It’s that time of year again, when restful sleep, a balanced diet and financial stability are bypassed for a bleary-eyed, brain-bruising fortnight of world cinema’s finest. The New Zealand International Film Festival is one of the few things (aside from roast lamb and the unchallenged liberty to wear slippers everywhere) that actually excite me about winter, and this year’s dazzling selection is no exception.
As usual, there’s an embarrassingly rich surfeit of foreign worlds to be visited, sublime experiences to be sampled, intense emotions to be felt and hyperbolic, overwrought summaries to be written, so I guess we should cut the shit and start.
There’s probably no better way to kick off Aoteroa’s own than with a bit of national pride, so that’s exactly what attendees of the opening gala received with James Napier Robertson’s unvarnished Kiwi crowd-pleaser The Dark Horse. Led by a commanding, delicate turn from Cliff Curtis, Robertson’s debut is based on the enduring impact of real-life chess champion Genesis Potini, and his struggles with mental illness against the backdrop of a violent, impoverished community.
As quietly harrowing as it is unabashedly heart-tugging, Robertson frames both the harsh realism of gang culture and the infectious warmth of a local kids chess club with an equal care for authenticity, always realizing his characters and environments with gritty specificity. The film does lean on its fair share of screenwriting contrivances (why does the pivotal tournament always have to fall on the same date as another event that may jeopardize a key player’s participation?) but Robertson and Curtis prove particularly adept at breathing life into every trope they tackle. A bittersweet closing shot proves a fitting summation of the film’s characteristics as a whole: deeply hopeful, brazenly sentimental, rarely false.
Much less successful at emotional connection was Martha Stephens and Aaron Katz’s road-trip comedy Land Ho! Following the adventures of two pensioners “getting their groove back” on a vacation in Iceland, the best way to set up the relaxed rhythm and congenial tone would be to draw comparison to Michael Winterbottom’s The Trip, but to imagine a version that’s lamer, older and worse with impressions.
Before I’m labelled a total asshole, I should probably clarify that I’m genuinely passionate about seeing better, fleshier roles for older folk onscreen. It’s too often a demographic resigned to comic punchlines, sympathy buttons and tokenized wisdom dispensers, and to neglect the wealth of history and humanity in our older population is one of the greater problems we have with representation in the movies. I just find myself much less responsive when most of said representation is structured around the “hilarious” juxtaposition of hearing 70-year-olds talk about weed and pussy. It might have worked a little better if the jokes were actually considered or clever, but I’m not sure we should all be expected to giggle just because someone’s grandpa said the word “cumshot”.
It’s a well-intentioned vehicle – eager to please and stuffed with human warmth – to the point where it’s actually a difficult movie to outright loathe. But once we hit that slow-motion montage of its two leads goofing off to a frothy dream-pop soundtrack, it became pretty apparent that all the filmmakers ever planned to do was coast on fumes.
The Zellner Brothers’ weird, wondrous Sundance hit Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter was a much more successful riff on the road trip movie. Rinko Kukuchi stars as the eponymous protagonist Kumiko, a lonely Tokyo office worker who stumbles upon an old VHS of the Coen Brothers classic Fargo and convinces herself that the lost briefcase of cash buried by Steve Buscemi actually exists. An offbeat odyssey to the unforgiving lands of North Dakota ensues – peppered with sly humor, shrewd cultural observations and, most unexpectedly, an uncompromising emotional undercurrent that almost belies the oddball hook of the film’s premise.
I was somewhat concerned about the four-hour length of Frederick Wiseman’s At Berkeley, to the point where I nervously packed a sack of sandwiches in case I was to become hungry or bored
Kumiko’s disorientation in translation is more psychological than cultural – her grasp on the English language is certainly limited, but it’s her understanding of human custom that suffers the most from disconnection. Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter is a rather sad portrait of loneliness, the perils of fantasy and delusion, and the barriers presented to connection by mental illness, and it isn’t afraid to pair this bleak thematic terrain with suitably chilly design. But for those afraid of the dark, there are also plenty of laughs and a ridiculously cute bunny in it, so don’t write it off from being the Quirky Curiosity every schedule should have at least one of.
On the topic of trepidation, I’ll freely admit I was somewhat concerned about the four-hour length of Frederick Wiseman’s latest observational opus At Berkeley, to the point where I nervously packed a sack of sandwiches in case I was to become hungry or bored. The good news is I only managed to eat one of them; the rest of the time I was quietly fascinated with this butt-numbingly comprehensive but richly nourishing portrait of America’s most preeminent public university.
I’d only previously seen one other Wiseman film – Crazy Horse (NZIFF 2012), which I didn’t really care for. Being previously unaware of Wiseman’s unobtrusive, removed approach, I suppose on that occasion I found two hours of Wiseman creepily lensing the naked bodies of flexible women more like an exercise in sleazy voyeurism than institutional examination. But seeing his style applied to something like this – a sprawling, dense tapestry of the various, multifaceted components constituting a truly formidable campus – was to understand his mastery a little better.
To say that I found myself tuning out on several occasions might belie my praise, but in fact I think it supports it: At Berkeley literally feels like it’s exploring everything, so the fact that my mind wandered a little during a lecture on molecular science or one of many administrative meetings shouldn’t discredit Wiseman. The film is exhaustive and exhausting by design and to trim it in any way would be to render it a whole lot more specific – which, as I’m slowly learning, that’s not really Wiseman’s style.
It’s not really any secret that my most anticipated film of the festival (perhaps even of the year) was Jonathan Glazer’s Under The Skin sprawled across the Embassy screen. And even with such lofty expectations, it only took a few frames before I was utterly transfixed into virtual hypnosis by what is surely one of the most striking works of cinema of recent years. I’m a fan of Glazer’s two features (in my humble opinion, Birth remains one of the most underrated films of the century thus far), but even his previous highs in exploring every corner of a creepy, compelling concept were quickly eclipsed by this frightening, abstract masterwork.
Under The Skin is certainly inscrutable, and for every discernable development plot-wise is another that conceptually evades us. But its brilliance is in how readily it can be consumed purely on a sensory level, an ominously intoxicating drink of sight and sound insidiously seducing us into its depths. And for those who like to theorize and speculate, there’s plenty to chew on regarding gender, sex, identity and the human body. I’d really love to hear what Laura Mulvey thinks about all that predatory gazing.
Closing out my first weekend was the recent Berlinale winner Black Coal, Thin Ice, a Chinese neo-noir similarly slippery and inscrutable as Under The Skin. Berlin has become particularly reliable in crowning essential works in recent years, and Black Coal, Thin Ice is certainly in the same league of thrilling discoveries as last year’s Child’s Pose or Asghar Farhadi’s masterful A Separation.
Director Diao Yinan’s penchants for dryly disconcerting laughs, colorful bursts of violence and artful compositions keep this murder-mystery continually compelling, but it’s the underlying focus of the souls beneath it that offers an elliptical evasiveness that is tougher to shake. The conceit of an unsolved murder resurfacing for a haunted, self-destructive cop reminded me a little of HBO’s True Detective, but that comparison really begins to stick once Yinan’s nihilistic, cynical vision takes hold – a bleak recognition of man’s inherent insignificance and inescapable expendability. We see Rust Cohle’s philosophy of time as a circle, in which human horrors are doomed to repeat themselves, quietly realised beneath the unfurling plot.
That the film concludes on a seemingly unrelated, irrelevant assault on police from a shower of fireworks – or that our protagonist is introduced as a misogynistic, abusive drunk and then undergoes no transformation – is no accident. The horror continues cyclically and we continue to spin on loop, pirouetting on thin ice.
The New Zealand International Film Festival is on now in Auckland and Wellington.
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