MIFF: Further lust for inanimate objects

If you recall this post from six years ago -- and really, which among you doesn't?? -- you'll know I have a MIFF habit of seeing films in which characters have an unusual fixation on inanimate objects. And by "habit" I mean it happened twice, on the same night, six years ago, when both of the films I watched had to do with characters under the hypnotic sway of a particular garment in their wardrobe. 

We can now add a chair to this group.

By Design was the only MIFF movie I saw on Sunday night, the only of my four nights where I'm seeing only one movie. But so as not to waste a train ride into the city just for a single 90-minute chunk of weirdness, I followed it up with Zach Cregger's follow-up to Barbarian, called Weapons, which won't comprise any meaningful chunk of this post. In fact, its single mention has now passed, and you should not view that as any commentary on its worthiness for discussion or lack thereof.

By Design falls about halfway between Peter Strickland's In Fabric and Quentin Dupieux's Deerskin -- the two films in the above-linked post, if you didn't click on it (how dare you) -- in terms of my ability to connect with it, sharing a titular structure with Strickland's film and an absurd comedic sensibility with Dupieux's. 

In short, it's the story of a woman who wants to become a chair, and then succeeds in this goal. 

They actually swap bodies, in a playful skewering of the time-worn formula that currently has its latest example in movie theaters now with Freakier Friday. 

The woman, played by Juliette Lewis, does not initially want to become the chair, though she does see some of the inherent pleasures of that lifestyle. Initially she just wants to purchase it to add to the existing furniture in her house. But oh how strong wishes can be fulfilled in strange ways in the magic of the movies.

It's a fairly ordinary chair. I think you're supposed to think this from the start, just how the red dress is pretty ordinary in In Fabric and the deerskin jacket is pretty ordinary in Deerskin. Here, I'll give you a look at it:

Oh no wait, I can't. There has not yet been enough published online about this movie, which played Sundance but does not yet have a release date (or a distributor? maybe? it doesn't yet have a proper poster), for there to be a solo shot of the chair available for me to show you. But trust me, it's fairly ordinary. There's some grace to the looping of its wooden armrests, part of an entire wooden structure to comprises the entirety of the chair. But really, it's just a chair.

And yet any number of people in this film -- first Lewis' character, then the man (Mamoudou Athie) who is gifted the chair as a breakup present from his ex -- are absolutely besotted with it, losing all composure when matters of the chair come up. Affected to a far lesser extent by this are Lewis' two besties, who verge on frenemies, played by Robin Tunney and Samantha Mathis. (Side note: I dated Samantha Mathis' half sister nearly 25 years ago.) 

Even if Deerskin did not exist, Dupieux would make a solid comparison for what writer-director Amanda Kramer is doing here. The undercurrent of absurdity prompts bouts of surprised giggling with some frequency. For a while, I thought I might like By Design as much as my favorite Dupieux movies. (Rubber has the edge there over Deerskin.) Particularly funny are the scenes where other characters interact with Lewis -- motionless while inhabited by the soul of the chair -- as though she were actually present and not completely comatose. There's some light commentary in there about solipsism, our indifference to noticing whether others are present or not as we are so obsessed with our own personal concerns. You know, the kind of thing Weekend at Bernie's once poked fun at. Lewis' ability to stay as still as she does, with only a slightly rising and falling of her chest to show that she's breathing, is pretty impressive.

Where the movie lost me a little was in these discordant digressions -- I suppose you could say all digressions are discordant -- about side characters whose presence within the story didn't exactly make sense to me. Clifton Collins Jr. plays this stalker who is introduced fairly late in the story, and he gets this three- or four-minute soliloquy that isn't funny and that doesn't seem to have any place here, especially since it's primarily sad and not funny. That happened one too many times for me to give By Design a full-throated endorsement.

But it's definitely a thumbs up overall, and I really like the way it speaks to other films in my MIFF history -- even if they both happened on the same night six years ago.

MIFF: Which Fabric? Deerskin!

You couldn't have orchestrated a funnier or more appropriate double feature from the hundreds of films playing this year's Melbourne International Film Festival than the one I saw on Saturday.

And of course, as with all the viewing coincidences I tirelessly tell you about, this one was completely unplanned.

How's this for a theme? Both of the films I saw involved a garment as the film's central character. A garment which is either actually alive in some supernatural sense, or is bestowed life as a result of the crazy person who beholds it.

Of course, the genre for one film is horror and for the other is comedy, though the horror had some very comedic elements in it, and the comedy some very horrifying ones.

The films were Peter Strickland's In Fabric and Quentin Dupieux's Deerskin, and from here I'll address them separately.

Strickland's film was one of the first I locked in when I perused this year's MIFF program, as it filled my annual MIFF niche of "latest release from a director I love." Strickland easily clears that bar as both Berberian Sound Studio and The Duke of Burgundy appeared among my top ten films of the years I saw them. In Fabric promised more of the same giallo-inflected deliciousness.

This was scheduled for 5:30 on Sunday afternoon at the same venue I visited for opening night, The Plenary at the Melbourne Convention Centre. I was also joined by two "mates," to use the Australian term, although one was my mate and one was his mate he brought along (though I hope I'll soon be justified in calling him my mate, directly). Both of these guys are admitted giallo fans, which is an unusual trait to find any two cinephiles sharing in common. Although I started to ponder the limitations of this extremely large venue when you're not doing something like opening night, this session was special too in that Strickland himself introduced it. See, he's being featured (along with Agnieszka Holland and Penelope Spheeris) for this year's director retrospective, meaning all of his films are screening at one point or another (and I'm actually seeing Berberian on the big screen for the first time on Wednesday).

In Fabric was preceded by a short Strickland directed, which used his distinct cinematic style in the service of a Hungarian fairytale about shoemakers and an enchanted lake. I liked this, but felt myself impatient to get to the feature. Alas, that impatience was ultimately misplaced.

Anyone who has seen Berberian or Duke will find themselves in the same capable hands with In Fabric, at least aesthetically speaking. There's a kind of montage approach to eerie imagery that fetishizes some of the giallo touchstones, which include blood, the color red, and sexual/bondage imagery. The concept seems very Strickland, as well, as the story involves an entrancing red dress with a black brooch that kind of hypnotizes prospective owners. The dress is possessed in some way and first brings rashes to those who wear it, and then much, much worse. There's also a creepy department store with this terrific TV ad campaign that recalls the early 1980s VHS phantasmagoria favored by a director like Panos Cosmatos. Strickland's regular collaborator Fatma Mohamed, who appears in both of the films I've mentioned previously, is also on hand as the store's satanic emissary.

Unfortunately, Strickland makes a bold structural choice in the narrative that just does not pay dividends. Without saying too much about what happens or why, I'll just say that the movie resets itself about halfway through, so that we're following different and, it should be said, far less interesting characters for the second half of the movie. This idea can work but it does not here, and this major violation of conventional structure left me very frustrated as it robbed me of my ability to tell where I was within the course of the narrative. In a 118-minute film that can be very difficult indeed.

I changed viewing companions and met my wife for dinner before the 9:45 showing of Deerskin. Neither of us had planned to see a movie on Saturday night, for a couple important reasons: 1) We'd happened to allocate our limited number of tickets elsewhere, and 2) We expected to have our children to look after. But they ended up going for a sleepover at their aunt's house, and my wife came into a possession of a whole second minipass -- which means ten more tickets. How many of these we will end up being able to use remains to be seen.

So a few burgers later we reported to the Capitol Theatre on Swanston Street. And here was where my eyes lit up with delight, and not just because of the movie.

The Capitol Theatre is one of my favorite MIFF venues, but it's been a long time since I've been there. That's because they stopped using it for MIFF in 2014. I'm not sure why they stopped initially, but lately, it's been unavailable because it was being refurbished. That's done now, and it's being reintroduced at this year's festival, with a brand spanking new lobby (gorgeous) and probably new seats in the theater proper, though that wasn't specifically something I was looking for. All I really wanted to know was that the great interior -- which I described in this post as having "walls and ceiling composed of these jutting features that are somewhere between regal, art deco-inspired protrusions and concrete monstrosities" -- was intact. (And if that descriptions sounds tepid, let's just say I wasn't sure what to make of the interior at first, and then grew both aesthetically and sentimentally attached to it.) Indeed that ceiling is the venue's crown jewel, and indeed it was still there in all its glory.

Quentin Dupieux directed one of my favorite oddball films of the last decade, Rubber, as well as a film with a similar tone that I didn't really get, Wrong. If you don't remember, Rubber is the one about the killer tire. If I'd been scanning MIFF's options a bit better when the program was released, I probably would have noticed Deerskin was directed by Dupieux and immediately added it to my schedule, for similar reasons to why I added In Fabric. Instead, I had to come by it Saturday afternoon, after learning my kids would be elsewhere that night, and seeing if I wanted to take advantage of my wife's newly acquired tickets.

After another short film to kick it off, the Polish film Rain which I won't describe but implore you to seek out, Deerskin was just the gas I hoped it would be. It stars The Artist's Jean Dujardin as a man who becomes separated from his wife, and then from his grasp on his own sanity. He becomes obsessed with a used deerskin jacket someone sells him online for an outrageous number of Euros, and because he's spent so much, the guy throws in a video camera. The man starts fancying himself a filmmaker, and soon starts talking to the jacket, whom he believes wants to be the only jacket in existence.

I won't tell you any more. Just see the movie.

Next up could be a surprise screening on Sunday night, but if it isn't, it'll be Chris Morris' The Day Shall Come on Tuesday.