MIFF: Golden slumbers fill my eyes

Every time the title of my seventh MIFF movie of 2017 came into my head, I couldn't help but start singing to myself the Beatles' "Golden Slumbers," one of the final songs on their classic album Abbey Road. Hence, you get this title for this post.

Last year, when I increased my MIFF viewings from a modest four in 2015 all the way up to 11, I started thinking that a good goal for an expanded schedule was to try to target the new films by filmmakers whose work I had loved in the past. I suppose that's an obvious goal for any festival, but I suppose I mean that articulated the goal to myself and specifically pursued it. I immediately got a great chance to test that approach to selecting films, as the 2016 slate happened to include new films from the guys who made my #1 film of 2011 (A Separation), my #1 film of 2013 (Beyond the Hills) and my #2 film of 2014 (Like Father, Like Son), all three of which had earned five stars from me on Letterboxd. Unfortunately, of Asghar Farhadi's The Salesman, Cristian Mungiu's Graduation and Hirokazu Koreeda's After the Storm, only the last film earned as many as four stars, while the other two dwelled in the lukewarm three range.

The closest I could get to that philosophy in 2017 was Alex Ross Perry's Golden Exits. Perry made my #10 film of 2015, Queen of Earth, a psychological horror starring Elisabeth Moss and Katherine Waterston, which left me well and truly throttled. I didn't expect that Golden Exits would delve into that territory, and indeed it did not. But I did like it a lot, as it's earned a four full starts and slotted in as my third favorite of the festival so far.

It was also my first chance to get to what I consider the crown jewel of the festival venues, the Forum on Flinders Street, which used to be a much larger performance space, but has had its upper balcony area walled off into a smaller (but still pretty big) screening space while the floor area now serves as a festival hub and bar. The place has the ornate stylings of old-world movie palaces, and I was almost worried I would miss out on it for 2017, until Golden Exits had a last-minute venue change from ACMI across the street to here. (I'm also getting there on Saturday afternoon, but that was a last-minute change as well as I had to scrap a later afternoon session that was scheduled at the Forum. More on that in the upcoming post about that viewing.)

Exits is a lot more like Perry's previous film, Listen Up Philip, than it is like Queen of Earth. And since I wasn't a huge fan of that film -- I was a fan, but not a huge fan -- I was concerned that Exits would indulge in the same kind of intellectual navel gazing that had put me off just a little bit in that film. That's certainly how this film starts out, as it again explores the relationship between the adult children of an important literary person and their deceased father. Actually, Queen of Earth also explores that, and maybe Listen Up Philip doesn't, but it explores similar territory. Let's just say Perry has his particular interests.

This was a film that really grew on me, though. The cast is lousy with talent, headlined by the likes of Jason Schwartzman, Chloe Sevigny and Mary-Louise Parker -- not to give short shrift to the talented younger actress, Emily Browning, and to Adam Horowitz, who has quiet the dramatic instincts for a Beastie Boy. Actually, this is my second Schwartzman film of the festival, after he starred -- his voice starred, anyway -- in the animated movie I saw last Thursday, My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea.

But the actress who really grew on me, much as the film did, was Lily Rabe, who has the kind of face that sort of alienates me. I can't really figure out a better way to describe it. But as I continued to watch her, I realized that Rabe is portraying so much pain in her performance -- not loudly, but firmly -- that it almost hurt to look at her. That was what I found alienating about her appearance, and I think that has to be a compliment.

It's essentially a "first world problems" type of film, where a bunch of generally privileged white people in New York ponder their unfulfilling lives and unquenchable desires. But as the movie went on, scored unobtrusively by a plaintive piano, I started finding profundity in their ruminations, ruminations that might have seemed self-indulgent in lesser hands. The familiar temptations toward betrayal and bad behavior are all there, but they do not culminate in familiar plot beats, and a number of these characters end up doing the right thing -- which does not leave them feeling any less hollow.

I'm out for consecutive nights for the first time during MIFF, as a bigger winner at this year's Cannes is up next for me on Thursday.