#sim: sam levison

[reveriste]

home

[sweetsmellosuccess]

TIFF 2020: Day 4

Films: 3 Best Film of the Day(s): MLK/FBI

76 Days: Hao Wu, realizing very early on that the early medical reaction to the Coronavirus in Wuhan was something worth capturing, begins his of-the-moment doc, where else but the emergency ward of a Wuhan hospital. Staff members, dressed head-to-toe in protective gear, including hazmat suits, masks, screens, and goggles, frantically try to keep order as sick patients literally bang on the door from the cold, packed waiting room. Once inside the ward, they are quickly dispatched to the only available beds and immediately intubated, the flow of patients either leaving under their own power or being sent to the morgue. Alarms go off, people’s phones bleat and go unanswered. Wu, also using footage from Shanghai, with similarly dire imagery, switches out from the frantic hospital wards long enough to show the Wuhan in total shutdown, the streets and bridges devoid of cars, pedestrians or any sense of life at all. If you squint your eyes a bit, it could seem like a found-footage zombie horror flick. Standing with a population of 7.9 million  —  only half a million people smaller than New York  —  to see Wuhan brought to a complete standstill is to grasp the enormity of this calamity, and the idiocy of countries who were unprepared for such a disaster. The footage tends towards the splintered  —  beyond a couple of key figures whom we see more than once, the closest we come to a narrative arc is watching one sickened “grandpa” (as all elderly men are called) with dementia, in the beginning wandering around the ward helplessly, sobbing in his bed at his suffering, only to recover and be let out some weeks later  —  but what it lacks in cohesiveness, it makes up for in immediacy. What does come out from the footage is how caring the staff is with their patients, even against impossible numbers, and working beyond exhaustion, they take the time to care properly for the citizens under their supervision, giving them pep talks, holding phones so family members can communicate with them, brightening their days as much as feasibly possible. Fittingly, the film ends with a scene as one of the nurses draws the miserable job of calling family members to inform them of the death of their loved ones. “My condolences” she says, over and over, suffering from the limitations of language to express such exhausted grief.

Violation: A film that shoots for disturbingly provocative, but hits blurry stridency, Madeleine Sims-Fewer and Dusty Mancinelli’s fractured rape-revenge story has a lot to say, but can’t quite find the right mechanics to pull it off. Mood and atmosphere, it is not lacking in at least: From the opening credits, blurry font laid over blurred background, to the continued use of the natural world  —  albeit mostly repped by wolves/rabbits and spiders/flies that, shall we say, doesn’t leave much to the imagination, analogy-wise  —  and the time-fractured nature of the narrative, the film has a sense of complexity that its characters can’t sustain. We are at a sweet vacation house somewhere in the pine woods of upstate New York, where British sisters, Miriam (Sims-Fewer) and Greta (Anna Maguire) are reunited after a sizable absence from one another. Miriam has arrived with her unhappy husband, Caleb (Obi Abili), from London, to meet with Greta and her more affable husband, Dylan (Jesse LaVercombe), a friend of Miriam’s since their days in high school together (it was through her that he and Greta first met). Into that happy sort of setting, the two couples trying to enjoy a weekend together, there are scenes from one time in the future or other (at first, unclear), with a much more haunted seeming Miriam conspiring some kind of psycho-sexual caper involving Dylan back at the house, and from there, a scene further out still, in which a sad and bedraggled Greta, upset with Miriam over something, is expecting a large group of people at the same vacation house. Eventually, we piece together that Dylan raped Miriam that first weekend, and her revenge is what comes at us from the near future. Only the rape itself is weirdly muted, and comes out of seeming nowhere, given their long-standing (and unbroken) friendship from earlier. The early scenes of relative happiness between the principals are actually good enough that the characters’ respective turns towards dark and twisted don’t feel like the same people, or the same relationships at all, which divides the movie further into sections that don’t seem terribly connected. Along the way, we get a graphic amount of (male) nudity, lots of painstakingly blood-letting violence, and many, many scenes of now-crazed Miriam sobbing, and heaving, and breaking down over and over, at a creeping pace. We get the point: the politics of sisterhood, rape, and revenge, and the manner in which our deepest convictions can be challenged by the wrong set of circumstances, but despite the filmmakers’ earnestness and care, the film doesn’t hang together the way it needs to for the impact it wants to have.

MLK/FBI: That J. Edgar Hoover’s largely unregulated FBI turned its considerable sights on Martin Luther King Jr. and the rise of the civil rights movement can’t be surprising to anyone familiar with the director’s abhorrence of people he deemed rebel rousers, or chaos-agents, but the actual stated reason for his paranoia on the subject, featured in this doc from Sam Pollard, tells a more interesting story. The success of King’s movement, highlighted by the wildly successful march on Washington in 1963 (an event after which MLK was deemed “the most dangerous negro” in the country by the FBI, whom they would have to “destroy”) spurred further investigation by the bureau, and what they found was even more troubling to Hoover. Amongst King’s immediate group of advisors was an outspoken Jewish civil-rights lawyer named Stanley Levison, who had been and almost certainly remained a member of the American Communist Party, the single greatest threat Hoover perceived against the “American way of life” (ie. “white”). Inflamed by the fear that the Communists were influencing King to lead his peaceful revolution towards social equality for the Reds, Hoover went all in on wiretapping and live-recording King, such that they amassed an enormous amount of material, including the knowledge that the married Baptist minister and father of four was also a serial-cheater, having affairs with more than 40 women Hoover’s G-men documented (nevermind that the sitting president, JFK, was known as an equally philandering playboy, and was protected at every turn). As King’s agency and influence became more widespread, the only thing holding Hoover back from releasing this information to discredit the Black leader was King’s strong relationship with President Lyndon B. Johnson, the signer of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, after JFK’s assassination. When, some years later, King finally followed his conscience, and spoke out against the Vietnam War, an act of bravery even many of his fellow civil rights crusaders refused to go with, severing his relationship with LBJ in the process, Hoover finally had the opening he needed to put his long-held plan to work. Working primarily with historian David Garrow, along with interview commentary from members of King’s inner circle, including Andrew Young and Clarence B. Jones, and featuring many recently declassified materials from the FBI’s own files, Pollard paints a vivid portrait of the political machinations of men with tremendous power, navigating difficult waters, and the cost of speaking out your conscience. Perhaps, best summed up by notorious former FBI head James Comey, who calls this period of time, “the darkest era in the bureau’s history.”

In a year of bizarre happenings, and altered realities, TIFF has shifted its gears to a significantly paired down virtual festival. Thus, U.S. film critics are regulated to watching the international offerings from our own living room couches.