Other Pleasures @glasgowfilmfest

Tags

china, france, gff, japan

While the majority of the films I saw at this year’s Glasgow Film Festival – and isn’t that a lovely phrase to write, normally I’d only manage a couple of films at this festival in total – were firmly within the confines of two of the festival strands, I did see a small assortment of films that didn’t fit into either of those categories. Films that I didn’t pick for logical reasons but instead because something about them – the description, a post on the GFF twitter feed, the trailer, or even just that this might be my only chance to see them on a big screen.

One Second

I have a funny feeling that this wasn’t the film that I meant to see, that when I was flicking back and forth between the schedule and the film blurbs I mixed it up with another film, because this very much wasn’t the plot I was expecting. It’s a good movie and I’m glad I watched it, but I ended up watching a historical drama – does it count as a period piece when the era is the 1970s? – when I was expecting a crime thriller. As much as the film does feature an escaped prisoner, this being the Cultural Revolution, he’s quite clearly in prison for political reasons, rather than for the ‘fighting’ for which he’s supposedly doing time. Also, given that the film was apparently originally selected for the Berlinale and then withdrawn for ‘post-production problems’ that seem to have been code for censorship reasons, I’d be interested to know what subtler political statements the film is making about present day China that are not obvious to the less informed viewer. On the surface it’s as much about children paying for their parents mistakes as it is about anything else and no less moving if that’s all that really is going on.

It’s a film that really illuminates both just how vast China is as a country – the dessert between the two ‘work unit’ locations we move between in the film seems like it could go on forever – and how claustrophobic life in that time was – everyone in the film is trapped within their assigned role to a greater or lesser extent. After all who needs walls or guards or fences when you have gossipy neighbours and miles of dessert?

I had presumed early in the film that the circulating films were meant to sugar the pill of the propaganda newsreels, that they showed first so that people wouldn’t leave as soon as the film finished. But it turns out that the townspeople are so desperate for an escape from their lives that – regardless of their grumbling about having already seen the film many times – they will watch it over and again if given the chance. Just as our fugitive, Zhang Jiusheng, could happily watch the damaged fragment of newsreel featuring his daughter, over and over, in a loop all night, so the audience would watch anything the projectionist screens for them just as long as they can escape their day to day lives for little while longer. Finding a little freedom in the only place they can.

Love, Life and Goldfish

This film is a delight. Probably my favourite film of the festival, this is a film that commits utterly to it’s concept. I should make clear that the concept is completely ridiculous, being a musical comedy set in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere where the vast majority of the population are obsessed with goldfish. Specifically goldfish scooping – a part of Japanese culture that had totally passed me by but that much like the film both baffles and delights me.

The film is gorgeously shot, the colours are so vivid, the sets and locations are a visual treat – the contrast between the crushingly mundane and the vividly fantastical is perfectly handled. More generally, the film walks the perfect balance between playing it’s concept straight and not taking it too seriously. Both characters and cast seem to have the attitude of yes this is very odd, but this is our life deal with it. In fact of all the things that our ‘hero’ Makoto Kashiba does that his new colleagues find to be ‘odd’ the bursting into thematically appropriate song is the very least of it.

Fascinatingly to me, our hero, the character that we follow throughout is not the ‘romantic hero’ of the film. He absolutely thinks he is and resists that furiously – he is repressed to the point of comic disaster – but it turns out that he’s the catalyst for change both in himself and for the people he meets. His happy ending is absolutely what he was hoping for, but really not what I was expecting from the genre. Perhaps I’ve just seen too many old-fashioned Hollywood movie musicals, because I definitely had narrative expectations, some of which the film played with in a pleasingly meta fashion, but others it just totally ignored. It turned out to be something stranger and better than I was expecting.

Cleo from 5 to 7

Showing as part of the GFF’s Winds of Change Retrospective Season – where they’re screening great films from 1962 in the early morning slot, for free, you just turn up on the morning and if there’s space you get in! – this was the one film of the season that I was really excited to see. Like most film students, I got a little obsessed with the Nouvelle Vague films for a while though it was more through the medium of Cahiers Du Cinema than the films themselves as the films I could see were limited by the choices of the university library and what fellow film students had that they were willing to lend me. As a result I’ve always known Agnès Varda’s work more by reputation than in actuality.

When the Film Festival’s Co-Director Allan Hunter did the film’s introduction, he pointed out that Varda’s work has more in common with that of film makers Allan Resnais and Chris Marker than it does with the work of the more famous Nouvelle Vague directors like Truffaut and Goddard that she’s so closely associated with in most people’s minds and I have to agree, there’s an intimacy and a painterliness to this film that fits better with those films. More Left Bank than Right Bank if you like.

So when the opportunity to see probably her most famous film – on film even – I couldn’t resist, and it was well worth it. Apparently Varda herself called this film a portrait of a woman painted over a documentary about Paris, and I can see what she meant. It looks very much like an observational style documentary, just the protagonist we’re following as our guide through that world is an actress, interacting with other actors, saying scripted lines. You can really see Varda’s experience as a photographer and a documentarian here, her focus on faces and spaces, letting the story tell itself and giving things space to unfold ‘naturally’.

This is definitely one of those films where I felt that I’d seen a lot of the ideas and style choices before, but that also came with the knowledge that most of those films were in fact referencing – or at least influenced by – this one. The cliches aren’t cliches, this is where those cliches came from originally.

Walk Cheerfully @EdenCourt

Tags

japan, nablopomo, silent film

Almost as though the folks at Eden Court heard me lamenting the lack of silent films at the film festival a couple of weeks ago, a Japanese silent film with live musical accompaniment popped up in the cinema schedule. Despite Japanese films and silent films being two long standing cinematic loves of mine, I realised that I’d never actually seen any Japanese silent films, so clearly I needed to rectify that. Add to that the fact that Walk Cheerfully (1930) is an Ozu film, then well, how could I resist.

I got into Japanese cinema in a different way from most of the other genres that I fell in love with in my teens. In typical teenage fashion though, it was because I had a crush on someone who was really into Japanese cinema. Being a film student at the time, I spent the whole of that winter break reading every book on Japanese cinema that I could get out of the university library and watching every Japanese film I could get hold of cheaply. Unfortunately, being that it was the early 00s and the era of the ‘Tartan Asia’ releases, the crossover between the ‘classic films’ that the books talked about and the films I could actually get hold of was not particularly high. I saw a lot of Kurosawa and Miike films – often with my crush, though it turned out we were both more into geeking out about Japanese cinema together than snogging – but the films I longed to see, that remained tantalisingly out of reach, or at least budget, were the films of Yasujirô Ozu. For a while it felt as though Tokyo Story (1953) was taunting me as it seemed that every time it was screened somewhere I would try to go and then be thwarted. Screenings were cancelled, leave was cancelled, once memorably a storm caused all the trains to Glasgow to be stopped.

The film itself is a fascinating artefact, part 30s gangster flick, part romantic comedy, where our hero Kenji, a small time hood – he and his tiny gang seem to mostly be stealing wallets, Kenji and his brother Senko share not only a tiny apartment but it appears a bed too – is trying to go straight to win the heart of an honest girl with whom he’s fallen madly in love with and the pitfalls and struggles he faces along the way. An interesting point that another review of the film brought to my attention is that Yasue and her family are the only non-Westernised characters in the film, living in a traditional house, wearing traditional clothing, and by implication adhering to traditional Japanese values and honour. Whereas all the criminals, and their victims – even Yasue’s sleazy boss – are dressed and living as though they could be bootleggers in an American film of the same period. We’re told early on that this film is set in a time of great economic hardship and societal breakdown, and clearly the costumes are meant to stand in somewhat subtly for the moral degradation brought to the country by modern life in a newly globalised world. There are some fabulous beautifully choreographed sequences with the gangsters, that make them seem as if they’ve escaped from some kind of Hollywood musical before they were even a thing, as though they’ve decided to make their desperate, precarious existence glamorous if it kills them. Everyone is tap dancing on the edge of ruin and trying to scrape a better life however they can, often by sheer force of will. It’s a slight film, somewhat melancholic, but a charming and strangely hopeful one too.

Then there was Silvia Hallett’s accompaniment, which in the tradition of the best silent film accompaniment this was not just performing a basic score. It seemed largely improvised, so able to respond not just to the film playing on screen, but also to the benshi performance as well. She played a whole variety of instruments – some traditional, both Western and Japanese, some electronic – certainly but also provided a whole array of sound effects throughout the film that altogether felt more like she was performing live sound design!

Because my passion of Japanese cinema predates my passion for silent film, I clearly hadn’t paid much attention to Japanese silent cinema traditions – and in my defence I think most of the books I read in my research binge all those years ago, mostly focused on post-second world war Japanese cinema – so I was completely unprepared for the benshi performance from Tomoko Komura. Unbeknownst to me, Japanese silent cinema didn’t go down the inter title route, and instead had live narrators who performed dialogue, provided plot summaries and generally brought the piece to life. Apparently at the height of their popularity, the best benshi were paid on a par with the screen actors, and were just as much of a draw for audiences. I can absolutely believe that, because Komura’s performance was a tour de force, giving the whole film an atmosphere and vivacity that I would definitely seek out again. It was both a delight and a revelation, on a par with the first time I saw Neil Brand improvise to a Buster Keaton film for upending my ideas of what ‘silent’ film can be and do. Just excellent.

IFF17 @EdenCourt – New World Cinema

Tags

azerbaijan, belguim, egypt, films, iff, japan, world cinema

As is probably obvious to regular readers of the blog, this week has been the Inverness Film Festival. This year I decided to try organising my feature-film reviews about the festival by means of its own themes and threads. It’s probably inevitable that the ‘New World Cinema’ thread would be my favourite thread of the festival, as for me, that’s what film festivals are about, seeing obscure films from far flung or unusual parts of the world that I wouldn’t otherwise get the chance to see. This year felt like a particularly good one for this thread as none of the films that I saw that came under that heading earned any less than ‘very good’ vote on my audience choice award slips.

Blade of the Immortal
Apparently, Blade of the Immortal is Takeshi Miike’s one-hundredth film. Do you know what that means? That means there are ninety-five or so more films by him that I can watch! To a certain extent, if you’re at all familiar with Miike’s work you know what you’re getting with his films, and this film delivers that in spades. This year, I’ve seen two of his films – I managed to catch Yakuza Apocalypse on Film Four at the start of the year – and what I can mostly conclude about his film-making at this stage in his career, is that his films are much more fun these days. Blade is brutal and bloody certainly, but its also a film with a great sense of both humour and fun, and most importantly it has heart. It’s also really nice to have a film like this where the central relationship is platonic. Rin reminds the immortal Manji of someone he loved and lost years before, but that someone is his sister. Which neatly allows them to evolve a deeply devoted companionship – with appropriate sibling-style insults and arguments – while neatly avoiding any creepy undertones to the whole teenage girl and much older immortal bodyguard dynamic.

I laughed, I cried, I gasped with shock: a truly excellent film.

Pomegranate Orchard
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a film from Azerbaijan before. Or about Azerbaijan for that matter. (For those of you struggling to figure out where Azerbaijan is on the map, its either as far East in Eastern Europe as its possible to be or as far West as its possible to be and still be in Western Asia, depending on your perspective.) This is director Ilgar Najaf’s third film and the second film of his to involve pomegranates. (Some quick research reveals that pomegranates are one of the national symbols of Azerbaijan, and the Goychay Pomegranate Festival that features in the film is a significant cultural event.) Apparently the plot is based on Chekov’s The Cherry Orchard and as such features a prodigal son returning home to the family he abandoned twelve years before.

It’s a film full of space and silences. The family that Gabil left behind have co-existed together for a long time without him and do not seem to feel the need to infringe on each other’s space and thoughts too much. Both the characters and the filmmakers seem content to give each other space in which to be themselves and to make their own decisions. They’re conversations are measured as though they’ve learned to think before they speak, perhaps a necessary adaptation to avoid re-opening the emotional wounds that Gabil’s departure has caused. There is a great deal of play made of the relationships between fathers and sons, and the absence of Gabil’s dead brother. But for me the defining relationship of the film is the one between Jalal and his grandfather Shamil, with its quiet devotion and loyalty. Both of them men of few words, but with emotions deeply felt.

I spent the entire film feeling that Gabil was clearly up to something, but nonetheless, the twist was a proper gut-punch of a reveal. A really good film, atmospheric, beautiful and bleak.

The Nile Hilton Incident
An excellent Egyptian thriller for a Saturday night. A singer is killed in a hotel room, a member of the domestic staff is a witness and barely escapes with her life, and important people want the case to just quietly go away. Set against the background of the 2011 Tahir Square protests, by the end of the story the endemic corruption and utter failure of the justice system has both the viewer and the central anti-hero feeling no little sympathy for the urge to burn the whole rotten system down.

Leading man Fares Fares for some reason really reminds me of Christopher Eccleston, both in looks and in acting style. Which is no bad thing, as he’s an excellent actor too. His long serious face makes him look perpetually caught between sadness and grumpiness, but there’s so much going on with his eyes. An excellent performance as a corrupt cop discovering just how far across the line he will and will not go.

Cloudboy
Not technically part of this strand – this was actually one of two films to be shown as a result of the young cinema programmers project that Eden Court runs – but as a Belgian film set in a Sami community in Sweden I think it counts.

This is such a lovely film, one of my favourites of the festival. The protagonist Niilas is obsessed with sound and radios, recording things and people, and the film is full of all the weird perspectives and recordings that he makes. It’s such a warm-hearted film, with Niilas as this fish-out-of-water, finding his place in the life and family that his mother has built. The bonds he eventually makes with his siblings and mother feel all the more real for how hard fought they are. (And that his actions have real world consequences in this life.) And his stepsister Sunnà is clearly the most sensible, head screwed-on right person in the entire film.

I’m not entirely sure if the elk that keeps appearing at significant moments is an actual animal or a supernatural one, but the film gets away with it either way.