After a day of drinking, I realized that was ridiculous.
"A day of drinking" is a little misleading and makes me sound like someone 30 years younger than I am. (Or possibly an alcoholic.) College students engage in "a day of drinking."
But it's true that I had three beers while watching my friend play baseball on a beautiful afternoon. I used to play with him a few years ago, and his new team had made what they call "finals" here -- otherwise known as "the playoffs." A win would put them in the "grand final" (which we know of as "the finals"). Left to my own devices, I would have had only two beers, but my other friend who was watching with me convinced me to have one more after the game ended, as it was our first chance to catch up with the guy who had been playing. This was okay because I Ubered to the game in both directions (my wife needed the car), but also left me a little wobbly even from the mid-afternoon.
I had only about 45 minutes at home before leaving again for an evening that would culminate in actress Noemie Merlant's second directorial feature, The Balconettes. The movie didn't start until 9:15, but my wife and I had to catch the five o'clock train into the city in order to make a six o'clock dinner reservation.
The dinner was at a fancy restaurant called Supernormal, and it was fancy enough that the more ideal reservation times -- particularly if you are trying to match it up with a 9:15 movie -- were all taken. It ended up working out, though, because this was what was called "The Ultimate Supernormal Experience for 2 guests - Our premium banquet menu, guided beverage with our Sommelier, and the Supernormal cook book." So it took almost two hours to complete.
Why were we doing this particular dinner on this particular night, other than having a date night?
Well this was a present from my oldest friend for my 50th birthday last year. My wife and I were actually going to use it earlier this year, but had to cancel. There's a small part of my brain devoted to worrying over the potential expiration of an unused gift card, and though this one wasn't going to expire until 2026, that part of the brain receives a measure of relief when the gift card finally gets used.
I won't linger on the dinner except to say that the food was amazing and there was a lot of it. And the guided beverage included four more drinks, bringing my daily total up to seven.
At the time we left the house, I had not technically ruled out the idea of going to see my final MIFF film at 11:45 p.m., after The Balconettes ended, while my wife went home to relieve the babysitter (my sister-in-law). But the first of these four additional beverages ruled out the possibility that I would have the stamina for a midnight movie, meaning Vulcanizadora -- the latest from Buzzard director Joel Potrykus -- will remain a tantalizing mystery to me for now.
In truth, I didn't even have what it took to make it through The Balconettes.
Because there was still some time to kill between the end of dinner and the beginning of the movie, we went for yet another drink -- which would be eight for me over a period of eight hours. That's not totally unmanageable -- I wasn't sloppy or anything -- but you can imagine exhaustion was setting in by now. When you also factor in my son's soccer practice in the morning, I had spent a total of about three waking hours in my house that day, the rest of the time being out and about.
It didn't help, of course, that the film was in French.
Finally seeing a foreign film in MIFF 2024 was a much desired outcome. Not a single MIFF has ever gone by without me seeing a movie entirely in a foreign language, but this one had the chance. See, there was about five minutes when we thought we might have to cancel both the dinner and the movie on Saturday night because my wife had a friend visiting from abroad and this might be her only chance to see her. That ended up getting otherwise resolved, meaning that the tickets we'd gotten for The Balconettes would give us one movie in French. (Give me one movie, I should say. My wife has seen two movies in Chinese, one in Turkish, and I don't remember what all else.)
Whether that was a good thing or not, I was now questioning.
Despite getting the largest Pepsi you've ever seen at Hoyts Melbourne Central -- like, I don't know if they could even make it larger in the U.S. -- I spent a total of at least five to ten minutes of The Balconettes fully asleep. The rest of it felt like it took an eternity to get through, and I still had more than half my Pepsi left when it was over.
Because I was not at my best, it's hard to trust my own assessment of The Balconettes. It is, however, a lot easier to trust my wife's assessment. She had had half as many drinks as I had -- one fewer at dinner, and none at the baseball game, since she wasn't there. And she didn't much care for it either.
If you don't know the name Noemie Merlant, you probably know the face. She was the co-star of Celine Sciamma's Portrait of a Lady on Fire, my #2 movie of 2019 and #25 movie of the whole decade. And she accounted for my second straight MIFF movie directed by a French woman known primarily as an actress, after Ariane Labed's September Says on Wednesday night.
I think this movie has good aspirations and intentions. Described in the program as sort of a #metoo revenge fantasy, the story involves three women who spend a lot of time on their balconies -- the title in French is Les Femmes Au Balcon, which I believe translates to The Women of the Balcony -- during an awful heat wave in Marseilles. Merlant plays one of the women. At least one of them is an exhibitionist, as the actress Souheila Yacoub almost always has her breasts out -- which is nothing compared to the nudity Merlant herself gives us. So yes, if you have prurient interests, you might want to see this movie.
But then, you might also be one of its targets. There are a number of men behaving awfully in this movie -- at least three, though I may have slept through another one or two -- and the movie involves the revenge, intentional or otherwise, that these women get against these men. It isn't spoiling anything to tell you that people die, and the plot revolves around what to do with bodies and the like.
There's a bit of an awkward line being walked here though. On the one hand, there is a serious message about the casual malevolence and sexual violence men perpetrate on women. On the other, this is a madcap farce at times, and "loud" in the way I find a lot of French comedy to be loud. The combination doesn't really work, and the volume these characters are turned up to did not make me laugh.
Also, I quibbled with a lot of choices about how Merlant shoots this. I didn't like the quality of the images, but more than that, Merlant is guilty of holding her camera way too close the faces of her subjects, in a way I found almost grotesque. If it was the men, that might be the point. But it's the women, and I felt that it made it harder for me to sympathize with them, this shoving of the camera in their faces.
The film is very French, in that it is constantly confronting us with everybody's sexuality and wearing that as a badge of honor. I felt this was showy for the sake of being showy, and it wore thin on me very quickly.
But also, I was really, really tired.
I wouldn't have traded seeing my friend play baseball and having a lovely dinner with my wife -- and the drinking that went along with both -- for potentially liking my final MIFF film of 2024 a little better, and I'm not sure that would have been the outcome anyway.
So this brings another MIFF to a close.
I'm tempted to do a little recap, but it was only seven films I saw this year, and I did just do a recap of the 100 films I've seen over 11 years in my last MIFF post. So I might be a bit capped out.
I do want to acknowledge, though, that MIFF constitutes the time on the calendar each year when my attentions fully turn to current-year films, which will probably make up a good three quarters of my viewing from here until mid-January. And at least one film I saw at this year's festival -- Grand Theft Hamlet -- has already started to help shape the conversation around the top ten I'll be revealing five months from now.
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