But I did follow up the MIFF Closing Night film, Language Lessons, which featured a Duplass in front of the camera, with a Duplass favorite I'd seen only once, Cyrus, which has both of them behind the camera.
There's something a little special about a Closing Night film -- that phrase doesn't look right either lower or upper case -- that distinguishes it from the others. My 12th and final film of this year's MIFF only became available at 7 p.m. on Saturday night, and only for something like an eight-hour period, differentiating it from the other streaming films, which were available for the duration. (With the exception of the Opening Night film, CODA, which I did not see, which was only available for an eight-hour window that night.)
So in order to make it a little more special, my wife and I ordered Mexican from our favorite local Mexican restaurant, margaritas included.
When we planned that food option we didn't realize how appropriate it would be. Language Lessons, a two-hander starring Mark Duplass and Natalie Morales (who is also director), has to do with an American living in Oakland trying to brush up on his Spanish via video chat Spanish lessons with a woman living in Costa Rica. I suppose if she had been in Mexico that would have been a better match, but the language is shared between the two locations and that's good enough for me.
Two other reasons the film was an appropriate way to finish this year's MIFF:
1. It was yet another film where the language of the film proved to be a surprise. Since I knew it was starring Mark Duplass, I could only assume that the film would be in English. As it turns out, at least half of the dialogue is in Spanish, as the two characters try to speak Spanish as much as possible in keeping with Duplass' character's intended immersion in the language. So you could say it was yet another film that I thought would be in English that ended up being primarily in another language. At least in this case I mostly understood the language due to my own immersion in the culture of a city where it is widely spoken (Los Angeles), and half of it was being spoken by a guy where it was not his first language, as I myself would speak it if I tried. (But much better than I could speak it, as I can understand Spanish better than I can produce the words spontaneously in conversation.)
2. It was a film made during the pandemic, about two people talking to each other over screens. Duplass himself gave us that history with a little video intro, in which he bemoaned that he couldn't be there in person (that would have been fun) but that it was thematically appropriate that his greeting to us would have to be in this format. Indeed, seeing this movie in a cinema would probably be the weirder thing, given how it was created and what we've been through the past 18 months, as exemplified by this very festival, which had to scuttle its theatrical screenings in favor of online only.
Really liked the film. When I realized it was another film that was going to unfurl over Zoom, I got a little wary, as I'd already seen plenty of those in recent years as a kind of narrative stunt, even before the pandemic made it a somewhat necessary fallback option. But it's an extremely effective use of the format, not for reasons of "cleverness," but to show the sort of intimacy that can develop between two people through a computer screen.
And it's not that sort of "intimacy" either. Duplass' character is gay, which ruled out that sort of shipping from the start. In fact, we are just shipping for the friendship, which initially thrives on its obvious compatibility, and the fact that they both can be there for the other in difficult times. Of course there are threats to that -- the income inequality between the two being one -- otherwise there would be no conflict. But it ends up being one of those films with real heart and a real perceptiveness about human beings. Kind of like every other film Mark Duplass has ever been involved in.
I considered another Duplass two-hander that I haven't seen, Blue Jay, as the second half of my double feature when I couldn't scare up Cyrus in any of the obvious locations. But then I looked in a non-obvious location, and you know what? Cyrus is streaming on Disney+. That service just keeps on surprising me with its catalogue.
Cyrus was a favorite of mine in 2010 when it finished in my top ten of the year at #9. For reasons I can't really fathom, I've never gotten back to it for a second viewing. So when I decided a Duplass movie would be a good way to keep the evening's vibe going, this one immediately jumped to mind.
Still love it. The cast is great of course -- John C. Reilly, Marisa Tomei, Jonah Hill, Catherine Keener -- but I had worried that Hill's role in the movie might seem too over-the-top to me today. Hardly. There's a touch of post-Step Brothers in the relationship between Reilly and Hill, but it's like the Duplass version of Step Brothers, where everything is life-sized and the ways the characters sabotage each other are subtle. Plus, like all Duplass movies, tons of heart in the end.
Okay, that's a wrap on MIFF 69. Maybe things will be back to "normal" with MIFF 70 a year from now.
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