If I had watched every Kelly Reichardt movie MIFF had offered me over the years -- her last four, and probably more than that, but that covers the ten years I've been in Australia -- then Reichardt would hold the record for the director I'd seen most at the Melbourne International Film Festival.
As it stands, I have two official, and two unofficial ... the most recent of which is probably not even unofficial.
My very first MIFF in 2014 saw me attend Night Moves, which was at the time my second favorite Reichardt film only to Meek's Cutoff. (Still is, I think.) Two years later it was her next film, Certain Women, that earned one of my slightly less precious quantity of tickets, as that was the first year I got a pass and really went all out (watching 11 films total).
I tried to make it 3-for-3 in 2020 with First Cow, but that was the first year of COVID, and a funny thing happened: They actually restricted the number of available tickets to watch the festival's opening night film, even though it was streaming, where there are no seat limits. Something about keeping it an exclusive event and not eating into whatever theatrical release it may have gotten in the future. First Cow was one of the first films really taken down by COVID, as it came out in the U.S. just before everything closed down. I'm not sure if it did actually ever get an Australian theatrical release. (Wait, of course it did -- I wrote about it here.)
But because it had been released so many months earlier in the U.S., and because they were hopeful of recouping the lost theatrical dollars in any way they could, the movie was available for me to rent through my U.S. iTunes. So instead of watching an official MIFF stream of First Cow on opening night, my wife and I watched the version I rented from iTunes in the exact same time slot, joining in on the collective experience in our own way.
Because I knew Reichardt's latest, Showing Up, was released similarly long ago in the U.S., and also already available on iTunes, I didn't consider it as one of my MIFF tickets this year. But last night I did consider it a good time to watch the movie, with MIFF in the air and all. This time I won't count it among my MIFF films, even unofficially.
And unfortunately, I think I have a new least favorite Kelly Reichardt film.
I guess it's been diminishing returns for me on Reichardt since Night Moves, as I liked Certain Women a decent amount less than that, and First Cow a decent amount less than Certain Women. Now Showing Up shows up, and gets a full star less than First Cow's three stars -- making it the first Reichardt movie I have actually given a thumbs down.
I'm not sure I understood what the point of Showing Up was supposed to be, but I assume it was not for us to be punked by Reichardt. That's how I felt during this very boring movie in which nothing happens. Sorry, yes, things do happen -- Michelle Williams complains to her feckless landlord (Hong Chau) that her hot water doesn't work, they collectively nurse a pigeon back to health, and Williams' character looks in on her mentally unstable father (Judd Hirsch) and brother (Mr. Independent John Magaro) as he she prepares for a showing of her very bad sculptures of women. But those things were very boring.
Was the art supposed to be bad? A friend and I disagreed on this slightly in discussing it today. He thought it was just another failing of the movie that we were supposed to think the art was good, but it's not. I give Reichardt more credit than that, but then I wonder why she is showing us a bunch of boring people making mediocre art. (Williams is the central character, but she's one of only a number of artists we see laboring over art that only a mother could love.)
I realize I should probably clarify my use of the word "boring," which is an inherently anti-intellectual judgment about a movie that has a purposefully slow pace. I hope you understand that there's boring and then there's boring. It's the second one I mean here, which is not a comment on a lack of action in the story, but a comment on a lack of caring about the characters or the story because the writer-director has not given us anything to sink our teeth into. That's the case with Showing Up.
I guess that makes it pretty consistent with the MIFF experience so far in 2023, of which Showing Up is tangentially a part. Out of five movies so far, only one was really good -- and even that one, Past Lives, was not as good as I thought it was going to be.
I don't know if my final three are going to significantly improve the overall experience, but the last film I'm seeing on Saturday at least has the potential to -- and it will make that director the actual record holder for the most official MIFF movies I've seen.
But first, one tomorrow night and one Friday night.
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