Day four was relatively laid back. Two screenings that were separated by a couple hours. I was able to more properly enjoy my spicy buffalo chicken melt. I got to walk around and talk to strangers more. Flirting w/ old ladies and the like. It suits me just fine keeping the day down to two films. In this case the weakest film of the festival so far followed by the most accomplished. Worlds apart these two were!
The Balibo Conspiracy
Robert Connolly’s The Balibo Conspiracy is a barely serviceable piece of crap about a seriously underexposed historical moment that still needs proper exposure. It is the story of an Australian journalist named Roger East (the ever-reliable Anthony LaPaglia) who is recruited by the foreign minister (and eventual prime minister) of East Timor, Jose Ramos-Horta (Oscar Isaac acting a little too colorful), to come to East Timor in 1975 and help run their national media immediately before Indonesia’s brutal invasion of the small, impoverished island rich in untapped oil reserves. What attracts East to investigate is not the plight of the Timorese or the brazen actions of an Indonesian government directly assisted by the governments of America and Australia, but rather the disappearance of five other Australian journalists who went deep into the jungle to Balibo in order to cover the story of the invasion, never to be seen or heard from again. The film details Roger East’s cliché-driven consciousness-raising as he makes his way into deepest Timor, at first cowardly and in over his head, less interested in the plight of the natives or even his journalistic counterparts than he is in saving his own hide and buffering his own image. This is counterpoised w/ the previous journalists led by the courageous and sensitive Greg Shackleton, shot in 16mm, whose journey is interjected in the form of flashbacks to a few weeks earlier and leading up to their brutal murder by plainclothes Indonesian military forces attempting to pass as a local civil war faction. Balibo is a paint-by-numbers political thriller/melodrama in the Costa-Gavras / Roland Joffé mode equipped w/ a shopworn story not unlike those of amazing-awful Italian horror movies such as Lucio Fulci’s Zombie (’79) or such Ruggero Deodato films as Cannibal Holocaust (’80) and Cut and Run (’85) focusing on white people who find themselves in peril when adventuring into savage outposts where whatever intensions bring them there, good or bad, lead to no good end. An incredible documentary could be made out of this material, engaging both the international machinations involving Western corporogovernmental collusion and the remarkable footage left behind by these brave journalists that was discovered after their deaths and which is here recreated unnecessarily considering the stuff is really out there. The only real things Connolly’s film has going for it is that it makes this story more widely known, exposes the difficulty of covering and then dissemenating these kinds of stories in the analogue age, and makes visible to international cinematic audience the real landscape of East Timor and the places where this history actually went down. These are all things that a documentary could do as well if not better. I got the impression listening to Connolly talk about the footage and documentation available that even the special features on the Australian DVD of the film are most likely significantly more valuable and compelling than the actual film itself which, though it doesn’t shy away from the violence and conspiratorial politics of this story (which it depicts in the first case and plays lip service to in the latter), doesn’t do itself any favors by whitewashing a nation’s tragedy w/ blasé and ethnically-typed portraits of its citizenry and a story which foregrounds the actions of brave white males in their attempt to do right by these noble savages. It is not at all a technically deficient film, it is simply one that is not even remotely capable of optimally handling this material. The clichés come thick and fast and the story is old hat. You’d be better off reading up on this stuff, looking up Greg Shackleton on YouTube, and foregoing the movie all together.
D
Madeo / Mother
To my mind the festival’s first out-and-out masterpiece, Bong Joon-ho’s Mother is another densely political revisionist genre triumph from the formidable South Korean master. It may well be his best yet, and this is the guy who made the amazing bumbling police procedural / serial killer masterpiece Memories of Murder. At first Mother seems to settle into similar terrain as that 2003 film, focusing on an apparent miscarriage of justice and the various comic police incompetencies and endemic corruption that make it possible. Yoon Do-joon is a handsome, mildly-retarded young man who lives alone w/ his mother (the title character is played by Kim Hye-ja in an amazingly sturdy performance which plumbs emotional depths and deftly rolls w/ the character’s many sudden turns). The young man is arrested for the murder of a young schoolgirl because when she was last seen he was following her after a night of heavy drinking at a bar called The Manhattan. Next to her laid-out-for-all-to-see corpse a golf ball, a keepsake upon which Yoon Do-joon has earlier scratched his own name, is discovered, leading investigators to the not unreasonable conclusion that the young man is responsible for the girl’s death. Faced w/ a corrupt and incompetent police department that will not budge and a high-priced lawyer, talented at disappearing acts, who thinks they should exploit the boy’s mental condition for a reduced sentence, mom decides to investigate the case herself Miss Marple-style. Looking into the dead girl’s past she discovers a blackmail conspiracy relating to men the girl photographed w/ a cell phone her friend had turned into a “pervert phone” (meaning the sound the phone makes when you take a photo w/ it has been disabled) after having had sex w/ them in exchange for money, food, or other gifts. Because young Yoon Do-joon is in jail and in possession of a woefully inadequate memory, mother is pretty much on her own, though she does pay her son’s only friend, a young ne’er do well w/ a fondness for high school girls himself, to violently shake down a few potential young witnesses. From here the well-meaning mother becomes more and more corrupted by her need to prove her son’s innocence, slackening her moral worldview and increasingly giving in to desperation and ethically dubious stratagems leading up to a major twist that I will not give away except to say that it comes like, well, a pipe wrench to the head. An explicitly Korean film about selective memory, blanket corruptibility, living w/ lies, and bonds that run deeper than justice, Mother is a masterpiece of satirical suspense, bookeneded by a lonely and desperate old woman engaged in sad-ecstatic interpretative dance, that looks absolutely fucking amazing w/ its CinemaScope framing and cannot help but leave one thinking about Hitchcock at the top of his game. A mordant but tonally measured critique of a family-centric society w/ a tendency to extricate itself from incompetent autocratic rulers only to sink back into the same self-defeating patterns, Mother is a film about the private-public politics of amnesia that world cinema aficionados who see it won’t soon forget.
A+
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