Festival round-up megablog 3

Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter

Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter was the film I had my misgivings about beforehand. It had all the hallmarks of a festival fan favourite: it’s based upon an urban myth and it pays homage to another film. I was worried that it might be an American independent movie designed to tickle the fancy of the regulars at Sundance. I’m not against that kind of thing but I can find it on FilmFour. It's not that film. Rinko Kikuchi gives a wonderful performance as Kumiko. She’s a 29 year old ‘Office Lady’ or Personal Assistant. As her boss points out, she’s old for an OL. Usually, apparently, they have married and started families by 29. Her mother, who judges her by phone, is of the same opinion. Kumiko has nothing in common with the other OLs. They behave like young Tokyo female office workers in films always do: they are obsessed with their appearance. [I was reminded of them during the wonderful documentary The Salt of the Earth. The Zo’e Tribe must have thought that Sebastiao Salgado was doing a shoot for Vanity Fair.] Kumiko’s understudy must devote hours every morning to looking flawless and childlike. Kumiko does not – and she’s still late for work. Their chattering of her colleagues brought the all-female scenes of Ten Canoes to mind. She’s in a job she despises. Her life is going nowhere.

Kumiko’s apartment tells us that she’s having a nervous breakdown. It’s not unhygienic but it is a mess. She cannot deal with her post either. It spills out from her pigeon hole; she stuffs it back in. I like these details: they’re well-observed and understated. Both Birdman (2014) and Foxcatcher (2014) feature a smashing-up-the-room scene. It happens in a lot of movies but not in this one. Birdman is the most purely enjoyable film I've seen this year. Its director, Alejandro González Iñárritu, plays a few games in each one of his five movies. Some critics found them a distraction. Birdman pretends to be one continuous take; it’s like an album where each song leads into the next. I was reminded of All That Jazz (1979), another film about the key man under stress before opening night. Both films rattle along, take a few risks and they’re a lot of fun.

Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter begins with a day at the seaside. [Far From the Madding Crowd had one; it never occurred to the husband in Gett: the Trial of Viviane Amsalem.] Her treasure map leads to a sodden VHS of the Coen Brothers’ movie Fargo (1996). We don’t find out where this map came from but we see her create her next one. I have a small collection of ‘found films’ retrieved from skips and woods. It’s my contribution to Contemporary Archaeology and one method of escaping my demographic profile. One find was a DVD-R bootleg of Catwoman, copied in the cinema on camcorder. I thought such artifacts were an urban myth themselves.

Fargo, which announces that it is based upon a true story (and the sequence with the tree chipper certainly was set in fact), leads Kumiko to believe that Steve Buscemi did bury a suitcase full of money beside a very long fence in Minnesota. It’s a very funny moment in Fargo and 1990s cinema in general. How did he ever expect to find it again? Kumiko intends to.

Kumiko, the Treasure Huter

It was during a very tactile moment in The Duke of Burgundy that I remembered how little physical contact Kumiko makes with another human being during her film. A security guard takes her back to the library; an old friend she has no interest in prods her playfully with a mobile phone; she responds to a policeman’s kindness. Thankfully, Kumiko has a rabbit. It’s the other thing in her lonely, sorrowful existence that gets her out of bed each day. It’s also a relief for the audience. There’s nothing going right in her life but she is not thinking of ending it.

The film is beautifully balanced. Some films are just a chain of events. There has to be a relationship with the viewer. Amour Fou incorporates moments – the same song is sung three times – to contemplate the latest character developments. Patrick Keiller or Adam Curtis [his latest film, Bitter Lake (2015), is on release on the BBC iPlayer presently] will give you a minute or two, watching a spider build a web or some bizarre clip from the archives, to process the PPE paper's hypothesis being presented. Kumiko is punctuated with well-judged humorous interludes just when a laugh would help.

It’s a skill. Humour is a part of people’s lives, like football. A man in Black Coal, Thin Ice places a bet on Chelsea. [Chelsea also get a mention in Will Hay’s very amusing Windbag the Sailor (1936). It’s on YouTube. There are indigenous peoples in that too. “Did that sound like Norwegian to you?” I’m sure the Chelsea joke is referenced in a Crazy Gang picture. Chelsea had been a Music Hall punchline. Hay reacts because they won away at West Bromwich Albion. The club was founded, at great expense and fanfare, in 1905. Their first trophy arrived in 1955.] The men in Timbuktu are obsessed with the game. I know a few humanitarians who often visit the African continent. There’s a different man in a Man Utd top in every crowd they photograph. The jihadists are debating who’s best: Zidane or Messi. That’s globalisation. One Malian suggests that France won the 1998 World Cup by buying off Brazil with a shipful of rice. That’s ignorance. During the trial of the Toureg herdsman, in Timbuktu, a mobile phone rings. It has the same ringtone as a dead man’s in White God, in Budapest.

Difret was executive produced by Angelina Jolie. Sayeeda (now Baroness) Warsi engineered a meeting between Jolie and William Hague. They met at the 'End Sexual Violence in Conflict' global summit, campaigning for an increase in the number of prosecutions for warzone rape offences. When Warsi was profiled on BBC Radio 4 I got the impression that Hague doesn’t rate films. Simplistic tosh and three hours lost networking time. Perhaps Boris “we just want someone to come along with a bunker-buster” Johnson, Mayor of London, could watch Timbuktu then explain how a 10,000 ton bomb undoes an ideology. They would have greater effect launching 10,000 copies of Woody Allen’s fantastic Bananas (1971): “All citizens will be required to change their underwear every half hour. Underwear will be worn on the outside. So we can check.”   

Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter could have made mistakes. I worried when we spent some time with her video recorder. I’m as prone to nostalgia for solid state technology as anyone (and I still use mine; there are films on VHS you just can’t find anywhere else) but it’s an ingredient that can overpower the recipe. I was in a very appreciate audience for Violette (2013) last month, the French biopic of Violette Leduc, more project than prodigy of Simone de Beauvoir. The period detail was there but gently. Whereas, I could not wait for The Look of Love (2013) to end. Michael Winterbottom, Steve Coogan and many nudie ladies had made a boring biopic of Paul Raymond, pornographer and Britain’s richest man. The film had been colonised by the set designers. I met a man who took the photographs for Kays Catalogues all his working life. If the firm had archived their negatives they would still be in business. Albeit, a different business. British films get the twentieth century all wrong.

Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter could have been a film as fan convention. They did not resuscitate the fairly fictitious accent for a safe and easy laugh. The movie makes its own laughs. The scene with the library’s security guard has a great pay-off. The cameo by the North Dakota police officer is warm and funny. A funny scene can work wonders. George Clooney’s directorial debut, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002), is great fun but it is lifted to the next level by Robert John Burke’s appearance. In Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem Viviane’s witness, straight out of Jewish comedy, has her (and us) in fits. You can feel the waves of catharsis flooding from her. A film without a laugh in it should have its reasons. Given that Kumiko’s situation was extremely cold and life-threatening, it keeps the audience on the right path. I’ve seen a lot of herding in the past week – Gabriel Oak’s sheep, Mali’s cows – but few as skilfully as Kumiko’s audience.

A few years ago, at this festival, I noted the same cinematic shorthand in three very different movies: a male character rearranging his crotch after visiting the lavatory. It tells us what it tells us. In Timbuktu and Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter a woman walks oblivious to her ragged shawl dragging in the dust / snow. She is, we can assume safely, a bit chicken oriental.

In Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem husband stopped going to the cinema because of the sex and, after Charles Bronson retired, the wrong kind of violence. He would not have liked The Duke of Burgundy (2014). There’s a scene when three women discuss the purchase of a human toilet. “Well,” I thought, “This film passes the Bechdel test.” The Duke of Burgundy has elicited memories of other films-featuring-bondage. Oddly, because we only see Evelyn’s tied hands for a couple of seconds. I had not heard of  The Nightcomers (1972), starring Marlon Brando, Stephanie Beacham and Thora Hird, before. It was directed by Michael Winner. He directed more than 40 films. He never revisited them. I am sure some of them have their aficionados. I am sure some of them are better than the garbage Quentin Tarantino’s ilk have championed over the years. Perhaps he thought it wiser to leave sleeping dogs lie. His will’s executioners discovered his accounts to be his greatest epic.

The Japanese have an entire genre devoted to women and knots: kinbaku. The Historical Dictionary of Japanese Cinema describes it as, “A form of sexual bondage specific to Japan, with the emphasis on performance. Kinbaku, literally ‘tight binding,’ has been a frequent component of pink cinema.” A bit like Henry Mancini. I watched a lot of Morecambe & Wise last year. Glenda Jackson appeared with her Oscars. That led me to Negatives, a strange and memorable British film from 1968. She’s involved with a role-playing relationship with her lover but, as good male role-players are hard to find, risks losing him to another. It’s on YouTube.

The Duke of Burgundy is a study of the law of diminishing returns. There was a comic strip in the science fiction comic 2000AD called 'Rogue Trooper'. It had a superb premise which made it the favourite strip of every new reader. The problem was, after a couple of years, they’d done everything they could do with it. It became a post-apocalyptic Billy’s Boots – he loses his most prized possessions most weeks and goes looking for them. The authors admitted as much. There was nowhere to go with it but they were stuck. In Love is Strange George criticises a girl’s piano recital. It’s the most animated he gets. It sounded fine to most of us. He tells her how to do it better. It is much better. The sales pitch patter of the two novelty toy salesman of A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, very much in the wrong job, falls exhausted from their mouths. I was reminded of those grim comedies about very old Vaudeville acts doing the same routine together several times a day for forty years: production line work plus that old razzle-dazzle. It’s no wonder some go mad. One act attacked his producer last week.

A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence

The Duke of Burgundy was the film I had to see. I enjoyed Peter Strickland’s previous film Berberian Sound Studio enormously. Almost too much. It’s about a sound engineer; I’ve done that. The soundtrack is by Broadcast; I went to their first ever gig, supporting Pram, at The Jug of Ale, Moseley, in 1996. At one point I expected Toby Jones to spend the next half hour cleaning the tape paths of Uhers and Revoxes with Q-tips and his bottle of isopropyl alcohol. I wouldn’t have minded if he had. In The Duke of Burgundy Cynthia (Sidse Babett Knudsen) and Evelyn (Chiara D’Anna) enjoy a sado-masochistic sex-life, the most trusting of relationships. The first time we see it, we see its greatest game. Like Groundhog Day (1993), there’s one outlier date that goes far better than the rest. Evelyn purrs that it was perfect. In fact, it cannot be matched. It grows as dull as ritual. There’s a lot of humour in their less successful sessions. It’s like watching a sheriff trying to get his horse to start. On one occasion Cynthia cannot ‘perform’ at the crucial moment. On another, Evelyn gets the surprise she demanded but, like Kato and Inspector Clouseau, it’s not how she imagined. Cynthia allows her true emotions into her performance. Cynthia worries that Evelyn might want to break up the double act. There’s an old joke about S&M: the masochist makes a suggestion and the sadist ignores it. There are jokes that had to be made but this is a smart film. They have a good relationship but, like any other, they will have to keep working at it.

The Duke of Burgundy

I like thorough credits. The opening credits alert us to Lingerie by Andrea Flesch and Perfume by Je Suis Gizella. That’s because it’s important. Evelyn dresses up Cynthia in complicated arrangements by her favourite fashion designer. And a woman complains about the underwear her partner bought for her. Their relationship is punctuated by equally complex lectures about butterflies. They are both lepidopterists. The audience, and you will have to imagine the scent, are arranged with the same precision as the moths in their display cases. I want to believe that they’re all wearing Je Suis Gizella; method acting needn’t involve missing a night’s sleep. The closing credits list all the insects featured in the film, stage name and Latin name. The documentary Leviathan (2012) – not the other one (2014) – honours its featured sea-life in the same manner. I’m sure there are other people who want to check out the film clip or the painting or the architecture or the dreampop. Hot Shots! (1991) includes a recipe for brownies.

Peter Strickland makes every penny count. There are passages involving rostrum cameras that are a lot cheaper than filming explosions. I avoid films with explosions but there was one in A Little Chaos (for gardening purposes). I am reminded of an interview with a ‘lo-fi’ band: “Why are you ‘lo-fi’?”, “Because we have no money.” There are no men in his film at all. Not even a picture of one. A mannequin among the lecture audience is as close as we get. I found this incredibly refreshing. There are very few women in The Tracker – and the Australian soldiers ridicule then kill them.

Stephen Fry was interviewed about British cinema. He pointed out that other countries prefer our films to be about the class system. They can make their own gritty urban dramas. But they don’t have butlers. The minor aristocracy are as exotic to them as hunter-gatherers are to me. Hence, I’m guessing, a quarter of British movies feature a country house and a large number of actors are employed as the types who live and work in them. I’m grateful that British directors like Peter Strickland, Joanna Hogg and Peter Greenaway travel the World’s film festivals, demonstrating that there are other stories in British cinema. Though, it has to be said, the dwellings in their films aren’t humble either. There’s a lot of unclaimed territory in the British film landscape waiting to be grabbed.

Robin Clarke

Festival round-up megablog 2

Love is Strange

Love is Strange (2013) is an increasingly rare slice of life picture, set in New York right now. How else will future generations know about last year’s red trousers outbreak? I paused The Passenger (1975) the other week in order to fathom the apparel of a passer-by. I can’t describe it. Ben (John Lithgow) and George (Alfred Molina) are getting married after a 39 year engagement, of sorts. They would have done it sooner but it was not in the statute books. Their new status leads directly to George losing his music teacher job at a Catholic school. He does not contest it. Ben’s pension is their only income so they downsize: they sell their apartment, getting stung by the small print, and stay, separately, with neighbours or relatives.

The film improved days after I’d watched it. They are a lovely couple – it’s Lithgow and Molina – but we don’t see them together enough. I would have liked a prelude; we first see them on their wedding day. When the two men embrace, after weeks apart, you remember they’re still newlyweds. The b-story, about a teenage boy’s growing pains, did not add much for me at the time. Though he did have a five pound note pinned to his bedroom wall. They put the budget on the screen. The scenes between his mother, Marisa Tomei, and her brother and lodger, John Lithgow, were far more fun. The credits listed 26 producers, thanks another 70 and I suspect that the artists made a small contribution to have their paintings featured. It’s a sweet, sad, small snapshot. It’s only when I thought of other films about loss of income that its subtleties are revealed. They should have been able to continue from where they left off. If they had not married George would not have lost his job and all the things that followed. This small set-back – Ben imagines it will all be sorted out within a few weeks – has the worst possible consequence. We leave George, remarkably stoic, hanging Ben’s final, unfinished, painting on the wall of their dream apartment. This bad year cost him a further ten years of Ben’s love and company.

Is George too placid? During their date night Ben claims to have campaigned for gay civil rights during the 1960s. They don’t fight any battles, despite several opportunities, during the film. In his sister’s house Ben does not know when to speak and when not. The b-story boy does not attend his own uncle’s funeral. They have been sharing the same bunk-bed for the past few months. George accepts his rationale. It’s an approach that worked blissfully for 40 years and then, like an economic policy, fell apart overnight.

The Tracker (2002), a superb Australian Western, also features an old man holding the middle ground and a young man with some growing up to do. The moment you see his small stringed instrument you know it will be the first of the group to go. He destroys it in a young man’s idea of penance. Westerns have taught us that the man with the gun wins the argument. There’s a difference of opinion, a gun is produced and, as if by magic, the decision is made. Might is right. To think I avoided Whiplash (2014), which everyone says is excellent, because of the aggression. David Gulpili plays The Tracker, leading The Fanatic (Gary Sweet), The Follower (Damon Gameau) and The Veteran (Grant Page) after The Fugitive (Noel Wilton). The Fanatic is a serial killer in a soldier’s uniform.

The Tracker

I first came across game theory, the study of power and how it pans out, watching The All New Pink Panther Show during the late 1970s. (The first Pink Panther animation, The Pink Phink, won an Oscar in 1964.) It included old episodes of The Inspector; the only reason I watched the show. The plots are, to say the least, variable in quality but the music and drawings are great. Pat Harrington, Jr’s take on Peter Sellers’ Jacques Clouseau is extremely good. Anyway, in Toulouse La Trick (1966) Clouseau makes a particularly rash decision whilst transporting a prisoner he’s handcuffed to. He overvalues the extent of his status when compared with the size of the enormous felon dragging him around France. There’s a wonderful French thriller, Point Blank (2010) where allegiances are made and dropped at a dizzying rate. They should show it on election night. So let’s see how the man in chains plays his cards. We soon discover that he’s not the least powerful at all. You can spend the next day figuring out just how much control The Tracker had, from their very first steps. It’s worth focusing upon the fate of the sage old man. He was the only non-murderer among the four – and he was the first to go.

The Salt of the Earth

In The Salt of the Earth Salgado is told that he must not gift his knife to the indigenous peoples he’s visiting. I heard of an island that had existed happily within its own socio-cultural eco-system for thousands of years. A decade after they saw their first movie the divorces started. Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem (2014) was the simplest, and most gripping, film I saw all week. It was reminiscent of Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011), Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s film before Winter Sleep (2014), because a group of people do the same thing, over and over, getting nowhere whilst we get to know them. In this case, we witness every blind alley of Viviane Amsalem’s five year long attempt to divorce her husband. A friend of mine is in her fourth year of divorce proceedings. It rang too true. The laughter, the tears, the bad complexion days, false hopes, the sheer frustration at the pointlessness of it all. You could move from BA to PhD in that time. Some people look at trench warfare divorces and, like small children, reason that it takes two to tango. It only needs one to dig in. In Israel divorce falls “under the jurisdiction of the Orthodox rabbinical courts” – and requires the husband’s consent. He would not. She cannot leave her marriage and we never leave the building. We see them waiting to enter the courtroom. We see the courtroom: cheap tables for two parties, Viviane (Ronit Elkabetz), her lawyer (Menashe Noy) and, if they turn up, her husband (Simon Abkarian) and his brother, a rabbi (Sasson Gabai). The three judges are rabbis. Another rabbi keeps a record of proceedings. What is a court case but a storytelling contest? Our picture of their lives outside builds up during the 115 minutes. Sisters Ronit and Shlomi Elkabetz have written and directed three films. The other two in their marriage trilogy are To Take a Wife (2004) and 7 Days (2008). Ronit Elkabetz and Simon Abkarian appear in them all.

Gett, The Trial of Viviane Amsalem

Difret (2014), an Ethiopian film about an incredibly important legal case in their recent history, had to put certain story lines to one side. There wasn’t space enough. Boyhood (2014) does the same. We watch Mason, played by Ellar Coltrane, grow from a 7 year old to a personable young adult. How fortunate that Ellar became an actor. The fact that they were able to make the film at all, reuniting the cast for a couple of weeks every year for 12 years, is remarkable enough. I did not want anything more during its 165 minutes. Mason hangs out with older boys – but nothing terrible happens. Mason gets a shotgun for his birthday – but nothing terrible happens.

There aren’t many films that feature a gun without someone getting shot. In fact, in this festival, a sharpened stick is a murder waiting to happen. His father tells him, most deliberately, never to use a mobile whilst driving. He’s 19, driving, and his girlfriend wants him to look at a cute picture on her phone – but nothing terrible happens. They tend not to. Someone else can make those films. Actually, Werner Herzog made a documentary, for four mobile phone manufacturers and the public domain, about that last tragedy: From One Second to the Next (2013). In The Salt of the Earth Salgado photographs the incredible aftermath of the first Gulf War. Werner Herzog also made a documentary about extinguishing the oil fields of Kuwait: Lessons of Darkness (1992).

Mason isn’t the only character to grow up during the next twelve years. Remarkably, his father, played by Ethan Hawke, does too. It’s rare to see an adult character try that. All the terrible stuff happens to his mother, played winningly by Patricia Arquette. She escapes one dismal relationship for the next. There are a lot of miserable marriages in this festival. Poor Mrs. Ruskin, played by the festival’s new friend Eleanor Yates, in Mr. Turner; the perjury Viviane Amsalem is put through; two others – in Pandora’s Box and Difret – last a day and end in manslaughter. But the most unfortunate must be Nihal in Winter Sleep because she’s married to Aydin, one of the vilest men in movie history.

Winter Sleep

Winter Sleep is 196 minutes of Palme d’Or winning High Art. Aydin (Haluk Bilginer) is a retired and famous actor of considerable wealth. He owns the Hotel Othello, and several other properties in Cappadocia, Turkey. These dwellings are built into outcrops of lava from previous epochs. It is an astonishing landscape. He tells his lackey, “My kingdom may be small, but at least I’m the king.” Which makes his sister, his wife and his tenants his subjects and, given his profession, his audience. If there were jokes I wasn’t prepared to smile at them. The director, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, has stated that Chekhov has influenced all of his films. The film contains extremely long and engrossing scenes examining each interrelationship. He never discusses a subject – he wins arguments. Much of the script would translate to the theatre. Aydin has married a beautiful woman less than half his age, Nihal. In a heart-rending scene he sets about removing, with impeccable philanthropy, her sole intellectual property and, of course, last shred of independence. Having won his beautiful wife his next project will be to leave his mark upon her. The debtor’s reaction to her charity is shocking but understandable. It will have added years. 

I have been on a World tour of legal systems: I have seen the Aboriginal people’s sentences for rape and accidental death and Ethiopian common law, in Difret (2014), deal with the same. I have mentioned Israel Orthodox rabbinical divorce proceedings and now we get to sharia. A scene in Timbuktu (2014) shows two people buried up to their necks. It recalled Beckett’s play Play (2000), starring Alan Rickman in an urn. He directs, and plays King Louis XIV, in A Little Chaos (2014). It’s important to enter the cinema in the right spirit. Mr. Turner (2014) aims to be the definitive, most accurate, portrait of Britain’s most important artist. A Little Chaos is a box of cream cakes. If you hanker for old-fashioned family entertainment every film set before 1880 features a singer, a pianist and a drawing room. You never see many insects in period drama. I bet they were absolutely everywhere.

White God (2013) is the kookiest film I have seen for a long time. It’s a horror film that’s more interested in a Budapest girl’s first rites of passage. I’m sure the father, collecting her from the police after her first visit to a nightclub, had wished he’d let her feed the dog from the table. He should have let that phase play itself out. It’s very uneven – but I suppose dogs are too, fangs and fur. I was reminded of many other films, good and embarrassing. Lili’s search for her dog Hagen echoed The Vanishing (1988). The trip to the nightclub: Christiane F (1981). But it is difficult to portray a dog battalion without stirring memories of adverts for Pedigree Chum. Lili pledges to never discipline Hagen. Later, we’re given a how-to guide on training a ‘fighting dog’. It’s a stray dog’s life. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s first film, Amores Perros (2000) features dog fighting. I can’t recall seeing it in another film, let alone a 15 certificate. Though, after looking up a long-forgotten West Midlands post-punk band that surfaced in a charity shop, YouTube recommended all sorts of ‘underground’ pastimes for me. I only watched a clip from Look! Hear!

White God

We also learned that, in Hungary, a harassed father might ask his daughter, “Are you the Queen of England?” And that they have dogs named Fido. During the credits a spontaneous seminar broke out among the audience. That film was peculiar – what genre was it? White God also includes a clip from Tom and Jerry’s The Cat Concerto (1947). It won an Oscar. Later, Tom and Jerry starred in one of most disturbing children's cartoons ever made: Blue Cat Blues (1956). It ends with the two of them sitting on a railway line, waiting for the next train to put them out of their misery. I suspect the makers weren’t happy with their new contract. Neither animal resembled Henrich von Kleist.
To be continued...

Robin Clarke