In the end, the 12 films I did watch represented some of the best international diversity I have ever had on my slate of films.
But before I get to that, let me wrap the last week of watching movies at home through MIFFPlay, the nine additional days during which approximately 35 films were made available to stream, for "only" $15 as opposed to the $26.50 they cost you to see in the cinema.
After my final theatrical screening last Saturday night, I took Sunday night off but then got right back to it on Monday, knowing I had to use three more free passes for streaming films before they would expire the following Sunday. As it turned out, the movie my wife wanted to watch wasn't among the three I had identified for myself, so I purchased a fourth.
Despite being particularly tired that day, I opted to watch a movie because it was only 75 minutes long. Unfortunately, about 20 minutes into Art Talent Show, I noticed it was actually 105 minutes long. That's a pretty significant error by MIFF.
Fortunately, I did get into it and ultimately found it a pretty potent snapshot of what it means to be an artist in present-day Prague and whether this is something we should celebrate or a source for despair.
The documentary shows us a bunch of hopefuls auditioning for acceptance at a prestigious art institute in Prague. Their prospective teachers put them through a gauntlet of interview challenges that test their mettle as artists, and we get to hear their sometimes insightful but usually vapid or insipid thoughts as creative types in the modern world. Their teachers privately scoff at some of their attempts at art and some of the gaps in their knowledge. In one particularly cringey scene, the teachers run through a series of important Czech artists and the candidate is not familiar with a single one.
This film isn't just about making fun of today's young people, though -- if that's a fair way to characterize what it is about at any point. Rather, it's a captivating look at these gatekeepers of the art world and how their own thinking needs to shift in order to incorporate the work of today's artists into their overall framework for thinking about the local art scene. And it ends on one of my favorite shots I've seen this year.
When I put on The Face of the Jellyfish on Tuesday night, I realized I'd gotten confused, and this was actually the 75-minute movie, not Art Talent Show. That's a pretty significant error by Vance.
I possibly would have enjoyed 105 minutes of this beguiling Argentinian film that I watched on Tuesday night, about a woman who awakens one day to find that her face has changed. She still looks normal, in fact possibly more beautiful than she did before. But it's not her. It's someone else's face.
I already wrote about this film as my final of four MIFF reviews for 2023, and I think you can tell I ran out of steam a bit as I was doing it. But because I've already written about, I'll just link to that review here and move on.
Really good film, though, if you can ever track it down, which I doubt you will as it will probably not have a very conventional release.
My wife's choice
Staying in South America but moving from Argentina to a remote island off Chile, Sorcery tells the story of a 19th century village where natives, second- and third-generation people of Spanish descent and the more newly arrived Germans -- not sure if I have all my times correct on that -- live together under an abusive power dynamic, with the Germans treating the natives in sub-human ways. When one particularly cruel man thinks his servant's family has caused the death of their cattle through black magic, he sics two dogs on the girl's father, killing him in a shocking scene. This begins a cycle of revenge in which the girl learns to wield the very black magic she was falsely accused of using.
Sorcery is a great setup for a film, but it moves very slowly and relies a lot more on suggestion than any actual witchcraft pyrotechnics. In fact, so modest are its supernatural bona fides that it's probably more useful as a study of the uneasy sociopolitical landscape on this island than it is as a film with particularly strong genre components. In the end my feelings toward it were a bit muted, and its slow pace made it a bit of a struggle for me to get through. Which is a shame because the kind of thing you want to do in a marriage, if at all possible, is endorse your partner's choice of a movie to watch.
I realized that the biggest issue with Sorcery wasn't that it was slow, or that it did anything it was trying to do less well than it should have for the kind of movie it wanted to be. The issue is that when I'm watching a movie by myself these days, I almost always pause for a nap at some point while watching, which (sometimes) gives me a little boost of energy to continue. While watching with my wife, I couldn't pause it, so the struggle to get through had more to do with needing my nap than with any deficiencies in the storytelling.
Every year at MIFF since 2016 I have watched some form of what I've referred to as "outsider animation," and it took until my 12th and final viewing of 2023 for me to keep that tradition alive. Speaking of naps, I started watching on Saturday night, and the length of one of these naps made it so I had no hope of finishing it until today, which I did, about four-and-a-half hours before the window to watch it would have expired.
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman also sort of perfectly encapsulates the very international MIFF I've had this year. It was made by a French director about Japan -- it's based on the short stories of Haruki Marakumi -- but as far as I can tell, the spoken language was always English. In any case, all the credits are in English and all the signs in the movie are in English. IMDB says the spoken language of the film was French, but MIFF had no opportunity to choose an original language and have subtitles, so I just decided that maybe English was the original language after all.
I used the word "beguiling" on The Face of the Jellyfish and I'd say it applies here too. Although the film is separated into chapters, it's not a series of unrelated short stories, as I'd originally assumed, and more a case of about three interweaving narratives, the characters from which we revisit throughout the film. It takes place in the wake of the earthquake in 2011 that cause the Fukashima nuclear plant meltdown, and follows a handful of characters indirectly impacted by it as they take stock of their lives. Really this earthquake is just background, but there are seismic shifts with these characters. A woman leaves her husband after staring at the news for five days. That husband goes adrift after he's offered a severance package from his work. And an older employee at the same company is recruited by a talking frog to fight the worms under the city of Tokyo that threaten to cause another disaster.
Yes, as realistic as the film seems at points, it does have a talking frog. Its elliptical nature made it pretty enchanting.
Okay I am definitely out of steam on MIFF 2023 -- also it's 10:30 on Sunday night -- but I did want to get back to what I told you about this being my most international MIFF.
Here are the films I saw and the countries they either are set in, originate from or otherwise deal with thematically:
1) Past Lives - Canada, U.S., South Korea
2) The Bird With the Crystal Plumage - Italy
3) It Lives Inside - U.S., India
4) Anselm - Germany
5) Shut Eye - New Zealand
6) Bad Behaviour - U.S., New Zealand
7) Banel & Adama - France, Senegal
8) Monster - Japan
9) Art Talent Show - Czech Republic
10) The Face of the Jellyfish - Argentina
11) Sorcery - Chile
12) Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman - France, Japan
That's at least one movie from every continent, if you consider Australia and New Zealand to be part of a continent called Oceania. (I don't really, but for these purposes it works for me.) I've certainly never been had that kind of wide reach in my MIFF viewings.
Well, time to wrap up shop here for another year. Speaking of continents, I'll be back soon, possibly as soon as tomorrow, with a write-up of my viewing of Australia as part of my Baz Jazz Hands series.
No comments:
Post a Comment