Although a movie about religious lesbian lovers with the same first name would be great, and would be right up MIFF's alley, this is actually three movie titles combined into one, covering the MIFF movies I watched on Saturday and Sunday nights.Saturday was supposed to be a MIFF marathon of sorts for my wife and me, as it was our fourth Anything Day during the pandemic -- Anything Day being that pandemic invention where everyone gets to do what they want all day, including the kids. Or, I should say, including the adults.
But we didn't get to our first movie until 6, rather than mid-afternoon as we might have envisioned, and then my wife ended up bailing on the second movie, with good reason. So it was more of a MIFF trickle than a stream, though it was of course all a "stream," since this year's festival is entirely online.
That movie we didn't start until 6 was by far the best of the bunch. It's called The Killing of Two Lovers, and it's set in Utah, where a husband and wife are undergoing a trial separation while trying to figure out if the only reason they're together is because they married young and had four kids before they were 30. It is deceptively part of what was billed as a "thriller package," or something along those lines, that my wife bought -- part of a concerted effort to take some of the guesswork out of picking MIFF films this year. But without giving anything away, I'll just say there's more to that title than there may seem.
Loved this. It's shot in the 4:3 aspect ratio that Kelly Reichardt favors, and I now get what she was talking about in a recent interview I heard on Filmspotting, where she said close-ups never look right in widescreen. There's one scene between the two main characters in the front of a pickup truck where it is basically trading off close-ups of both of their faces, and I really appreciated the more square close-ups that Reichardt was talking about in that interview. There are a number of other distinct but unobtrusive filmmaking choices that make Robert Machoian's film really memorable and actually quite difficult to execute, while remaining very low-key. It gets at its themes really smartly while not cluttering things up by being too on the nose.
The movie my wife bailed on, and rightly so, was the MIFF Showcase Centerpiece, Benh Zeitlin's Peter Pan movie Wendy. To be fair, she had one foot out the door before the movie even started. She had forgotten that the movie had to be watched within the hours of 7 p.m. to 11:59 p.m. on Saturday, and was no longer sure she wanted her Anything Day evening to be hijacked by this movie. And we both admitted we didn't much care for the Peter Pan story in general. I can think of two really bad adaptations right off the bat in Hook and Pan.
Wendy is better than those, but not by the margin one would hope, nor is it significantly different from the director's breakthrough feature, Beasts of the Southern Wild. It even has the same kind of driving bombastic score as that other film. I liked Beasts of the Southern Wild quite a lot, but even that film slips into self-parody pretty easily, while this one is there right from the start. And though I didn't consider this to be a problem with Beasts, or at least I didn't identify it as such as the time, Wendy indulges in a fair bit of what I would call "poverty porn." Perhaps my biggest issue with it, though, was how it renders the Peter Pan character as essentially hopeless, always making the wrong choice and barely redeeming himself, if he does so at all. Isn't Peter Pan supposed to be more of a manic pixie dream boy, whose wrong-seeming ideas all end up being the right ones?
Sunday night concluded the weekend with my only documentary of this year's MIFF, if my current schedule holds, which is the Quebecois film Prayer for a Lost Mitten. And yes, I was taken in by that title.
From the description in the MIFF catalogue, I thought the film was going to focus on the deceptively profound experience of watching a wide selection of Canadians haunt the public lost and found as they search hopefully for some insignificant lost item. Say, a mitten. In reality, that is a pretty small part of the film, and the loss discussed by the majority of the interview subjects is less material in nature -- the loss of a child's love, the loss of a romantic love, the loss of the use of part of one's body, etc. Although that seems possibly deeper subject matter for a film, and is certainly worth exploring, I was expecting something a bit more eccentric, and that just isn't what this movie is.
It is gorgeous to look at, though, as Jean-Francois Lesage's film is shot in black and white, and during a Montreal winter, with lots of scenes of swirling snow looking ever so beautiful on that particular film stock.
Only one night off from MIFF this time -- tonight, as I write this -- before I return Tuesday with this year's Iranian entry, Just 6.5.
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