We've exchanged out so many tickets for other tickets in this year's MIFF that I'm starting to lose track.Tuesday night was originally envisioned as a double feature of Everybody Knows and a film called Arctic, but I traded in my Arctic ticket when the editor of my website needed a ticket for a film made by a friend of his. He's not the MIFF lover that I am so he usually gives me all the tickets on our pass, and was willing to just buy one. That didn't seem fair, so I gladly shaved off the ticket of mine that seemed most superfluous, and was set to just go to Asghar Farhadi's latest that night.
But then my wife traded in one of her daytime tickets for one of my daytime tickets, freeing up another ticket. If that sentence doesn't make sense, I'll explain. With a MIFF minipass you get three free weekday daytime sessions, as those sessions are always undersold since they can only be attended by people with flexible working schedules. That describes my wife, so she's going to a good number of daytime sessions this year. So many, in fact, that she used one of her ten regular sessions on a daytime session, when she could have just used one of the unused daytime sessions on my pass and saved one regular ticket for a nighttime session. Got all that?
As she's got a full slate anyway, she turned the newly converted nighttime ticket over to me. I was going to turn it into Arctic, but Arctic was sold out now. so instead I focused on another movie that had originally been on my shortlist, Timur Bekmambetov's Profile, picking that narrowly over Joel Potrykus' Relaxer.
I'm sure all these ins and outs were so interesting for you to spend the last minute of your life reading.
Anyway, that left me with an unexpected Tuesday night double feature, kicked off by the dumpling dinner I didn't have last week, with a snack of fries and dipping sauce between the two movies. I made all the sessions on time and nothing else interesting happened, so let's just get to the movies.
Given that I was relatively disappointed by Farhadi's last movie I saw at MIFF, The Salesman -- and then more so when it snagged the best foreign film Oscar away from Toni Erdmann, my #1 movie of that year -- I'd say my expectations were a bit muted for Everybody Knows. That's strange given that The Salesman was the only one of four Farhadi movies I've seen that I awarded fewer than 4.5 stars on Letterboxd. Nonetheless, I must have thought he was headed in the wrong direction, so even the promise of him transplanting the usual thing he does to Spain and to international stars (Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem) only left me intrigued enough to secure the ticket, not to actually look forward to it with great anticipation.
Boy was that dumb.
But first, what "usual thing he does?" For as great as he is, Farhadi is notable for being somewhat predictable in terms of the general composition of his films. In the review I just wrote that has not yet posted as of this writing (but may have by the time you read this), I said "Iranian director Asghar Farhadi has become the face of a subgenre that might be labeled 'social intrigue,' as his films address the miscommunications, misunderstandings and recriminations that lead to low-level tragedies among ordinary people." That's Farhadi in a nutshell. I'm sure he's made a film that couldn't be summarized in these terms, but I have yet to see it.
So I was watching this film just waiting to see what its "inciting incident" would be. That's a screenwriting term for the thing that occurs sometime in the first act that sets the rest of the plot in motion. Farhadi is master of the inciting incident as this is the thing around which all the rest of the confusion swirls, resulting in Rashomon-like competing interpretations of the same event. It was funny to watch the film consciously looking for what that would be.
Oddly enough for Farhadi, who normally deals in occurrences that are comparatively mundane, the inciting incident in this case is a kidnapping. Just when my alarms started to go off that he was selling out and becoming some kind of genre filmmaker, I was reminded that this is Asghar Farhadi we are talking about, and he possesses a keen insight on human nature. Of course this movie is not really going to be about a kidnapping. That's just the excuse to turn people against each other, even loved ones, and see what happens.
And damned if this isn't just about the best and most engrossing movie I've seen all year.
Read my review if you want to know more, but it's kind of best if you don't know too much. Hopefully you won't have to wait too long to see another Farhadi masterpiece.
Everybody Knows (and yes, I was singing Leonard Cohen in my head all night) was a tough act to follow for Profile, but it did so fairly admirably. That seemed especially unlikely given the film's central gimmick.
Yes, ladies and gentleman, this is another one of those movie that takes place entirely on the screen of a laptop.
Movies like that can be good (Unfriended) or highly unfortunate (Open Windows), but even when they're good they remind you of certain cinematic trends that are starting to feel played out. At their core they are basically found footage movies, as the events take place in real time and strain credulity to the breaking point.
The film's conceit is that a British reporter is trying to write a story about the way ISIS recruits western women into becoming revolutionaries, and in some cases, unwitting sex slaves. As she sets up a fake profile on Facebook in order to catfish one of these terrorists and learn the secrets of his operation, we see a series of Skype calls between her and her editor, her and her boyfriend, her and her BFF (who seems like a bit of a lush), her and the IT guy, and her and the ISIS member himself. Things get complicated when the ISIS guy is a lot more charming than he should be, and she wonders if she herself is genuinely being seduced.
Bekmambetov, a director known for his visual panache (see: Night Watch), does not seem to have an immediate outlet for that here, as a movie that plays out on a laptop screen is a trick that's been pulled off by the guys at Blumhouse. It doesn't necessarily require a master of the form. Refreshingly, Bekmambetov accomplishes a nifty trick that has everything to do with how the movie does not actually play out in real time. The events on the screen have a seeming continuity, but we can tell from time stamps in various chats and the progression of scenes that these conversations are actually taking place over a period of weeks. That they all seem like "one shot," as it were, is a testament to how Bekmambetov can continue to impress visually, even within these apparent constraints.
I would have liked to have provided you a poster of Profile to go along with the one for Everybody Knows, but in a search of the interwebs, I could not find one. Letterboxd only has the title over a blank poster as a placeholder for the poster that does not yet exist. A deep cut, to be sure -- which is why we go to film festivals, when you come right down to it.
Tomorrow's post will wrap MIFF for 2018 ... if I don't write a proper wrap-up post, which I might, and if I don't get any more free tickets, which given the recent history seems like a distinct possibility.
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