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IFFBoston 2010: The Father of My Children

To start, a confession. I arrived late to the noon screening of this film. It was Sunday, shenanigans had transpired the night before, and I misgauged the moving through space and time and procurement of restorative foodstuffs and iced coffee. In fairness and with all love to the IFFB organizers, screenings at the Somerville could be counted on to start a titch late, and then with the requisite intro and showing of the sponsorship clips, well, you have a little wiggle room.

But The Father of My Children was at the Brattle, and I should have known they'd get off to a crisp start. It was my first screening there this festival, and I was hoping to recapture some of the sense of Gallic wonderment that found me floating out of the theatre after seeing Summer Hours there the year before. [This is when I should say that I learned only yesterday that Hours director Assayas and Children director Mia Hansen-Løve are a couple. Which makes sense to me, given how I felt at times while watching this film about a French producer of not-so profitable art films.]

Still, the conditions of my first encounter with the film's titular father were strangely apt; Gregoire Canvel [Louis-Do de Lencquesaing] conducts his life in medias res. When I slipped into my seat in the darkness, he was already in his car, juggling multiple mobiles and a cigarette as he sped toward the wife and daughters awaiting him at their country house. One encounter with the gendarmerie, car impoundment, and rescue by his family later, he gets there. Only Gregoire isn't especially present. He's able to sit through younger daughters Valentine and Billie's charming theatrical performance for their parents and older sister, but it's a rare occurrence. There's always another distraction, another fire to put out in the office or on location pulling him away.

He's not much better with his colleagues at work. The scenes and characters set at Moon Films brim with the benign chaos that greeted a bemused Maggie Chung in Assayas's own 1996 film-about-filmmaking, Irma Vep [Indeed, lanky Hansen-Løve appears briefly at that film's epic dinner party, grooving to Luna's cover of "Bonnie and Clyde."] As in that earlier film, the women here on the whole are of a much more practical bent, and despite disasters, insane directors, and demanding visitors somehow films get made.

But let's not even get into the state of Moon Films' financials. Gregoire certainly won't, insisting on hanging on to the rights to his mortgaged many times over film library and picking up the check at business luncheons. He takes his family on holiday to his wife Sylvia's native Italy but cannot honor his promise to stay off his phones. It's becoming increasingly clear that the center will not hold. At least not for much longer. But it's more how and when Gregoire spins off his axis that sets The Father of My Children apart.

SPOILER ALERT. Sylvia does not walk away from her husband, as the movie seems to intimate she might after their unsuccessful trip. Instead, Gregoire, in a manner that shocks because it's so abrupt, commits suicide. We see it but find it as hard to believe and to process as those who did not. His younger daughters tearfully wonder why he did not love them enough; the eldest, Clémence [the magnificent Alice de Lencquesaing], seeks answers in the films her father chose to produce and with the young screenwriter, Arthur, he turned away. Sylvia sets about winding down Moon's affairs in as respectable a manner as she can manage.

Life does not stop when Gregoire did, or when Moon will, which is what makes the aftermath that takes up the second half of The Father of My Children so engrossing and so truthful. He is so vivid in the first half of the film, and so not present in the contents of desk drawers and sometimes strained relationships he leaves behind. It is a situation and a phenomenon I have witnessed more than once in life but never before on film. Never like this. It is in every sense a moving picture. The story squares its shoulders and gets on with things. What else can one do but go forward?

I enjoy being a girl: best Sex in the City 2 review ever

All hail to Lindy West of Seattle's The Stranger, who maybe didn't luuuurrrrvvve SATC2. A succulent little nibble:

SATC2 takes everything that I hold dear as a woman and as a human—working hard, contributing to society, not being an entitled cunt like it's my job—and rapes it to death with a stiletto that costs more than my car. It is 146 minutes long, which means that I entered the theater in the bloom of youth and emerged with a family of field mice living in my long, white mustache. This is an entirely inappropriate length for what is essentially a home video of gay men playing with giant Barbie dolls. But I digress.

I simply insist that you read the whole thing. Go ahead, I'll wait. [The cinetrix impatiently taps her distinctly not stiletto-shod foot — I'm rockin' K.Jacques cork wedges, bitches.]

H/T: the incomparable 'Fesser

When Jaws popped out of the water

Four years ago today, my friend Rob died. I miss him, but rather than be sad, I thought I'd celebrate his memory here with a little Mallrats foolishness. Untz, untz, untz, untz, untz.

Empty signifiers. Or, that's what she said.

The 'Fesser of late has taken to bellowing "Oh, lord! Lord!" in the style of Noah Cross at the end of Chinatown. It began after I screened the film for his students while he was off presenting a paper at some conference, but now it has taken on a life of its own.

Does this sort of thing happen in your home? If yes, what line from which film under which circumstances?

IFFBoston 2010: I Am Love

Io Sonno L'Amore is a melodrama as florid as its star Tilda Swinton is pale. The "Io" in question is Swinton's Emma Recchi, the Russian wife of an Italian textile magnate; the "amore" is what the French would call "fou." The Dardenne brothers it ain't. Which is to say, yay!

Love unfolds in a movie Italy all too familiar to art house audiences who've seen The Garden of the Finzi-Continis or Il Conformista, beautiful and damned. Director Luca Guadagnino's vertiginous camera lurches across lush interiors, sumptuously severe Jil Sander garments, marvelous Italian chins and noses and blue eyes fringed with lush dark lashes, sun-dappled pastorals, and sweaty couplings. Everything is suffused with sensuality: a gleaming bit of fish, a ribbon wound around tapered fingers, a spiraling blonde chignon we've followed once before on the streets of San Francisco.

The soundtrack is similarly overripe and indiscreet. The horns that blare in the trailer echo the warnings against being open to physical sensation that sounded across the piazza in Santa Croce in A Room with a View. Like Lucy Honeychurch [and, indeed, her namesake Mrs. Bovary] before her, Emma comes alive in a forbidden love affair that will lay waste to the life she's known. "And why should she not be transfigured?" as lady novelist Miss Lavish [Judi Dench] asked in that film. "It happened to the Goths."

Delicious demon

Somewhat improbably, I've only seen three of Olivia Williams' films: Rushmore, An Education, and, just last month, The Ghost Writer. Her turn in the latter as Ruth, the wife of disgraced former British P. M. Adam Lang [Pierce Brosnan], is a marvel of tightly wound fury and brittle, self-deprecating humor. She skulks about the gray-on-gray shingle and concrete Brutalist beach house [borrowed from her husband's publisher] in high dudgeon, her ire seemingly the only thing preventing her from being crushed underneath the outsize wall art and huge plate-glass windows that don't frame the drear wintery landscape as much as invite prying eyes to look in.

I got to thinking about Williams' performance as the scary-smart political spouse again recently for two reasons. When I was poking around the Internets looking for photos of her Education co-star Carey Mulligan, I came across the snap above, from the L.A. premiere of the film. As anyone who I was with at the last ever Film Prom [a.k.a. the 2009 New York Film Festival opening night party at Tavern on the Green] can attest, I was wearing that same dress. Which was not new then and had done tours of duty at any number of weddings throughout the Aughts. [It packs like a dream.] Let starlet Mulligan borrow couture. Olivia Williams was wearing an old, off-the-rack Diane von Furstenburg dress on the red carpet! Heart her!

But not as much as noted writer-of-mash-notes-to-actresses David Thomson of the Guardian does. A smidge of his tut-tutting about how under-appreciated Williams is from early April:

...we've probably only seen a fraction of what Williams can do. So here she comes now as the former prime minister's wife in The Ghost Writer, the new Roman Polanski film. She plays older here than she has before, bitchier and more knowing, and she's very good, or as good as the limits of the piece allow her to be.

"Older" is an understatement, although that may have something to do with the lines -- oh so rare in her industry -- visible on her face in the photo that runs with Thomson's piece and on screen opposite Brosnan. You see, Ruth Lang is supposed to have met her husband Adam when they were at university. Only Williams was born in 1968; Brosnan in 1953. Is that some sort of Jessie Royce Landis shit or what? 

Looking your age now means looking older than you are, a bigger crime even than wearing a not-new dress to a movie premiere. That's nice casting sleight-of-hand in a story that hinges on appearances being deceiving. It's perhaps part of the reason I found the disposition of Williams' character at the end of The Ghost Writer is so satisfying and startling. Its swiftness rivals the kick-in-the-teeth shocks of The Spanish Prisoner and reminds the viewer that building lasting careers in politics or the movies are all versions of the same long con. Or, as another "bitchier and more knowing" Polanski character once put it, "Course I'm respectable. I'm old. Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough."

IFFBoston 2010: Putty Hill

PUTTY HILL TRAILER (FINAL UP-REZ) from Matt Porterfield on Vimeo.

Putty Hill is what rose from the ashes when the funding for Matthew Porterfield's second feature, Metal Gods, fell through. It's an ungainly phoenix, if not a cinematic chimera outright, a sooty verité-fiction hybrid that follows a clutch of people gathering for a funeral in Baltimore.

The film rolled into Boston trailing behind it a well-received screening at the Berlinale, New Yorker film scribe Richard Brody's perfervid boosterism of all things Porterfield, SXSW love, and a unanimous vote from the lovely lads on the narrative feature jury in Atlanta. Even more persuasive, Baltimore native Gabe Wardell, the head of ATL FF, gave it his highest commendation. [Disclaimer: One of its producers has become a friend after several hectic Flaherty Seminars.] So there was some serious anticipation on my part.

Which almost disappeared completely as I mounted the stairs to the Somerville's wee theatre 4 and spotted the snow-white locks of one Ray Carney. Aw, crap. Somewhat improbably, in 2007 I'd ended up getting drinks with Carney, Aaron Katz, various Safdies, still more boys, and my pal Daniel after the American Independents screening at HFA of Katz's lovely Quiet City and Joe Swanberg's Hannah Takes the Stairs. I'd bristled then about being called to account for my entire gender regarding the character of Hannah, and not even meeting the lovely Greta Gerwig in person later, at the last-ever Film Prom [NYFF 2009], assuaged that. Irish Catholics hold grudges, as Carney [or his career path, anyway] would likely attest.

Then I got over myself. Carney may have a tendency to set himself up as a kingmaker when it comes to young, mostly male filmmakers of a certain stripe, but I generally like the movies that carry his imprimatur. And, man, did I like Putty Hill.

Cullen Gallagher has a thorough, thoughtful review of the film at Hammer to Nail. Trying to improve on it would be a fool's errand, or at the very least would involve many more viewings to even come close. So, instead, I want to talk about two moments of aural astonishment.

Gallagher notes:

Long takes and environment-specific audio dominate, which combine to give real weight to the time and place of the scenes—a natural rhythm whose deceptive simplicity belies the rigor and artistry behind it. A mother’s voice cutting through the booming sound of heavy metal emitting from behind a teen’s door; echoes of an ice cream truck and a helicopter mixing as a group of young girls walk through a forest, smoking and talking amongst themselves, their voices little more than an evocative element of a richly mixed soundtrack. In a later scene, these same girls sit on a couch, watching television and chatting. As two of them get up and cross the room, the camera follows. The soundtrack, however, stays with the girls on the couch talking about the upcoming funeral, resulting in a complex audio/visual counterpoint that goes completely against every textbook definition of “editing.” It’s an absolutely liberating moment for both the filmmaker and the audience, and shows the sort of delicate revolutions going on just beneath the surface in Porterfield’s films.

The direct sound recording is so beautifully designed and so immediate that the moments at which the film chooses to abandon its fidelity to sound perspective are arresting and discomfiting. Somehow, the documentary-style queries the offscreen director poses to the various characters seem more natural than the decision to follow two young men away from a skate park in a long shot while keeping their conversation lavalier-close to us. A technique so conventional as to go unnoticed in other films here sticks out. Yet the reasons for foregrounding this particular conversation are as mysterious and unexplained as everything else in this film.

More than anything, Putty Hill captures the noise of life. Even -- especially -- life in the shadow of the tragic, too soon but also inevitable overdose death of the never-seen Cory that draws these characters together. After the funeral, the mourners end up singing karaoke in a dingy, wood-paneled hall, borrowing the emotion from pop songs to express their otherwise inarticulate sorrow. We may think we've seen this before, but Porterfield's long takes let our embarrassment at watching these nonprofessional actors sing songs as cliched as "Wild Horses" and "I Will Always Love You" build, breathe, and then subside. What remains, miraculously, is moving and true. It's a shame that the trite rightness and ubiquity of these played-to-death songs goes hand-in-hand with the prohibitive licensing fees that will probably prevent them from being heard if Putty Hill ever gets distribution.

UPDATE: The Cinema Guild will distribute Putty Hill. Look for it this fall.

IFFBoston 2010: War Don Don

In post-civil war Sierra Leone, amputees play soccer. Vans hurtle down Freetown's crowded city streets, festooned with painted words glorifying God. War don don -- war is over. Officially, anyway. But what does that mean for former bush wives, ex-child soldiers, and others, their identities hidden, who testify before the independent Special Court assembled to try members of the various rebel groups/criminal enterprises deemed responsible for eleven years of atrocities and human rights abuses?

With the documentary War Don Don, filmmaker/international human rights activist Rebecca Richman Cohen takes advantage of almost unprecedented access to the defense as well as the prosecution team to follow the trial of Issa Hassan Sesay, a Revolutionary United Front (RUF) leader. His alleged crimes are extensive and appalling, but can the Special Court provide a fair trial? What will its outcome prove? And what does it mean for the people of Sierra Leone?

Archival footage and talking heads, sewn together artfully with the scrolling snow and static of VHS tape, make it clear that Sesay is a guy who did [and ordered others to do] bad, bad things. But some of the testimony against him comes from cooperating witness who are among the worst criminals in west Africa. The witnesses are paid, and not all of the proceedings are captured on public video. Is Sesay meant to be a synecdoche for the RUF? And if so, to what end?

Over time, the film's strategy emerges. Sesay, a charismatic and complex figure who was himself a child soldier, is a hook, a way into the narrative Sierra Leone is fashioning for itself and for the world. Otherwise, justice becomes an abstraction next to practical nation-rebuilding concerns. Trials and palaces of justice in which to convene them, not to mention the technology and personnel involved in "bringing the courts to the people" in remote villages, all cost money that could otherwise go to repairing infrastructure and addressing dire conditions that are as much a product of endemic poverty as they are of the war. Paradoxically, demonstrating that Sierra Leone is committed to peace through justice could persuade far wealthier nations to loosen the purse strings and provide aid.

The mission of the Special Court of Sierra Leone is to try "those who bear greatest responsibility" for the crimes committed during the civil war. The way in which War Don Don gathers and edits together its own evidence, expert witnesses, and testimony calls the efficacy of the entire operation into question without offering us a pat verdict. See it.

***

A confession: I'll admit to skipping War Don Don at Full Frame. It had already picked up a special jury nod at SXSW and, indeed, scored more plaudits in Boston. Yeah, I knew I'd have a second chance at it, but I also harbored skeptical suspicions after seeing scores of docs -- about Sierra Leone's civil war specifically, the atrocities of war more generally on the African continent, and truth commissions there, in South America, in Asia, and in the United States -- about whether it'd send its PBS-supporting viewers out of the theatre clutching their reusable shopping bags full of CFL bulbs, off to grab sustainably harvested coffee with like-minded pals and discuss the film passionately and righteously before going on with life just as before. Maybe it did. However, the film's skepticism about its subject is much better researched and argued than mine was. Mea culpa.

Face/off

A brief break from our week of IFFBoston coverage to share a bit of infelicitous [and worse still, perhaps intentionally so] press prose about a film I missed at the festival [because it played opposite Winter's Bone and I knew it comes out June 11]: Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work. See if you can pick out the turn of phrase that made me giggle:

SYNOPSIS

JOAN RIVERS - A PIECE OF WORK takes the audience on a year long ride with Joan Rivers in her 76th year of life; it peels away the mask of an iconic comedian, laying bare both the struggle and thrill of living life as a groundbreaking female performer. Filmmakers Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg (THE DEVIL CAME ON HORSEBACK, THE TRIALS OF DARRYL HUNT) expose the private dramas of this irreverent, legendary comedian as she fights to keep her career thriving in a business driven by youth and beauty.

IFFBoston 2010: American: The Bill Hicks Story

Reader, I ask you. When confronted by the following during the 9 p.m. block on Friday night -- Life 2.0, Lemmy [in fairness, reported to be a late add], Down Terrace, The Parking Lot Movie, I'm Dangerous with Love, and American: The Bill Hicks Story -- how do you choose? The physical challenge? Shaking your tiny fist heavenward?

Answer: You get arbitrary. Down Terrace will amble by eventually, thanks to some distributor. Life? I Heard Good Things but Second Life? Feh. Lemmy would be a blast and any flick with Captain Sensible, sign me up, but it would involve an unconscionable degree of fronting for this much more Smiths-skewing lass. Parking Lot I sincerely regret missing [in a please send me a screener, kthxbai way]. And I'm Dangerous? Er, ibogaine sounds like some drug that served as a lynch pin to a locked-room Sherlock Holmes story, and I'd promised myself this festival season to follow Tangina's advice and go to the light. Sorry!

Also, Bill Hicks and I share a birthday, which either explains a lot or nothing at all. Plus, my old pal and former coworker Bryan was intro-ing it.

So, how do you make a doc about a scabrous Texas-bred comedian more popular in the U.K. than the States who died at 32 from pancreatic cancer? Excellent question. One tactic is to use an odd 3D animation process that creates the illusion of depth in archival photos supplied by the late comedian's family and friends. True, it breaks up the monotony of the voiceover narration/talking head testimonials to a point, and it does the job of getting us to the era of grainy comedy club clips, but mostly it left me thinking fondly about Soderbergh's approach to Spalding Gray, about which more later.

OK, so American? Here's the short version. William Carlos Williams was right: the pure products of America go crazy. Which is to say, Bill Hicks Got It, in high school, no less, and like any true patriot too smart for his own good, it made him upset. Who else sneaks out in high school to slip downtown to a comedy club? Hicks, a good Baptist boy with a brain, perhaps the most dangerous creature on earth, was a comedy savant in a comedy-less town, Houston in the 80s, but he made it work in a way that'd impress RuPaul.

Yes, he moved to LA, got mired in addiction, got sober, but that's not the story. At all. This is: Hicks was a prophet hollering in the wilderness, and we are the poorer for his absence. This documentary gives us a glimpse of what could have been.

Toward the end, Hicks knew he was dying, though he told only a select few, which makes watching clips of his final performances that much more painful in hindsight. But! To counteract the ill effects of the "virus with shoes" he termed humanity, Hicks established a foundation for wildlife before he went. That's the sort of knowledge that enriches one's viewing of this doc, which can't be considered a success outright, but ultimately, slick filmic accomplishment is not essential to enjoying this earnest portrait of a man before his time, out of time, and taken too soon. By whatever means necessary, etc. etc.

A line that in many ways sums up all his iterations is this [menacing redneck voice]: "Hey, buddy, we're Christians, and we don't like what you said." [Hicks, brightly] "Then forgive me!"

Better we ask him to forgive us. Yes, watch this flawed but still essential film -- then delve deep into the YouTube clips and comedy albums Hicks left behind.