In a wasteland of monochromatic post-industrial dullness we see fleeting moments of quiet desperation, quixotic humour and heaving torpor. It’s kind of like Samuel Beckett went to Ikea and came back with everything and a kitchen sink. The characters are beautifully realised archetypes and their stories, unravelled across intersecting vignettes, present modern maladies and ennui with a dark but often funny zeal. Underneath it all, the filmmaker Roy Andersson sprinkles political references with a prophetic doomsday mentality. There are swastikas hiding in the most delicious of homes, death is waiting around the corner, racism is only a haircut away and love seems the hardest thing to find. However, it isn’t all grim mortality on show. Indeed, there are moments of hilarity, musical interludes and a witty precision in every department of the film, from the set dressing to the performances. It’s hard to see this film joining the ranks of quirky Swedish movie success stories (think As it is in Heaven) if only because it’s perhaps a little too bleak for mainstream distribution, so catch it at MIFF this Sunday while you can.
Screening at Regent: Sun, 12th 2007f August, 11:00 AM
Theo van Gogh’s legacy as a filmmaker is darkly tied to the tragic end of his life but as Interview illustrates, his sense of humour is equally worthy of our attention. The film has the deceptively simple structure of a two-hander conversation that, in its rich text and complex psychological games, unearths a complex thematic through-line. Steve Buscemi and Sienna Miller play wonderfully off each other as determinedly opposing but complementary members of society. He is a middle-aged, alcoholic, cynical, self-serving political journalist. She is a young, coke-snorting, blonde, self-serving starlet. At least they have one thing in common from the outset. The battleground is sexual, gendered and all about the assumptions and haunted pasts that encumber both the characters and the audience. Throughout the film van Gogh’s spectre looms, with plenty of self-referential details in the set dressing, but Buscemi has made the film not as a cloying tribute but as the sinisterly creeping satire and provocative set piece that van Gogh would have wanted.
Screening at Greater Union: Fri, 10th of August, 9:00 PM
On her last day in the office before taking a well-deserved overseas jaunt, I caught up with Kristy Edmunds, Artistic Director of the Melbourne International Arts Festival (MIAF), to talk about this year’s program from her perspective.
There is something wonderfully seasonal about Melbourne’s festival circuit. The winter solstice comes and goes and, even though the winter winds still chill everyone in their tight black jeans, the Arts Festival program launch and the Film Festival screenings get Melburnians out on the streets, all of them flipping the bird at the frost and the rain and looking ahead to the warmer, longer days to come.
My experience of MIAF has been limited to the two previous years that Edmunds has led but something that struck me as noticeably different about this year’s program announcements was the flurry of names familiar from last year’s festival—Robert Wilson, Dan Zanes, Jérôme Bel, William Yang and Daniel Bernard Roumain all return with fresh engagements. In an industry where festival spots can be vital career catalysts, there may well be artists feeling that they’ve been left out in the cold when others are getting a second go, but Edmunds’ reasoning for the decision is convincing. As she related to me, each artist is coming back for very specific reasons.
In the case of the Grammy-winning children’s musician Dan Zanes, Edmunds explained that, for the kids who went to see him last year, it would have been their first encounter with him. This year, the kids will be familiar with his songs and excited about the chance to see him again, instead of him just being a funny guy in a green suit that their parents thought they might enjoy.
Edmunds cites her curatorial responsibility to both audiences and artists. In bringing these performers, directors and choreographers back, she is able to develop an audience for their work and sustain their practice while also enriching the experience of audiences by giving them the opportunity to garner a broader and deeper understanding of an artist’s work. Edmunds suggested an analogy with visual artists whose work is constantly retrospectively surveyed and considered, whereas the performing arts have an inherently more ephemeral quality. As such, repeat appearances allow us to see the evolution of an artist’s style.
From a practical perspective, it would be impossible for MIAF to mount two Robert Wilson pieces in one festival, but the 12-month interval also allows for audiences to fully digest the epic I La Galigo in advance of seeing this year’s The Temptation of St Anthony. Where I La Galigo was an opera inspired by the story and musical tradition of the Bugis people of Indonesia, The Temptation pairs Wilson with Bernice Johnson Reagan (founding member of Sweet Honey in the Rock) for an African-American-meets-Flaubert musical.
In the case of Jérôme Bel, The Show Must Go On is a seminal work of contemporary dance that Edmunds has been working on getting across for the last two years. Last year, Bel was here with a delicately understated and hilarious piece of conversation-cum-dance-lesson with Pichet Klunchun that was one of my festival highlights. So, for those who witnessed that work, The Show Must Go On has already been contextualised by a sense of Bel’s aesthetic and sense of humour.
The program for this year’s Melbourne Interantional Arts Festival also brings to our shores a number of works by international artists with long-established reputations. Renowned theatre-maker Peter Brook, aleatory choreographer Merce Cunningham, butoh master Ushio Amagatsu and multimedia whiz Laurie Anderson are names that have been reverently honoured for decades. All of these artists have left an indelible mark on their artform in terms of their legacy, but Edmunds is quick to point out that they are still active practitioners, not taxidermies of a bygone era.
The Merce Cunningham residency, with its myriad offshoots into the intertwined worlds of John Cage and Robert Rauschenberg, is a festival within a festival. With exhibitions, installations, films, discussions, new works, old works and happenings, there’ll be plenty of opportunities for older generations to revisit a choreographer whose work they may have first seen half a century ago. For those of a more youthful disposition, who perhaps thought that Cunningham had already danced his last mazurka on this mortal coil, the old master’s form is still du jour, with iPod shuffling used as part of Program A, as well as hip, Sigur Rós perform live as part of Program B.
The inclusion of big-ticket international items like Cunningham is conversely also part of Edmunds’ focus on developing the local arts scene. By bringing important practitioners to town, she hopes to aid in the artistic edification of emerging creatives who have barely enough cash to pay their rent, let alone to catch a flight to New York for a premiere. Of course, she also wants to put Melbourne and Australian artists on show to the world. This year sees the return of wunderkind Barry Kosky with another show originally conceived in Vienna (his home away from home) that promises to follow up his sell-out success Boulevard Delirium. Edmunds also commissions local works for the festival and I asked her what it was she looked for in developing projects. The festival arena allows Edmunds to shine a beacon on artists ready to make the next step onto the international arts scene but she highlighted that the arts festival circuit “is not what I would call a hyper-nurturing environment for artists”. The investments are large, the criticisms quick and scathing, so Edmunds looks for artists whose vision is solid, like Lucy Guerin with last year’s Structure and Sadness and Shaun Parker with this year’s This Show is About People.
For those local artists who will simply be audience members come October, Edmunds has a treat for you too. Since coming to the festival, she has established the Artist Card initiative that provides practising artists with concession pricing, rush-ticket specials and Artist Lounge access in the hope that one’s professional research can afford to be broader and richer with this assistance.
With only a few moments left on the clock before Edmunds had to get to her next appointment, I asked her what was next for her (she departs after the 2008 festival). “Nothing” she said. She’s never considered herself career-driven but, though we joked about the possibility of her opening a very entertaining hot dog stand, her skills as a facilitator of artists will surely be snapped up by an appreciative body somewhere if she doesn’t decide to return to being a full-time artist herself. Indeed, it was because of a sense of responsibility to her fellow artists that she originally donned the cap of facilitator/artistic director/curator. Edmunds felt she could be a conduit between living artists and the impersonal monolith of institution that provided their livelihood, but she has never given up on being an artist herself and it would seem that there are still paths in her art that she has yet to explore and which we may yet be witness to.
For now, get hold of a MIAF program and book your tickets before all the decent concession seats are snapped up. For those interested in theatre, Edmunds couldn’t stress enough that Dood Paard and Teatre Lliure’s respective productions are must-sees for those wanting to see cutting-edge stuff.
The Melbourne International Arts Festival takes over the city October 11-27, 2007, with select shows touring regionally.
A disclaimer: from all appearances, Werner Herzog lives a highly creative, highly prolific, highly nomadic existence of which I am insanely envious. I feel a pang of excitement whenever there’s an opportunity to see a new Herzog film as much because I want to vicariously inhabit his world as I want to see the movie. Nevertheless, his films are more than worthy of my attention. He has a predilection for solitary humans battling/inhabiting/conquering extreme natural environments. Whether it is the straggly blond hair of Klaus Kinski floating up a South American river, or a nutty American frolicking with grizzly bears, or geeky scientists onanistically dreaming up space stations, Herzog has been there to honour their enthusiasm, undercut their pomposity and point out their inherent shortcomings in the face of Nature (scare cap intended). In Rescue Dawn our hero (Christian Bale) is an all-American lad with his gusto, optimism and clarity of intent but, and this is the inimitable Herzog slice of irony, he is actually a German. Set in the nascent days of the Vietnam war, Rescue Dawn could be seen as a mainstream diversion for Herzog—a genre film with established Hollywood actors. However, the whole film is laced with darkly satiric elements that make fun of the Hollywood films it evokes and quietly condemn the cock-sure attitude of American imperialism. Christian Bale and Steve Zahn are excellent as the central duo, with Zahn channelling his comic expertise into the tightly-wound Dwayne. The true events that this film is based on bear a slight resemblance to another true story of jungle survival that Herzog filmed—Wings of Hope—and the two could make a compelling double feature—fictionalised / documentary, South East Asia / South America, man / woman, war / peace. For now, it makes for highly entertaining cinema all by itself.
Screening at Greater Union: Sat, 04th of August, 9:15 PM
Alexander Sokurov is known for making films that walk the knife-edge of indulgent minimalism. To some, his films are devoid of plots, deliberately obscure and fundamentally boring. Then there are some of us who think his films are pretty damn good. Then there are the ardent Sokurists who bow down before his Slavic certainty like he’s Andrei Tarkovsky’s second coming. As you might have divined, I fit into the middle camp. Alexandra confirms for me that Sokurov is a filmmaker on top of his game. War from the perspective of the innocent is not an unheard of genre, see Turtles Can Fly, but its capacity to make us look again has lost none of its power. The war between Russia and Chechen separatists has been waged for many years now but rarely makes it into our consciousness, we are after all too busy with imagined threats to deal with the concrete reality of a people ravaged by endless fighting. Alexandra is a stolid and stoic babushka with an air of impenetrable seriousness, but even she is left moved by the scars she witnesses. She wanders the dusty, sepia-tinged barracks and village chatting to those who’ll listen, listening to those who’ll chat. There is something other-wordly about Alexandra in this landscape and the Russian soldiers, many of whom are too young for a beard, are mesmerised by her presence, as though the world back home that she perhaps engenders had become something exotic and alien to them. Sokurov interlaces the Russian military characters with local Chechens, some of whom are mutely condemnatory of anything Russian, while others find the commonality, the humanity that is shared in order to forge new friendships. The film is in its form meditative, at times funny yet the portrait of life and war that it paints is stern, grim and despondent. There is hope, but like Alexandra, it is there only fleetingly before, helped on to a train, it pulls away and out of sight, leaving those who remain to continue as they were, at least for now.
Screening at Regent: Sun, 12th of August, 3:10 PM
“Auschwitz” and “tongue-in-cheek comedy” aren’t often phrases that share the same sentence, but this documentary from Italy covers both. Primo Levi the chemist, novelist and Holocaust survivor immortalised his recollections of his internment in If This Is A Man. He followed this up with The Truce, which journalled the ten months it took him and his fellow Italians to return, via a circuitous train journey, to Turin. Crossing Poland into the lands of the USSR, Levi’s book is filled with carefully observed minutiae as well as conveying the Italians’ desperate sense of weariness that their freedom should only take them further from their homeland and possibly to the gulags. Director Davide Ferrario takes the text and journey of The Truce as the starting point for his own journey, retracing Levi’s steps and considering the same landscape sixty years on. Along the way we get an interview with legendary Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda on the ruinous skeletons of Polish industry in the post-communist era. Indeed, much of the film is wrapped in the fallout of the Soviet break-up, with the outcomes being both tragic and comic. The movie rattles on at an entertaining pace and leavens the contemporary documentary with excerpts from Levi’s book, which serves to complement and juxtapose the visuals. A must for fans of Levi’s writing and a great introduction to the Eastern European disposition for those who like their travel to happen in a cinema.
Screening at Forum: Wednesday 1st of August, 3:00 PM
MIFF: Indigènes (France, Algeria, Morocco, Belgium)
0 Comments Published July 29th, 2007 in Reviews.
History is written by the victors, they say. History is also written by the colonisers. Despite the justifiability of Western Europe’s indignation at the neo-con imperialism of Bush, Cheney et alia, there is something undeniably hypocritical in their stand when considered from the perspective of their own colonial pasts. Take two of the producing countries of this film: Belgium and France. In the Congo, the Belgians tried to make up for their country’s temperate reputation with gruesome atrocities. In North Africa, French forces practised “pacification” through massacre and were hardly averse to torture. There have been films, such as The Battle of Algiers, that have chillingly brought these matters to a global audience and Indigènes is a film steeped in the post-colonial political mire of the last fifty years. The film follows the tribulations and victories of a North African infantry division fighting for the French in the Second World War. The soldiers, from Algeria and Morocco, are risking their lives for the very colonisers that for so long stood as the enemy but who, in wartime, promise them liberty, equality and fraternity, regardless of ethnicity. Of course, promises and words of honour are easily given and easily lost in the fog of war. Tracing the men’s journey across French soil as far as the Alsace, Indigènes always balances courage with despair, camaraderie with mistrust, love with narrow-minded injustice. It is unashamedly an attack against France’s cynical exploitation of its colonies and one which has borne fruit—the French government was propelled into action in the wake of this film to raise the pensions awarded to 80,000 former soldiers. It is also a very fine war film and a heartfelt cry for solidarity and justice at a time when the chasm between Europe and its former colonies is as vast and dangerous as ever.
Screening at RMIT Capitol Theatre: Sun, 12th of August, 5:30 PM
Julie Christie returns to the big screen and, her beauty as crystalline and mesmerising as ever, she remains a luminous presence. We are introduced to an apparently blissful retired family life. The lighting is warm, the location bucolic, the cross-country skis are new, the hair silver but lush, the couture that catalogue-perfect ensemble of earth-coloured, deconstructed natural fibres, he reads Ondaatje to her on the sofa, they have friends for dinner with red wine and laughter. But when Fiona (Christie) puts the frying pan in the freezer this simplest of domestic trifles suggests that not all is well. As Alzheimer’s begins to take hold of Fiona, we see how it untethers her from the world she has shared with her husband Grant (Gordon Pinsent) and leaves her adrift in a vague sensory sea where her mind is unable to connect the signified with the signifier. The film, lovingly crafted by director Sarah Polley, unfolds this arduous decline of consciousness as much to reveal the underlying fractures of the marriage as to illustrate an illness. Grant begins to futilely wonder/hope that this is perhaps all a charade on Fiona’s part—a way to get back at him for past transgressions—and the film flirts with the ambiguity of Fiona’s involvement in her own unravelling. In brief moments of lucidity, she seems almost to be begging Grant not to try to drag her out of the blissful coma of unconscious waking that she has fallen into, as though fighting against the Alzheimer’s and the recognition of her own incapacities that this entails is more horrible than simply giving into the blur of unthought. What shines through more than anything in the film are the touchingly open performances from both Christie and Pinsent. Former head of VCA Drama, Lindy Davies, was performance consultant on the film and with Sarah Polley, an actor herself, they have extracted finely-wrought and truthful characters who are trying to deal with their own mistakes, their own mental failings and their own mortality.
Screening at Regent: Sunday 5th of August, 3:00 PM
Kim Ki-duk’s Breath is set in the freezing air of a South Korean winter. The glacial atmosphere extends inside the unromantic modernist achitecture that is home to Yeon, a sculptress in a gratingly unfulfilling marriage. Also searching for some warmth are the shivering prisoners who inhabit a bare-wall cell of Hang Sung prison. There’s a profound sense of stylistic essentialism in the filmmaking. The script is lean, the characters mercurial and mysterious, and the humour black. Scenes are almost universally monologic, or more accurately, they are dialogues with only one vocal participant. It is a choice that frees Ki-duk from dictating motivations and allows him to harness the silences, the unspoken parts through visuals. For a film that is in some ways so unadorned, with so few speaking roles, it nevertheless relates a complex web of relationships, dependencies, passions and desires where every character is viscerally intertwined with the central lovers.
Alan Rickman and Sigourney Weaver are two actors not generally associated with odd-couple comedy but some of the finest moments in Snowcake come out of their on-screen disparity. Rickman has that dry, acerbic voice that marks him as a natural villain, not because he looks nasty (though he can) but because there’s clearly something he’s hiding and he doesn’t seem to mind you knowing, but in Snowcake he is playing a fundamentally good person with a flawed past. Weaver is playing a woman in a Canadian backwater with “high-functioning autism”. Carrie-Anne Moss plays her neighbour, a woman with a penchant for gentlemen callers and an Oriental interior design philosophy (Blanche DuBois meets feng shui). The whole plot smacks of contrivance unfortunately, but I tried to push my misgivings aside and go with it. The three central actors are all seasoned performers and I feel all of them are doing their best with writing that doesn’t quite work. Nevertheless, there are moments in the film where the writing is razor sharp, particularly in the centre-piece scene of “comic book Scrabble” between Weaver and Rickman. The supporting cast simply make up the quota of eccentric townsfolk but the film still has a heart-warming and genuinely engaging quality to it. Montreal collective Broken Social Scene provide a disarmingly cute score but the fact that Steve Coogan and Michael Winterbottom pop up as executive producers seems surprising—perhaps on the page it seemed “quirky” rather than manufactured.