MIFF: Duelling masters at my MIFF Astor debut

Asghar Farhadi and Hirokazu Kore-eda have a shared lineage in my personal film history as well as my personal MIFF history.

Both had a film in the early part of last decade that bowled me over, the first I had seen by the director in each case. For Farhadi, it was A Separation, my #1 of 2011. For Kore-eda, it was Like Father, Like Son, my #2 of 2014 (though its release year was 2013 in Japan). 

Both then popped up regularly at MIFF, each time feeling like a slam dunk in terms of films I wanted to be sure I got on my schedule. In the case of Farhadi, that meant seeing The Salesman in 2016 and Everybody Knows in 2018. With Kore-eda, I saw After the Storm in 2016, Shoplifters in 2018 and Monster in 2023. And in each case, only one of their films I saw was not in the very upper reaches of my list that year, as Everybody Knows was my #3 of 2018, and Shoplifters and Monster finished #11 and #4 of their respective years.

If Kore-eda got ahead of Farhadi, it's only because Kore-eda is prolific and Farhadi is not, though Farhadi is also from a country that punishes filmmakers for defying the government. In fact, MIFF in 2016 and 2018 both featured a film from each director. I'm not going to say they synched up like women spending a lot of time together and getting on the same cycles for their period, but if you want to say that, I won't disagree with you.

When I heard both directors were again having a film in 2026, I knew I had to get tickets for both. And when I learned both films were playing on the same day, a plan started to take shape.

And when I learned both films were playing, six hours apart, at the Astor Theatre on Saturday, August 8th, a plan really started to take shape.

You see, this would be my first time attending the Astor as part of MIFF. About damn time, I'd say.

The Astor Theatre is an old single-screen movie house in South Yarra with a ton of history. I don't see a lot of movies there, in part because it specializes in repertory screenings, in part because it does not take my critics card, and in part because of its location (more on that in a moment). But it's the place I saw The Hateful Eight in its properly projected 70 mm format, and I've seen a few repertory titles there as well. It's the kind of place you feel like it's a treat to attend.

The reason I don't go to its MIFF showings? Well, it's not in the CBD.

The benefit most MIFF venues have -- outside of the regional Victoria screenings -- is that you can ping pong between a half-dozen different theaters in Melbourne's central business district. If you are trying to go to two back to back, you need at most about 25 minutes to hoof it between the theaters, even if it's between the IMAX at the Melbourne Museum (where I saw I Saw the TV Glow a few years ago) and ACMI, which are probably the two venues most distant from each other.

You can't hoof it to the Astor at all. South Yarra is at best a train ride from the CBD, and enough of a train ride that you couldn't make it there after another movie in the CBD unless you had at least an hour between the two showings. Not that it would take you an hour, necessarily, just that you'd want to allow that much time to make sure nothing went wrong. After all, mechanized transport is outside of your control the way travelling on foot is not. You wouldn't feel good planning a night around it, in any case.

But two showings on a Saturday, when the CBD doesn't even need to enter to it? Now that was something I could go for.

Kore-eda's Sheep in the Box was playing at noon, and Farhadi's Parallel Tales was playing at 6. So all I had to do was leave my house around 11 to make sure I had plenty of time to get there, and then bring some stuff with me to kill the 3+ hours between the two movies. And because South Yarra and neighboring St. Kilda are nice places to spend an afternoon, it sounded quite nice to just make a day of it -- unlike the night before, when my MIFF downtime was more nebulous and unsatisfying.

So I found parking more easily than I thought, though only between movies could I confirm that I had, indeed, parked legally, and that there wasn't a ticket waiting for me. I know the general rule of thumb is that if you can't see a street sign that speaks to how long you can park, you can park there forever, but my spot was only a few blocks from the Astor, so it seemed too good to be true.

My first impression of the Astor, which I had not attended in any form (could it be?) for almost ten years, is that it was an heir apparent to the Comedy Theatre (which no longer shows MIFF movies) in terms of the comfort of the seats. Which is to say, no comfort at all. Like that other theater, the Astor seems to have most of its original fixtures, including hard wrought-iron seats with cushions that hardly meet the definition. The bigger problem, for a tall guy like me, was that there was no good place between the seats in the row in front to wedge my foot, which I often need to do during a movie. Suffice it to say that I learned my lesson in the first movie, and in the second one, opted for a chair that had no row in front of it, and plenty of room to stretch my legs.

And so started Sheep in the Box, which was, sadly, firmly in the lower half of the nine Kore-eda films I've seen. 

The director is known as a humanistic director of realistic family dramas, which places him as an heir to Ozu, though I don't know if that thought is original to me. In saying that, I forget that one of the first films he ever made, After Life, was about a posthumous bureaucratic waystation, making it not realistic in the slightest. However, let's just say that all his other films I've seen are safely within the bounds of the realism of our present day world.

Sheep in the Box deviates from that in that it is set in the near future, where drone delivery has become common, and refrigerators try to keep you to your diet. And unfortunately, its actual subject is derivative in a way a film by Kore-eda rarely is. 

The film is basically Steven Spielberg's AI: Artificial Intelligence, if it was made by a Japanese director who liked realistic modern-day films that are humanistic at their core. It imagines a company that can make replacements for your loved ones, specifically your children, should they die prematurely, and it invites all the familiar questions of whether an AI can have a soul and the capacity to love -- and whether we have the capacity to love it in return.

I'm not going to say this film is clumsy, nor that it isn't mildly touching in spots. But my concern was that Kore-eda doesn't do enough with the ideas that I personally first remember thinking about in AI, especially given that the 25 years since AI have featured a lot of other variations on that theme, particularly in the last five years. Nearly every director is freaking out about AI these days, and I guess I just don't feel like Kore-eda has ever, in his career, done what "nearly every director" is likely to do. He brings his own touch to it, to be sure, but it wasn't enough for me, and the film went on for 20 minutes longer than I thought it should.

After checking to be sure I didn't get a parking ticket -- and that was just for my ease of mind, since I wouldn't have bothered to move it once I'd already gotten the ticket -- I continued walking in that direction to St. Kilda, which took another 30 minutes or so of walking. Which was good, because I needed to get my steps in for the day.

I got to a cafe just as it was about to close, but not before they made me a flat white and an almond croissant. (They didn't make the croissant fresh. They already had it.) I noodled around on my computer while enjoying these, and would have liked to linger longer, except that people want to get out of there ASAP when they close their cafe for the day. They didn't rush me, but I rushed myself.

So then I spent another hour-and-a-half on the beach. This was really nice, as I set myself up at a picnic table for a restaurant that was closed, meaning they weren't using it. They didn't rope off their seating area, so I didn't feel like I was trespassing or anything. And I took my shoes off and kneaded my feet in the sand, which added to a sense of relaxation. I caught up on more computer stuff, including writing part of yesterday's post about my first night of MIFF. Sooner than I imagined, it was time to get back, especially if I wanted to grab a kebab on my way back for my dinner.

I again arrived in plenty of time and even ran into someone I knew in the lobby of the Astor. I caught up with him a little bit about film and MIFF in general, though I then extricated myself, because he was with a friend and I didn't want to be a third wheel. 

Farhadi's Parallel Tales, like Sheep in the Box, was a bit of a deviation for the director. We say we want our favorite directors to expand their repertoire and not limit themselves, but do we really? I'm not so sure.

At its core, the film still has the sort of "he said she said" social dynamics of what I have often referred to as the domestic thrillers he makes, whose conflicts arise from semantics and misunderstandings. That's there in this film, but it's a bit more high concept, which I didn't think suited him as well. And sadly, the film, set in Paris, contains zero Iranian content. 

I thought the first character we meet, played by Adam Bessa, might be Iranian by heritage, but IMDB says nothing about that. He's "just" a Frenchman, it would appear. And we know the others are French, because they are played by such French legends as Vincent Cassel, Isabelle Huppert and (in just one scene) Catherine Deneuve. 

It's not the first time Farhadi has made films outside Iran, though The Past at least contained Iranian characters. Everybody Knows does not contain any Iranian characters and is set in Spain, but in that case, I don't know, it just worked for me. (I'm sure Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz had something to do with that.)

This one? I missed the Iranian connection for sure. It felt like "just" a French film, which was not what I was looking for.

And the meta story worked for me only sporadically as well. Without going into too much of a synopsis, let's just say Huppert plays an aging writer whose publisher (Deneuve) tells her her books are old-fashioned and won't sell. So she essentially throws out her current manuscript, which is a love triangle based on what she imagines is happening in an apartment across the way in which the two men and one woman produce foley work for films. Adam, the character played by the aforementioned Adam Bassa, is an ex-con who has been hired to be sort of an assistant to the aging writer, and he essentially fishes the manuscript out of the trash and passes it off as his own. He uses it has an excuse to meet the female foley artist, who has caught his fancy, and a "life imitates art" situation arises out of her imagined story in the manuscript and the actual reality of the three foley artists.

Parallel Tales deserves more than that quick synopsis if we want to pull apart everything it's doing, but I've got to be honest with you: I've got to go make dinner.

Suffice it to say that although the film grew on me as it went, and I found there to be some interesting elements in how the story wraps up, before then I did not get enough of a sense of what makes this distinctly an Asghar Farhadi film. Like, I wouldn't say I was surprised if you told me he'd directed it, but that certain something that has allowed almost all of his films to profoundly impact me -- save the aforementioned The Salesman -- just wasn't present here in the quantity I wanted it to be.

Okay, I now have almost a week off from MIFF before I return for another double feature next Friday. Back to our regular programming for a few days. 

MIFF: Kore-eda's record

My final in-cinema viewing for the 2023 Melbourne International Film Festival set a record for its director.

I talked earlier this week about how I had seen four Kelly Reichardt films during MIFF, but only two of them were official MIFF viewings. The other two were iTunes rentals, and I sort of counted First Cow as a MIFF viewing because I watched it the same night it was the festival's opening night film in 2020, when the whole thing was online.

But on Saturday, Hirokazu Kore-eda became my first director with three official MIFF viewings, meaning he has this one to himself.

The first of these viewings came in 2016, when I flocked to After the Storm after Like Father, Like Son had blown me away a few years earlier, ending up as the #2 movie of its year and ultimately my #6 for the whole decade: After the Storm was a four-star experience for me and finished about #30 for the year. I followed that up two years later with Shoplifters, which finished just outside my top ten of 2018 and earned 4.5 stars on Letterboxd.

Monster, his newest film, which debuted (as most Kore-eda films do) at Cannes earlier this summer, gives him a third official MIFF viewing and breaks a tie with a half-dozen other directors, among them Reichardt, Asghar Farhadi, Yorgos Lanthimos and Peter Strickland. 

If I'd been around for MIFF 2022, Kore-eda probably would have set this record last year, since Broker played at last year's festival. (Yes, Kore-eda is prolific.) I still haven't seen that one, as it wasn't released anywhere in time to rank it with my 2022 films, at which point it ceased to be a priority for me -- though I do think of myself as a Kore-eda completist, so I'll get to it soon. (A completist who has about half the Kore-eda filmography complete. Ha.)

It wasn't a particularly glamorous ending to the festival in terms of the theater that was hosting the movie, that being the Hoyts multiplex in the middle of Melbourne Central, a high-end shopping center. But I follow the movie, not the theater, and Monster was obviously a hot ticket as they were playing it on two screens in adjacent auditoriums. After a few slices of pizza in the food court I found my way to a very good seat in the middle.

This was a bit of a slow burn for me. For the first 15 minutes or so I was a little disoriented, until I realized that was part of the film's design. Monster is a bit indebted to Kore-eda's fellow countryman Akira Kurosawa, whose Rashomon is always a point of reference when a story shows the same event through the perspectives of multiple characters. But I say it's "always" a point of reference to indicate that it doesn't bother me, that lots of films do a similar thing and Rashomon merely got there first. I think it's a really interesting style of helping us empathize with multiple characters -- thereby fulfilling Roger Ebert's idealized notion of movies being a machine for creating empathy. 

If we're already using the problematic word "indebted," I'll say that Kore-eda is also here indebted to the films of the aforementioned MIFF alum Asghar Farhadi, inasmuch as Farhadi has any trademark on his own approach to filmmaking. I've often called Farhadi's films "domestic whodunnits," in that they present complex social mysteries driven by misunderstandings, whose details only steadily reveal themselves over the course of the narrative, and which tend to paint all the characters in lights that are varying degrees of sympathetic. If someone does something bad in a Farhadi film, it is usual inspired by their own hopeless circumstances, and not a reflection of the nastiness of their soul.

In Monster, there are multiple central events in question: a mysterious fire at a so-called "hostess bar;" an accusation of violence by a teacher toward a student; the possibility that that student is also bullying another student; a terrible accident involving the school's principal and her grandchild. We see multiple characters' versions of these events in slightly adjusted form, though the way I'm describing it actually sounds more high concept than it really is. This isn't one of those Groundhog Day ripoffs where you watch the same footage over and over again, because Kore-eda is a skilled enough filmmaker to entrust us with intuiting how events we haven't seen before relate to events we have. 

Anyway, my initial difficulty getting my bearings in the story were rewarded quickly enough and fully enough, with a story of great humanism and nuance, that Monster rapidly rose for me to the best of the festival and one of the best so far of 2023. I won't go into a huge number of details since these MIFF posts aren't meant to be proper reviews of the films, but I do want you to know that you should make it a priority to see Monster when it comes to a theater near you.

And speaking of MIFF posts, that's the last one for theatrical screenings in 2023. 

But wait there's more!

MIFF shifts online now, where a smaller selection of less prominent films continue to be available until the 27th. And this week I expect to see at least three and possibly as many as four before they finally cut us off for good next Sunday. I've written enough MIFF this year that I may talk recap them all in one post at the end of the week ... unless one of them inspires me to write sooner.

Abandoning the normal

One of the things I've liked so much about the four Hirokazu Kore-eda movies I've seen is that they focus on normal people, dealing with a heightened sense of normal life.

As the Japanese master has made his first non-Japanese language film, he's made a change in his subject matter as well, and not a welcome one.

Instead of normal people dealing with heightened reality, it's famous people ruminating on the banal. 

The Truth is in French with a little bit of English -- they don't make Ethan Hawke work too hard, so his scenes are mostly English. That itself is not the problem with the movie, as other great international directors, such as Bong Joon-ho and Asghar Farhadi, have made movies outside their native tongue with impeccable results. There's no reason to think Kore-eda shouldn't be capable of the same. 

No, it's that by making the characters celebrities -- Catherine Deneuve a multi-Cesar winning actress, Hawke a TV actor -- Kore-eda has decided he no longer cares about the travails of ordinary people.

In the past, I've been likely to dub Kore-eda the modern-day successor to Yasujiro Ozu, as his films are replete with the dynamics and sometimes heartbreaking betrayals of unremarkable Japanese families. Sometimes there would be a high-concept plot -- like the infants switched at birth story of Like Father, Like Son -- but it was always normal people that these high-concept plots happened to. Another example of this would be the non-biological "family" of grifters in Shoplifters.

The basic humility of the characters was something I cherished. The other two films of his I've seen -- After the Storm and Our Little Sister -- deal especially in these characters' core modesty. They have hopes and dreams like everyone, but they aren't attention seekers.

Deneuve's character is like the embodiment of the polar opposite of everything Kore-eda has previously stood for. She's vain, self-centered, jealous of the attention received by others. She lives her life on the stage.

Hawke has more of that modesty going for him, but there's something so insubstantial about his character, who really is just a hanger-on at the periphery of this story, that one wonders why he's even really in it. He's the husband of Juliette Binoche's character, who is Deneuve's daughter and the only unfamous one of the three. But he's so free and easy and a goofy dad that it's almost like he's in the movie as a light parody of Americans.

Deneuve, meanwhile, does that thing that everyone does in movies about fading greats, where she looks out of the corner of her eyes at people who represent threats to her, when she's not looking down her nose at them..

I'm just not that interested in yet another story about an actress (or actor, it doesn't have to be an actress but it usually is) who is nearing the end of her career and is ungracefully accepting her faded glory. There's something fatally solipsistic about it. I suppose all movies about aging are solipsistic in a way, but when it relates to a person who seems to have been self-centered even when she was a young woman, it feels even more self-indulgent.

I guess I just don't understand why this subject interested Kore-eda. I can see why he wanted to work with these actors, all of whom are or have been brilliant, but I don't see why this particular story needed to be told. And if you've got one famous person in it, it feels like you're just doubling down by making another of the main characters famous as well. It start to seem more like an exercise in glamorous, movie industry navel-gazing than a story of something true and real that we might all encounter in our everyday lives

In the end I liked enough about The Truth to give it a marginal recommendation if anyone were to ask me -- three stars out of five. But you can see how this is a disappointment by Kore-eda's standards, as he's previously received five stars (Like Father, Like Son), four-and-a-half stars (Shoplifters), four stars (After the Storm) and three-and-a-half stars (Our Little Sister) from me. If he's going to keep up this pattern of having each film earn a different star rating from me, I don't like where things are going to go from here.

But he shouldn't, as Kore-eda is a good filmmaker -- a great one, even. But even great filmmakers sometimes abandon their core artistic preoccupations at their peril, and I just don't want to see it happen for this guy.