Ah, the film festival: the last outlet for the clean and sober spree-happy addict that I am; a time of overindulgence, unswayable all-systems-go immersive indulgence; weeklong retinal-aural bliss-out. Nothing beats a good film festival. This is my first in Palm Springs and may well be my one and only opportunity to sample its various nefarious delights. Palm Springs, after all, is no place for a thirty-year-old heterosexual writer-musician-whatever. This is not the place for me and it never will be, but that doesn’t mean I cannot take full advantage of its damn fine art gallery, sundamaged, rutting celebrities (was that Cloris Leachman enjoying the avocado club sandwich at Rick’s?), and even the occasional cultural event that is not taking place in a casino and featuring some washed-up crooner of yore or avuncular stand-up comic.
The line-up in for the World Cinema section is good here. The Palm Springs International Film Festival prides itself on this. They annually screen every country’s submission for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. They are, in fact, the only festival in the world that scrupulously goes about doing this. Which is pretty cool, but would not work if they didn’t also bring in stuff that doesn’t have that disempowering stamp of approval from governmental funding agencies and the diplomatic corps. Luckily they appear to be keeping things sufficiently interesting in this regard. There is also a spotlight on new Australian cinema this year, which I will be sampling some of and which is undoubtedly a good idea. It is an underrepresented national cinema that at its best effortlessly competes w/ any in the English speaking world, and it has been a little while since I’ve caught a reasonable dose. Cool. What else? This year has already, before the proper commencement of festivities, seen one newsworthy story break. Arms of the Chinese government, in all its anarchic cartoon Stalinism, have reached out to withdraw both of the Chinese films that were supposed to show up here (City of Life and Death and Quick, Quick, Slow) after the festival refused to itself withdraw The Sun Behind the Clouds: Tibet's Struggle for Freedom the existence of which (and the festival's unwavering intention to screen it) pissed off the Chinese for obvious reasons. This is too bad, as clearly City of Life and Death was the big discovery at last year’s Toronto fest, and was one of the films that I was most excited about. Alas. Them’s the breaks.
All in all the first day was a real promising blast-off. The crowds are huge here, and full of ridiculous bourgeois scum and people holding appallingly stupid conversations in the extremely lengthy lines (except for Polytechnique, amusingly, which attracted approximately ten of us, despite the presence of the lead actor at the screening, going to show that English Canada is not the only place where nobody goes to Canadian films). Today in line for the new Michael Haneke a woman behind me actually extemporized that Barack Obama's politics were, to her mind, well to the left of Attila the Hun's. Attila the Hun? Attila you dastardly proponent of collectivized farms you! Attila w/ yr five year plan! Goddamn Hun apparatchik! Fucking moron. I wonder how long this woman lasted in the two-thousand-strong baffled audience for the Haneke, filling every last seat of the Camelot’s main theater, many noisily making their exits as the film progressed, finally leaving us w/ a substantially less packed-to-the-rafters group of people who had not just apparently stumbled unknowingly upon their first European film. What a pissed off group of old white people in shorts and white socks that remained though! I, of course, was pleased as punch by the whole gleeful clusterfuck. This is going to be a strange-ass weak!
Anywho: without further ado, my first day’s screenings:
Fish Tank
Andrea Arnold’s second feature, after the well-received CCTV downer Red Road, is so determined to pay homage to the bleak tradition of unflinchingly dower kitchen-sink downers that have long met programming requirements for British TV, that she and DOP Robbie Ryan have shot this BBC and Film Council-funded bleak house in blocky and boxy 1.33/1 ratio w/ a surprisingly good eye for television-scale compositions. The camera spends a lot of time tracking after determined fifteen-year-old aspiring hip hop dancer protagonist Mia (the very credible newcomer Katie Jarvis overplaying her hardened insouciance because that’s what her character would do as a means of survival and emotional defense) in a way that suggests the influence of Alan Clarke’s steadicam urban roadmappings (see the original Elephant (’89) and the appropriately named Road (’87) especially), also shot in the 1.33/1 ratio (though they, unlike Fish Tank, debuted on television and were not intended to be shown on theatrical screens). More than the television work of Clarke, though, which tends to be smooth and ascending, the documentary kineticism of these tracks – often from behind, yo-yoing over-the-shoulder, or in profiles that slap the vigilantly restless protagonist against the skuzzy urban gridwork like something trying to escape a spider’s web – makes them resemble those that show up repeatedly in the contemporary films of the Belgian Dardenne brothers, whose Rosetta (’99) clearly informs Fish Tank in ways that are not always flattering to Arnold’s film, the inherent poetry of which is more forced and less delicate/immanent than that of Rosetta. Compared to the slew of films over the years that have focused on down-but-not-out lives in the miserable confines of English council estates, however, Fish Tank stands up as a powerful and first rate offering, rhythmically and visually alert, as well as showcasing a natural ability to glean crystalline moments from its ugly Essex w/ its emptied out wastelands concealing a beauty that the film repeatedly ferrets out when least expected to. These films always walk a tightrope between proffering condescending portraits of their vulgar, stupid, and reflexively violent working class characters on the one hand, or demonstrating how social imbalances and organizational institutionalization of class structures creates the conditions in which individuals are stripped of the privilege of being able to make moral decisions or the option to treat others w/ anything like the respect w/ which they themselves would like to be treated on the other. I very much like how in Fish Tank a lexicon of grievance, anger, and contempt persists even when the characters are trying to express love and understanding for one another. Mia will repeatedly lash out w/ vitriol at her mother and sister, and especially at her mother’s boyfriend Conor (Michael Fassbender, who is way too much of a hunk to ever quite fit in here, and whose character is so anachronistically sensible he even backs into parking spots), for whom she progressively develops confusing sexual feelings, at exactly the moment that feelings of love-or-something-like-it are excited. When Mia leaves the family nest at the end of the film, having fucked Conor, who then retreats from their lives and the pursuit of whom reveals more secrets, lies and painful self-realizations, her little sister sobbingly tells her that she fucking hates her only to embrace her in a hug. Her beautiful drunk mom tells her to fuck off already whilst dancing to Mia’s Nas CD, only to then join her two daughters in a sad and touching cavort to the same music, in which they mirror one another’s swaying movements and try to conceal smiles. Ultimately the film becomes about how facades of toughness and coolness, conditioned by measly living environments and legacies of hurt and abandonment, become entwined w/ how love and devotion become simultaneously expressed and repressed. It is about how sad it is that some people only know how to express love through cruelty because cruelty and fear define their world from the ground up through no fault of their own. Fish Tank is ultimately as compassionate and cruel, or rather compassionate-cruel, as its characters. Fish Tank is a shitty name for this film, however, and not one that helps it look like it has found a way around the problem of positioning its characters condescendingly. Do they really need to be compared to helpless fish?
B+
Das weisse Band - Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte / The White Ribbon
“A German Children’s Story” as the German subtitle has it, which does not survive the title’s translation into English. Haneke has said that he excised that part of the title for the rest of the world because he did not want people outside of Germany to think the film somehow was a nationally specific allegory, but was more than happy to have German audiences believe that it was. Meaning? Meaning that Haneke, as usual, wants his Palme d'Or-winning film to implicate everyone, nobody excluded. And it’s personal, buddy. So yes, Das weisse Band explores w/ lateral moves, calculating elisions, and novelistic digressions that great and perennial 20th century theme: fascism starts at home. The main temptation for misreading the film, however, would lie in wanting to extrapolate from this story of young minds being shaped, disciplined, prodded, and humiliated into supplication before the social-behavioral tenants prognosticated by the principal adult figures in one particular German Protestant village at the dawn of World War 1, an allegory expressly about the emergence of one particular fascism: the subsequent rise of National Socialism and Hitler’s Germany during the adulthood of the film’s teenagers and children. While the film certainly wants us to understand that this connection is there, it is finally much more universal than that. Haneke’s anti-Bilungroman about how raising children is doomed always to pervert them, shot in digital color to allow for natural light to be used at night, and then de-chromaticized to take on the stark b&w of August Snader’s photography from the era, is about how children raised to universalize the value systems promulgated by their parents and community leaders (here represented by The Pastor, The Baron, The Steward, The Doctor, and the narrating Teacher), become aware of the fallibility of these parental figures, the implicit hypocrisy at the heart of cycles of discipline and punishment, and instead of seeing these failing as simply human, develop a spirit of revenge or give in to even harsher reciprocations of the regime of discipline-punishment, judging their progenitors w/ their progenitors’ own values and finding them wanting, turning a newly intensified regime upon their own offspring and thereby perpetuating the cycle. The film is really about how socialization invariably damages the young, rendering us all defective in its attempt to impose its correctives. Haneke focuses on the hungry eyes of the young people, eating up every minute adult failing, registering the pain of unjust rapprochement, concealing the knowledge they possess as well as a deep, troubling animosity. Essentially about a series of cruel events that take place in the village (The Doctor and his horse felled by a strategically placed trip-wire, a farmer’s wife falling to her death through a shoddy wooden floor, the pretty son of The Baron found tied-up and beaten in the barn, the subsequent burning down of The Baron’s barn, the midwife’s Down syndrome child found brutalized and blinded) that are paralleled w/ acts of cruelty witnessed by, enacted upon, or informing the world of these children, and three acts of violence explicitly executed by young people (the eldest son of the dead woman gets revenge on The Baron, whom he deems responsible, by fervently laying waste to The Baroness’s cabbage patch w/ a sythe, the daughter of the pastor murders his pet bird and leaves it impaled by scissors on his desk in the shape of a cross, two young children of laborers beat up The Baron’s son and nearly drown him in order to steel his wooden flute). The film very much follows from Caché (’05), Haneke’s last film (not including the Funny Games remake), a thriller that focused on a bourgeois intellectual whose past was fraught w/ post-colonial guilt, being besieged w/ a frightening array of incendiary reminders of his past. In that film we are given a series of clues that lead nowhere, pieces of a puzzle that cannot be resolved, thus the mystery becomes informed by the central character’s own paranoid guilt. In Das weisse Band, we once again are met w/ a slew of incidents and portents, connections and ambiguities that suggest a puzzle that will never quite fit together. The final ominous sense in that of a secret bond between the children (the film has been compared by many to Village of the Damned (’60) which is actually fairly accurate), a repressed bubble of collusion that remains outside the realm of adult oversight and which one is lead to suspect, along w/ the teacher, has replaced the adult world’s system of justice w/ its own more streamlined and unforgiving version, and that the reason that two of the town’s more innocent children (especially the retarded boy, who is wholly innocent) are punished is based on some sort of perversion of this system of discipline-punishment that is forced to enact itself on persons who are entirely without the ability to resist. Not only does this unseen alliance of the children portend the fomentation of Nazism, it suggests how the exercise of power over children may engender all kinds of extremisms on either end of the political spectrum or entirely independent of it. This is the byproduct of all forms of social-production at the site of its real point of energetic implementation: the consciousness of the child, and by the extension upon the social body of the community of young people (dominated by, as The Baroness says of the village itself, “malice, envy, apathy and brutality”). It’s Haneke most dense, dynamic, and literary film (not made for television). At times it’s kind of like a homage to Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Le corbeau ('43), which was another stark portrait of a town whose raw nerves are exposed and irritated (in that film a small French village during Nazi occupation suffers a mysterious outbreak of poison pen letters). And the fact that Buñuel’s old writing partner Jean-Claude Carrière helped w/ the script here means that there is way more humor (some of it dark, granted, such as when The Doctor viciously dresses-down the midwife. his erstwhile lover), playfulness and even warmth than one usually finds in Haneke. It is his best film since Code inconnu (’00).
A
Polytechnique
Polytechnique is Quebec filmmaker Denis Villeneuve’s attempt to cinematize the 1989 massacre at l'École Polytechnique, an event which still looms large in the consciousness of Canadians and which means that the very idea of such a film was extremely controversial from the moment it was first announced. The film goes to great lengths to demonstrate that it doesn’t exist for the wrong reasons and intends no ill-will to survivors, victims, or the families thereof. It refuses to attempt to get inside the killer (Marc Lépine in real life, “the killer” in the closing credits here), it uses composite characters instead of trying to gaudily fictionalize the people whose lives were directly impacted by the event (sort of: Sébastien Huberdeau plays Jean-François, one of the men who stood by helpless while the women were killed and who did his best to help in the bloody aftermath, but who was so guilt-stricken and traumatized that he ultimately took his own life, which means that there is one particular individual in real life whose story his parallels as actor Maxim Gaudette explained after the screening). Years ago Jacques Rivette wrote eloquently in Cahiers de cinema about what he saw as the morally appalling tendency of filmmakers to aesthetecize historical tragedy, particularly anything to do w/ the Shoah. In the seventies, when the Cahiers entered its sternly-theoretical-but-still-hip period under the leadership of the amazing Serge Daney, such a position became even more engrained. Any film that attempted to use beauty and artifice to frame historical tragedies was immediately attacked on moral grounds. While such positions seem a little outdated these days, Polytechnique spends so much time not existing for the wrong reasons that it never really finds a reason to exist. I was also, I must admit, strangely put off by its b&w gorgeousity. It is intermittently very effective in terms of its look and the incredible amount of tension and sensory shock it exploits. Its sound design is especially stunning. There is clearly one reason, however, that the film was shot in black and white (no matter what the very talented but occasionally vapid Villeneuve says about wanting to minimize the blood and gore (really?)), and that is that nobody wants to have to try and make a typical Canadian university look like anything other than an ugly, shittily lit cinder-blocked hell on earth. The movie wants to look pretty. I cannot blame it for that. But somehow I cannot credit it for that either. Especially when its composite characters and gender politics are so unpleasantly telegraphed in ways that absolutely kill the movie when nobody is getting killed. The main female Valérie (actress and co-producer Karine Vanasse, often framed beautifully to showcase her strident absence of an Adam’s apple) is shown before the carnage begins sauntering through hallways while loutish men bump her about, entrapped in the bondage of high heel shoes, then being frankly told by a prospective employer that chicks make bad engineers because of their tendency to grow up and lay eggs. It’s silly, especially as the male killer is explicitly made out to be a deranged malcontent and not a redolent microembodiment of patriarchal society (he is rather someone who has been especially unsuccessful at fitting into that society). Thankfully Polytechnique waits until Valérie’s unspeakably poorly-written monologue at the end – in which she goes on about how she hates it when people tell her she is strong but demonstrating through her stating this how strong she in fact is, talking about being able to lay eggs and still be an engineer, all of this edited over footage of her working in a hangar and at a desk that looks like a fucking b&w DeVry add – to get around to just outright sucking. Villeneuve’s pretty, fun, and somewhat vacant previous women’s films may not have been masterpieces, but at least they weren’t fucking stupid. Polytechnique leaves you w/ a final impression that finally undoes anything that it might have had going for it. Where Gus Van Sant’s impossible-not-to-compare-it-to Elephant ended pretty awkwardly, this one just takes a crap on the linoleum. There’s a pretty cool upside-down track along a hallway roof’s fluorescent lights that closes the awful final passage. Earlier I also like how swirling snow seems to equate the killer’s spree w/ ethereal natural forces. But still …
C+
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