SLIFF Notes: Three Films at the Tivoli

A quick note about three films I caught at the 2021 St. Louis International Film Festival, which screened a number of great selections this year out of a cinema that was once the center of art-house and international films in the city, The Tivoli. 

The theatre was recently closed during the pandemic, temporarily accessed for festival use, and even though the seats aren't any wider than they used to be (while I certainly am), it was a nostalgic and welcome return. My memory of the venue stretches back to the original run of Peter Greenaway's The Pillow Book (1996), and while it was reported that the Tivoli might be turned into a showplace for Christian films in the wake of the pandemic, thank god that doesn't seem to have happened yet. After all, this was the theatre that not only gave me access to greats like Greenaway once upon a time, but also a highly memorable Valentine's Day screening of Kirby Dick's Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist (1997). If cinema is my religion, then Bob Flanagan is definitely a minor deity of the subversive variety.

Long Live Ecstatic Cinema at the Tivoli!

First up at this year's SLIFF--and, like Sick, in the same category of "documentaries I won't soon forget"--is the experimental film that, perhaps, can scarcely be called a documentary: I'm an Electric Lampshade. Aside from the title, what makes the film so memorable is it's refusal to be categorized. More accurately, I'm an Electric Lampshade begins in a highly recognizable documentary form before disappearing into a somewhat surreal and Lynchian (a descriptor I don't use liberally) portal of transformation, just with a bit more choreography. I'll be curious to see if this docu-dance-performance-art-hybrid film finds an audience - the director was involved with Girl Walk: All Day, which was among my Best of 2012, and it's great to see the same sort of infectious energy come through in the best sequences here. I'm not sure where the film's subject Doug McCorkle ends and his alter-ego begins (or where his control of this film ends and begins--an aspect that seems essential to grasping the project completely), but the filmmakers bail on the documentary mode just in time, and what follows is much more cinematically interesting than what takes shape in the opening passages--essentially, the story of a retiring accountant attempting to launch a music/performance career, beginning with his single "I Am and Electric Lampshade." The shift of genre is both what's great and puzzling about the film, leaving more than a few questions floating in the air, and while McCorkle and the filmmakers particular blend of Lady Gaga-esque performance art appropriation and Right Said Fred musicality isn't entirely inspired, the film is a truly entertaining curiosity..

I'm an Electric Lampshade  dir John Clayton Doyle

Next up at the SLIFF was Nadav Lapid's Ahed's Knee, the story of an Israeli filmmaker (played with a perfect intensity by Avshalom Pollak) screening his film in a remote village where he becomes increasingly embattled with the village's liaison for the Ministry of Culture (the compelling Nur Fibak). Ahed's Knee is an urgent and more swiftly made follow-up to Lapid's Synonyms (2019), a film that didn't connect with me as fully as it did with critics in general, and while my response to Ahed's Knee is similarly somewhere between admiration and despondency, I find there's more to hold onto here than with Synonyms, particularly in how the movie subverts elements that seem autobiographical to a seemingly uncomfortable degree. Ahed's Knee is not a simple tale about a filmmaker's stand against censorship, although the way the film seems like it might become that, with Fibak's bright and admiring character caught in the middle, is essential to what's compelling, and also a bit frustrating, about where the film ultimately goes. What evolves is an uncompromising character piece that refuses to stand on an easy moral platform. Pollak's performance is calibrated perfectly to a character defined by his trauma and grief, eventually taking some unsettling turns into unreliable narrator territory. The result is dark, and the implications difficult to digest. A serious film striving for something other than the usual template for dramatic impact, which I admire. Still, not my favorite encounter at the festival, though it has stuck with me more than I expected.

Ahed's Knee  dir Nadav Lapid

Probably the most anticipated screening for me at the SLIFF was Bruno Dumont's France, a sprawling satire featuring Léa Seydoux (also excellent this year in No Time To Die and The French Dispatch) as France de Meurs, celebrity tabloid journalist.  My previous experience with Dumont is mostly his early films: L'humanité (1999), Twentynine Palms (2003), and Flanders (2006), and given the somewhat grim tone of those films it's been interesting to note the director's success with comedies in recent years. I haven't seen any of Dumont's comedies, but his early films certainly don't suggest that particular tonal turn, and after seeing France I'm inspired to back-track the path from the sparse and uncompromising horror of something like Twentynine Palms to France, which seems to represent more new territory for the director. France is a fairly Brechtian attempt to alternate the audience's attention between the drama of France-the-character and the larger state of France's politics via superficial TV journalism. Seydoux seems essential to this endeavor, as the film is highly aware of her current celebrity in tandem with the character of France, which creates a whole other fascinating level to the film, occasionally blurring the lines of whether we're watching the character or the actor. For me, Dumont's creative relationship to Seydoux is more successful than Weerasethakul's co-lab with Tilda Swinton this year in Memoria, and more akin to what Pablo Larraín achieved so successfully with Kristin Stewart in Spencer and Natalie Portman in Jackie. While France de Meurs is not an actual historical figure, as with the Larraín films, the hollow echo of her brand of tabloid journalist has a very real resonance that reaches beyond the nation of France itself, and the film itself has much deeper implications than the bloated satire of Adam McKay's recent Don't Look Up--similarly, the final 20 minutes of France feel overextended, but by film's end there's purpose in the duration and repetition, rather than the belaboring of a one-note joke.

France  dir Bruno Dumont