Over the last couple of weeks I've seen about twenty new films by women directors, so here they all are!
Angels Wear White (Vivian Qu) – Solid low-level crime / conspiracy film in which a young, undocumented hotel worker observes (what turns out to be) the rape of two schoolgirls, and has to figure out what to do with the evidence. There’s a good deal of social critique (not all of it subtle) about the pervasiveness of corruption and the commodification of virginity, and a grim twist at the end that ties all the themes up in a disgusting bow. Good performances throughout, a great use of its well-defined setting, and it ends on a tiny glimmer of hope. This is the kind of dark, pessimistic thriller I associate more with Korea than China. It’s nothing startlingly fresh, but it’s a solid genre film done very well. I didn’t see Vivian Qu’s previous film,
Trap Street, but now I’m looking forward to her next one.
Birds of Passage (Cristina Gallego, Ciro Guerra) – This is Cristina Gallego’s first directorial credit, but she previously collaborated with Ciro Guerra s producer on
The Embrace of the Serpent and
The Wind Journeys. This new film retains the ethnographic aspect of those two, but this time it’s folded into an apocalyptic crime epic, unfolding over a decade and a half in Colombia. Great visuals, and an operatic sweep to the narrative. Well worth checking out.
Blue My Mind (Lisa Bruhlmann) – I’m going to have to be coy about what this is about, even though it becomes pretty obvious from early in the film, and that element is the weakest thing about what is otherwise a pretty good adolescent-angst / body-horror drama. To be honest, if I’d known what the main idea of the film was, I wouldn’t have bothered going to see it, because it’s something that’s hard to pull off once, let alone twice, and probably not worth the effort (it would have worked much better as a metaphor). New girl at school struggles to fit in with the cool girls, has some kind of troubled past and an icy relationship with her mother, and discovers disturbing changes in her body. This basic material is handled really well, and it’s a delightful surprise when the Alpha Cool Girl actually turns out to be a good egg. The denouement is what it is.
Capharnaum (Nadine Labaki) – A clichéd mess. It’s trying painfully hard to be a sentimental wallow in misery and injustice, but at the same time it saddles itself with a goofy framing premise and can’t resist the temptation of an upbeat ending. Oh, and the director casts herself as the white knight putting things right. This is a film you should’ve already seen many, many times before in much better versions. Stand by for rapturous reviews and an Oscar nomination.
[Censored] (Sari Braithwaite) – An entertaining and fascinating collage film of bits and pieces that were cut out of films by the Australian censors between 1958 and 1971. The snippets are arranged thematically by subject, which is sometimes disturbing, sometimes revealing, and sometimes both (as with an endless, repetitive collection of shots of men slapping women). The film’s narration details the filmmaker’s struggle with the material, and for me that’s the most problematic aspect of the film, as the gist of it is that she is shocked, shocked! that the bits of sex and violence cut out of films from the 50s and 60s reveal a misogynistic filmmaking culture. Either she entered the whole project hopelessly naïve, or she’s being extremely disingenuous in her commentary. Either way, it kind of dilutes the impact of many of the interesting conclusions she does draw from the project. The two cut sequences that do get the feminist seal of approval are from Varda’s
Le Bonheur and Bergman’s
Persona – but surely she didn’t expect that those were the only kinds of films being censored at the time?
Djon Africa (Filipa Reis, Joao Miller Guerra) – Fairly standard rambling arthouse quest film, with a Portugese man travelling to Cape Verde to try and find the father he never met. It’s elevated by the winning performance of Miguel Moreira and the majesty of the Cape Verdean landscape.
The Field Guide to Evil (Veronika Franz, Katrin Gebbe, Agnieszka Smoczynska et al.) – A more miss than hit horror anthology. Franz / Fiala’s opening episode looks fantastic, and is about the only one to have any kind of interesting twist / resolution. It’s a middling opener that makes you optimistic for better things that never come. Smoczynska’s entry also looks fantastic, but doesn’t go anywhere after it’s worked through its premise. Gebbe’s ‘A Nocturnal Breath’ is solid, but fairly generic, and has to contend with a demonic CGI mouse as its Great Evil. It does have a reasonably decent conclusion, but like the entire film, there’s a big whiff of So What hanging over it.
Good Manners (Juliana Rojas, Marco Dutra) – This is perhaps the ultimate example of a film of two halves. For the first hour and a bit, it’s a slow-burn mystery about a nanny-housewife’s growing realization that something is wrong with her pregnant mistress (and eventual lover). This section is a well-done mood piece, predicated on the excellent rapport between the two actresses. For the second hour and a bit, the film is completely bonkers.
The mother was impregnated by a werewolf, and a little werewolf baby was on the way.
It’s not exactly good, but I was full of admiration for the filmmakers’ commitment to the complete change in tone and mood: the film even becomes a musical, for Christ’s sake! You want to see something genuinely weird, here you go.
Happy As Lazzaro (Alice Rohrwacher) – I wasn’t a huge fan of Rohrwacher’s
The Wonders, but this film won me over. Lazzaro is a Candide-like innocent stranded in a gritty drama about rural struggle in an isolated community, until he unexpectedly becomes a Candide-like innocent stranded in a magic realist urban fable. Magic realism is incredibly difficult to pull off on film without becoming cloying, but Rohrwacher navigates the pitfalls with formidable skill, coming up with a film that ultimately recalls Pasolini (specifically the Toto / Ninetto films) and Bunuel (particularly with an episode in a church that could have come straight out of
The Milky Way or
The Phantom of Liberty) after starting out in Taviani territory. Her central naif never really becomes a figure of pathos, and I think that works strongly in the film’s favour and helps unify the film’s two halves.
Holiday (Isabella Eklof) – Contrived shocker that didn’t work for me. Little Sascha goes on holiday with her gangster buddies. Is she as bad as them, or she just really fucking dim? In the end, does it really matter? This is the kind of film that’s trying to impress us with how edgy it is by staging a prolonged rape scene in a single shot with a static camera at a distance. No thanks.
Island of the Hungry Ghosts (Gabrielle Brady) – Strange, impressive quasi-documentary film which plays like a European art film, but is a horror movie under its surface, the twist being that the monster lurking in the forests of Christmas Island isn’t the horde of primitive creatures with nasty claws advancing inexorably across the land, but the Australian government. The film juxtaposes the harrowing refugee interviews conducted by a counsellor with her reasonably sunny family life, and with footage of the migration of the island’s red land crabs. There’s a risk with this kind of subject that the suffering of entire groups of people is reduced to the mere catalyst for the protagonist’s trivial personal crisis (see, for instance, another recent Australian film,
Jirga), but this film smartly sidesteps that criticism by giving full expression to the refugee’s stories and distinguishing them clearly from the counsellor’s separate but related professional frustrations. It’s an intelligent response to an intolerable situation, and I hope this small, intriguing film attracts the wider exposure it deserves.
Kusama Infinity (Heather Lenz) – Bog-standard portrait documentary of the artist Yayoi Kusama. Her personality carries the film, which is remarkable only in its consistently tin-eyed stretching and crushing of all manner of valuable archival footage to fit the uniform frame. This kind of visual illiteracy is particularly galling in a film about a visual artist.
Liyana (Adam & Amanda Kopp) – Somewhat bland quasi-documentary about a storytelling workshop conducted with Eswatini (Swaziland) orphans. They collaborate on a narrative, which is illustrated and (barely) animated for us. The film intercuts the kids’ brainstorming with the story they’re forging, and the presentation is simplified and upbeat as it if were intended for other children. But the most interesting thing about the project is that the story the children come up with reflects their own personal experiences, which are generally horrific, so they create a brutal story haunted by AIDS, violence and death, in which the heroine is raped and children are kidnapped, caged and trafficked. This makes the presentation of the film a little disjunctive: are kids elsewhere really the right audience for this story? Are they going to understand the cathartic power of exorcising those experiences in narrative form, or are they just going to be confused or freaked out? If this is really a film for adults, then it could really use a lot more grounding in the realities of the kids’ lives and a lot less specious uplift.
Looking for Oum Kulthum (Shirin Neshat) – I’d be totally up for a perfectly ordinary biopic of the great Arabic singer as long as it had wall-to-wall amazing music, but I was totally unprepared for this narcissistic trainwreck. Kulthum’s life and work is barely dealt with, and dealt with in an inanely perfunctory and clichéd manner. Instead, we get a pretentious and self-serving self-reflexive film about how difficult it is being a film director making a film about Oum Kulthum. And this material in itself is just as clichéd as the tired biopic we’re fitfully watching being made. If the filmmaker were striving to make something interesting and individual, and meeting resistance from conservative producers / crew, maybe there’d be a story to tell, but it seemed to me like we were watching a mediocre director making a really shitty biopic, while striving to make an even shittier one. A completely pointless film, and not even the musical numbers can save it. They’re fine, I suppose, but the music is always truncated and often pointlessly rescored.
Milla (Valerie Massadian) – Already commented on above. A wonderful film!
Nico, 1988 (Susanna Nicchiarelli) – Decent biopic, with a great central performance by Trine Dyrholm and a couple of galvanising musical numbers. In the middle of the film there’s a version of ‘My Heart Is Empty’ which the narrative demands be a transcendent performance, and the movie pulls it off. The rest of the characters are pretty sketchy, and whenever Dyrholm is off the screen the energy level drops precipitously, but this is a solid portrait of the unglamorous side of the music business. (Side note: the film is extremely coy about naming Alain Delon as the father of Nico’s son, presumably for legal reasons, which I found mildly surprising. Surely they could at least have identified Delon’s parents as the people who raised and adopted Ari without fear of a lawsuit?)
Rafiki (Wanuri Kahui) – Fairly standard lesbian coming-of-age story with the stakes dramatically upped by being set in Kenya, where same-sex relationships are an imprisonable offence. This follows the predictable ‘forbidden love’ story beats slavishly, which makes it curiously old fashioned in 2018, but it’s watchable enough.
The Rider (Chloe Zhao) – Slight, pretty homemade Malick. It’s a quasi-documentary, but that doesn’t bring much to the table in the way of freshness or insight: the storyline is generic Sundance life lessons all the way, and the film only really comes alive in what are presumably its most purely documentary moments, when Brady is actually working with various horses. This is a project where I don’t think tailoring the raw material into a fictionalized narrative form did it any favours.
Terror Nullius (Soda Jerk) – A joyous, if glib, politicized mash-up of hundreds of Australian films. Brief, punchy and often hilarious, this meticulously edited and altered collage satirizes Australian politics, racism, sexism and illusions of ‘tolerance’ by slamming together the images it creates of itself. Thus the girls at Hanging Rock note a passing Steve Irwin just before they confront the baddie from
Wolf Creek, and all of this is observed by Skippy, who then offers a post-colonial reading of the scene. It’s inevitably his-and-miss, but a fun way to spend an hour, and an extremely impressive feat of de- and re-construction.
You Were Never Really Here (Lynne Ramsay) – I don’t have any problem with genre films, let alone really well-made genre films, or genre films made by supposedly ‘non-genre’ directors, and I thought Phoenix was terrific in this film. Much as I enjoyed it, though, it didn’t feel to me like there was much substance to it: no other appreciable characters, a bare plot machine without much nuance. Bravura filmmaking, and some nice tricks, but it didn’t stick with me. Maybe it’s because the next film I saw after this was the French drama
Custody, a brilliant first film that reminded me how much more difficult it is to make an arresting film about the victims of violence than it is to make one about the perpetrators of it.
Zama (Lucretia Martel) – Doing this in alphabetical order means I’m saving perhaps the best for last. This is a substantial leap forward for Martel in terms of ambition, and it’s a triumph. Like many of the other films in this group, it’s a complex mix of genres and registers, combining a sweeping historical epic with a bureaucratic comedy, but Martel masters the slippery twists of tone and introduces other, stranger flavours at will, including a kind of tinnitus effect that adds an otherworldly dimension to scenes of personal crisis for our woebegone anti-hero. There’s a fleeting visual reference to the panoramic historical paintings of Argentine artist Candido Lopez, which seems to be there only for its visual beauty and to indicate that Martel has done her homework. This is one of those films that affords the pleasure of entrusting yourself to a master filmmaker who’s going to take you a journey who knows where.