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HUNGER
Saying that Steve McQueen's arresting debut feature is merely about the Irish hunger striker Bobby Sands is selling it short. Far from being a lock-step biographic tale, Hunger is a harrowing meditation on physical being and the toll of devoting yourself to a cause. McQueen's approach can be alienating and off-putting, but the fact remains that this is some manner of extraordinary achievement.
Hunger takes place during the last six weeks of Sands's life, yet you wouldn't know that from the film's first act - Sands doesn't even show up until a good half-hour has passed. McQueen uses the setup not to introduce us to Our Famous Man but to give us a dense, textured sense of the brutal, intense everyday physicality of being alive in the H-Blocks of Her Majesty's Prison Maze. Our central identification figures at the outset are new prisoner Davey (Brian Milligan) & his cellmate Gerry (Liam McMahon) as they participate in the no-wash protest by smearing their feces on the walls of their cells and refusing to bathe; McQueen also often cuts to prison guard Ray Lohan (Stuart Graham), who we first meet as he soaks his busted knuckles.
The reason for this injury is revealed later on in the film, as McQueen rejects dialogue, skips across time and uses small moments to build an environment of barely-contained tensions amid physical degradation. Davey and Gerry smear shit on the walls. Lohan checks the underside of his car for bombs as he leaves for work in the morning, his worried wife watching him from inside the house. Prisoners use shows of affection to pass secreted pieces of paper and tiny scribbled notes to their visiting loved ones, and vice versa. Davey furtively masturbates at night underneath the blanket he, like the other IRA prisoners, wears at all times in protest after refusing to wear a prisoner's uniform. Lohan smokes a cigarette while a light dusting of snow falls, and a flake lands on his injured hand and slowly melts. The tension often erupts into violence, as in the sequence where a prisoner is forcibly shaved and bathed; this turns out to be our introduction to Sands.
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Sands is played, in a stunning economical performance, by Michael Fassbender, and the film steadily pushes him to the center of the narrative once he's unwillingly shorn of beard and hair. Eventually, seeing that the no-wash and blanket protests are gaining no ground towards the intended result of recognition as political prisoners, Sands pushes for the hunger strike, with himself the first one on the line. Hunger has more in common with body-horror than it does with the average biopic, concerned as it is with the excreta and breakdown of the human body, and McQueen's spare and unflinching camera eye, so effective early on, becomes punishing when Sands begins his slow descent.
This part of the film offers some concessions to convention (pain-wracked Sands flashing back to a significant moment in his childhood, for instance), yet the film's only true nod to more traditional forms of biography comes in its second act. It's a long scene between Sands and a priest where Sands lays out his reasons for wanting to start the hunger strike. After the image-heavy filmmaking of the first act, the sudden river of dialogue is jarring, but its function is clear: It offers us a dose of historical/political context that the rest of the film goes out of its way to avoid. The priest is a counterbalance to Sands's martyrish fervor, and it's McQueen's aim (and to his credit) that we head into the strike with ambiguous thoughts about which one of the two men is right. Once the third act gets truly underway, the focus gets narrower and narrower until all that's left is the stark, cruel sight of a man dying. Hunger strikes me as an attempt to make something universal out of one of the twentieth century's most fierce partisan battles; McQueen wants us to keep in mind that, once you strip the politics away from things like this, all you have is a pile of bodies. This is not a harangue or a polemic. This is simply a record of decay. Death's just death no matter how you dress it up.
Steve Carlson
Ashes of Time Redux
When one follows film, there are certain directors whose work seems almost mandatory. Many people will include the work of Wong Kar Wai in this category; however, the Hong Kong filmmaker has never quite done it for me. Regardless of his pictorial excellence, when I watch films like 2046, My Blueberry Nights and now this version of Ashes of Time, I find that his visuals overshadow any kind of empathy or emotion for his characters, making it hard to actually connect to his films. I've left his films remarking how pretty they looked, but I've never had anything nice to say about Kar-War's ability as a storyteller.
Ashes of Time Redux is a re-edit of Wong Kar Wai's 1994 film "Ashes of Time." I have never seen the previous film, so I cannot say what has been changed, but based on the running times and some odd gaps in the storyline (which are explained by on-screen texts), this version is about seven or eight minutes shorter than the other. Taking place in ancient China, we open with narration by Ouyang Feng, a fallen swordsman who is driven by greed to become a loner. He makes his stance against love very well known, explained by his own love story where he was rejected. Taking place over the course of the four seasons, we're treated to a multifaceted storyline which encompass the themes of lost love and memory, and some magic wine that will make one forget the past.
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So once again, I am left cold by a Wong Kar Wai film. Once again, I cannot see the genius that many people acclaim. Once again, I was struck by his way with visuals, and was able to look past that and see that his pretty images and colors, are just brittle shells for his dull stories.
Eric Mattina
I'm Gonna Explode
Gerardo Naranjo could be a fine filmmaker some day, if he ever settles on a consistent viewpoint. His 2006 film Drama/Mex married the we-are-all-connected banality of the Crash/Babel school to easy, attention-getting grotesquerie, only to shift gears in an attempt to undermine itself. The problem is that Naranjo enjoys wallowing in the muck too much to pull back and judge it from an objective distance, and the same love of juvenile crudity mars his new film.
Explode is primarily about Roman (Juan Pablo de Santiago) and Maru (Maria Deschamps), teenage lovers who fake a kidnapping/runaway to escape their parents, particularly Roman's semi-absentee blowhard politician father. They camp out in a tent on the roof of Roman's immense house, going down for provisions when the worried adults are out. Eventually they find a way to hit the road, aiming for Mexico City, but things don't work out as planned.
You've seen this particular iteration of l'amour fou several times over, and so has Naranjo, as his film contains blatant echoes of, among other films, Pierrot le Fou, Badlands, Breathless, Bonnie and Clyde and Cruel Story of Youth. The falseness of it all seems to be the point - this is a fine excuse for the clumsy non-performances of Santiago and Deschamps - yet Naranjo goes for the fake and the cheap even when he knows he should be sincere. One of the running threads in the film is Roman and Maru, both virgins, making halting attempts at sex; they do finally consummate their relationship up on the roof, and it's a tenderly awkward moment until Naranjo turns it into a dumb gag by having Roman's stepmother witness it and use it as fuel to initiate sex with Roman's father.
This kind of cutting-off at the knees of the material seems ingrained within Naranjo. Within the structure of I'm Gonna Explode, we can see a faint glimmer of a film that points up the foolishness of such heaving youthful impetuousness, but therein lies Naranjo's fatal weakness - he wants to make two films in one, but can't break himself from his admiration of his protagonists. It's all there - the implicit disapproving criticism, the naked role-playing pointing up the immaturity of the two youths (i.e. Maru practicing a conversation with Roman in a mirror), the slide into tragedy at the end. But it's never reconciled with the fact that Naranjo really seems to think these rebels, in a sense, are cool kids. It's the kind of film that, for all its feints towards being above this kind of teenaged romanticism, happily plays Bright Eyes during a crucial late-film scene; the push-pull tension between the emo heart and the stern logical brain render it a hollow stunt. Bonnie and Clyde was able to have its cake; I'm Gonna Explode tries to follow suit, but chokes on it.
Steve Carlson
Gomorrah
Before the screening of this film, the festival's selection team introduced director Matteo Garrone, stating that he was under protection from the Italian mafia during the whole of the production. It's a fact that was hard to wrap my mind around. This is a film that does not glorify the mafia like mob classics Goodfellas or The Godfather did. This is a raw and gritty look at the Italian mafia, sometimes so disturbing in its sudden violence and tension that it's hard to watch. It's a very interesting piece, filled with moments you would not see in a typical gangster film from Hollywood - I'd even be as bold to say that Martin Scorsese could takes notes from the realism here.
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Gomorrah is not perfect, but very absorbing. Garrone shakes his camera quite a bit, giving the film a documentary-like feeling, and by casting non-professional actors he really creates the sensation that we are actually in the rooms with these characters - there are no familiar faces winking at the camera, providing comfort. It's just dark and brutal all the way. Not all of the sections managed to keep my full attention, but when the film centered around the two boys the tension is high, mostly thanks to the fiery natural performances by Toni Servillo and Carmine Paternoster.
The film isn't a steady ride all the way through, but there are moments, characters, and images throughout that show the talent of Garrone. He has crafted a highly entertaining and dismal look at mob life, vastly different from the glamour and fun of the Scorsese gangster films. I'm not putting those down, but this is a very different approach, one equally worth taking.
Eric Mattina
RR
One hundred and eleven minutes of 16mm film filled up entirely with shots of trains chugging past fixed cameras. That's the sum total of James Benning's avant-garde feature RR. Doesn't sound like much of a fun time at the multiplex, does it? Yet, even if there isn't much more to the film than that description, it's pretty involving all the same.
Benning's approach is minimalism defined: A camera is set up at a certain angle near a train track. The shot starts before the train comes into view, the train passes, and then there's a cut to black after the train leaves. Repeat for forty-three shots worth of film. Yet it's the differences between the angles and the duration of the shots that make the film as fascinating as it is. Benning plays with audience expectations as expertly as any Hitchcock-inspired suspense crafter; once you get into the rhythm and modus operandi of RR, it's hard not to be thrilled by a train that moves on so long that it ends up crossing itself via a suspended bridge, a train that passes so close to the camera that it ends up being a minute-long blur of movement or a shot of a track over a river where, instead of a train, we see a work truck passing by. The shots in RR are gorgeous to a fault (the shot on the Bonneville Salt Flats is spectacular in its desolation), yet there's also an element of playfulness in some of the setups that, to this Benning neophyte, was unexpected.
It also helps that trains, at least to me, are an auditory delight. I'll admit this right out: I love the sound of trains. They make an incredible racket, yet there's a syncopated regularity to the tympanum-rattling chunk-chunk that almost comes off as soothing. They're like gigantic white noise machines, spewing out a rhythm at once energizing and relaxing, so RR, at least on that level, is an absolute joy.
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It's also notable that the first shot has a train passing a church where a choir is singing "\The Battle Hymn of the Republic; it's also significant that a later shot overlays President Eisenhower intoning his famous warning about the military/industrial complex; another uses an early version of Woody Guthrie's This Land Is Your Land. RR is, finally, a sociopolitical document about America's direction. Many of the photographed tracks are in areas that could be termed rural, if not economically depressed, and the very idea of the train itself hearkens back to a past that we as a country hardly know any longer. If nothing else, RR is invaluable as a filmed record of a dying way of life, with the trains as a stand-in for anything that's ever been eclipsed by the newer and shinier ways of life. This gains traction by reflecting on Benning's statement that this will in all likelihood be the last film he ever shoots on 16mm (all future ventures will be on high-def video).
The forty-third and final train is one that passes in long shot through a wind farm in Palm Springs, discarded rubber tires in the desert foreground. The train does not pass through the shot but instead comes to a halt surrounded by the large white propellers. The import is impossible to miss.
Steve Carlson
Afterschool
I was curious when I saw this film scheduled, if only because of the the fact that it was only one of two films from the United States in the regular lineup. My interest was piqued when I learned that it was the feature film debut of Antonio Campos, age twenty-five. While his age shows, there are strong shades of talent, even if they're partially obscured by numerous flaws. Afterschool plays like a Gus van Sant or Larry Clark film, using young amateurs to populate a stark, realistic boarding school where tragedy strikes, but it deals with anxiety, awkward sexual tensions and violence in a much less creepy way than those two other film makers. Sadly, it does stumble into the familar depths of film-student pretension at times, but there are several positive things about this film.
"Afterschool" introduces us to the boarding school very slowly, showing us around with ease and allowing us to adjust the same way we would to any new surrounding. We are then introduced to Robert, a rather lonely young kid who complains to his mother that nobody likes him while, in the background, we see two teens making out. Robert spends most of his time in the front of the computer screen, watching animal tricks and school fights on YouTube, as well as porn where the cameraman strangles his subjects for a moment. He begins a rather tedious physical relationship with his friend Amy when they are assigned to work on a film project together. And then Robert, while filming the school's hallways, sees a pair of twin sisters leave a closet covered in blood, one dead and the other quickly dying, from some kind of drug overdose.
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It is easy to draw comparisons to films like Elephant in its study of high school life, or Cache in the method of letting the camera linger for several minutes on one image. Campos does a good job with the camera and with the sound, creating several tense moments out of some quiet scenarios. But at times he borders on the pretentious, and makes several obvious film student moves, such as tilting the camera up during long scenes and only showing us the top half of the characters heads, or showing us scenes through a video camera that is laying on a desk. I'm assuming that Campos is making a statement about the YouTube generations, how we watch so many videos that are taken by a camera that is often not placed properly, but it seemed more like a gimmick than an actual statement. Some of the scenes seem to drag on forever, and there are moments where not much happens for long stretches of time.
It may sound like I didn't enjoy Afterschool, but there were elements of the film that I really did admire. It ends rather bleakly, but also with the promise of a film maker that I want to get better, and there were certain scenes and images that just showed the promise of talent - raw and strong talent.
Eric Mattina
The Windmill Movie
Richard P. Rogers was a experimental filmmaker who, on the side, specialized in ethnographic and historical documentaries. Yet the one subject he wrestled with all his life and never cracked was himself, as evinced by this stultifying documentary. He spent the majority of his life shooting film and video of himself, hoping to some day assemble it into a personal-essay document; however, he never felt that he'd found a reason for that document to exist; Windmill was posthumously assembled and directed by his friend and student Alexander Olch, and I don't think that Olch was able to find its reason for being either. Sometimes, leaving well enough alone is the proper response.
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What keeps Windmill from being an entire waste of time is paradoxically its own worst enemy, Rogers. When he allows himself to be so, Rogers can be a personable, funny and charming guy in the manner of most smart, self-aware neurotics; for instance, he gets some decent filmic mileage out of a self-deprecating incident that required the amputation of toes. His personality is eventually laid bare; once Rogers is diagnosed with cancer, the autoerotic self-loathing falls away for the most part and what remains is the man in full. It's in the late stages that Rogers gets the bulk of his best work, whether it be filming his irascible, enfeebled mother and father (coming to terms with his own potential death) or lensing the long-in-the-works nuptials to his longtime filmmaking partner/lover Susan Meiselas.
Still, the general aimlessness is unshakable. The film derives its title from an annual cocktail party held in the East Hamptons near such a monument, but it might as well have been inspired by Don Quixote's notorious tilting. And just as Quixote was never able to take down a windmill, neither has Olch been able to carve something out of the morass of his mentor's unfinished business.
Steve Carlson
Four Nights With Anna
Try as I might, I can't think of a summation more succinct for Jerzy Skolimowski's Four Nights with Anna than that of Mike D'Angelo, who groused, "Maybe I would have been more impressed if I had never seen Monsieur Hire or Decalogue Six."
Skolimowski has been absent from the world cinema scene for nearly twenty years, but at the time, he was one of the most thrilling and idiosyncratic talents around, with films like Deep End, Moonlighting and the utterly berserk The Shout to his name, so there's something depressing about seeing him attempt a comeback with material routine to the point of threadbareness. Whatever transformative touch Skolimowski had back in the day that elevated a familiar plot like that of Deep End has yet to return.
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The premise is somewhat unsavory, yet we never feel like Leon is a threat to Anna because, as depicted, Leon is one step away from autism. He's damaged goods and no good around people, but he's also so infuriatingly passive that it's hard to feel sympathy for him. Four Nights with Anna is shot in a cold, dank world, comprised mainly of shadows and icy steel shades of blue and gray; the color scheme reflects the frigid torpor that Leon is caught in, and I spent much of the film wishing to no avail that something would come along and jar him right the hell out of it. There's a scene that flashes back to Leon's sentencing, and while he's being sentenced, he's staring at a broken-winged fly that cannot lift itself away. I wish I were joking, but that's the level Skolimowski is working on.
There's obviously more going on between Leon and Anna than we're told; Skolimowski mixes and shuffles the chronology of the film, slowly revealing what put Leon in jail, why he's stuck where he is and why he's got a thing for Anna, yet the time-tripping structure combined with the near-mute protagonist results in a curiously dead film. To Skolimowski's credit, his directorial eye is as sharp as ever; he has a handful of images, notably a surreal shot of a cow floating down a river, that stick in the mind, and there's a bravura sequence midfilm with Leon acting as benevolent, loving lord of the manor after Anna has drunkenly passed out from an overindulgence of vodka during a raucous birthday celebration. But as Four Nights with Anna moves from thuggish to flummoxing to graceless and overdetermined, the question remains why this film exists at all. It's nice to have Skolimowski back, but I hope he stays around long enough to produce something that was worth the wait.
Steve Carlson
Wendy and Lucy
This film features perhaps the finest female performance I've seen all year, a performance of raw naturalism and of heartbreaking realism. It's a pleasant surprise after Kelly Reichardt's last film, Old Joy, which I found underwritten and trite. There isn't much difference between the two in terms of approach; both films tackle bare-bones material and very simple plotlines. Old Joy was about two friends who take a trip to the woods after several months of not seeing each other; Wendy and Lucy is about a young woman looking for her dog. But there was something missing from Old Joy that is present here, and that is Michelle Williams.
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There isn't much of a story here, but Michelle Williams moves the story along, giving us small hints of her past through subtle looks and glances. There are scripted hints, such as a phone call to a sister who thinks she's calling for money, but for the most part the character is created by the performance. When Lucy is missing, Wendy's calls get more and more desperate, and we hate to imagine what Wendy's life would be like without her.
It's beautiful to watch her walk down the streets, and Reichardt works well with landscapes, giving serene forest settings a creepy vibe as Wendy searches for her. This little town that Wendy is stuck in is gray and depressing, almost like a ghost town; it has an almost Biblical feel, with Wendy's entire life being slowed to a standstill in this drab location.
Reichardt's film really had an odd effect on me, and I found much beauty on display. Not only is it 80 minutes long, but it contains very little dialogue and was probably made with a very small budget. As for the ending, yes, it is somewhat depressing, but not in the way that you would think. The final revelation is not only fitting, but it is also fully satisfying. When we leave Wendy's life, along with the rather haunting melody that she hums throughout the film, we finish on a note of sadness, but also a note of hope and promise. Perhaps Wendy will return to this place one day, and we can only hope. Because the irony is, this drab little town is populated by some of the best people that Wendy ever met.
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- Halo-17 Staff (0 comments)