The NZIFF Diaries: Part IV

For an auteur that has on several occasions pronounced cinema dead, few filmmakers have worked as tirelessly in resuscitating, dissecting and experimenting with the medium as mad-scientist Jean-Luc Godard.

That might explain all of the references to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in his latest Goodbye to Language, the disjointed 3D mind-melt that kicked off my second weekend at the New Zealand International Film Festival. Employing some of the most mesmerising and migraine-inducing use of three dimensions I’ve ever experienced, this is cinema chopped and screwed – Godard wrestling spectacle to the floor; stabbing it, disfiguring it, tearing it to shreds.

For some, this will be near revolutionary in the way it assaults and reconstructs cinematic language. For the rest, it will probably feel like the most obnoxious, pretentious brand of art-film gobbledygook. Almost comically obtuse at points, Goodbye to Language will confound many (most?); for me, it was the first experience I’ve had with Godard’s later output that I actually felt compelled to comprehend.

I won’t pretend to have a full grasp on this film’s theoretical position (despite being vaguely familiar with some of the film theory referenced), but there’s enough thrilling provocation and proposition here to make hitting the books seem like a worthy endeavor.

But for a slightly easier thesis to digest, audiences only had to wait for David Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars to start. A scathing, scabrous satire of Hollywood depravity, one needn’t look much further than the pervasive mentions of incest and blazing infernos for their subtext. Subtle this isn’t, but given how relentlessly this subject has been strung up over the years, there’s actually no need for it to be.

For better or worse, it almost works that Bruce Wagner’s screenplay just goes for broke with the vulgarity, with several children and all political correctness cracked upon the altar of Hollywood disaffection. As we careen from profane sexual acts to Columbine paraphernalia to Julianne Moore taking a dump, it quickly becomes apparent that there’s no depth Wagner won’t plumb for our guilty, astonished laughter.

Back when Adam and I were speculating about the Cannes line-up, comparisons were made to both Bret Easton Ellis and David Lynch, and those sensibilities still make for solid reference points: numbed moral bankruptcy, possessed by the haunted psyche of Hollywood. It’s just a bit of a shame that Cronenberg doesn’t seem all that concerned with translating the hideous surfaces of his texts into indelible imagery quite like he used to.

Some creepy hallucinations aside, most of this sees the master pushing his chair back and leaving Wagner’s repugnant wordplay to crackle. All well and good for some detached amusement, but a big part of me misses the visionary that used to offer us shit like this. And this. And this.

That sense of detached amusement was only to continue with Lenny Abrahamson’s Frank. A comedy of kooks in the Sundance vein, Frank follows the creative journey of “the Soronprfbs”, an eccentric art-rock band fronted by Michael Fassbender wearing a giant papier-maché head. Only halfway resisting the urge to coast on the wackiness of that premise all the way to the finish line, Abrahamson sets us up with Jon (Domnhall Gleeson), pedestrian songwriter and avid tweeter, who joins the band with misguided aspirations of musical stardom. In a cultural landscape saturated with fickle platforms to fame, it was certainly satisfying to see a film condemn creative mediocrity rather than celebrate it.

In exploring the correlations between mental illness and creative genius, Abrahamson eventually decries the ‘tortured artist’ archetype as fallacy, observing the tragedy of unchecked psychological affliction and introducing evidence of Frank’s musical brilliance preceding his condition. But that is undermined by a denouement that confirms the status of its healthiest character as its most creatively useless. Thankfully, Frank is at least divertingly humourous throughout all of this thematic and tonal confusion, even when leaning lazily on idiosyncratic character quirk, goofy slapstick or gags lifted directly from The Big Lebowski.

An even worse portrait of musical genius came in the form of John Ridley’s lackluster tribute to rock-god Hendrix Jimi: All is by My Side. There’s no doubt that biopics are tricky business, and on paper, it seems Ridley (fresh from an Oscar triumph with his harrowing adaptation of 12 Years A Slave) selected the wisest route. But despite being forthcoming about his subject’s misgivings, carefully selective in regard to scope, and eager to inhabit all the pockets glossed over by his Wikipedia page, All is by My Side amounts to something equally as dull as a traditional treatment anyway.

It’s disappointing, not just for its lack of iconic tunes (the Hendrix estate refused to release the rights to any of his music) but for its craft. Ridley leans on obvious dialogue, empty inquiries into the rock-star psyche and contrived dramatic scenarios designed to make Hendrix appear more complex, but that instead expose how utterly shallow this material is. (One violent episode involving a telephone receiver was apparently entirely fabricated.)

On top of that, Ridley’s jagged formal structure – fractured editing and disjointed sound design – is totally distracting, and I could never tell whether it was employed to emulate the freewheeling, broken rhythms of Hendrix’s music or just to chisel some rugged edges onto what is essentially a boilerplate rock-pic, chewed up and spat back on the plate. Not even a nuanced, thoughtful turn from Andre Benjamin could alleviate the familiarity.

But ironically, familiarity proved a virtue for Richard Linklater’s empathic, absorbing epic Boyhood. Prosaic not by its relationship to cinema but to the common threads of all cultural rites of passage, Linklater’s pulse for the rhythms of human connection remains as accurate as ever. Boyhood follows protagonist Mason growing up over the course of 12 richly-realised years. Much of the interaction here could feel a little mundane without the overarching conceit, but the effect is always accumulative. For example, any one of Mason’s conversations with his father (Ethan Hawke) could feel inconsequential taken individually, but framed within an evolving narrative, it’s probably the best representation I’ve ever seen of the way a parent will transition from mythic figure to relatable human-being as one matures.  

But Linklater is so often acute with authentic, off-hand moments that it’s particularly jarring on the rare occasion that he isn’t. Boyhood is littered with clumsily-conceived assholes – the horny seniors, the school bullies and most notably the drunken abusive stepdad – who are either one-dimensional or, in the case of the latter, employed purely to inject more heightened drama into the narrative. We don’t need them – the awkwardness of adolescence has enough pain in it as is, and while hostile domestic environments will surely resonate with certain viewers, most of the pathos here is simply in shared experience.

But some thin characterisation can be excused in a film about the formative experiences of a single person, and to that end, Boyhood is as generous as the hype might suggest. With credit to Linklater’s sense of feeling and the prescient casting of Ellar Coltrane, it’s an experiment whose incredible conceit is mostly matched by thoughtful execution. 

Adolescent pangs seemed to be the order of the day, with Alice Rohrwacher’s Cannes Grand Prix winner The Wonders up next. Pitting the burgeoning of one age against the gradual decline of another, Rohrwacher pairs us with Gelsomina (Maria Alexandra Lungu), a 14-year-old apprentice to her father’s beekeeping venture, coming to terms with her role within the family hierarchy while simultaneously deciphering how their way of life fits into the world beyond them. The competition at the film’s centre – an agricultural talent show, honoring the best representation of “contemporary values” – is no gimmick. It’s a mournful observation of a tragic cultural shift, in which spectacle and superficiality have laid claim to the very fabric of modern life.

Stained in 16mm grain, The Wonders has a glorious vintage aesthetic that marries beautifully with its thematic concerns. Occasionally, Rohrwacher’s realization of this biographical landscape comes at the expense of focus, with the presence of many of its supporting players offering plenty texture but much less clarity. But eventually, this sense of foggy obscurity lends The Wonders some genuinely haunting closing notes. Fading out on an elliptical coda, Rohrwacher ends on a billowing sheet in a doorway, clinging to the frame like a pensive, stubborn ghost. By this point, I too felt burdened to leave this graceful purity of living behind.

Just as my previous diary entry opened on something difficult and foreign and closed on something totally spooky, we conclude with yet another brilliant horror movie in a year of many: Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook. In Adam’s recent interview with the Australian filmmaker, Kent describes her feature as “slow, sustained torture”, akin to a pair of hands gently resting on your neck, gradually tightening to strangulation. I really couldn’t put it any better. It took me a good hour before I was brought close to anything even resembling terror, but by the time I crossed the threshold, the unexpected noise from a rustling packet of chips was literally enough to jolt me into hysteria.

A lovingly crafted Polanskian thriller thoroughly unconcerned with modern rhythms, The Babadook builds tension slowly – forgoing the punctuation of jump scares for coiling psychological claustrophobia – but slowly starts to mount dread to near-unbearable levels. It’s never a particularly novel exercise (in a narrative sense, at least), but the craft on display is truly formidable and this is absolutely worth experiencing in a cinema – even for its superlative sound design alone. To feel my seat literally trembling during the film’s cathartic climax is something I won’t soon forget.

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