Blame it on the Democratic National Convention, blame it on baseball, blame it on writing three actual reviews of MIFF films, but I just haven't been very motivated this week to keep you updated on all my MIFF happenings as they happened. There's also a bit of burnout when you're coming to the end of a MIFF, even if you never even had to leave your house to participate.
So I'll just jam together two mentions of my mid-week MIFF films and link you to their corresponding reviews if you want more.
On Tuesday night I kept alive a tradition of watching Iranian films at MIFF that is not actually as extensive as I had thought. In fact, I have seen exactly one previous Iranian film at MIFF, that being Asghar Farhadi's The Salesman in 2016, which I didn't even like all that much. There seemed like more. (Maybe it's because I saw Everybody Knows at MIFF 2018, which was directed by Farhadi, but set in Spain and in Spanish.)
This year's Iranian film makes it a tradition now, at least. It's called Just 6.5, and it stars Farhadi's lead actor in A Separation, Payman Maadi. I really enjoy this actor from several other exposures (he's crossed over into English language films), so adding this one to my schedule was a no-brainer.
It's a The Wire-type look into the war on drugs in Iran, Tehran specifically, and it was surprising for a number of reasons. For one, I didn't expect this type of movie from Iran, essentially a genre movie, as the movies that are allowed to be made have always been very closely monitored by censors, leaving a relative paucity of permissible subjects -- family drama, usually. All of Farhadi's movies basically qualify as that. But director Saeed Roustayi, with whom I was unfamiliar, managed to get this idea of cops and mules and drug dealers the green light from his government. I tried to find out online how he did it, but the internet was not very forthcoming on the topic.
The second thing that surprised me is that I didn't realize Iran was a country that had a big, visible drug problem. The film depicts slums and shanty towns where literally hundreds of addicts lie around smoking crack and heroin, only to scatter like ants when the police come to clear out the joint -- the punishment for some drug offenses is death, after all.
I really enjoyed the movie. It does have the grit, determination and moral complexity of a show like The Wire, though the execution is also at sort of a TV level -- before the days of prestige TV, I should say. I gave it only 3.5 stars out of 5 on Letterboxd, but it obviously stuck with me, as I had boosted its rating up to the equivalent of four -- 8 out of 10 on my site's scale -- by the time I reviewed it. (You can read that review here.)
The second was the second movie in the themed "dark dramas" package my wife had picked up, the first being The Killing of Two Lovers, which I loved so much. Well, this package was clearly the MIFF winning move in 2020 as La Llorona immediately became my second favorite of the ten films I've seen.
I did carry a small bias into the movie, which was that there was just a schlocky horror movie, an extension of the Conjuring universe, made on this subject last year. That was The Curse of La Llorona, or The Curse of the Weeping Woman, as it is known in Australia. Fortunately, this had only the bare minimum to do with that, as both were inspired by the same Latin American folklore. This, though, was groundbreaking new prestige horror that had me in its spell straight away.
The technique itself was groundbreaking -- I was entranced by director Jayro Bustamante pulling his camera away from the subjects in the frame one centimeter at a time -- but I'd have to say the primary new elements for me were the subject matter itself, and the country of origin. I'll take the second first. I am not sure if I've ever seen a film about Guatemala, let alone made by a Guatemalan director and technically a production of the Guatemalan film industry. As a matter of fact, I was not even sure such a thing existed. It's a French co-production almost by necessity, one would imagine, but if this is what Guatemalan film has to offer us, why have they been hiding it from us?
Then there's the subject, which is, yes, more or less a haunted house movie where the main ghoul is this physical embodiment of folklore about a weeping woman who drowned her children. But it's set in and around the trial of a Guatemalan general who has been accused of genocide for giving orders, back in the 1980s, to exterminate large swaths of the native Mayan population. That the haunted house is a palatial estate barricaded by protestors gives it a very #2020 feel, as it mixes in a social justice message that is very in keeping with the world events of our year.
Plus, it's super scary.
But I say pretty much all this stuff in my review, which can be found here.
MIFF ends this weekend, as all streams must be complete by the end of the day on Sunday. Though I'm tempted to fit a few more in, remember what I said about burnout, and you'll know why I am content to finish with 11 films when I watch the closing night film on Saturday, Pablo Larrain's Ema.
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