#smart and cuttingly funny but so caring

[halfdeadwallfly]

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[trashartandmovies]

Berlinale Film Festival 2021, Industry Event, Day 2

One of the great treats of going to a film festival is getting the chance to wake up and see some transgressive mindfuckery first thing in the morning. This can be either thrilling, like seeing ANTICHRIST at 10:00 AM in Toronto and then being excited to see if the rest of the day’s movies can top that; or it can knock you out for the rest of the day, like seeing IRRADIATED at last year’s Berlinale and needing to process my contempt and hope for humanity.

Of course, part of the thrill of these experiences has been sitting with an audience and going through the mindfuckery as a collective, feeling the energy, seeing people walk out, getting through it together. When things are moved online, and the timing and schedule of your streaming film festival is more or less up to you, many pleasures are lost. But I have to say, there was a thrill in getting up at sunrise to put on some headphones and sit with THE SCARY OF SIXTY-FIRST, an effectively wild and perverse shriek of a movie from first-time director Dasha Nekrasova, and part of this year’s Encounters section.

Shot in New York City, on beautiful 16mm film, THE SCARY is a steep plummet down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole, triggered by the death of Jeffrey Epstein and two roommates moving into a new apartment on 61st Street that may be linked to the man and the sex trafficking ring he was involved with. These details are merely the place setting for an aggressive and sometimes messy assault on good taste and mainstream cinematic conventions. The two roommates descend into different kinds of madness — Addie seems to be possessed by some sort of evil within the apartment, while Noelle is quickly consumed by the conspiracy theories circling Epstein, the royal family, pizzagate, etc. Wedged between the two is Nekrasova herself, playing an amateur sleuth who indoctrinates Noelle with lurid websites, pharmaceutical speed, and sex. From there, the rabbit hole just keeps getting wider and weirder, Addie becomes obsessed with Prince Andrew and creepy tarot cards keep popping up. There will be blood.

I found it all pretty damn intoxicating, but I can understand that others will be put off by its shrillness and lack of subtlety. While the movie is dedicated to Stanley Kubrick, and it gets some inspiration from EYES WIDE SHUT, it’s more along the lines of John Waters crossed with John Carpenter. If you hated FEMALE TROUBLE, you may want to stay away from THE SCARY OF SIXTY-FIRST. Otherwise, this movie sits comfortably next to the kind of outre indie horror movies that got passed from VCR to VCR in the late 80s and early 90s. But what really makes THE SCARY kick, is how directly it speaks to the age of QAnon, the equal parts seduction and repulsion of violence, and the horror that comes from being trapped in a system you have no control over. My only complaint is that the film leans a little too heavily on old horror tropes right at the end, but this couldn’t take away the thrills it provided up to that point. I’m already looking forward to how Nekrasova might follow-up this one.

This year’s Golden Bear for best film went, deservedly, to Radu Jude’s BAD LUCK BANGING, OR LOONEY PORN. Another extremely transgressive film, this one takes a flamethrower to contemporary values in Romania and any other place where racism, sexism and authoritarian fetishism have taken root — meaning, it’s both very specific to Romania and quite universal.

The movie begins with a very graphic and absurdly funny home porno, being shot on a phone. Soon enough, we find out the woman in the video is Emi, a respected history teacher at a private school in Bucharest. The first act of the movie is Emi walking through Bucharest. The city is littered with signs of capitalism run amok, juxtaposed against fervent religiosity. Gambling and wholesomeness. Tastelessness and righteousness. The camera makes these connections with some choice camera panning maneuvers. These movements bring to mind Robert Altman’s style of movement — casual yet smart and impactful.

As Emi makes her way to her destination, the film’s regard for realism begins to deteriorate. Bit by bit, drivers begin showing less regard for the safety of pedestrians. Everyone is foul-mouthed and inconsiderate of others, even while wearing pandemic masks. If you can’t afford a car, who cares about you? It’s not that far from reality, but the pointed exaggerations start piling up and lead us into the mid-section of the film, where we’re treated to an A-Z montage of our most pressing issues and what’s wrong with the world. It both serves as a rundown of the topics that are going to present themselves in the final act of the movie, as well as more visual evidence of our corrupted values and moral decay. It’s a bitter and bleak hoot.

It’s all leading to a confrontation between Emi and her school’s parent-teacher board. It’s one of the most absurd, insulting and cuttingly insightful trials put on film. What are a teacher’s responsibilities outside the classroom? What if the teacher in this situation were a man? What if the teacher is also including lessons about Romanian history that today’s citizens would rather not deal with? All of this and much more is on the table for riotous discussion. More than once, someone cackles the Woody Woodpecker laugh when the debate really goes off the rails. While the visual language in the final act settles into a more conventional groove, the sound editing is something of a tour de force. It’s punchy, freewheeling, obscenely hilarious and brings the movie to an unbelievable final moment.

BAD LUCK is a hard act to follow. If I’d known how ambitious it was, I would have saved it for day’s final screening. But for better or worse, the next film was a very quiet, understated Competition title — this one from Hungary (which was well-represented this year), entitled NATURAL LIGHT. Written and directed by Nagy Dénes, this is a gorgeously shot war-is-hell movie that follows a weathered unit of Hungarian soldiers as they try to round up Russian partisans during WWII. Yes, the title of the movie perfectly describes the golden, autumnal hue of the movie, as it is primarily set in barren forests, small, sooty villages and fields with plenty of mud.

The film is based on a massive book by novelist Pál Závada, but Dénes made the interesting decision to just focus his movie on a few days in the life of István Semetka, who is forced to step up and take charge of his unit early on in the film. Aside from capturing the unrelenting force of their natural surroundings, cinematographer Tamás Dobos also does an amazing job of capturing people’s faces — not unlike the films of fellow countryman, Bela Tarr. Ferenc Szabó, who plays the beleaguered Semetka, has two of the most soulful eyes I’ve seen on screen lately. This is of critical importance since the film has very little dialog until a couple of well-written monologues at the end. Semetka’s eyes say it all.

As mournfully beautiful as it is, NATURAL LIGHT isn’t an easy movie to sit through. It’s quiet and heartbreaking. But this level of sorrow and atrocities is also very familiar to cinema. In a way, it’s unfair because this story, in its way, is unique. But the message of how indifferent war is to soldiers with good intentions, has been told before. Few movies, however, have told it in such a wordless and poetic way.

Throughout the history of film, there’s always been a struggle to turn good theater into cinematic art. When talkies began and TV took off, we turned to the wealth of good theater scripts that already existed as readymade source material that could meet the demand for content. Sometimes it works, and the scripts can be well-adapted into the cinematic language. Other times, it’s like we’re just looking at a filmed documentation of a theater piece, which relies heavily on the strength of the words and performance, and not on any tools of the filmic trade. Denis Côté’s new film does a neat job of adding a new wrinkle to this long tradition of finding ways to turn monologues and long chunks of dialog between two people into an engaging work of film.

Côté has always had a strong experimental streak to his work, and even though he wrote this script and titled it “Social Hygiene” in 2015, it would seem that the current pandemic gave him the final push to turn the unusual idea of long, socially distant conversations in a field into a movie. Aside from a few shots that follow a young woman as she walks through nature, says hi to some livestock and offers an intermission dance sequence, SOCIAL HYGIENE is a series of static shots, framing different sections of rolling Canadian countryside, and containing a couple of people talking to each other across a certain distance. The framing, the sounds, the tone and rhythms of the conversation, are all very stylized. And in its way, perfectly cinematic. Côté pays attention to the ambient noises during these scenes. Birds turn into a cackling audience, construction noises go quiet and resume at just the right moments — it’s all very well-orchestrated.

The story and conversations of SOCIAL HYGIENE have nothing to do with the pandemic. It’s the fairly universal story of a charismatic, smooth-talking guy of unmet potential, who is consistently disappointing the women in his life. This man is Antonin, and we first meet him as he bickers with his sister. While Antonin is married, he’s currently living in a friend’s car, getting by through small-time theft and avoiding plans that might improve his lot in life, like working on that screenplay he’s been kicking around. Both his wife and his mistress try to prod him in the right direction, but he’s such a charmer that he enjoys spinning his destitution as the life of a lovable rogue, who’s morals and values can’t be met by traditional means.

More than any other film seen, so far, from this year’s Berlinale lineup, SOCIAL HYGIENE had me laughing-out-loud the most. And I’m very willing to admit that this is likely due to how much I related to Antonin’s faulty reasoning. But it’s also due to the fact that the script is supremely sharp and its deadpan delivery brought to mind Hal Hartley’s films. Like Hartley, Côté is anti-realist in his staging and delivery, meticulous in his timing, and yet uses humor to get at some very fundamental human dilemmas. I love Hartley and miss his sensibility dearly. So, yes, I loved every minute of SOCIAL HYGIENE.

Even with a press pass, it can be a challenge to sit for every Competition screening. There are simply too many other films that call for your attention. But in this streaming scenario, I was committed to seeing every last one. I felt like I didn’t have any good excuse not to when you can make your own daily schedule. So, Xavier Beauvois’s ALBATROS (or DRIFT AWAY, as it may end up being called in your neck of the woods) got a late Tuesday night home screening. It didn’t go down well.

The only one of Beauvois’s previous films that I’m familiar with is 2005’s THE YOUNG LIEUTENANT, which follows a homicide detective in La Havre. ALBATROS follows a police chief in the much more idyllic region of Normandy. Jérémie Renier plays the cop, Laurent, and just as the movie starts, he’s just proposed to his girlfriend of ten years, with whom he already has a young daughter. In the next scene he’s cleaning up after a suicide on the beach, and then there’s news of child abuse by local resident, and his friend is at the end of his rope dealing with farming regulations. Things are piling up quickly, and the chipper Laurent is soon getting edgy and taking his work home with him.

The beginning of the movie isn’t bad. It’s clearly building to something and it can hold your interest while it does that. But when that shoe drops, the film goes off the rails and descends into a completely ridiculous and phony final act. It doesn’t help matters that Beauvois never really finds an interesting visual language with which to tell this story. From the get-go, his camera is just there, shooting scenes and conversations in a way that makes everything seem slightly off and unnatural. It feels like things are being staged, much as the wedding photo on the beach that gets interrupted by a death at the very beginning. Unfortunately it never shakes this feeling, and two hours later, you can’t believe that you’re watching an ending so clichéd that Hollywood would probably think twice before giving it a greenlight. It’s the kind of denouement that is so cheesy and unearned that instead of choking back tears, you feel completely cheated.

Aside from ALBATROS, Day Two was a rich abundance. The punk stylings of THE SCARY OF SIXTY-FIRST, the anarchic Molotov cocktail of BAD LUCK BANGING OR LOONEY PORN, the austere meditation of NATURAL LIGHT, the playful theatrics of SOCIAL HYGIENE — these all had something special to offer. Tomorrow, we’ll visit China, France, Georgia and, once again, Hungary, for two more films with big rewards and two that struggled to transcend their formal trappings.

[taiweiland-blog]

Oh My General episode 12 recap

The emperor welcomes Eno (I believe that's the foreign prince's name) to the banquet. He tells the Emperor that he'll give a martial arts performance. Everyone is nervous because Eno comes quite close to the emperor with his weapon, but everyone manages to keep calm despite of it.

After the whole episode, Eno approaches Ye Zhao to give her toast, but Jin says he'll accept the toast on her behalf. (In the previous episode, Jin said that he doesn't want her to drink too much as she gets 'handsy' when she's drunk and thus cause him to lose face in front of the whole court! lol)

The two men exchange little barbs at each other while Ye Zhao watches on. Maybe because he had his manhood slighted by Eno, Jin asks Eno to have more drinks with him, saying it's tradition to have more than one. (As if!) The two exchange further barbs, which makes a minister quite nervous. Said minister comes over to douse some cold water over the heated exchange, saying that Prince Jin sure loves to crack jokes! He drags Eno away for a toast. Ye Zhao however was rather amused by it all (maybe cos Jin is being assertive). Prince Jin preens a little when Ye Zhao praises him, saying that he did really well.

Jin then tells YZ that he senses that Eno is a dangerous fellow, to which she replies: I trust your evaluation. (I'm sure she knows that though?) Jin tells her it's instinct. There's this cute scene where Jin stops YZ from drinking, only to drink himself, and she slyly sneaks in a drink.

Back home, Jin is totally passed out from all that liquor, however, and YZ can't help but take that opportunity to be "close" to her hubby. Hah! She's handsy even when she's not drunk - but can you blame her, really? And I think that conversation with Eno must have affected Jin a little bit more that he let on because he sits up in the middle of his sleep and declares, "I am a man! I demand to be on top!"

Poor dear.

YZ tells him, "Yes, yes, you're on top. Come, hold on to me." YZ is of course, totally taking advantage of it all, though Jin spoils it a wee bit by talking about a courtesan next and makes kissy faces.

Jin wakes up the next day without his clothes, with YZ at his side with some medicinal soup. Jin demands to know if she did anything to him. She says innocently, "Do I look like that kind of person?"

YZ is summoned for some court business, and when she leaves, Jin comments to himself: "I feel like a woman that has been ravished!" (I burst out laughing at this. Gawd.)

Jin is suspicious when one of the concubines hinted that he must have had a good night with YZ. He summons his manservant (I forgot his name) and demands to know what happened. The manservant tells him that he was really, really drunk last night and was vomiting and all, and YZ took care of him the whole night. Jin asks worriedly: "Did she do something outrageous to me?" (Actually he used the idiom, do something to "offend Heaven and reason", which I thought was doubly funny.) Cue the manservant's gobsmacked expression, to which Jin quickly says, "I mean, did I do anything untoward to her?" Manservant reassures him that he did not.

Jin's trio of good-for-nothing friends are amused to see him working out with weights later. They invite him to the go the pleasure house. There, Jin finds out to his annoyance that YZ is with Eno. He goes down to confront them and ends up listening to Eno belittling him.

"Tell me what are his good qualities? Perhaps I can learn." Eno demands.

YZ cuttingly says that he cannot "learn" Jin's good qualities.

Eno goes on to say that he heard that Jin is a man that hasn't done a day of honest/productive labour in his life and is stubborn and stupid by nature. He goes further to say that Jin must be a cute, adorable and obedient sheep at home. And why not? After all, YZ is a general.

YZ fiercely says: "No, he's not a sheep. He's an eagle."

Eno laughs out loud.  "An eagle? A cute eagle then!"

YZ scowls a little, saying that he may be a young eagle with down instead of feathers now, but he will soar to be a great man in the future. He is very smart, he never forgets what he reads from books. He's kind; although he has a high position, he will defend the poor who are bullied. He cares about the people around him, protecting them under his banner (not very sure about this part), he is chivalrous - he's not afraid of how powerful his opponent is. He is so positive a person - although he is often ill since childhood, has hovered between life and death, he has never given up - he has always been able to rise after a setback.

Jin is actually moved to tears by YZ's words about him. "Everyone thinks I'm a good-for-nothing bastard and a dandy, and yet she sees the potential in me. She believes I will soar."

(Sniff. Like Jin, I'm really moved by this scene too. I think this is when Jin sees his wife in a new light, don't you think?)

Jin goes to Master Lin’s  house to demand YZ's dagger back. (I think I must have missed something in the last few episodes. Jin must have replaced YZ's dagger with a fake one.) Lin wants his money but Jin grabs the knife from him - none too gently too. Lin ends up on the floor.

Jin goes to YZ's room and gives her the dagger and a new dress, telling her that he'll design her clothes in the future. (A fashion designer husband. I want one.)

 [[I'm a little unsure about the dagger biz; I originally thought that Lin master made a fake one for Jin to replace YZ's real dagger, but I need to rewatch the earlier episodes carefully to be sure - anyone care to fill in the gaps?]

The next day, our couple gets a shock when they're told that Master Lin has been found dead. The onlookers point to Jin, saying that they saw him arguing with the dead man last night. Jin and YZ  are summoned to the palace to explain themselves.

Thoughts

A funny episode, but also a revealing one. We see Jin’s pain beneath his playboy, flamboyant exterior. He’s gotten so used to people thinking the worst of him that he was very taken aback when YZ said such wonderful things about him. And YZ is right, of course. 

One quality I love about Prince Jin is how he mingles with the ordinary folk, and how he went out of his way to seek justice for the son of the restaurant owner (he eats lamb stew/soup there often). He didn’t have to, but he did it anyway. 

He’s also more intelligent than he lets on, like how he demonstrated with his skill with the dice in earlier episodes. (Jin, in order to seek justice for the restaurant owner’s son, goes to the gambling den that ensnared the boy and drains it dry with his mad gambling skills.)

Obviously, Jin could be a great man if only people let him. And it looks like YZ will be the one to help him soar like an eagle.