Well the Sydney Film Festival made a Covid delayed return without celebrity visitors (Paul Schrader sent a video that they played too loudly) or anyone too much worried about social distancing. Otherwise, it was pretty much the formula as before, the buzz of being force-fed a year of serious film and the old irritations - cashless box office, an image too small for most of the seats in the State.I'd have liked to see Jacues Audiard's Les olympiades and Takayo Hirao's Pompo the Cinephile but the schedule beat me. I did quite well by cherry-picking my way through it, though that's not the best way to go. The highlights have constantly proved to be unexpected. Think Larisa Shepiko’s 1963 Znoy, Richard Gordon & Carma Hinton‘s 1995 The Gate of Heavenly Peace, Ziad Doueiri’s 2017 L'insulte / The Insult.
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| Zhang Yimou |
Yi miao zhong/One Second proved something of a return to form for Zhang Yimou.
Coming over the bleak dunes, Zhang Yi the ragged lead, gets into the dusty strip mall town in time to see a scruffy figure steal a reel of film from a courier’s motor bike left outside the bar. It takes a while to find out why this is so important while they fill in the back stories.
The thief is Liu Haocun, one of those “My goodness - you’re a girl” characters familiar from the Kung Fu movies and earlier and wider. She’s a companion to Minzhi Wei in Zhang Yimou’s best film, the 1999 Yi ge dou bu neng shao/Not One Less, both children called on to carry adult responsibilities with their Cultural Revolution backgrounds a key element of the plot.
Along the way, the purloined reel gets to change hands with leads flanneling a truck driver with conflicting stories and the can with Newsreel Number 22 falls off a truck and gets dragged along a dirt road.
The damaged reel has high significance for each of the principals - income for the impoverished girl (lampshades made of movie films are trendy) his Mr. Movie status and that of his tiny Unit 2 Town movie house for operator Fan Dianying and the powerful significance of one second (actually several) for Zhang Yi who proves to be on the run from a prison camp.
The film’s most memorable passages involve his district cinema where Fan involves his entire tiny community in the work of restoring the damaged film reel, preparing bowls of distilled water and drying racks to clean it while stressing to the stranger the importance of his work.
They take immense trouble with the technical stuff, finding a fifties hand joiner, applying film cement with a steel blade and wooden applicator stick and contriving a looping set up, which Fan Dianying proudly tells Zhang Yi his fellow operators are unable to do. It’s a bit concerning that after all this care the damaged reel shows negative damage rather than print wear.
The pair have to wait till the house empties after the showing of Zhaodi Wu’s Ying xiong er nü/Heroic Sons and Daughters (1964) which the clips make look livelier than the few movies we get to see from this era. Dianying explains that the audience will stay watching anything he puts on the screen with a hint of pride.
The security division are on the trail of Zhang Yi and it is the film’s most poignant moment that neither they or Haocun Liu are able to understand when Dianying slips the fugitive frames of the image.
There is another tacked-on happy ending when the now scrubbed up and freshly clothed protagonist is given his liberty and returns to the village. It has been suggested that this tampering is the cause of the delay in the film’s release. Either by oversight or intention, we may be seeing more than overseas viewers who claim the fugitive's crime is unexplained, while we saw the projection box dialogue about punching out a red guard.
Not the least appealing aspect of the piece is its place in the line of films lingering on the importance of the movie shows of the maker’s youth - obviously Cinema
Paradiso (1988) along with The Last Picture Show (1971), Ettore Scola’s Splendor
(1989) Australia’s 1997 The Picture Show Man or the 2007 Hong Kong Lo kong ching
chuen/Mr. Cinema.
Persian Language drama Ghahreman / A Hero is recognisably the work of Asghar Farhadi again fronting the Iranian legal scheme.
Here decorator Amir Jadidi’s business is ruined by the arrival of printed sign technology. His failure to return borrowings from a family friend, made to get him free of a loan shark, has landed him in jail. On a two day release, he mounts an unraveling scam.
Audience sympathy with Jadidi is progressively eroded, shifting to his creditor who drew on his daughter’s dowry to help. When our Hero returns gold coins his lady friend found, he is is at first lionised by the prison authorities, the press and a charity which collects to meet his debts and awards him a framed certificate which he carries in a visual irony through a later part of the film. Everything Jadidi does digs him in deeper.
In a curious and revealing exposition, the people who actually have financial skin in the game drop out - the real owner of the coins or the creditor who storms out of the meeting honoring Jadidi, though his daughter remains indignant. Jadidi articulates the film’s message that it is no longer a matter of the money but of suspect honor. The jail governor fears another scandal after a suicide incident, the charity worries that its credibility and the financial support that brings will be imperiled. Jadidi turns on friends who rehearse his speech impeded son for a pleading video. After his deceptions, this rings false. If we are meant to see this as a comment on values of the Iranian state it is too oblique.
There’s an irrelevant opening, showing restoring the Tomb of Xerxes in Persepolis and referencing Bamaghan, interesting enough in a touristy way but padding an already long film. Performance and staging are straightforward providing the usual attraction of Iranian film - that it shows a society like but also very different from our own. PFarhadi only finally shifts from unemphatic handling to the striking dyptych of Jadidi in the dim image, signing back into the jail he couldn't face, while a prisoner unconnected to the story is brightly lit screen right, released through a background door into the sunny exterior.
After the conspicuous run of hits including The Young Pope and the drear Il grande bellezza Paolo Sorrentino is a star of subtitles Cinema, so his new È stata la mano di Dio/The Hand of God was always going to be a movie event. It’s a clearly autobiographical account of growing up in Naples in the 1980s with the writer-director assessing the input of his extended family, movies and the world-altering transfer of Diego Maradona to the city’s soccer team.
The piece opens with the limo offering aunt, voluptuous Luisa Ranieri, a lift where she gets goosed in the presence of “The Little Monk” who will make another appearance at the film’s end. She says it was to lift the curse of impotence but her wife beater husband says she was off whoring again when the family breaks up the rough stuff. This sets the tone where the film juggles fantasy and documentary with blurred division between them.
Young Filippo Scotti’s parents dominate, mother Teresa Saponangelo, with a nice line in juggling oranges for the family’s delight, and dad Toni Servillo without whom the film loses traction. They front a grotesque gallery of relatives where the family picnic is dominated by exhibitionist Ranieri emptying the batteries out of an aunt’s decrepit suitor’s electrolarynx voice box into the bay.
Around them pivot neighbor Baronessa Betty Pedrazzi, a head butting cigarette smuggler and Renato Tenerezza Carpentieri, in there somewhere too. Everything else is eclipsed by the Maradona deal. One of the most striking moments is the shot of the apartment balconies full of people cheering in unison the broadcast results of his game.
The streets contribute bizarre glimpses - the uncle playing hopscotch on the pavement,
the rich sheik with his abusive whore, the family trio riding the motor bike.
Gradually movies move into the center of this tumult. The influence of Fellini is cited along with Zeferelli, not to mention the Once Upon a Time in America cassette that sits on the player, but they intrude physically in the person of Neapolitan director Antonio Capuano, played by Ciro Capano, who Scotti finds in a Galleria shooting the scene which the young man will watch in a theatre before he sees Capuano leap up in the stalls and humiliate the starlet Salomé on stage, before a night where Scotti walks the city in the company of the older man whose views jar with his vision of film as art. Director Capuano ends by offering Scotti work in his local Neapolitan productions but for no clear reason the last scene finds the kid pulling into Rome Trastavere. |
| Christian Petzold |
Christian Petzold is one of the sharpest knives in the draw right now so his new Undine is the subject of some anticipation, coming in the wake of his Nina Hoss films and Transit which was headed up with some skill by Paula Beer and Franz Rogowski the leads of the new film.
Undine rapidly lays out the rules. Fraulein Beer who clearly has not spent hours in wardrobe and make up is facing Jacob Matschenz across their regular table in the yard coffee shop saying “If you leave me I would have to kill you.” That’s the water sprite who mates with a mortal with fatal consequences - right?
The way we begin is the way we must go and the film keeps on throwing the spectator off balance by alternating the legend and realistic narrative when we are getting used to the other.
The elements are intriguing - Beer’s career lecturing on the history of Berlin using large scale table models, her abruptly appearing new lover Franz Rogowski as a marine engineer working from an air hose in his diving gear and confronting a giant, menacing catfish near where he discovers her name painted on an under water tunnel mouth. This is plenty eerie.
It is juxtaposed by striking realistic scenes - the fish tank that shatters round the pair,
Rogowski running the open air platform with the train bringing her to him. The police
told to hold her when it’s believed that he is brain dead from a diving accent, a logic and time-confronting recovery, the startling meeting in Matschenz’s night time, blue lit pool.
The illogicality is the film’s dominant element. It both gets attention and frustrates. There were too many phantom lovers and two year later titles in this festival but the excellence of performance and filming makes us forgive Undine’s irritations. The underwater hand is genuinely scarey
His sharp, saturated imagery and talented players (Maryam Zaree is another Petzold regular) assure us that he knows what he’s doing and if we can’t accept it, that’s too bad.
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| Paul Schrader |
Paul Schrader is a funny animal. He seems to live in the world of Film Festivals (he wrote a thesis on Bresson, Dreyer and Ozu) but he uses the frame of reference and personnel of popular Hollywood given a push towards the deep end - the sex workers of American Gigolo and Hard Core, the low lifes of Taxi Driver or for that matter Mishima. I can’t think of a Paul Schrader movie character I’d like to introduce to mother and his work is becoming increasingly difficult to find. The new Card Counter has proved indigestible for its Streaming producer and is headed to theatres in an inversion of the old scenario. I homed in on it with some enthusiasm.
It’s encouragingly, recognisably Schrader - first-person narration from the social reject lead’s journal which provides narration, like the ones from the country priest, Travis Bickel and Willem Dafoe in Light Sleeper along with his American underbelly setting and distinctive throbbing music like Blue Collar.
Opening image of the cards on the green playing surface with loner Oscar Isaac’s voice-over laying out the values of cards in a blackjack deal, a skill acquired during his time in military prison, (“Red and black roulette is the only smart bet for a beginner”) and his modest goals which make his ability to beat the game inconspicuous. (“poker’s all about waiting”)
We see him move into his new hotel room and cover the furniture with his sheets.
This is all compulsive viewing. Concentration isn’t broken till young Tye Sheridan (Ready Player One) gives Isaac his room number after Veteran Military Expert William Dafoe’s Casino Security lecture, introducing the ABU Ghraib back story. The two elements never satisfactorily blend.
Sheridan is on a personal vendetta and knows that Isaac is one of the Abu Ghraib guards (“Nothing - nothing can justify what we did.”) who did time for the atrocities that none of their superiors were indicted for. We get a couple of distorting wide angle travelings through the violence and humiliation of the occupation prison cf. the cellar corridor depravities of Last Night in Soho. Turns out that both Isaac and Sheridan want Dafoe (who we will only see one more time) to atone. “... the weight created by his last actions. “It is a weight that can never be removed.” The pair set out on a road trip through the country’s gambling resorts.
Previously comic performer, appealing Tiffany Haddish comes on for Isaac who recognises her as a recruiter for her stable of players financed by an off-screen banker on a percentage of the winnings but Isaac sees future indebtedness and declines. The trio become the focus for our sympathies contrasted to Alexander Babara’s loudmouth player, “Mr. America” who gets about in a stars and Stripes outfit supported by “U.S.A.” chanting supporters, with Isaac contemptuous of him never having served a day in the military. Things funnel down to the World Poker Tournament in Las Vegas where the players face off after Isaac has made a serious attempt to resolve Sheridan's situation.
Throw in Google Earth, TV News and a characteristic violent ending, with its coda of hands either side of the glass partition providing mood rather than resolution.
Strong performances, subdued colour, effective setting and atmospheric music all contribute but this one stands or falls on its script and the presentation of its subject.
Whatever its faults, The Card Counter is far more involving than most of both the
trival and earnest films competing in its market. Schrader’s fans among whom I count
myself will be rewarded.
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| Ildikó Enyedi |
It’s hard to imagine Ildikó Enyedi’s The Story of My Wife/A feleségem története existing outside a film festival. We get a near three-hour piece relying on dialogue written by someone for whom English is a foreign language - “What peace do you find in living with me?” “You must accommodate life. Otherwise it will smash you.” “Fire! We’re burning.”
The opening, with the narration over the underwater shots of a gliding whale, sets the eerie tone which the film would like to sustain and we are into the story of stoic Sea Captain, Dutch TV actor Gijs Naber in charge of a freighter where the multi-married cook tells him that the answer to his stomach problems is one or more women. The Captain takes this seriously and tells shady associate Sergio Rubini that he’s going to marry the next woman who comes through the door of the nicely decorated cafe. After a near miss, this turns out to be the always delectable Léa Seydoux. She inexplicably agrees.
For a while, it looks as if we are in for diluted Joseph Conrad with the plot of Captain Naber joining classy passenger ship Marietta and refusing to send out distress signals, incuring salvage costs, when a fire breaks out, despite the concern of his first officer - relying on steaming into a rain storm to put out the embers.
However when Naber goes onshore, non-sequiturs accumulate. What awful truth did the police want to conceal from him? We have to take for granted a mining scam which is supposed to make Haber rich, though it will impoverish the current owners. I’ll admit it is encouraging to see Rubini speaking expert English there.
Narrative developments endlessly contradict one another What do we make of the Luna Wedler romance when our hero is enamored with Mlle Sedoux? When he distrusts Louis Garrel so profoundly why does Naber go into the rescue business on his suggestion? To sustain interest, we have to rely on the work of the celebrity cast and Miss Enyedi’s Hungarian associates, cameraman Marcell Rév’s subdued lighting and designer Imola Láng’s simulation of early Twentieth Century Hamburg complete
with nicely decorated real streets.
After punching out Garrel, Naber looks like he’s got things sorted but we get an inexplicable betrayal and ghost romance ending. The film shifts from Joseph Conrad to George DuMaurier - leaving me sorry I’d persisted through its 169 Minutes to get there.
Enyedi must be remarkably persuasive. She previously got a sixty grand award out of the festival, managed to marshall resources on this scale and have the result sent out for our benefit.
