Think I'll finish up Wednesday night regardless of whether this lockdown continues past Thursday, which it probably will -- but we have a good chance of being out of self-isolation, at least. They're sending us for another COVID test tomorrow, and if we pass that test, we may be able to walk down our front steps and onto the street again.
Oh, I'll probably keep watching about a movie a day, but it's nice not to have artificial parameters on what I watch, as enriching as this experience has been for me. Need to get back to watching some dumb horror I unearth on Amazon.
I've watched a documentary, a prison break drama, an intimate marital drama, a children's fantasy, a comic book movie and several others, but no "film festival" is complete without a foreign film, now is it?
So due up Monday night was Aki Kaurismaki's The Other Side of Hope from 2017. It's my second Kaurismaki film after Le Havre. Michael Phillips put the Finnish director on my radar on one of his Filmspotting appearances nearly a decade ago now, but I've still only waded this far into his filmography. I think knowing that Le Havre was a bit of a shrug for me -- a good shrug, but still a shrug nonetheless -- made me slow to seek out a second film, but The Other Side of Hope made its way into my library DVD borrowings and into my DVD player on Monday night.
It was a bit of a shrug. A good shrug, but a shrug nonetheless.
Kaurismaki's films have kind of a dry humor that almost only registers as humor if you squint. To be sure, there were some moments that almost made me chuckle, but more because they were mildly absurd than out-and-out funny. He reminds me a little of fellow Scandinavian director Roy Andersson, though Andersson's films are far more absurd and far less tethered to an identifiable narrative.
The narrative is clear enough here, or at least a narrative framework with a recurring set of characters. The film takes place in and around Helsinki, bringing a couple main characters into contact with each other. One is a Syrian refugee trying to get work in Helsinki while also trying to stay legally in the country, as he conducts a long-distance search for his sister, who was separated from him at a border crossing. His story can hardly be considered humorous, as we learn in an interview with immigrant officials that the entire rest of his family, totalling eight or nine people, were killed in bomb blast in Aleppo while they were lunching together. A laugh a minute, you will agree, but Kaurismaki presents it in a way that steers clear of the maudlin. He's not the sentimental type.
Then the other sort of main character is a man who leaves his wife, wins a lot of money on an improbable straight flush in an underground gambling establishment, and buys a restaurant. The workers at the restaurant are a quirky bunch and provide most of what is considered humorous about this film.
That's pretty much the whole thing. However, it takes stabs at some real humanism toward the end, and it's one of those movies whose fullness only strikes you as it is winding down. That may not be a ringing endorsement but it's enough for a positive assessment of the movie. Kaurismaki may not really be my bag, but I'm glad I've seen both of his films that I've seen.
The title is interesting, as "the other side of hope" would be, I guess, despair. Certainly, there's a lot for the characters in this movie to despair about, but that's not the feeling you get from this movie, and I think that is its greatest strength. Maybe "the other side of hope" is more optimistic than I'm suggesting -- like, maybe hope actually pays off when you come out the other side.
Hope was a lot more absent in my Tuesday night film.
I'd wanted to watch On the Beach, the 1959 Stanley Kramer film, for several years now, as it is set in Melbourne. That wasn't the only draw about the film, though. No, this is a movie about the immediate days after most of the world is destroyed by "the atomic war" and the radiation that kills those who aren't in immediate blast zones. Due to its isolation and general distance from the conflict -- though the primary combatants are never named -- Australia is the last area of the planet to still be waiting for its dose of radiation on the wind. But oh, it's coming.
The film stars lots of big names from the time: Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire and Anthony Perkins. As I suggested, though, the main draws were not the stars. I was really curious to see what Melbourne looked like in 1959, and the film did not disappoint, giving us (my wife watched with me) a lot of familiar street views as they looked 62 years ago. We got all the expected highs such an experience might provide. (I thought she'd seen it before, but she hadn't.)
But what may have interested me more than that was what a cautionary tale about nuclear (or atomic) war would look like in 1959. This was years before I figured they started making movies like this in earnest. And in truth, a lot of the time it doesn't feel like that kind of movie, having more of the trappings of a romance than anything else, or a nautical adventure. (Peck and his crew pilot a submarine when they aren't in Melbourne.) There are some chilling shots of abandoned cities, but really, the way this movie is post-apocalyptic has more to do with the question of what people will do with the little time they have left.
At the start of the narrative, the radiation is projected to hit Australia in five months' time -- I don't know if that's scientifically accurate, and I suppose it would depend on the closest blast site to the country. But what this does is it sets up this uneasy tension between people trying to live their lives -- which they mostly can, though they're going through privations like a petrol shortage -- and preparing for the inevitable. In fact, we see much of this fragility of life through Perkins' character and that of his wife, played by Donna Anderson, who have a baby girl. There's a whole plot point about how Perkins is trying to acquire suicide pills to give to his wife, which she will give to their daughter and herself, if she gets sick before he returns from what is expected to be a two-month submarine mission. If that's not chilling, I don't know what is.
And so this film exists in sort of a suspended state of ennui, as Peck's and Gardner's characters consider the possibility of new love, as well as its futility. (In fact, Peck has a wife and two sons of his own who are back in America and presumed dead, a reality he at first denies before ultimately coming to grips with it in a powerful scene.) The whole thing is suffused with melancholy and I really got caught up in it. As a neat trick, there's also a fair bit of humor, which somehow does not seem out of sync with the rest of what's going on.
A few other unrelated thoughts. One was that dispiritingly few characters in this film even attempted Australian accents, as only a few side characters were played by actual Australian actors, though almost all of them outside Peck and his crew are supposed to be Aussies. Another funny detail was that "Waltzing Matilda" plays on the score about two dozen times, so much so that the only other thing I could liken it to was the frequency of "Moon River" in Breakfast at Tiffany's.
I also wanted to say that I don't think I've ever seen an Ava Gardner film before. I suppose I did find her somewhat fetching -- she's supposed to be fetching, right? -- but the one who really turned my head was Donna Anderson. She's a real beauty. Yes, is -- she's still going strong today at 81, only five days younger than my dad.
Okay, cannot leave behind the discussion of these films without telling you whether I could have watched them on streaming.
Coming into these two movies, DVDs had been holding a shaky lead, 4-3, over streaming. By that I mean, of the seven movies I had watched in this festival so far, four of them could not be found on any of the streaming services I subscribe to, while three of them could.
I'm sorry to say that DVDs have lost that lead.
The Other Side of Hope is available on Kanopy, and On the Beach is available on Stan.
Now that DVDs have fallen behind, 5-4, I'm questioning the wisdom of having only one more night of this series. If it ended in a tie that would be kind of a disappointment.
So let's say this. I'll watch a movie Wednesday night. If that movie is also available on streaming, the series will be over -- streaming wins 6-4 in a best-of-11 scenario. However, if it's only on DVD, it'll necessitate a tiebreak on Thursday night.
I started out this post weary, but now I'm kind of excited again.
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