Parallel lines – of further adventures in film and the other arts

Some things to have consumed me, my time and my all-too-finite energies in recent months, keeping me distracted from blogging, include:

Tourists descend en masse
upon Bruges even on Segways!

1) A grand, month-long European jaunt undertaken back in March. It included a day spent, in tribute to Martin McDonagh's wonderful film of a few years back, lying low of an afternoon in Bruges which, as it transpired, is surely amongst the very worst places in the world one could attempt such a thing – canal-loads of tourists, even in the low season, inundate this most picturesque mediaeval theme park of a town, their cameras clicking ceaselessly all awhile. I dread to think how many times I appear in complete strangers' holiday snaps from those few hours spent in Bruges!

My trip also took in the 25^th Fribourg International Film Festival. Senses of Cinema published my report on the FIFF some weeks back; the wider issue it is filed away in (#59) has just last week gone live, so please do be checking it out. And, Melburnians, you never know – some of what I've covered in my festival report (and other writers in that same issue in theirs) just might word you up on some films destined for this year's MIFF, as was the case in several instances last year.

(Re MIFF: a little more below.)

2) Speaking of Senses of Cinema, and of the launch of its latest issue, here's word of a great weight of film cultural labour I've performed even while this blog lay completely idle.

For I have not long completed the colossal task of migrating into its new-ish Content Management System all of Senses of Cinema's archival articles, essays, dissertations, rants, thinkpieces, polemics, peer-reviewed jargonfests, buff fluff, scholarly considerations, minutiae trawling 'reconsiderations', book reviews, festival reports, interviews, annotations for the Melbourne Cinémathèque, DVD reviews, ruminations upon the rise/fall/rise/fall/rise? of Australian cinema, and so on, ever published.

It took quite some doing. But I'm better now.

3) A fair period has just passed of living between fixed abodes, which made it difficult to get into any sort of relaxed groove, the better to diligently attend to the rigours of blogging. (I am in fact not completely out of the proverbial woods yet but matters have significantly improved.)

4) There has most welcomely emerged a wonderful reinvigoration of my love of music with respect to both its appreciation and its creation, in and out of conjunction with the staging of an almost imminent theatrical extravaganza. (For more about which, see below.)

5) Then there's the matter of my own disposition towards inertia when uninspired. Not for nothing have I declared myself here a “procrastinateuse extraordinaire”. I am never more so than when snowed under with workaday worries and considerations which, not being the stuff of riveting blogging, shall not further be dwelt upon here.

Here endeth the apologia. And beginneth anew A Little Lie Down!

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This Thursday (today!), I'll be back on 3RRR's SmartArts after four weeks in the (proverbial) wilderness. I'll be reviewing Michael Winterbottom's The Trip and Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life.

Now, notwithstanding sometime sudden onsets of mild performance anxiety, I always look forward to letting loose a little film crit across the airwaves, especially when, as with today's show, I've been able to discern some sort of serendipitous link between films I'll be covering, the better to more firmly cohere my segment's contents and to bestow upon “A Fistful of Celluloid” a greater fluidity. (Well, one can always hope.)

My today's consideration of The Trip and The Tree of Life will then riff on that old warhorse, “the personal is the universal”, a philosophy – and a mantra evangelised by many a writer and teacher of writing – I feel to be at the core of both films, if manifest in completely different fashions.

In The Trip, it's manifest through the very particularity of its casting. Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon play versions of themselves, with select aspects of their personal lives (and Coogan's in particular) fictionalised to some humourously unknowable, but telling extent, as with these same actors' casting in the same director's recent Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story.* "Coogan" and "Brydon"'s respective lots in life, ** and the one-upmanship-driven dynamic between them are milked not only for much of The Trip's abundant comedy but also for the considerable pathos the film surprisingly generates.

* Note to self: be sure to take on the mandatory-for-all-critics-at-some-point challenge of a consideration of that great shibboleth, the “unfilmable novel”, in a future post.

** By "Coogan" and "Brydon" I am referring to the gestalt entities derived from conflating the real, off-screen Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon with their fictionalised counterparts in The Trip, and in Tristram Shandy before it.

That pathos is a function of the protagonists' differing levels of success achieved relative to the levels aspired to; of the differing weights of importance they ascribe to one-upping one another, and, most profoundly come the dénouement, of their differing approaches to and appreciations of family and interpersonal relationships. In offering Coogan and Brydon as dialectical opponents, The Trip tells us much about these two gestalt entities 'individually' and specifically, but, in opposing one man (“Coogan”)'s lonely, insecure, insatiable quest for fame and fortune against another (“Brydon”)'s simpler, non-aspirational, domestically-centred contentment with his more modest lot in life, it also speaks to something universal. And that something is that great chimera, happiness, and that to which people will resort in its pursuit.

The Tree of Life parlays an absolutely extraordinary gambit in its equating of the personal with the universal. Why, the film has barely started before it unfurls an astonishing, extended representation of the coming into being of life, the universe and, oh, just everything. It's Terrence Malick's way of putting into perspective a very personal tragedy, an incident infinitesimally tiny and insignificant in the greater scheme of things, but universal in its impact. For who wouldn't, even many years into a life of comfort and of accomplishment in, say, the corporate world (or anything at all, really), having evidently risen far above humble beginnings (for example), still pause nonetheless, time to time, a la The Tree of Life's Jack (Sean Penn), to seek answers of the cosmos, of a universe which may or may not be part of some grand design (the film wisely hedges its bets on this matter), for, say, the incomprehensibly cruel loss of a beloved sibling, way back when.

The Tree of Life goes to great and spectacular lengths to position the personal and the universal as one and the same, even aestheticising equally Jack's flashbacks into his childhood and his consciousness' into the dawn of time. The latter is to 2011 as 2001 no doubt was to 1968; the former is tantamount to the most stunningly beautiful home movie ever made. I can't wait to see it again on the big screen, and it's very rare I feel that way about something I've only just seen for the very first time. The Tree of Life is glorious cinema writ not merely large but universal!

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The discernment and appreciation of chance parallels, motifs and themes running across multiple films is far more than something I'm occasionally drawn to ahead of doing a spot of radio; it's also (and much, much more so) a hallmark of film festival-going. It's something which considerably and unpredictably enriches the greater festival-going experience (even if sometimes also serving to render indistinct narratives, aesthetics, polemics, etc., to have graced any given individual film amongst a mass of others with which it might be found to have commonalities, blurring them all together in the memory).

Which thought brings me to the Melbourne International Film Festival, now looming large on the Melbourne calendar – its 60^th anniversary edition begins in just a shade over three weeks' time!

There could scarcely be a better time, then, to re-boot this blog than when Melbourne's film culture is about to experience its peak two-and-a-half weeks for the year. I hereby pledge to do as I did last year and cover the festival from go through to whoa...

You might, meanwhile, like to be kind, rewind, and cast a glance over my last year's coverage as an appetiser.

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What else is afoot?

In film:

I have committed to writing book reviews for various journals for publication later in the year. Book titles include, but are not limited to, Dekalog 3: On Film Festivals and Alexandra Heller-Nicholas' Rape-Revenge Films: A Critical Study.

And a collaboration is under way with a European festival with respect to some programming sourced from 'round these 'ere parts destined to be taken to 'round thems, and about which too much more right now would be premature to say beyond stating that it's all very exciting! And that I have some wonderful support from a few local bodies too.

In music and theatre:

Coming to you later this year at North Melbourne's Czech Club, where it'll be running throughout the Fringe Festival, Dirty Nicola and the Cheap, Filthy, Pre-loved, Shop-soiled Spud Hussies (myself on bass; Katrina Wilson on keys; Nicola Bell on drums; the three of us altogether on foley) will provide live, original musical accompaniment to a rather more polished and wonderful vaudevillian theatrical production of Wilhelm Busch's Max and Moritz: A Juvenile History in Seven Tricks, replete with marionette and human cast members, than already went down a treat at last year's Village festival in North Fitzroy's Edinburgh Gardens. Stay tuned for more about this in coming weeks as well as for details of further Max and Moritz action to follow at other festivals later in the year!

And in words:

My novel is resolutely not writing itself but we'll be setting that small matter to rights later in the year (one hopes). Meanwhile, my research for this project, already gestating overlong, carries on apace...

On which note, I'd love to hear from anyone who knows of any novels wherein a caricaturist features as the protagonist. Anyone know of any? Anyone? Any?

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More from me soon,

x Cerise

That was the rest of the August that was... August 2010. (Part One)

Post-MIFF, and more particularly, post-Friday the 13^th, when my beloved little cat became an ex-Pushpaw, August has been a trying time indeed.

That's not to say I've been denied the pleasure of seeing films, although, alas, I've almost as good as missed attending as many as three whole film festivals (the Indonesian Film Festival; the Melbourne Underground Film Festival, and The Other Film Festival) due to my faltering health and energies.

Ahead of that fateful 13^th day in August, I did at least get to a media preview of The Other Film Festival and so can offer some thoughts on a few films to have screened at TOFF, if not on the festival experience, per se.

That said, I am disappointed to have had so limited an engagement with the TOFF this year as a) I worked for the festival a few years ago and enjoyed, and gained from, the experience tremendously and b) the festival, with its focus on “cinema by, with and about people with a disability”, both screens material acknowledging, and indeed celebrating, “otherness”... of which I am a fan..., as well as acting as (one hopes) a harbinger of a more utopian future where cinema is for, and accessible by, everybody, not just those boasting a full complement of senses, the capacity for autonomous bipedal motility and an at oneness with consensual reality, like I often am.

The good folks of The Other Film Festival have a dream, a dream I tells ya!, and, more importantly still, take measures through their own fine example to demonstrate that that dream can – nay, should – be a reality.

My TOFF films seen, then:

Rita (d. Fabio Grassadonia & Antonio Piazza)
A very fine 18 minute-long Italian short which does wonderfully well in communicating something of the experience of the blindness of its titular character, a strong-willed, ten-year-old girl (Marta Palermo), principally through a combination of effective sound design and strategically keeping the camera trained upon her highly expressive face for all of the film's housebound first act.

The second act begins when, heard well before he's 'seen', a bloodied intruder enters Rita's house, and one can't help but immediately fear the worst for the very vulnerable girl; any number of horror films previously viewed condition one to fear for any character claustrophobically framed, as here, when there are ominous bumping noises emanating from outside of the frame, even before matters of blindness are taken into consideration.

However, the intruder's visit ultimately proves a good thing... possibly... in an ambiguous, 'be careful what you wish for' sort of way.

Sound-Shadows (d. Julie Engaas)

A semi-animated short which, like Rita, goes some way to convey the experience of blindness, in this instance portraying it as a synaesthetic affair. The narrator (Hege Norset Blichfeldt) explains how she perceives the world as a soundscape in which objects and people within it emit “sound-shadows”, enabling her to negotiate her environment. Pencil-drawn outline animation, sometimes superimposed over real-world backdrops, helps visualise for the seeing-unimpaired that which the narrator cannot see, as we understand it, for herself. A lovely piece of work.

The Sunshine Boy (d. Fridrik Thor Fridriksson)
A feature-length Icelandic documentary on autism narrated by Kate Winslet. It chiefly concerns the quest of an Icelandic woman (Margret Dagmar Ericsdottir) to better understand, and hopefully improve the lot in life of, her nonverbal, autistic 11-year-old son, Keli. To which end she and he travel far and wide, spending a lot of time in the United States and interviewing many experts in the field before ultimately finding some joy through the “Rapid Prompting Method” developed and practised by Soma Mukhopadhyay in Texas.

While the film feels a little like it could benefit from a bit of trimming, there's no denying the power of the film's understated but nonetheless triumphant close, wherein Keli, by degrees, demonstrably comes to be able to express himself, to communicate interests and desires that would not otherwise likely ever have been expressed, let alone met.

Sigur Ros and Björk feature on the soundtrack, which is of course no bad thing. And admirers of Errol Morris' “First Person” series, ca. 2000/01, will welcome hearing once more from the marvellous Temple Grandin, autistic inventor of humane slaughterhouses.

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Post Friday the 13^th, Pushpaw's passing echoed wherever I went.

I caught Michael Winterbottom's neo-noir The Killer Inside Me just a few days later, which cheered me up no end. I jest. A friend who saw it at MIFF summed it up thus: “Spank spank spank, kill kill kill, spank spank spank, kill kill kill...”

I've not read Jim Thompson's 1952 novel, but it's hard to imagine it could be any much less pleasant a stroll through the mind of a psychopath, portrayed in Winterbottom's film by Casey Affleck. Affleck's performance as Deputy Sheriff Lou Ford is chilling, to be sure, and his graphically beating to a pulp Hollywood lovelies Jessica Alba and Kate Hudson is just about every bit as shocking as what Gaspar Noé inflicted upon Monica Bellucci in Irreversible, Michael Haneke upon Naomi Watts in his US version of Funny Games and Darren Aronofsky upon Jennifer Connelly in Requiem for a Dream. There is an undeniable and inflated horror and astonishment in seeing beautiful, established stars, rather than mere nobodies, having horrific things meted out to them on the big screen. And doesn't Winterbottom know it! We are spared nothing.

The Killer Inside Me packs quite a punch, and ends strangely and strongly (with perhaps a tip of a Sheriff's hat to a certain illustrious Robert Aldrich noir classic), even if its protagonist's psychopathology is explained away in a fairly pat fashion (albeit one, I suppose, generically satisfactory).

Winterbottom continues to startle as one of the most protean and fearless filmmakers going, but let no-one tell you The Killer Inside Me is anybody's idea of a good time waiting to be had.

The following night it was off to the Melbourne Cinémathèque to catch the Alain Delon double of Plein Soleil (René Clément, 1960) and La Piscine (Jacques Deray, 1969). I had seen neither before and had read up only a little on them, so knew not really what to expect.

So, of course, wouldn't you know it, both come to feature Delon murdering somebody, though the deaths this time are, in both films, a darned sight less graphic – and a good deal more watery – than in The Killer Inside Me.

I don't really feel like writing expansively on either other than to say that a) both were made in a time of higher pants and b) La Piscine, boasting charms additional to Delon's surfeit courtesy of his real-life ex, Romy Schneider, as well as a young and gawkily beautiful Jane Birkin, is an absolute cracker... up until when the police are called in, late in the piece, subsequent to which point everything just drags. At that stage in the film, the only good that could come of introducing Mr. Plod to proceedings would be to have him summarily dispatched too...

Death even infiltrated my following night's trip to the theatre, though this time it came as no surprise when it showed its spindly narrative hand. I was joining my dear friend Richard Watts at the Opening Night of the Melbourne Theatre Company's production of All About My Mother, an adaptation of my favourite Pedro Almodóvar film, and one in which much of the narrative hinges upon a pedestrian being clocked by a passing car. (Sigh.)

Sadly, All About My Mother was highly disappointing. I had presumed to give it the benefit of the doubt; the adaptation was said to have come with Almodóvar's blessing and the original is heavily concerned with matters theatrical in the first place.

However...

From the very opening, things were a bit amiss. Alison Whyte, in the lead role, gave her Manuela a bizarre, plummified Australian accent... oh if only she could have sounded a little more European, any sort of European!

This accent robbed her character of believability and gravitas, and jarred all the more when she shared scenes with certain members of the rest of the cast who did adopt some sort of Spanish accent. (Whyte once or twice did, perhaps accidentally, ostentatiously roll an 'r' – which just made matters worse.)

This wasn't the least of its problems, however. The idea to have Manuela's son posthumously moping around the stage for most of the play's duration was surely an ill-conceived one. Even sillier, he silently interacted once or twice, apropos of nothing, with some of the living characters. I felt for Blake Davis, the young man who landed that largely thankless and, frankly, quite embarrassing, part.

Of course, Paul Capsis is always going to be entertaining, and he is perfectly cast as tranny hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold Agrado. However, there really was no need whatsoever to have Agrado's addresses to the audience exist outside of the narrative; they had been perfectly integrated within it in the film.

And, while the first half held me, notwithstanding all of my reservations already outlined above, the arse fell right out of the whole production almost immediately after the intermission; the play's rhythm was gone, gone, gone. And not because of the intermission; the problem was that the second half began with an abrupt shift of mood, all easy laffs and camping it up, which just utterly smothered the following serious narrative developments.

There were some positives; I didn't mind the layered mobile screens that, three deep, inhabited, and subdivided, the stage throughout – screens in the double sense of being canvases for projections as well as being coverings behind which actions – diegetic and 'behind-the-scenes' – could be strategically unseen, or seen, to occur.

Wendy Hughes was fine too.

Let's hope though that the production of John Cassavetes' Opening Night, at the forthcoming Melbourne International Arts Festival, makes for rather more successful a theatricalisation of an already 'theatrical' film.

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And that will about do for now. I'm tired, pleuritic and cranky as I type this, but will commit to putting August properly to bed within the next few days, probably just after my Thursday's contribution to 3RRR's SmartArts (11.30 Melbourne time (GMT+10:00)), during which I'll no doubt talk about a few of the things I didn't get around to covering in this post, as well as this year's Message Sticks Film Festival.

Toodle-oo meantime.