perspective. Not that it’s a kitchen sink drama: Élise is our point-of-view character and, as Poole pointed out, “We never have more information than Élise [who is 13] can understand. She knows that something is wrong between her parents, that her father has somehow betrayed her mother – but when we see her looking for the cause in his golf bag, we know she doesn’t really understand.”
The father’s affair with his golf buddy is lightly sketched, one of the many subtle shadings and complexities that swirl around Élise and her younger siblings.
Twelve-year-old Conrad spends the summer building a go-kart, but also crying with longing for his mother who has left her cheating husband to take care of the kids while she pursues her career. Conrad’s vulnerability is one of the many surprising and lovely reversals in the film – and is beautifully expressed when he sings ‘Bang Bang’ in a tremulous, gorgeous voice at his mother’s beloved piano.
The film is great on the violence of childhood: the youngest child, Benoît, keeps decapitating his Action Men. Benoît appears to be developmentally delayed – and the film carefully and unsparingly shows both his genius for thinking differently, and the damage he inflicts on himself and the family through his misunderstandings. Poole’s work with the young actors is astounding: she says that they told her it was like being at holiday camp and a treat for her, and that the actor playing Benoît, in particular, pretty much became his character.
“Marianne Fortier [Élise] will become a great actor: she has something special in the way she looks, strong and expressive of small details even in silence. That first glance at her father when he arrives home with his golf buddy, as she catches the moment and tries to make sense of it: it’s a complex, thoughtful piece of acting, and she nailed it every time we shot the scene. It’s a complicated camera movement, and when we had to reshoot a few days later for technical reasons, she had it exactly, again.”
Poole has a reputation for discovering talent; Lost and Delirious was one of Mischa Barton’s first big screen outings, and a major role for Piper Perabo as well. It’s one of the most affecting portraits of adolescence – and Poole is full of praise for what her actors bring to a film: she told me that Perabo found and persuaded her to use the gut-wrenching Ani Difranco song, ‘You Had Time’, that plays in a key scene in Lost. Maman… ends with the young actor who plays Conrad singing a heart-melting version of “The Great Escape”. The final shot of Élise and Benoît hiding from reality sums up the feeling: your just-pre-teenage summers all over again, sunstruck in the tall grass, bittersweet-sticky with tears.
Sexykiller review
Teenage kicks of a different sort in much-hyped Midnight Madness screener Sexykiller . The title is nakedly tempting, and Shelagh reckons that it lives up to the buzz: “Imagine if Buffy (the Vampire Slayer) was never the chosen one. She stayed a Valley girl with an acute fashion sense, had an overbearing mother who believed a girl could never be too rich or too thin, and one day decided to become a serial killer.
“You would probably come up with Barbara, the gorgeous vamp with a taste for red lipstick and spilling blood just for the hell of it in Miguel Martí’s fantastically funny Sexykiller. Barbara is no ordinary girl: attending medical school in order to find a husband, Barbara longs for a Barbie-and-Ken-like existence but instead finds herself killing those who anger her or whom she simply doesn’t like. Martí combines pumped-up sound effects, music video-like interludes and an almost comic-book quality to the film, emphasizing both the absurdity of the situation and its reflections in reality. Barbara often speaks directly to the camera, telling her story and instructing the audience in a very Martha Stewart fashion, on the preparations necessary for a murder.
“Halfway through the film, though, the plot takes an odd turn which is at first disappointing (I only wanted to see Barbara), until the importance is revealed later. Barbara is the extreme representation of ‘Girl Power’ gone wrong (or right, depending on your point of view): she loves pretty clothes, longs to fall in love, but uses her rampant sexuality for murder, not the pleasure of men. And the woman knows what to do with high heels.” (SR-L)
From high heels to low-budget: Shelagh’s next pick is a documentary about a film industry that – when it’s reached the outside world – has thrilled many Midnight Madness viewers. Not Quite Hollywood sounds like the perfect antidote to the air-kissing, celeb-dominated, autograph-hunting that can feel like it dominates a festival full of hidden gems. “Australia has always been the black sheep of English-speaking countries, by virtue of its geographical distance from North America and Europe, and its unique flora and fauna.
“It’s no wonder, then, that its cult cinema would be far more extreme and outrageous than anything produced by other Western nations. This cinema is lovingly examined and exposed in Mark Hartley’s documentary Not Quite Hollywood.
“Splicing together interviews with actors, directors and critics, clips from somewhere near 100 films, and fabulous graphics reminiscent of ’70s porn films, Hartley divides the doc into three parts, each one looking at a different cult genre: soft porn comedy, horror and road films (the latter category containing the most famous of Australian cult cinema’s exports, Mad Max). Most of these films have rarely been seen outside their own country, and would shock even the most hardened fan by not only the imagery, but the risks taken by filmmakers and actors on set. Male actors were willing to take severe punches, female actors readily stripped for the camera, and cars and property destroyed without much forethought. The film drags somewhat towards the end, as the point of how outlandish and daring the industry was has already been made continuously. But it’s a must-see for any fan of cult cinema who thinks the North American counterpart might be a little too tame.” (SR-L)
It’s interesting to speculate about how much Australia’s cult industry might be related to the violent circumstances of its imperial history – Mad Max is certainly a film about land, water and power. In the third of her Midnight Madness picks, Shelagh sees a similar thread in a US film set in the classic westerns era, but with monsters instead of (as?) Native Americans… “Zombies, vampires, aliens from outer space: these monsters are a twentieth century invention. For, say, cowboys in 1865 roaming the Dakota plains, no words or concepts would even exist for creatures that bury humans alive in order to soften them up for eating.
“This blending of western and horror is the fourth feature from director JT Petty, The Burrowers. A young ranch hand, Coffey, finds his sweetheart and her family either murdered or gone from their home one day, and he and a small band of locals (briefly supported by some soldiers) go in search of them. The horror aspects of the film were fantastic: the creatures come out of the land, the very thing that sustains humans and for which they massacre others.
“They come out at night of course; but this night is the night of the lonely plains, where there is no light except for the few feet of the campfire, and guns only hold a few bullets. Cinematographer Phil Parmet’s work is amazing, as he brings to life the beauty and loneliness of the landscape, against the backdrop of the terrifying unknown. I jumped out of my seat and covered my eyes several times.
“Since this is late-19th century America, of course, racism against Natives and newly-freed slaves abounds, represented by a sadistic army official. But the metaphor of the creature horror to represent the horror of the settlement of the west, and the treatment of Natives and freed slaves, was too obvious and stereotypical. More restraint in the script was called for. As well, the strongest actor in the group, Clancy Brown, playing the strongest character of the group, the local sheriff, was gone too soon from the film. The film is worth watching, though, for film fans who like their genres to mix.”
Before Tomorrow review & interview
And for a dose of the reality of colonialism, Before Tomorrow. I’m guessing the bodycount is almost as high as in The Burrowers, and here the killer is an alien: smallpox.
And you haven’t seen acting until you’ve seen Peter-Henry Arnatsiaq, who played the charismatic villain Oki in Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, act everyone offscreen while being dead from smallpox. His role here is smaller than in that first feature produced by Isuma Igloolik (this is the third), as Apak, the father of a young boy Maniq (Paul-Dylan Ivalu) who loves spending time with his grandmother. When she goes to dry fish on Puvirnitur island, Maniq goes with her, spending his time learning to use the harpoon his father gave him and listening to his grandmother’s stories.
The portrait of the inter-generational relationship is as affecting and as stringent as in Central Station, given added piquancy by the fact that Ninioq is played by Madeline Ivalu (who also co-directed), Paul-Dylan’s real-life grandmother. Paul-Dylan carries a great share of the film – undoubtedly aided by having Arnatsiaq as his acting coach.
By staying on the island, Maniq and Ninioq survive the smallpox epidemic, but Ninioq is faced with the awful question of how to raise the child without a community. Co-director Marie-Hélène Cousineau, one of the founding members of the Arnait Filmmaking Collective who have been making video documentaries about the lives of Inuit women for 18 years, concluded our interview with a passionate statement that the film is about how community is made and sustained through storytelling. In one sense, she says, nothing happens in the film: a boy and his grandmother work, walk, sleep and occasionally talk.
In another sense, a whole world is made vivid and alive. Aided by gorgeous cinematography – arctic light is hallucinatory, and cinematographer Félix Lajeunesse captures some truly spectacular polar sights that support the film’s underlying theme of the fragility of light – and great music from the McGarrigle sisters, the film left the audience gasping with its devastating, honest ending.
Cousineau was pleased to hear about the reaction at the screening: she said that for her, the film has a political intention, but moreover she wants it to “help people to be human. I know that making these films with Arnait has had an impact on the people in the films, the process changes lives,” but she also hopes that the film can spread the word (in a totally undidactic way) about colonialism and about environmental devastation.
Arnait’s next planned film (and they are a true collective: Cousineau said that a journalist kept asking, “But really, which one of you is the leader?,” clearly implying that Cousineau, as the only white member of the collective must be in charge, and art director Susan Avingaq said, “I don’t think we can say there’s a leader” – Cousineau says that’s very important for her: “When we are filming in Igloolik, we are in their world. There’s no way I can be the leader”) will take them to Mexico and hopefully Peru to talk to indigenous women in both countries about the effects of mining and mineral exploitation on their lives. Before Tomorrow is a gorgeous glimpse into one culture that is threatened, once again, by destruction imported from the industrial world.
Isuma Igloolik’s project has stoked the fire of Inuit culture, providing employment, reviving traditional skills to create the film’s mises-en-scènes, and gaining international recognition and respect. Before Tomorrow, which had its international premiere at Toronto (but not world premiere: Isuma are committed to showing their films first to the communities in which they’re made), burns bright.
