The NZIFF Diaries: Part VI

Last Tuesday, I think I saw my favorite film of the year. I was unprepared for just how much the Dardenne brothers’ latest social-realist masterwork Two Days, One Night would affect me. But within the first ten minutes, I began to weep (just a little bit), continuing to do so sporadically all the way to its bittersweet, perfectly measured conclusion. Then I wept some more.

Guided by a graceful, empathic turn from Marion Cotillard, Two Days, One Night centers on Sandra, an emotionally frail woman recovering from a bout of depression, who is given one weekend to convince her co-workers to reject a generous bonus in order for her to retain her job. This extraordinarily simple premise is somehow sustained by empathy alone: we don’t need to see suffocating squalor to understand what’s at stake. Cotillard takes us there in a glance.  

As Sandra trudges from home to home, swallowing pride as she pleads with others from similar positions of economic strain, the Dardennes are examining how human nature intersects with our capitalist structure, not unlike a social experiment imagined with real subjects. The result is a film of enormous compassion, toughness and truth – harboring all of the tension of a ticking-clock thriller but with the attentive emotional precision of the Dardenne’s (and Cotillard’s) best. That Julianne Moore got more Cannes Jury love for taking a dump will remain one of the year’s great outrages.

Apart from Sam Shepard gently sobbing for a bit, there weren’t many tears to be shed with Jim Mickle’s pulpy Texan crime-thriller Cold in July. As much as I’d like to like to lead you all in with a logline for this, the narrative twists to follow would only betray it. About five different types of thriller all at once, Cold in July shifts gears basically every twenty minutes, eventually arriving at a ludicrous, blood-splattered climax a world removed from its quietly taut opening minutes.

Luckily, it’s always enough fun to roll with. Even when perpetuating tired machismo-as-masculinity bullshit (which the aforementioned waterworks hardly redeem), Mickle has a slick, confident sensibility that’s difficult not to get behind. Inhabiting the reckless, murky spirit of the cinematic era in which it is set with a pitch-perfect feel for atmosphere, one could argue that whatever reprehensible ideologies may emerge will only be shades of the territory. If you are a fan of said territory to begin with, this will probably prove an unequivocal home run.

For those interested in bleaker domains, Russian heavyweight Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan has more than enough weathered cynicism to spoil your week. Following one man’s doomed battle against a corrupt local council in the process of seizing his family land, Zvyagintsev’s latest is an familiar fable of human corruption on both personal and political scales. But while we can map this trajectory a step ahead for most of the journey, Leviathan is bolstered by deep pockets of anguish and an angry, barbed specificity to its homeland.

Zvyagintsev can tend to bang the old “Why Do We Suffer?” drum a tad forcefully, which I suppose is only a natural concern for a film based on the Book of Job. But mostly, Leviathan ascends to the grandiosity of its themes, with its heavy thematic terrain complimented beautifully by actual terrain. Staggering ranges of stone and sea, peeling windswept homes, ravaged shipping wrecks, mammoth skeletons of mythically-sized creatures: frames stuffed with the irrepressible weight of nature stripping us bare. But since the Lord Almighty remains beyond our comprehension, Zvyagintsev condemns the next indifferent authority within his reach. Perhaps a much more tangible indictment is to be made in witnessing the film’s burly, villainous mayor standing amidst a church service unscathed.

Another film rooted in national identity came next, albeit one of a more affectionate relationship. The Tale of Princess Kaguya is the latest effort from the incomparable Studio Ghibli; an evocative riff on Japanese folklore whose elegiac delicacy quickly proved therapeutic. Rendering 10^th-century fable The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter in rugged, impressionistic watercolor, Kaguya plays like an ancient Japanese painting sprung to life. I genuinely lack superlatives for how exquisite this animation is, other than to say that some of the sequences here rival Pocahontas’ “Colors of the Wind” for vivid, reckless expressivity.

Shifting from a soft, weightless quality for Kaguya’s ecstasy to a careless, jagged coarseness in her despair, the imagery’s stylistic temperament is attuned to its protagonist’s emotional interior, and I think that’s why this film offered such a tonic in the thick of festival fare; instead of scanning the narrative critically for emotional truths, we can simply sit back and let its textures and tones wash over us. In light of all the recent speculation of Ghibli’s next industry move, The Tale of Princess Kaguya is a beautiful supplement to either direction; both a mournful coda of rare purity and a reminder of exactly why cinema needs Studio Ghibli to continue making movies.  

Swap Budapest for San Fran, dogs for genetically advanced primates, and a young Hungarian heroine for James Franco, and Kornél Mundruczó’s Cannes hit White God might end up bearing a striking resemblance to Hollywood blockbuster Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Some may find that comparison reductive, but I think it’s a fitting bridge to address my gripes with the recent Un Certain Regard winner. Both narratives essentially run into the same issue: that the human drama is innately less involving than the animal spectacle, especially when our emotional attachment to the latter relies on us severing connection to the ignorant self-importance of mankind.

But where Rise of the Planet of the Apes seemed to realize this, pushing Franco to the sideline to focus on the magnetic Caesar, White God continually interrupts the plight of its furry rebel Hagen with irrelevant diversions to Lili (Zsófia Psotta), his former owner. I assume her loss of innocence (getting drunk in the club) is somehow intended to mirror that of her dog’s (abandonment, torture, violence, incarceration, etc.), but it nearly always proves a distraction to the surging tension at hand, slowly sapping the imminent uprising of its power.

A dog is an empathy-magnet, and scenes like those featuring Hagen reacting to the bellow of a foghorn or trying to cross the street are evidence of just how extraneous most of the plotting is to our investment. Thankfully, the eventual rebellion is quite impressive; a moderately scaled but tightly choreographed torrent of rabid, revolutionary pooches storming the streets, refreshingly bereft of computer generated trickery. If only Mundruczó has applied this brand of focused purity to his storytelling. 

Another film in need of sharpened scope came in the form of Tony Mahony’s The Mule. A pitch-black drug comedy based on a real-life episode in Australian history, the trafficker in question is Ray Jenkins (Angus Sampson) – a naïve, impressionable simpleton convinced to swallow twenty condoms of heroin and smuggle it into Melbourne. After being stopped by Border Security and then detained in a hotel room by Australian Federal Police, Ray finds his only remaining choice is to deny all charges, defy his bodily functions, and refuse to shit out the evidence until the court order expires.

It’s a killer conceit, but without the commitment to do it justice, forever puncturing its internal tension with constant distraction. My dream version of this would open with Ray seized at the airport, and then remain sealed in the hotel room from there onward; we don’t need backstory to appreciate the gravity of the situation, and we certainly don’t need deflating detours to insignificant supporting players. There’s just so much potential here for a hellish, claustrophobic nightmare that it quickly proves frustrating to only catch slithers of it. Once Ray started hallucinating, I began to pray for his fragmented fever-dreams to hijack the narrative entirely. While that might make for a much less palatable experience, there’s only so pleasant you can make a movie about drugs and feces anyway, right?

But in that regard, my festival run was to be concluded with a true miracle: a film that manages to be unabashedly crowd-pleasing while never stooping to sacrifice its ruthless, jet-black spirit. The film is called Wild Tales and it might just contain the most unbridled, exhilarating glee I’ve experienced all festival. An Argentinian “portmanteau” film comprised of six parts, each of director Damián Szifrón’s devilishly conceived vignettes marries genre fare with comedic absurdity and the result is just exceptionally fun to howl along with.

I’ve read a few criticisms about the lack of cohesion between all of these vignettes (uh, they’re all wild?), but it wasn’t long before I decided I could care less. Perhaps festival fatigue has quashed my critical capacity, but the fact that every short could spawn merciless laughter felt like more than enough cohesion for me. With contenders for the year’s best opening sequence, the year’s best closing sequence, and perhaps a couple of other best sequences in between, Wild Tales wields its structure in the best possible way; a lively tapas menu far more concerned with flavor than with substance. I can’t think of a better way to wrap up another year.

Cheers @nzff. Thanks for the memories.

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