MIFF’09 Day 3: Fish Tank

‘Fish Tank’
Andrea Arnold | UK | 2009 | 124 mins

Writer/director Andrea Arnold does not here expand upon the cinematic and storytelling dynamics of her earlier work, but it is perhaps her most accomplished film so far. Again a solitary female is the subject and a working class council estate the milieu. But Kate Jarvis’ fierce teen Mia is far more complex than the irresponsible young mother of Wasp (a great short film nevertheless), and more fascinating than 30-something Jackie of Arnold’s terrific-yet-arduous Red Road, likely because realistic portraits of teens are so rare in cinema. Mia is a bit of an outsider, she would rather headbutt her contemporaries than tolerate them, but not so much that her actions and dreams are beyond the scope set out for her by her upbringing. Arnold maintains an exhaustive realism within every facet of the film, matching any of her social realist filmmaker contemporaries in formalism and depth of character. The cinematography is at once typical of recent low-budget productions with its handheld, Dardenne-esque subjective camera, and uniquely beautiful shot with a restricted depth of field allowing for such exquisitely soulful focus movements. The choice of a narrow 1.33 aspect ratio is an interesting one, coupled with the softness of the lighting it reminds one of Polaroid photos, and also heightens the claustrophobic feeling inside this suffocating tank that is Mia’s world.

The acting by all here is unusually strong. Kate Jarvis in her first role ever is simply outstanding, upholding the aggressive facade of a proud teenager to such a degree that we can still see her pain and insecurity underneath. Michael Fassbender proves again how terrific he is after last year’s Hunger as the charming, soulful, but ultimately imperfect Connor, the new boyfriend of Mia’s mother’s. Of course, Arnold herself is to be praised for eliciting such rich performances, starting with her script. She embodies the characters with such distinguishable traits that be it from written word or improvisation they are three-dimensional people bouncing off each other, people we all know or have known. For this reason the film is very funny in places simply because of this associability. Most laughs come from Mia’s sister, played by 12-year-old Rebecca Griffiths, who teems with obnoxious but often witty comebacks and curses likely stolen from television and older kids. But she too has an innocence we see under the tough facade. In one scene as Mia’s sister and a friend lay on her bed acting cool smoking and mocking the people on the TV, Mia and the audience observe relatively intact butterfly stickers on the bedpost. Fish Tank is a coming-of-age story of startling nuance and texture. It stumbles once with a contrived piece of plotting involving a child, but is nonetheless expertly made and one of the year’s best films.

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MIFF’09 Day 3: Tales From the Golden Age

‘Tales From the Golden Age’
Hanno Höfer, Razvan Marculescu, Cristian Mungiu, Constantin Popescu, Ioana Uricaru | Romania, France | 2009 | 155 mins

Cristian Mungiu proves again that he is one of the most interesting, intelligent new filmmakers after 2007’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days with this decidedly lighter but no less probing account of life under Communist rule in 1980s Romania. Golden Age is a portmanteau film, in which a group of directors each create a piece of the final product, usually linked by a shared theme. Up until now, I believed the recent Tokyo! to be the best of these, likely because it was made up of only three stories. But the revelation here is simply that each story was written by the one mind, Mungiu. Thus it is easily the most coherent of portmanteau films; the episodes similarly follow comrades dealing with a comic situation (all based on famous urban legends), beautifully rendering the spirit of these people while pointing out the absurdity and incompetency of the Party. In this way, the stories work like Milos Forman’s The Fireman’s Ball. Mungiu never lays the satire on thick, it is always bubbling underneath the antics, fuelling them as much as the character quirks do.

While we aren’t told which director did which segment, it’s fairly clear Mungiu’s two directorial efforts here are the longer, more melancholy ones at the rear of the picture. While I prefer the comedic ones in general for being succinct (and well, funny), the later two possess a reverence so embedded in the fabric of life portrayed that is just as effective as satire. My main complaint would be that the second of these quieter stories, the last short on the version I saw, seems superfluous after the reverence and beauty provided by the previous story (The Legend Of The Air Sellers), which perfectly offset the comic tone we had become used to and (had it ended there) would have given the film a surprisingly moving denouement. With the extra story, however, the film feels too long as a whole and the melancholy becomes too much.

Since audiences all over the world are to receive different versions of the film (stories shuffled around, added on, taken away, even split into two feature films), for reference sake, this was the order my screening showed them:

*The Legend Of The Official Visit: The funniest and probably best of all the shorts. Gorgeously shot.
*The Legend Of The Party Photographer: Terrific use of repeated compositions and editing to enhance the comedy in this excellent yarn about the manipulation of truth in the media.
*The Legend Of The Zealous Activist: Nicely satirises the Party’s clumsy forcing of ideals where it may be unnecessary and unwelcome.
*The Legend Of The Greedy Policeman: In which a family attempts to gas a pig in their apartment. Wonderfully played.
*The Legend Of The Air Sellers: The longest and the sweetest. Mungiu’s camerawork here is excellent.
*The Legend Of The Chicken Driver: The least interesting of the bunch.

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MIFF’09 Day 2: About Elly

‘About Elly’
Asghar Farhadi | Iran | 2009 | 119 mins

In 1960’s L’Avventura, Antonioni used the sudden disappearance of the main protagonist as a means to explore the emotional isolation of other characters. Clearly taking inspiration from the film, About Elly similarly eliminates its main character beside the ocean, but instead the friends worry and bicker right up until the mystery is “solved”. Thus the film ultimately pales in comparison to Antonioni’s film, which not only remains genuinely mysterious after all is said and done, but is concerned with more than a panicky aftermath, regardless of how intensely realistic Farhadi handles this in his film. I have heard from a few people who said they found the film to be a critique of Iran’s treatment of women, and that this commentary quickly becomes laboured and obvious. I honestly never read the film this way at all. The treatment of Golshifteh Farahani’s character, she who is blamed again and again for a number of untruths and mistakes leading to her friend’s disappearance, is understandably harsh but not more than she deserves. Anyway, the blame thrown around throughout goes in all directions, to both sexes, by both sexes. Both the men and the woman here are shown as each having their strengths and flaws of character, and this is actually one of the better aspects of the film.

About Elly seemed more to me to be something of a real-world farce, bordering on black comedy. Imagine a typical sitcom plot in which some banal incident occurs, and then a group of friends stumble about trying to deceive some innocent person as the lies steadily grow while they try to figure out what’s going on. Now transfer that into the real world. This is what Farhadi so deftly achieves. While I doubt it would be particularly interesting to watch more than once, for knowing how it all pans out would take away much of the suspense, it is still an expertly directed visceral ride in observing human interaction at a time of panic. Much of this is the result of the handheld camerawork, which places the viewer right in the middle of the mess, and even before this just tracking the many characters around the beach house gives a distinctly authentic feeling of a busy environment. It may not match L’Avventura’s masterfully detailed compositions and sense of space on that terrible island, but this is a film of largely external emotion and it effectively mirrors that the way L’Avventura is shot to reflect its characters’ internal disillusionment. It also uses sound terrifically. The lack of score helps keep our attention on the sounds, and thus we remain involved at all times. When the group first enters the beach house, Farhadi makes the sound of the crashing waves more than audible, foreshadowing the coming incident.

No matter how well-made it is, and it is very well-made, About Elly is ultimately rather empty in the wake of such a promising first act. The near-farcical web of lies that occur and are revealed after the disappearance seems to keep the drama going for the sake of keeping it going. It definitely highlights the tendency for human error in dealing with uncertainty and fear, but the prolonged question of Elly’s whereabouts (which isn’t actually very ambiguous) is exhausted to the point where it is no longer as interesting as it once was.

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MIFF’09 Day 1: Blessed

‘Blessed’
Ana Kokkinos | Australia | 2009 | 117 mins

As I walked hurredly up to the Forum theatre, worried I would miss my first screening at this year’s festival, I quickly realised that was unlikely to happen. For this screening of Ana Kokkinos’ Blessed was a world premiere, a fact I only remembered upon seeing so many confused-looking people, followed by photographers, followed by actresses Miranda Otto and Deborah-Lee Furness posing for said photographers. It wasn’t until after the screening did I learn that the whole cast watched the film (for the first time) alongside me.

Perhaps it was due to waiting in line for 15 minutes among strictly bourgeois types (ironic considering the film is based on a play called “Who’s Afraid of the Working Class?“) -a certain group of which made it very clear indeed that they knew some famous people in the Members line -or because all the people who worked on the film were in the audience, but I couldn’t escape an air of phoniness about it all. This wasn’t helped by the film itself, at least not at first. Kokkinos has never been a director with a distinct eye or ear for realism, and this clashes with her intense desire to portray life as it is (and while it’s admirable to not shy away from the terrible things in life, I do find her work generally unconvincingly cynical). Her 1998 film Head On in particular possessed a contrived rawness that felt more like melodrama than social realism. This would be fine had the drama been less clumsy and cliche, the performances toned down, refined, embodied with nuance of character. This is something Mike Leigh and even Ray Lawrence really excel at doing. The latter’s Lantana, like Head On and Blessed, was also based on a script by Andrew Bovell. Yet, Lawrence does have an eye and ear for authenticity that comes through in the texture of the drama. Thus Bovell’s words do not still feel like words on the screen, as they often do in Kokkinos’ films. To be fair, some of the actual dialogue here (whether by Bovell or one of the other three writers)  is simply poor. TV soap poor. But again, these clumsy moments remain largely in the first 45 or so minutes which focus on the children in the film, so the lack of experience in the acting may also be to blame.

Blessed looks at the complexities of the mother-child relationship, specifically focussing on working class families -no doubt because Kokkinos wants us to better understand these oft-maligned members of society. To better explore this relationship, the screen time is given to a number of separate stories, rarely connected in any way, and fluidly edited together so they each reach their denouements at the end of the picture. The opening montage of sleeping children, who we are to follow on their aimless night wandering the streets, is a nice way to tie the characters together in a thematic sense as well as to provide a reference for when the plot backtracks to the same morning, when we see the waking mothers and thus observe their day.

And this is when the film improves rather significantly. Although some of the stories are a bit one-dimensional or at least feel underdone, the performances by the adults are truly impressive despite this. Frances O’Connor (of A.I. and the little-seen noir gem Kiss or Kill) is particularly outstanding, not just in a devastating scene towards the end, but in all her scenes. Unlike the overdone pieces of acting that came earlier, her Rhonda looks and feels entirely authentic. She looks utterly haggard and cheap in her shiny blue dress, tattooed and pregnant, stumbling around and mouthing off as she does. And Miranda Otto (she of Lord of the Rings and so deliciously dry in Love Serenade) is engagingly loose yet run down, even though her story is lacking in depth. And so too are most of the other stories, unfortunately. At least singularly.

The film really soars as one piece, as these multiple character movies tend to do, and suffers a bit when you break it down. Otto’s relationship with her daughter (Sophie Lowe) is practically nonexistent until its neat, easy ending. One of the more interesting characters, the gay teen Roo (Eamon Farren), is nicely developed in the first half or so, then forgotten about when you want to know more. Unlike his sister (Anastasia Baboussouras), who not only provides vital comic relief throughout, but whose relationship with her mother is beautifully understated. Tasma Walton (of Blue Heelers) plays a fairly generically sympathetic social worker in the otherwise terrific story of Rhonda. The clumsiest story here is that of an old lady (Monica Maughan) and her Aboriginal adult son (Wayne Blair), which is partly told in a sort of memory flashback and is confusing as can be, not to mention underdeveloped. And I hate having to bring up this whorey old criticism, but including an Aboriginal character in a film like this always feels contrived, as if the producers would not get funding otherwise. And anyway, his ethnicity here could be exchanged with practically any other, being so bare.

Getting back to Kokkinos’ knack for inauthenticity but also her lack of polish, there are a number of more superficial problems with the film. The score (which can be heard in the trailer) is simply dated. It’s the sort of lazy score we heard a great deal in movies a decade ago, and is not only a nuisance throughout, but is unnecessary too. This is in great contrast to the expert lack of music and attention to sound in Samson and Delilah. Another element that makes you wonder if Kokkinos thinks it’s still 1999 is the use of Eminem as Roo’s sexual obsession. Maybe he was relevant back when the play was first performed, but here it’s just another detail that does not gel. As for lack of polish, and I’ll admit this is nitpicking, the title font is a standard Windows selection and looks very cheap as a result.

Ultimately, Blessed is certainly worth seeing despite the problems outlined above. It may not be as “brave” as her last two films, but in being more accessible yet not shying away from the tougher moments (and with the presence of well-known actors), this is likely to be her first film to reach a large audience. The script is surprisingly cohesive given the fact it is based on a play (scenes aren’t long and clunky) and was written by four different people. Overall, the writing is intelligent, even though some characters and parts are stronger than others. The stories are wrapped up not with a sense of melodramatic finality, be it optimistic or pessimistic, but with a gently realistic return to status quo. The problems will continue (for the individual characters and the working class in the broader sense) but at the same time a greater understanding is reached between some of the family members.

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