I dipped into the end of this year’s Sydney Film Festival which appeared to be thriving after the Covid Break. They usually jam all the attractive material into the first weekend to encourage repeat business so it’s unlikely that the few films I saw represent the two hundred on show. Without the guide of familiar name film-makers I found myself picking viewing on the basis of session times
What I saw did meet the criteria I always push for these events - unfamiliar material that is not likely to surface any other way. Did it have to be so grim though?
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| Before, Now and Then |
The Indonesian Nana/Before, Now and Then, directed & written by Kamila Andini, is an extraordinarily tranquil film for one that deals in revolution, decapitation and multiple adulteries. Incidents are laid out in apparently random order and only come together in the final scene when Arawinda Kirana, the girl we’ve been seeing in the background is identified. I’m still wondering about the Ox wandering about the house - the disruptive presence of a Communist butcher - Oh come on!
There’s a hazy narrative with elegant Happy Salma and her sister fleeing through the wood to escape not the Dutch or the Japanese but the bandit who wants her (and a few more apparently) as a wife. The distant apparition of her husband (she’s beginning to forget his smell) among the trees comes with an inset of her father, who warned her to move on, being joined on his way to the mosque by a group one of whom produces a machete.
Further along, we find her dying the hair of her older Sudanese husband Arswendy Bening Swara, whose business she manages while caring for a second family. His decorative pin gift is used to secure her long hair tied in a bun which takes on symbolic importance that her young daughter is rejecting. A cycle messenger brings assignation notes along with gifts of meat wrapped in leaves from the husband’s new tootsie Laura Basuki, who the daughter takes to, and who becomes a member of the extended family. As an outing, the women leap into the flowing river together. This is very much a film playing to the senses rather than the mind.
With all the expected business, objects take on significance strange to the outside viewer - the brass insect ash tray or water jug. Salma turns the leaf packages into a delicious native meal. Ornamental carp drift under the title. The gift of the long sash fixed by the pin changes our heroine’s carriage. The husband does his traditional Sudanese choreography at a gathering for the neighbors, one of the many musical interludes that intrude into the images and the track of the film. The radio brings news of the 1966 Soeharto – Sukarno transition, the only real clue to the film’s time span.
Deploring the terrible fate of their gender, (“Why do we have to live like this?”) the women slip off and smoke ready mades. We’re just getting used to all this when there’s a switch into wanna-be Wong Kar-Wai romance melodrama, which is a bit much as the husband actually encourages Happy to move on, letting the kids decide who they want to be with (disturbing this) at a meeting of judgmental family friends.
As well as the varied musical scoring, there is the film’s visual texture – lemony diffusion where lighting a cigarette causes a flare. Before, Now and Then is too contemplative for an audience conditioned by Hollywood but provides a glimpse not only of an unfamiliar film industry but an unfamiliar mindset. It’s not really something I would seek out but it is a useful reference point and clearly the work of gifted individuals.
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| Mediterranean Fever |
Mediterranean Fever (title in English) offers more than it finally delivers. Like director Maha Haj’s Personal Affairs,it deals with Palestinians living in Israel, something we know perilously little about, and it has a striking opening with a woman’s body lying on the floor of her Haifa apartment, which proves to be a digression.
We get into the plot of family man, former bank worker Amer Hlehel for whom things are not going well. His attempt to support himself as an author isn’t working out (his dad prompts that he still hasn’t started writing). Hlehl’s two years of therapy haven’t proved productive and his school age son keeps on succumbing to what the doctor describes as Mediterranean Fever - an unexplained ailment that strikes people of his ethnicity.
As if things weren’t bad enough, aggressive neighbor Ashraf Farah moves in downstairs with his mean dogs barking, loud music and borrowing home appliances late at night. The newcomer forces his company on our hero and we worry about the menace he represents but the men prove to have unexpected things in common - both are stay at home husbands and the film cuts between them on the phone doing household chores (“Can you put beige with whites in the wash?”) At the housewarming, he insists Hlehl attend, a couple of debt collector heavies show up and Hlehl seeks out their company - claiming he is doing research on the underground for his novel.
Hlehl’s wife demands to know why he is socialising with someone he doesn’t like and the intrigue deepens when Farah proves to be a dead shot when they go hunting with his friends. Pressure mounts on both men when the cause of Hlehl’s son’s malady proves to relate to his politics (“Palestinian is not a religion” the medical records clerk warns him) and the black helmet bikers put rounds through the window of Farah’s family home. There’s the scene of Hlehl getting a panic attack in the claustrophobic car wash.
It proves that he has a solution to all their problems which inverts the balance between the two men - and unfortunately leads to a feeble conclusion.
Efficiently made, this one will have to go in the informative basket.
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| Rimini |
And if you’re into revolting there’s Rimini from Ulrich Seidl, an established German film-maker whose output hasn’t previously reached me. This one sets its field of reference early on. In corset and shoulder-length hair, Michael Thomas’ Ritchie Bravo is the entertainment for busloads of elderly, mainly female tourists in coastal summer resort town Rimini. It’s winter and the 007 Lounge manager is cutting his share of the take.
Thomas’ main line of business is as gigolo for the elderly customers, one of whom has brought her bed ridden mother to occupy the adjoining room while they cavort. The film-makers take a very dim view of senior citizen sex.
The issue is complicated by Thomas’ now senile WW2 fascist dad Hans-Michael Rehberg (Schindler’s List), frustrated by the fact that the photo mural doors in his retirement home are all locked, and the arrival of twenty something Tessa Göttlicher, who Thomas moves on before he discovers that she is his abandoned daughter pursuing eighteen years of child support and bringing her silent, bearded Muslim hoodie companion.
The appeal of this one is its grotesquerie, particularly if you like watching drunken sixty year olds make out. Thomas rents out his Richie Bravo Villa, a fan monument decorated with his memorabilia. He performs sentimental ballads from the sixties and poses for selfies with the customers. Thomas serenades Göttlicher with the theme from a Winnetou movie. There’s the striking shot of his sparse audience all recording his performance on their ‘phones. His final coup is achieved by blackmail, using his own record of one of his couplings and it rebounds on him without it undermining his heroic self-esteem.
The film is revolting and tedious but Thomas gives an imposing performance and that and the depiction of bleak, windswept, winter time beach front Rimini, with homeless people sleeping on the footpath outside the tacky cabarets, deserve a better movie.
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| The Day After |
Anyadin... /The Day After follows one of the hundred year old Bangladeshi river Rocket paddle boats traveling the two days from Dhaka to Khulna. The captain is continually swearing at other craft sailing at night without search lights and at the dredger which threatens to force them onto a mud bank. We see customers divided between fifty-dollar cabins and five-dollar deck passengers, with an argument over the use of toilets. The poor are told they are Rohingyas.
What appears to be the outward trip, picks out the girl singer, the ticket seller being besieged with demands for refunds and a Video blogger whose camera drone, caught by the wind immediately plunges off the deck into deep water never to be seen again. Our interest in what appears exotic and intriguing is echoed by the two European girl tourists on board.
This holds attention well enough but when these become-familiar faces are replaced by Stanford University students grilling a politician passenger the film outstays its welcome.
It looks like observational documentary but director Kamar Ahmad Simon showed up to blow the whistle, when he described it as hybrid fiction where his own cast mixed with genuine travelers over twenty-two trips during eight years - one just to take sound, the ubiquitous motor noise having penetrated most of his shooting.
The occasional attractive scenics and the picture of busy shipboard activity do convince and I did like the re-appearance of the Vlogger for the final moments.
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| Super Furball 2 |
Supermarsu 2/Super Furball 2 directed by Joona Tena is the second in the series of kids films from Finland mixing digital animation and live action. Emilia, the so Scandinavian Blonde pre-teen heroine of the first film, now Senni Peltoniemi, still converts into super hero guinea pig Super Furball by taking a swig from the pet’s water bottle. This time she’s called upon to stop a speeding underground train (driven by author Paula Noronen in a guest shot) before it crushes a talking snail (voiced by Jani Karvinen) with a shell that’s a speaker system.
The Viking Chief Guinea pig, who instructs her on the roof of the space needle, questions her judgment but still sends her ahead in time via Furball taxi, to when her school bully Greasy Antero has become the magnate world leader and has eliminated the bee population, leaving people to fertilise plants by hand and margarine as the most popular ice cream flavor.
This traces back to an incident at the bully’s exclusive birthday party where gifts were ranked by cost and bee Joonas Saartamo caused chaos, leading to Emilia’s disrupting the factory hive scheme and Greasy shipped off to the super strict military school in the Arctic from which he emerged as a vindictive dictator.
Intervention by Super Furball, including a spectacular helicopter crash into the yellow canola field brings things out with the expected kids’ morality and ecological comment matching the director’s previous Syvälle salattu.
Unfortunately, the live-action material is inferior to the toon sections and characters like Emilia’s decorator-mother roller painting over pictures on the wall and furniture, the teacher who gives lessons got up as a tree and cowboy headmaster going round shouting “Yipee”, just register as grotesque.
This one’s heart is in the right place but whether a sub-titled version will play with it’s intended child and adult audiences is speculative.
The festival's word of mouth on other material was good and I guess I’ll keep on coming back for more, despite the dispiritingly familiar retrospectives and the grim notion of entertainment that the program tends towards. The films in the national events are less of a chore.
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