MIFF, sort of

It may seem a little late in the year for my first MIFF post. In reality, you probably have only a vague idea when the Melbourne International Film Festival starts each year, but trust me, it's late. The festival is already starting later than it used to, as the days when it caught the tail end of July appear to be gone. But there was still a three-day delay between the August 5th opening night and last night, August 8th, when I finally got around to watching my first MIFF movie of 2021. 

That's probably because this year's festival feels well and truly compromised, even more so than it did last year.

COVID is the compromiser, of course, and logically, COVID should be less of a problem this year than it was last. Well, yes and no on that.

It's less of a problem because we are not, in 2021, locked down with a nightly curfew like we were last year. August of 2020 was a month of particular seclusion, if I remember correctly.

But it's more of a problem because we thought we were going to have something approaching a normal festival this year ... and this latest lockdown, which began last Thursday and does not figure to end this week, has proven to us the naivete of our assumptions.

It was always the idea to have MIFF 69 ("Huh huh, huh huh." - Butthead) exist partially online and partially in cinemas. They had even expanded the number of venues showing MIFF movies so they could sell the same number of tickets while still having the venues less densely packed. Then there were some movies that were always only going to be available through MIFFPlay, the streaming wing of MIFF, or in some cases, available in both places.

To accommodate the last lockdown -- which only just ended a week before this one started -- MIFF had already moved the theatrical screenings back a week, starting this coming Friday rather than last Friday, to give us additional clearance from the appearance of threat. The MIFFPlay movies were also expanded to be available for the entire duration of the festival, from the 5th to the 22nd, as a sort of compensation. 

The problem is, the current lockdown -- which features an alarming number of new daily cases by Victorian lockdown standards -- is not likely to end this week. And it needs to end if anyone is going to get to their first theatrical screenings, scheduled (quite ominously) for Friday the 13th.

Me, I'm hoping that at least the venue my wife and I are supposed to attend on Friday -- the Coburg drive-in -- might be allowed to go forward with its screenings, since social distancing is built into the drive-in experience. But I know that is not the reality of a lockdown, so our Zola viewing probably will not go forward, considering the way things are looking now.

So they should just push everything that was going to screen at a theater into MIFFPlay, as they did last year, right?

Not so fast. Last year was different. Last year they knew the score coming in.

When a festival gets the rights to show a particular film, there are very strict guidelines on when it can be shown and to whom. This is why some of the online screenings sell out. It's not that there is a finite number of digital streams of a movie -- the very concept of that is ludicrous -- but that the distributor does not want so many people to see the films that it destroys the potential for profit of an eventual theatrical run in the local market. It's possible that some of these terms could be renegotiated, but it's not entirely clear that this is what will happen. As far as I'm aware, MIFF hasn't even issued a statement about what is likely to happen in the event that people cannot go to theaters this weekend, and understandably, does not want to speculate, thereby potentially propagating misinformation and further customer frustration. 

At least I've finally gotten started on 2021 with my first MIFFPlay screening on Sunday night, Cooper Raiff's Freshman Year.

Don't recognize the title, but recognize the name Cooper Raiff? That's because this film was released in the U.S. last year as Shithouse, which is kind of a funny reversal, because "freshman year" is more of an American term and "shithouse" is more of an Australian term. Here, I'll use it in a sentence: "Sure, I'll hit a ball around with you, but I'm really shithouse at tennis." Yes, it's an adjective. 

I wish I could say it had gotten my MIFF off to a better start. I expected this to be an easy win for me, as it had been likened to Before Sunrise, which I really liked, and had been praised by the hosts of the first podcast I ever listened to (and obviously still do), Filmspotting.

Turns out, no. Raiff's character is no Ethan Hawke. He's a college freshman who is weirdly always on the verge of tears because he misses his mommy. That's an over-simplification, and there's a dead father in there potentially contributing to some of these emotions, but I was kind of taken aback by how weirdly babyish this character is. 

I think it has something to do with my expectations. Most movies about characters adjusting to college life have an aspirational quality, like you want to be the main character, either because he's cool or because he's a screw-up in relatable ways. The character who talks to a stuffed animal from home, when he's not crying on his phone to his mother because he misses her, does not meet those preconceived notions.

Too bad because I really like the actress Dylan Gelula, who is Raiff's co-star.

Also, I know it would have still been the same movie, but I think I would have liked it better if they'd just stuck with this:

Well, maybe I'll get a better result on my second MIFF film, which I plan to watch tonight.

And I also hope this will get me into as much of a "MIFF groove" as is possible in a year when so much is up in the air, when it feels so little like the time to make annual rites approximate what they've been in the past.

To put it another way: Here's hoping this year's MIFF won't be shithouse.