After an exhausting and very successful trip abroad, however, I felt ready to just give the whole thing a miss, to use the Australian phrasing. It felt like a lot to wrap my head around. And for the first time in five years or so, I had applied for no press credentials for the festival, meaning I'd need to pay the full $15 ticket price for each film -- not a particularly appetizing prospect after having dropped so much money on that trip.
But then it happened ... I got my usual MIFF itch.
And having only a fraction of the titles to choose from made the whole thing feel a lot more manageable.
So on the second night back last Sunday, when I was really too jet-lagged to be focusing on any movie that required more than my minimal intellectual engagement, I watched the first of an eventual five movies in this year's MIFF.
It was supposed to be six, but I'll get to that in a moment.
For now, a recap of what I did watch, and some of my thoughts.
Hit the Road (2021, Panah Panahi)
Watched: Sunday, August 21st
This was one of my "must sees" in this year's festival. I love Iranian cinema, and was interested to see what the son of one of today's most celebrated Iranian directors could do. It had already gotten some buzz on Filmspotting, and I thought it made a good first viewing because, indeed, its road trip setting convinced me it wasn't going to be too heady or difficult to grasp in a sleep-deprived state.
As it turned out, I probably shouldn't have watched it, and wouldn't have if I'd only gotten caught up on my ReelGood email a little earlier. The movie opened in Australian cinemas on Thursday, meaning it violated my usual MIFF guiding principle of trying to see only movies I wouldn't soon be able to see elsewhere. Plus my email contained an invite for a free screener of the movie in order to review it, which I did actually ask for in case I needed to brush up on it before I wrote that review (which posted last Thursday). As it turned out I wrote the review from memory -- you can read it here -- which is just as well because I didn't like it so much that I really wanted to watch it again only a few days later.
But as you can see, I did quite like it, especially the ways it broke from the cherished realism/naturalism of the Iranian New Wave. As I say in that review, Iranian cinema is known for blending truth and fiction, though usually that represents itself as straddling the line between documentary and narrative film. Panahi straddles that line with his occasional use of magical realism, or at least devices that put one in a magical realist head space. That touch really stood out to me in a nice film about a family on a road trip to smuggle their older son out of the country, unbeknownst to the younger son.
Watched: Wednesday, August 24th
After taking two nights off from MIFF -- one to watch my movie for Settling the Scorsese, one to catch up on a backlog of emails and other life admin -- I returned with this high-concept but ultimately slow-moving story of a near-future Japan where euthanasia is not only legalized, but even incentivized, for citizens over 75 years old.
I think I was expecting it to hit the sci-fi elements of the story a bit harder, and maybe play its hand a little more strongly on the themes of what it means to end your life at a time of your own choosing. (And is it really your choosing? Discuss.) Instead it's more of a slow burn featuring a few key storylines, each infused with melancholy more than with tight plot mechanics. And maybe this was even the right approach to the material, but even on my fourth full day back from the trip, I was a bit too tired to appreciate this one as much as I might have. That's especially the case given that there's a grab-your-attention cold open that reeks of studio notes -- not that a Hollywood studio had anything to do with this -- that, if memory serves, never actually pays off in the story.
Watched: Thursday, August 25th
On my older son's birthday -- he's 12 now -- it was time to fill my annual slot reserved for an "outsider animation" film. (After returning from the arcade, where I had a cocktail.) This slot has been filled in some capacity each of the past six or seven years, and My Sunny Maad stood out like this year's obvious choice. It's the story of a Czech woman who marries an Afghan man and then moves to post-Taliban Kabul, where she's surprised? I guess? to be forced to cover herself and to have no rights. Although it was nominated for a Golden Globe last year, it didn't surface anywhere that I was aware of and I'm happily ranking it with my 2022 films.
I hoped this would scale the heights of a personal favorite of mine from last decade, Cartoon Saloon's The Breadwinner, which covers a similar part of the world and similar themes. It didn't get there, but it got into four-star range, both for the look at the world in question and the provocative use of its relatively simple animation. I couldn't help but being a bit frustrated with the protagonist, who doesn't seem to have properly considered what lay ahead of her, and then takes only some guarded measures to try to improve her situation -- guarded, I suppose, because anything more strident than that could quite literally result in her own death. Still, we expect our protagonists to have a bit more agency, even when their lack of agency is part of the problem. (Don't worry, she does get there in the end.)
I also wasn't quite sure what I thought of the note it ends on, but I won't go into any further detail on that in case you want to seek it out -- which you should.
Watched: Friday, August 26th
My only afternoon-slotted movie -- which I watched after work in my garage on Friday -- is from a name you might recognize. Or you might not. But if you read this blog around the end of 2020, you might.
Robert Machoian directed my #3 movie of 2020, The Killing of Two Lovers, which didn't make it to most places until last year. But I saw it at MIFF in 2020, and one of my favorite goals at each new MIFF is to catch up with the latest from directors I may have discovered at a previous MIFF. The Integrity of Joseph Chambers has the same star as well, Clayne Crawford, who was so memorable in Lovers. He plays the title character, a man who, perhaps under the influence of conservative media, believes that "the end is coming" and needs to learn how to provide for himself in his family. In this particular instance, that means going to a friend's private forest land and shooting himself a deer -- even though he's not particularly experienced with guns or with outdoor survival of any kind. If he'd only wait for his friend who owns the land, who will be available next week ... but Joseph Chambers has got places to be and deer to shoot.
What follows is a sparsely cast "what would you do?" type consideration of a moral dilemma resulting from a mishap. The concept is explored interestingly and I didn't want the film to be "more," as such -- I just wanted it to be as good as The Killing of Two Lovers. It was never going to be that. However, it's a nice next step after a movie that was certainly difficult to follow, in my estimation, and I liked seeing that Machoian has attracted some higher profile on-screen collaborators, as this film features appearances by Jordana Brewster and Jeffrey Dean Morgan.
Watched: Saturday, August 27th
This was the talk of the festival, if the MIFF emails I glanced at over the past few weeks are to be believed. It won an audience award, or some other award, and it attracted my attention by virtue of being from director Saul Williams, known previously to me as a poet and a musician, who has actually collaborated with my favorite musician, Trent Reznor. Then the description was the sort of potentially insane oddity that drew me further in: "Afrofuturist musical." When I mentioned it to my wife -- whose last name is Frost -- she had also heard the buzz, having evidently read the same emails I read. She was eager to watch it with me as her only MIFF film in 2022. As such, we planned it for Saturday, as kind of a "closing night" film -- even if it would be both opening and closing night for her.
As it turns out, Neptune Frost may have been more of a Tuesday night film. Or a Tuesday afternoon film after a morning where you've had a good night's sleep and have a relatively clear head. Simply put, this was a challenge. The first challenge was not one that we shouldn't have been able to overcome, but does play into your expectations for a Saturday night film -- it wasn't in English. I guess I'd made the assumption of English based on the co-director being American.
Then this film is -- how should I put this -- highly experimental. It doesn't really allow you to get your bearings, and I don't even know that I could really explain what happens in it, except that it involves a non-binary character who is involved in some sort of cyberpunk collective that has aims at overthrowing parts of the Rwandan labor infrastructure. Most of the dialogue is more poetic than practical in terms of communicating what's going on in the narrative. I'd love to be able to give you a better description of this film, but I'm ashamed to admit that I was enduring it more than engaging with it for most of the time -- a sentiment shared by my wife. That said, I respect the movie immensely -- I've never seen anything like it -- and it has a particularly great sound design. Even if only out of guilt, I couldn't give it any less than three stars on Letterboxd.
Domingo and the Mist (2022, Ariel Escalante)
Watched: Didn't watch
Serves me right for trying to sneak in one more movie before the 11:59 Sunday night viewing deadline. We'd already had our sort of "closing night" with Neptune Frost, but since that was sort of unsatisfying, I was even more determined to see a sixth MIFF film -- which would still keep me under $100 in total expenditures for the festival. I had a shortlist of 15 films and had at one point thought I might watch at least half of them -- when I had planned to watch more than one on certain days, and not take a two-night break. So at least this sixth seemed like it should be doable.
Well, it would have been if the movie had had subtitles.
Unlike the previous four foreign language films I'd watched, there were no subtitles in the streaming copy of Domingo and the Mist, a film about an elderly man who won't leave his property in rural Costa Rica because the land is still being haunted by his dead wife in the form of a mist. There were comparisons made to the work of Apichitpong Weerasethakul, and though he can be sort of hit and miss with me, I thought it would be a worthwhile final Sunday night film -- short on dialogue and long on atmosphere. Well, short on dialogue is one thing, having no dialogue you can understand quite another. I tried to watch it without the subtitles, but I just decided there was too much meaning to infer to continue on this way.
I did try to turn on the subtitles, but I couldn't find a way to do this, and besides, it hadn't been necessary in Hit the Road, Plan 75, My Sunny Maad or Neptune Frost. I decided it was just broken, and I had to abandon the viewing and ask for my money back. This morning, a guy from MIFF wrote back to me to say he would do it, but to let me know that I did, indeed, need to turn on the subtitles. I wrote back saying I couldn't figure out how to do that, and he didn't respond, so what I should have done differently will likely remain a mystery.
It was already 10 o'clock by the time I gave up on being able to watch Domingo and the Mist. I could have still fired up one more film, assuming it was short enough, but there seemed to be a decent chance the streaming would be cut off entirely at 11:59, as per the many published listings of that time. So instead of watching one final MIFF film, I watched the new Predator movie Prey, which was just plain awesome.
For the first time since 2019, I hope to have a "normal" MIFF in 2023. Hopefully COVID will just be a distant memory, and the theater in which these films play will know to turn on the subtitles for me.
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