View from the Paperhouse is unusual among film criticism blogs in that I very rarely cover new films (the one exception so far being Final Cut: Ladies and Gentlemen), and there's a good reason for that - in order for a movie to be obscure enough to warrant resurrection here it needs to stand the test of time as an obscurity, and new films will only become easier and easier to see. That being said, film festivals are always a huge crapshoot in terms of which movies will persist to more festivals, general release in the States and TV/home video/on-demand distribution, though one can expect the flicks with stellar orbs to find a way to pry 10 bucks or so from your wallet months later. It's been a few years since I attended the Seattle International Film Festival, the largest film festival in the country (though not North America, as that honor goes to Toronto), mostly because I've been in stuck in college during previous runs (or simply out of state), but this year I went to a good number of them and by God I'm gonna talk about 'em. I'm saving this review for the end of the fest (though will be revising it as I go) so I can do a larger discussion about what I saw as a group and also my thoughts about which films will reappear, and as I'm catching many of the films at their final screenings recommending a film right after seeing it only to see it fall between the cracks would be frustrating for my readers. Because I'm only one man I'll end up missing most of the films, so forgive me if you really wanted to know how Richard Linklater's 11-years-in-the-making Boyhood turned out, as its two screenings are either already sold out or only happening tentatively and I'd rather wait for its almost guaranteed general release. It's a promising lineup for SIFF's fortieth birthday, so let's get reviewing!
First up was Attila Marcel, though I wanted to see Another but couldn't find parking around the Uptown in time. I'm a big fan of its director, Sylvain Chomet, whose two previous films were The Triplets of Belleville and The Illusionist (not to be confused with that Edward Norton 19th-century magician flick that came out alongside The Prestige), both animated and virtually dialogue-free. Attila Marcel is his first live-action film, and while it has some interesting ideas and a candy-colored design scheme into which a lot of work went I can't say it isn't without problems.
Paul (Guillaume Gouix) is mute, a talented pianist who nonetheless lives a sheltered, stunted existence with his two identically-clothed aunts (Bernadette Lafont and Hélène Vincent). They adopted him after the death of his parents when he was 2, and while he can't remember how they died (and his aunts won't tell him) he has ambiguously bad memories of his father (also Gouix in his best Ted Nugent impression). His life consists of playing piano for his aunts' dance school, occasionally eating croquettes (small, delicious-looking pastries from the most stereotypically Gay Paris bakery ever), staring blankly and occasionally having bad memories of his father. One day he sees Mme. Proust (Anne Le Ny), a frumpy, middle-aged woman playing the ukelele in the park, and discovers that she lives in a concealed room below his apartment. Her hobby is growing vegetables in her apartment (with the help of an elaborate mirror-chandelier), making noxious herbal teas from them, and giving them to customers so they can slip into a subconscious state and relive memories. After breaking into Paul's room and finding a shrine to his mother she talks him into taking her treatment in order to fully remember his childhood, and through a series of remembered incidents Paul might have a chance at figuring out why his parents have died and possibly gain the ability to speak. But will he do it in time to win the upcoming Young Artists music contest, and will he go to bed with one of his competitors, the over-eager cellist/erhuist Michelle (Kea Kaing)?
There's a lot to like in Attila, and the audience at my screening absolutely loved it. The memories are quite inventive, as Mme. Proust sparks the memories with pieces of music and the objects creating the music make their way into the memories. For example, one of the songs is a children's record done by a band in frog costumes, and halfway though the scene the band appears in front of Paul (all the memories are seen from Paul's P.O.V.). The memories are also musical numbers, and the quality of the choreography and the scene's overly-stylized unreality show just how much work went into making the film. The acting is generally quite good, especially Paul, whose sad, blank face imparts a Buster Keaton quality and shows off actor Gouix's subtle toolbox of expressions. I also laughed a lot at a side character who is a practicing taxidermist, and we occasionally see his botched attempts to preserve pets that their owners returned out of disgust. Unfortunately, the main conceit of the film, the mystery at the center of the story, doesn't quite make sense, and there is no adequate reason given for Paul's muteness. Chomet's previous films had almost no dialogue, and the characters were able to communicate quite fully with facial expressions and hand movements, giving their worlds consistency. In Attila Paul's muteness feels less like a real affliction and more like an excuse for Chomet to direct a mute protagonist for no other reason than he likes the idea of it. Once the resolution of Paul's search for the truth rolls around you're left unsure not only of what the problem was in the first place but how its resolution is supposed to make Paul feel, or why any of it was a mystery at all. Another problem is the look and feel of the film, which has an overtly cute, storybook quality and is draped in bright solid colors. The Triplets of Belleville and The Illusionist, while animated and more than a bit whimsical, maintained a dark undercurrent and mostly took place in dirty, crowded metropolises (and in the case of The Illusionist allowed its story to take an unexpectedly downbeat turn in the last act). Attila seems much more forced, its whimsical elements a laundry list of kid's-story quirks (quaint shops, siblings who dress alike, hidden gardens) in a failed attempt to make the story appear more like a fable (or at least appeal to a wide audience). We all know that Amelie lived in a ridiculously whimsical version of Paris, but Amelie allowed its details to be as refreshingly odd as they liked and had a manic energy that Attila lacks (not to mention an undercurrent of sexual mischief). The whole movie just seems fake, poorly conceived and more shallow than it thinks, but if you can ignore its problems you'll probably have a big fat smile stretching across your face for the whole running time.
Later that same night I saw The Double, based on a novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky and directed by up-'n'-comer Richard Ayoade (2010's Submarine). Jesse Eisenberg stars as Simon James, a cripplingly meek office drone who harbors an unspoken crush on Hannah (Mia Wasikowska) who works in his office's copy room and also lives in the apartment complex directly across from his (allowing him to peer into her room with a telescope). After witnessing a suicide across from his apartment building, Simon is perturbed do discover that his I.D. card doesn't work at his office, and flat out faints once he sees that his boss has hired a new employee named James Simon who looks and sounds exactly like him. James is both his mirror image and his personality inverted, an over-confident smooth talker with a spring in his step and success with the ladies, and while the two gain a kinship Simon is disturbed to see James take credit for his work and win the heart of Hannah. As James steadily takes over Simon's life Simon's own situation goes down the toilet, and as the world seems to turn its back on our everyman hero he must take drastic measures to regain his identity and his very existence.
The Double had me hooked from frame one, not only because Ayoade is a stylish and determined writer/director but also because of the film's universe. The Double uses its story of paranoia and unreality to create a Brazil-esque dystopian landscape, its sets cobbled together from weather-worn artifacts of various eras and poised as loopy satire of modern life. Simon works with computers, but the computers are no more advanced than a late-80's color MacIntosh and are imbedded in gray, plastic roll-top desks. Culture hasn't progressed past 1987 and seems to be dragging its heels since the 60's, as Simon can still pick out Kyu Sakamoto's "Sukiyaki" on a jukebox and is a fan of a sci-fi show straight out of Space Mutiny. The dialogue is fast and furiously funny with James getting all the best lines (especially during his pep talks with Simon) and Simon's boss, played by an over-caffeinated Wallace Shawn, steals the show whenever he appears. Another scene stealer is The Colonel (James Fox), the C.E.O. of Simon's workplace who has fashioned a cult of personality around himself. The acting is perfect, with Jesse Eisenberg turning in his best performance yet as Simon and James. I've long suspected him to be a one-trick pony but he brings out a lot of good moments for each personality, finding ways to differentiate between the two of them both overtly and very subtly. Mia Wasikowska is surprisingly good, alternately sweet and scatterbrained, and along with her hilarious supporting role in Jim Jarmusch's Only Lovers Left Alive her performance here might make me forget how much I hated her in Alice in Wonderland and Stoker. There's also neat cameos by Chris O'Dowd and Christopher Morris in case you're a fan of British comedy. On a less superficial note, there are many different interpretations and messages one could glean from The Double, and part of its charm is that its well-told main story allows for all of these interpretations to coexist, not favoring one possible message over the other and simply allowing its bizarre situation to play out as it will. The Double is a fantastic satire on modern times with great acting, great design, great dialogue and overall greatness, and I love every second of it.
I was pretty interested to see Quod Erat Demonstrandum as I had never seen a Romanian film before (I find the language beautiful and am a big fan of its classical composer home-town hero, George Enescu) and its plot seemed promising, a scientific counterpart to The Lives of Others. Set in the mid-80's in Communist Romania, Q.E.D. follows mathematician Sorin Parvu (Sorin Leoveanu), stuck teaching math to high schoolers, still living with his mother and forced to smuggle his breakthrough-laden scientific papers out of the country to be published in foreign journals. On the cusp of completing a study of waveform theory (I think?) that could have wide applications to pretty much every field imaginable, he draws investigation from mid-level police detective Alexandru Voican (Florin Piersic Jr.), who takes the case in order to climb up the ladder. Sorin has romantic interest in Elena Buciuman (Ofelia Popii), whose mathematician husband Ducu went to France for a conference and never came back, leaving her and her son living with her increasingly senile father and living off his measly pension. Elena might be Sorin's hope to get his new paper to an understanding audience, as she is fighting to get approval to travel out of the country with her son to see Ducu, but Voican's investigation and the impossible bureaucracy of the Romanian government may make Sorin and Elena's dreams wither and die.
Look, I'm no expert on what it was like to live behind the Iron Curtain in the 80's, but Q.E.D. does itself no favors in its refusal to properly explain why Sorin can't get recognition for his work in Romania or publish overseas. This isn't a patent issue, as Sorin doesn't have an invention he wants to sell but rather a mathematical theory, and theories can't be owned or bought - they're for everybody, and Sorin only wants to publish his findings in an academic journal. What benefit would Romania gain by clamping down? If his work is so valuable to science, wouldn't the government be inclined to promote Sorin as an example of Romania's scientific prowess? If they don't want other countries to have the knowledge, why don't they do anything with his work? The movie never offers a satisfactory answer for this, and on top of that nobody asks why. In other movies I've seen about life under oppressive Communist regimes the movie offers at least one character who spouts a twisted logic train to defend an unsavory policy, illustrating the frustrating totality of the system for people who didn't experience it firsthand - Q.E.D. has none of these moments, its only conversations about policy merely raising more unanswered questions. Maybe the issues in the film are much clearer for people who lived in Communist Romania, but ignoring for a moment that I'm an American, the Berlin Wall fell 25 years ago and the film could do good for itself by at least trying to be comprehensible to Romanians who weren't old enough to remember life behind the Curtain. Scientific discovery policies aren't exactly common knowledge, and I'd bet dollars to donuts that plenty of young Romanians walked out of Q.E.D. not knowing any more on the subject than I did. I've actually heard some abominable things about Romania's old regime, but those policies at least had some kind of superficial benefit beyond a cartoon villain's need to control every little thing. If you squint enough you can just make out glimpses of a nice story under the plot's malaise, but those moments are poorly served by the lack of any real motivation or tension for the characters. I might have been able to ignore this if the acting and production were top notch, but the film is saddled with dead-eyed, sotto voce performances across the board and cripplingly conservative camera work. The director, Andrei Gruzsniczki, chose to film it in black and white, and while I understand the use of B&W stock to illustrate the dreary regularity of Eastern Bloc life he just has no flair for camera movement, shooting everything at film school-approved medium shots and featuring very little movement, the movements doing nothing for the flow of the film and seeming more like a quota the director felt he needed to hit so his movie wouldn't be the flattest film ever made. Quod Erat Demonstrandum is a movie that would get a passing grade in film school but can barely stay awake on its own energies, a badly told story of life under a supposedly oppressive government that has no idea how to make its audience care about its message, or what the message actually is, and I'm sorry that it was the first Romanian film I saw; you should just watch The Lives of Others again.
Willow Creek is the first foray into horror for writer/director Bobcat Goldthwait, done as a "found footage" film. It follows Sasquatch believer Jim (Bryce Johnson) and his skeptical-yet-loyal girlfriend Kelley (Alexie Gilmore) as they drive into the Cascades in order to retrace the site of the famous 1967 Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot footage, a cornerstone piece of evidence in the 'Squatch myth, documenting their journey as they go. They visit the town of Willow Creek which is completely funded by Sasquatch merchandising, and while they meet a few people with 'Squatch stories others they meet have less than hopeful warnings for the pair. They drive into the mountains and try to hike to the Patterson-Gimlin site, but when they camp overnight in the woods strange noises and threatening figures circle around them and they find themselves far deeper in danger than they bargained for.
Found footage movies tend to be very divisive, including fantastic ones like The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield, largely because of its central conceit of trying as hard as it can not to feel like a movie. The footage in Willow Creek is supposedly filmed by the one camera the couple brought on their trip, and the film clears the first logistical hurdle all these films face by never forcing me to question why the footage is being filmed - everything being filmed could theoretically turn up in Jim's documentary, and the combination of staged interviews and home video footage is completely believable as raw footage. This also clears the second logistical hurdle quite easily, the question of how it's being filmed. As for the two other major questions, who found the footage and why/how they found it, is left unanswered, and the ending is ambiguous enough to leave at least the latter question hanging forever. The film was listed as a horror comedy but that's not really true, rather the camera captures a lot of funny dialogue and details early on and then watches as things turn decidedly horrific in the last act. The flat, unengaged style allows for a totally smooth transition, one that is surprising and even haunting. Once the real horror elements show up they're unexpected and quite original considering what Jim and Kelly set out to find, raising more unanswered questions in the best possible way. Lastly but most importantly, Willow Creek's main characters are extremely likable, very funny and sympathetic, and this factor is essential in horror movies if we are to feel bad when the characters face off against the horror. Jim and Kelly have sharp senses of humor, turning in a very entertaining first half as Jim attempts documentary inserts with goofy results and Kelly responds with snark ("There could also be 100 leprechaun corpses in the woods, for all we know."). The town of Willow Creek is also quite funny in just how deep into 'Squatch it is, with every other building named "Bigfoot Such and Such" and sporting at least two big Sasquatch statues. One of my favorite bits is when the couple goes to a restaurant and order Bigfoot Burgers - the burgers come on big, feet-shaped buns. One mark against the film is that the plot is eerily similar to The Blair Witch Project, right down to mimicking a couple of setpieces ("We passed this tree before!"), but the setting and structure serves the subject matter well enough that it doesn't really matter. My only other complaints are so minor that they're not worth mentioning here. I'll admit that the deck was stacked in my favor for Willow Creek as I'm pretty into found footage movies to begin with, but even without that Willow Creek is a very entertaining and well-crafted horror movie that puts another feather in the cap of the surprisingly successful comedy auteur Bobcat Goldthwait, and I hope horror fans embrace it as one of the better recent films in the genre. Coincidentally, Blair Witch co-director Eduardo Sánchez just made a Bigfoot horror movie of his own, Exists, so maybe Goldthwait beat a seasoned horror director to the punch.
All I knew about O Menino e o Mundo (The Boy and the World) going in was that it was animated, had no dialogue, was from Brazil and was supposedly beautiful. Thank God I took a chance on it, because it's one of the best animated films I've seen in a long time (or at least since ParaNorman). Cucu (never named in the film) lives a simple existence in the country with his parents until his father leaves on a train for parts unknown. Cucu takes a family photo and an empty suitcase and tries to find his dad, meeting helpful people along his journey: an old man who picks cotton and a young man who weaves it (both suspiciously similar-looking to Cucu). His adventure takes him through each layer of modern industrial life, following a single product through various stages of manufacture and sale and eventually to a large city where workers eke out an existence, unaware of their own place in the industrial cycle and at odds with an approaching fascist organization that threatens to buy out and control pretty much everything. Cucu's journey transforms not only the way he views the world but also his place in it, and his future becomes the future for children the world over, his choices their choices and his potential theirs.
The descriptions didn't lie - The Boy and the World is strikingly beautiful, deftly animated in a flat-yet-layered crayon-drawing style. The minimalistic approach allows for both enormous scenes and extreme intimacy, the spare lines letting scenes blend into one another and Cucu's imagination to take over. The film doesn't exactly take place in Brazil, though some cultural aspects are decidedly South American, and its exotic countryside and drably-collaged cityscapes make the story a parable for all places and peoples. Its director, Alê Abreu, has a sharp eye for detail and delights in embellishing his cartoony world with seemingly endless detail and charm, each new corner revealing a fresh commentary on our own world. This pan-national feeling is helped by the use of a garbled non-language for the few times people speak, and text on road signs and ads are often cut into bits or turned upside down and sideways. It's a story to be understood entirely visually, even making music visual, each note a floating, transparent ball and allowing for one of the most touching details of the film: whenever his parents sing, Cucu catches one of the notes in a jar to save for later, burying it and revisiting it much later to find that the music is still there. The design for Cucu and the other people uses faces so simple and blank as to afford any emotion, and Cucu's outlet-like visage speaks everything from wonder to confusion to irreparable loss. There's a lot of music in the movie and it's all excellent, responding perfectly to the events on screen and featuring a folk-song central theme that manages to survive a lot of transformations without losing its poignancy. I adored The Boy and the World - it's a wonderful piece of visual storytelling, packing a great amount of emotional impact and some very affecting and important messages for everyone and every time. It needs to be seen by everybody, so make every effort you can to find it and sign any petition you see to bring it to American theaters. It's the kind of movie that makes you remember why we need storytelling, and I can't think of a higher compliment for it than that.
Ari Folman's The Congress stars Robin Wright as a fictionalized version of herself, a washed-up former star whose career has tanked due to a string of bad decisions and the increasing debilitation of her son Aaron. Her agent Al (Harvey Keitel) approaches her with "the last offer you'll ever get", an offer from the president of Miramount, Jeff Green (Danny Huston), to have her body and identity scanned into an advanced computer replication system so the studio can make movies with Robin Wright without having to deal with the actual person Robin Wright. As the 20-year contract involves signing away her right to act, Robin refuses at first, but Al and Jeff use her past failures to bully her into cooperating. 20 years later, Robin attends the Futurist Conference at Miramount's hotel in Abraham, a "limited animation zone" where Robin uses psychotropic drugs in order to see the world in an animated view. Her goal is to negotiate the renewal of her contract with Miramount, but before she is able to get a straight answer out of Jeff about what will happen to her character in the future the Congress is attacked by rebel forces and Robin slips into a semi-hallucinatory state, suspecting that people put hallucinogenic agents in the tap water. She is saved by Dylan (John Hamm), a man who headed up the animation team that controls the digital Robin Wright, but soon she seems to fall deeper into hallucination, forcing doctors to cryogenically freeze her body until a time when her condition can be treated. After 20 more years she awakens in a strange new world, and only with the help of Dylan can she find out the truth of the future and the fate of her son Aaron.
As far a cry from Folman's earlier Waltz from Bashir as you could imagine, The Congress might be the most over-ambitious, confused and frustrating sci-fi movie since Richard Kelly's Southland Tales. Based on Stanislaw Lem's novel The Futurological Congress, Folman's adaptation uses Lem's gimmick of a future where people live in hallucinations to make satirical (?) commentary on Hollywood and mankind's need to project their personalities onto more attractive fictional personae, but it took a lot of mental squinting and heavy lifting to deduce that and any hope of conceptual clarity and even basic storytelling is crushed under out-of-control world-building, awkward and often incomplete dialogue, confused acting and fatally shoddy plotting. This is Folman's first film in English as well as his first fictional film, and you can tell that his eyes were way, way too big for his stomach in terms of scriptwriting, filming and directing actors. The live-action first third of the film is almost painful to watch, featuring good actors who have no idea how to deal with the forced, unnatural dialogue they have been given, especially Keitel, who looks like he's on the brink of having a stroke as he gesticulates in a desperate attempt to understand basic motivations and even sentence structure. Robin's children are just awful, not only because the actors can't wrap their heads around their own characters but simply because Folman can't write convincing child characters to save his life, saddling Aaron with a bizarre hobby (building kites to mimic early flying machines) so poorly it seems like nothing more than a desperate ploy to get the audience to sympathize with a character already in the grips of a debilitating medical condition (he is simultaneously losing his hearing and his sight). Folman creates a fictional version of Hollywood that puts Robin Wright as some kind of Greta Garbo type, a stunning beauty who starred in films like The Princess Bride and Forrest Gump before retreating from the limelight, but as much as some characters seem to worship the ground she stands on I wasn't convinced of this alternate history for a second, mostly because Robin is such an understated, precise and reserved actress that thinking of her as a sex symbol seems preposterous. Folman also shoots his future world in the foot by leaping ahead so far in time with each act change that the audience is left scratching their heads as to what is going on, why those things are happening, and what is even real and what isn't. For example, the "limited animation zone" not only features people who look somewhat like themselves, such as Robin, Dylan and Jeff, but also people who look like they stepped out of a Fleischer Bros. cartoon or Ralph Bakshi's Cool World. Did they choose to look like that, or did someone else design them? Is everybody seeing the same animated world or is it different for each person? We see people inhaling psychotropics that allow them to temporarily look like other people, but if they have the option of designing their own personae why would they choose to look like half the people walking around the hotel? A particularly weird example is a pair of drummers in the main congress meeting who look like Jemaine from Flight of the Conchords wearing nothing but blue briefs. Why would they choose to look like that, and if they were made to look like that who on Earth chose that design?
The world even farther into the future makes even less sense, as society (or at least Los Angeles) has completely retreated into a hallucinatory simulated world where they can look like anything they want. I understand the different characters walking around, but the actual world looks like a surreal alien landscape with Lovecraftian flora and skyscrapers with wings. Is this just what Robin is seeing, or is there an outside designer? This state also allows people do do pretty much anything they feel like, such as flying and causing catastrophic destruction with no real damage to themselves, but how are they doing it and who is controlling it? Suitable explanations could have been offered, but Folman gives all his characters oddly incomplete dialogue, as if he expected the audience to deduce the whole nature of the world out of half-conversations and the incidents, but these lines only leave the audience riled up and more confused than before. The sad thing is that I love movies that take place in shattered realities; my two favorite movies are Videodrome and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and both of those movies left trails of logical breadcrumbs the audience could follow in order to figure out the nature of their stories' unreality. These kinds of stories are very difficult to tell, not only requiring the author to invent a comprehensible hall of mirrors but also to craft a good story with believable characters to inhabit it. Not only does Folman fail at the world-building part he fails exponentially in terms of character and story, a task he might not have been up for in the first place but is way out of his depth considering the book he was trying to adapt and the social commentary he was attempting. The story completely falls apart in the final two minutes, reminding me once again that it doesn't take much monkey business to completely derail a plot. Further gumming up the works is the animated versions of the main actors: while you'd expect animation to free up the actors expressive capabilities, Folman's designs make Robin and the other leads as emotionless dolls, their eyelids akin to those retractable headlight covers on sports cars. I suspect he was afraid to make them too cartoonish at the risk of making the audience unable to relate to them, but he ended up running so far the other way that he failed anyway.
A movie The Congress reminded me of quite a bit was Charlie Kaufman's insanely ambitious passion project Synecdoche, NY, which starred Philip Seymour Hoffman (God rest his soul) as a middle-aged theater director who uses an unexpected MacArthur Genius Grant to stage the play to end all plays in a disused warehouse. The main conceit of the film is that he seems to be losing touch with reality following a traumatic head injury, and his play involves recreating New York City inside the warehouse in order to encapsulate, well, life itself. His play becomes his view of his own life, and major life events and long stretches of time slip past him as he continues to exist inside of his "production", turning reality into scene rehearsals and creating smaller and smaller replicas inside of replicas, even hiring actors to mimic himself and his family. While I can't say that Synecdoche, NY was entirely successful or comprehensible, Kaufman knew well enough to stick to one gimmick long enough to let the audience piece together what was happening and settle into a groove. He also wrote better characters and had a good sense of humor about the thing, and when things fall apart near the end the excuse of Hoffman's increasing senility/schizophrenia allowed for a bit of confusion to stand. While Synecdoche might eventually find an audience on its own merits The Congress will most likely go down as an unwieldy, unenjoyable mess, too grim and embarrassing to be entertaining as a cult romp and sinking in a quagmire of poorly conceived scientific concepts and social satire. I'm sure some people will be able to sit back and let the weirdness flow over them but for people like me who've seen enough reality-warp movies to know the ropes it offers little more than bile-spewing frustration. The best thing I can say about the film is that it failed because it flew too close to the sun; that's at least better than Quod Erat Demonstrandum, which couldn't even tell a simple story without making a hash of it.
I had the chance to watch Amer, the previous film from the filmmaking team of Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani (not counting their contribution to The ABC's of Death), the night before I saw L'étrange couleur des larmes de ton corps (The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears). A semi-experimental psycho-sexual thriller, Amer created an intense sensory experience by sensually exploding fragmented moments in a young woman's life, largely in homage to Italian giallo thrillers of the 60's and 70's. I found Amer to be a hell of a ride, far more fascinating than the majority of gialli I've seen, though I admit that the second half dragged quite a bit and I don't know if I fully understood the film. There weren't many people at my Strange screening, but I'm pretty sure every one of them left the theater invigorated and scratching their heads, trying to unravel its violent technicolor mystery.
Dan Kristensen (Klaus Tange) returns from a business trip to find that his wife is missing, but his apartment is still locked from the inside. His search for answers takes him deep into the bowels of his apartment building and his own psyche, uncovering bizarre characters, violent pasts and fractured realities. Stalked in daylight and dreams by visions of a leather-clad killer, Dan's elliptical journey may ultimately reveal more about himself than his wife or his neighbors, and the only one who knows the real truth is the mysterious and elusive Laura - but finding her may prove altogether more lethal.
Cattet and Forzani anchor the film by one of the oldest rules in the book - location, location, location. Dan's apartment building is completely art nouveau, one of the most stunningly beautiful buildings I've seen in a recent film. Every corner of this place is lusciously designed, is deep colors home to endless shadows and kaleidoscopic geometry (appropriately enough, the opening credits play over a kaleidoscope view of the building's exteriors), ensuring a heck of a lot of mileage for horror. Once again C & F utilize a roll call of giallo motifs, such as killers slicing people with straight blades while wearing leather gloves and trench coats (as well as art nouveau design, in the case of Suspiria), in such a way as to make them interlocking psychological symbols in the puzzle of Kristensen's mind. Even the long, outrageous title is a giallo staple, rubbing shoulders with the likes of The Iguana with the Tongue of Fire and Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key (yes, those are both real). C & F also ladle on 70's funk and disco instrumentals to stylish and occasionally humorous effect, usually through records the characters play themselves. Their direction is equally intense as in Amer, perhaps even more so, as tight compositions, deep colors and swift movements create a hyperkinetic claustrophobia well suited to the situation. C & F not only make an intoxicating visual and aural experience but also a tactile one, its characters constantly feeling a variety of objects in close up with the accompaniment of brilliant sound design (if Strange doesn't get awards for sound design I swear to God...). On top of these elements are images I've never seen before and may never see again, including a record made of crystal and hands working around underneath peoples' skin. The trouble starts when you try to solve the film's mysteries and stay emotionally invested at the same time, and C & F's scattershot tension-and-release trajectory makes the latter task nearly impossible. Without spoiling too much, imagine that you're watching a movie that splits from one point of view into three, and the three stories all have different, contradictory resolutions that the film expects you to connect with. Strange builds to a fractured, yet surprisingly simple resolution that requires simultaneous finales and leaves the viewer far too confused to care, and I'm speaking as somebody who likes playing these kinds of psycho-horror games. The directors certainly cared, and the actors are completely committed to their characters' insanity, and the latter attribute is one of the most important needs of splintered reality flicks like this, so you can at least count on that. Regardless of its confused storytelling The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears is a Neo-Giallo delight, a sensory roller coaster that hangs in the mind long after the credits roll, and will most likely stay in mine for years to come.
Pitched in the SIFF listing as "Dirty Harry meets Fargo", In Order of Disappearance follows the recent gangland killing of the son of Nils Dickman (Stellan Skarsgård), named "Citizen of the Year" for his tireless efforts plowing the streets of snow-buried rural Norway. Stopped from suicide by a friend of his son's, whose theft of a bag of cocaine started all the nonsense, Nils sets off on a blood-soaked journey of revenge, picking off goons in the chain of command of local cocaine kingpin Greven (Pål Sverre Hagen). Unaware of who is systematically murdering his underlings, Greven assumes it's the work of a Serbian gang who had previously dealt coke in peaceful coexistence, and kills one of their men in retaliation - a man who turns out to be the grandson of the gang's leader, Papa (Bruno Ganz). Will Nils see justice, or will he be buried in an avalanche of revenge like all the others?
While Order's plot isn't anything new (as Liam Neeson reminds us via contractual obligation), director Hans Petter Moland and writer Kim Fupz Aakeson have crafted a crowd-pleasingly deadpan black comedy that makes easy company with Fargo and a host of other mob comedies. Moland maintains an elegantly styled distance from its subject matter, letting the mood casually stroll from mourning to humor without trouble. This distance also allows funny moments to seem much funnier because of how dark everything around it is - in fact, the humor is the film's salvation, as without it Order would be incredibly dreary and ultimately pointless. The filmmakers know how little credence modern audiences lend to revenge, and as such we can appreciate an anti-vengeance message through the power of the characters' compounded shortsightedness and ignorance (this is one of those plots that could be solved with a five-minute phone call). A particularly nice touch is the capping of each death with an intertitle showing the deceased's name, age and religion, a gag that might not sound that funny on paper but had my audience in stitches as the body count rose. Even if the film wasn't smart as a whip, the character of Greven and specifically Hagen's performance as him would still steal the show. Looking like a Tolkien elf (at least 6' 6'', thin, wearing a ponytail and even sporting slightly pointy ears), Hagen's performance is hysterically funny, wildly energized and showcasing a vast repertoire of nervous tics and sneers. It's easily the best gangster performance I've seen since William Hurt in A History of Violence and should get this guy some awards, and it'd be interesting to see if the role captures the interest of American moviegoers if Order ever gets a general release in the States. The other performances are also quite good and very well balanced, with Skarsgård keeping the proceedings grounded in understatement and Ganz getting some of the best lines in his surprisingly funny moments. I don't know if In Order of Disappearance has much more to say than its surface entertainment (and the ending is a bit lackluster) but it's a wicked good time regardless, and what more can you ask for at the movies?
I made a point of going into each SIFF film relatively cold, foregoing watching previews and doing more research than the descriptions in the guide, but it appears that everybody else knew about The Babadook well before me and were breaking down the doors for a chance to see it. I attempted to see it at a midnight screening at the Egyptian but was appalled to find a line around the block 25 minutes before the film was supposed to start. I decided not to risk waiting 20 minutes in a line to find out the show was sold out, so I waited until the second showing at the Uptown at 9:30 the next day. Having purchased my ticket online well beforehand, I arrived 50 minutes early to find a ticketholder line already curving around the building, and the guy in front of me said that he'd seen the trailer for The Babadook a year earlier. The Australian horror flick had been gaining steam ever since its early festival screenings, and now it's been foisted on Seattlites to at least one sold out screening (mine). Thankfully I was able to see the movie in its most appropriate stomping ground, a theater crammed with as many excited people as possible, as it's been a while since I saw a horror movie engage and thrill a theatrical audience as much as this one.
It's been seven years since Amelia (Essie Davis) lost her husband Oskar in a car crash on the way to give birth to her son Samuel (Noah Wiseman). Left alone in a big old house, Amelia has come just about to the end of her rope trying to raise her son, a child of unique and destructive hobbies (a spicy combo of magic and homemade weaponry) and a hyperactive attitude that has pushed his teachers over the edge. Threatened with the assignment of a one-on-one special needs teaching situation for Samuel, Amelia pulls him from school in the hopes of finding one more fitted for his needs. Each night they go through a ritual - Samuel claims monsters will get him, Amelia checks the usual corners for things that aren't there, and the two of them read a story until he falls asleep. The night after Samuel is pulled from school he is allowed to choose his own story, but the book he pulls out, Mister Babadook, is one Amelia has never seen before. The book is a rhyming pop-up tale of a silhouetted figure in a hat, long coat and pointy gloves, one who announces his presence with knocking and wants to get in. Samuel doesn't take it well, and his fears of monsters now have a name and a face. In subsequent days and nights Samuel says that the Babadook is trying to get him, his seeming delusion growing more obsessive and belligerent until he pushes a child out of her own treehouse at her birthday party. Amelia breaks down and begs a doctor for sleeping pills, hoping that keeping Samuel asleep will help her regain sanity. At least she got rid of the book, having torn it into bits after catching it in Samuel's possession. Except that it's reappeared, and it's brought something much more terrifying into Amelia's life, something that wants far more than Amelia is willing to give.
Expanded from her 2010 short film Monster, The Babadook is one hell of a great first feature for writer/director Jennifer Short, taking an engagingly creepy concept and running with it at full speed through a brick wall. Short has an impressively sharp eye for pacing and design, exploiting every creepy moment to the point the audience is lifted off their chairs by their own goosebumps. Her editing is deftly breakneck, using sharp, surprising cuts to vault tension across scenes and occasionally generate laughs. The Babadook itself is one of the best boogeymen I've seen, that perfect combination of specific and vague that gives Short full reign to mess with the audiences' head, keeping them guessing as to what it'll do next with equal parts fascination and dread. The pop-up book is a brilliant introduction to the monster and would make a great tie-in product if the film ever gets picked up by the Big Time. All the sturm und drang is anchored by a pair of incredible performances by Essie Davis and the very young Noah Wiseman, reminiscent of The Ring's David Dorfman but without the Uncanny Valley wise-beyond-his-years air Dorfman always gave off. Ring and Babadook make good buddies, as they are both about mothers attempting to raise and understand unusual children under the looming threat of supernatural entities, and much like The Ring Babadook uses the conceit of a mentally off-kilter kid to avoid the tiresome cliché of the child who sees the monster and the parents who remain skeptical and scornful to the bitter end, like in the frustrating Don't Be Afraid of the Dark remake from a few years ago. My one real strike against the movie is that, while the pacing is consistent throughout, the fast speed of the first third means that character development is delivered through blunt force. Important details are blown past, the characters left to shout their attitudes rather than breath them and a few moments too truncated to make sense. I suspect the first act might have been more leisurely in an earlier edit but somebody decided to trim suspected fat to deliver scares sooner and shave the runtime down to 90 minutes. My audience didn't seem to mind it - they loved every second of the thing, howling and gasping and jumping out of their seats. Don't let my very slight reservations distract you - see it as soon as possible, preferably with as much popcorn as you can carry, because horror movies this solid and entertaining come by at the rate of blue moons.
*****
And that was that. I gotta say, I'm really glad The Babadook was the last movie I saw in the festival; I skipped the Boris Karloff experimental documentary A Masque of Madness after seeing people online call it a turdburger. I ended up seeing nine movies, which might seem like a lot of movies to see theatrically in three weeks but was maybe 3% of the movies shown. There were plenty of movies I wanted to see but couldn't, like Black Coal, Thin Ice and The Trip to Italy, but that's what happens when you live a half hour from a big city and hate paying for parking in trendy neighborhoods. I'm super glad that SIFF started showing movies at Bellevue's Lincoln Square theater, as I ended up seeing six movies there. I had pretty good luck this year, seven of the nine movies I saw were really good, a better ratio than some previous years I've been. My ranking is below, but as years pass these things are sure to fluctuate and I hope I'll be able to see the majority of them again for then'n'now comparisoning. If any of you went to SIFF movies this year or past years I'd love to hear your thoughts, and let's toast to SIFFs to come being better than ever.
1. The Boy and the World
2. The Double
3. The Babadook
4. In Order of Disappearance
5. Willow Creek
6. The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears
7. Attila Marcel
8. The Congress
9. Quod Erat Demonstrandum
~PNK
