One of the challenges a critic faces each year is to keep up with new theatrical releases while the Melbourne International Film Festival is in progress, a task complicated by trying not to trample on the good graces of the critic's wife. And there was a movie dropping during MIFF this year that I felt like I just had to review on ReelGood, because our readers would ask after it if I didn't.
So yes, I caught one train early to work on Friday and left in time to see the 4 o'clock showing of Asteroid City downstairs from my office, before the 6:30 start of my MIFF double feature.
It worked out unexpectedly well, with no desperate rushing. The only thing I couldn't do was walk from Cinema Kino at the end of Collins Street to the Hoyts at Melbourne Central between the 6 p.m. ending of Asteroid City and the 6:30 p.m. start of Anselm. So I just took a free tram instead, and arrived with plenty of time to get my 3D glasses and find a good seat.
Yes, I said 3D glasses. And yes, I'm skipping over discussing Asteroid City -- I'll have a review up in a day or two -- to get to the first actual MIFF film.
And in a festival where I always make note of firsts when they occur, this was definitely my first MIFF film in 3D.
We tend to think of 3D as being reserved for your Avatars or your Marvels or for some other big-canvas film that was obviously designed with the most methods of upselling the customer in mind, but 3D does occasionally make its appearances in the arthouse as well. One example that comes to mind was when Gaspar Noe made his film Love in 3D. I didn't see it that way, but the experience of watching a penis ejaculate off the screen at me would have probably been worth the price of admission.
Anselm doesn't have any ejaculating penises, but it couldn't get any more arthouse, being a documentary about an artist as it is. The artist is Anselm Kiefer, about whom I had never heard prior to this film, despite a career in the public eye that dates all the way back to the 1960s. The German sculptor and painter uses a variety of forms to confront the viewer as well as to interrogate German history, particularly the Holocaust. One memorable installation of his, which is somewhat the centerpiece of this film, involves fancy 19th century dresses posed on armature, but instead of a head coming out of the top, there's a stack of bricks, or a sundial, or some other blossoming feature that gives them an alien quality. We also see his process of covering a large canvas in straw, igniting it in flame, dousing the flames with water and then painting over the charred remains of the surface of the canvas.
Watching the film -- which was directed by Wim Wenders, I should say -- was overall impressive, despite periods when I thought it was becoming tedious and was waiting for it to end. As a documentary, it leaves you disoriented for quite some time, as it introduces Kiefer through his works and the poetry of Paul Celan more than any narrative about his life or career reliant on talking heads. We do get a clear sense of his influences and the phases of his career over the course of the film, and it wouldn't be accurate to say Anselm is difficult to follow, to the extent that you are trying to follow it -- it's more like a walk through one of his installations, in a glorious third dimension that makes you feel like you are really there. However, that also made it feel more like something I would watch in a museum than in a movie theater. So while I didn't love it, I respected it enough that it will make for a good next MIFF review on ReelGood, well in advance of its final showing next Saturday afternoon.
Unlike my third movie of the night, the Kiwi film Shut Eye, directed by Tom Levesque. He and star Sarah May were both in attendance, so I made sure to hightail it out of there before the Q&A session began. As the film was going on, I tried to think of a decent question to ask them, since I hate that awkwardness of no one asking the filmmakers anything about their film that they are obviously very proud of. When I decided I couldn't think of anything I could legitimately ask where I actually cared about the answer, I decided just to get out of there so I wouldn't have to witness it, if indeed that was what was about to go down.
To be fair, I might have been in a better mood for Shut Eye if a) I'd liked Anselm a little bit better, b) I'd had enough time after the movie to get the wantons I wanted to get (I think the place I used to go has shut down, and I didn't really have the time anyway) instead of the lukewarm pizza slices I ended up buying from one of those places that sells them by the slice, or c) it weren't my third film of the day.
The film concerns a woman named Sierra (Millie Van Kol) who has insomnia and severe wallflower tendencies, who becomes obsessed with an ASMR live streamer (May). I'd found myself interested in the film for two reasons. For one, it was giving me Ingrid Goes West vibes, that having also been a film I saw (and loved) at MIFF. Then there's the fact that I find ASMR fascinating. A couple years ago I thought I was going to get into ASMR and even subscribed to a channel on YouTube, though ultimately, I only watched one or two videos back at that time.
The movie is curiously ambiguous about what it actually wants to be. Yes I suppose Sierra does become obsessed with May's Kate, but only because the streamer originally reaches out to her to ask if she wants to hang out. This seems like strange behavior for the internet's version of a public figure to reach out to a rando in her viewing audience, when the rando has only posted some shallow ALL CAPS thoughts with every word abbreviated to the point of being nearly unintelligible. Why pick out this one person on what appears to be a healthy stream of other comments? And why confuse us about who is obsessed with whom?
And these AMSR videos bothered me to no end due to a failure by the filmmakers to notice a particular design detail. You know how when you are watching a livestream, there's that little icon that shows you how many others are also watching? I noticed that this ASMR streamer had 506 other viewers in the first stream Sierra attends, which I thought seemed like a decent amount and made it all the more unlikely that she would pick Sierra out for personal engagement. And then I noticed that through perhaps four other distinct streams, each time she has exactly 506 viewers. I can't believe no one noticed this at any point in the editing process.
I'll stop dunking on this small film from New Zealand, I promise, but I did want to say that its biggest missed opportunity was how it used, or rather failed to use, ASMR. The fact that the ASMR helps Sierra get to sleep creates the opportunity for some really interesting sound design and the chance to explore other themes related specifically to ASMR and in what way this comforts Sierra. Unfortunately, ASMR ultimately has very little to do with anything else in the story -- this person could have been playing with her electric train set just as easily as she could have been crinkling candy wrappers into microphones for all it ultimately has to do with the true themes of the film, which arrive rather suddenly at the end and without sufficient preparation within the dialogue.
Okay, my next MIFF outing is on Wednesday.
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