Some Sydney Film Festival reviews.

With 20-ish films seen, you can check through my twitter and look and my contribution to the Sydney Critics scoreboard for my general impressions on all the films. Here are thoughts on a few of the Official Competition entries...

HEARTBEATS (dir. Xavier Dolan, 2010)

It seems no review for this film (or Dolan’s previous I Killed My Mother, which I have yet to see) can’t discuss it without taking its maker’s 21 years of age into account, and to be fair, all its strengths and flaws can be attributed to Dolan’s specifically callow point of view. So while its evocations of first love are all swoony and ecstatic as they come (those knives against cutting boards!), there’s an unfortunate prosaic side of the film, especially the shoehorned interviews with random people, who all spout off banal truisms passed off as revelations worthy of digression from the film’s central characters/narrative. And while I’m fine with ‘love letters to cinema’, Dolan’s list of influences are almost exclusively failsafe canonical touchstones (Annie Hall, French New Wave, Wong Kar-Wai, zzzz), so much that I kept waiting for the characters to reenact scenes from Midnight Run to break the homage monotony. But hey, I enjoyed this more than Jules and Jim, so I ‘spose the kid’s doing something right. Let’s just wait a few years before we start giving him major prizes.

LIFE DURING WARTIME (dir. Todd Solondz, 2009)

There’s a scene in Todd Solondz’s new film in which a poster of I’m Not There appears on the wall of the college student son of Ciarin Hinds’ paedophile (originally played by Dylan Baker in Happiness, of which LDW in a loose sequel to) during a particularly tense confrontation in the former’s dorm room, shortly after the latter’s release from prison. The scene is probably the film’s emotional centerpiece, but I just couldn’t stop thinking about what that poster was doing there, in such prominence during a key scene in the film. My initial impression was that the it was just an incidental part of the ‘what a hipster’s dorm looks like’ mise-en-scene, but it’s given so much space in the frame during the scene, and I ended up flashing back to Solondz’s own Palindromes’ & the similar use of different actors playing the same characters shared by I’m Not There and decided this was no coincidence, and that the film I’m watching right now is about forgiveness for past mistakes, and I began to suspect that Solondz was literally holding up Haynes’ alleged plagiarism on display for our collective consideration. And then I wondered that if this really was Solondz’s intention, is he ignorant enough to not have seen That Obscure Object of Desire, Bunuel’s 1976 film in which two actresses play the same woman? It’s very well possible that he hasn’t, since his visual style and grasp of cinematic language is rudimentary at best; displaying no awareness of past traditions beyond Woody Allen and maybe Blue Velvet and… wait, where am I?

Such distractions of mine are understandable, there’s not much new that Solondz brings to the table with this serving of sloppy seconds; a fine cast + expectedly sharp dialogue + general watchability aside, it’s difficult to escape the 90’s-hangover quality of the whole affair.

WASTED ON THE YOUNG (dir. Ben C. Lucas, 2010)

There are films that stumble upon something universal through a rigorous concentration on the specificities of their milieu. And then there are films that take a milieu, gloss over its particularities and idiosyncrasies, and attempt to impose a universal statement over the bland, neutered surface. Ben C. Lucas’ admittedly competent-in-most-areas debut is such a film, and might’ve been enjoyable (albeit still offensive and irresponsible in its treatment of school shootings) as a martyrdom fantasy had it been played as camp. Instead, it’s plagued by hamfisted attempts at critical commentary on life in our technology-dominated era, with text messages actually superimposed over the film’s physical spaces, comments from some anonymous social networking site acting like a Greek chorus (complete with like/dislike options!), and a generally over-inflated sense of the elusive ‘zeitgeist’ being captured, that makes Up in the Air look humble by comparison.

It also seems that after years of strictly televisual offerings, the current Aussie cinema has to compensate with an overkill of stylistic bombast (cf. the otherwise excellent Animal Kingdom); rather than being cinematic, this film has the look and feel of an extended anti-binge drinking commercial, authorizedbytheaustraliangovernmentcanberra. I have no doubt that Lucas is a smart guy, and I wish him and his fine cast success with future projects. This film, however, is misbegotten. Ian dislikes this.

UNCLE BOONMEE WHO CAN RECALL HIS PAST LIVES (dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2010)

Upon having my mind gently blown by Syndromes and a Century several years ago, I wondered if it would’ve been as enveloping if I didn’t come in with the foreknowledge that it was based on Apichatpong’s ruminations of how his own parents met. Accordingly, I kept wondering if my initially slightly-less-than-transported experience of Joe’s latest would’ve benefited from knowing beforehand of how sincere his beliefs in reincarnation are. I read a Cannes press interview with him afterwards, and was particularly struck by his admissions of reincarnation as a metaphysical device for the film, one that has correlation with the process of cinema-watching itself, whereby life is ‘preserved’ and in effect reborn before our own eyes. Fleeting references to the political violence and repression of Thailand’s past and present seem to emphasise the need for reverie as a means of redeeming dire circumstances, and the focus on reincarnation could easily represent the need for reform as well.

Reports from Cannes (where the film won the Palme D'or, probably due to Tim Burton picking the 'talking catfish & monkey spirit movie' by default) have emphasised the film's relative accessibility within Weerasethakul's filmography, and this is possibly due to its relatively straightforward progression of events, as well as the fact that the reveries are this time loosely motivated by plot and character (rather than Syndromes or Tropical Malady, where the ruptures occur completely out of the blue). Taken on its own terms, Uncle Boonmee is thoroughly hypnotic if – in my eyes – even more perplexing than Joe’s previous three films (all of which are personal all-time faves). But I’ve found the film more and more moving as I look back on it, without taking the spiritual aspects of the film too literally. In particular, the film’s coda and final scene feels absolutely perfect in the culmination of ideas and motifs introduced earlier, clarifying ‘rebirth’ as something that also occurs moment-to-moment in addition to life-to-life. It can’t be a coincidence that the film ends with three characters watching images on a TV set – continuing a process of regeneration. Or maybe this is all grasping at straws. Uncle Boonmee is another gem from an artist dedicated to capturing the ineffable, so much that words fails me. I shall lick its palm instead.