10/30/21
10/29/21
CIFF Notes: Memoria (Saturday Oct 23 - 2pm)
Apichatpong Weerasethakul's new film Memoria was a perfectly serene way to begin a day of festival going (especially following the previous evening's screening of Phil Tippet's less-than-serene Mad God). Given the recent news that Memoria will not receive a DVD or streaming release any time soon, the director opting instead for the film to live a one-screen-at-a-time existence indefinitely, I feel fortunate to have seen it with a large, mostly appreciative audience. Weerasethakul is a filmmaker I greatly admire, and I applaud his attempt to allow the film to exist more as a cinematic exhibit, especially since it plays more like a museum piece than any of his previous feature films (that is, outside of his actual work of experimental pieces designed specifically for museum exhibition). Weerasethakul has stated: "For Memoria, [the] cinema experience is crucial or maybe the only way. Let’s embrace the darkness and dream, one at a time."
The Thai director's emphasis on "cinema as dream" is a defining characteristic of his work, and while that may suggest something like traditional surrealist imagery, Weerasethakul's cinema is more dreamlike in it's stillness, duration, and control than any sort of surrealist abandon or unexpected juxtaposition. Yet, Memoria contains some fairly unexpected elements in it's final passages that I'll leave for the viewer to discover, and Weerasethakul's first major film, Mysterious Object at Noon (2000), does indeed borrow from the Surrealist idea of the "exquisite corpse" in it's construction, so there are significant ties with that experimental genre to his work. Shorts like Nimit (2007) also show a surrealist sense of play, at times looking like entirely unguided, hand-held video work that challenges anything most would consider traditionally cinematic.
I'm not sure Weerasethakul is too worried about audience members drifting into sleep during Memoria, perhaps filling in the long takes with their own dream imagery, or not being able to distinguish the act of dreaming with their eyes closed from dreaming with their eyes open. Late in the film, the central character of Jessica (Tilda Swinton), encounters a man scaling fish. The have a conversation about television and the types of shows he might be missing without one, which feels like an alien conversation near a Colombian stream outside of his small, powerless shack. Jessica is on a journey to track a particular sound that haunts her consciousness--a deep and earthy booming sound that simultaneously haunts and guides her throughout the film--and perhaps this man has heard the mysterious sound, as well. Earlier in the film she has consulted a sound engineer named Hernán to attempt a recreation of this sound, which apparently only Jessica can hear.. The search for this sound constitutes the entire narrative trajectory, and leads Jessica through a meandering course of action that includes encounters with her ailing sister and local archeologists, and eventually to the man scaling fish, also named Hernán. Is this an older version of the Hernán we met earlier? Has Jessica time travelled somehow? Have we? Indeed, our sense of time has been altered by Weerasethakul's adeptness with duration and rhythm, which is a huge part of the magical quality that compels us back to his work. Jessica sits beside the older Hernán--I believe she asks him to nap as she sits next to him (is the person next to me napping? Am I?)--and a still, medium shot of Hernán laid out horizontally across the screen proceeds as Hernán naps with eyes open (are our eyes open or closed?). What connection to the universe are these two characters sharing?
It may take another viewing or two to begin to decipher the connection between Jessica and Hernán, between Swinton and Weerasethakul (Joe, she calls him), and between these dual auteurs and their exploration of Colombia, but I'm not sure the film will draw me back to it the way his previous films have, particularly Blissfully Yours, Tropical Malady, or Syndromes and a Century. Memoria is the first film of Weerasethakul's shot away from his homeland, and the first film with an actor like Swinton at the center, so it marks a huge upheaval of familiar elements in his work. This might be why I found the film less impactful than any of his previous works, though I respect the creative journey that both director and actor obviously felt they needed to take. While Swinton has rightly praised the precision of Weerasethakul's frame in interviews, the overall rhythm of the film felt less impactful than usual, less immersive. Likewise, while the collaboration of Swinton and "Joe" seems like an attractive proposition, and is what I suspect is fueling much of the praise for the film, it honestly seems like a mismatch to me. Weerasethakul's actors are typically entirely unlike Swinton--an actor who wants to be looked at, who you can't stop looking at. No knock against Swinton--I think she's remarkable (see: Julia, We Need to Talk About Kevin, A Bigger Splash), even though she might be coming down with an artier case of Nic Cage-itis (see: Snowpiercer, Suspiria), but she's not the actor for Weerasethakul, whose performers often feel previously un-gazed-upon in the best way.
At the time I saw the film at the CIFF, it had already won the Golden Bear--top prize at the festival--so I wondered if perhaps I was missing something. A series of landscape shots that end the film struck me with more meditative impact than anything that proceeded them, so I stay in my seat, taking in the audience around me, trying to hold on to that sense of calm. As the quiet credits roll, I have a look around, a bit lifted, but mostly underwhelmed. Those in front of me have seemed disengaged for quite some time. Some leave swiftly, some linger. The young girl behind me stands transfixed, encounters some friends by chance, and when asked by them what she thought can only muster: "I can't stop crying."
10/28/21
CIFF Notes: Mad God (Friday Oct 22 - 10:30pm)
The "After Dark" portion of the Chicago International Film Festival is dedicated to a brand of shock cinema the festival guarantees will "keep you up late into the night," which was aided by the relentlessly jarring sound design of Phil Tippet's magnum opus Mad God and the free can of iced coffee sponsoring the festival that was handed out at the door. The programmer of this series assured us that we were in for something unlike anything we will ever see in Phil Tippet's 30-years-in-the-making Mad God, and while I generally swoon to the allure of unique cinematic experiences, I wasn't wholly won over by this, admittedly, one-of-a-kind passion project. For a film so full of unique visual flourishes, it's interesting to me that Tippet is someone that any genre or sci-fi film lover is highly familiar with, even if they don't know his name. Tippet is the FX artist responsible for the iconic holographic chess game in the original Star Wars film, as well as creature designs and visual effects for a slew of major films, from Jurassic Park to the Twilight saga. If someone is going into Mad God as a fan of those Tippet projects, they will be getting something much bleaker than any of those films, and something way less mainstream. In fact, that may have something to do with why this film gets my award for "best overheard post-screening audience comments," which ranged from the unimpressed to the utterly gob-smacked. My reaction falls somewhere in between.
Mad God excels incredibly well in a wordless visual storytelling mode for, roughly, the first half of the film. In fact, I was so taken with the hero's journey of a "diving bell" trooper lowered into an apocalyptic landscape, who occasionally unfolds a progressively disintegrating map toward an uncertain goal, that I began to trust the film's adeptness with visual storytelling. The vision is dark and disturbing, to be sure, and Tippet assures you that there will be little frivolity early on in this journey with the brief and comparatively colorful appearance of two tiny garden gnomes amidst the strafed landscape, then immediately crushed under the bootheel of our protagonist. Yet, the final half of Mad God aggressively rips away any semblance of engaging storytelling that the first half seems to promise, opting for a seemingly endless sequence involving the excruciating repetition of cries from a bloody grub worm that is eventually transformed into silver dust and sent into the cosmos by some giant, Tim Burton-esque, black-beaked specter. This act seemingly causes the film to go into a heavily Kubrick-inspired hallucinatory state, while also sparking an endless repetition of civilizations being disintegrated and re-formed, clocks winding forward and back, images dark and gooey and horrified coming at the screen at a rate that defies the viewer's ability to process. It should be said that, generally, I love that kind of thing. I'm not one who's critical response clings to narrative cohesion exactly, and am prone to experimental detours, but the finale of Mad God seemed unhinged in a way that felt simultaneously rushed (which seemed odd for a film 30 years in the making) and not really doing anything interesting within experimental traditions, or even just being engagingly trippy. Of course, it's likely that Tippet's intent is that it all go off the rails, and he has reported that much of it was completed by his film students on Saturdays who were looking to get some experience, which I can see creating a somewhat disjointed end product. It isn't called Narratively Concise God, after all, and while it is a somewhat unforgettable experience that will likely find a cult fan base, I think it might have been more successful as a few shorter films.
10/27/21
CIFF Notes: The Tsugua Diaries (Friday, Oct 22 - 8pm)
I was fortunate enough to see eight films over the final three days of the 2021 Chicago International Film Festival, and my first screening was The Tsugua Diaries directed by Maureen Fazendeiro and Miguel Gomes. The first two films in Gomes's The Arabian Nights trilogy were definitely among my favorite films of 2016, so this new collaboration with his wife and creative partner Fazendeiro was highly anticipated and ended up being my favorite of the films I saw this past weekend. I say that still kind of stunned by how beautifully this film triumphs over three factors that might likely result in something much more self-indulgent than this gorgeously made and subtly hilarious meditation on pandemic living and creativity: 1) that it's a "pandemic" film, and 2) that it's told in reverse chronology--that is, the "diary" of the title begins on Day 21 and each segment of the film moves backwards from there, ending with scenes from Day 1, and 3) that it is, ultimately, a work of meta-cinema.
Perhaps I bristle too quickly at the thought of a "pandemic" film, as well as the idea that we'll spend a lot of time trying to define just what a "pandemic" film is in the coming years, possibly to no useful end, but The Tsugua Diaries clearly acknowledges that it was shot during lockdown (in sunny Sintra, Portugal), and within it's storytelling makes one of the most poignant and effectively satirical commentaries on the last year and half that I've seen in any form. While I admit to largely avoiding "pandemic cinema," it's hard to imagine I'll see anything that captures both the absurdity of class privilege in the midst of our collective crisis, while also channeling the creative impulse through that crisis with such fruitful experimentation. This feels hand-made in the best ways--inspired and playful and ultimately yielding something of a quality that outshines many an under-pressure-of-quarantine art project.
An effective commentary on our collective pandemic experience might be enough for one film to pull off, but The Tsugua Diaries is also remarkably rich in a variety of other ways. The film has at it's center three enchanting actors--Crista Alfaiate (Crista), Carloto Cotta (Carloto), and João Nunes Monteiro (João)--and begins (at the end, so to speak) by observing some of their mundane and fairly decontextualized activities--a bit of partying and possible romance--primarily focusing on their attempts to build a small structure to house butterflies. As the days tick backwards, the film uses it's reverse structure in such a subtle way that it avoids all sense of potential gimmickry, and displays just how patient and poetic the teamed-up Fazendeiro and Gomes are in their technique. The Tsugua Diaries is elegantly constructed, never trying to fool or alienate the audience with it's construction, but pull them closer in.
The third element of the film that might feel self-indulgent in lesser hands is the meta-cinematic aspects, or the way in which the film is about it's own construction. Incorporating the filmmaking process as part of the narrative of the film is a common feature of Gomes' work, and how Fazendeiro and Gomes integrate this meta-move is better left unpacked for potential viewers--it's not like this is the next M. Night Shyamalan picture (thank goodness), and the effect is something that is revealed progressively, rather than as a surprise, one-note twist. In fact, the "reveal" of The Tsugua Diaries is so perfectly folded into the film, which is continually folding itself back through time, guiding you gently, simultaneously, forward and backward, that it takes on a deeply poetic quality, albeit one that maintains a wry and perceptive sense of humor. What I will give away is that within that gentle manipulation of time and cinematic reality, a surprisingly trenchant conversation about the nature of film performance occurs, that in it's own playful way brings out a question that emerged for me throughout the final weekend of the CIFF in the works of directors like Hong Sang-soo, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and Ryusuke Hamaguchi. All the films I saw over the weekend by these masterful directors take a different approach to many of these same themes and play in their own ways with the borders of "narrativity" and "activity"--"seeming" and "being." Many of these films were much more serious in tone, though not without their own sense of humor, and while they're a rich lot of films, none of them held for me the memorable beauty, joy, and strangeness of The Tsugua Diaries.
Finally, this film brought to my attention this great jam by Frankie Valli and the Fours Seasons: The Night. What a song. It's used so perfectly as a sort of bookend to the film and captures the spirit perfectly.
