I had planned to open this entry with a review of Wim Wenders’ documentary about Brazilian photojournalist Sebastião Salgado, The Salt of the Earth. When I arrived at the cinema, though, the audience was clustered in the foyer, listening to a nice man in a checked shirt. “DCP issue,” he said. “We’ll have an extra screening next week,” he said. “We’re sorry,” he said.
This is the risk of the modern, digital NZIFF. Usually it’s just a matter of corrupted subtitle files – see this year’s Black Coal, Thin Ice screenings in Auckland, or the screenings of The Minister at Wellington’s Penthouse in 2012. There are rare occasions, though, where it’s something more serious, like a corrupted file or a password that hasn’t been delivered. Something like that happened on Sunday. It’s not the NZIFF’s fault. But it sucks.
“We’re playing The Wonders instead,” he said. I opted out. I went to a bar and waited for the next film.
Boyhood was worth the wait. Linklater’s grand filmmaking experiment (filmed over 12 years, same actors throughout, etc) is an often-impressive exercise in contracting and blowing up time, both as memory and as cinematic language. Individual moments draw themselves out and are given the space to meander, allowing us time with the ideas that form the whole of the titular boy, Mason. See the two clumsy and meandering and frank conversations between Mason and his crush-turned-girlfriend late in the film, and note how what he’s saying kinda sounds dumb when you’ve got a few years on him. And yet we only visit Mason in the context of individual, isolated weeks – windows into the everyday that illustrate what he’s been made into, if not necessarily what makes him.
A still from Richard Linklater's Boyhood Photo: New Zealand International Film Festival
Take Linklater’s use of post-2000 pop culture as a motif to both indicate chronology and signal Mason’s development, from the boy who played Disney Skate Adventure on his GBA to the teenager immersing himself in Austin’s gig scene. But the landscape is purposefully incomplete in a way that invites the audience to find themselves in the story. There were certainly parts that resonated deeply for me, capturing the awkwardness and combativeness and flailing carelessness of my own adolescence.
It should go without saying, though, that Boyhood’s not totally universal. Mason’s very much one with the rest of Linklater’s young men: philosophical (or trying to be), muted, observing the world as much as they partake in it. Ellar Coltrane grows perfectly into that mould, but the experience he’s playing is a certain type of experience, one that’s middle-class, white and (obviously) male.
While that’s not necessarily a bad thing so much as it’s just a thing, Linklater doesn’t help matters with some forced, inauthentic attempts at trying to capture a greater range of experiences. The introduction of an abusive upper-class stepdad, for example, is insensitive and clumsy: parts are written and blocked like a poor PSA and actor Marco Perella brings no credibility to the role.
Rolf de Heer’s latest collaboration with legendary Aboriginal actor David Gulpilil, Charlie’s Country, is also about a specific set of experiences – but ones with far less exposure in everyday media. Charlie’s Country sketches a microcosm of modern Aboriginal communities in allegedly post-colonial Australia as experienced by the wily old man Charlie. He’s too old to return his ancestral home, so he lives in a corrugated-iron hut on the outskirts of an isolated Aboriginal town. What we witness is an institutional culture of devaluing Aboriginal life, evident in everything from the housing stock to the food available to policing. Charlie’s community is micromanaged by white people who live and work in better conditions than the community itself, and those same white people patronise him, undermine him, and blame and abuse him when he hits rock bottom because of their actions.
Gulpilil owns the screen in a way no other actor has for me this Festival. His face wears a million stories in its contours and expressions, and his pale, soft eyes dart around the landscape, alert and on notice. Gulpilil charts the dulling of Charlie’s sharp mind in an intricate and heartbreaking way, physicalising the pressure of every microaggression he experiences at the hands of a ‘reasonable’ legal system and an ‘equal’ social welfare system. de Heer could stand to trust Gulpilil’s performance more – a simple, cloying piano motif over scenes undermines them with sentimentality – but Charlie’s Country remains a profoundly sad, angering look at how Aboriginal Australia is made to live.
"Thankfully, the eventual rebellion is quite impressive; a moderately scaled but tightly choreographed torrent of rabid, revolutionary pooches storming the streets, refreshingly bereft of computer generated trickery." Photo: White God // Fehér Isten
White God, about a dog uprising, should have been my jam, as I love dogs and I love uprisings. And parts of it are my jam. Kornél Mundruczó’s modern fable opens with a bravura setpiece involving Lili, our human heroine, cycling through empty Budapest streets pursued by a large pack of dogs. He also repeats the scene as part of an explosive, surreal third act involving a bloody canine revolution led by Hagen, an adorable mixed-breed abused and exploited by the city’s adults.
As Judah mentioned in his review, though, the road to that third act is full of potholes. When Hagen and Lili's paths dovetail a short way into the film, Mundruczó gives the characters equal story time. However, there’s nothing to Lili’s teen rebellion: it lacks stakes and is easily resolved, leaving it feeling like empty set-up for the frenetic climax. Hagen’s story is a potent and engrossing metaphor for myopic revolution, but alongside it a teen disobeying her dad lacks weight.
At one point in Pulp: A Film About Life, Death and Supermarkets, Pulp’s loveable frontman Jarvis Cocker talks about how he tries to let the audience into his performances, to tell them stories and emotions “in an intimate and friendly way”. Director Florian Habicht plays this over a scene from Pulp’s final show of their reunion tour, in their hometown of Sheffield: Jarvis, at the front of the stage, holds a toilet paper-cannon to his crotch and thrusts, ejaculating toilet paper over the screaming, ecstatic audience.
It’s this kind of eccentricity and unironic enthusiasm that elevates Pulp over your standard music doco. Habicht explores some fairly stock questions – what was Pulp’s influence on the world? what does it mean to be at the end of the road? – but he does so in a way that’s reminiscent of his big-hearted documentary Kaikohe Demolition. Habicht restricts the scope to Sheffield and earnestly seeks out the oddballs and the excitable, be they the elderly mother-of-seven who loves Pulp because “their words make you think” or the alternative musician and the girlfriend he bonded with over serial killers. The result is something akin to Errol Morris’ Vernon, Florida but for band documentaries, a charming and energetic look at how bands and hometowns both shape identities for people and act as sources of strength. It’s optimistic and life-affirming, and sometimes that’s all you need.
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