Cuppla MIFF capsule reviews

CARLOS (dir. Olivier Assayas)

One of the film events of the year doesn’t disappoint. A great big, sexy, richly detailed, 5.5 hour feast of history, moving by at a lightning pace; Assayas’ musical editing rhythms (frequently cut to bouncy punk tunes, but always coasting on similar energies) make the final stretch, detailing Carlos’ final years in Sudan just as propulsive as some of the more dramatically meaty and action-packed segments earlier in the saga. If the film maintains an obligatory ‘ambivalent’ stance toward terrorist activity, it’s not in the programmatic way that most narrative films on the subject do; Assayas keeps the historical context rooted in Carlos’ restless subjectivity, with the attention to tactilely rendered spaces in lieu of psychology (as such, the elliptical handling of the relationship between Magdalena and Carlos makes the former’s trajectory all the more moving). Accordingly, the film’s soundtrack choices are as audacious and inspired as ever; 80’s post-punk from The Feelies and Wire for Carlos’ idealistic early years, with each music cue becoming decreasingly anachronistic in correspondence with his decline.

AIR DOLL (dir. Hirokuza Kore-eda)

Hey, it’s Bicentennial Man meets In a Year of 13 Moons! Sadly not as fun as that sounds, Kore-eda’s latest film takes a premise best suited to an undergrad project (sex doll miraculously becomes human) and strains for the melancholy and poetry that usually comes to his films naturally. It’s pretty in a vapid way for a while, but after two hours of plotless cutesy tweeness, soft piano keys, nuggets like “not having a heart is heartbreaking”, and a billion different endings - each one more maudlin than the last - I was ready to puncture my arteries.

VILLALOBOS (dir. a fan)

This portrait of minimal house maestro Ricardo Villalobos makes no concessions to the unconverted, but even as a convert I’m a little disappointed to see the formal potential of a doco on the man squandered in favour of such a predictable non-approach. There’s a fine line between willfully austere and youtube-ready chunks assembled in a slapdash fashion, and it’s only a squiz at the filmmaker's IMDb page revealing 25 years of doco experience that edges me toward giving this film the benefit of a doubt.

POETRY (dir. Lee Chang-Dong)

Lee’s Oasis shook me to the core; his new film – focusing on an Alzheimer’s stricken women who impulsively takes poetry classes – is an eerily quiet, airy one that accrues its power from the accumulation of intimations and suggestions rather than overt gestures and statements. It’s a vaporous, free-floating blank-canvas kind of a film; despite Lee’s obvious empathy for the forgotten women in the film, the anti-feminist reading suggested by my viewing cohort doesn’t seem like all that much of a stretch. All this isn’t necessarily a bad thing; the sleepy rhythms and allusive, meandering narrative is easy to get lost in and project upon, but I just couldn’t make enough intuitive sense of it all, not the least in the sense that the connection between a poet's writers-block and Korean social malaise seems both tenuous and strained at once. I prefer Lee the heartbreaker.

LE DONK AND SCOR-ZAY-ZEE (dir Shane Meadows)

Paddy Considine flaunts his considerable comedic abilities saying ‘fuck’ a lot and making a right mug of himself as a roadie & talentless wannabe-emcee; amiable enough to sustain 70 minutes, and an acceptable breather in between the fest’s weightier fare.