For my first MIFF movies of 2026, well, there was a lot of thumb twiddling and downtime.
I don't know whether it had to do with leaving work earlier than I usually do on a MIFF night (in other words, on time, rather than staying late) or a later start time for the first movie (6:45), but I found myself with more than an hour after I finished eating but before the movie started, during which I had no idea what to do with myself. (I ended up messing around on my computer unproductively, which was pretty unsatisfying.)
And before that, I spent a fortune on burgers.
Five Guys is a burger concept that began taking off in the U.S. right around the time I was leaving back in 2013. I assume the chain existed long before then -- in fact, the internet tells me it started up in 1986. But I'm guessing it was one of those things that was regional for at least the first 20 years of its existence, before it finally started creeping to areas I lived.
Anyway, I never tried it before moving, and only in the past year or so have I noticed there are restaurants open here. Fancying myself a bit of a burger connoisseur -- or at least the less sophisticated sounding "lover of burgers" -- I had been wanting to check it out.
But a number of times in a row now, I've gone to my favorite ramen place after work but before a movie, and when I continued walking on, it was only then that I remembered the Five Guys was just two doors down. This happened most recently on Wednesday when I went to see Ice Cream Man.
Only two days later, it was easy to remember that I wanted to try Five Guys, so I took out a second mortgage on my house and bought a burger, shake and fries.
The main sticker shock came from the burger, which was priced at either $26.50 for the bigger one or $24.50 for the smaller one. Now I should say that this wasn't just the plain burger, it was a bacon cheeseburger -- I could have gotten the plain one for a few dollars less. But I decided if I wanted to give Five Guys a real shot, I should get the sort of burger I would normally order, and that would have bacon on it.
During a little banter with the checkout woman over the price -- very jovial on my side, I can assure you -- she explained that it was the ability to add as many as ten extra toppings, free of charge, that made the burger more expensive. I say, keep your toppings and charge me $3 less for the burger.
In the same vein of wanting to give the place a fair shot, I also ordered a small fries and a peanut butter milkshake.
It was all fine.
In fact, everything was pretty big, especially the "small" fries. Maybe they inherited the sizes from the U.S. too. So I don't really feel like I didn't get enough food for the $40 (!) in total I spent on it.
But the reality is, it didn't make my toes curl with its special mixture of flavors, and so I can just as easily say that this is probably both my first and last Five Guys visit. Not because I would never eat there again, but because the prices are just so inflated that I'd rather have a nice Chinese sit down meal in neighboring Chinatown (which I also plan to do during MIFF) than fast food burgers for the same price.
The slightly less than satisfying meal was followed immediately by the realization that I had too much time and not enough to do. Sometimes when I'm in this situation, I go and lie on the lawn outside the State Library, but they had it fenced off to allow the grass to recover from the footsteps of 10,000 feet. So I ended up just sitting on a bench next to it, a bit glumly, with my computer. After about five minutes, six police officers started some very elongated and gentlemanly arrest proceedings for a motorcyclist who had no plates and a suspended license. He ended up sitting right next to me on the bench. I might have moved except the whole thing was, in fact, very civilized.
When it finally came time for the movies, I didn't like either of the first two movies as much as I would have liked.
The first was my annual choice for "outsider animation," of which I try to get at least one every year. (In fact, I prefer it to be exactly one, but there is another coming later in this festival.) It's from China and is called Light Pillar, and though I enjoyed a lot of the experience of watching it, halfway through I decided I was glad I wouldn't be reviewing it. (Forgetting, of course, that I planned to give you a mini review here.)
There isn't much in the way of narrative, but the film takes place largely in the winter and at a basically abandoned movie studio somewhere in China. We see the staff do mundane activities like lean against walls, smoke cigarettes, and suck drops of snot back up their nose. (One character is doing this every time we see him, which is unnerving.) Their overlord bosses -- really just middle management functionaries, one of whom is never seen without a microphone, even when it doesn't make any sense for him to have one -- come through and try to inspire them by telling them that this year, they will get paid every three months rather than every six. Guilted into lackluster applause over this, the employees applaud with zero enthusiasm.
We follow one guy, who seems to be a wallflower teenager, and talks just about as much as anyone, which is to say, almost none at all. Small laugh-out-loud absurdities occur all over the place, including, for example, the fact that there is a Roomba that lines up along with the rest of the employees, and wordlessly engages in the same activities they engage in. The director, Zao Xu, has captured a great sense of a mouldering future, where everything is dingy but the technology is advanced enough that you realize it isn't quite right now. The fact that snow is covering everything makes it even more desolate and lonely, though I suppose, if you are of the right mindset, oddly cozy as well.
The "hook" of this setup is that our main character has an escape from this dreary dead-end world through a VR headset, and when he goes into the VR world, it's our world. Or, not exactly our world as this is also quite expressionistic, and filmed so. But it's live action, and in this version of the world, he can come to life a bit, he can venture toward another online character who interests him, and he can try to become the best version of himself.
What I would have said in a review if I'd written one is that this is a clever setup, but the animated world is so drily funny and rich that we feel a little bit disappointed anytime we see real human actors, even if this is undeniably adding thematic dimension and distinctiveness to the project. I'd have also said that I started off kind of loving this film, and as it became clear to me that it wasn't going to have a satisfying payoff, I became increasingly uncertain about my own reaction. I am also having strange difficulty remembering all the details of it, which could have been the result of nodding off every once in a while. So it feels a bit like a dream, but a dream that I mostly enjoyed.
After another hour's break in which I loaded back up on drinks and snacks for the second movie, I returned upstairs into Hoyts Melbourne Central -- it occurs to me that I hadn't named the venue previously -- for my second of a Hoyts double feature. And if the whole first evening was a bit sluggish, that could be because Hoyts is kind of a disappointing place to start MIFF. It's not one of the unique venues that only get used for movies during MIFF, which presumably have other uses that keep them in business during the rest of the year. Hoyts is just a regular movie theater multiplex that I visit to see regular movies, having just seen The Odyssey and Spider-Man: Brand New Day there, and it doesn't feel very festivalish.
So the 9:15 movie was Radu Jude's Diary of a Chambermaid. If you don't recognize that name, Jude is the latest Romanian sensation whose film Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World perplexed me more than it seemed to perplex most people, and whose Dracula I haven't seen yet. (He also directed the provocatively named Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, which I also haven't seen.) Even though I didn't particularly care for End of the World, it did indicate to me that Jude's films were ones I wanted to grapple with, which is why I prioritized this one.
There's nothing as audacious in this adaptation of the Octave Mirbeau novel as the 40-minute unbroken take of a safety video that ends End of the World, but that's not to say there is nothing convention-breaking in this otherwise fairly straightforward film. The film is conceived as a satire of class politics in Paris, where a Romanian maid is looking after an upper-class family while earning enough money to send back to her daughter and mother in Romania. And at most of the points, Jude is content to let little telling moments speak for greater indignities, in a way that is fundamentally based in realism.
The break from conventions comes from interspersed stage performances of Mirbeau's original novel. These do have a literal existence in the narrative of the movie, since the lead character (played by Ana Dumitrascu) has been cast playing the titular chambermaid. Some of these scenes are wild, ostentatious and overtly sexual portrayals of what I have subsequently learned are actual plot developments in the novel, such as a man's sexual fixation on the boots of his chambermaid. These are played loudly and with some intent to discomfit us. The chambermaid also has some narrative asides when she's telling stories to the Parisian boy she's looking after.
Still, it always returns to the spine of the story, which is the way her employers use and abuse her in passively aggressive ways, in order to bring about what's best for them even if it's worst for her. To his credit, Jude doesn't exaggerate any of these, he just lets the actual way upper-class Parisians would handle this -- aware of the need to not come across as monsters, but only just -- speak for itself. The story takes place, sort of in the diary format of the title, in the three months leading up to Christmas. And if you think this woman is going to get back to Romania for Christmas to see her daughter the way she promised, well, that's probably not going to go exactly as planned.
I was getting a little bit of Jeanne Dielman from this at first, but I brushed that away as a stretch ... until I saw the poster you see above. It can't be a coincidence that it looks so similar to this, can it?
In any case, Chambermaid is less than half the length at only 94 minutes.
I definitely liked Diary of a Chambermaid better than End of the World, but I think I might have gone for it even more if it did not have such an abrupt ending. And I don't mean an ending that doesn't work out for the protagonist, I mean an ending that seems to come without a resolution one way or another. I suspect for a rule breaker like Jude, that might have been the point, but I still think that actual ending needed to be rethought. It doesn't even end on a moment of dramatic irony, which I thought would have been our bare minimum expectation.
Okay, back at it tomorrow with another two movies to wrap up a busy first weekend.
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